“Only when Captain Ahab vanishes from the face of the seas along with his Moby Dick, and not a single trace of either is left to inflame the vengeance of their kin . . . only then can there follow peace!”
Somewhere along the forward part of the superstructure of the Bedford there came the sound of iron doors bursting open and the confused clatter of running feet. But they were too far away. The decks below the bridge were still empty as Commander Allison leaned over the railing and yelled: “Shoot him! Shoot him down!” He straightened up and shouted again to the helpless men around him: “Shoot him! . . . My God! Among all the fantastic weaponry of this ship, is there nothing with which to shoot a lone madman?” Then he saw Schrepke aim his pistol at the warhead and, together with all the other men on the bridge, recoiled and threw himself down behind the thin metal shield of the combing. Only Captain Finlander remained upright, facing the end unflinching.
A fiery red rose blossomed out from the Bedford’s waist, appeared to hang suspended in a convulsed ball of flaming petals, then burst into an obliterating explosion outward and upward. In the foretop Seamen Thorbjornsen and Jones saw its searing glow rising toward them as they pressed their faces against the glass windshield of the crow’s-nest; it protected them from being instantly incinerated as it enveloped the foretop, but they felt the mainmast buckle and start to fall and knew they would be dead in a few seconds. The explosion acted downward too, ripping through decks and bulkheads which bulged and flew apart into splatters of molten metal. Warheads in No. 2 magazine ignited themselves spontaneously from the searing heat and concussion, adding their energy to the holocaust. No. 1 boiler blew up with a deafening roar which Fireman Bert Meggs never heard because he was scalded to death in one thousandth of a second; the other three boilers went in quick succession, bursting their casings and releasing all of the Bedford’s eighty thousand horsepower in a cataclysmal storm of fire and superheated steam. It tore through the open watertight doors to the engine room, then collapsed the entire bulkhead. Ruptured fuel lines spewed black oil into the inferno where scorched flesh mingled with molten metal. Up at the Master Control, Lieutenant Commander Franklin’s and Chief MacKay’s last living sight was of the turbines rising up off their beds and the steel hull breaking apart like cardboard to allow a wall of green water to fall in upon them; they died only a fraction of a second later than Fireman Meggs, only two seconds after Commodore Schrepke had pulled the trigger of his pistol. By the third second the Bedford’s amidships was enveloped in a cascade of explosions which broke her in two between the crumbling funnels. The Beek fell screaming through a fiery crevasse which engulfed him and his beloved HUFF-DUFF. The severed after section slewed off sideways and was almost instantly driven under by the still turning screws; nearly one hundred enlisted men lying in their bunks were taken from living to eternal sleep with but the briefest nightmare transition. . . . Only one man among them, Collins, the Negro steward, suffered a little longer. He was awake, having faithfully resumed his medical studies instead of seeking sleep when the action was over, and now looked up from the delicate sketch he was making of the human heart, meeting death in full consciousness as he was probing the mysteries of life.
But even in her death throes the Bedford’s intricate automation systems were attempting to function and save her. In the forward part, which remained afloat and still slicing through the waves at nearly twenty knots, fire alarms were clanging with a feeble din compared to the uproar of explosions. Automatic watertight doors were activated by their miraculous mechanisms and started to close, but mostly too late and well behind the columns of fire which were racing through the passageways. In sick bay Merlin Queffle’s hypersensitive eardrums were blown in by the shock wave racing ahead of the flames which cremated him an instant later, as they did Ensign Ralston in the next bunk. Lieutenant Commander Chester Porter died in the receiving office with his pen poised over the ensign’s Form 28 in which he had just recorded the young officer’s nervous breakdown with a certain smug satisfaction. No. 9 fuel-oil tank, only half full of oil and choked with fumes by a clogged vent, ignited and exploded, breaking through the bulkhead to the wardroom, where Lieutenants Krindlemeyer and Spitzer were holding an oblivious and weary post-mortem of the action against Moby Dick; they died trying to think of ways of making their miraculous electronic weaponry safe from human errors. The next explosion, still less than five seconds after the first, took place in a rocket-propellant storage compartment, which in turn burst the armored walls of No. 1 magazine containing two hundred hedgehog depth charges. With a final roar the Bedford now broke apart once more, the third piece spewing writhing serpentines of fire after the flaming ball which had shot into the night and turned the snowflakes for miles around into floating rubies. In his cabin Ben Munceford had been gripping the edge of his bunk, his body knotting tighter as each blast which racked through the ship came one upon the other with the sound of an approaching thunderbolt, and now he screamed as he saw the walls buckle around him, then peel away. Ice-cold water rushed in, turned the flickering lights green before extinguishing them, then engulfed everything in a sinking maelstrom of absolute darkness. But Ben Munceford flailed and fought against it as if he could keep up the sinking ship with his own furious will to live.
It so chanced that as the Bedford was sucked down into the deep, a part of her disintegrating hull broke loose and driven by the upward force of trapped air shot back to the surface of the roiled sea. Within this wreckage was carried one single man, Ben Munceford, hurled clear before he could burst his lungs in his wild struggle. His ship was gone, but she had left the sea on fire, and for another perilous moment burning oil threatened to break his gasping hold on life. Then the big swells intervened, scattered the flames, extinguishing them and plunging all into merciful darkness. A charred life raft, blown from its lashings but still buoyant, found the floundering man and allowed him to use the last of his strength to claw himself over its still steaming sides. With his body anointed by an insulating slime of oil, he lay upon the raft, his blood fighting the bitter cold with the fortifying effect of the alcohol it had absorbed only a short time before, but with his mind slipping into a limbo as black as the deep which had taken all his shipmates. Thus he floated on a dirge-like main, one hour passing, then another, until a gray dawn finally overtook the night. The unharming Greenland sharks glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage skua gulls sailed with sheathed beaks. On the fourth hour a ship drew near, nearer, and picked him up at last. It was the devious cruising Novo Sibirsk, who, in her retracing search after her missing children, found only another orphan.
THE END
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The Bedford Incident Page 31
