“Shit on you too, Ivan!”
The silence on the bridge lasted for a few seconds more before Ensign Ralston came out of his shock, gave a fearful glance toward Captain Finlander and wheeled on the chief quartermaster. “Rickmers! Put whoever yelled that obscenity on report!”
The captain had remained hunched over the railing, watching the Russian’s slop defile the hull of his ship, without betraying his fury; the upturned collar of his white duffel hid the scar on his throat. But when he heard Ralston’s order, he looked up and quietly told him: “Belay that! Let’s make allowances for extreme provocation when it’s warranted.” Then he asked Allison in an equally quiet tone: “Do you still feel like exchanging courtesies with the Commies, Buck?” When his executive officer shook his head and maintained a tight-lipped silence, he gave him a forgiving slap on the shoulder. “All right, then! If it’s any consolation to you, I came within a hair of falling for it too. Friendly-enemies deal! Dip the colors regardless, as an expression of the universal brotherhood of all men who pursue their duty on the cruel sea! . . . Well, at least we don’t have to analyze that load of garbage to know its significance!”
Ensign Ralston seethed beyond the point of containing himself. “Why don’t we steam upwind and give them a good long dose of our dirtiest smoke, sir?” he blurted out.
Finlander gave him a balefully crushing stare from beneath his snow-flecked brows. “I prefer to leave the dirty little acts of defiance to the more amateurish elements among our enemies, Mr. Ralston,” he answered coldly, then addressed himself to Allison and the OOD: “Very good. I think we have intimidated this customer in spite of his show of insolence. At least he will suspect we know what he is up to and — remember — nothing is more demoralizing than to have the secrecy stripped from one’s secret mission. So let’s leave him stew about it while we go after his pet pigboat, Moby Dick.”
As the Bedford pulled away and the Novo Sibirsk began to dissolve into the gloomy shroud of another squall, most of the bridge watch retreated into the pilothouse, there to thaw out their numbed faces and ice-crusted clothing. The lookouts remained, once again straining their eyes over a darkening, empty sea; and Captain Finlander remained because this fading gray oblivion was another sunless sunset. Wolfgang Schrepke, also compelled by old habits, moved toward his solitary vigil in the opposite wing of the bridge, but first paused by the captain to say: “I noticed one more thing about that Russian.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Those large discharge valves. I recall them to be of the type used for transfer of concentrated hydrogen peroxide.”
“Yes?”
“That was the fuel used by our Walther-type U-boat propulsion plants. As a Russian prisoner I was assigned to work on their copy of such a unit. You can look for Moby Dick to be a Chelnikoff Class with a submerged maximum speed of twenty-five knots and a duration of thirty hours without schnorkeling.”
“Thank you, Commodore.”
Down belowdeck there were two men who were totally oblivious of what had taken place beyond their cabins during the past forty minutes.
One was Lieutenant Commander Chester Porter, who had stretched out on his bunk with one of the books he had found in Lieutenant Hirschfeld’s collection, Montcalm’s War Psychology in Primitive and Modern Man. For over two hours he had been absorbed in it, being frequently sidetracked by the profuse marginal notes and the more detailed loose-leaf ones stuck in between pertinent pages. It was these writings by Lieutenant Hirschfeld which he had studied with an increasingly disturbed fascination. Finally he had got up off the bunk and begun to pace back and forth over the narrow confines of his cabin, still reading and muttering disconnected excerpts to himself in agitated whispers: “. . . stresses far exceeding those of any normal peacetime patrol . . . producing hate syndromes . . . war’s only natural release, killing, is denied . . . aggravating latent aberrations without recourse to normal checks and balances. . . .”
And one deck lower, Ben Munceford had escaped into his even more isolated cabin (it was actually located below the waterline) , determined to avoid any of Finlander’s cornball production ideas for the balance of the afternoon. After dark he would venture forth and try to tape some interviews of the crew — enlisted crew. In the meanwhile he planned to digest his lunch in peace and maybe doze off a bit. The only thing which prevented this was his shameless desire to refresh the vision of Shebeona in his mind, and that caused him to poke about Lieutenant Packer’s locker and drawers. He stopped short of a full scale shakedown search and, when he failed to find her, disgustedly heaved himself up into his bunk, where he lay thinking about Nancy III just to discourage himself on the subject of women. Still Shebeona’s picture haunted him. But he soon went to sleep anyway.
3.
When the watch changed at 0400 of the following morning, it was pouring with rain. The thermometer indicated a fraction under twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, yet it rained a thick, penetrating, all-soaking rain which fell out of a windless, opaque blackness, washing off all the snow which had accumulated on the Bedford during the previous day and substituting a sheathing of glass-slick ice. Every raindrop which touched the ship seemed to freeze solid instantly. The decks were like newly surfaced skating rinks, and ice covered even the lifelines, the handholds, the vertical surfaces and the antennas, from where it would break loose at intervals, falling and clattering against the superstructure like showers of pebbles. The seas had flattened out as the ship came under the lee of the Greenland coast and her motions were reduced to an occasional easy roll as she drove silently through the night; the wind had completely died out and the only movement in the bitterly saturated air was created by the eighteen-knot forward velocity of the destroyer herself. Both bridge lookouts slipped and fell before they had been on watch for more than a few minutes.
One of the lookouts who promptly fell as soon as he stepped out on the bridge was Fireman Second Class Bertrand W. Meggs, and he would not have been there at all had it not been for Captain Finlander’s order to give all of the Bedford’s crew a crack at spotting Moby Dick. Meggs had been pleased when Chief MacKay picked him to represent Engineering on the bridge for an hour, but his pleasure had turned into trepidation when he was so rudely acquainted with the appalling topside conditions. It was not so much the fall, although it had been hard enough to leave a throbbing ache in his back and shoulder, but when he finally worked himself out to his post in the port wing by a series of uncertain shuffles and slides, he had blinked his eyes to make sure they were open, then held a hand out in front of his face and been absolutely unable to see it. It was then that the futility of his assignment struck him, the uselessness of his exchanging a warm, bright post at No. 1 boiler for this sodden, freezing, black agony. Moby Dick could have surfaced right alongside without being spotted! Meggs had never in his life seen such a black night, or such a cold, wet one! The quartermaster had made him put on a sou’wester and a slicker over his regular arctics, but a chill was creeping up his bruised backside and an icy little stream of water working its way down his neck, seeping through the collar past two sweaters, shirt and thermal long-johns, to dampen his chest. The rain splattered on the sou’wester pulled down over the closed hood of his parka, making a patter like rain on a tarpaper roof; it was so loud that all other sounds were blotted out, even the hissing of the destroyer’s wash.
It crossed Meggs’s mind that he was being allowed to take this “eyeball” lookout assignment simply because the sharpest, best-trained eyes on the ship could not see a god-damned thing through this muck anyway — so let some poor nearsighted son of a bitch out of the boiler rooms waste his time trying for the captain’s prize! The quartermaster and his regular “eyeballs” were probably sitting on the heaters in the pilothouse, laughing at him. Well — to hell with them! He would try anyway. Maybe a miracle would happen and the god-damned Russian sub would come steaming along the surface with his navigation lights ablaze. Or trailing a bright patch of phosphorescence. Yes! There was
sometimes an amazing phosphorescence in these black waters!
Fireman Meggs cautiously felt his way along the railing of the bridge, leaning far out and trying to see if there was any glow in the wash, fifty feet below. But he could see nothing. It was as if the ship were mysteriously flying through the night, supported by nothing but the trillions of raindrops. Then he suddenly bumped up against something like wet leather, soft, yet with a hardness underneath which briefly rippled with a living action. “Jesus! Who’s that? Somebody else out here?” he gasped.
“Yes, obviously, sailor.”
Meggs’s shock subsided and he was happy to find some human company in this stygian blackness, but also irritated because he was not being trusted with the lookout job by himself. “You mean they’re wasting two of us out here! That’s a bunch of crap, by God! Even if they gave us a seeing-eye dog apiece, we wouldn’t be worth a fart in the wind!”
The other man took his time before answering, then rather curtly agreed: “It is quite thick.”
“Thicker than the inside of an undertaker’s drawers, brother! I can’t even tell who the hell you are. One of the regular ‘eyeballs’ around here?”
Again the other man hesitated before answering, but this time he spoke with a somewhat lighter tone. “Yes, I suppose you might call me that.”
Fireman Second Class Bert Meggs finally caught the Germanic accent in the voice speaking to him out of the dark and a shock of outright fear shot through his chest. “Christ almighty! You sound like . . . I mean, are you? . . . Yes, Jesus! You are the commodore!” He almost slipped and fell again as he backed off across the icy deck. “Excuse me, sir! It’s just so horrible damned black out here I can’t see my hand in front of my f . . . face, sir.”
“It’s all right, sailor,” Schrepke told him, sternly, yet somehow also reassuring. “You must not worry about speaking to me or about this very dark night. A good lookout does more than just look. He must listen, no? Have you listened yet, sailor?”
“Listened, sir?”
“Yes. Try it now.”
Meggs listened and heard only the hard patter of rain against his sou’wester.
“Do you not hear something?” the Germanic voice patiently prodded him out of the black vacuum.
Meggs yanked off the sou’wester and tore open the snaps of his thick woolen hood. When he had bared his head and felt the sting of raindrops on his scalp, he leaned far out over the railing and stared into the void, but straining his ears rather than his eyes. And now he heard it! A weird deep rumbling which seemed to surge faintly above the soft noise of rain falling into the sea. It had an eerie, menacing quality which raised the hackles in the back of his neck and set his heart to wildly beating. “Oh, God, sir! What is it?”
“Ah! You hear it too, then. Ice in breakers.”
“Ice in breakers?”
“It won’t get you your captain’s prize, sailor, but I believe he would be grateful if you reported it,” Schrepke quietly suggested.
“Ice and breakers! Jesus Christ!” Meggs exclaimed and, wheeling for the pilothouse, began a frantic shuffling, sliding rush for its door. Yanking it open, he electrified the shadowy figures inside by yelling at the top of his voice:
“Ice and breakers ahead!”
Three minutes later Captain Finlander came out on the port wing, bareheaded and wearing only his white duffel over white pajamas. He became an almost ghostly figure, shimmering with a pale luminescence as he stood there in the pitch-black night, intently listening. His ship was more silent than ever since her engines had been stopped and she wallowed sluggishly over the oily swells. But the ominous rumbling was so pronounced now that it filled the blackness all around with a tangible threat which could be felt as well as heard. The captain absorbed its vibrations for a moment, then unerringly addressed himself to the invisible Meggs. “Did you sound off about this, lad?”
“Yessir . . . sort of, but . . .” He hesitated, gingerly groped around for Schrepke and was thrown into speechless confusion when he found the German had mysteriously vanished from his side.
The captain had little time to waste and so gave him none to recover and explain what had happened. “Well done, Meggs!” Returning inside the wheelhouse, he joined a badly rattled OOD, Lieutenant Petersen, who was staring at the radar scope with something close akin to hatred. “All right, Mr. Petersen,” Finlander mildly admonished him. “There’s no use in venting your frustrations on that inanimate object. It has simply been overwhelmed by conditions which — please note — can only be coped with by ordinary frail human beings. Well, perhaps I am being unfair. Fireman Meggs seems neither ordinary nor frail, God bless him!”
Behind them a voice crackled out of a speaker on the communications panel:
“CIC to bridge! The MTS is picking up strong ice echoes now, bearing three-one-zero, range two-four-zero-zero.”
“Oh, Lord, that’s close!” Petersen exclaimed and moved to acknowledge, but Finlander beat him to it.
“Congratulations, CIC!” the captain acidly purred into the microphone. “The eyeball watch appreciates having their reports confirmed by you scientists — even belatedly. Now could we trouble you to keep track of that ice, please? We don’t want it closer than a thousand yards or so, if it can be helped. Thank you.” Although he was needling them, he spoke without anger and there was something reassuring in the mere fact that he was being flippant about it. Obviously he did not consider the situation dangerous even though they had come close to smashing into the icefields hugging the Greenland coast. He even grinned at Petersen and managed to draw a nervous smile in response. “I suggest you forget radar for the time being and use the master fathometer to help you hold us hove to while I go backstage and cast the navigational bones with Commander Allison.”
“Yes, sir. And I’m sorry I messed things up.”
“Messed what up? Are we in trouble? No! Just had another close shave which is part of the hazards of arctic operations, that’s all. Go to it, boy!”
Commander Allison had also been urgently routed out of his cabin. He was the kind of man who always yanked on his trousers under such circumstances, then rushed for the bridge while still wearing the tops of his pajamas. He and the captain made an odd, un-naval-looking pair as they bent over the chart, carefully studying it in the glow of the red blackout light, each still wearing part of his sleeping garb and part uniform. “The Inertial Navigator and our last reliable radar bearing don’t check out, sir,” the exec told Finlander. “We should be here — about sixty miles southwest of Cape Tupinier and still well off the hundred-fathom curve. But I’m afraid we are in fact badly off our reckoning if surf noises can be heard.”
“Not necessarily, Buck. I don’t see any reason to question our pampered Inertial Navigational System as long as the CSP room doesn’t flood or freeze up. Furthermore, I even doubt if those are shoreside breakers we hear out there. Could very well be a grounded berg left over from last season with a raft of growlers in its backwash to create the uproar. In any case, I’m more concerned about Moby Dick’s position than our own — which can’t be off more than a mile or two at the very worst. . . . Good Lord, Buck! When will you give up those screaming striped pajamas?”
“I’ll buy a nice conservative set of white silks when I make captain. . . . I take it you want to go by the INS position, sir?”
“I see no alternative, do you? With radar haywire and the overcast too thick for any old-fashioned celestial help, that’s when we’ve got to go along with Krindlemeyer and Spitzer’s bag of scientific tricks, right?” Finlander’s eyebrows cocked suddenly into their most sardonic expression. “And by the way, Buck! You never will make captain if I write in your fitness report that you barge around my bridge in that barber-pole outfit casting aspersions on the navy’s pet navigational whizbang. Shocking reactionary attitude, I’d say. Like going around plumping for battlewagons and gunboats.” He shook his head and made some disapproving clucking sounds. “Well, I’m going back to bed, but don’t
hesitate to call me if there’s anything I can do.”
“Sweet dreams!” Allison threw after him with a stiff, one-sided grin, noticing that the captain was not taking the situation so lightly as to return to the luxury of the double-sized bunk in his stateroom, but retired to the spartan day cabin behind the navigation office. The executive officer still felt worried, but the gnawing apprehension which had flooded his mind when the OOD’s panicked call first brought him rushing to the bridge had subsided. Stepping into the wheelhouse, he took his foul-weather gear off its hook on the bulkhead and slipped it on over his pajama tops. He asked the JOOD to send a messenger below for the captain’s and his own clothing, then went out into the freezing sleet to check for himself the grim sounds which filled the surrounding night.
During the next hour the Bedford remained in the same spot, rolling and heaving lazily while her position was maintained in the absolute darkness by using the fathometer to pick a reference point off the bottom, one hundred and ninety fathoms down. The distant rumble rose and fell without increasing its threat on the average. The downpour slowly moderated and by two bells it was more of a thick, penetrating mist than actual rain. But when the quartermaster of the watch recorded the hourly temperature reading, it had dropped two degrees to twenty-seven Fahrenheit — which meant that the destroyer’s unbalancing coating of ice would be freezing more solidly than ever to her superstructure. In thickness it built up only inch by inch, but in aggregate weight, ton by ton. This was why she was getting more sluggish and slower in recovering herself after the low swells passed beneath her keel.
The Bedford Incident Page 17
