The Last Ship (26 page)

A
s regards the major air masses of the planet, in the Northern Hemisphere they move and wheel in a clockwise fashion, in the Southern Hemisphere in a counterclockwise one, all in accordance with the familiar Coriolis force known to all properly educated schoolchildren. These simple twin facts determine man’s life to a degree perhaps not all realize and the first in particular had profound implications for our present circumstances. The mainland of Europe surely had received the worst of the contamination but it was also true that Europe’s winds would in due time—though not, of course, until it had done its deadly work—send back to the east, upon the place that had sent it forth, the very poisoning itself, and no doubt had already commenced to do so. Whether this matter had been worked out by some god of Mars concerned with fair rules of warfare or by some angel of irony concerned only with that specialty I had no time to speculate.

My interest was that out of this fact and a couple of others a ship’s captain could reason prudently the following series of probabilities. Our best chance and hope would seem to be to get below the targeted northern mainland of Europe. This meant the Mediterranean. The thing appeared to be to enter it, determine its status, i.e., whether it had escaped entirely, had suffered a temporary or partial alteration, or had suffered something of a more lasting character—I speak of habitability; if favorable, seek a haven there; if otherwise, proceed on the same plan, that is to say, moving always on an easterly course, on the course on which the contamination would move but would eventually stop and hence somewhere beyond that point surely permit us to find some sort of safety. One would pray that this consummation would occur well before then, specifically on the shores of the Mediterranean itself; that is, assuming the region had not been a direct target, the Coriolis might see to it that no serious after-fallout would reach it. If matters proved otherwise, there was a good deal of world left, or very possibly left.

Perhaps it requires Barents sailors fully to appreciate the simple benevolence of the sun. As we gained the Mediterranean latitudes, its very warmth, flooding wantonly down from a vault of pale blue upon stilled sapphire waters, seemed to commence an interim of healing. From the bridge wing I could see, whether I looked to fantail or fo’c’sle, off-watch crew sunbathing, the ship herself seeming to bask voluptuously in the joyous sunshine. Coursing through the ship like some deep-reaching balm I could feel the immense lift in our hearts as we stood eastward on a course which would take us directly between the Pillars and into a body of water perhaps blessed and special beyond all others, seeming the sea of the Divine; and supremely the sea of seamen. And altogether mine.

There was not a true sea on the planet I had not coursed with the decks of a ship beneath me. It was as though I had loved many women—the seas of the earth—but that one stayed fairest in my heart. That peculiar and idiosyncratic love I harbored for the Mediterranean was something that was never seriously contested, a sea alluring, beguiling in a mystery all its own, holding an unrivaled lavishness of earth’s delights. I felt the sea even carried in its breath a scent different from other waters, as though a certain elusive and tantalizing spice hung in the air, in the winds that stirred over it. The sea of Homer and Ulysses, of Pindar and Aeschylus, of the Roman Caesars and of St. Paul . . . of Columbus and mighty Nelson . . . of great sea battles, Salamis, Actium, Lepanto, the Nile. Beyond all others, a seaman’s sea; of bold seafarers. From here Phoenician sailors, so said Herodotus, circumnavigated Africa. From here Pytheas of Marseille voyaged to Britain and perhaps Iceland. Here Ptolemy published his
Geographia,
momentous to all seamen. From here da Gama set forth to find a sea route to India, Vespucci to find the New World was not Asia, Magellan to circumnavigate the globe. A sea standing sublime among the waters of the earth. From her shores came man’s philosophies, his mathematics, his music, his painting and his sculpture, his architecture, his writings. Came the great and discrete civilizations that had arisen on its every littoral since man first made appearance on the planet. Spanish, French, Roman, Greek, Turkish, Arabian, Jewish, Egyptian, Carthaginian, the wondrous Moors—to take them clockwise, each leaving its distinct and priceless legacy. No place on earth, one felt, had the Almighty so singled out to favor, planting there what seemed his personal garden, one of such riotous intellectual variety, of so many differing peoples, ways of life, ideas and ideals, as to seem to encompass all the possibilities inherent in His supreme creation, man. And yet something kindred in them all, the first of which surely was their common belief, expressed in such diverse and fascinating ways, in the One who had placed them there: the Christians, the Jews, the Mohammedans, and a hundred offshoots of each, all raising their voices in praise to Him—often, too, raising their swords against one another in a manner, a zeal of hatred, which must have perplexed Him, as if one could ever chop off the head of one of His children and ascribe the act to His direct orders.

Never mind. The Mediterranean holds a reserved and glowing place in the secret heart of any sailor who knows its waters. And incidentally—to descend from such lofty matters—it holds also, I feel confident most sailors would agree, the most luscious liberty ports on all the seas: Marseille with its spicy and inventive French women, Naples with its saucy and knowing Italian ones, Tangier with the variegated and luxuriant flesh of a dozen races and nationalities, to name but a few. We had all been here before. We were all filled with a voracious eagerness to enter its gates again. Even the mighty and fitting name given to those guardians of its portals, Gibraltar and Jebel Musa: the Pillars of Hercules, for seamen one of the great signposts of the world of waters. I stepped into the pilot house and looked at the engine-order telegraph. It showed two-thirds. Ten knots.

“Mr. Sedgwick,” I said to the OOD, “we appear to be dawdling. I think it’s time we gave her a little exercise. Open her up. If you please.”

“Aye, aye,
sir,”
Sedgwick said. “All engines ahead full,” he spoke brightly to the lee helm.

“All engines ahead full,” Garber repeated in the same jaunty air.

The ship shot through the water with an exuberance of her own, as if she knew full well into which sea she was bound. I stepped back out to the port wing. Over the bow the waters split and gave way before her, the seas rushing back along her sides, coalescing in a wide and throbbing alabaster wake. She, too, had been through those gates. Three times. Fleet maneuvers twice. Once on an alarm of trouble in the chronically troubled Middle East, when it appeared we might be putting troops ashore, some place or another, in yet another outburst of that incessant and insensate snarling frenzy and rage by those shore peoples, the nature or cause of which I could no longer remember. It had happened too often—and then always matters had settled for a spell and once again we had returned to our Norwegian base and the somber and melancholy Barents. I kept peering eastward through the radiant sunshine.

The ship raced on. I had my binoculars up, alert for the first thrilling glimpse of it to appear over the horizon like a ship’s mast. I saw nothing. But then I began to see land.

I climbed up to the open bridge. Below me I could see what seemed the entire crew, certainly all those off watch, lining the port lifelines and straining as was I for its first appearance. Now I could make out clearly the unfolding continents. Africa off the starboard bow, Europe off the port. The fifteen miles of water between them shining in the sunlight, majestic in the entire silence of sea and sky. Then I could begin to detect far off the very coastlines of the two great land masses unrolling before me and holding this sea of marvel as though in a protective embrace. We could be but eight or ten miles from the entrance. I found my eyes fastened on the land to port, to the European side. And remaining there, as the miles counted down. I spoke through the voice tube to the pilot house below.

“Mr. Sedgwick!”

“Sedgwick here, sir.”

“Slow ahead.”

“Slow ahead, aye, sir.”

Even his voice had changed. As the ship came down to a crawl and made her approach between the two continents, I was aware of the men below, of hundreds of pairs of eyes looking, straining at one fixed spot, and felt a profound silence settle over the ship.

I lifted the binoculars, just to be sure. It was no longer there.

T
he fact that the ship was nuclear-powered did not mean that we could run the seas forever. We had remaining enough nuclear fuel—highly enriched uranium fuel, on which the reactor cores ran—to last us for approximately seven months based on low-to-medium cruising speeds. Seven months may seem a goodly time for a ship but there was much to be done before the expiration date of our reserves would bring us forever dead in the water, unable to move, marooned on the ship herself—barring, of course, the infinitely remote possibility of obtaining new cores. I could not afford aimless cruising. Sightseeing, even if one had been so inclined, was out of the question. Even the enormous curiosity as to what had happened had to be suppressed. All must be ruthlessly subjugated to the first requirement of finding a place for us before the fuel ran out. I conceived a plan. The disappearance of Gibraltar told me almost to a certainty that the great U.S. naval base at Rota in Spain, with its immense facilities including nuclear submarine pens, had been the object of a direct and massive strike—in military terms, it would have been criminally negligent, so to speak, if it had not—and that in consequence the entire western Mediterranean waist from the late Pillar of Hercules through Spain and France had most likely been rendered uninhabitable. On the other hand, sticking out as it did deep into the Mediterranean, essentially a narrow peninsula of land embraced by seas, there was at least the outside chance that Italy had been partially spared, enough so to take us in. This hypothesis carried sufficient possibility to enable me to reach the following decision: I would first steer a straight-line course across the Mediterranean to the mid-portion of the Italian boot and reconnoiter there. If it also was gone I would then “sweep” the northern shore of the Mediterranean east to west, stopping only if something favorable presented itself, and if it did not, if nothing acceptable was found, cross the Strait of Gibraltar and commence another sweep from Tangier clear across the northern coast of Africa to Suez. If Europe was gone, Africa, with the Mediterranean as a buffer between them, might yet remain; or a part of it. Beyond that I did not at this juncture plan, or even allow myself to contemplate. For now everything pointed to Italy. I set a course for Naples.

I felt I understood a little more now about the submarine which had followed us so tenaciously then dropped abruptly from our sonar screen. It must have been based at Rota and have got away, though damaged. Another possibility was that she could have been returning from patrol when the base was hit and thus intelligently come about and headed out to sea. These speculations assumed she was American. A third possibility occurred. The submarine was not American at all. It was she who had destroyed the base and much of the Mediterranean coast with it. Whomever she belonged to, I felt to a certainty that we had not heard the last of her.

 *  *  * 

Only our navigational readings informed us that we were on the latitude of Naples. The city lay invisible across the waters, hidden in the familiar shroud of towering dark vapors, dense, gritty, and whirling in their trademark vortices, stretching from sea to firmament. That sight told us that it was the last place we should venture in. If further proof were needed it was furnished by Selmon’s readings, which certified that even the atmosphere above the waters leading to the city was unacceptably threatening, so that we could approach no closer than some twenty nautical miles, and passing by could only stare across the sea at the city’s somber funeral pyre. I was not altogether surprised. The NATO command for the entire Mediterranean basin. I had been stationed there. I decided to continue southward toward Amalfi, to as far as Calabria and the boot’s toe, then if the approaches were still barred to us to come about, make a northerly heading up the Tyrrhenian, then at the top of the boot set a westerly course and conduct my sweep of the Mediterranean coast in accordance with my original plan.

I had kept lookouts posted as if we were in a war zone. Forward and aft, port and starboard sides of the ship, each constantly glassing his designated arc—no greater than forty-five degrees, each overlapping his mates’—and an extra lookout on the port bridge wing, this one peering through our most powerful sighting instrument, Big Eyes, with instructions to keep sweeping the shore smartly whenever we were in sight of it. Barker, our expert lookout, was one of the two who manned the position on watch-and-watch, and two hours instead of the customary four, it being such intense work. It was he at the time. Thurlow was officer of the deck and I was on the open bridge alternately scanning the shoreline with binoculars and gazing northeasterly at the retreating darksome and sinister substance shielding that joyously Byzantine city in which I had spent two years of my life. The black vapors had diminished appreciably as we moved on our southerly course, enabling us, with the permission of Selmon’s counter, to steer closer in. We were some eight miles offshore, running a parallel course, and not far below Amalfi, when that thrilling cry sang out, surging across the weather decks and electrifying all in earshot.

“People on the beach.”

I slid down the ladder to where Barker stood on the bridge wing, eyes riveted to his shore-pointed Big Eyes. I could feel the tremor in him as he stepped aside for me. I bent and peered through. The first thing that occurred to me was to let all hands see it. I stepped in the pilot house and spoke through the 1MC.

“This is the captain speaking. All hands not on watch report topside on the double. We have people ashore.”

I could not keep the high exhilaration out of my voice. I turned to the watch officer. “Mr. Thurlow,” I said, “I’ll take the conn. Left full rudder,” I said to the helmsman, Seaman Fletcher.

“Left full rudder, aye, sir.”

I felt the ship respond eagerly under me. “Steady on course zero nine five.”

“Steady on course zero nine five, aye, sir. Checking zero nine six magnetic.”

We came about, perpendicular to the shore. I spoke to the lee helm, Seaman Keith. “All engines ahead two-thirds. Indicate five zero revolutions for ten knots.”

Then Keith’s voice: “Engine room answers all ahead two-thirds. Indicating five zero revolutions for ten knots, aye, sir.”

Steadily and ardently on we came, the ship pointed straight for the beach. Looking down, I could see the men crowding the lifelines, their zealous eyes straining landward. From them, from throughout the ship, I felt the pulse of the most immense excitement running, a great and exultant fervor. I spoke to Lieutenant (jg) Selmon, standing by me as always.

“Mister Selmon, I want continuous readings. Any change. Start now.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” He looked at his bridge repeater, gave me the reading.

As we proceeded shoreward and the cluster on the beach began to take on recognizable shapes, the unmistakable lineaments of such as us, that emotion that had seized us from Barker’s first sighting flowered and built into a field of force that filled us with its unbounded sense of rejoicing, its huge wonder: the discovery of one’s own. Presently I heard Selmon’s voice near me. I felt a mild surprise that it had gone up quite that rapidly. I spoke to the lee helm.

“Stop all engines.”

“Stop all engines, aye, sir.”

The ship lay dead in the water, at some four thousand yards offshore. The Mediterranean stretched away, a vast and untroubled mirror returning the ship’s reflection. Across the water I could see them standing there. Beyond and above them rose the gentle hills of the Amalfi coast riding above the sea, indented, I knew, by small beaches all the way up the road to Naples, with a little town set above each beach, each tiny cove. I could not see any of this but I had driven down that road and I had stopped in some of the towns: had swum in some of those coves; many had underwater caves, things of delight and marvel. A bizarre and reflective sailor’s thought, irrelevant as could be, crossed my mind: the invention of the mariner’s compass is attributed to Gioja of Amalfi. 1302. My eyes came back down from the hills and rested on the small cluster standing on the sand, apparently not having moved an inch. I felt the thing leap anew in me, and the anxiousness to get with it.

“Mr. Jennings,” I said to the JOOD, “take the conn. Mr. Thurlow.”

“Sir.”

“Prepare Number Two boat for lowering: eight hands. The doc. Mister Selmon. Yourself. Miss Girard. Also Palatti.” He spoke the language of his forefathers. “The chaplain. I’ll come along.”

“The men under arms, Captain?”

I waited a moment. “No, Mr. Thurlow. No arms.”

Soon we were climbing down the Jacob’s ladder into the boat where Meyer and Barker awaited us.

“Slow in, Coxswain,” I said.

“Slow in, aye, sir,” she said from her helm.

We moved at circumspect speed toward the beach and directly toward them. I decided on a change.

“Put us in downbeach from them, Coxswain,” I said. “Fifty yards.”

Her wheel moved. “Fifty yards downbeach, aye, sir.”

The boat slid in gently on the easy sand and we got out and stood on the beach. We could see the ship standing patiently out, gray-blue and immobile, sole lord of a gray-blue sea.

“Captain?”

I turned. He was looking at his counter. “What is it, Mr. Selmon?”

“We have one hour, sir.”

I looked at him steadily, startled. In the warm sun I felt a chill touch me. I pushed it back. We did not know anything yet.

“Let’s go, men,” I said. “Soft and steady will do it.”

I led the way slowly up the beach toward them. I was able to count them roughly as we came near. Thirty souls or thereabouts.

 *  *  * 

They stood in the bright sunshine, motionless figures in the sand, looking at us with a kind of staring vacancy. They seemed scarcely of this world, as though having crossed over into a world all their own, a nether world but recently invented and belonging neither to the living nor to the dead but to new beings in between. Phantoms, apparitions, they seemed, except for the faint and indistinct sounds that came from somewhere within that cluster and from the expressions that could be made out on those with sufficient faces left to form expressions. These were not those of phantoms. They stood as though holding secret and whispering intercourse with themselves, in solemn appraisal of these approaching figures from the sea.

It was a pretty day, a gentle warmth flowing down from the azure across which a few white billows of fat cumulus coursed lazily, the heavens standing serene, unspeaking, as if watching our enterprise. At first as we approached, having intentionally come in downbeach from them, they had actually begun to back away from us in seeming fright, as if we must have been the ones who had brought them to their present state and now had arrived in person to finish off the job. The Jesuit speaking softly to them in their language brought them warily to a stop in the sand and we came on, slowly so as not further to alarm them, as one might approach shy birds, to a distance of perhaps twenty feet away before halting ourselves. The two parties, the men from the sea and these shore people, stood looking across that space at each other.

They varied greatly in how far they were gone. But for the most part their bodies appeared to be—well, decomposing; in a process of disfigurement which seemed an ongoing thing; in diverse stages of disintegration, a state of decay: gouged-out places on their figures as though some great claw had simply torn hunks of flesh away at random and was continuing to do so; charred, blackened areas; bleedings everywhere, in various of them, from the flesh, from the gums, from all bodily orifices; livid crenulations of the flesh; immense and festering sores. In the hot brilliance of the Mediterranean sun, some seemed afflicted with an uncontrollable trembling; one was aware here and there of a ceaseless fluttering of hands, of bodies. From some, blood seeped from under rudimentary bandages or from fresh wounds which—and this was startling—seemed to inflict themselves on their bodies even as we watched them. The illusion was that their substance, their very flesh was still in the process of being slowly consumed, literally eaten away, before our eyes, by some feasting and cannibalistic creature, invisible, insatiable. Their faces carried puzzled expressions, seemingly permanent, looks of bewilderment, of indelible stupefaction, as if what had happened to them was the most immense mystery, a vast enigma, forever indecipherable and therefore hopeless and foolish to probe; they appeared to huddle close to one another, in the cruel loneliness of the abandoned. One wanted to apologize for watching them; it seemed an outrageous and intolerable invasion of privacy. Even our dress seemed an affront. We had come in our clean seaman’s whites to confront figures whose clothing, torn, shabby, stained and clotted in filth, they seemed to have worn forever. The bleeding may have been the worst; the drops dripping with an infinitely slow and silent heaviness from their frail and meager figures and staining in blackish crimson patches the pristine sand. Many were losing hair, some quite obviously young ones among them beginning to turn bald. Some were blind. Almost all appeared to have had their vision affected in greater or lesser degree, as evidenced by the manner in which they patently had difficulty seeing us with any great definition, even across the short distance their eyes squinting, some holding a shading hand over them the better to focus on these arrivals from the great waters now no more than ten feet away. For we had edged cautiously nearer, trying not to alarm them. Close in, they had the look in the sullen stillness of the utterly forsaken, their figures cast in attitudes of agony and despair. A trancelike glaze lay over their staring eyes, a bulging glitter almost incandescent, pools of perplexity, gleams of something riveting and rapt, perfervid, as though they counted on their eyes to state what their voices could not, pitiless and merciless looks from inside a devouring torment: There was a great light in their eyes, the immobile and shining pupils seeming to look at once deep into our souls and, as if they struggled in the toils and turmoil of violent nightmares and epic horrors, to look far away into some unknown distance, beyond us, beyond the sea, beyond all horizons—to where? At things not seen before? Things now forever their sole and commanding possession, impossible to pass on to those who had not been present? One felt one gazed into the very soul of outer darkness.