Table of Contents
MAP
DEDICATION
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PART ONE — THE WAR
PART TWO — THE CHASE
PART THREE — THE BATTLE
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE BEDFORD INCIDENT
Copyright © 1963 by Mark Rascovich (renewed 1991)
Published by agreement with the Mark Rascovich literary estate.
All rights reserved
Edited by Dan Thompson
A Thunderchild eBook
Published by Thunderchild Publishing
1898 Shellbrook Drive
Huntsville, AL 35806
First Edition: March 1963
First Thunderchild eBook Edition: May 2016
Drawings by the author
MAP
DEDICATION
This book is affectionately dedicated to Gwen and Ed Rigg whose kind understanding and warm friendship have gone far beyond the call of duty of ordinary in-laws!
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Some of the anti-submarine warfare techniques and equipment described in this work have been deliberately obscured. This has been done because the author has had access to certain confidential naval information imparted to him in his capacity of marine researcher and has no wish to betray such trust or embarrass his associates.
This in no way impairs the validity of the story, which in essence and spirit remains a potentially true one for as long as we live under the present circumstances.
MARK R. RASCOVICH
PART ONE — THE WAR
1.
The loudspeaker outside the stateroom door squealed with a discordant facsimile of a bosun’s pipe, a sound which was immediately followed by an incongruous hacking and wheezing. It alerted all hands of the U.S.S. Tiburon Bay to the fact that their second officer was trying to clear his infected sinuses before delivering an important message over the ship’s PA system.
“Now hear this — now hear this! The smoking lamp is out — the smoking lamp is out.” It was very like him to put this emphasis on a routine regulation before anything else. If he had to call out “Abandon ship!” he would precede it with “The smoking lamp is out!” The unhappy second officer was not only addicted to colds, but suffered from a phobia about fire, both qualities making him singularly unsuited for service aboard a fleet tanker on cold war duty in arctic waters. “The smoking lamp is out,” his voice repeated. “Pumping crews, man your stations for refueling DDL 113 approaching our starboard side. Line handlers and riggers to wear immersion suits. Personnel scheduled for transfer report to highline station on forward main deck. That is all.”
Lieutenant Commander Chester Porter listened with his bulky body braced against a sluggish roll of the ship, then zipped up the flap of his blue Valpack bag. “That means we’ve got less than twenty minutes,” he said to Ben Munceford, who was lying in the top bunk of their steel cubicle. “Captain Finlander is awfully sensitive about the Bedford’s record for the fastest refueling at sea of any destroyer in the navy.”
Munceford was nursing a shot of bourbon in a soggy paper cup and continued to drag on a cigarette in spite of the second officer’s insistent announcement; he showed very little concern over Porter’s implied suggestion that he immediately prepare himself for the impending transfer to the Bedford. He had not even dressed and was lying there in a suit of thermal underwear which was unzipped to his navel, the toes of his naked feet playing with the electrical conduits which snaked across the ceiling above his bunk. Munceford had been napping away the forenoon to make up for a late session of cards in the PO mess during the previous night. “I’ll wait till you’re clear, Doc,” he drawled. “No use getting in each other’s way.”
“I thought you wanted some pictures of this operation,” Porter said as he squirmed into a heavy sweater.
Munceford glanced toward the gray opaque eye which was the single porthole of their cabin. “Not enough light out there.”
“About as much as you’ll get in these high latitudes. In November there’s only six hours of daylight here — less when we get farther north.”
“That’s okay, Doc. I’m more of a reporter than a cameraman anyway. How about one for the road before we head into the great unknown?”
Porter finished pulling on a hooded windbreaker and eyed the bottle which Munceford had produced from under his pillow. “No, thanks, Ben,” he answered with a stiff smile. “By the way, I should warn you that the Bedford is not run as informally as the Tiburon Bay. Even as a guest of the navy, you’ll be expected to only drink liquor when it is prescribed by me against shock or snakebite.”
Munceford was a rawboned southerner with an incredibly boyish face for his thirty-six years, and when he was piqued, it could take on a childishly petulant expression — as it now did for an instant. “I can take it or leave it,” he said, scowling from the surgeon to the bottle.
“The Bedford is a go-go ship operated by a bunch of trade-school boys,” Porter told him. “Captain Finlander is a cinch to make admiral on the next list.”
“Okay, Doc. I’m not going to hold him back,” Munceford exclaimed with a laugh. He swung his legs over the edge of the bunk, jumped down, flipped the clamps of the porthole, opened it and tossed the half-full bottle of bourbon into the sea. Then he turned and jokingly saluted the lieutenant commander. “Sir, I beg to report that the U.S.S. Tiburon Bay is now bone dry, according to regulations, and that all danger of contaminating the U.S.S. Bedford has been removed.”
Porter’s round red face rippled through a series of expressions of surprise, amusement and anger. “Jesus, Munceford! Don’t you even know the rules about dumping floating garbage overboard?” he asked, half laughing, half snarling.
The injured childish look flashed back. “Are we at war, for Christ sakes, Doc?”
“Out here we play it that way. Especially when Finlander is in command.”
“This Finlander must be some jonah! You’ve got me hating him already.”
“Oh? I was hoping you’d be an objective sort of correspondent,” the surgeon said acidly, then reacted to the sound of bells from deep in the ship’s engine room. The vibration of the turning screws dropped to a lower register. “You’d better snap it up. We’ll be transferred right after the mail and fresh milk.” He picked up his Valpack, opened the door and squeezed himself into the passageway.
After the lieutenant commander had gone, Munceford was left with a frustrated and uneasy feeling. He was suddenly quite certain that he would not get along well with the Bedford and her captain, that this whole assignment was jinxed from its start. For a moment he toyed with the idea of aborting it and returning to port on the Tiburon Bay with a couple of hundred feet of film and tape describing life on a navy tanker. But, of course, that would put him in a bad light with the PRO he had badgered into accrediting him an official navy correspondent. And then there was Nancy’s lawyer waiting for him on the stateside docks. Jinxed or not, he had to go on. With a shrug he opened up the porthole again to toss out his cigarette.
A waft of raw, damp air struck his face, ice cold compared to the stuffy warmth of the cabin. But he held the glass open and continued to peer out because something had caught his attention on the misty periphery of the lazy swells. There were wisps of sea smoke drifting off their undulating surfaces and, far out there, a low bank of fog lay like a translucent gray wall between the gray sea and gray sky. Out of that fog, Munceford suddenly noticed the shadow of a vessel’s superstructure materializing like a ghost ship. For an awesome minute she appeared to be floating on air, her hull only
slowly solidifying, hesitating to touch the sea. The tall foremast with its lacework of halyards and aerials remained for a long time the only part crisply etched against the diffused horizon, a rotating antenna of a search radar making a strange pulsating effect as it turned. Gradually the shadowy shape transformed itself into the classical lines of a destroyer slicing along at flank speed, plunging and rolling with a weird kind of slow motion as she thrust ahead, a pale grin of a bow wave curling from her stem. Crystals glinted with baleful winks out of the ice which sheathed her foredecks and turrets. But even as she merged into sharp focus, she retained a mysterious aura of mist which clung to her as if she had torn loose some shreds out of the fog and wrapped herself in them. On the curve of her bow, between the rise and fall of flying spume, the white number 113 became clearly visible — DDL 113, the U.S.S. Bedford.
Ben Munceford stared wide-eyed, shuddering from the cold which was stabbing at his bare chest, and from the sight of the Bedford. He suddenly crossed himself as if he were beholding some kind of evil specter. It was a peculiarly senseless thing to do and it made him angrily slam shut the porthole, turning the destroyer into a shapeless blur behind the film of moisture on the glass. Why had he crossed himself like that? He was neither superstitious nor Catholic. Why did the uneasy feeling which had been gnawing at his insides ever since leaving Portsmouth suddenly turn into outright foreboding? He, who prided himself on being a cheerfully cynical person, should not suffer such notions! He looked at himself in the mirror above the tiny washbowl and wondered what was getting under that skin he fancied to be so thick. “Is it Porter turning stuffed shirt all of a sudden?” he asked his reflection. “Or that character Finlander everybody’s bowing to the east over? Or maybe Nancy’s still bugging me!”
The thought of Nancy aggravated his irritation as he began to dress. If anything wrong was to happen on this trip, it would really be her fault, because he had undertaken it to escape her silken whining in that coffin of a studio apartment in Greenwich Village. Like the other Nancys before her, she had first seduced him with a voluptuous body, then repulsed him with a barren, selfish mind which was nothing but a ganglion of short-circuited female nerves. Like some kind of bull animal, his life with women seemed fated to follow a pattern of courtship, rutting and desertion. “Why can’t you get a regular job at home?” they would all eventually scream at him. “Because then I’d be stuck with both you and the job,” he would answer. “At least give me money for a divorce!” “With your legs and tits, you’ll always find yourself another pigeon if you don’t wait too long.” “A wife’s got some rights! I’m going to see a lawyer!” “That’s why I’m leaving. By-by, honey!” Well, the other Nancys had got their divorces without his having to spend a nickel. This one would too, he hopefully told himself as he stamped his feet into a pair of old fleece-lined air-force boots. But just to make sure, he would leave the Bedford in Reykjavik, beg a ride on a MATS plane to London, peddle his story to one of the American television outfits there, get paid and be off on some other interesting overseas assignment. No Nancy would ever catch up with him! Never!
There was a knock on the cabin door and a young seaman who bulked monstrously large in his arctics looked in. “The second officer’s steaming because you ain’t at the highline station, Mr. Munceford. The Bedford’s bearing down on us right now, you know.”
Munceford grinned and patted him on the shoulder with the familiarity he liked to show enlisted men. “It’s okay, sailor. Tell Mr. Boomer to keep his shirt on. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
“But you ain’t even got your gear together,” the boy exclaimed with a certain admiration. “Can I help you with any of it?”
“I travel light,” Munceford told him and yanked his duffel bag out of a locker. It had hardly been unpacked during the four days since they had left Portsmouth, and all he had to do was to shove in his toilet kit and some dirty socks.
“What about your camera ‘n’ stuff?” the seaman asked, helping him to knot the bag and nodding toward the large aluminum case under the desk. “Want me to deliver it to the cargo sling?”
“I’ll carry that myself, thanks. Might want to run off a few feet of film on the way over.”
“Mr. Boomer won’t allow it, sir,” the boy told him. “All baggage gotta go across in a sling on account of we once lost an ensign who went in the drink and was dragged under by some personal gear he’d strapped to himself.”
Munceford swung out the case by its leather shoulder strap and plonked it on the lower bunk. He opened it up and the sailor stared with fascination at the jumble of equipment which was jammed into it. At first glance it gave an impression of the wealth of film, tape, cameras and recording gear which a professional TV feature reporter would be expected to carry with him on a navy assignment, but this was an illusion created by the disorder. The single movie camera was an old sixteen-millimeter Bell and Howell, the miniature battery-operated recorder a cheap Japanese make; many boxes of film and tape were pushed down among filter cases, lens shades and a tangle of microphone cords, yet really not enough to satisfy any professional doing the kind of job Munceford was.
“Gee!” the sailor exclaimed, genuinely impressed. “You sure got some fancy stuff there, sir.”
“I only bring old equipment on a story like this,” Munceford answered with studied indifference. “Salt air raises hell with cameras and recorders. All this will be written off and thrown away after the job’s over.”
The sailor’s eyes popped. “Christ! I’d like to be around when you start throwing it. Must be a thousand bucks’ worth.”
Munceford smiled and left the exclamation answered by an effective silence. He had actually bought everything in the case from a New York discount store for a little over two hundred dollars — having borrowed half the cash from a friend who was a technical director for NBC and charged the rest to something which the salesman called Instant-Credit. When he yanked out the camera, there was a general collapse of knickknacks within the case and its contents suddenly did not look at all impressive. He quickly shut the lid, locked it, then looped the strap over the sailor’s shoulder. “I’m much obliged to you,” he told him. “Tell Mr. Boomer that I’ll be along shortly.”
The boy left with the duffel bag and camera case, gingerly wiggling through the narrow door as if he were carrying a load of fresh eggs.
Munceford heard the engine-room bells’ muffled clang and felt the beat of the Tiburon Bay’s engines increase from their idling rumble. The Bedford’s siren let out a blast which reached his ears as a distant wail. He looked around the bare cabin with his lips pressed together and a frown on his face as if hesitating to leave it. But then he began to move with some urgency, pulling on the quasi-military fleece-lined windbreaker which had become the envy of every young sailor aboard. It was made of brown, green, yellow and pink camouflage twill. On the shoulder of the left sleeve blazed the patch of the Strategic Air Command, on the right a patch of the 82nd Airborne Division; on the left breast a submarine insignia was pinned above a combat infantryman’s badge; on the right was stitched a leather strip with the word CORRESPONDENT embossed in gold letters upon it. The cap which he carefully adjusted at a rakish angle on his head was of the type worn by soldiers in arctic climates, with a fur lining and large earflaps that neatly snapped together across the crown. Pinned to it was the silver insignia of a paratrooper.
After taking a last look at himself in the mirror, Ben Munceford picked up his camera and hurriedly left the cabin.
2.
Captain Larsen of the U.S.S. Tiburon Bay was a Commander, U.S.N.R., who had been recalled to duty from his highly paid civilian job as skipper of a tanker belonging to Standard Oil, Because that company had generously continued paying him half of his regular salary, he was actually making as much as he had become accustomed to and was therefore not as disgruntled as most of the reservists under his command. Mr. Boomer, for instance, he suspected of deliberately nurturing one cold after another in or
der to be returned for medical reasons to inactive status and thence go back to his fancy marina in Fort Lauderdale. And Mr. Carmichael, the assistant engineering officer, did nothing but worry about a plumbing business in plush Westchester County of New York, from which he had been cruelly torn during a construction boom which flourished regardless of the cold war. Well, only out here did the cold war take on any real meaning. The thermometer attached to the wheelhouse registered eleven degrees below freezing.
As the Bedford emerged out of the fog which reduced the surrounding vastness of this frigid ocean to a couple of square miles of visible bleakness, Captain Larsen drew a sigh of envy. There was the real professional navy! The destroyer itself he did not care about so much — even modern ones like the Bedford were terrible riding and Larsen had reached the age where he preferred comfort to excitement. What he envied was Captain Finlander’s staff of officers, who were one-hundred-per-cent Annapolis graduates, probably all with a rating of superior (or better) ; his enlisted crew were all career men, many of the chiefs being on their third six-year hitch. Even a bucket like the Tiburon Bay could be efficiently run with a gang like that! He watched the Bedford through his binoculars for a moment, then called toward the wheelhouse: “Log visual contact with DDL 113 at 1350 hours. Captain will take the conn at this time.”
The executive officer was standing next to him, his eyes glued to his binoculars, watching the destroyer intently. Lieutenant (J.G.) Laurin Wilburforce also envied the Bedford, but for purely romantic reasons. “Jesus! She’s gorgeous!” he muttered, as if he were speaking about a beautiful woman who was far above the class of a plain clod like himself. He was indeed an undistinguished-looking young man, but at least he was an Annapolis graduate, the only one aboard the Tiburon Bay, and, because of this, was exec in spite of holding a lower rank than several officers under him. Captain Larsen suspected that Wilburforce either had been the lowest in his graduating class (1957) or had somehow managed to sully his record subsequently. He was a dully efficient young officer, but why else would he be exiled to an old fleet oiler manned by reservists, children and exiled thirty-year men? “Will somebody back there acknowledge the captain’s orders?” Wilburforce irritably called to the wheelhouse.
The Bedford Incident Page 1
