Finlander’s gloved fist swung down beneath the combing of the bulwark and hit the red lever next to the speaker. The silence which had lulled the Bedford was torn apart by the raucous clang of her GQ alarm. Almost instantly the wheelhouse door thrust open and the OOD stuck his head out, eyes wide and questioning. “Possible visual contact, bearing three-zero-zero relative, one thousand yards,” the captain called to him with a controlled urgency. “Execute Maneuver Able immediately, Mr. Collins . . . then relieve your starboard lookout!”
As the Bedford picked up speed and heeled in a turn toward the suspected enemy, the captain remained where he was, once again listening with a kind of alert detachment to his section commanders as their voices came through the speaker, reporting their respective battle stations closed up. He did not react to the somewhat irritated tone of Lieutenant Krindlemeyer as he announced from the CIC that all readouts on the detecting gear were negative; the ECM officers were never less than patronizing about “eyeball” contacts, often taking them as a direct affront to their instruments. Nor did he give more than a curt, perfunctory explanation of the GQ alarm to Commander Allison when he joined him and began sweeping the empty gloom ahead with his binoculars. But as the unfortunate seaman who had been lookout shuffled past him, Finlander’s hand shot out and stopped him with a hard grip on his shoulder. “Do you know why I’m busting you off my bridge, sailor?” he asked in a voice which was both gentle and implacable.
It was too dark now to see the face inside the hood, but the answer told of the misery which was there. “Captain, sir . . . one thinks one sees all sorts of things out there that just ain’t so,” he protested, trying to express the suffering his responsibility entailed rather than make excuses for himself. “One don’t like to sing out against the sonar and radar reading without being sure. One got to think it over. One —”
“All right, son!” his captain interrupted him. “If you had not seen those flashes, you would not be blamed. Our eyes can’t catch everything in this kind of light. But you admitted to me you did see them, yet did nothing about it. It’s not your duty to evaluate a sighting, only to report it. I don’t want to see you up here again until you have so thoroughly familiarized yourself with the duties of a lookout that you instinctively react correctly. Now go below.”
The sailor saluted stiffly, then sagged as he moved away, crushed by his failure. Finlander turned back to lean over the bridge bulwark and scan the sea. “I want you to ream out that kid’s section commander, Buck,” he gruffly told Allison. “He is a good boy and we owe him the proper indoctrination before making him responsible for the lives of his shipmates. I want it explained to him — and to all our lookouts — that sonar and radar also sometimes see things that are not there. Sometimes fail to see things that are. I want it understood by all hands that this ship depends first of all on her men, not her machines, which must always remain subservient to us. Even to an ordinary seaman. Understood?”
Out of the speaker came Krindlemeyer’s plaintive voice reporting all readouts still negative. Allison said: “Yes, Captain,” without taking his binoculars from his eyes.
The GQ turned out to be abortive. Within ten minutes the Bedford was secured from battle stations and once again returned to her northward base course, skirting the now invisible edge of the Greenland icepack. Commander Allison returned to the navigation office. A new lookout, doubly on his guard because of the calamity which had befallen his mate, took up his position in the starboard wing and probed the black emptiness of his assigned quadrant of ocean with fearfully alert young eyes. Commodore Schrepke came over from his isolation on the opposite side of the bridge and stood for a moment next to Captain Finlander, who was waiting out the last fading shimmer of afterglow staining the western horizon. “All Soviet periscopes are hooded to prevent reflections,” he quietly said in his fluently precise German-English. It was a statement of fact, not a reproach. Finlander barely nodded and remained silent. He owed explanations of his actions to nobody on this ship, not even to this, his technical superior in rank. Nor did he say anything when the commodore added before withdrawing in the dark: “But you did the right thing. Those hoods sometimes get knocked off.”
The quartermaster of the watch came out to record the hourly temperature reading and exclaimed loudly over the thermometer’s accelerating plunge since sunset, then quickly retreated into the warmth of the wheelhouse. But the captain remained where he was, now alone on the bridge with the lookout, watching the first faint flare of northern lights darting among the stars, wondering if the commander of Moby Dick was watching them too and praying they would illuminate a safe passage into some secret fiord where he would plot a submarine missile launch against Thule . . . or Montreal . . . or New York. Inside the icepack he would be safe, safe until he sooner or later must come out and rendezvous with the Novo Sibirsk; then the chances would be good for a solid contact! Especially if this fine weather held without snow to hash up the radar and storm-scattered icefloes to bedevil sonar with false echoes. But fine weather never held for long in these waters, and the cirrus clouds, so beautiful with their filigree tracery aglow from the cold fires of the night sky, were precursors of another dismal blizzard. Finlander sighed, straightened up from his hunched position, stretched the freezing stiffness out of his arms, then went down to his cabin. There he found, patiently waiting, Lieutenant P. L. M. Packer, R.N.
“Sir, I would appreciate a word with you regarding a private matter — if it is convenient, of course.”
The bristly eyebrows gave a quick flicker of surprise, then settled back into a severe black line. The captain nodded and motioned the young English officer to follow him into his cabin. As he shook himself out of his white duffel coat, he said: “Sit down. I will be with you in a minute,” and vanished inside his bathroom, where he proceeded to thaw out the numbing cold in his face by splashing it with hot water.
Packer perched himself uneasily on the edge of a chair and thought that he had picked a bad time to speak to the captain. He appeared in a forbidding mood. But when Finlander came back through the louvered door, he seemed also to have thawed his frosty manner somewhat. “Now, then, what can I do for the Royal Navy?” he inquired.
Packer suppressed his nervousness and smiled. “It’s really something for plain Peter Packer, sir. Well . . . you see, I hear that you are permitting normal wireless traffic even though we are on a sweep after Moby Dick. In that case, I would very much like to get off a ‘personal.’ The truth is, I’m having some bother at home.”
“Nothing serious, I hope?”
“I want to stop somebody close to me from doing something awfully foolish, sir.”
The young officer sounded so coolly casual that Finlander had to peer intently into his eyes to see the trouble behind them. “I don’t mean to pry, Mr. Packer,” he told him, “but you will have to tell me more than that. Although we are officially operating under peacetime conditions which permit a certain number of ‘personals’ to be transmitted, war conditions are in fact imposed upon us.” Having spoken as a captain, he dropped into a chair and tried to bridge the wide gap of age and rank with a softer tone. “Our friends and relations are constantly doing foolish things while we are at sea,” he sighed. “That is one of the hazards of our profession.”
“I realize that, sir. But this particular foolishness rather vitally affects me.”
“A girl?”
“Yes, sir.”
Finlander shook his head as if this was turning into an altogether too frivolous problem. “At your age the foolishness of girls assumes a major importance — I know that. But when you reach mine and look back on it, you’ll realize it was all froth on the waves which rolled on regardless.”
Packer’s voice was suddenly not a bit casual. “I respectfully submit, Captain, that I am not your age, and to me, right at this moment, this is the most important thing in my life.”
“More so than your navy career?” Finlander shot back.
“It is com
pletely tied up with it, Captain.”
“I see. Then I gather this is a matter of a broken engagement — right?”
“Yes, sir,” Packer answered in a lowered voice.
“And another man?”
The Englishman’s hesitation betrayed that this was so, even when he finally blurted out: “Shebeona is worried by my absence on long patrols and about . . . well, the rather uncertain future of it all.”
Finlander nodded. “Absence and uncertainty must be faced by our womenfolk. Good navy wives are very hard to find. Yes, harder today in our indulgent soft society than in my own courting days. I never did find one myself, you know.” His face twisted into a strange sort of pained grimace as he paused for a moment. “I cannot pretend to be an expert on women, Mr. Packer, but it seems to me that if this girl is so troubled by the prospects even now when she should be at her most ardent, you should pass her up as a bad risk.”
“Captain, sir, I appreciate your advice on the matter,” Packer answered with a chilly respect, “but I only wanted to trouble you for permission to transmit a personal message home. That is all.”
Finlander silently contemplated him for a moment, then said: “Permission granted. You may inform Lieutenant Beeker I am allowing you to transmit ten words.”
“Ten words, sir?”
“Ten words, Mr. Packer. Under the circumstances, I do not believe excessive loquaciousness on the subject would be fitting for either yourself or my ship.”
With that the discussion ended, the English officer rising out of his chair, thanking the captain for his time and quickly taking his leave. Finlander remained seated for several minutes after he was gone, hands clasped under his chin, his brow furrowed by thought. Then he got up and moved to his desk, picked up the telephone and dialed the Communications Center. When Lieutenant Beeker answered, he told him: “Mr. Packer will shortly submit a ‘personal’ with my permission for its transmittal. Before you send it, I want you to phone me its contents for my personal clearance. This is a confidential matter and Lieutenant Packer is not to be embarrassed in any way whatsoever. . . . Thank you.”
It was almost an hour later when The Beek called back and read to Captain Finlander a telegram containing exactly ten words over which Lieutenant P. L. M. Packer had agonized in the solitude of his cabin. With Shebeona’s photograph before him, he had written and rewritten, racking his mind for the exactly right ten words, trying out dramatic ones, dryly witty ones, mildly sarcastic ones, even ones which were outright pleading. Then Ben Munceford had come bursting in and hoisted himself into the upper bunk, from where he launched a steady flow of griping about his assignment on the Bedford, at the same time surreptitiously eying Shebeona and the growing column of scratched-out ten-word lines with which his companion was filling the pad. Growing more and more agitated and self-conscious, Packer finally capitulated to forthright simplicity and hastily wrote on a fresh sheet:
I BEG YOU RECONSIDER AND AWAIT MY RETURN-LOVE, PETER.
After crumpling the others and stuffing them into his pocket, he hurriedly left for the Communications Center. As soon as he signed the transmittal order and departed, Lieutenant Beeker telephoned the captain.
Finlander listened to the message with his eyes closed, then left the line tense with a long painful silence as he thought back to long, long ago when he had begged a beautiful bitch whom he passionately, blindly loved. But she had married a wealthy stockbroker instead, then a banker, then an oil tycoon. If she had acceded to his begging, he would have wound up like them, a flaccid, shorebound source of alimony, fighting cholesterol and surtaxes. He had not thought about her for years, but now her face came back to him in a brief flash of remembrance, hazy in detail except for that selfish, sensuous half-smile her lips had always worn. An angry, impulsive and negative reaction almost expressed itself in words, but he managed to choke them back. “All right, Mr. Beeker,” he said at last with something approaching sadness. “Let it go. Let it go if there’s no priority traffic.”
PART TWO — THE CHASE
1.
With a caprice typical of the arctic’s weather system, the thermometer began climbing during the night and when a leaden dawn seeped through the thick overcast, it was twenty degrees warmer than it had been during the previous sunny day. But it did not feel at all warmer. Flurries of fine snow rode squalls of raw wind just strong enough to foam the tops of steep swells being funneled through the narrows separating Iceland and Greenland. The Bedford was angling across the seas with long, corkscrewing rolls, occasionally throwing bursts of spray over her long foredeck and adding to the weird surrealistic sculptures the freezing slush was creating on exposed parts of her superstructure. The gunners who came out to clear the traversing and elevation mechanisms cursed this savage thing which the meteorological officer euphemistically called a “warm front.”
The glass-eyed aluminum capsule which was the crow’s-nest on the mainmast flew through the air in lurching captive arcs which failed to disrupt the digestive processes of Squarehead Thorbjornsen’s stomach. He had filled himself with fried eggs, ham and hash-brown potatoes before going on watch, washing it all down with two glasses of milk and a mug of double-sweetened coffee. His belly made sloshing sounds like a barrel full of fermenting pickles, but this did not bother him at all. What bothered him was the visibility beyond the rocking wiper blades. In the squalls it was less than a half-mile and when the scudding clouds dragged their dirty gray skirts to mast level, the bow itself vanished in a misty blur. The OOD had telephoned a warning about keeping a sharp lookout for drifting ice, but this was becoming extremely difficult, and that worried Squarehead, who had recently seen a movie about the sinking of the Titanic. Big icebergs were not common in the Denmark Strait during this time of the year, yet sometimes huge floes would be wrenched off the icepack and set adrift; they could be big enough to chew through the Bedford’s lightly built hull. “I sure hope radar is getting through this muck,” he shouted down to Seaman Jones, resting in the shaft below him. “My own eyes sure as hell ain’t!”
The OOD, Lieutenant Petersen, was also very much concerned with the possibility of heavy floes suddenly appearing ahead of his ship. But having alerted the “eyeball watch” to this, he himself had taken up station at the navigational radar in the wheelhouse, switched it to its most sensitive one-mile range and proceeded to follow the sweeper as though hypnotized. As it spun round and round the glowing tube, myriads of tiny sparks were kindled by the snow flurries to confuse the more solid echoes of ice. He would have liked to slow the Bedford down, but they were still some distance from the estimated position of the Novo Sibirsk and Finlander wanted to get a look at the Russian in daylight — for what that was worth in this dismal gloom.
The captain had stood his customary dawn watch in the starboard wing of the bridge, then, as if something of significance had been mysteriously communicated to him out there in the swirl of spume and snow, had ordered a change of course before retiring to his day cabin. A change of course which would take the Bedford across to the Icelandic side of the strait. He gave no reason, and, of course, nobody asked for one. Not even Commander Allison. Commodore Schrepke had come in from his solitary communion in the port wing a few minutes later, his black leather jacket a-shimmer with caked snow. He checked the gyro-compass, grunted and silently departed. The relief lookouts peeled back their hoods and steamed themselves on the heater coils in the back of the wheelhouse.
In the insulated twilight world of the CIC, Lieutenant Spitzer noticed that his tactical radar was becoming obscured by hash created by snow and the sharpness of the signal was turning fuzzy as freezing slush began coating the antenna revolving on the mainmast. He got up from his console at Master Control and adjusted the rheostat which shot more current into the heater elements in the antenna. Next he checked the echo-ranging signal, to which a sonarman was listening with a relaxed concentration as his body swayed with the roll of the ship. At eighteen knots the system was bothered by ambient sounds which
made it crackle like a pocket radio being played in a thunderstorm, but this was an inherent limitation and the operators had been carefully trained to pick out a hard contact through the static. One might miss it, but there were three of them continuously on duty. And standing by there was Merlin Queffle, who had once, during a special demonstration for a Senate Naval Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee, homed in the Bedford on the bubbles from a frogman’s breathing apparatus. To the delight of Captain Finlander and his grateful admiral, these political gentlemen had rushed back to Washington and restored to the budget thirty millions of dollars which had been lopped off by an economy-minded soldier-President. Ever since that occasion Merlin Queffle had been a privileged character aboard this ship. But Lieutenant Spitzer loathed the skinny, buck-toothed little enlisted technician who in blithe and brash ignorance could work miracles with fantastically complicated submarine-detection devices of whose engineering principles he only had the haziest understanding. Yet Spitzer could never implement his loathing because Queffle not only was the key to Finlander’s very circumspect confidence in the department, but never gave any really concrete cause for a rebuke. He simply was a naturally abrasive, dedicated little bore.
“I feel like raising a hot contact today, sir,” he cackled at Spitzer, his rodent tusks glowing a sickly green in the reflection of the PPI scope. “We’re going to dish up Moby Dick on toast for the skipper real soon. I just feel it in my earbones, sir!” Queffle was constantly referring to his “earbones,” being fully conscious of their enormous importance.
“Take care they don’t swell up so they clog your whole head,” Spitzer sourly answered him and, with Queffle’s high-pitched laughter ringing in his own ears, fled through the hatch leading down to the CSP room, where Lieutenant Krindlemeyer presided alone over his robot faculty of mathematical wizards — the Bedford’s awesome battery of electronic computers. Down here all the intricate calculations relative to navigation, target analyses, even meteorological and oceanographic data of strategic nature were solved in a fraction of a second by a fabulous interlocking system of artificial brain cells which had a memory as well as a certain fundamental power of reasoning. There was also a perfectly ordinary electric coffee percolator which provided Krindlemeyer and Spitzer their only counter-regulationary vice, a potent brew of special java which they imbibed in the inviolate privacy of this inner scientific sanctum, like priests nipping sacramental wine in a sacristy. This they did now to the soothing accompaniment of the insect-like sounds of computer circuitry and the rustle of whirling spools of data tape. Even when their masters relaxed, these robot genies never did. But perhaps the privacy was not so complete after all, because sooner or later that damned intercom would inevitably break in with something like:
The Bedford Incident Page 14
