The Last Ship (30 page)

I swept her meticulously bow to stern, knowing her captain to be doing the same to me, staring point-blank at each other across some five miles of water. Above anything else I was anxious to determine her nationality. Saw nothing. Swept again. Then as my eyes came to rest on her sail I observed there, limp in the windless air but unmistakable, that startling ensign, apparently just raised—felt an instant wariness in that fact, a consideration as to fraudulent identity: Why so late in hoisting?

I raised up and immediately issued two commands: one bringing our anti-ship weaponry into firing position, the other instructing Signalman Bixby to blinker the message even as I fed the words to her verbally. Every fiber of the ship hair-trigger tense in the waiting, a Harpoon missile poised in its vertical cell launcher, its fire control system manned in CIC, I watched as the light flashes shot across the void of the Mediterranean. Not five minutes had passed before the answer came blinkering back over the stretched-taut zone of water between us—the flashes much slower than Bixby’s had been, almost stuttering in execution, as though sent by a not altogether experienced hand, infiltrating further doubts, Bixby sounding them out and a seaman writer taking them down but the words known to me as, letter by slow letter, I also read the flashes; when it was over standing in a moment of astonishment and wonder, laced yet with a cold, hard streak of suspicion, scarcely realizing anyone was around me when I became aware that Thurlow, the OOD, was standing there and heard him say, “Sir?”

Startled, I turned, looking at him as at an apparition in the oncoming darkness, somehow aware of the first star having appeared, pale in the eastern sky. I waited a moment, during which the decision seemed not so much to have been made by myself as dictated from elsewhere: almost as though something was telling me it was a last chance, that if we rejected it there would not be another; as if saying that an excess of caution and skepticism can be fully as dangerous as its opposite: that the moment, and the ineluctable risks it carried with it, must be seized: this conviction fortified by a sly and slender intimation within, held all along, perhaps only false hope, still not to be resisted, that he had a message for me and for reasons unknown would deliver it only in person.

“Stand down the Harpoon, Mr. Thurlow,” I said. “Lower the Jacob’s ladder and Number Two boat.”

In the shadows I felt the disconcertion in him, felt him hesitate fractionally. Then he turned and disappeared into the pilot house to carry out my orders.

For myself the course admitted no dispute. I had to find out about him. I had also not to risk the ship. Rather than the peril of taking the ship any closer, this appeared simply the safest method to accomplish my objective.

Having traded blinkers again, it was no more than ten minutes before I was stepping into the boat, having left the most explicit of contingency instructions. Barker’s boat hook came out and gently shoved us away. The boat heeled as Meyer, standing high in her pulpit, swung the wheel and we started across the long interval to the low profile in the distance. Suddenly there appeared atop her sail area the yellow “flasher” above the masthead light mandated in peacetime under international maritime rules for surfaced submarines, commencing its sequential empiercements of the darkening waters, spectral and yet affording a grasp of assurance to a seaman’s heart. I looked back and saw what I expected to see: my own ship’s riding lights come on as if in amicable answer, Thurlow’s smart doing. I turned back, from where I sat in the stern sheets, steadfastly watching the other vessel. Coming on was a night of a haunting beauty. The sun gone to the waters, taking with it whatever day breeze remained, no sound whatever save that of the low chum of the boat as we advanced, slowed down, seeming to glide over a sleeping sea, parting gently to permit our passage through the fervent stillness. The earlier cloud cover now stood peeled back to make way for the impatient stars. Only these, coming on in alacrity, beginning to fill the hushed heavens in their multitudes, looked on as our boat closed the long slender shape dead ahead, affording just enough light that, with the added aid of the flasher, I could begin to make out a few dark shapes standing at the submarine’s Jacob’s ladder, ready to receive me aboard.

The responsibility of an officer commanding at sea is unparalleled by that of any other relation in which man may stand to man. Both wisdom and humanity dictate that from the peculiarity of his position, a sea-officer in command should be clothed with a degree of authority and discretion inadmissible in any master ashore.

—Melville,
White Jacket

P
rone in a blue sea, her low black shape coiled and menacing, she stood facing us across five miles of water. It was the immensity of the thing. It looked as if it would never submerge and if it did that it surely could never come up. I thought how her captain had shown me everything, stem to stern, seemingly holding back nothing; other than the curiosity of having my first look inside a Russian submarine, not too many surprises other than a certain astonishment at the amount of firepower she carried. I would not have estimated it as so much: twenty-six SS-N-20 Seahawk ballistic missiles, each packing eight 500-kt multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles—MIRV’s—for a total of 104,000 kilotons; as measured by the Hiroshima 12½-kiloton divisor, an 8320-H vessel as originally constituted, as against our 896-H—each arsenal only slightly diminished by recent expenditures. He had pointed out the holes left by the launchings in the vast space extending upward through two decks—a full two-thirds of the submarine—reserved for the missiles. The unfathomable power remaining registered now but dully as a curiosity, there being nothing to use them on; they stood like worthless antiques, castrated dinosaurs, impotent for want of targets; something almost pathetic about them. I was far more interested in something else he had also shown me, his complement—intact, none used to date—of thirty-two C-533 nuclear torpedoes, as they designated them, virtually identical to our own Mk 48’s, except for the warhead—this no coincidence, their having stolen the specifications from us, he had remarked almost prankishly. After that visit aboard, one close to cordial in tone, I had had to remind myself that, after my departure, a couple of these were of a certainty locked in on us. With good reason. Both our Harpoon antisurface missiles and our ASROC depth charges, the ASROC nuclear-armed, were ready, with the fire control watches fully manned, and in the case of the Harpoons the bearing of two-nine-zero set. We stood like two men shaking hands with one hand while the other rested on a cocked pistol.

I took one more look at her.
Pushkin.
One wondered at the thinking that had led them to name a class of submarines, and the largest ever built, after writers; for not very clear reasons one admired it. Turning, I climbed down the ladder and entered the wardroom to relate the particulars of my visit, and what I had been told, to my waiting officers, gathered expectantly around the long table with its green felt pool-table cloth.

 *  *  * 

“Very well, Mr. Selmon,” I said. “You may proceed.”

The most important thing I had done on my return to the ship was to brief this officer in meticulous detail on the Russian captain’s report, giving him also my own translation of the French radioman’s transcribed message, lifted from the doomed
Bonne-fille,
removed from my cabin safe where I had kept it, awaiting just such a time as had now come. The former by far the more extensive, almost voluminous: I had been surprised at first, the reason later made clear, that the submarine commander had prepared for me English translations of the considerable number of messages he had picked up dealing with events—these I had brought back for Selmon’s intense perusal, applying all his knowledge on the subject, along with an as keenly analytical brain as I had come across in the Navy. He was ready with his interpretations. He proceeded straightaway, first with a preface directed at myself.

“This assumes the accuracy of our two sources, sir.”

“They’re all we have, Mr. Selmon,” I said, a bit shortly. “Together they add up to a reasonable certainty in what you’re about to tell us, wouldn’t you say?”

“Fortified by the negative nature of our own communications efforts; taken also with our direct experience—the beaches on the north shore . . .” He meant the Mediterranean. “Very close to an unqualified certainty, sir.”

“Then let’s get on with it, Mr. Selmon,” I said briskly.

“Aye, sir.”

He had affixed to the wardroom bulletin board a simple Mercator projection of the United States and as he talked, addressing the officers at large, he flicked a pointer over it, pecking at regions as he referred to them, at individual states.

“The littorals . . . Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland . . . Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida. The Eastern seaboard, all of it: One could not so much as set foot on the beach. Levels grossly intolerable. Pacific coast the same,” he said almost as an afterthought. “Well inland—the Dakotas, an example” . . . the pointer flicked out . . . “Oklahoma . . .” flicked again, “—holding on a while longer, disallowing their being active targets, the information not absolute on that point. Irrelevant in any case: these also effectively gone by now, target or not. Considerable possibility of pockets here and there the substance did not reach—leaving a few gatherings of human beings in isolated parts of the country’s deep interior. Likely talking about a few hundreds of people. These random enclaves, refuges, not apt to remain so for long, being subject to arriving waves of contamination that would remove their present rather fragile hold on habitability . . .”

Selmon’s invulnerable equanimity, his tenor-voice pitch by nature pedantic, had existed from the first, an asset to the ship of major proportions: we could not have functioned, conducted our affairs, without it. He proceeded carefully, with that characteristic air of his of leaning always to the conservative, that is to say favorable, assessment.

“We’ve moved now into a degree of speculation: There may be a few thousands of human beings instead of a few hundreds. There may even . . . Some freak congruence of circumstances: example, the winds carrying the material missing altogether some truly deep-shielded patches in, say, a remote valley of the Appalachians . . . Kentucky, West Virginia . . . a coal mine might turn out to be something extremely useful to have at hand . . . some such combination might enable survival for a few dozens—a few hundreds—more or less permanently. I would not rule it out. Personally, I’d be surprised if the place were totally without people.”

He paused as though on a hopeful note, and altogether like a professor giving his class time to absorb what had been thus far presented before proceeding with fresh material; attention absolute, silence total; continuing then in that cadence of his, something about it almost liturgistic.

“However. To our purpose. In absence of communications of any kind, absence also of all usual means of transport—cars, trains, planes, horses—it might take years of exploration simply to ascertain the whereabouts of these enclaves, assuming they exist. Even if the land lying between them and the seashore were traversable. As it is, what’s happened back there—the most massive nuclear-warhead throwweight, almost certain meltdown of a considerable number of those hundred of nuclear power plants we were building including up and down both coasts . . . the likeliest situation is that an actual radioactive wall blocking entrance to the country is in place—from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Key West, from Puget Sound, Washington, to San Diego. Megacuries of radiation released in such amounts that no reasonable man would even attempt to put a figure on it. Therefore no possibility exists of getting across that distance of fully corrupted terrain, through that prohibitive atmosphere—we’re talking about true saturation readings—to wherever people may be, if they are. One could think of them as being imprisoned in a kind of oasis, if one may use such a term, ghetto might be a better one, surrounded on all sides by wasteland lethal to pass over; for us, for them, for anybody. No movement possible into or out of it. No exit, no entrance.”

An almost imperceptible sigh, the last thing from being callous: rather, a viewpoint that one’s sole duty lay in unhesitant embracement of whatever the mind’s most unsparing analysis, based on the best available evidence, suggested the realities to be; any other course to be reserved for fools, or worse, certainly not for naval officers.

“Of course, no reason in the world to try to reach them; no reason other than curiosity. If, as I say, they exist at all. Even if one could get to them—one could not—the last thing they would welcome is new arrivals with whom to share what few resources for survival they may have remaining. Newcomers more likely to be met by shotguns than by open arms. Hypothesis reaching a futility here. Forgive the digression, sir.”

Selmon shot a glance at me, obviously fearful he had stepped over that line he so punctiliously maintained between his role of explicator, concerned only with facts or probable facts, and his captain’s of decision-making—never speaking to the latter unless specifically asked for his recommendations.

“That’s about it, sir. As to the basic situation.”

He stopped. It had been a shade eloquent for Selmon, understandably so given the subject matter: nothing being more crucial in directing the course of our future actions, and the literal course of the ship, than the matters he had just set forth. Remorse, desolation, the possible onslaught even of panic: In all who heard (and who watched severally, with the most fixed attention, as Selmon’s roving pointer touched down on one’s own region of the nation), with no exceptions, I think I can say that, however present in human souls these might be, by efforts almost sublime they were there sealed away, for the most irreducible, unforgiving of reasons: we simply could not afford them; proscribed as constituting the most extreme peril. We stood in a nonnegotiable insistence of the last ounce of our faculties, emotional fully as much as mental; of calm most of all; to give way would have been not short of craven: 305 in ship’s company, including themselves, mortally dependent on an unfailing adherence to this code of behavior. I was grateful for the company, the sure sustenance of such officers. Sitting quietly now for a bit, each of us with his thoughts, knowing as through a sure instinct given straight from the Lord that these could not be spoken—let that dam, with its inflexible constraint, be breached it would sweep us all away; each mind left to deal with his own; this unspeakable loneliness given a measure of emollience by the presence around one of shipmates known to be in identical suffering, identical pain. Beyond all of this, you felt that nothing you could say would reach the seat of the agony. Better by far to say nothing as regards that. A faint breeze entered through the ports. Looking up and out one of them, I could see the slightest of stirrings on the blue face of the sea. It was oddly solacing. I spoke to Selmon.

“South America?” It would at least be the nearest, forays to the north perhaps possible from there in time. “Assuming no direct hits.”

“By now that would have made little difference, sir. Considering the massive nature of the direct trauma in the north. The winds will have delivered it there. If we were permitted to have a look at the two places, say by a flyover, there would be but one prevailing difference immediately apparent. Structures all standing in the south where there were only heaps of stones in the north. As for the occupants of the two—I should say the absence of occupants—no difference at all to amount to anything. By now the winds will have leveled that aspect out: so close by after all as winds move. Insofar as approachability is concerned, the situation in the two by now has to be effectively the same. Due again to wind patterns, the eastern ones—Colombia, Brazil, Argentina—going before those on the continent’s western side—Peru and the others—forgive me, sir, the geography there has slipped my mind for the moment. In the deep interiors, possibility of those same mentioned pockets here and there, leaving a few parties of human beings as in the north; these too likely soon to follow, remote chance for the noted aberrant exception making it through, again speaking in terms of a few hundreds, a few thousands at most; maybe deep in the Amazon, potential protection of extremely thick vegetation, if one were to hazard a guess.”

He stopped again, like that. He had finished.

“Well, Mr. Melville.” I turned promptly to the engineering officer, sitting at my left at the wardroom table. Him also, before this officers’ meeting, I had directed to have ready findings for various courses. He spoke with a quiet professionalism.

“Sir, at fuel-conserving speeds not to exceed twelve knots, we have a few days short of six months of steaming time left on the core. If we make a direct heading at that speed—the coast of Virginia, my calculations are based on—reaching Hampton Roads . . .” He looked down at a clipboarded sheet covered with figures. “Calculated also on running time provided by Mr. Thurlow, at that juncture, sir, we would have expended approximately five thousand steaming miles.”

“Captain?”

“Yes, Miss Girard?”

“I must mention, sir. The slower we proceed the more food supplies we consume.”

“I take your point, Miss Girard. We’re caught between rocks and shoals. For the time being we have to come down on the side of fuel. The men can fast for a while if it comes to that. The ship cannot.” I turned back to the engineering officer. “Allow, say, two thousand more for reconnoitering. Atlantic coastline . . .” I waited a moment, figuring something myself . . . “Having completed our sweep Maine to Florida, we are standing off Key West. Fat, dumb, and happy. The Panama Canal is gone. So we continue down the longitude, keeping well off South America. Around the Cape . . .” I stopped, looked straight at him.

Lieutenant Commander Melville inevitably suggested an academic, not strange since he had been one, a bright one, a theoretical physicist at Georgia Tech, bound upward in his sheltered career when he abruptly abandoned it for the chance to work hands-on with nuclear reactors and cores on a seagoing missile ship. A body supple and hard, not an ounce of fat on it, in that respect looking rather like the 100-yard-dash man he had once been; his lean good looks, brown thoughtful eyes that looking at one made one think he was a step ahead of you but not at all vain of the fact, perhaps not even aware of it: All these seemed to be the exactly ordered up adjuncts to the rest of him; a man of rituals, of mansuetude entire, a graciousness of manner so marked as to seem almost to constitute a throwback, living out his life without the slightest seeking of drama. He looked at his clipboard.