MacKay lolled his head to port against the roll of the ship and carefully scratched around the navel of his exposed belly. “That I will after things calm doon. But since it takes physicists to nur’rse the pettyfoggin’ ailments of this engine room, one must beware of exposing such lubbers to falling into the machinery, causing worse damage than an anemic transistor.”
Commander Franklin winced. “Jesus, Mac. You must be flipping, putting on that phony Scottish accent. I’d better have you relieved and sent up to sick bay to get your psychosis reamed out.”
MacKay guffawed, blowing a fine black spray of coffee over his chin. “Hoot, mon, Command’rr! If Lieutenant Hirschfeld was there, I’d willingly go, but . . .” He brought himself up short as the telephone suddenly interrupted him with a ring which loudly jarred above the sound of the turbines. With a flippantly insubordinate gesture, he picked up the receiver and tossed it at the engineering officer, who barely managed to catch it in mid-air.
“Engine-room Control. Commander Franklin.”
The executive officer was on the other end of the line, and in a few clipped sentences he outlined Finlander’s coming maneuver to outwit Moby Dick and the part Engineering was expected to play in it. “Steam out of here like a locomotive,” Allison finished by saying, “and come back as silent as driftwood.”
“Aye, aye! And it may work at that!” Commander Franklin swiveled around in his chair and threw the phone back at MacKay. “We’re about to pull a fake play, Chief. Stand by for flank speed. And you’ve got about ten minutes to blow tubes and do any other noisy chores needed.”
“Chr-rist! It’s going to be U-1020 all over!” MacKay exclaimed. Pulling his feet off the console, he threw his cup of coffee into the trash bin, quickly slipped his upper plate out of his mouth and into his shirt pocket and had his hands on the throttles just as the annunciator clanged and switched to ALL AHEAD FLANK. “Hang on, lad! It will be a wild ride!” He shoved the levers smoothly ahead until they touched the emergency gates. From below them the sound of the turbines surged until they reached a frenzied pitch of full power. Franklin looked down there and saw a machinist grab a handhold to keep himself from falling as the propellers bit savagely into the sea and sucked down the stern before thrusting the Bedford ahead. Her bow butted solidly into a huge swell which sent a shudder through the ship as she began heeling hard over in a turn. The machinist hung there for dear life, momentarily completely off balance, his face peering up in alarm at the engineering officer. Then he grinned, shook his head and recovered himself.
In the galley the chief cook also grabbed for a handhold, this one on the stove, where he had taken a chance on frying thirty pounds of pork sausage for breakfast. The turbines were three decks down and beyond nine watertight compartments, but he could feel their sudden surge of power through the soles of his shoes. Even as he glanced over his shoulder toward the VIOLENT MANEUVER light, it flashed from amber to red. As the destroyer leaped ahead, smashed through the big swell and heeled steeply, he helplessly watched the hot grease flow off the griddle into the trap, then slosh over it and run onto the tile deck. A hundred sausages rolled and butted against one another like a stampeding herd of little fat pigs; a half-dozen jumped the guard rail and splashed into the spreading puddle of grease. The chief cook swore and yelled: “Belay hot breakfast!” The assistant cook echoed his curse and began pulling himself hand over hand along the steam table to help scoop the sausages into a pan. But as he jumped across to the stove, he slipped in the grease and hit the deck hard.
The chief cook waited for ten seconds until the Bedford began straightening up on her keel, then let go of the stove handhold and crouched down by his assistant, who was looking foolishly at his arm. It was broken.
“Lie down flat, Andy, and press it to your chest so it don’t hit nothing else,” he said, all his anger changed to sympathetic concern. Then he clawed his way over to the opposite bulkhead, reached for the telephone and dialed sick bay. “A corpsman to the galley! We got a casualty!”
In the Communications Center, Lieutenant Peter Packer had just taken a routine HUFF-DUFF bearing on a transmission from the Tiburon Bay when he felt the quickening pulse of the Bedford’s engines. His hasty calculation plotted the tanker’s position as somewhat less than two hundred miles south-southwest of their own, and it was perhaps natural for him to think that Finlander had decided to break off the preposterous cat-and-mouse game with Moby Dick to speed toward a rendezvous. He looked up at the PA speaker, expecting an announcement to stand down from GQ, but no sound came out of it. Instead there came a bass-drum boom as the destroyer hit a heavy sea, followed by the whoosh of spray flying over her entire superstructure. Packer had to brace himself against the plotting table as the Bedford lay over in a violently contested accelerating turn. A glance at the gyro-repeater would have told him that she was not turning toward the Tiburon Bay, rather away from her, pointing her plunging bow northeast toward the desolate blackness of the Denmark Strait. But once he sensed that the endless jogging over the wreck of the Hood had definitely come to an end, he suddenly could think of nothing except that the only brief closeness to his father which he had known in his whole life was likewise ending. With each turn of the thundering screws, they were torn farther and farther apart, the schism of death’s oblivion once again widening between them — most likely, this time forever!
Lieutenant Packer tore off the earphones and rushed into the radio room, where he grabbed the dozing Lieutenant Beeker and shook him awake. “Look here, Beek! Cover for me a few minutes. I absolutely have to go out on deck.”
Becker blinked at him. “What’s the matter, Peterpacker? You going to puke after standing everything this long?”
“No, damn it! I’ve got to go out for a while, that’s all. Do you mind?” He yelled it out with such vehemence that all three radio operators turned from their sets and stared at him.
Becker shot himself erect in his chair with a startled expression. “Well, okay, Packer. Go ahead!” the communicator exclaimed. But his permission was entirely superfluous, as the British officer was already halfway to the door. He yanked his parka off its hook and, while still struggling into it, vanished through an icy blast and a slam.
A solid wall of snow-filled wind swept down the deck, thrust into Packer’s crouched body and propelled it along the heaving, slush-coated plates. Blotches of spume rushed past the Bedford’s flanks, flaring a ghostly white before fading back into the absolute night; the diffused blue halos of the battle lights on the main yard performed wild gyrations against the black void of the sky. Particles of ice were wrenched loose from the mast and came clattering down, an occasional larger icicle hitting the deck with a resounding clang. The blower intakes roared angrily as they gulped huge quantities of air for the Bedford’s throbbing boiler rooms, and in an eerie falsetto accompaniment the halyards and radar antennas began to wail in the slipstream. But Lieutenant Packer noticed none of these things. For a wild moment he was skidding along without moving his feet, miraculously missing the cleats and hose connections which cluttered the deck. Somehow he hooked an arm around a davit of the whaleboat and pivoted around it, changing his course to right angles. A stanchion on the edge of the deck burned his gloveless hands with a searing cold, but kept him from pitching over the side. He hung there, leaning far out, staring into the thirty-knot wash, and beyond it through the calming blackness of the deep into two hundred and ten fathoms of eternity. While the snow lashed his face with squalls of stinging ice needles, he felt a wordless prayer for his unknown father, the Hood and all the lost souls calling to him from her algid hulk.
In the starboard wing of the bridge, another man was staring down into the black rushing sea. Commodore Schrepke had been there since leaving the CIC a little after 0300, occasionally fighting the terrible cold by pacing a few steps while slapping his arms across his chest and cracking off the snow freezing to his leather jacket, but mostly crouched by the windscreen and following the battle between the Bedford
and the Russian submarine without any benefit of fathometers or sonar. In his mind there was a built-in sensory system which not only kept track of the destroyer’s seemingly aimless jogging over the black surface, but was also in almost tangible communication with the craft hiding in the blacker deep beneath it. He had done so many times what those submariners were doing now that he could live and feel every moment of every man, bridging the years since he had experienced the same thing as if they had never existed. Perhaps there was a German among the Russians down there. An old U-boatman like himself, and like himself serving in a foreign naval vessel, but a Soviet one because fate had presented no choice and he had finally thrown over any scruples and capitulated to a pitiless destiny. Perhaps it even was one of his own boys, like Raschnau or Manteufel, both of whom had vanished into the faceless maw of Soviet forced labor. Perhaps. Only one thing he knew for certain, and that was that there were no Communists or Nazis or Democrats, Easterners or Westerners or international agnostics hiding down there in the sepulchral sanctuary of the dead British battle cruiser. Only humanoids reduced to the ultimate equality of stark terror, each fighting his own loneliness and desperately binding up his own bowels and backbone with a last thin thread of discipline while listening to the sounds of the hated destroyer’s relentless stalking overhead.
When Schrepke felt the Bedford’s engines surge with a burst of power and a sudden squall of stinging cold spray whipped over the bridge as she leaped ahead, his heart jumped with relief in his chest, probably in unison with the heart of the Russian commander of Moby Dick. Just as he would, he found himself muttering a fervent prayer that the destroyer was breaking off the action and steaming away. But he quickly sensed that there was another, more sinister purpose in the maneuver. The Bedford was accelerating and turning, moving on through the range of speed of a normal withdrawal in these sea conditions, failing to pick up the southerly heading which the commodore knew to be her base course, instead coming around until her bow pointed directly into the swells and starting to hurdle them like a greyhound in a steeplechase. Finlander was turning north, and there could be no reason for this except one. Schrepke remained where he was for several minutes, staring over the side while enduring the freezing, brine-filled wind, trying to divine whether or not the Russian commander was suspecting the trap being laid for him. Then he turned and rocked toward the wheelhouse.
Lieutenant Commander Porter was genuinely shocked when Commodore Schrepke suddenly appeared in the door of the day cabin, looking in at him, Finlander and Queffle, who was eagerly draining the last of his malted milk. The German was almost solidly caked with frozen slush, his face blotched, his eyes swollen. “My God, sir!” the surgeon exclaimed. “You’re badly frostbitten!”
Schrepke stuck the fingers of his right hand in his mouth and pulled off the glove with his teeth, then forced open the stiff folds of his leather jacket. Bits of ice fell from his muffler and made brittle sounds as they hit the deck. “I am all right, Doctor,” he said with a smile which looked as though it too should break loose crusts of ice. “But perhaps you will prescribe something warming, no?”
Finlander stared at him with a tinge of shock. “Give him one on the house, Commander,” he ordered the surgeon.
“Thank you,” Schrepke said. “I will take it in a hot cup of coffee.” He remained in the door, bracing himself there against the now bone-rattling pitches of the racing destroyer. His eyes were on the sonarman seated on the bunk, and a look of doubt came to his face, as if seeing Queffle there might make a difference in his evaluation of the situation. “Is your young magician being rewarded for a completed performance, or is he being primed for a grand finale of his black art?” If there was sarcasm in the question, it was not directed at the boy who stared back at him, uncomprehending.
“Queffle is resting,” Finlander answered guardedly, “and recuperating after over twenty-four hours of intermittent duty.”
“And while he is resting, you are utilizing that time to give the submarine the impression you are departing. Right, Captain?”
“Right, Commodore.”
Schrepke nodded, all doubt gone from his face. “Will you please step into the chartroom with me, Captain,” he said and abruptly turned from the door, going in there himself without waiting for an answer. He had spoken to Finlander as a superior officer to a subordinate.
Lieutenant Commander Porter was leaning over the small desk, trying to aim a splash of brandy into the sloshing cup of coffee he had poured out of the Thermos jug. He immediately sensed an electrifying tension after the German had spoken, most of it emanating from Captain Finlander, who hesitated for a long moment before following him out of the cabin. Merlin Queffle must have felt it too, because he exclaimed in a nervous whisper: “Geez, Commander! Is he going to chew the skipper over me?”
“No, Queffle. Of course not.”
“Then what, sir?”
“Nothing that’s your business.”
For a moment the surgeon wondered whether it was his business either, but he was itching to hear the exchange between the captain and the commodore, and, after all, he had an excuse since Schrepke had requested the spiked coffee. So he steeled himself and went after them.
The two men were standing in the pool of red light by the chart table. “. . . and I would appreciate to know exactly what your tactical objective is in continuing the action, Captain,” Commodore Schrepke was saying, his guttural English containing a steely Prussian edge.
“I believe you know it perfectly well, sir,” Finlander answered him. “To force the Russian to the surface.”
“You had him surfaced yesterday, Captain, but forced him down again.”
Finlander smiled. “He was not ripe then, Commodore. I am not playing games. My purpose is to so exhaust him and shatter his morale that he will be unable to accomplish the purpose of his trespass on this side of the ocean.”
Schrepke noticed the surgeon and reached out for the cup of coffee in his hand, waited a couple of seconds for the Bedford to shake herself free of a huge sea, then took a deep gulp of the brew. “In my judgment, these harassment tactics have gone too far and should be terminated immediately,” he bluntly told Finlander after recovering from the invigorating pain of the drink.
Finlander shook his head adamantly. “I will break off when it is firmly established in the minds of both my own and the Russian’s crew that I’m doing so only on my terms.”
Schrepke rolled the cup in his hands, warming his numb fingers with its heat. “How do you know what is in the minds of the Russian crew, Captain? By the electronic phantasmagorias in CIC? Surely not, when they so often short-circuit themselves on their own complexity or are so oversensitive as to become alarmed over a bed of shrimp. Or do you count on the mystic powers of young Queffle? Of course not! You know as well as I do that his only true talent is an accidentally high acuity of hearing. Between those ears there is nothing more formidable than a quite ordinary brain belonging to a confused boy. But if you want to believe in any kind of extrasensory perception, then believe in mine. Yes, Captain — I have been in that submarine ever since you started chasing it two days ago. I can tell you her captain and crew are now reduced to such a state of desperation that they may no longer act in any way except as animals fighting for survival. I can tell you this because it has happened to me in submarines, so you see there is nothing really mystical about my powers either. I merely remember and put myself in their place.”
Finlander had listened with his huge head cocked to one side, his eyes burning behind their network of tired wrinkles, the scar on his throat throbbing. Lieutenant Commander Porter could feel the tremendous pressure building up in the man and wondered whether he was about to finally lose his temper with the one person aboard who was immune to his powers. But the explosion was delayed and something like a smile came to Finlander’s lips as he asked: “Is that what you do when you seclude yourself in the wing of my bridge, Commodore? Commune with your old U-boat comrades?”
Finlander appeared to flinch slightly at the word “madness,” but his head rocked in one firm negative motion. “I am sorry, sir. I can’t break off yet. And for your information, it isn’t a question of one or the other. Everything is firmly in control aboard my ship.”
Lieutenant Commander Porter shocked himself by suddenly blurting out: “I respectfully disagree, Captain, sir” and brought upon himself the explosion he had expected to be directed against the German officer.
“Damn you, Porter!” Finlander shouted, his face a livid mask as he wheeled on the surgeon. “Who invited you to partake in this discussion? Get out!”
As if she were echoing her commander’s fury, the Bedford slammed into a wave and leaped through a hurricane of spray before wildly pitching into the next trough. Porter collided heavily with Schrepke, who had to steady him and then kept a surprisingly hard grip on his arm after the destroyer recovered herself. The surgeon wanted to flee the bridge and Finlander’s wrath, but found himself held back by the German.
“Please stay,” Schrepke said with a commanding insistence. “I do believe a medical opinion may be in order here.”
“What are you insinuating, sir?” Finlander yelled, his voice ringing above the roar of the destroyer’s thrusting through the sea. His eyes were no longer slits, but wide and bulging; the wiry eyebrows no longer formed a solid bristle across the bridge of his nose, but had broken adrift among the anguished furrows of his forehead. Lieutenant Commander Porter yanked himself free of Schrepke’s grip and recoiled backward. This, then, was the explosion he had feared, but far more horrible than he had ever dreamed. “What sort of medical opinion?” the captain screamed, completely beside himself. “Out with it! You want to throw a bunch of catch-all psychiatric accusations at me you’ve picked up from Hirschfeld? All right! But spit them out right here and now. Say I’ve brainwashed my crew and turned them into a bunch of schizos. Then tell them and let them laugh you off my ship.”
The Bedford Incident Page 23
