“And perfectly capable of losing control of themselves,” Munceford eagerly coaxed.
The surgeon shook his head, but only to protest the interruption. “That is my simple diagnosis of this action as an ordinary medical man,” he persisted, “but I am also a navy doctor and must accept the risks of any given naval situation. Certain degrees of schizophrenia may be among them, and unfortunately the opportunities for group therapy are extremely limited out here. So instead of therapy, we use a man like Finlander to keep things from falling apart.”
Munceford frowned and protested: “But surely the four stripes on his sleeve don’t make him immune to cracking up!”
Porter squirmed in his chair. “I agreed there are risks,” he answered with a rising pitch. “I agreed we are under a severe strain. I will even agree that Captain Finlander is taking terrible chances. But then so is the Russian commander; furthermore, he is still down there continuing to take them. And that is the whole point and justification of what we are doing. As a naval officer, I refuse to challenge the judgment of my captain. I actually suspect he is made of the same stuff as John Paul Jones and a lot of other patriotic heroes we have been taught to revere in our history. To doubt him would be the same as to doubt them, to reject all the benefits Americans have derived from the aggressive spirit of men like him.” His lips pressed together, cutting off the flow of words, and he leaned back with a somewhat melancholy look of smugness.
Ben Munceford blinked and shook his head, then switched off the recorder. “Well,” he sighed, “that was a beautiful speech and I suppose Finlander will be delighted to hear it if he gets his hands on this tape. But I still wonder whether you believe it deep down. You certainly haven’t been acting so god-damned inspired lately.”
The surgeon squirmed uncomfortably. “I’ve been scared and . . . I’m still scared. But when the chips are down, Commodore Schrepke cannot make me disloyal to my ship and my captain. Nor can you. Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got to fill out a casualty report.”
“Okay, Commander. Thanks a bunch. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
After Ben Munceford left him, Lieutenant Commander Porter sat there staring for a long time at the assistant cook’s Form 28 without touching his pen to it. For a moment tears brimmed his eyes, but they quickly dried, leaving a stinging little hurt outside and an emptiness inside, as if everything in him had finally dried up.
Munceford stood in the passageway outside the ship’s hospital, hesitating as he realized that he really had nowhere to go now. Nowhere that really mattered. He did not want to return to the wardroom in case Schrepke was still there, so he headed in the opposite direction and found himself at the hatch leading down to Engineering Control. He lifted it open and felt a waft of oily warmth strike his face and squinted against the bright lights reflecting off polished metal gratings. The noises from the engine room were now no more than a tensely suppressed humming. He eased himself through the hatch and went down the ladder.
Lieutenant Commander Franklin and Lieutenant Brubeck were standing at the main panel, looking like scientists in their spotless white coveralls as they checked the multitude of dials and recorders, making notes on complex charts attached to clipboards. They merely accorded Munceford a quick glance when he stepped off the ladder and walked up to them. “So how’s the war going down here?” he asked with his old flippant manner returning.
“All systems are go,” Brubeck answered shortly. He did not take his eyes from an oscilloscope whose fiery green line was dancing nervously. “The cycling of number-two WP generator has a flutter, sir,” he said to Franklin.
The lieutenant commander watched it for a few seconds. “It’s within functional limits, but keep checking it.”
Munceford moved over to the master control console and sat down in an empty chair next to Chief MacKay, who was crouched over the throttles as if he expected an order from the bridge at any moment. His leathery face was screwed up into a grimace of intense concentration, his eyes glued to the revolution indicators.
“You bearing up under the strain, Chief?” Munceford asked him.
MacKay’s head jerked around. “What? Oh, it’s you, Mr. Munceford!” The grimace became a grin. “Sure! No sweat at all.”
“What are you feeling right now, Mac? A hate syndrome? A guilt complex? Or both mixed together?”
The chief’s face went as blank as a piece of rock. “Uh? What was that?”
“I mean, how do you feel about it all? Good or bad?”
“I feel I’m doing my job, and that’s good, ain’t it?” He looked at Munceford as if he had asked a very foolish question, then remembered his duty and turned back to the rev counters. But he added with a scowl: “I only wish we could take this son-of-a-bitch all the way — like Finlander and I did on U-1020. But we can’t, and that’s bad. Too god-damned bad!”
Lieutenant Commander Franklin came up behind Munceford. “Please don’t take Chief MacKay’s mind off his work, Mr. Munceford. The bridge has asked for hair-trigger reactions on the throttles. . . . May I trouble you for my seat? Thank you.”
Munceford quickly got up and moved to the railing which separated Engineering Control from the engine room below. His eyes followed the white shape of Lieutenant Brubeck as he noiselessly scrambled down the series of ladders and scurried along the gratings between the huge turbine casings, then crouched down to nurse some small part of a generator. A machinist joined him and they both knelt before the machinery, their hands waving and motioning as if they were making incantations before an altar.
Munceford hooked one leg around a stanchion of the railing to brace himself against the long, corkscrewing pitches of the Bedford, took out his tape recorder and erased everything on the tape.
6.
After addressing the crew over the ship’s PA, Captain Finlander seated himself in his chair by the wheelhouse window and stared blankly through the glass at the blackness beyond it. He remained there, isolating himself with his own thoughts, until Commander Allison brought the Bedford around and set her on a return course for the wreck of the Hood, her power reduced so that she was partly surfing down the swells rolling up on her stern, partly loping along under the slow paddling revolutions of her screws. Then he got up and joined his executive officer to watch with him the difficult work of the helmsman.
“Steer like you’ve never steered in your life,” Allison told the seaman at the wheel. “If you feel her getting away from you, don’t wait for orders. Catch her before she makes a noisy splash.” He knew it was the trickiest kind of conning any helmsman could take on, this blind running before the seas with bare steerage way. A big wave could broach the ship, its rush of water negating the bite of both rudder and propellers unless the counter-measures were instantaneously accurate. So he had Ensign Whitaker keep an open circuit to the engine room, ready to call for immediate backing on one or the other propeller in case the rudder lost control. There was as much strain on Ensign Whitaker as on the helmsman because a wrong order to Chief MacKay would fatally aggravate an impending broach.
But Finlander knew that the greatest strain of all was falling on Bucky Allison, His calculations and minute corrections had to bring the ship back over an infinitesimal, invisible reference point lying two hundred and ten fathoms below a black void of heaving ocean. The forty-one thousand tons of twisted metal which had been the Hood were nothing but a needle in a liquid haystack. Closer to the Iceland coast it might have been possible to take some radar bearings to help him, but it was too far and the hash created by the heavy snowfall too heavy. “How are you going to make it, Buck?” Finlander asked the exec as he checked his stop-watch in the reflected glow of the automatic course recorder.
“By pilotage and — I hope — by some sort of ESP of my own,” Allison answered.
“If anybody has a sixth sense for this sort of thing, you do.” They both held their breath for a moment as they felt the Bedford’s stern begin to slew around under the thrust of a steep sea. The boy at
the wheel let out an agonized little grunt, his reflexes reacting with explosive speed as he spun the steel disk. The ship steadied and the sea slid under her, coasting her along on her stealthy way. The captain let out a soundless gasp of relief, then said: “All right. I leave the bridge to you, Buck. I’m going back to sweat it out in the CIC.”
On the way there, Finlander stopped in his day cabin and found Merlin Queffle lying on the bunk, staring up at the ceiling. He sat up when the captain came in and exclaimed with a nervous eagerness: “I’m ready, sir!”
The captain studied him for a moment. “You didn’t really rest, did you, Queffle?”
“Sure, sir. I’m all right now.”
“Now you listen to me, son! If you can’t pick up anything on the sound gear, I don’t want you to blame yourself. It will simply mean that the Russian has evaded us, that he just isn’t around any more. And that is my responsibility, not yours. So don’t go flying to pieces over it. Understand?”
“He’s there, sir,” Queffle answered and bared his rabbit teeth in what was supposed to be a confident smile. “I can feel him in my earbones already.”
Finlander remembered what Commodore Schrepke had said about this sonarman’s talents and shoved him back on the bunk somewhat roughly. “Maybe what you feel is your own blood pounding in your ears,” he said. “You can’t detect Moby Dick without sonar. So don’t try to kid me by saying you hear things you think I want you to hear. We’re not playing around with some kind of supernatural séance here, but conducting a tough ASW operation. Stick to factual readouts of our detection systems — okay? All right, so let’s get going!” He yanked Queffle to his feet and gave him a shove toward the door.
Lieutenant Spitzer had put the CIC back on full GQ immediately upon the Bedford’s turnaround. Krindlemeyer, his alter ego, had come up from the CSP room and was leaning over his shoulder at Central Control, myopically peering at the scopes and dials through his bifocals. Lieutenant Aherne had relieved Ensign Ralston at Fire Control, but the latter hovered close to the console, watching its rows of winking lights with as much eagerness as if he were still in charge. The radar and sonar operators were in silent concentration at their posts and the CPO on the plotting board was poised to process any contact they managed to pick up. There was still weariness in everybody’s face, but it was an undercurrent submerged by the nervous tension which hung in the air like a physically gaseous thing. If anything, it increased when Captain Finlander came through the steel door with Merlin Queffle in tow.
“You stand by as relief on MTS for the time being,” he told the Breton Kid. “I don’t want you in harness until we close the range some more.”
Queffle started to protest, but sulkily obeyed and placed himself behind the operator at the Master Tactical Sonar console. Captain Finlander walked over to Krindlemeyer and Spitzer. “What’s the status, gentlemen?” he asked.
“All systems go, sir,” Spitzer reported.
“Sensitivity should be eighty per cent according to input efficiency from CSP, sir,” Krindlemeyer reported, peering balefully at his captain over the edges of his spectacles. “Layering zero. Sea-return four-point-five, sir.”
“Very good,” Finlander said. “We should be able to hear a porpoise fart at six miles’ range with that kind of saturation.” As Krindlemeyer and Spitzer chuckled dutifully, he stepped over to Fire Control. “I see our weapons all seem accidentally in a state of readiness,” he said as he checked the status board.
Lieutenant Aherne nodded. “Yes, sir. With the seas behind us and this slow speed, there’s not much problem of spray slushing up the launchers.”
“Just so those gunners keep on the ball,” Ensign Ralston injected irritably, “and aren’t lulled to sleep by the easy going.”
“Simmer down, Mr. Ralston,” the captain shot at him over his shoulder. “Or I’ll send you topside on an inspection just to see how easy the going is out there.”
“I’d be glad to go, sir.”
“I said to simmer down! . . . Lieutenant Aherne, have you been clearing your auxiliary firing circuits periodically?”
“Yes, sir. And local control is standing by on the hedgehog.”
“Very good. It seems there’s nothing I can criticize here except possibly a bit of overanxiousness on the part of your junior fire-control officer.” He wheeled on Ensign Ralston, who was leaning over the board and fiddling with a perfectly adjusted rheostat. “If you’re so darn eager to keep busy during your relief period, Ensign Ralston, how about calling the galley and asking my steward to shoot me up some breakfast?”
“Certainly, sir. Bacon and eggs?”
“My guess is everybody’s getting another lot of dry rations this morning. That will have to do for me too.”
Ralston hurried to the telephone talker by the plotting board while the captain moved in behind the sonar operators and inspected their blank PPI scopes. Because they were listening on passive systems, there were no pings coming in over the speakers — only a faint hissing sound. The tactical radar scope, however, was cluttered with hash caused by the snow, and unless Moby Dick suddenly snorted within a few hundred yards of the Bedford, it could not possibly pick up any contact. But that did not keep the radarman from studying the blur of pulsating blobs with an intense red-eyed concentration.
When he completed his round of the CIC’s complex interlocking functions and found them operating to his complete satisfaction, Finlander returned to the Central Control station and seated himself next to Spitzer. “All right,” he exclaimed as he hunched down in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest, “nothing to do now but wait while we close in.”
7.
A half-hour dragged by. Not a glimmer of a signal penetrated the silence of the deep. Commander Allison reported from the bridge that he estimated the Bedford had returned to within six miles of the Hood, a range clearly sufficient to pick up Moby Dick’s echo-ranging if he started probing toward the surface. But there was not even the clickety-click of a single shrimp. It was as if all the myriad beings which inhabit a cubic mile of ocean were holding their breath in suspense along with the protagonists of this stalking conflict. Merlin Queffle stared at the PPI screen from over the shoulder of his relief and strained his ears toward the muted speaker. His hands were entwined over his left knee, which danced an agonized, unceasing beat; at increasingly frequent intervals he shot a pleading glance toward his captain, whose eyes appeared only half open as he sat swaying in his chair at Central Control.
But Finlander’s half-open eyes did not mean he was only half awake, although the Bedford’s long steep yawing, strangely dampened compared with earlier, was having a nightmarish lullaby effect on her crew. He was aware not only of Queffle’s suffering, but of the states of mind of all the men in the CIC, while at the same time his own kept analyzing and evaluating the situation minute by tense, endless minute. Would Moby Dick move out of hiding without an echo-ranging sweep? Possibly. But most probably that sly Russian was doing exactly the same thing he was, listening on passive sonar and refusing to be drawn into a rash action even though he might suspect the destroyer had long since retired out of range. But could he already have pulled out while the Bedford was at the apogee of her deception maneuver? Was that possible? Should he have kept Queffle on sonar to guard against such a move? Should he put him in now? The temptation was tremendous to order Spitzer to start a maximum-effect sweep and fill the surrounding ocean with its tactile electronic fingers — which, of course, could pick up Moby Dick if he had started to rise and move, but would also send him scurrying back into hiding and return the battle to its previous deadlock. This patient, silent waiting was better, no matter how trying on the nerves.
Steward’s Mate Collins came into the CIC with the captain’s breakfast tray, which contained some pork sausages and a half-scrambled, half-fried egg, rendered unrecognizable by the pitching griddle of the galley. Finlander was pleased and relieved his tensions in some casual banter with the Negro steward. “Well, well!
Hot chow! I feel like a pampered character, Collins. My compliments to the cook! Stay awhile and watch, so you can tell him we too are on the job!” Collins nodded politely, then looked around him, taking in the many luminous scopes and dials, and the men making their trance-like obeisance to them. His face remained inscrutable, an expression which the captain mistook for awe. “All these instruments and technicians are pretty impressive, aren’t they, Collins?” he said through a mouthful of egg. “Maybe impressive enough to inspire a bright boy like you to switch his ambitions from medicine to electronics?”
“No, sir,” the Negro answered politely but firmly.
Finlander looked at him more carefully and more accurately appraised his demeanor. “Oh? Commander Porter has been brainwashing you, I suppose.”
“No, sir, only tutoring me in my studies.”
“Yes — all shrouded in the hocus-pocus of medicine’s mystical mission to succor suffering humanity,” Finlander said with outright derision. “That’s old witch-doctor stuff, Collins! Today the electronic scientist has taken over the navy, the world and outer space. You should get out of the dark ages, boy.”
“It’s still dark enough in here for witchcraft, sir,” Collins answered quietly. This brought a peculiar look from Lieutenant Spitzer, who swiveled around in his chair and stared at him for a moment. Finlander frowned too, but then was gracious enough to laugh.
The Bedford Incident Page 26
