Commodore Schrepke bent away from the blast slightly, but countered in a coolly controlled voice: “I was going to say nothing more than that they are, in their own way, as overwrought as the crew of the submarine, and as liable to make fatal mistakes in this dangerous game.” He turned to the stunned surgeon and calmly asked: “Do you not agree with me, Doctor?”
“Go ahead — Doctor!” Finlander viciously shouted. “I dare you to agree with him!”
Lieutenant Commander Chester Porter suddenly found himself the focal point of the stares of both men, the captain’s eyes wild and fearfully threatening, the commodore’s gimlets of blue ice which seemed to be penetrating to his soul. He felt a confusion of fear, indecision and bitter frustration welling up inside him, but of the three, fear was predominant. And when he noticed that a fourth man, Commander Allison, had come into the navigation office and was also watching him intently, fear submerged all other feeling. His mouth opened and closed fitfully without a sound coming out of it, the ineffectual silence lasting for a mortifying eternity until the executive officer bailed him out of it.
“Sick bay has just reported a casualty, Commander,” he announced. “A broken bone needing your immediate attention.”
While the surgeon hesitated a moment longer, Finlander’s hand shot out and seized Allison’s arm. “I will at least get a straight answer out of you, Buck!” he shouted. “Tell me if this operation has been conducted in an irresponsible, overzealous — in fact, mad — fashion.”
Allison looked into the face of his captain, then turned his head toward Commodore Schrepke. There came a suggestion of a wrinkling of his beaked nose. There also came one of his rare smiles, but it seemed only to creep up one side of his face, leaving it with an expression of half amused contempt, half sullen truculence. “Maybe so, Captain,” he slowly answered, “but only to a frightened submariner.”
Finlander let out a single, gleeful “Ha!”
Schrepke shook his head and blinked his eyes as if he disbelieved what he had heard. “I asked a question of Commander Porter,” he persisted, “and expect an answer from him.”
But the surgeon had been edging away from the chart table and now seized his chance to escape. “Begging your pardon, Commodore,” he hastily pleaded, “it seems I’m urgently needed in sick bay.” He lunged toward the door, staggering like a whipped drunkard as the Bedford violently heaved and shuddered under his feet. His arms flailed at the blackout curtain and in a moment he had clawed his way through it and was gone.
With the surgeon’s retreat, all the fury drained out of Captain Finlander and he regained control of himself as suddenly as he had lost it. There was even a gleam of triumph in his eyes as he stared toward the still swirling folds of the curtain. He knew now that he would not have to request the relief of his medical officer. He knew that Bucky Allison was firmly standing by him. Changing his hard grip on his exec’s arm to a slap on the shoulder, he told him: “She seems to be working pretty hard, Buck. Have Engineering start easing off the revs before we get any more broken bones aboard. I doubt if our doctor is in shape for a lot of surgery this morning.” When he found himself alone with the German officer, he managed a thin smile and said: “I am sorry I lost my temper, sir. It was foolish of me and really quite unnecessary to prove my point.” The malice in the apology did not go unnoticed by Commodore Schrepke, but he was still looking down at the empty spot on the deck where Lieutenant Commander Porter had stood swaying uncertainly a few moments before. He sighed deeply and a shadow of bitter irony briefly animated the inscrutable hardness of his face. “I have at least found out,” he said, “that we Germans are not the only ones guilty of breeding submissive militarists.”
Having demolished Porter, Finlander had enough resurgence of confidence to press home his advantage over the German officer. “With all due respect, Commodore, I suggest your guilt is rather one of having survived defeat,” he answered, deliberately twisting the knife.
Schrepke stiffened almost imperceptibly, then shook his head as if all this had been an unpleasant but irrelevant deviation from the main issue. The unfamiliar commanding tone returned to his voice as he spoke, looking directly into Finlander’s eyes. “I must act in this situation according to my responsibilities as senior NATO officer aboard —”
“And I will act upon it according to the prerogatives of the commanding officer of a United States naval vessel,” Finlander loudly injected. “In my judgment, it would prejudice the interests of my service to break off the action at this time. That is final, sir!”
“In that case I wish to officially go on record as being opposed to that judgment, Captain.”
“That is your privilege, sir. Anything else?”
“Yes — I want you to understand I intend to communicate my opposition to Admiral Sorensen at NATONAV 1.”
“That too is your privilege, Commodore,” Finlander answered dryly, “but I strongly advise you to await the outcome before putting yourself on record in one way or the other. It would make you look foolish to have tried to stop an action which resulted in thwarting the Soviet navy’s most notorious intruder operation.”
“Regardless of the outcome, Captain, you have run the most appalling risks for very dubious objectives,” Schrepke retorted. He drained his now cold cup of coffee, then began zipping up his leather jacket. “However, since I am unable to make you understand that, let’s terminate a useless argument.”
As the German moved to leave, Finlander blocked his way, suddenly switching to a manner of patronizing familiarity.
“Look here, Wolfgang. Our relationship has been good on this patrol. Believe me, I do respect you as a man and naval officer. It is very painful to me that this respect is not mutual.”
“But it is, Erik,” Schrepke replied without a trace of geniality. “You have my respect. But it is the respect of fear. Frankly, your executive officer was right . . . you frighten me.” He touched the visor of his cap. side-stepped Finlander and walked out of the chartroom.
The captain followed him with a frown containing both satisfaction and perplexity, He stopped a few steps inside the blacked-out wheelhouse, listening to the door of the bridge open and close, feeling the chilling blast of wind which Schrepke had let in from the night as he left. Then he cautiously moved across the heaving deck, checked the compass over the helmsman’s rocking shoulders and joined Commander Allison, who was intently studying the dimly illuminated face of the automatic course recorder.
“I see you’ve sent our frightened U-boat veteran back to his hermit ledge,” the exec said without taking his eyes from the instrument.
“Don’t kid yourself, Buck,” Finlander answered him testily. “Wolfgang Schrepke isn’t frightened of anything in this world.”
4.
The Bedford’s captain and executive officer both assumed that the German had returned to his secluded spot on the bridge, there to brood in loneliness over his ineffectual attempt to divert the course of events. But this was a mistaken assumption. He was actually on his way to the Communications Center. Heading there via an exterior companionway and the narrow deck below the bridge, pulling himself along, stanchion to stanchion, through the turbulent blackness. When he had said that he intended to protest the operation to NATONAV 1 and Admiral Sorensen, he had not meant it would be done only in due course after the patrol was completed, although there was some malice aforethought in leaving that impression. He intended to do it immediately and in spite of the radio silence imposed by Finlander during the action against Moby Dick. To accomplish this he was counting on two factors: finding Lieutenant Packer, NATO liaison officer for communications, on duty, and by convincing the Englishman of the urgency of transmitting the signal forthwith. Finlander had a right to impose radio silence on his ship, but not at the expense of severing the senior naval officer aboard from contact with his Fleet Headquarters. So there certainly was justification in attempting to circumvent the captain’s authority in this matter. And as he pressed on against the l
ashing wind, Schrepke also thought that he must break Finlander’s hegemony over the minds of his crew. He had to find at least one officer — and one with more backbone than the surgeon — to back him up in his attempt to forestall what might become a tragedy; at least find one to give him some moral support so he would not be so damnably much the despised lone German. Of all the men aboard this blighted ship, Lieutenant Peter Packer was his only hope.
Schrepke found the starboard entrance to the Communications Center to be securely dogged, so he had to continue where the deck bent around the forward funnel and turned into nothing more than a catwalk which crossed thwartship to the port side. Whirlwinds whipped around the tall moaning stack and had built a drift of snow which tripped his boots in its cold softness; as the destroyer lurched, he fell and almost rolled between the icicled lifelines to the main deck, invisible in the blackness far below him. But as he lay there for a moment, trying to catch his breath and clear his nostrils of the flying snowflakes, his eyes made out the ominous shape of the ASROC missile poised in its launcher, it dark shadow rising from the void, its green-painted warhead strangely luminous, like a cyclops’ eye staring out of a cavern. Dimly he made out a figure clambering on the launcher itself, flailing with what appeared to be an ordinary broom at the frozen spume clogging the steel tracks.
“Das is doch wahnsinn!” Schrepke yelled in a sudden outburst of pure anguish. But although the man could not have been more than ten feet below and beyond the catwalk, he did not hear the cry, which was torn away by the wind and drowned in the roar of the sea.
Schrepke staggered to his feet, half slid along the grating where it changed from snow to ice, reached the port deck and turned to fight his way back toward the Communications Center. But as he passed the whaleboat davit, a huge wall of spray erupted out of the wash, and in the instant before it blew away he saw silhouetted against it a man slumped over the wire lifeline. It was only a fleeting glimpse, but it stopped him because he had recognized Lieutenant Packer.
“What in God’s name are you doing out here?” the commodore shouted with genuine shock as he pulled himself alongside the Englishman. “Are you sick?”
Packer straightened up with a start, peered into Schrepke’s face, then hunched back onto the lifeline. “Yes, I’m sick, Commodore Schrepke,” he answered bitterly. “Sick at heart.” His eyes returned to the black rush of sea hissing against the hull.
Schrepke felt a sudden surge of hope. Was this young lieutenant suffering from the same forebodings as himself? “Then you should do something about it,” he shouted over the wind and put a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe we should both do something about it, eh?”
Packer twisted away from his touch and faced him again. Although it was too dark to see the expression on his face, the vehemence in his voice told Schrepke it would not be a friendly one. “I only want one thing from you, sir. Just one thing, that’s all. Tell me if you had anything to do with sinking the Hood. Did you?”
Schrepke was completely taken aback by the question. “The Hood? . . . She was sunk by the Bismarck, a battleship. I served in U-boats. What do you —”
“Did your U-boat have any part of the action, sir?” Packer interrupted him with a nearly savage insistence.
Schrepke edged in closer, trying to get an impression of his eyes. “My boat was at sea under orders to intercept British units but . . . I was several hundred miles away when the Hood blew up.” His tone sharpened as he recovered from his surprise. “Why do you ask me this, Lieutenant? You were nothing but a boy when that happened.”
“Nothing but a boy,” Packer echoed his words. “An orphan boy. My father died in the Hood.”
Schrepke suddenly understood why the young officer was out here alone with the sea and raised his gloved hand to touch his shoulder again, but Packer recoiled from him and he was left with his arm raised as if to strike a blow rather than make a gesture of sympathy. He felt the return of the empty loneliness inside him and it seemed to freeze and harden his whole being. “I am sorry,” was all he managed to blurt out and he knew how callous it sounded with his harsh German accent. “It does no good to grieve about it now. Not even when we pass over the grave of your father’s ship, it does no good.”
“It does good to know whom to hate,” Packer shouted at him. “I was thinking that maybe I should hate you, sir. Like I hate that god-damned bloody submarine down there, defiling the Hood with her filthy presence. I wish Captain Finlander would sink it and to hell with this play-acting. We’re all going to try to kill each other soon anyway, so why not now? Why not get down to some serious hating and killing right now?” He turned away and stared off into the night, expecting and getting no answer. But as the silence between them became prolonged, the lieutenant’s turbulent feelings slowly abated and deeply ingrained discipline began regaining control. He suddenly became aware of how rudely he had addressed an officer who would have been an admiral in his own navy. With a frantic apology on his lips he wheeled around and was startled to find himself alone. Commodore Schrepke was gone. Even when he lunged away from the lifeline, peering hard through the flying snow, he could see no trace of him. “Oh, God!” he muttered miserably to himself. “I’ve made a damned fool of myself! I’ll have to apologize tomorrow.”
5.
Ben Munceford had left the bridge and gone out on the main deck to chill his burning anger after the clash with Captain Finlander. He had stood alone in the dark, sheltered from the snow and spume by an ice-coated life raft, hooking one arm through its lashing and hanging on, hating the Bedford and her captain. But he had not been there more than a few minutes when the destroyer’s wild burst of speed through the swells brought floods of freezing water rushing down the deck. Over the roar of the wake he heard the metallic clang of doors being closed and dogged. He barely managed to splash through a torrent and escape back inside. A seaman slammed the door on his heels without as much as a glance at him, then vanished. Moving with a kind of listless uncertainty, bouncing from bulkhead to bulkhead as the ship pounded from crest to trough, he struggled along the passageway, gravitating toward the wardroom because hunger was gnawing among the other unpleasant feelings in his insides. The wardroom had been converted into an emergency first-aid station during the GQ, but the corpsmen had been returned to mess duties in an effort to get out a hot meal for the rest of the crew. Nobody was there.
Munceford found only some cold dregs in the coffee Thermos, but in a tray there were sandwiches left over from last night’s dry chow. Ham and cheese on unbuttered bread, curling and turning stale around the edges. He took one, pushed aside the stacked litters, slumped down at a table and began eating, making a grimace over the crumbly sour taste. On the second bite he gagged and gave up, concentrating his thoughts on the events which were confusing and upsetting his mind so much. Shoving the sandwich aside, he took the tape recorder out of its case, placed it in front of him, switched it on and rewound the tape. Then he pressed the playback button and put his ear down against the tiny speaker.
Out of the plastic box came the voices of Finlander and Allison, thin and weirdly hollow, and sometimes nearly smothered by the rumble of distorted background noises of the Bedford’s rolling and heaving. It was a terrible recording, one which no technical director of a broadcasting station would pass as airworthy, yet it was intelligible and to Munceford contained an elusive importance which he could sense but not fully understand. He listened with his eyes closed to the discussion of the plan to lure Moby Dick to the surface, to Finlander’s judgment against Commodore Schrepke, to his cutting interchange with Lieutenant Commander Porter. When it was over, he rolled it back and played it through again. This time he found himself no longer thinking of it as show material, but as part of a case to be presented in a court-martial. As evidence.
Evidence of what? Were matters aboard the Bedford really building toward a court-martial? Was the hounding of Moby Dick finally transgressing the accepted conduct of a cold war? Was the mounting irritation between
Finlander and the surgeon building toward a serious clash — like the one he had had with Hirschfeld? There were intimations of these possibilities on the tape, but still nothing concrete or outright damning. It was the tone rather than the words. Somehow all the tense feeling of foredoomed predatory purpose which permeated this ship seeped between the lines transcribed on the acetate ribbon — or was that feeling entirely in his own mind? And if it was, was it an accurate one? While listening to the tape for the third time, he began to toy with the idea of preventing Finlander from confiscating it, of somehow smuggling it off the Bedford. He suddenly realized that he needed more material like this, either sneaked recordings or comments from somebody aboard whom he could get to really speak out.
Munceford stopped the recorder and sat there staring down at it, his thoughts vacillating from conviction to doubt, from moral principle to crass indifference. Why meddle? Was he supposed to be one of those egghead correspondents who “report in depth”? Finlander himself had made it perfectly clear that he was here because he was nothing but a hack who would not probe too deeply, yet give the illusion that everything was aboveboard in the Bedford’s private cold war. All right! Why not play ball? Maybe Finlander would finally and dramatically force Moby Dick to surface in broad daylight and he would be able to get some good shots of the Russian submarine. That would undoubtedly be worth a thousand-dollar bonus from any TV network. No questions would be asked about the circumstances. If the whole story was presented from the point of view of the brave, dedicated American naval officer maintaining a vigil in the cruel arctic, inspiring his valiant crew to endure all the hardships of the patrol, then Captain Finlander would come out of it all smelling like a budding vice-admiral. Ben Munceford would become bona-fide, star-spangled, ass-kissing naval correspondent. His hands fondled the ERASE button on the recorder . . . but he did not press it. For no other clear reason than perhaps sheer contrariness or the fascination of toying with a potentially dangerous course, he pushed the one marked RECORD, palmed the microphone and softly spoke into it:
The Bedford Incident Page 24
