Munceford felt a stab of guilty uneasiness over the fact that Porter was getting to Finlander before him. He fumbled the handshake with Commander Allison, who was a short, robust man with a big nose. “Have you ever been out with the navy before, Mr. Munceford?” the executive officer asked him.
Munceford hesitated before answering, hoping that Ralston would inject something to the effect that he was an experienced military correspondent who had dived in submarines, jumped with paratroops and flown with the Strategic Air Command. But now that he was on the bridge, the ensign’s transformation was complete. His demeanor and silence were rock-like and Munceford’s hesitation became a suspicion of uncertainty. “Yes,” he finally said. “Submarines, and also on a short DE cruise with a reserve unit. DE’s are kind of like destroyers, so I’m not completely lost here.”
“I see,” Commander Allison said. His eyes were suddenly glued to the camouflage jacket and Munceford became aware that it glowed with a hideous hodge-podge effect in the red light. For the first time he felt embarrassed over it. “Well, DE’s are somewhat similar, of course,” the exec agreed, as if he actually resented the comparison. “But this DDL is damned near as big as a cruiser. However, the main thing to remember is that we are not on a reservists’ cruise, Mr. Munceford. We are an active part of NATO defenses and operate our ship virtually under wartime conditions. And that reminds me — may I see your credentials, please?”
The abrupt request took Munceford completely by surprise. He fumbled inside his jacket and brought out the creased envelope which contained the orders from the Navy Department attaching “Munceford, Benjamin J., Civilian Correspondent,” to DDL 113 for a period of two weeks, handing it to the commander. Then he fished his wallet out of his back pocket, picked about among the few bills and many dog-eared membership cards for his War Department correspondent’s ID. Finding the plastic square, he gave it to the exec with the same resentful feeling he had often felt when handing his driver’s license to a tough cop.
“Thank you.” Commander Allison briefly checked the orders and the ID, then gave the latter to the ensign. “Mr. Ralston, will you please note in the log that Mr. Munceford’s credentials have been checked and enter the serial number of this ID.” He flashed a thin smile at Munceford. “Like I say, we operate under virtual wartime conditions. There’s a lot of highly classified equipment on this ship.”
“And what would you have done if my credentials hadn’t been in order? Thrown me overboard, Commander?”
The smile remained, but the executive officer obviously did not think this question funny. “We would confine you to quarters while the matter was being checked through with COMFLANT,” he answered dryly and turned his attention to the chart from which he had been diverted when Munceford was brought before him. “Maybe you are interested in the Bedford’s current position and our projected patrol for the next week. This is where we are.” He pointed with a stubby finger to an X penciled over a course line. “Approximately at the southwest entrance to the Denmark Strait. From here we will patrol through it toward the general vicinity of Jan Mayen Island — here.” The stubby finger jabbed a tiny speck in the vastness of the Arctic Ocean to the northeast of Iceland. “The course line shown here is nice and straight, but it probably won’t work out that way in practice. Radar and sonar contacts have to be investigated. Ice conditions and weather can get awfully bad, pushing us off course. How are your sea legs, by the way?” He stole another doubtful glance at Munceford’s jacket when he asked the question.
“I can make out, Commander. Do you expect we will run into Russian subs?”
“Some.”
“How about their trawlers?”
“Some of those too.”
“I’m getting the impression that they are far more active than has been let on at home. Is that so, Commander?”
Allison’s answer came clipped and definite. “I will let Captain Finlander brief you on the tactical situation, Mr. Munceford. He will have to decide what to tell you and what not to tell you. Frankly, I am surprised that you are here at all. This area is far too critical to make a TV show out of it.” He pronounced TV as if it were a dirty word.
“You mean you want to fight yourselves a sort of private cold war out here?” Munceford acidly asked. From this moment on, he knew they would dislike each other. The commander did not answer him. Ensign Ralston returned to the chart table and handed the ID card back to the executive officer, who in turn passed it on to Munceford. For a moment there was a painful silence while the camouflage jacket received another strongly disapproving scrutiny.
“It gets pretty cold in these latitudes,” Allison finally said. “Mr. Ralston, will you see that Mr. Munceford is issued some regulation arctics out of our slop chest, please.”
“Oh, don’t trouble yourselves,” Munceford protested. “This is my regular working outfit and it keeps me plenty warm enough.” But as he said this, Ralston snapped out: “Yes, sir,” to the commander.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some duties to perform,” Allison politely but firmly announced.
Munceford found himself started on the long return journey through the Bedford’s intricate interior maze of passages, once again following behind the ensign’s broad back. On the way down the shaft from the bridge, he ventured to observe: “The commander is an abrupt cuss, isn’t he?”
“He’s okay by us,” Ralston answered shortly.
They went the rest of the way in silence. When they reached the cabin they found Lieutenant Packer seated at the desk, writing in a black notebook. Pipe-tobacco smoke hung in a blue mist around his head.
“All right, Pete!” Ralston boomed out with a startling return of his former hearty manner, which he evidently reserved entirely for this area. “Quit scribbling complaints about us to your Admiralty and take charge of entertaining our guest. I think he needs a drink.”
“A drink?” Munceford exclaimed with hopeful surprise.
Packer put down his pen. “Don’t expect too much,” he drawled. “This navy isn’t trusted with the real stuff. You have a choice of a whisky sour without whisky or a Bloody Mary without blood. What did you think of our old man?”
“Didn’t meet him,” Munceford answered, then added with a wry grimace: “But I met a Commander Allison. He could charm the balls off a brass monkey.” He immediately sensed a frosting of the two officers’ demeanor, but did not care. His ugly mood had returned and his boyish face showed it.
“And what do you think of the ship as a whole?” Packer asked evenly. “Any interesting snap judgments there too?”
Ralston snickered.
“The corridors are clean and all the doors neatly closed, as far as I could see — which wasn’t much, on account of the peculiar indirect lighting.”
“That’s so our eyes can quickly become adjusted to total darkness if we have to go on deck,” Packer explained. “Kind of gloomy at first, but you’ll get used to it. Let me take you to the wardroom and I’ll show you some of the gayer side of life on the Bedford.” He knocked the ashes out of his pipe and got up from the desk.
“The wardroom is warm and cozy,” Ralston pointedly told Munceford. “You won’t need your jacket in there.” Before hurriedly leaving ahead of them, he gave it a last amused glance. “It’s sensational, Ben! It knocked out Commander Allison! . . . See you later.”
As Munceford took it off, he swore to himself he would wear his jacket as much as he damned well liked and to hell with Allison.
8.
The Bedford’s wardroom was not exactly gay, but it turned out to be at least cheerful in décor and almost spacious. One bulkhead was covered by blue drapes with green and gold palm trees which created an incongruously frivolous departure from the austere warship’s atmosphere and the cold, dark sea she was traversing. The opposite bulkhead gave the impression of having been paneled with walnut, but it was actually a very clever kind of plastic coating which created this illusion. The proper naval touch was provided by a
framed reproduction of the Bonhomme Richard engaging the Serapis. There were two long tables, one of which was being set for the evening meal by a steward in a spotless white jacket; he was dropping stainless steel cutlery into the individual compartments of a mahogany rolling-guard fitted over the tablecloth. The surrounding chairs were functionally comfortable and padded with a blue vinyl which matched the drapes; a small settee was covered with the same material and next to it was a stand full of very battered magazines. A sideboard held a steaming silver Thermos of coffee and two jugs, one containing a red, the other a yellow liquid.
Two lieutenants (J.G.) were seated at the empty table, poring over a large sheet of paper filled with complex electrical diagrams and were so immersed in a deep discussion when Munceford and Packer entered that they did not even look up. But the Englishman went right over to them and started the introductions.
“Gentlemen, I want you to meet Mr. Munceford, the TV reporter who is going to be with us for a week or so. Ben, this is Lieutenants Krindlemeyer and Spitzer, the electronic wizards of the old Bedford.”
The two officers bobbed to their feet with vacantly surprised expressions. Although one was dark and the other light-complected, they somehow looked identical and both stared myopically at Munceford through identical spectacles. “Where did you come from?” Spitzer asked as he shook hands.
“Do you only know what goes on in the sky and under the sea?” Lieutenant Packer asked. “Aren’t you aware there was an eighteen-thousand-ton tanker alongside of us this afternoon?”
“Oh, that! Sure. We picked up the Tiburon Bay on the QB-two-R when she was fifty-eight miles off.”
“Yes,” Krindlemeyer confirmed. “And detected her emissions at over eighty. Do you know at what range she picked us up on her radar, Mr. Munceford?”
“No. I was sacked out.”
“These ECM chaps live on a pink cloud all of their own,” Packer explained, steering Munceford away from them and toward the sideboard. There he introduced him to the steward, whose name was Martin and who regarded him with considerable curiosity.
“Are you going to put us on TV, Mr. Munceford?” he asked.
“Sure am,” he answered, not really knowing how without a camera.
“Us ordinary guys too?” the steward asked with a sly glance at the officers.
Packer screwed his face into a grimace which was supposed to express a lampoon of British stuffiness. “Well, of course, Martin. This is the democratic American navy, isn’t it? Absolutely anything goes.”
“I wasn’t knocking the system, sir,” Martin answered softly and with a twinkle of amusement. He glanced toward Krindlemeyer and Spitzer, who had resumed droning at each other over the diagrams. “It’s all the fancy education around here that gets an ordinary mortal down. There was a time when you’d pick up some good dirty jokes in a destroyer’s wardroom.”
Both Packer and Munceford chuckled.
“By the way, sir, you got some letters,” the steward announced in a normal voice and handed Packer four of them from a tray on the sideboard which was stacked with mail.
“Oh, thanks, Martin!” the Englishman casually exclaimed and shoved them into his coat pocket, but not so quickly that he did not take time for a hasty glance over the handwriting on the envelopes. Three of them were in Mumsy’s precise penmanship; only one was addressed with Shebeona’s bold scrawl. This gave Munceford a peculiar sense of gratification when he noticed it. He did not want that beautiful creature to be a puritanically faithful navy wife or sweetheart whose letters caught up with her sailor boy in carload lots. The near indifference of the recipient was also encouraging. “What’s your poison, Ben?” Packer was asking. “The whisky sours are spiked with lemon extract. The Bloody Mary’s with tabasco sauce and the stuff Martin puts in his hair.”
The steward chuckled as he left through the pantry door.
“I’m a whisky drinker, myself,” Munceford answered without much enthusiasm over the prospects of an ersatz. “Are you a married man, Pete?”
“Not bloody likely on my salary. Are you?”
“Just getting rid of my third.”
“Gad! You must have something to do with the population explosion we hear so much about.”
“Hell, no! I’m a pillar to the birth-control industry.” This changed his companion’s grin to a frown of mild shock.
Lieutenant Packer mixed the drinks by simply dropping an ice cube in each glass and pouring the juices over them, but he did it with a flare and conviction which indicated a determination to kid himself as well as Munceford. Even when he sipped the concoction, Munceford was not entirely sure that it was nothing but fruit juice. “Almost fools you,” he admitted as they sat down at the opposite end of the table from the oblivious Krindlemeyer and Spitzer.
“What do you mean almost?” the Englishman laughed. “Twenty or thirty of these and you’d be in sick bay.”
Munceford noticed that he was subconsciously fondling the pocket containing the letters. He wanted to ask whether he was engaged, but instead inquired: “Is it a fact that there isn’t a drop of hard stuff aboard? Not even up here in the Arctic Ocean?”
“Surgeon has some. If it were old Hirschfeld, I’d say you might stand a chance, but I don’t know about the new chap. I may throw a fit in a day or two and try him.”
“I bunked with Commander Porter on the Tiburon Bay. He’s pretty strait-laced. If Hirschfeld was so cooperative, why did you get rid of him?”
Packer reacted with a sudden frown and an icy: “What do you mean by that?”
“Well . . . nothing in particular. I only thought —”
“Lieutenant Hirschfeld is a closed subject,” the Englishman interrupted with surprising vehemence. “Forget it.”
Munceford blinked, sighed, stared down into his glass and wished to God in Heaven it would miraculously change into one-hundred-proof bourbon. If ever he had needed a real drink, it was now. He thought of the bottle he had tossed out of the porthole of the Tiburon Bay just to needle Porter, now lost forever on a dark, empty sea a hundred miles astern. Perhaps it would drift ashore on the Greenland coast where some Eskimo would pick it up and get roaring drunk. He wished he were that Eskimo right now. He wished he were anywhere but on this destroyer.
Lieutenant Packer sensed that he might have inadvertently betrayed a secret which was not suspected, that he had unfairly been rude to Munceford, and suddenly became very flustered about it. He glanced up the table toward Krindlemeyer and Spitzer, who remained preoccupied with their own electronic problems, then toward the pantry door, which was swinging silently back and forth on its hinges as the Bedford breasted the swells. “I’m sorry, Ben,” he said with an earnest whisper. “I know it was accidental, but don’t ask any questions about Hirschfeld on this ship. He’s a devil of a sore subject. Had a big row with the skipper.”
“Is Finlander so hard to get along with?” Munceford asked without bothering to lower his voice.
“Captain Finlander is one of the finest officers I have ever known,” Packer answered, also raising his voice to a normal level and with a certain defiance in it. “And that includes my own Royal Navy, which is going some, believe me.”
“Well, okay.”
There had been no reaction from Krindlemeyer and Spitzer, who could have heard the last remarks. Martin came in, distributed some ketchup bottles in slots of the dinner table’s rolling-guard and left. Munceford sipped his fruit juice and noticed that Packer’s right hand was still nervously resting on the pocket containing the letters. “Look, Pete,” he said. “You don’t have to entertain me. Go ahead and read your letters.”
“Oh, they can wait.”
“Hell, go ahead! You haven’t heard from Shebeona for weeks!”
Packer’s jaw dropped open. “How do you know her name?” he stammered.
Munceford felt himself flushing a bright scarlet. He bit his lips, rocked back in his chair, then pounded his fist on the table and exclaimed: “Oh, damn!”
Spi
tzer looked up from his electronic diagrams, but from the expression on his face it was hard to tell whether he had been startled by the profanity or was staring into space at some imaginary blackboard filled with phantom equations.
“How do you know her name?” the Englishman demanded again, this time with a sharp insistence.
“Pete . . . I lay down on your bunk this afternoon. I felt the frame under the pillow. So I looked. So shoot me. So I’m sorry!”
“I’d damned well think you would be. That sort of thing isn’t done, really. Very bad manners.” His voice was very low, very even and very angry.
“I said I’m sorry, Pete. Now go ahead and read your letters.”
“Thanks. I think I will.” Lieutenant Packer got up from his seat opposite Munceford, moved to another chair at the center of the table, twisted his back to him and in a moment was a thousand miles away as he opened the first letter with restrained agitation and began to read. It was from Shebeona and only filled half the page.
Munceford drained his insipid drink and, after finally tearing his eyes away from the letter, stared smugly at the palm trees on the drapes, which swayed with a peculiar realism as the roll of the Bedford rippled the material. The steward padded in on silent feet, deposited some butter dishes on the dinner table and left. The turbines hummed softly and their vibration set up a momentary resonance in a cup full of coffee spoons on the sideboard, making them buzz with a thin metallic sound. The murmur of Krindlemeyer’s and Spitzer’s whispered conversation suddenly seemed almost loud and Munceford could not help overhearing it.
“You’ve got to remember that when you interrupt an inductive circuit, switches will create arcs,” one of them was saying, his nose almost touching the sheet of diagrams. “That would give you peaks and craters in the contacts.”
“Right, but I think this is a matter of contact bounce,” the other answered. “There’s a sequential repeater on that circuit with a rate of ten milliseconds. The operating time is considerably longer than the bounce, and that’s what produces the noise in the system.”
The Bedford Incident Page 6
