Down in the receiving office of the ship’s hospital, Lieutenant Commander Chester Porter listened to the captain’s speech as it came through the speaker above his desk, a look of perplexed wonder on his face. When it was finished, he gave out a low whistle and said to Ensign Ralston: “My gosh! The skipper is a real tiger, isn’t he! I suppose every man will jump at the chance for some extra leave and a commendation in his jacket.”
Ralston had continued to stare at the speaker after it fell silent, a kind of luminous eagerness lingering in his eyes; now he came to with a start and shrugged his broad shoulders. “We all jump for Captain Finlander, regardless of any rewards, sir. And mark my words, the Commie commander of Moby Dick will rue the day he put to sea to cross this ship’s course! . . . Now, sir, to get back to the matter of your litter-carrying drill. My objection can be overruled, of course, by Lieutenant Aherne or the exec. But I think you’ll find them opposed to saddling the men with any work not directly connected with the operation at hand.”
The surgeon frowned uncertainly at the ensign and experienced a resurgence of his frustrating feeling of being merely tolerated as a required item on the Bedford’s manning table. After breakfast he had dutifully presented himself in sick bay to await patients who never came. After sitting around uselessly for an hour, he had decided to pull a sanitation inspection of the galley. The cooks had appeared quite shocked, but were respectfully cooperative while showing him food lockers and refrigeration rooms which considerably exceeded regulations in their spotless cleanliness; that had turned out to be another hour wasted. Then, remembering that Lieutenant Hirschfeld had failed to carry out litter-carrying drills during GQ’s, he had seized upon the idea of rectifying this situation at the very next alarm. For effective drills it would be necessary to arrange with other department commanders for simulated casualties, so he had optimistically set about organizing this. Picking Engineering as his first choice, he had descended into the engine room, where Commander Franklin had flatly refused his request. “Sorry, Doc! Can’t spare any of my men just to play dead!” This had punctured his ardor somewhat, but he had stubbornly persisted and next accosted a more junior officer, Ensign Ralston, asking him, as assistant fire control, to allot him a couple of men out of relief crews. They should, after all, not be very busy during a GQ. But, to his surprise, Ralston had vigorously objected, even implying that the whole idea of litter-carrying drills was nonsensical. “Lieutenant Hirschfeld never went in for stuff like that, sir!” he had informed Porter and now was suggesting that his stand would be supported all along the chain of command — including the executive officer, who, of course, spoke for the captain.
“Seems to me Captain Finlander runs a real taut ship and would want all prescribed drill schedules complied with, Mr. Ralston,” Porter protested in a plaintive voice.
The ensign smiled condescendingly. “You don’t quite get the picture, Commander Porter. The captain is damned quick to throw away the book when it makes no sense to go by it. He’s a stickler for operational performance, not for conformity with piddling sub-paragraphs appended to NAVREGs. He allows plenty of leeway in how you do a job, as long as you get it done effectively. Oh, sure . . . maybe some stuffed-shirt fleet inspector could pick on him for this minor infraction or that petty noncompliance, but you can bet your life we’d all make it our personal business to make any criticism of the Bedford sound utterly ridiculous.” Lieutenant Commander Porter was by no means accustomed to being talked down to in this way by an ensign, but he was only able to say: “My gosh! He certainly inspires a tremendous loyalty.”
“And performance, sir,” Ralston added, getting up from his chair and preparing to leave. “And don’t worry! If litter drills were really necessary, he would be right on your tail, Commander — if you’ll excuse me for being so blunt.” He spoke pleasantly and continued in a lighthearted tone as he moved to the door. “Between you and me, there won’t be any more old-fashioned battle casualties. If the Bedford were to take a hit, it would most likely be from a missile or torpedo containing at least a half-ton of amatol, if not actually a nuclear warhead. Our own supply of high explosives, rocket propellant and superheated steam would certainly go off regardless of all our automatic damage-control systems. The ship would blow to pieces. Maybe two or three freak survivors would find themselves in the water, but they’d be quickly incinerated by burning oil. Everything over in a matter of seconds. Total obliteration or total survival, that’s the prospect, sir.” Noticing the expression on the surgeon’s face, he began to laugh outright — without actually meaning to be cruel, yet that was the effect. “Don’t feel too bad about it, Commander. The odds are overwhelmingly in favor of total survival — because of Captain Erik J. Finlander. Now, if you’ll pardon me, sir, I must prepare to go on watch.” He left with a salute which was more a cheery wave.
Lieutenant Commander Porter sat there seething, but he was the kind of man whose temper never seemed to erupt at the right moment and therefore was always quite ineffective. When he finally shot out of his chair, rushed through surgery past a startled McKinley and burst into the passageway, Ensign Ralston was long since gone. He had intended to dress him down for not only being presumptuous and somewhat insolent but also quite illogical for a supposedly professionally trained navy man. Certainly warships had a tendency to blow up — but, on the other hand, plenty of them had remained afloat while being battered into hulks, then made it to port. “And the crew were damned grateful for a good medical department too!” he exclaimed aloud. “A medical department properly drilled in litter carrying!”
Ben Munceford came around a corner, stared at him and then up and down the deserted passageway. “What’s up, Chester?” he asked with a puzzled expression on his freckled face. “Who are you talking to?”
The surgeon felt himself turning scarlet. “Nobody. . . . I mean . . . I was asking if you’d be interested in acting as a simulated casualty in a litter-carrying drill?”
“Hell, no!” Munceford answered, then reacted as if Porter should be humored. “But I tell you what, Chester. Let me know when you get it organized and I’ll take some pictures. It ought to go good with whales. volleyball, balloon flying and all the other shipboard activities of this cruise. Okay?”
“You go to the devil!” Porter snarled at him and stalked off in the direction of his cabin.
“A bunch of nuts!” Munceford muttered to himself after Porter was beyond hearing, then shrugged and headed for his own quarters.
When the surgeon stalked into his cabin he was surprised to find Steward’s Mate Collins there, ostensibly to collect laundry, but actually rummaging through the small collection of medical volumes on the bookshelf above the bunk. “What are you doing with those?” Porter sharply asked the Negro.
Collins showed no trace of embarrassment. “I’m gathering up some hooks Lieutenant Hirschfeld left behind, sir,” he explained. “He asked me to ship them to him together with some which he let me keep for my studies.”
“I thought they all belonged to the ship’s medical library,” the surgeon told him irritably. “In any case, I’d like to check them against the department inventory.”
Collins took this with better grace than the implication would warrant. “Yes, sir,” he quietly agreed. He should have left the cabin with his laundry bag, but lingered and asked: “Has the commander settled down enough to consider my request of yesterday?”
“What request? . . . Oh, yes! You are the one who wants to become a doctor.” Lieutenant Commander Porter barely checked himself from shouting “You don’t know when you’re well off!” Instead he dropped into the chair and, after gnawing on his knuckles for a moment, fixed Collins with a jaundiced eye and said: “Yes — I might help you with your studies when I have time. But I would expect you to do me an occasional favor in return. For instance, during the next GQ I’ve got something right up the alley for a man with your keen medical interests. . . .”
2.
The Bedford caught up with t
he Novo Sibirsk during the early afternoon when dusk was extinguishing the feeble daylight which had permeated the clouded Denmark Strait. Snow squalls had continued to follow one upon the other and the Russian suddenly materialized out of one of them, blossoming from a nebulous dark blotch into a solid, chunky little ship snorting along with spray bursting around her raked bow like vapor from a bucking workhorse. Thin smudges of diesel exhaust puffed out of her short stack, whose bright red band with the gold hammer-and-sickle insignia made a startling splash of color in the sullenly monotone seascape. There was less than a mile between the two vessels when the American destroyer sighted the Russian, who doggedly held his course as the warship bore down on him.
All of the “eyeball watch” on the Bedford sang out within seconds of one another, but without creating any surprise, as the officers on the bridge and in the CIC had been plotting the Novo Sibirsk position during the past two and a half hours. The Beek had picked up the emissions of the Russian’s radar and, by computing their strength and bearing, had enabled Finlander to circle the perimeter of maximum-return echo and make his approach behind the shielding effects of the snow squalls and Iceland’s mountainous coast. At least, that had been the tactical concept. Chances were, of course, that the Russians’ detection equipment was as good as the Americans’. Yet, if they had known of the Bedford’s approach, they did not betray this fact by taking evasive actions. When the two ships were within three miles of each other, the CIC had reported a hard sonar contact which they plotted very close to the Novo Sibirsk and Captain Finlander had come near ordering battle stations in the brief hope of actually catching Moby Dick being serviced by its supply vessel. But Merlin Queffle’s miraculous ears had quickly identified the contact as something much smaller than a submarine, and shortly thereafter Lieutenant Spitzer had obtained a trace of the echo which clearly indicated that the Russian was towing some kind of underwater object at the end of a long steel cable — probably a hydrographic device or biological trawl. Now, as the bridge watch focused their binoculars on the Novo Sibirsk, they could make out the cable streaming from a gallows frame on the forward welldeck.
“So chalk up another one for our boy Quefe,” Captain Finlander exclaimed with a mirthless chuckle. “The Commies are putting on their usual innocent act!”
“Probably heard us coming and decided to try and look scientific,” Commander Allison growled through the closed face flap of his arctic hood; his big nose stuck out beyond it and glowed with almost the same red as the Russian’s stack.
The captain looked around his snow-swept bridge for his oceanographic expert and spotted him trying to crouch out of the way of the icy spume whipping over the windscreen. “Say, Mr. Burger! What kind of gear are they working? Anything you recognize as legitimate?”
Lieutenant Burger reluctantly exposed himself to the elements and poked his face over the side, his eyes squinting painfully through his binoculars, which quickly fogged up. “Can’t tell, sir,” he answered. “Not without knowing what’s at the other end of that tow cable.”
“Lot of use you are to me!” Finlander shouted back at him, but more jokingly than with real rancor. He suddenly seemed strangely elated and full of caustic good humor. When the CIC called up and warned of the rapidly closing range on a collision course, he said to the OOD: “I suppose it won’t do to run her down, Mr. Petersen. Just intimidate her, that’s all. And make sure Pinelli gets some good snapshots.”
As Petersen rushed back to the pilothouse, he brushed past Commodore Schrepke, who was just stepping out on the bridge. The German officer unhurriedly strode up alongside Finlander and raised his huge Zeiss glasses for a long, careful scrutiny of the Russian.
“Can you pick out anything compromising about her, Commodore?” the captain asked.
Schrepke took his time before answering, then spoke in clipped sentences without taking the binoculars from his eyes. “She has much depth and beam for extra bunkers. There are large-capacity fuel valves on deck. Booms and winches are unusually heavy. The bow is reinforced against ice. Radar and wireless antennas indicate extensive communication and detection equipment. Her lines suggest East German construction, probably in the yards of Stettin.”
“Ah! We are faced with proof of German enterprise wherever we go!” Finlander exclaimed dryly.
Schrepke gave him a quick, hard look, retorted: “We are what our friends and enemies have made us, Captain,” and removed himself to an unoccupied part of the bridge, from where he continued to study the Novo Sibirsk apart from the other officers.
As the Bedford closed with the Russian and details of the other ship began emerging more clearly out of the diffusing snow flurries, Yeoman Pinelli crouched in the turret of his Mark VII camera, his right eye pressed hard against the rubber cup of its viewfinder. The cross-hairs were lined up on the Novo Sibirsk’s bridge and he found himself looking into the faces of a group of men who appeared to be staring right back at him; one of them aimed a Leica-type camera and they snapped each other’s picture almost simultaneously. Pinelli smiled and activated the traversing mechanism of the gyro-stabilized turret, sweeping the howitzer-sized lens over the alleged research vessel and shooting close-ups of her superstructure and fittings. The red warning light was flashing on his control panel, indicating that it was too dark for good exposures, but he continued to press the trigger because he knew that even bad pictures could be immensely valuable to Naval Intelligence. Down on the Bedford’s main deck some other, far less sophisticated cameras were also being aimed at the Russian by a few sailors who had ventured out into the snow and spray to obtain proof that they had met the enemy. These would be far worse pictures, but still good enough to strike awe among family and barroom acquaintances.
By the time the two ships were some three hundred yards apart, with the Bedford slowing down to cross close astern of the Novo Sibirsk, a number of Russian crewmen had swarmed out on deck to line the railings and stare at the big American destroyer. Their faces were pink blobs framed by the darker hoods of their arctics — the same clumsy, heavy arctics used by anybody forced to work in this bitter climate. But, of course, there was also the inevitable sprinkling of rugged individualists who came out bareheaded and wearing nothing but their working fatigues — as in the American or English navies, these seemed to be engine-room or galley personnel with an obsessive need to show themselves off as fresh-air fiends. In fact, these Russian sailors looked remarkably like their American counterparts, clean, neat, well-fed, rosy-cheeked youths. Lieutenant Burger remarked that there were no women among them, pointing out this was unusual for a Soviet research vessel, an observation which Captain Finlander took note of and complimented him for. With a rare flash of humor, Commander Allison added that they also lacked that shaggy, piratical appearance affected by the bona-fide working oceanographic fraternity, hinting that this in itself was highly suspicious! That brought a sly smile to Finlander’s lips, then a startled exclamation when he spotted two Russian sailors hurrying toward the stern of their ship, where the ensign of the U.S.S.R. was snapping its red folds in the wind. “Good Lord! Don’t tell me they are going so far as to dip their colors to us!”
The executive officer watched them intently through his binoculars, and when they aligned themselves in a formal position by the jackstaff looking back toward their own bridge for a signal, he said: “I suppose we better play along and prepare to acknowledge their salute.” He was about to order Ensign Ralston to rush a detail to stand by the colors when the captain intervened, his lighthearted manner completely gone.
“I exchange no courtesies with ships operating under false colors, Buck!” he snapped. “Have you forgotten this is a Soviet wolf in sheep’s clothing?”
Allison shrugged. “All right, sir. But if we add insult to injury, that captain is a cinch to lodge a formal protest through diplomatic channels, accusing us of ‘buzzing’ his ship. . . . We’re passing him pretty close,” he added with a slight note of reproach.
“Dear me!” Finlan
der retorted with a sarcastic grimace. “While I don’t give a damn about embarrassing our State Department, I certainly don’t want to rattle my exec!” While everybody on the bridge but Allison cringed, he bellowed over his shoulder toward the pilothouse: “Pass at legal distance, Mr. Petersen! No more! No less!”
All the binoculars on the Bedford’s bridge were trained again on the Novo Sibirsk as the faint shrill of a bosun’s pipe came drifting across the intervening waves. It was presumably the signal from the Russian OOD to dip their colors to the American warship as age-old naval custom required, and Chief Quartermaster Rickmers anticipated the ceremony by gleefully growling between clenched teeth: “Come on, you Red cruds! Tip your hat to Uncle Sam!”
The two Russian sailors bent down out of sight, but not to untie the halyard of their ensign. When they straightened up they were hefting a garbage can between them which had been hidden behind the railing. Tipping it over the edge, they deliberately dumped the contents into the path of the American ship. A moment later the Bedford was forced to chum through the degrading mess staining the white foam of the Russian’s wake and one of those sailors swept an imaginary hat off his head and gave her a ceremonious bow. Carried and chilled by the arctic wind, some deep Slavic laughter wafted across the bare hundred yards between ships. On the destroyer’s bridge there was a stunned silence, but from one of her amateur photographers somewhere amidships of the main deck there came a defiant, salty bellow:
The Bedford Incident Page 16
