by Jeff Thomson
“Clear,” Mick called from below, and Lane began to reel in the cable.
He looked down onto the pier where Spute stood next to the one and only remaining pallet. Hallelujah, he thought, panning the crane arm right, until the hook hung directly over the load, feeling relieved the night’s work was almost done. But then he saw Jim’s SUV rolling up the pier and remembered it was loaded with ammunition. His heart sank. His body ached. He lowered the hook to Spute.
“I do so love my job,” he said to no one who cared.
38
John looked at the lightening sky to the East as he waited for the crew to assemble on the fantail. The last of the stores had been brought aboard and secured for sea, the last pre-trip checklist had been completed. They were as ready as they were going to get.
He looked at their faces. Everyone was there, except for Gus and Mick, who were down monitoring the running engines. Their faces were drawn, their eyes were red and bleary from sleep deprivation. He knew the prudent thing would be to wait until everyone had at least a little sleep. But with the sun slowly rising and the tide just beginning to go out, and the question of whether Gilbert Farcquar had managed to escape his bonds and could be - at that very moment - talking with the police, now sounded like a really good time to get the fuck out of Dodge.
“Before we go any further, does anybody have any questions?” he asked.
“Uh, yeah,” Bob Stoeffel said. They called him Bob-Bob, because three simple letters, B-O-B, wasn’t enough to describe the huge man. He had once tried out for the Milwaukee Brewers, but didn’t get picked up because he wasn’t fast enough. He could hit, though. Whenever they played softball, every time he swung a bat and connected, the boom could be heard a mile away.
“Where are we headed?” He concluded his question. Several of the others perked up. John hadn’t explained the details of the plan, beyond getting out of Astoria and away from the plague.
“We’re going west,” John said. “Toward Hawaii,” that produced a few smiles, but there were still looks of confusion and uncertainty. Why would Hawaii be any better than anywhere else? “Several reasons,” he continued, checking them off on his fingers. “The weather is okay here, now, but we don’t know how long we’re going to be gone, so we’re better off heading to where we know the weather is good, all year round.” He ticked off another finger. “Islands are going to be the safest places to go on land, because there won’t be as many people...” he could see looks of scepticism, “...once we get away from Hawaii. If we find one where there are no infected people, we’ll be golden, as long as nobody else shows up.”
He ticked off a third finger. “My Niece, Molly is out there, in the Coast Guard, on one of the new buoy tenders. She’s been vaccinated, and she’s smart and capable.” He looked at Marcie, as if for confirmation, and she gave him a smile. Then he ticked off the final finger. “There will be other Coasties with her, and if we’ve got to ride out an apocalypse, I want the Coast Guard around me.” That, perhaps more than any of the others, seemed to satisfy the assembled crew. The men were all retired Coasties. Most of the women and children had spent their lives in a Coast Guard family. They knew the people, knew their training and their strength, and dedication.
John could see he’d convinced them. Now to get going before anybody had a chance to second guess their decision.
“If everybody could please form a circle...” he said. He half expected bitching, moaning, groaning, and an untold number of good-natured aspersions against his character, but everybody was too damned tired. They did as he asked.
He looked at each of them in turn: Marcie, Samantha and David (who looked as if he might actually be sleepwalking); Lane and Janine, whose kids (a boy, 23, and a girl, 19) elected to try and sit this plague out in Alaska, where they now both lived with families of their own; Spute and his girlfriend, Clara, who only started dating a month before the plague was announced; Jim and his daughter, Stephanie, and his wife, Denise; Gus’ wife, Joanne, her salt and pepper hair a mess of frizzy split ends after the heat generated by the galley dishwasher; Bob Stoeffel, whose wife had died of the fever two weeks ago, a scant three days before they’d gotten the vaccine, and their twelve year-old son, George; and Jason Gilcuddy, who had never found a wife, though he had - according to him - looked under every nook and cranny, whatever the Hell that meant. All of them were his friends, except Clara, whom he didn’t really know. She’d been happy about getting the vaccine, though.
“Here’s the weird part,” John said. “Everybody hold hands.” They did, though a few of them sniggered, and Jim raised an amused eyebrow. “Most of you know I’m not the least bit religious...” There were several nods around the circle. “But there’s no sense in tempting fate, so I’d like to offer a prayer.” Both Marcie and Samantha, on opposite sides, gave his hands an encouraging squeeze. He bowed his head. “Lord, the sea is so big, and our ship is so small. Watch over us and guide us safely to our new home, wherever that might be, ere journey’s end.”
“Amen,” several of them said in response.
“Okay then,” John said. “Let’s get underway.”
39
“Fuel barge is away,” Scoot called from just outside the port Bridge door.
Jonesy turned to LT Medavoy, who had by now reached new pinnacles of crew loathing with the dick move (pun absolutely intended) of bringing his family aboard after he’d expressly forbidden the rest of the crew the same right, and saluted. “All checklists are complete, sir. The ship is ready to get underway.”
The new (though still unofficial, since no message had come down from District Headquarters about the Change of Command) CO nodded, then turned to LTjg Bloominfeld, the Conning Officer, and said: “Single up all lines.”
Bloominfeld turned to BM3/DECK Richard Masur, a short, squat young man, who wore what, to the uninitiated observer, might look like industrial hearing protection headphones with a large plastic microphone, but anyone who’d ever served on a ship would know they were sound-powered phones, designed to communicate even if the ship lost all power. With the exception of his mop of strawberry blonde curly hair, he looked like the nickname of every ship’s Deck Force: a deck ape. Most people who knew him would say he acted like one, too. His billet for Special Sea Detail, was phone talker for the Anchor Detail and line handlers.
“Single up,” the Conning Officer said.
“Single up all lines,” Masur said into the microphone.
Jonesy knew without looking that men on deck, fore and aft, were bringing in the first of the doubled lines mooring the ship to the pier, thus completing the intricate dance, borne of hundreds and thousands of hours of training, practice, and experience. This was a good ship, in Jonesy’s estimation, and a great crew. He didn’t like them all, but he knew them all, and trusted them all with his life. That’s what it meant to be part of a ship’s crew.
He looked at brand new Ensign Molly Gordon, standing next to him at the chart table, which was laid out with the paper chart of Honolulu Harbor. She stood ready to plot the navigational fixes that would begin moments after they left the pier, with information coming in from the radar, where Scoot stood looking down at the activity on the forecastle, and from the port and starboard wings, where BM3/OPS Eric Hebert and BM3/OPS Jack Ross stood ready to provide visual bearings to known fixed objects; as, for example, the red light standing atop the bollard at the end of the pier to which they were moored. Jonesy would be taking in the information through his own set of sound-powered phones, writing it down, adding further information from the GPS, then passing it to Molly; each individual acting as part of a whole, the result of which was that they would not just know, but be able to prove exactly where they were at the moment the fix was taken. This, too, was part of the dance.
Advances in electronic navigation, as well as the ship’s Dynamic Positioning System, made it technically unnecessary for them to do what they were doing, but Jonesy’s attitude was that electrical things can stop working. The pen
cil Molly would be using to plot the fix wouldn’t; or if it did, all she needed to do was sharpen it.
He looked at her face and suppressed the urge to laugh. She looked so serious, so determined to do a good, professional job on this, her first time getting underway on this, her first ship as a commissioned officer of the United States Coast Guard. But at the same time, he could see beneath the demeanor and to the young women trying her damnedest not to smile. Strip away all the officer shit, all the military shit, all the professional shit, and when it came right down to it, this shit was fun.
Until you thought about why they were doing it.
When Jonesy sounded the ship’s whistle to announce to anyone with ears that they were underway, he couldn’t help but see the glow of numerous fires, as Honolulu burned. They were getting out just in time. Question was: would there be anything left to come back to?
40
LTjg Amy Montrose, age twenty-three, with dark hair and eyes, shaded by her blue ball cap, exited the interior of the Polar Star onto the starboard Quarterdeck and went in search of her boss, the Assistant Operations Officer. She was an athletic woman of the not-quite graceful sort; more like a weightlifter than a runner, though she looked more like the latter than the former. General consensus of the crew (who thought she didn’t know this, but were wrong) was that she was likely to beat the crap out of anyone who crossed her. It wasn’t true, but she spared not one bit of energy to disabuse them of the idea. It gave her an interesting sort of “street cred,” she thought. She found who she was looking for on the Boat Deck, just forward of the rectangular red bulk of the LCVP (Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel) leaning on the rail and slowly - very slowly - smoking a cigarette and staring out to sea.
LT Steven Wheeler, who was (as he told everyone at every opportunity) from Baaston (meaning Boston), which, according to him was the Center of the Known Universe, was ever-so slowly smoking that cigarette, because he knew the number of available cigarettes in the world had suddenly become finite. No world meant no tobacco farmers, which meant no cigarette companies, which meant no more cigarettes. So he was savoring what he had while he could.
He was thirty-five, tall and stocky, and had gone to OCS, after working his way up to QM2, having not entered the service until he was twenty-three. When the announcement was made about combining QM and BM, he decided he would much rather be an officer. Amy liked him, though she wasn’t quite sure why. He was one of those people it was hard not to like, in spite of (or maybe because of) his brusk manner and brash personality.
“Mistuh Wheeluh,” she greeted him, intentionally saying his name with a Boston twang.
“Amy,” he said, smiling, and tossing the thoroughly-smoked cigarette butt over the side. “What’s the haps?”
“I’m actually here with something of an official question,” she said, smiling in return.
“Oh, do tell.”
“It’s in my capacity as Morale Officer.” One of her duties (and the Junior Officers always had a multitude of them - far more than their superiors) was to evaluate crew morale and see that it never got below a certain level, though that level had never been clearly defined. The previous AOPS, LT Gardella, left the ship in Australia, by helicopter, a mere three weeks before the plague was announced. He hadn’t known how to define the level, either, but suggested anything over and above the crew being ready to mutiny was a good goal to maintain.
Wheeler frowned, slightly. “Go on.”
“In a word, sir,” she said, “it sucks.”
“Not happy with the end of civilization, are they?” He asked. Three days had passed since the orders came down to head toward Guam, top off their fuel tanks, then take station in the middle of the Pacific. Once there, they were to...wait. Just sit and do nothing as the world fell apart.
“No, sir, they’re not,” she said, crooking half a smile at him. “Neither am I, now that you mention it.”
“It is a kick in the crotch, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think I’d have put it quite that way...”
“Yeah,” he said, waggling his eyebrows at her.
“They’ve lost everything,” she continued, ignoring his crudity. “Their families, their country, their world...”
“Yeah,” he said again, no longer smiling.
“I think we need something - some event - to jolt them out of it,” she said.
“I somehow don’t think the Captain will go for letting them get falling down drunk, so... Talent Night?” He suggested, referring to a shipboard tradition where the crew showcased their general lack of talent for the amusement of all.
“Bit more than that, sir.”
“Oh?”
“I was looking at the chart last night,” she said, smirking as he theatrically rolled his eyes at her. Junior Officers “looking at the chart,” or anything even vaguely related to independent thinking, was a long-standing joke among all the military services. In the Coast Guard, however, given their numerous missions, enormous Areas of Responsibility (the Pacific Area alone covered eleven million square miles), and ridiculously small numbers, it was essential that those same Junior Officers do exactly what the jokes were there to mock. Still, they couldn’t be allowed to get too cocky, and so the jokes remained.
“I am suddenly very afraid,” he said, returning her smirk.
“Of course you are, sir,” she replied, in mock seriousness.
“Go on.”
“Couldn’t help but notice that, with just a little creative navigation, we could cross the X.” The “X” was an imaginary spot in the Pacific where one could cross the Equator at the International Dateline. Many sailors had crossed one or the other, but far less had crossed them at the same time. It would, in fact, be an event - especially when combined with a “Crossing Ceremony.”
Crossing Ceremonies were also a long-standing tradition, though historically they had been far more about hazing than about ceremony. As such, they had been frowned upon in recent years.
“I think we should have a full on crossing. All the disgusting bells and whistles,” she said.
“You realize you would be included in that ceremony?” He asked. They had crossed both lines individually, on the way down, but because of the political incorrectness of the hazing aspects, had simply held a barbecue up on the flight deck, renamed “Non-Skid Beach.”
“I do,” she said, a bit nervously. Tales had been told of Crossings past that weren’t so subdued. Most thought the lurid descriptions of the “old salts” who had been through them were just a load of hyperbolic bullshit to scare the boots. They were wrong, but didn’t know that.
He pondered the idea for a moment, slowly nodding his head. Then he smiled.
“Let’s wake up King Neptune,” he said.
41
“Jonesy, wake up!” Seaman Joey Siemen said, shaking him. Seaman Siemen had taken so much ribbing about his name, every single day since arriving at boot camp, that he’d just gotten used to it. But it made no difference to him at the moment.
Jonesy cracked the eye on the right side of his head (the one on top, since he was lying on his side) and stared at him. “What?” He growled, then glanced at the clock on the small desk next to his rack. 2326, it said.
He ordinarily shared the compartment with ET1 Carlos Hernandez, but the Electronics Technician had gone TAD to a school for some twidget bullshit Jonesy didn’t understand, and so he had the compartment to himself and didn’t have to listen to the bastard snore.
“It’s Scoot, Jonesy,” the young man replied, and he suddenly noticed that the kid looked...frightened. He sat up.
“What about him?”
“He’s on the Mess Deck,” Seaman Siemen said. “There’s something wrong with him.”
Jonesy stood, wearing only underwear and a white tee-shirt. He grabbed for his gear. “Go wake Duke.,” he ordered. “Tell him to rig up and meet me there.”
The “something wrong,” was BM2/OPS Scutelli stripping off his clothing in the middle of the
Mess Deck. The compartment was relatively empty, at that late hour, but not entirely. The people scheduled for what was called the Midwatch were gathered there to eat midrats (midnight rations) that were to sustain them while standing watch until 0345, and then beyond, since they wouldn’t be crawling out of the rack three hours later to eat breakfast.. So there were people there to witness Scoot’s “strip tease;” kind of like the reverse of that dream where you’re in front of a class, naked - only for real.
Harold F. Simmons, jr., was there, drinking bug juice, along with DC3 Mike Kiepelkowski (Ski, to everyone - every ship had a “Ski”). They were sitting at their table in open-mouthed shock. CS3 John Ryan stared through the serving window, an expression of mixed amusement and horror on his face. MK2 Frank Roessler had been sitting at a table with ET3 Terry Proud (who didn’t have watch, but had decided to grab an extra meal, anyway). They were now standing as far away from Scoot as they could get. He was howling.
Scoot looked really, really pissed off. He twitched and blinked, looking around as if unsure where (or who) he was. And then he launched himself at Terry Proud.
Jonesy was still strapping on his tactical rig as he reached the top of the ladder leading up from Crew Berthing. He wore the same uniform he’d had on since talking with the Captain (the real Captain, as far as he was concerned): black LE tactical, with boots, gloves, and helmet, body armor, emblazoned with the words: US COAST GUARD on the chest plate, plus the tactical harness that held two retractable LE batons, a large Gerber knife in a sheath, and a small holster containing the taser that he’d kept hidden in one of his cargo pockets, in case Medavoy got too curious. He had an additional blade - his dive knife - strapped to his right calf.
Conspicuously absent from the rig were any firearms. The idea still pissed him off. As he headed down the passageway toward the Mess Deck, he had the undeniable feeling he was going to need at least one.
