The Bedford Incident

by Mark Rascovich

  Queffle twisted around in his seat and looked up at Finlander with a desperate expression. “I can pick him up, sir. I know I can pick him up. It’s just a matter of concentrating on it awhile longer. Don’t yank me off now, sir. Please! Please!” He was pleading like a boy begging his coach to give him a last chance to salvage the impending defeat of his team.

  “Ease up, Queffle,” Finlander said with surprising gentleness. “You’re not even sure he’s still down there.”

  “I d-don’t know for sure he isn’t,” Queffle stammered. “I think he might be. He must be. If only I could concentrate enough.”

  Ensign Ralston suddenly spoke up loudly from his position at Fire Control and there was something of the same pleading in his voice. “Captain, sir, couldn’t we drop a shallow charge? If he thought we weren’t kidding, he might be bluffed into making a run for it.”

  One of the stand-by sonar operators let out an approving growl. Finlander realized with a wave of relief that the morale was not as bad as he had suspected. “That’s a good idea, Mr. Ralston,” he answered, “but I don’t think it would work with this character. He’s as smart and tough as they come. We’ve got to face up to that.”

  “And give up, sir?” Ralston exclaimed, appalled.

  “You know me better than that!” Finlander retorted and suddenly found himself addressing everybody in the CIC. “Moby Dick is as smart and tough as they come among submariners. But we are as smart and tough as they come among submarine hunters. So it’s going to be a close call like . . .” He paused for a moment, thinking back. “Like a game I once played with another smart submariner — Stoltz of the U-1020. It took me fifty-two hours to pin him down and kill him. . . . Fifty-two hours!” He paused again and his face seemed to harden with the inspiration of fresh determination as he recalled the action. “I didn’t win that one by giving up. I won it by making Stoltz think I had given up. All right! I’ll show you how it happened!” He was suddenly full of a tense suppressed excitement which he sensed was being communicated to his men. He also sensed that he was irrevocably putting at stake their confidence in him by demanding from them a last ounce of perseverance in this nebulous battle. He was betting against all the evidence of the Bedford’s electronic gear, against the wavering extrasensory perception of his own pet magician, Merlin Queffle. He was betting that Moby Dick was down there, still hiding in the protective shadow of the hulk of the Hood, and that he could fox him. Turning to Spitzer, he ordered: “Secure the maximum-effect sweep! Put your department on stand-by GQ. Relax! Have the galley send up sandwiches and coffee for all hands. I’m going up on the bridge to brief Commander Allison on the trap we’re going to spring.” He hooked his hand under Queffle’s arm and pulled him out of the chair.

  The Breton Kid resisted with a nearly subordinate violence: “You’re not yanking me off, sir!” he protested. “You’ve got to let me see this through!”

  Finlander laughed. “Certainly, Queffle! But I’m not going to throw you into the final play with your senses befuddled by fatigue and tension. Come with me.” Steadying the skinny little sonarman against a violent gyration of the Bedford, the captain led him to the door. After it clanged shut behind them, Lieutenant Spitzer leaned back in his seat at Central Control and announced:

  “Okay — so it’s all systems guarded for stand-by GQ. Reliefs, take over your stations. All others relax like the skipper said.”

  The order was obeyed, but with an atmosphere of tense expectancy.

  2.

  In the darkness of the wheelhouse Commander Allison was perched on the captain’s chair, which had been moved in front of the recorder of the fathometer. Like a blind man probing his way along with an invisible stick, he was navigating back and forth, back and forth, over the wreck of the Hood by watching the trace of the bottom contour on the graph while calling out changes of course to the helmsman. Lieutenant Petersen, the OOD, was standing next to the gyro-compass, checking every move of the wheel. Ensign Whitaker, the JOOD, leaned heavily on the annunciator, listening with unflagging concentration for the frequent engine-room orders. Next to the quartermaster and talker, two bridge lookouts huddled by the heater, thawing themselves out after being relieved from an agonizing twenty-minute watch on the snow-lashed bridge. Only Commander Allison’s and the helmsman’s faces stood out clearly in the gloom, illuminated by the instruments before them; all others were only vaguely visible as blacker shapes in the surrounding blackness.

  Merlin Queffle came up through the shaft, being pushed along by Captain Finlander and securely held by his possessive grip. They stopped by Commander Allison, and the captain exclaimed: “You are doing a terrific job of navigating off the bottom, Buck.”

  Allison flipped his head away from the fathometer as though he had been awakened out of a trance. “Hello, Captain. Well, sir . . . it’s pretty flat down there and the Hood stands out like a sore thumb. We’ve got our drift down pat, so it’s only a matter of establishing a fixed pattern of maneuvers.” His eyes moved to Queffle, noticing the sonarman’s hangdog look. “What’s the score in CIC? Still lost contact?”

  “He’s down there, all right,” Finlander answered, sounding absolutely confident. “But we’re going to change our tactics. Turn over the conn to your OOD and come into the navigation office, Buck. I’ll tell you what we’re about to pull.”

  Finlander had not released his grip on Queffle and he now guided him into the navigation office and through it into his day cabin. There he found Ben Munceford curled up on the bunk, fast asleep. Unceremoniously he shook him awake. “Heave out, Munceford! If you’re going to sack out through this action, do it in your own cabin!” As the bunk was vacated by the sleepily startled correspondent, the captain gently shoved the Breton Kid down on it. “Now you lie down and relax your nerves, son,” he said. “Just let your mind go blank for a while. I’m going to send to the galley for your favorite drink and sandwich. What would you like?”

  “Gee — nothing, I guess, sir,” Queffle mumbled. “I think I feel kind of sick.”

  “Okay. I’ll fix you up.” Pushing Munceford out of the way, he went to the telephone attached to the bulkhead and dialed the ship’s hospital. Lieutenant Commander Porter’s weary voice answered the call. “Doc! I want some brandy to the bridge on the double. Bring it yourself and whatever is necessary to put an exhausted man back in shape for another couple of hours.” Before the surgeon could ask him for any details, Finlander hung up on him and dialed the galley. “This is the captain speaking. Send a messman up to my day cabin with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a thick chocolate malted. On the double.” When he turned from the phone, he saw Munceford standing over the bunk, staring down at Queffle, who was lying there with his hands over his face. “Get out of here, Munceford. From now on, make yourself as scarce as possible.”

  Munceford shrugged and almost fell out of the cabin, propelled by a deep pitch of the destroyer. Finlander sat down on the edge of the bunk and put his hand on Queffle’s chest, trying to belay its heaving. “Listen to me, boy,” he said in a tone which was gruffly soothing. “I know how you feel. I know you think you’ve failed us. But that is not true at all. Talents like yours don’t just suddenly evaporate. They may become dulled by tension and fatigue, but never simply vanish into nothing. So I want you to know I’m still convinced you’re the best sonarman in the whole navy. I’m going to give you a chance to prove it in a little while and have no doubts that you’ll come through. Okay, Merlin? Are you with me?”

  The hands fell away from the gaunt face and there was a look of wonderment in those bloodshot eyes. “You’re the best captain in the navy, sir,” the Breton Kid whispered.

  Finlander’s forehead wrinkled into lines of embarrassment above the thistly brows. “I can be no better than my boys,” he answered, gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder, then quickly left the cabin.

  Commander Allison was waiting by the chart table in the navigation office, his eyes watching the gyro-repeater above it, his
fingers absently twirling a pair of dividers. When the captain joined him, he turned and looked at him with a calm expectancy. “Something wrong with Queffle, sir?”

  “The boy’s worn out. But we’ve got to have him back in shape within an hour. Porter is coming up to nurse him for a while. Here’s what I want done. . . .” The captain leaned on the table and began to subconsciously sketch out the maneuver with a pencil as he spoke. “Belay jogging over the Hood. Turn into the seas and leave the area at flank speed. Pick a course so that when we eventually turn around, we will be able to drift back to this exact spot with a minimum of engine maneuvers or noise. I want Moby Dick to think we’ve picked up a false contact and rushed off to investigate it. Or, better still, that we have given up. Let’s get at least ten miles away before we sneak back on him. To confuse his sonar even more, have the engine room gradually reduce the revolutions as we draw away. I have ordered CIC to guard on passive so they won’t hear our pings. . . . Any comments, Buck?”

  Allison looked thoughtfully at the sketch which Finlander had traced on the chart. “Do you think the Russian commander will fall for such a simple old trick, sir?” he asked.

  “The simple old tricks sometimes are the undoing of men who have grown too complex in their thinking. I also am sure he’s been under terrific pressure for these past forty-two hours. That, combined with oxygen starvation, may well be clouding his judgment.”

  Allison nodded and said: “Possibly, sir.”

  “But the main thing I’m counting on is that you’ll be able to make our return run so quietly that he won’t pick us up. The sea is still pretty rough, so chances are his sonar is bothered by a lot of surface hash. That will screen us to some extent. Yet if we take a real bad sea ourselves, it could give us away. It’s up to you and Engineering to make the sneakiest approach ever pulled. Can you do it?”

  Commander Allison nodded again, but there was a tinge of doubt in his demeanor which made Finlander ask: “So what’s bothering you about the plan, Buck?”

  “It’s sound as such, sir,” the executive officer answered. “But I am wondering whether we should check it with Commodore Schrepke. A mere formality, but —”

  “Where is he?” Finlander impatiently interrupted.

  “In his usual place on the starboard wing, sir.”

  Finlander made a face. “Even in this tactical situation? Well, that cinches it as far as I’m concerned. The man is too brooding and withdrawn to be entirely normal. And I know what’s eating away at his insides. He’s still a U-boatman — a defeated U-boatman who knows he should be among the thirty thousand of his colleagues whose bones litter the floor of this ocean. He feels himself a traitor to them, not because he is working with Americans, but because he’s working with destroyer-men, the mortal enemy of all submariners. Well, I grant you, traitors can be useful, but not when their professional detachment becomes inhibited by remorse and guilt. I have nothing against Schrepke personally, nor do I not respect his rank, but I say let’s leave him out there in his own purgatory and go about our business. . . . Do you agree?”

  “We can do without him, sir, especially since he hasn’t bothered to make any suggestions,” Allison answered.

  “Very well. So let’s pull out of here, Buck.”

  Both men were startled by a voice behind them which loudly asked: “Do we stand down from General Quarters, Captain?” It was Lieutenant Commander Porter, who had entered the navigation office unnoticed and was standing there with a first-aid kit slung over one shoulder.

  Finlander looked sharply at him. “No, Doc. I don’t want the whole ship’s complement to feel the fight is over. I want them to stay keyed up.

  “They’re far too keyed up, sir,” the surgeon warned with an accusing tone. “Sooner or later, some of them are going to start caving in.”

  The captain’s eyes become smoldering slits beneath the shadowing brows. “Then I’ll let you patch them up after this action is over, Commander Porter. In the meanwhile you will go into my day cabin and work on Queffle. Medically — not with any mollycoddling psychiatric mish-mash, sir. I suggest a shot of brandy to begin with.”

  The surgeon’s haggard pallor flushed into a deep shade of mortification. “Has the captain any other medical advice for me?” he asked.

  “I advise you to proceed with extreme care, Commander,” came the seething retort.

  “Thank you. Captain.” Porter sullenly turned away and headed for the day cabin.

  Commander Allison watched him go with a troubled expression on his face. “Don’t misunderstand my mentioning this, sir,” he said to Finlander, “but it’s going to look bad for us to have serious trouble with two surgeons in a row.”

  “Our only worry is to accomplish our tactical mission, Buck,” Finlander answered, “then everything else will take care of itself. Go ahead and execute the maneuver immediately.”

  Allison said “Aye, aye, sir,” and hurried out of the navigation office.

  Finlander remained at the table, looking down on the chart with all the lines of his face compressed into a dark scowl. His eyes were on the penciled outline of his plan, but his mind was momentarily festering on the sore subject of surgeons. If it were not for the fact that his executive officer was absolutely right in his fears, he would signal a request to COMFLANT to have Porter relieved. But that would, of course, bring a fleet inspector along with the replacement. The only answer was to either bend the surgeon into the Bedford mold or break him so thoroughly that he would come to doubt his own judgment. At least Porter was nothing more dangerous than a confused naval conformist, not a zealot in the cause of humanity, like Hirschfeld. It was definitely not worth the risk of triggering an upheaval at COMFLANT by requesting his replacement. But the man had to be watched. . . .

  Finlander was just turning to go into the day cabin when he was alerted by the sound of a familiar click which stopped him in his tracks. Looking in the direction of the crisp little noise, he spotted the lanky shape of Ben Munceford in the dark corner by the chart locker.

  “Didn’t I make it clear you are to make yourself scarce around here, Munceford?” the captain challenged.

  “And I did too,” Munceford replied with an insolent grin. “At least I thought I was being as unobtrusive as a mouse caught in an alley cats’ convention.” As he stepped out of his dark corner and up to the chart table, its light revealed the flash of chrome and plastic in his hands.

  “As usual, your humor is shallow and out of place,” Finlander said, looking down at the tape recorder and fighting back an intense urge to smash it to the deck. “And to tape a discussion between myself and my officers without our permission is a flagrant breach of trust and ethics.”

  Munceford managed to keep smiling. “Well, Captain, you know I like to get spontaneous off-the-cuff stuff. It has so much more authenticity than faked set-ups. Besides, why get in an uproar when everything’s going to be checked by the PRO at COMFLANT before it’s released?”

  “It’s also going to be checked by the commanding officer of this ship before it gets that far,” the captain told him icily. “I think you’ve gotten all the authenticity you need from my bridge. From now on concentrate your efforts on other parts of the Bedford.”

  “Like maybe CIC?”

  “You stay out of CIC!” Finlander shouted with such violence that Munceford shied away from him, his face momentarily flustered with the old childish petulance. The captain instantly recovered control of himself. “I want no diversions down there whatever. Besides, everything in CIC is classified, so it’s of no pertinence to your assignment. Understand? Good. Now get out.” He kept his eyes fixed on the correspondent until he passed through the blackout curtain to the wheelhouse, then turned and went into the day cabin, there to check up on the surgeon’s treatment of his prized sonarman.

  3.

  In the Bedford’s engine-room flats there was neither gloom nor raw chill. Lights illuminating the huge control panel were bright, glinting off polished steel, enamel an
d jewel-like splashes of bronze. The air sang with the melodious monotone of the turbines and was warm with a faintly pungent odor of dry steam and lube oil. There was a certain weariness here too, but not of the tense kind prevailing on the bridge or in CIC. Engineers are a special breed whose nervous systems are so finely tuned to the machinery in their charge that nothing on or under the wild ocean outside seems to upset their equilibrium, unless it be combined with an erratic flicker of a needle or a strident ambient noise out of a reduction-gear casing. Like Chief Machinist’s Mate Lauchlan S. MacKay, who had been almost continuously on duty since the previous morning, as long as Captain Finlander, the Breton Kid, Commander Allison, Chief Quartermaster Rickmers or Lieutenants Spitzer and Krindlemeyer. He was both as fatigued and as enervated as any of them, but the reaction was a capriciousness strange in such an old hand, manifested by his starting to mix a Scottish burr into his Boston flat a’s. He was seated at the throttles, leaning back in his chair while fondling a cup of boiler-room coffee, his feet propped up on the control pedestal, his eyes critically appraising a minute nervous twitch in No. 3 boiler’s pressure gauge. Into the account of his and Finlander’s action against U-1020, he injected a nonsequitur observation that “these automatic fur’rnaces with their thermostatic controls still don’t match a detail of flesh-’n’-blood firemen for keeping an even strrrain on the manifolds.”

  Lieutenant Commander Sanford Franklin jerked himself upright in the chair next to MacKay and pounced on this opportunity to stem the flow of reminiscences from the chief’s engagements with U-1020 . . . 784 . . . 866 . . . and other sanguinary but insignificant naval battles of a bygone war, all of which he knew by heart and did not need to sustain him in this prolonged current contest with Moby Dick. “So why don’t you have the thermostats calibrated instead of just sitting there bitching about them, Mac?” he demanded.