Munceford wagged his head in a noncommittal motion. “Sort of — but how do you keep going with all those troubles, Captain?”
“The book recommends to instill pride of service and a strong sense of duty,” Finlander answered him with a wrinkling of his nose. “It also says to give the men frequent current-affairs talks so they know what it’s all about. That sort of thing doesn’t even stem the tears of a reservist crying to return to his junior vice-presidency. A professional needs something far more concrete to dedicate him. The brutal truth is that nothing will do it as well as a real enemy challenging him to a fight. And that’s where I hold an advantage over commanders in other cold-war areas. We’re not here to make faces at Commies over a wall; we’re not in a base area indoctrinating simple-minded natives into the complex savagery of modern guerrilla tactics; we’re not sitting in an air-conditioned Florida blockhouse trying to shoot a bigger hole in the moon, weather permitting. Here we hunt Russians. Here we have our enemy and, more than accepting his challenge, go after him without any inhibitions of containment policies or technical inferiorities. We miss the kill, but have become addicted to the chase, and I admit that I shamelessly use its exhilaration to inspire my crew.” He stopped and stared thoughtfully at Munceford through half-closed eyes which seemed to smolder beneath the heavy lids. “Are you shocked?” he asked.
“Well, surprised, sir,” Munceford answered and winced a little over finding himself “sirring” Finlander. He had always made it a point to address all officers on an equal basis. “And I wonder if this won’t provoke a real attack one day; if somebody won’t lose their temper and pull a trigger.”
“Oh, you mean that old saw about somebody accidentally starting a war?” the captain countered with a contemptuous flick of his head. “We’re not amateurs on either side, acting impetuously or subject to fits of temper. Nor do we have any red telephone or a bunch of keys which serially unlock the firing switches. But the whole business is so inherently calculated and technical that it is naturally kept under control at all times.”
“And really only a game, after all,” Munceford said with an unconvinced laugh. “Maybe the Commies get a kick out of bitching you too.” He immediately sensed that he had said the wrong thing.
Finlander’s eyes narrowed and the scar on his throat began to pulse visibly, betraying an inner pressure. But his voice remained even. “Bitching me?” he repeated. “I don’t know what has been whispered to you about that. I make no secret over being concerned over one Russian sub. But bitching implies unrequited frustration.” He paused with lips pressed together into a thin, hard line, and Munceford waited breathlessly, suspecting he had inadvertently touched a sore point which was about to be revealed. He was not expecting what came next.
“Have you read Moby Dick?” the captain asked.
“Uh . . . well, I saw the movie. All about whaling and . . .” He received such a coldly contemptuous look that it stopped him in mid-sentence.
“It’s not all about whaling. Well, never mind.” He twisted impatiently in his chair and suddenly seemed quite uninterested in continuing the discussion. When a knock on the cabin door broke the painful silence between them, it was with relief that he shouted: “Enter!”
It was Commodore Schrepke, and behind him a steward was carrying a tray full of food. Finlander got up and exclaimed: “Dinnertime already? Good. I’m starved. But first have yourself a quick drink, Commodore.”
Munceford thought that he was about to be invited to have dinner in the captain’s cabin, but as the steward passed him to put the tray down on the desk, he saw it only contained service for two. Finlander quickly dispelled any remaining notions that he had been accepted on such intimate terms. “If you’ll forgive me, Munceford,” he told him, “the commodore and I will dine alone together in order to go over the day’s operations. I’m sure you’ll find some interesting company in the wardroom.”
Munceford got up. “Yeah — okay. Thanks for your time, Captain.”
“Quite all right. We will talk some more after you get settled.” He turned to Schrepke, who was pouring himself some juice. “You should tell Mr. Munceford some of your U-boat experiences, Commodore. It would help him understand the over-all picture of ASW operations.”
Schrepke glanced at Munceford and it was as if he decided then and there that he wanted no part of him. “There are several books on the subject,” he said with a forbidding politeness. “My own experiences are of no interest to the American press, thank you.” As he spoke, he took a small silver hip flask from his pocket and blatantly proceeded to spike his drink with its contents. Munceford stared in amazement at this flagrant violation of American navy regulations, then shifted his eyes to Captain Finlander, expecting a blistering reaction from him. The heavy eyebrows were drawn together in an ominous line and the scar on the throat pulsed a dull red; but he said nothing.
Schrepke raised his glass, exclaimed “Prosit,” drained the drink with a grimace indicating a pleasurable pain, looked right through Munceford and caught the expression on Finlander’s face. “I presume, Captain, that Lieutenant Hirschfeld’s medical prescriptions are still valid even though he himself has been removed from his practice aboard your ship.” There was an unmistakable note of irony in his voice.
The steward fumbled a plate, barely managing a noisy retrieve against the edge of the desk.
Captain Finlander glared at the German, then wheeled away from him without answering. He grasped Munceford by the arm and ushered him toward the door. “You will find that submariners who’ve been overly hunted develop permanent instabilities in their nervous systems,” he said so loudly that it was obviously intended as a direct jab at Schrepke. “So killing them isn’t always necessary. . . . I will see you tomorrow. Good night.”
The cabin door slammed shut and Munceford found himself alone in the dim red glow of the passageway. He stood there for a moment, listening, half expecting to hear an explosion inside the captain’s cabin. None came. So he shuffled off in the direction of the wardroom, bracing himself against the bulkheads as he tried to balance his movements with those of the destroyer.
Munceford found eight officers in the wardroom who were already halfway through their supper. Lieutenant Peter Packer was the only familiar face and he made the introductions so quickly that the names hardly impressed themselves on his memory: “Ensign Lissholm . . . Commander Franklin . . . Lieutenants Harwell . . . Petersen . . . Goodfellow . . . Brubeck . . . Samuels . . .”
None did more than nod or mumble a barely comprehensible word of welcome through a mouthful of roast beef and mashed potatoes. There was a minor confusion on one side of the table as everybody had to squeeze down in order to make room for him. Nobody tried to engage him in conversation, but neither did they talk among themselves; most of them were occupied with reading mail delivered by the Tiburon Bay while eating at the same time. Steward Martin put down a plate in front of Munceford which was heaped with meat and vegetables, all washed in a miniature surf of gravy activated by the roll of the Bedford. The lieutenant next to him automatically passed salt, pepper and a sticky bottle of Worcestershire. The commander giggled softly over something amusing in his letter. The ensign squeezed up the last of his gravy with a piece of bread, then sat back and began picking his teeth, one hand shielding the other according to best Annapolis etiquette. He watched as Munceford tried to separate a piece of fat from a piece of lean, and finally asked with offhand interest: “Was the chow good on the Tiburon Bay?”
“What? . . . Oh, sure. Pretty fair.”
“113 serves steak or roast beef three times a week.”
“Fine. I was on a sub for a while and they served all the steak we could eat.”
The ensign said: “They need it,” and terminated that conversation by turning his attention upon a dish of chocolate ice cream which the steward put before him. Nobody asked Munceford about his experiences on a sub, and for a moment he was tempted to announce loudly that when they did not eat steak,
submariners lived on prairie oysters. But instead he filled his mouth with food, masticating as silently as the rest, his thoughts going back to his session with Captain Finlander. He had not really made up his mind whether he liked the captain or not; he was a strange, yet compelling personality. But at least he talked. At least he seemed to care about Munceford being present on the Bedford. What was it he had said? “. . . believe it or not, Munceford, your being aboard is a matter of strategy.” What had he meant by that? Some sinister implication behind it, as there was behind some other things he had said?
After a while Lieutenant Packer announced to nobody in particular that he had to attend to some decoding and left without having given his cabin mate a glance or a word since the cursory introductions; he was evidently still sore over the incident with Shebeona’s photograph. One by one, the other officers finished their meals, folded up their letters and departed too. The commander was the last one to leave, and before passing out the door, he stopped a moment and looked back at Munceford. “Which broadcasting company did you say you work for?” he asked.
“I’m free-lance.”
The commander frowned. “But you’re on a definite assignment, aren’t you?”
“Well . . . NBC has expressed a lot of interest.”
“Uh-huh. Good night.”
Munceford found himself alone in the wardroom with a dish of melting ice cream and a cup of tepid coffee, the commander’s question having channeled his thoughts into fresh worries. An assistant director of NBC’s news department had expressed interest, but with certain reservations. The story had to show some fresh action scenes from a destroyer on arctic patrol, it had to give a clear insight into the operational problems, it had to contain human interest and drama. Otherwise, the best he could hope for was the sale of stock footage at the going rate of $1.25 per foot — perhaps $250 as against $5,000 for a feature. How could he meet those requirements if Captain Finlander insisted upon the secrecy of the operation? How could he get human interest and drama if men like Commodore Schrepke were evasive and uncooperative? How Nancy would laugh if she could see him in this predicament! Yet Finlander obviously wanted some kind of story. What? Well, he’d have to stay on the good side of that man, no matter how difficult and strange he turned out to be.
Munceford drained his cup and left the wardroom to pick his way through the empty passageways toward his cabin, which he found only after making several wrong turns. Packer was not there and the cubicle was as lonely and oppressive as ever. Neatly laid out on his bunk were a regulation navy arctic parka and, on top of it, a shiny new Model 70-H camera, complete with three lenses in its turret. Munceford stared for a moment at this evidence of the Bedford’s enormous efficiency, but without any particular admiration or gratitude. He listened tensely to the silence beyond the whine of the turbines and hiss of the ventilator, then turned his attention to Packer’s bunk, which was once again immaculate in taut perfection. Leaning down, he surreptitiously slipped his hand beneath the pillow, cautiously probing under it with his fingers. There was nothing there. Shebeona had been removed to safety by her jealous lover and Munceford found himself thwarted in this innocent game of cuckoldry. He had hoped to go to bed with her exquisite beauty refreshed in his mind’s eye, but instead there would only be Finlander, whose face remained indelibly burned into it.
10.
The heavy overcast cleared during the night, and by 0500, when the cooks sleepily manned their galley, the Bedford was steaming over a glass-calm ocean which mirrored a fantastic dome of starlit space. There was no moon, but northern lights rippled across the heavens with curtains of cold blue fire which cast their luminescence over the ship, sharply etching her on a silent course twixt abyss and infinity. Her tall mast described lazy circles around the constellation of Corona Borealis; the stars also touched the sea around her and broke into sprays of dancing diamonds in her wake. On the bridge the quartermaster of the watch came out of the wheelhouse to check the thermometer for his hourly weather entry in the log; it stood at two degrees above zero. He also checked from a respectful distance the figure crouching by the windscreen, the same figure which had been there the hour before, in exactly the same position, not facing up and outward like a man entranced by the arctic night, but staring downward at the black waters sweeping by the hull beneath him. Black leather glistened with a faint sheen where it was stretched tight over broad, hunched shoulders. In these dark hours before dawn Commodore Wolfgang Schrepke could always be found here, unless the bridge was so swept by freezing spume as to become untenable even for him. No duty called him here; no officer of his rank stood a regular watch. He came only for his own troubled reasons to find a brooding solitude with the sea, to stare into it like an insomniac contemplating a cemetery which holds too many of his departed kin.
At 0600 reveille was piped through the ship’s PA and men began stirring inside her. Deep down in her lower vitals, where the biting cold of the Arctic Ocean was replaced by a humid heat radiating from roaring boilers, Fireman Second Class Bert Meggs checked dials and made a minor adjustment to the steam manifolds to compensate for the hot-water requirements of shipmates taking their morning showers. In the galley the first couple of hundred pancakes were coming off the griddles to be stacked by messmen in the steam tables; fumes containing the tingling aroma of frying bacon were sucked into the ventilators and wafted into the freezing outside air, where they rose on a following breeze and stimulated the nostrils of Seaman Willy Kolinsky, crowded high up in the crow’s-nest. He shifted his cramped position and pressed himself harder against the heater coil which kept the Bedford’s masthead lookout from freezing to death in his lonely perch. Above him the radar antenna whirred softly as it turned, sweeping the night with its sensory microwaves. The northern lights had faded, but no trace of dawn had as yet replaced their glow, and the night enveloped the ship, darker than ever. Ensign Ralston emerged from the wheelhouse with a sextant and unerringly sought out Regulus among the sparkling myriads above; Commodore Schrepke finally moved away from his isolation in the wing and stepped up behind the young officer, watching him for a moment as he took his three-star sight. Then the German retreated to his cabin and Ralston went into the navigation office to calculate his position and check it against the observation made a half-hour earlier by Lieutenant Harwell.
The watch changed at 0745 and only then was there a faint lightening on the eastern horizon which began washing out the stars hanging low in that quadrant of the sky. The thermometer on the bridge now registered exactly zero degrees, and because of this extreme cold there was no muster or inspection on deck this morning. Only a detail of gunners showed up to traverse the turrets and launchers in order to make certain they had not become frozen in their tracks during the night. In the chartroom Commander Allison sipped coffee with the OOD while listening on the monitoring circuit of the communicator system as the weapons-control officer checked all his stations from the CIC. Captain Finlander finished a spartan breakfast in the isolation of his cabin, put on his white duffel coat and the long-billed fisherman’s cap with its tiny silver eagle and went up on the bridge to watch the dawning. From there he descended into the tense twilight world of the CIC and silently joined Lieutenant Spitzer’s vigil behind the sonar operators, listening with them to the hollow pings and watching the sterile green glow of the PPI scopes in their consoles. After a while he shifted his position to the main search-radar scanner and saw the sweeper activate incandescent rows of blobs to the west — the return from mountain ranges on the Greenland coast thirty miles away. Up in the crow’s-nest a new lookout, Seaman First Class Robert W. Jones, also spotted those mountains, but as a jagged white line appearing with startling suddenness on the horizon where snowy peaks were kindled by the first streak of dawn and reflected back its light. Jones picked up the phone and dutifully reported his sighting to the bridge, seventy feet below him. In the Communications Center three radio operators sat at their sets listening to a cacophony of jumbled Morse signals, their
trained ears separating the vital from the trivial; near them Lieutenant Peter Packer, R.N., turned a receiver to the commercial ship-to-shore RT frequency and suddenly found himself listening to a voice speaking English with a thick north-country accent. He listened with a wistful sentimentality as the man talked about a poor catch of codfish he was bringing back to Grimsby. In his cabin Ben Munceford woke up, found himself as alone as ever, rolled out of his bunk and wondered if he were too late for breakfast.
At 0921 the sun at last cracked the rim of the sea to the east and reluctantly rose out of it, a pale burnished disk without the slightest trace of warming red. For a long time some of the larger stars successfully defied it to extinguish their light. In the crow’s-nest Seaman Jones adjusted his binoculars and carefully studied the horizon ahead of the Bedford. He had caught some flashes out there, something like weak blinker signals, but he quickly identified the source and telephoned the bridge to report drifting ice ahead. It gave him great satisfaction to do this because he knew that neither radar nor sonar had been able to detect this hazard in spite of all their intricate technological gobbledygook — a good pair of eyes was still needed. In the wheelhouse Captain Finlander discussed the report with the OOD, Lieutenant Harwell.
The Bedford Incident Page 8
