Schrepke hesitated a moment with a faint nodding of his head. “What would happen if it became general knowledge that we sank a Soviet submarine in the high seas after deliberately tracking him for forty-eight hours?” he asked.
“All hell would break loose,” the captain quietly replied.
“A nuclear hell, Erik?”
Finlander’s long silence betrayed the fact that he feared such a possibility, but he said: “That would be sheer insanity, to precipitate nuclear war over an incident such as this.”
“The incident itself proves how rampant insanity is.”
A half-hour ago this reply would have triggered Finlander’s temper, but now he took it with an unflinching calm which was, perhaps, far more frightening. He said simply: “Yes.”
They were both diverted by the sounds of annunciator signals being transmitted from the bridge to the engine room and looked at the gyro-repeater and rudder indicator above the Control Center. Commander Allison was maneuvering the Bedford in a slow, tight circle. “I must go up on the bridge,” the captain muttered without making the move. “I must see this thing through to the end and carry the responsibility all the way. I will, of course, log your protests against the action, Wolfgang. You attempted to stop it and you must be absolved.”
Schrepke shook his head. “I am not looking for absolution, nor could I ever find it. What do you think the Russian government will do when they find out that a senior officer of the West German navy was aboard the ship which sank their submarine? Would they accept his protestations that he acceded to the orders of the captain? Some of my colleagues were hanged not so long ago with the same kind of excuse on their lips. And they deserved their fate. For my own part, I must accept my responsibility. I cannot do it with pride or honor, but at least I can try for courage.”
Finlander leaned forward and tried to see Schrepke’s face, which was only a blur in the faint glow of the red blackout lights. He opened his mouth to speak when the bridge intercom crackled to life and Commander Allison’s voice interrupted him: “Could the captain please come to the bridge? This is urgent.”
“In a few minutes, Buck! You carry on.”
Allison became insistent and it was evident that he was still badly rattled. “Captain Finlander! We are circling the area of the sinking. There is oil and wreckage, but no signs of survivors. EDA reports an increasingly strong radar emission on the Soviet frequency. Estimate eighty miles away. Communications has intercepted repeated calls for Moby Dick originating from the same range and bearing as the radar emissions. Communications also reports repeated calls to us from NATONAV 1 and Polar-bear. I recommend immediate action, sir.”
Before Finlander could answer him, he felt an iron grip clamp down on his arm. Schrepke’s other hand shot out and locked the microphone button in the off position so that Allison could not hear what he was going to say.
“Tell him to reopen communications with NATONAV 1 and report contact lost and action broken off — no more.”
“You still think there is a way of covering up this thing?” Finlander asked him with both doubt and hope.
“We cannot risk having the Soviets break the code of an action report. I most emphatically suggest you keep any mention of it off the air, Captain. I speak officially, but also as your friend. Do not make any action report.”
A tremendous load seemed to fall suddenly from Finlander’s shoulders. “Yes, sir,” he agreed, his hands waving before him as if grasping at a solution he had glimpsed in the darkness. “You are right. We will keep the secrecy of this and pass it on as such to our Fleet Headquarters, who then will have no choice but do the same . . . will they? Of course not! Obviously the Commies know nothing about it as yet! They haven’t heard from their precious pigboat for over forty-five hours — and now they never will. So it can be done!” He pushed Schrepke’s hand away from the intercom lever and spoke into the microphone with much of his old vigor and confidence. “Buck! Reopen standard Code C communication channels with NATONAV 1 and report to them contact is lost, action broken off and we are resuming base course.”
“No action report, sir?”
“Negative. Negative. The lid is down tight on that. Search the area for five more minutes, then retire away from radar emissions for thirty minutes before resuming base course. Announce a special briefing of all off-watch officers in the wardroom at 0700. I’ll be right up . . . so keep an even strain, Buck!” When he switched off and rose up out of the chair, there was a fatalistic kind of cheerfulness about him. “Well, I’m going to leave this electronic chamber of horrors and cleanse myself in the wind and spray of a good, old-fashioned open bridge. It’s my guess that I won’t be permitted that privilege much longer. . . . Are you coming?”
Commodore Schrepke began to lift himself from his seat, but froze halfway up as Commander Allison’s voice came through the intercom again:
“Captain! We have picked up human remains!”
Schrepke slumped back into the chair. “If you don’t mind, I will stay here until we are under way again,” he rasped.
“I understand, sir,” Finlander whispered. “The flotsam of a smashed submarine must bring back terrible memories for you. I understand.”
“But we must still be practical about such things. Especially in this case. Remove all the evidence you can. And about the slick of oil — I suggest you pump some of your own into it so that if the Novo Sibirsk finds it, it will not be so easily identifiable.”
“That is a very good idea,” Finlander agreed. He put his hand on Schrepke’s shoulder in a hesitant gesture of friendship. “You are a very fine officer, Wolfgang. We may have had our quarrels and old enmities have stood between us, but, no matter what happens to me now, I will tell them you are a fine officer and that I consider you a good friend. Please believe I mean it.”
Commodore Schrepke answered with a wistful irony: “What you feel for me now is the kinship of the damned, my poor captain.” The hand pulled away from his shoulder, but the dark figure remained by his side for a moment. “Go clean up matters on your bridge, Erik,” the German urged him. “You have only little time left.”
“All right. Lock the door when you leave.”
After Finlander had gone, Schrepke remained in his seat for a couple of minutes to give him plenty of time to climb the shaft to the bridge. Then he got up and went over to Fire Control, leaned down over the console and carefully read the labels along the rows of switches. Finding the one he wanted, he gingerly grasped it between thumb and forefinger, slowly, very slowly pushing it forward. Two red lights winked on. On the Weapons Status Board a sign lighted up, reading NO. 2 ASROC - LOCAL CONTROL. He stood there for a moment, listening and tensely waiting, as if he expected some kind of drastic reaction to what he had done. But the intercoms remained silent; no alarm sounded, nobody came bursting in. With a deep sigh he left, rammed home the automatic locking bar of the CIC door, climbed down the shaft to the main deck, then on through silent passageways to his own cabin. There he brought out his small leather suitcase, opened it and from beneath the neat packing of socks and underwear brought forth his service pistol. He methodically examined its magazine and chamber, then put it down on the desk. From a drawer he took a shabby wallet, and from it a fading, dog-eared photograph of a smiling woman with a solemn-faced blond young boy. This too he put down on the desk. Before seating himself for a last communion with his dead family, he carefully checked his watch as if to predetermine how much time he could allot to them.
11.
Outside of her gloomy interior, the Bedford had suddenly erupted in a blaze of lights. From her armored honeycombs of compartments and stations, men had poured out on deck and swarmed to the railing and lifelines, from where they silently stared into the sea. Scattered snowflakes still danced in the brilliant periphery created by the floodlights and they sparkled like floating diamonds when caught in the more powerful beam of the probing searchlight. On the heaving dark swells, a darker blotch of oil, perhaps an acre wid
e, stained the sea like a pool of black blood, viscous and shimmering weirdly with dull flashes of iridescence; here and there it was coagulating around bobbing lumps of shapeless debris. Two seamen on the foredeck were wielding the same long-handled dip nets they used to pick up garbage for the surgeon’s analysis, trying to snare these lumps as Commander Allison slowly maneuvered the ship through the slick. One of them had been put in a bucket, which was being passed from man to man in a fitful journey toward the bridge; some stopped its progress momentarily to look at the contents with morbid shock, others closed their eyes and practically threw it on to the next link in the human chain. One seaman fainted as soon as it left his hands. Chief Quartermaster Rickmers, the last to receive it, put it down under the light by the wheelhouse door, where it arrived just as Captain Finlander was stepping out on the bridge in his white duffel.
A stunned, awe-struck circle formed around the bucket and among the men was Ben Munceford, paralyzed with his camera in his hands as he gaped at what had been a full-grown, living man only an hour ago — now a mangled, oil-soaked glob of gore contained in a two-gallon bucket with plenty of room to spare.
“Th-that . . . that ain’t human, in Christ’s name?” Munceford gulped.
“No, not anymore,” a seaman answered and turned away.
Captain Finlander said: “It is the pressure of the deep which did it, not the explosion.” It was almost as if he were denying his complicity, but actually this last incontrovertible piece of evidence of what he had done was searing itself upon his mind. He had seen such remains before when nearly twenty years ago he had blown to pieces the ill-starred U-1020. For that action he had received the Navy Cross; for this one he would receive excoriation and infamy. No matter how well the navy would be able to protect the terrible secret, there was no protection possible for him, and, in some small measure, this grisly butcher’s scrap which had once been a man would be avenged.
Commander Allison waited for his captain to order that something be done with the remains, but when he continued to stare at them along with the others, Allison took the initiative upon himself. “Mr. Whitaker! Throw something over that and carry it down to Commander Porter for disposition.”
This seemed to snap Ben Munceford out of his paralysis. “Wait!” he exclaimed and, raising his camera, snapped on its brilliant Solarpack light.
Without a word Captain Finlander struck out with his gloved fist and exploded the light with a single blow. Everybody jumped back, cringing from the shower of hot glass. Munceford yelped and dropped the camera. When he started to bend down to retrieve it, the captain kicked it beyond his reach. Munceford straightened up and glared at him, white-faced and shaking, but there was no childish petulance in his manner. “That will do you no good,” he said. “You can bust up all the cameras you like, tear up all the tapes and do your damnedest to muzzle me, Captain. But it will do you no good. I finally have this story straight in every detail. I’m going to see to it the truth is told.”
“The matter will shortly be out of my hands, Mr. Munceford,” the captain answered with an icy calm. “In the meanwhile I am having you confined to your cabin. You will remain there until we dock in Reykjavik. If you attempt to move about this ship — even to the wardroom — you will be locked in the brig. Mr. Whitaker! Escort Mr. Munceford below.”
Ensign Whitaker picked up the bucket with one hand and took Munceford’s arm with the other. The circle of men opened up, allowed them to pass, then scattered to line the windscreen and peer down at the brilliantly illuminated oil slick lapping at the Bedford’s hull.
Captain Finlander slowly walked to the part of the bridge where Commodore Schrepke used to spend his lonely vigils and, like him, stared down into the fouled sea. Commander Allison stood silently behind him for a moment, then joined him shoulder to shoulder. “How in God’s name did this happen, Erik?” he asked.
“A misunderstood order, I think,” Finlander quietly answered. “The details are all a mixed-up nightmare in my own mind, but they don’t matter for the moment. There were eleven men in the CIC when it happened and the Investigation Board will pick the pieces out of their brains and fit them together for my court-martial. Right now I must do better what I have been trying to do all along, so help me God, and that is to protect my country. The Bedford must be made a more silent ship than she has ever been before.”
Allison looked down at the men swarming along the foredeck below the bridge, leaning over lifelines or clambering on the turrets in groups of ten and twenty. There must have been a hundred in view down there, peering and pointing at the stain of Moby Dick’s killing, letting it saturate permanently into their consciences. “This is going to be an awfully rough one, Erik,” the executive officer whispered. “Awfully rough. I admit I’m badly scared.”
“So am I, Buck,” the captain replied, then added a bitterly suppressed outburst: “The cold war! How can governments expect their military to guide their actions by such a blatantly sordid euphemism? Is there really such a thing possible as a half-war? Can one half-fight with these deadly weapons? Did those Russian submariners half-threaten us? Are they now only half-dead down there? Should I only have half-feared them when the crews of so many American ships and planes are totally dead as a result of Russian actions? Does it not all naturally culminate in a totality of death and destruction? The answer lies in that bucket they passed up to this bridge a few minutes ago. I’d like to pass it on around among the world’s cabinets and make every last politician take a good long look. Look and see what this cold war really is. The same as any war. Death.” Finlander shook himself and checked the luminous dial of his watch. “All right, Buck. Let’s get out of here before those Soviet radar emissions get strong enough to give them a return echo. I’m going to run home to Uncle Sam, tell him what a terrible thing I have done, accept my beating and hope that he can protect himself and the rest of his children from the consequences.”
Without a word Commander Allison turned and walked off toward the wheelhouse. Captain Finlander remained where he was, looking down at the men below him. Then he leaned far over the windscreen, cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted to them: “Take a last look, men! Let the sight and feel of it sink in. Let it burn into your hearts and minds so well that you will never have to ask or speak about it among yourselves in order to recall it. Then, when the lights go out, clear the decks and seal it all up inside of you. From this moment on, learn to live with this secret, because if you become in the least bit careless with it, then an infinitely more terrible thing may strike far beyond this ship. There could be a mîllionfold more dead than those wretches who have perished here — God rest their souls!” For a moment longer he stared down at the hundred white faces looking up at him, watching that whiteness ripple away as they turned back for a last glance at the oil slick, then he nodded at Rickmers, who was standing by the wheelhouse door. The chief nodded back, vanished inside, and an instant later all the floods and exterior lights went out on the Bedford as he pulled the main blackout switch. The ship’s decks emptied of life, once again became deserted and lashed by cold spray as she gained speed and retreated into the dark folds of the arctic night.
As the Bedford got under way, Lieutenant Beeker drew a sigh of relief and left the EDA room, where he had been anxiously monitoring the Russian radar emissions. “I was wondering if the skipper was going to hang around and let the Novo Sibirsk pick us up,” he said to Lieutenant Packer. “Their microwaves are getting pretty solid now. Not more than sixty miles away.”
Packer had just completed supervising the reopening of communications with NATONAV 1, had coded and transmitted the captain’s messages to them and was now standing by the radio operators who were receiving and acknowledging some routine FOX Scheds — a kind of calm before the storm of amplification requests he suspected would soon be crackling out of the ether. His duty here had prevented him from going out on deck to witness the brief salvage operation, but one of the stand-by operators had brought back a crudely l
ucid eyewitness account. He had been one of the men who had helped pass the bucket up to the bridge. Somewhere in the back of the English officer’s weary mind the idea began to crystallize that they were actually at war. They had to be, since there had been a killing. Sometime during this awful long arctic night it must have started, although they had intercepted no messages about it from NATONAV 1 or any other fleet headquarters or task force. Well, these days war would start in secrecy, of course. Just sudden actions with sudden deaths, as there had just been out here. “Moby Dick tried to slip us a fish!” the relief radio operator had passed on the scuttlebutt, “but the skipper was on his toes and beat the bastard to it!”
And here came the quick promotions which always went hand in hand with war. The operator on Channel 5 received some personals and Lieutenant Packer quickly unscrambled them on the decoding machine:
ERIK J. FINLANDER, CAPTAIN, USN, COLDSNAP VIA NATONAV GENAVRAD -YOU HAVE MADE ADMIRALS LIST STOP A CINCH FOR CONFIRMATION IF YOU KEEP UP SPLENDID WORK STOP WELCOME TO THE CLUB AND CONGRATULATIONS-SIGNED RIERSEN, BENTLEY, MCLAURIN.
“A cracking day for the skipper,” Packer muttered to himself, then stiffened as he ran the next one through the decoder. The printed strip it fed into his hand read:
P. L. M. PACKER, LIEUTENANT RN, COLDSNAP VIA NATONAV MACKAY — FIND I WOULD RATHER HAVE YOU AND LOSE YOU THAN NEVER HAVE YOU AT ALL STOP SO COME BACK AND LET US LOVE WELL IF NOT WISELY FOR WHATEVER TIME YOUR NAVY ALLOWS US-SIGNED SHEBEONA.
Packer read it through a second, a third and a fourth time. He passed a trembling hand over his face, his palm rasping against the stubble sprouting over his jaws, then read it a fifth time. His mind was a complete confusion now, a numbed mixture of thoughts of war, death and love. Shebeona wanted him back! But wasn’t the very thing she feared happening already? Would she stick if there was war? Would she quickly become another forgotten Packer widow?
The Bedford Incident Page 29
