“Mr. Packer!” He hailed the officer without any formality at all and with a voice which still contained a strident note of puberty. “Did you make out what kind of whale that was?”
“A humpback, I believe.”
“Are you sure, sir? Did you get a good look?”
“Quite sure, Qua’le,” Packer insisted with a kind of patient indulgence.
“Darn it!” the boy exclaimed with the petulance of an innocent child. “I wish they’d assign a marine biologist to this ship. I suggested one, you know — but no! I get an oceanographer instead. Now, what earthly help is an oceanographer in cataloguing ambient noises of animal origin, I ask you?”
“I am sure Lieutenant Burger is doing his very best,” Packer told him acidly.
“Oh, yes, sir. 1 didn’t mean anything personal, of course. And, actually, I am quite sure it was a humpback. My own readout on the MTS indicated it, you see. So let’s record it as such.” He began scribbling in the notebook, his long, bony fingers, already an unhealthy purplish crimson from the cold, curling around the pen in a painful, double-jointed grip.
When he had completed his notes, Packer got around to introducing Munceford to him: “Ben, this is Sonarman Second Class Merlin Queffle, our ace sonar operator. It is rumored that Captain Finlander ran roughshod over a dozen destroyer and submarine skippers in order to obtain the services of this lad. Unfortunately, he is perfectly aware of his own importance and treats his ordinary mortal shipmates in a most cavalier fashion . . . up to and including the executive officer.”
Queffle took the sarcasm with a guileless smile which revealed his front teeth to be very large and very crooked. “Oh, get off it, sir,” he exclaimed with a high-pitched giggle, then turned to Munceford and extended a slender hand toward him. “You must be the television man who joined us yesterday. Glad to meet you. Gee, that’s a sharp jacket you’re wearing. I like it!”
Ben Munceford had been staring at and listening to this strange young sailor with an openly amazed disbelief. Now he was a little slow in grasping the offered handshake, and when he did, it felt somewhat like grasping a bunch of wilted asparagus. “How are you, Kwivvle?”
“Quefe, sir,” the sonarman corrected him. “Merlin P. Queffle. It’s French . . . Breton, really. A lot of my friends call me the Breton Kid.”
“And some call him Merlin the Magician,” Packer injected.
“Oh, get off it, sir. . . .”
“Because he has ESP,” the English officer persisted in explaining to Munceford. “A formidable secret weapon in submarine tracking.”
“ESP? What the hell is that?”
“Extrasensory Perception,” Queffle brightly told him, with neither humility nor bombast. “The idea is that I’m supposed to be able to sense whether or not a subsurface sound is of man-made origin. Well, the long fancy name is all right, I suppose, and I do kind of enjoy the ring of it. But I prefer to think I’m simply in tune with the sea and what goes on down there. I’m from a long line of Grand Bank fishermen and captains, although you’d never guess it to look at me.” He jokingly sucked in his cheeks to exaggerate their gauntness, then flashed a buck-toothed smile. “My mother played violin with the Boston Symphony before she married my father, and I suppose I inherited my sensitive ears from her. Anyway, the combination seems to make me pretty hot on the sonar and —” He would have rambled on about himself in an unabated torrent had he not been rudely interrupted by an angry voice calling his name from the wheelhouse door.
“Queffle! What the devil are you doing out there without cap and gloves?” It was the OOD, Lieutenant Harwell, and he came rushing toward them with a belligerent annoyance which at first boded ill for the sonarman, but then somehow quickly and mysteriously abated. The dressing down which followed was not only mild but almost pleading. “Do you realize what the temperature is out here, Queffle? Twelve degrees! For God’s sake, boy! What do you think the captain would do to me if you caught a cold in your ears during my watch? Besides, it’s against regulations to enter the bridge without proper dress, you know. Please go back inside at once. Please!”
Queffle had watched the DOD’s approach and listened to his words without any special alarm; now he looked around and sniffed the brisk slipstream sweeping the bridge, his nostrils and lips parting slightly and giving him an extraordinary rabbit-like appearance. “It really is quite cold, isn’t it?” he agreed, then excused himself and ambled off toward the wheelhouse door.
“Damn it, Pete! You should know better than to let him stand out here like that,” Harwell rebuked Lieutenant Packer. “Don’t you remember there was hell to pay when Queffle got infected sinuses last month?”
The Englishman laughed, but somewhat cautiously. “Sorry, but, frankly, I’m awfully inhibited about how to handle your precious Merlin. Delicate, precocious children always have thrown me, actually.”
“Now, don’t give me that, Pete,” Harwell angrily retorted. “Merlin Queffle is an enlisted sailor in the United States Navy and should be treated like one.”
“Then why don’t you?” Packer instantly countered, the humor gone from his eyes, leaving them coldly serious.
Lieutenant Harwell became terribly flustered as well as angry. “B-because . . . uh . . . because, you know damn well why! Although I see no reason for him to come up here in the first place. I’m going to speak to Spitzer about that. With two million dollars’ worth of sonar gear aboard this ship, I can’t understand why we’ve got to pamper a primad —” He abruptly stopped himself in midsentence as Commander Allison stepped out on the bridge and came toward them.
“I hate to break up your gossiping in the sun,” he dryly announced to Harwell, “but we seem to have a tactical situation shaping up and there are a few details to be taken care of by the OOD — which is you, is it not, Mr. Harwell? Fine! First bring the ship to sixty-five degrees and increase her speed to eighteen knots. Then please send your JOOD to find Commodore Schrepke, present the captain’s compliments and ask him to come to the bridge. Also notify Lieutenants Spitzer, Beeker and Burger to report to the captain’s day cabin in exactly five minutes. That will do to start with.”
Harwell said: “Aye, aye, sir,” then could not contain himself from asking: “Are we on to Moby Dick, sir?”
“Maybe — maybe not. But you know the skipper. So get cracking and play it like we are!” He waited until Harwell had rushed back into the wheelhouse and called the new course to the helmsman, then he turned on Ben Munceford, gave his camouflage jacket an icy look and said: “Ensign Ralston is organizing a volleyball game on the fantail. I suggest you lay aft with your camera, Mr. Munceford.”
“But I’d rather stick around here if there’s going to be some kind of action, and —”
“The captain wants pictures of the volleyball.” Allison cut off his protest with a slight, yet very threatening rise in his tone. “You must not keep the men waiting on deck in this temperature.” Again he waited, this time while Munceford sulkily left the bridge. The executive officer’s body was racked by a distasteful shudder inside his bulky parka and he said to Lieutenant Packer: “It must be rough on you, sharing a cabin with that man.”
“He’s not really so bad when you get to know him, sir,” the Englishman answered with a certain hesitation. “I really suspect the brashness is a front.”
“I hope you don’t judge our American press by him,” Allison growled. “I thought that type of reporter went out years ago, but evidently it has been reinstated by television.”
“Don’t worry, sir — we have that kind in England too.” He coughed and cleared his throat, then blurted out: “I suppose the captain’s awfully busy right now.”
“Yes. . . . Something which I could help you with?”
Packer met the probing look in the commander’s green eyes, and the indecision over whether to send a message to Shebeona became a jab of physical pain in his chest. He hoped it did not show in his face. “Oh, nothing important, sir. It can wait.” He forced a smile, t
hen covered his embarrassment with a sudden urgent exclamation: “Goodness! If Lieutenant Beeker is to report to the bridge, I must relieve him immediately at the Communications Center. Excuse me, sir.”
He rushed off, leaving Commander Allison thoughtfully staring after him before turning his eyes to contemplate the distant, snow-crusted ramparts of Greenland’s coast. The Bedford was picking up speed, and although the Arctic Ocean was still lying placid around her, she began to generate her own wind, which chilled the meager warmth of the sun. It gnawed with cold little fangs on his exposed face and he turned his back to it, looking aft toward the wake which had straightened out, unraveling itself from the twisting track of the whale hunt. He saw six men emerge onto the main deck, dressed in heavy sweatshirts and pants, and hurry toward the fantail, the last one in line hefting a ball as he ran.
15.
Standing alone on his bridge in a blackening, brooding mood, Erik Finlander watched this lovely day on the Arctic Ocean end with a breathtaking sunset. Even with his mind troubled by a tangled skein of plots and travails, he remained aware of every detail of it.
Some high cirrus clouds had come drifting across the clear sky, fashioned by stratospheric winds into delicate brush strokes of pearl white. In the land-bound west, fingers of mist had crept out of the fiords and closed around the coast, hiding in a silvery shroud all but the glacier crowns of the mountains and the glittering seaward edge of the icepack. Now, as the sun dipped, swelling into a red ball of fire, her shimmering disk hesitating and slightly flattening to the touch of the sawtooth escarpment of Greenland’s frozen highlands, all things in the firmament, ocean and land became briefly kindled by the splendor of her departing glory. The clouds burst into flames. The soft surging swells were splattered by a froth of rubies. Even the austere warship, slicing along her hunter’s course, shed for these moments her steely quality and turned into a ship of fire trailing a comet’s tail of illuminated foam. Then the sun slipped behind the mountains with a startling suddenness, and from the darkening east the onrushing winter night cast its mantle to extinguish the afterglow. Red turned a dull gold, gradually tarnishing into a uniform bluish mauve which soon draped everything in a melancholy veil of deepening twilight. Only one thin thread of brilliance remained, a long, arrow-straight vapor trail stretching across the sky, headed by a tiny silver cross which was an aircraft flying so high it was still a speck in the eye of the sun.
Finlander was aware of the presence of the plane, but did not seem to pay it any particular attention. Through the small monitoring speaker which was attached to the bulwark beneath his elbow, he had been subconsciously listening to the reaction of the Bedford when her radar picked up the faint pip while it was still one hundred and forty miles away. The air-defense officer had immediately pulled an alert, the CIC starting to feed target information into the computers, which in turn digested and analyzed in a flash, then fed the results into the battery of TERRIER missiles poised in their launcher. Communications had issued a challenge which was quickly answered by the correct countersign, identifying the jet as an RB-47 on reconnaissance patrol out of Thule AFB. As a final precaution, Yeoman Pinelli had aimed his turreted Mark VII camera at the minute silver cross as it unraveled its wispy line to a point directly overhead, the huge lens gobbling up the intervening forty thousand feet, and in ten seconds producing a close-up on Polaroid film. The captain had heard those section commanders concerned report these procedures to the bridge and knew they were handling the matter properly without any necessity for his intervention. After a cursory glance upward, he dismissed the aircraft from his mind and turned his eyes from the sky to the sea which contained somewhere in its darkening vastness the real enemy occupying his thoughts.
Time was standing still for Finlander now, for the twilight periods before dawn and after sunset were ever the time of reconning for submariner and sub-hunter alike. The time to contest with each other for the ambush, to maneuver and countermaneuver for the weather gauge of darkness and light. Time to attack. Time to kill. Time to die. Time for captains to isolate themselves in taut watchfulness in conning tower or bridge. And that was where Erik Finlander would always be found during his every dawn and every sunset at sea since taking command of his first ship back in 1943. That was why time stood still, even retraced itself for him during these moments. Nothing had changed. It was always the same, whether on old four-stack cans or modern super-destroyers like the Bedford, whether in actual conflict or supposedly bloodless cold war where the intent to kill could not — or should not — be implemented. The sham of it only served to tense a captain like Finlander who had once tasted blood, his own as well as the enemy’s.
The deep scar on his throat, now tingling with an accustomed pain as the icy wind probed the collar of his duffel, had been inflicted upon him in these same Greenland-Icelandic waters during that other peculiar cold war, the one which existed between Germany and the United States in the months before open warfare inevitably erupted. He had been exec on a recommissioned old four-piper, the U.S.S. Benjamin Crocker, engaged in what Washington called a “neutrality patrol” — a convenient subterfuge for aiding the hard-pressed British navy. The torpedo which came streaking out of the twilight (a twilight exactly like this one) , ripping the old destroyer in two and sinking her in sixty seconds, had brought formal apologies from the Nazi government which in no way inhibited their informal gloating. It had also brought a Navy Cross to a young machinist’s mate second class, Lauchlan S. MacKay, who supported in the freezing water a lieutenant (J.G.) and at the same time pinched closed the terrible wound in his throat, doing this for the better part of an hour before they were rescued. Ever since that awful sunset of eighteen years ago Erik Finlander had held on to a seething hatred of submarines through peace and war; he had likewise held on to that man Lauchlan S. MacKay, keeping him with him through a formidable roster of illustrious destroyers, including the Bedford, in whose engine room he was now the reigning chief.
Revenge had come to Captain Finlander, but too far away from the scene of treachery and defeat. He had sunk the U-784, the U-866 and the U-1020, but all in the Central Atlantic or Azores. His luck had not been as good on the Murmansk convoy routes, although he had participated in kills where the final fatal stick of depth charges was delivered by Canadian frigates; while given official credit for “assists,” he did not count these himself. Thus he scoured this arctic sea today as if it still concealed the U-boat which had blooded him in the realities of submarine warfare, as if the same enemy commander lurked down there, ready to shrug off a “mistake” and pass on the responsibility for apologies to a cynical government, one still subject to the caprice of an absolute tyrant. Finlander’s good sense told him, of course, that the chances were overwhelming that the U-boat which had sunk the Benjamin Crocker and killed one hundred and four of her crew, including two of his Annapolis classmates, had itself been eventually sunk during the course of that war — in the final tally, only one out of four German submarines had survived to be scrapped or impressed into the Soviet navy. Only a few U-boat commanders remained alive today, only one of these on active service, and that one relegated to an advisory capacity on Finlander’s own ship. Commodore Schrepke, he was sure, would be ensconced in the opposite side of the Bedford’s bridge, driven by similar compulsions to the same lonely twilight vigil — the same, yet so different, his mind not only plagued by memories of terror and defeat in these waters, but by trepidation over his unnatural purpose aboard a former enemy’s ship. A strange and subtly cruel fate, one which held an almost morbid fascination for Captain Finlander.
Being a man who could command a strong grip on reality, he also permitted himself certain flights of fancy, a kind of masochistic nurturing of old hurts and hatreds, of mulling over superstitions and omens, of deliberately playing these against his obsession. He believed, for instance, that the Denmark Strait had it in for him, that the presence here of the Russian submarine his men called Moby Dick boded old scores to be settled th
rough a fated encounter threatened by an ill-starred past. Already they had twice met, and each time the submarine had mysteriously vanished, leaving his frustrated specialists helpless at the consoles of their miraculous electronic detection apparatus, but himself more stubbornly determined than ever. Like its legendary namesake, this Moby Dick only drove the pursuing captain to further tempt the very fate he suspected to be deviling his wake. Foolish superstition to occupy the mind of an intelligent naval officer? Perhaps for some, but Erik Finlander could afford such broodings and even turn them to his own advantage since they made him more flexible and more alert. They instilled in him a healthy skepticism about the complex scientific accouterments of his ship and their hold upon their technological servitors, making him depend at least equally upon the basic instincts of a human animal who had been both the hunter and the hunted. Never again would he stand and hesitate as he spied the split-second flash of sunset on the objective lens of a periscope, wondering because sonar was giving no return echo whether it was only the glint of a drifting bottle, glass fisherman’s float or piece of ice, then realizing too late the fallibility of manmade instruments as torpedo wakes blossomed out of the dark waters a couple of seconds before the shattering explosion. One hundred and four shipmates had died because of too much trust in scientific gadgetry and too little in human instincts, his own blood barely stemmed from flowing out of his body by the convulsive grip of Chief MacKay’s grimy thumb and forefinger. A far-off glinting little flash like . . .
“Lookout! Didn’t you spot that reflection out there off the starboard bow?” Finlander shouted at the seaman huddled in the wing.
The boy gave a start and his head seemed to rise up out of the folds of his parka as if activated by a spring. “Y-yes, sir. I think . . . I might have seen a couple of winking sort of flashes, like . . . like off a bottle, or ice, or something like that, Captain, sir. . . .”
The Bedford Incident Page 13
