The Last Ship (20 page)

Light, I became aware, was returning through the ports, and I reached over and switched off the lamp. I realized that he had stood up to go. I looked up to where his tall, angular figure hovered over me in the shadows. The thought hardly occurring when confirmed. The quiet-spoken, almost murmured, “Captain, why do you think God put them aboard this ship?” “I didn’t know He had. I thought that was the Navy’s doing.” The irreverence bringing but a soft smile. A ship’s captain may at times require help but does not wish it to be of an insistent character; he is by nature jealous of his authority. Suddenly, an amendment to the feeling of thanksgiving for his support, I was taken with an unsettling wonderment as to the role he expected himself, almost in a taken-for-granted manner, to perform in the matter we had been discussing; one for which I was not at all sure I had a place in my plans, my own intentions, and especially if the role contemplated was that of playing the Almighty, or any facsimile thereof. On this tropical latitude, a tremor went through me. I felt his hand touch my shoulder. I hardly knew whether to be reassured by it or to feel the terror of God.

 *  *  * 

That very afternoon I called Lieutenant Girard to my cabin and, forcing the matter out into the open, doing all the talking while she did all the listening, told her of the decision I had reached. I asked—authorized, directed—her to convene a meeting of the women of ship’s company in their own quarters, themselves only present, to inform them of it. To give them a week to determine if they could come up with a decision of their own. During that time to have as many closed meetings as they liked, sitting like some all-powerful court of last resort, its deliberations secret, sacrosanct from all men, while reaching toward a decision it knew would be as canon, apodictic, not subject to appeal; ratified, whatever it might turn out to be, in advance by ship’s captain with all the weight of his sovereign authority. Then to report back to me. It was a colloquy calm, mannered, almost sacerdotal, on both of our parts. She received all of this as if hearing from her captain some routine order, dealing perhaps with the uniform of the day, which she would then proceed to carry out to the letter.

The week passed while preparations on the island went forward. To the day she made her appointment. I closed the door to my cabin. She sat and came at once to the point.

“Captain, the women have reached a decision.” She spoke in her clean-run way, her voice unemphasized, forever unshrill, easy as always on the ear, quietly self-assured. “There remain many details to be worked out; for these we will need further time. But they have considered everything carefully and have drawn up . . .” She paused momentarily, as if searching for the exact identifying phrase. “. . . their overall basic decision in this matter. I have had Talley type it up. The paper, you will note, is signed by all the women.”

Swift solidarity. She handed me the single sheet. I sat back and began to read.

 *  *  * 

When she had left I stayed awhile in the loneliness, still holding the piece of paper. Suddenly a remembrance came at me without warning, and as is often the case with remembrance, whether with connection or not it was impossible to tell; a thought that I seldom permitted myself these days pressing its way into my mind in a single word.
Pushkin.
Of the Russian submarine with whose captain I had struck that prodigious deal off Gibraltar; the matter now seeming beyond any reasonable conjecture, so long since the submarine had disappeared from our radio bands. Despite every resolve I found myself from time to time, hardly knowing I was doing so, still helplessly scanning the northern horizon as if that long black shape might suddenly come in sight, breaking the vast and never-ending emptiness, bringing that gift beyond price: a five-year supply of fuel, enabling us to go anywhere, freeing the
James
from the chains now binding her: changing everything. Customarily this exercise in the abstract conveniently stopping there before it got to my part of the compact and which, caught up as in some epiphany with the contemplation of what the fuel would mean, I sometimes forgot, which was to take him and his ship’s company into our society should he make it through and ourselves find a place that would accept us, as we now had done. Remembering that half of the deal, which even now I scarcely knew whether to term an angel’s or a devil’s bargain, speculating yet again with myself whether that remarkable vessel was the last thing I wished to see manifest itself on the horizon. Never being able to decide: one moment praying for her coming; the next dreading it.

I shook my head involuntarily, almost violently, as though to dispel it of such dangerous divarications, such exorbitant reveries, arrival of any kind now so beyond admissibility; knowing that for those instants I had become that most precarious of all things for a ship’s captain ever to permit himself to be, hope’s fool. I came back to course. Read that single sheet of paper yet again.

Quite enough to fetch me back to concerns as far from the abstract as could be, to that most brutal of realities, whether we should construct on this island a decent community of men or see ourselves torn apart in a manner that did not bear thinking of; knowing in a chilling fullness for the first time, now that we were dead up against it, what I held in my hand telling me so, that the answer to this question would be resolved more than by any other single element by the matter that piece of paper addressed, by how we dealt with that frightening perversity in numbers. I seemed to stand at some sort of crossroads of time, where memory went one way and a future to which I had neither chart nor compass the other; and to know, little as I might wish to do so, I must travel the first in some way to help me reach a decision about the second, as to the ship’s company, as to the ship herself, as to the proposal set forth by Lieutenant Girard and the women that now seemed to send through me a literal shudder of the flesh. And so, knowing not where any answer lay, or even if there be answer at all, feeling somehow that the only hope of finding one lay in what had served me well before, I allowed memory to take me backward to when it all began. In the way the mind measures time, seeming an epoch ago; in real time, a scant eight months. Exacting as it went memory’s standard toll charge. Starting with simple numbers. Once we had been 282 men and twenty-three officers. The figures now were 160 men, eighteen officers. Expressed another way, 152 men, twenty-six women.

I
n those days every ship of our capability in what was known as the retaliatory forces—variously submarines, cruisers, destroyers, frigates—had a fixed target city—or cities, depending on the number and type of missiles carried—and was deployed in one of nine bodies of water: the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea, the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the North Pacific, and the Sea of Okhotsk. The Navy had used the waters of the world, free and unsovereign to all under ancient laws of the sea, effectively to surround the enemy on virtually all points of the compass. We felt actually lucky to have a city at all. The total capability had become so considerable that there were not enough cities to go around so that there developed something of a continuing bureaucratic battle in the armed services for target cities. Not only that, there was further such bureaucratic fighting within the services themselves for the assignments. In the Navy, for example, one ship alone, the nuclear submarine USS
Ohio,
carried an even two dozen multiple-warhead missiles—enough in one vessel to obliterate every major and medium-sized city on the enemy’s surface. And the
Ohio
was but one of ten Trident submarines with seven of these on patrol in the North Pacific at all times; not to mention other missile-armed submersibles regularly patrolling other seas, all within range of targets. So that there arose a competition even within the Navy itself—for example, between the admiral in Washington commanding submarines and the admiral commanding destroyers—as to the allocation of cities.

The submarines, perhaps fairly, considering their relative invisibility, got most of them, but a few were reserved for the guided-missile destroyers, of which we, the USS
Nathan James,
were one. There were compelling reasons. Despite all our famous technology, unlike surface ships there was a good deal of unpredictability attached to communications between distant nations and their submarines. True, much progress had been made of late with VLF (very low frequency) channels, but the problem was still there. No one in far-off national command centers could be certain of reaching across long waters, then down into the deep to a submerged submarine, and especially in atmospheric conditions made twisted, distorted, as conflict would of a surety do. Why our ship was in the Barents in the first place could be said in a single word, one of those strange and omnipotent words, quite awful but apparently essential, which in the latter part of the century seemed eerily to change and darken the very nature of language itself. Redundancy. Redundancy, survivability, options, backups: These, not without cause, considering that the enemy was guided by the identical nomenclature, became the operable terms; if one system failed there would be another which would work. But perhaps the most mandatory reason of all for including surface ships in land-attack forces was the following: The submarine went principally armed with the ballastic missile, the surface ship with the cruise missile, which though slower was much more marvelously versatile; infinitely more accurate, far more difficult of detection; the fact furthermore that, due to limited magazine space, submarines could not carry anything like the quantity of missiles of a surface ship. Altogether, there was no escaping the fact that surface ships embraced many factors of reliability in regard to reaching target not present with the submersible fleet. All the same, considering the competition for them, we counted ourselves fortunate to be given a city. Its name was Orel, situated at latitude 36°00’ N., longitude 53°10’ E., 1,040 miles from the cold shores of the Barents Sea.

On our ship—and I have an idea that something of the sort was true of other vessels—the city that was assigned us became over time as familiar to us, almost in a familial sense, as is a “sister-city” in the kind of relationship that cities of different nations sometimes have with one another, in those cases most often because there is something to connect them—a city in Michigan, for example, keeping up a relationship with a city in Holland from which many of its citizenry had originally come, exchanging visits and holding welcoming festivals over the years and the like. We exchanged no such visits, but nevertheless the relationship became a strong and binding one on our part. We came to think of it as “our city” and grew to know it quite fondly. At first we knew little more than the population—311,656 by the latest available census, but in time we picked up, accumulated, in the nature of a research hobby, a good deal of information concerning it. The fact that its name translated as “eagle” and that it had been established in 1564 during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Its status as the district capital and an important railway junction, situated at the confluence of the Oka and Orlik rivers. Its principal industries—manufacture of agricultural and roadmaking machinery and of food products. The item that the city boasted a small but exceptionally fine ballet company. Actually, in our case, as in most, the target of course was not the city itself but the installation located near it, in this instance the even dozen SS-18 missile silos, housing the great “heavy” ten-warhead ICBM, set not far beyond the city’s perimeter on the road to a place called Spasskoye.

It was not that we needed any of these facts (except the last-named) in connection with our mission but rather that man being an inquisitive creature, it was natural that that curiosity in this case should be directed toward the one place on earth with which we were so inextricably linked, the city that indeed constituted the entire reason for our existence, though none of us had ever seen it or in all probability ever would. Except, by pure chance, one member of our ship’s company, Lieutenant Thurlow, our navigator. Thurlow had undertaken Russian studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and had been in Orel once after Michaelmas term. As we patrolled, now in the Norwegian Sea, now in the Barents—thirty days in those often turbulent waters before being relieved by our sister ship, the USS
Cantwell,
and heading back to our base in Norway for ten days of liberty and upkeep before once more standing out to sea and returning north to station—we had many random conversations on Orel, with Thurlow telling us all he knew, and otherwise wondering, picturing in our minds, what the city that lay beyond those dark waves might be like on a given day, the people going about their business, market days on a summer Saturday, a church scene on a January Sunday with people approaching the church in astrakhans, bundled up as in a Tolstoy novel, and shaking the snow from their garments before entering to worship. Thurlow even furnished us with its name and description: Church of the Archangel Michael, located on a street interestingly named Sacco and Vanzetti. I think the loneliness and isolation of duty on those bleak and tossing waters also assisted the Orel studies by giving us something to be interested in. Thurlow’s freely proffered elucidations included the particular that local enthusiasts were accustomed to call the city the literary capital of Russia and that many of the streets were named for writers and poets who indeed were born and lived there, including Turgenev, Andreyev, Bunin, Granovsky, Fet, Prishvin, and Leskov, the last named setting forth the claim that the city “nourished for the motherland more Russian writers than any other Russian town.” To few aboard were these names known except, by a certain number, that of Turgenev; Thurlow then going on to elaborate on the considerable Turgenev family estate, now a national shrine, and the datum that it lay forty miles north of the city at Spasskoye, where the writer grew up and, returning after years abroad, there accomplished some of his more illustrious writing including the completion of
Fathers and Sons;
the navigator fluently mentioning a letter penned by the writer in France to a Russian friend, “When you are next in Spasskoye give my regards to the house, the grounds and my young oak tree—to my homeland,” adding offhandedly that he had observed on his own visit to the estate that Turgenev’s oak tree was still to be seen. As a consequence of this tutelage, we went so far, at the navigator’s instigation, as to procure this author’s works for our library and enough of the crew, men and officers alike, read them as to make me feel safe in asserting unreservedly that the
Nathan James
numbered in her company more Turgenev scholars than any other vessel on the United States Navy’s entire roster of ships.

As to our ship’s strike capability, ourselves alone carrying weapons able to erase millions of souls, we scarcely ever alluded to the fact, much less discussed it. To converse on such a matter: there are things that to discuss seems an exercise in puerility before immutable fact, unalterable by men. One might as well have discussed why stars exist—or, perhaps more aptly, why wars. To do so is not the habit of sailors. Our ASWO (anti-submarine warfare officer), Lieutenant (jg) Rollins, happened to be a ballet aficionada. Once Rollins did comment briefly that a famous dancer by the name of Kalganov whom she had been fortunate enough to see perform in Houston, Texas, during a leave in her home state, had for a number of years lived in Orel as a member of its celebrated ballet before defecting to the United States and remarked oddly, “I’m glad he’s not in Orel anymore.” It didn’t seem to occur to anybody where this famous dancer now was, New York, or that all of the earth’s seas flow two ways. On a rare occasion someone might mention that if we had this almost affectionate relationship with Orel, surely one of theirs had a similar relationship with, say, the American city from which the speaker came, say Boston. But that sort of parenthetical interjection in our Orel conversations was a seldom thing, almost never picked up, certainly not encouraged. We preferred to dwell on the characteristics of Orel. It sounded altogether an interesting city. Not a hand aboard but who would have liked to have shore liberty there.