The Last Ship (25 page)

The ship leapt beneath us, as if she, too, wanted to get out of there. I had felt something like a brutal note in my voice giving out the familiar cadence of commands to remove us from that place, the echo of an inner rage and desolation, of having touched a madness the recognition much less contemplation of which attacked one’s own sanity: a rage I knew I must subdue lest the madness take me, too. I stepped out onto the starboard wing.

Beyond the ship’s wide white wake, stretching from channel to sky in the chill stillness, it hung like an enormous shroud over the Isles. I put our position simply. We did not know if somewhere behind that eclipse, moving, staggering, lurching about, there were live people or not. And there was no way to find out without finding our own doom in the act of discovery. I stood and permitted the ship to continue to go away from there. I turned my back on them. I had not—no, not remotely near it—done a more wrenching thing in my life. Never experienced the naked feelings of a coward. A terrible thing filled me, an overpowering self-loathing. Then by a conscious effort of will I let everything in me go limp, blanked out. Nothing was more urgent than not to think. I stepped back into the pilot house.

“Mr. Sedgwick, take the conn.”

“Aye, sir. I have the conn,” he said in a clear voice so that all the watch could hear.

All the way down we ran, the ship opened up, rushing to put the stench and peril of the land behind us, keeping well out, far across the water the shield of drifting black vapors to starboard continuing to hold the Isles in its funerary grasp, rendering invisible the tolling roll call of shorelines we passed, of Kent, of Sussex and the Isle of Wight, of Devon, Plymouth, and Cornwall. Engines all ahead flank, ripping at thirty-eight knots through the Channel, until finally we were approaching Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly. Land’s End! How the very name leapt up to thrill us. Then there it was. Twin azures: Stretching in an endless blaze of blue beneath the unblemished vault of a pale blue sky, her far horizon about to receive a hazeless sun, stood the great Atlantic; there as it had forever been: the clean and open sea. It was as if we had come home, found, by grace or fortune, our way back to the one safe refuge.

The first thing I decided was that we would go on half-rations.

 *  *  * 

I brought us a goodly distance out, fifty miles, then put us on the southerly course, staying always out of sight itself of the land. For it was during that run down the Channel that I had decided something else. Not a difficult decision, for in truth no other rational choice offered itself. One fact lay in our favor and dictated the decision: the pattern of Europe’s winds.

Not until the midwatch change did I go below, pausing a moment in the port wing to look with immense thanksgiving across the cleanness of the waters, where Selmon’s counters showed no corruption whatsoever, bearing us southward, the solitary inhabitant of the vast sea. No, not quite solitary, I stood thinking in the greatest thanksgiving of all, the knowledge having gone swiftly to all hands: Earlier we had sighted schools of dolphin, joining us, their timed leaps as they escorted us for a while sending a lift of something like exultation through the ship in their certification that the sea yet remained, in health, in well-being. Now I stood under the glorious array of stars still in their courses, I felt comforted to observe—I caught myself checking on the positions of a number. The keeping to the routine of the ship; nothing would be more important.

“It’s a pretty night, Mr. Adams,” I said to the oncoming officer of the deck as I might have at any other time.

“Aye, sir,” he said, his voice as equable as my own. “A pretty night.”

For one knew as from an unfailing inner compass that we could survive only by not talking of it. If from that moment we had all begun to fight for our soundness of mind, it would have to be a silent fight, at least for the time being. We had not the luxury of unproductive speculations and hypotheses, of useless conjectures. Our deadliest enemy, at least for the foreseeable future, would be to give expression to our horrors and anguishes, to hold any colloquy whatsoever on them; talk now would only put at risk reason. This, to the last hand, we knew as the most crucial imperative of all. One felt it in one of those unspoken understandings, a silent shared consent, surer than declared vows, that move so mysteriously through a ship. As for thinking, that would have to be left to each hand aboard, to deal with as best he could. I felt this in our favor: The seaman’s work of attending to the needs of the ship, simply of keeping her moving through the waters, would come as a profound blessing: A ship underway at sea is the most demanding of creatures, requiring the mind’s full resources in precision and concentration, leaving no room for extraneous probings and larkings. A ship at sea stands always in peril. The men know this; so they would do their job toward her as always.

I heard eight bells strike. I left the usual word to be awakened for any reason and in any case in two hours—the longest period I felt I could now be absent from whatever might be in the course of developing—and went on below to my cabin and was down to my skivvies and into my bunk and had found oblivion, hardly knowing the sequence of these rituals until I dreamed of bees in their hives and awakened to the buzzing of the sound-powered phone that connected the bridge with the top of the bunk. I heard the voice of the OOD.

“Captain, Rollins has picked up what she thinks is a sub. Following us, we believe.”

“Sound General Quarters, Mr. Adams. Commence standard zigzagging.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The pulsating beat of the klaxon filled the air and broke out over the silent sea, through which the ship had already begun to execute her shrewd and graceful turns. I quickly pulled on trousers, shoes, hat, and swung my way down to CIC. I felt hardly any surprise at all. It was as though I had expected it. My only doubt lay in whose she was, theirs or ours.

I
t was such a night, had the angels chosen to tell sailors of the news, as they might have been hastening across the waters to Bethlehem. The thought was stirred in me surely by the Christmas time and by the profusion and particular glittering aspect of the white stars in the clear wintry night shining down upon an untroubled sea empty save for our solitary vessel making south toward the Pillars of Hercules. From the starboard bridge wing I leaned over and watched the bow phosphorescence enhanced by the huge underwater sonar dome lighting the ship’s path. I turned and looked aft to the serene dark waters beneath which she lay cozily invisible to all save our detection gear. I stepped into the pilot house and assumed the conn.

It was the easiest thing in the world to determine if the submarine had simply stumbled across us by chance or if she was in fact stalking us. I spoke through the 21MC to Lieutenant (jg) Rollins, the ASWO, in the combat information center.

“The Captain here. Bearing and range to the contact.”

“Aye, sir. Bearing zero seven five.” I heard her steady voice. “Range ten thousand yards. Course estimate one eight zero, speed one five.”

The sub was off my quarter and paralleling the
James.
I gave the command to the helmsman.

“Right ten degrees rudder.”

“Right ten degrees rudder, aye, sir.” In the shadows of the pilot house, the only light that cast by the binnacle and the engine-order telegraph, I was aware of Porterfield gently putting the ship over. She swerved expertly into the turn. “Rudder is right ten degrees, sir.”

“Steady on course one nine five.”

“Steady on course one nine five, aye, sir. Checking one nine eight magnetic.”

I waited fifteen minutes to give our chaperon time and leaned to the 21MC.

“Sonar, report the contact.”

“Bearing zero seven three. Range eleven thousand yards.”

“Keep on her.”

For an hour and a half I zigzagged under ten-degree turns, now to port, now to starboard. She stayed resolutely in my wake, zigzagging as I did with a precision that stirred my seaman’s admiration. I came back on my original course, determined that she was still with us at near the same bearing and range. I spoke to Garber at the lee helm. I had decided to string her out.

“All engines ahead full. Indicate one two zero revolutions for twenty-five knots.”

I could hear the sharp clank as she put the engine-order telegraph through the notches, then the clear voice of Seaman Garber. “Engine room answers all ahead full. Indicating one two zero revolutions for twenty-five knots, sir.”

The ship leapt through the night. Five minutes passed. I spoke into the 21MC.

“Range.”

“Range eleven thousand five hundred, sir.”

“Bearing.”

“Bearing zero seven two, sir.”

“Stay with her.”

“Stay with her, aye, sir.”

So she was nuclear, like myself. She was able to stay with us and she intended doing so. I brought us back down.

“All engines ahead standard. Indicate zero seven two revolutions for fifteen knots . . .”

It was no surprise when presently she reduced speed to accommodate ours. I stepped out onto the bridge wing and once more looked aft across our wide wake gleaming white to match the constellations above, across the sea beyond to where she came trailing us. No destroyer captain can be happy with a sub in the vicinity and unhappiest of all is he if he knows one is following him with some undeclared intent. I still might be able to outrun her; I had not opened us up to flank. I decided I didn’t want to do that just now. For the time being I did not want to shake her, assuming I could. For I had a great curiosity about her. We were being stalked and I wanted to find out by whom and why. But as much as we were being stalked, we were leading her. My thoughts went through the night and across to the far star-fraught horizon and down through the sea’s surface and into the vessel, coursing like some immense fish of unknown and unimagined striking power through the hidden depths, into her captain’s mind; penetrated there, in absolute concentration, striving to probe his intentions. The possibilities appeared these:

1. He might not know that it was all over, given the difficulties by their nations in reaching submarines that I have mentioned elsewhere. And if he heard it from us, he might well choose not to believe it. He might look upon any such communication with the greatest of suspicion, a trick to avoid his sinking us and to give us a maneuvering edge to sink him. I must tread here with the greatest delicacy lest I arouse a quiescent tiger and he come bounding after us. He would carry nuclear torpedoes as we carried nuclear ASROCs and I did not wish that these should be unleashed against one another.

2. He might not know that it had started, much less that it was over. In that case he might simply be stalking us with no intent to do us harm. Merely using us to practice his following skills and perhaps teasing us, having his sport with us, as well. We had gone through that ten thousand times with them, and they with us, on many seas of the world, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Sea of Okhotsk, over many years. Indeed I think the sailors on both sides rather enjoyed the game, a break in the endless watchful monotony. Not knowing anything, he could be playing the old jolly sport. He hadn’t heard. But this made no sense. Submarines, both ours and theirs, followed almost religious communications schedules.

The stars shone down in those multitudes and with that brilliance which they seem to reserve for winter’s night on quietened seas, the serene ocean vastness conveying a blessed and restorative peace. Only our sonar gear dispelled the illusion. Throughout the night it continued to feed us its metronomic and warning
ping
as she clung to us with the tenacity of metal to magnet. When we altered course, she altered course. When we changed speed, she changed speed. Staying always on the same bearing from us, the same range of six to seven miles. It did begin to get on the nerves; standing as we were throughout at full GQ battle stations; ASROC poised in its mount. We began to have to fight back the impatience to do something. So that finally, after a long night of it, I did. The stars had begun to pale and first light was just appearing from behind an invisible Europe across the water to port when I decided to send her a simple message in a top-secret U.S. Navy code she would possess if she were American. Using our powerful active sonar as an old-fashioned signaling device we queried:

WE ARE THE AMERICAN VESSEL USS NATHAN JAMES. PLEASE IDENTIFY YOURSELF.

No reply came back. Winter’s clean sun rose and began to light the water and we continued to send the message. I looked across the windless sea aft, trying again to get inside the vessel trailing us below the unruffled horizon and into her commander’s head. I began to add further possibilities to my list:

3. His radio gear could be knocked out.

4. For the first time another possible explanation for his curious behavior occurred to me: He may be in distress. His compressors, his piping, or God knows what else of the profoundly complex systems of a submersible may have been rendered inoperable, perhaps by some fearful underwater concussion during these recent times, so that, assuming he is nuclear, something of which I have every certainty, he may be caught in a terrible doom, condemned to remain forever in the deep, never to come up but to continue helplessly to roam the underseas until his food supplies run out—or perhaps his crew goes mad in their living tomb. In that case he would certainly latch on to the first surface ship that came along, friend or foe. In pure desperation. Not knowing of any solution to his problem but having nothing to lose and, the hopes of the hopeless and alone kept alive by the nearness of others of their kind, by their awareness of his predicament, even perhaps imagining that between them the seamen below and those above, with the ingenuity of their breed, could somehow together work out something, some device, some method, that would extricate them from the grave. So that he was not so much stalking us as clinging importunately, frantically, a mortal cripple, to us, as his only distant forlorn hope of help, and by his very silence sending out an imploring Mayday stating that he could neither answer nor surface, was marooned in the deep.

And then I added two more variations:

5. His ship could be crippled and he could be doomed himself. But was determined to take someone of an enemy character with him. Those about to die sometimes desire company.

6. His radio and his ability to surface could both be disabled. In his extremis he is seeking my help. Especially mine. He received my message and decoded it, could not answer, but knows by it that we are as himself. American. And in his mute plea for succor counts on my powers of reasoning, such as I am engaging right now, so to interpret matters and to assist not attack him: comes no closer for fear none of this has got through to my mind and that if he approaches I will blow him out of the water; and by his very nonapproach is signaling me that he is without hostile intent; himself needs every help. The thought was enough to stay the hand of the most eager destroyer captain.

And finally:

7. Treachery. Its presence, any man-of-war sailor allowed for that, was always possible, in some fashion all my thinking on the matter had been unable to divine.

Southward we moved, a troubled ship ourselves. For suddenly I found warring in me a fear of attack and a consciousness of the most imminent danger versus that profoundly ingrained and ineradicable feeling of compassion and desire to render all help to those in peril on the seas which runs strong in every sailor and nowhere more so than toward fellow seamen of whatever origin or nationality. There is this: We had almost a need now to show compassion if we could find someone to show it on.

In the end I decided to wait. Just barely. I will lead the submarine, to see if she will follow us through the Strait. Then, if she does so, do it then and there, one or the other, depending on conclusions reached at that time from her behavior: either turn and attack her or seek some way of determining if she is indeed a supplicant, crying out for us somehow to raise her from the monstrous fate closing over her; at least to make the effort. A method for ascertaining the latter occurs to me: to enter waters too shallow for her to follow, for instance the lee of Gibraltar, then if she comes stationary send a boat directly over her with the hope of communicating with her from there.
If
she should come stationary: as her captain’s intelligent instinct should tell him to do based on my action—after all it was up to him to divine my intention as well as to myself to divine his, it would take two ship’s captains conducting this silent dialogue, if this thing were to work, to bring it off. Looking across the waters aft I began to have the sensation, or hope, that just possibly he and I had begun to speak to each other.

Suddenly, while I was attempting to sort out the riddle, the sullen sea made its own decision; perhaps to call our distracted attention to itself. I had known before these waters westerly of the Bay of Biscay to possess their own peculiar temperament. As if in consultation, all the elements closed in; screaming winds escorting the whitecapped waves hammering into our pitching bow and lashing rain across our decks, the short, steep seas beginning to board the ship, leaving us unbefriended either by the sun by day or the stars by night, the dark and cumbersome heavens hanging low over one visible and one invisible ship driving on a single course south through assailing seas to the Mediterranean. Us not knowing who she is and perhaps even her not knowing who we are if truly her surfacing gear be disabled so that she cannot rise even to periscope depth to have her look at us. Something easier to do without detection in these turbid seas. I made certain our sonar watch kept a wary eye on her to see to it that she kept the distance I had allotted her.

Then she simply vanished from our sonar. Next day, about the time we were preparing to make our turn. It came as an actual shock. I could not make out whether I was relieved or despondent, felt a gain or a loss. And I felt something of the same uncertainty toward the matter in ship’s company. A sense of renewed loneliness seemed to come over us, even as we stood down from the long General Quarters. It was entirely strange, a matter of perplexed astonishment—and about as unnatural a thing as I can imagine, destroyer men rightly looking upon submarines as their sworn enemy. Then I felt I knew why. The vessel which was following us was in a way actually good news: It meant that there were others.

But not for an instant did I have any conviction that she had disappeared into the deep. Quite the opposite. I had the distinct feeling that she would come back again, appear one day on our sonar screen, at a time of her own choosing. I even felt she had a message for me, if she could find a way to deliver it, or I one to extract it from her.