The Last Ship (31 page)

“Sir, going that course, we could just about make it into the Pacific,” he said in those soft Southern, almost courtly tones. “I’m not certain the exact fix. In any case, not far up the longitude. Dead in the water except for emergency reserves.”

That brought a kind of shock moving outward from Melville and both ways around the table, like a sudden rogue ocean wave encompassing all. I suppose the engineering officer wanted to finish off the report neatly. He had always been a precise officer on fuel matters, as in tending his domain of nuclear propulsion devices; in those regions terrible penalties awaited any who were not.

“Dead in the water,” I heard someone say softly, as if to himself.

We sat awhile, not a word spoken, sipped our coffee: slowly these days it seemed to me, coffee, that sailor’s standby, rationed to two cups a day now. The only sounds the tinkling rattle of these, the murmur of the sea through the ports. I turned back to my officers, ranged on both sides of me down the table.

“Thank you, Mr. Melville, for those calculations. Let us leave these considerations for the time being. They require digestion in any case. I’d like now to report further matters arising out of my conversation with the Russian captain. He had a rather interesting suggestion.”

I had their attention and I waited in the silence of it for a bit, then gave it to them all in one shot.

“He told me that he explicitly wanted us to see the beaches of Italy and France, the human beings there, knowing we would go there, find what we found, and that when we did would come back to the Strait, where he would be waiting for us, come back ready to deal with him.”

A period of absolute stillness—the winds whispering through the ports no louder than moments before but now sounding almost noisy—held the wardroom. Every head lifted, all eyes looking up the table at me. Waiting.

“The deal being: for him to accompany us. To join forces. To look for a new place together.”

A long pause. “Let’s hear it.” I opened it to reactions, opinions.

“What did you tell him, Captain?” Thurlow’s voice, the softest of interrogatories.

It was the first time “a new place” had entered our considerations but, to my gratitude, it slipped by in the attention directed to the other proposition, which seemed to dumbfound them.

“Nothing. I turned noncommittal.” I spoke rather absently, with the purpose of feeling my way with the utmost care in these waters; then more direct seriousness of tone: “I wished to consult my officers.”

I sipped the coffee’s last dregs, shoved the cup away from me, marched on in an explanatory and also probing fashion. “I suppose the idea was that if we ran into trouble, two ships are always better than one. No naval doctrine older than that. If that captain is anything, he is a navy man; my impression: a first-rate sailor. A destroyer and a submarine operating in tandem: I’m not sure that’s ever been done. I can see it would make for a rather formidable force.”

Girard said, “The Russian is not going home, sir?”

“To what? His answer. They’ve made their decision on that one.”

“That part—the keeping together—would seem to make a good deal of sense.” Thurlow spoke in a kind of slow thoughtfulness, in tones of reflection, almost as if to himself, as though uncertain about it but trying to move ahead into the various implications of such a proposal. No one aboard had a more open mind—whatever the subject—than did the navigator. “We might be able to help each other.”

“How?” It was the unmistakable voice of Chatham, the combat systems officer; rather curt, the single syllable, in his usual challenging tone. It brought Thurlow up.

“Why, I don’t rightly know, Henry.” By habit amiable in temperament, a man of give-and-take in addressing any proposition, the navigator was nonetheless able to give as good as he got if poked. “I can’t read the future. Especially these days. Perhaps you can, Henry.”

“I can read this much. He’s got to have something up his sleeve. He’s a Russkie.”

“Up his sleeve?” Thurlow repeated the phrase as if there was something impossibly childish, even idiotic in it; his voice now moving up a notch, headed toward the acerb; was about, I think, to make this semantic assessment of his quite explicit to Chatham; instead, smiled softly and sighted up the table at me. “You feel any ulterior motives there, Captain? I mean in this
Russkie?”
this time letting his feeling of something like distaste as to Chatham’s use of such phrases, in the circumstances, come through clearly.

“I don’t think so. Unless I was too stupid to catch them. Always a possibility, of course. I can’t promise but I had no feeling he was any more devious than the average captain,” I said rather slyly myself. “Not a practicing philanthropist; looking out for his own ship’s interests, of course—like any captain. That allowed for, I think it was an honest suggestion; a straightaway sailor’s suggestion; something he felt might be good for both of us. Stronger—in whatever difficulties we might encounter, these being quite unforeseeable—the two of us navigating together than one of us alone: I should mention one thing.”

I stopped there a moment, with intention. “Mr. Chatham may have a point. When he took me through that monster of his . . . so far as I could tell we didn’t miss a compartment . . . well, when we got into the stores spaces, I began to notice a lot of empty spots. There was no way you could miss them. It was easy to judge his food supplies were lower than ours, appreciably lower. Of course they have far less space for stores, even with that size—so much of it’s for missiles and nuclear torpedoes, more of both than on any submersible of ours I ever saw. And, of course, they have a smaller ship’s company. Still, when we got back to his wardroom and I was sipping the tea he offered me—damned fine tea—I simply asked him. He wasn’t the least bit coy. Just smiled, sort of, at the question. Then said right off, ‘Two months.’”

“There you have it,” Chatham said, not without triumph. “He wants us to feed him.”

“Two months’ food supplies?” Girard said. She spoke in a sharp tone. “Against seven for us. Anything like that . . . it wouldn’t be fair to the men, sir. Especially considering it’s because of their being on half-rations all this time that we’ve got that many months left.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” I said. “When I asked him, I think he detected what I was thinking so he asked me about ours and I gave him the seven-months figure. You know what he said? He said, ‘Captain, assuming we don’t find anything first, if we do join forces, go in company, we’ll have one hard rule: we make it on our food supplies; you make it on yours.’”

“Has to be some kind of trick,” Chatham said.

“Maybe. I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s pretty hard for one sailor to lie, straight off, face to face, to another sailor and get away with it. I think we’d agree on that. I don’t care what the nationalities involved. But it’s possible. Especially with the stakes.”

Why I could not tell—perhaps it was brought on by this exercise in assessment of the Russian captain’s character, integrity—but it was right then that my thoughts went to that particular moment that ever since had nagged troublingly at me, more so than any other in my conversation with him; it seeming to him, and thus to me, even in its inexactness, this appearing to me deliberate, to be the most important part of all in our interchange; none of this communicated in direct language but intimating, to my mind unmistakably, his intentions in wishing that we join up more truly than any of the motives which Chatham was attributing to him. I tried now as best I could to suggest something of this to my own officers; aware of the difficulty of conveying secondhand any solid meaning in a few phrases not clear even to myself who had heard them spoken.

“There was something else—this sensed rather than expressed between us . . . something in the idea that the known existent human beings should stay together. That we had something like a responsibility to do so.”

This seemed to pass like a piece of indecipherable code, if not gibberish, over the ship’s officers—or maybe it was simply that their minds had no space left for anything but what Selmon had told them; save for one. Somehow I was not surprised that as I paused it was Girard’s voice I heard.

“Responsibility, sir?” was all she said. But I felt more in it than that echoing inflected question of the single word coming out of that steady poise of hers; felt the first faint beginnings of comprehension, a dawning on her part, this in turn seeming to validate my own perceptions as to what the Russian had in mind. Of course, all of this could have been an excessively grasping imagination—one felt unsure of anyone’s words, not to mention thoughts, these days. The Russian’s, Girard’s, even one’s own. Seeing meanings where none existed, an aggrandizement of a randomly uttered idea, of an intimation as to something else entirely . . . one could not know. Still, wagering, I would have placed strong money that I was right on this one, at least as to the purpose of the Russian captain . . . Suddenly a desire, bordering on urgency, to get away from it before Girard, or some other officer, come alert, should pursue the matter, pin me down; feeling distinctly that she was on the point of asking for elaboration, for my own interpretation of that strange word; beginning to have her own. So I cut away—hard right rudder—back to the course we had been running.

“I suppose Mr. Chatham has in mind that he’s thinking of jumping us at some point, getting to our provisions. I can’t chart his mind. I don’t possess that kind of Fathometer, for exact depth readings. Unless someone else present here does, I suggest that we not anticipate. Myself, I’m not of a mind right now either to accept his proposal or turn it down out of hand. Much too early for either. We need time to consider—told him that. I’m going to want every officer’s views. Think hard about the implications. Say, for instance, if we say nothing doing and he decides to come along anyhow, trail us, what do we do about that?” Someone started to speak. “Not now. Let’s sleep on it. I’ll have more thoughts of my own after I see him again. One more thing for now.”

There is no way for a ship’s captain to avoid slyness. He would be crippled without it; a necessary weapon and I had my share; still one to employ with great caution, and restraint; otherwise a weapon capable shipboard, where such devices run much less shielded, much more naked, than is the case on the shore, of turning in an instant dangerous, pointed, dagger’s edge, at oneself. I knew that I was utilizing this resource and felt I was staying within those limits. Having deliberately held it back, now was the precise time, I decided, to hit them with it. I spoke in the most judicious of tones.

“I should point out that all the balances don’t strike one way; it wouldn’t be exactly a handout. We have seven months’ food supplies to his two. On the other hand, in respect to nuclear fuel, of which Mr. Melville has just told us we have six months remaining . . . well, he has two years’ running time left on his cores.”

“Two years!” came from the engineering officer. I could not remember his ever making a like exclamation.

“He showed me everything required to support that figure; showed me through his engineering plant—reactor hours in the log. I spent a time checking it out—more there than any other single place on the sub, except for that long discussion in the wardroom. He was very up front with me. I’d call the two-years figure firm.”

I spoke carefully into the abrupt hush. “When this ship stops moving, his will have a year and a half steaming time left on her. Speaking of having something up one’s sleeve, it might be worthwhile on our part to take that fact into our considerations as to his proposal.”

The point needed no elaboration now nor the implications; not to nuclear sailors. On that score comprehension was complete and instant in every officer present. Expressions alone said that. Nothing I had brought back from my visit aboard the Russian sub, other than that other terrible news, was anything like so important. An awesome new element had entered the equation. One felt something like a fear in all even to give voice to the enormity of the resource so suddenly appearing on our horizon: beyond all valuation. I moved—slyly—on.

“Just a thought, a possible trade-off: our sharing our food stores with him if it becomes necessary; in return his sharing the fact of having a long-fuel-reserve vessel under him if that becomes necessary; if ours runs out before we find something . . . if it came down to that.” I stopped it there.

“Are you saying, sir . . .” Bainbridge, the communications officer, his words a kind of gasp, part chill, part a lifting hope as to immeasurable betterment of our circumstance.

“All I’m saying, Mr. Bainbridge, is that if we ran out of fuel, the land so far being as is, uninhabitable, I would rather have a ship alongside me that could still navigate than to have only an empty sea.”

I could see Thurlow’s mind working: “Captain, what did you say was the size of his crew?”

“One hundred and twelve officers and men.”

The navigator came down on it directly. “I have in mind personnel accommodations—if things ever reached that stage.”

“Well, no, he doesn’t have that kind of space now. Not for all of us. I suppose if he cleared out his missiles—two-thirds of the ship—he could take on a good many more. Still not all of us . . . perhaps a half of ship’s company . . .” It was time to sheer off; frightening possibilities lay just beyond, one dared not so much as approach them; my purpose achieved, give the idea itself time to take hold. “These matters are far on the horizon. I want it understood that I have not discussed any such contingencies with the Russian captain. To suggest to him that he jettison his missiles, for instance: Speaking of someone else’s suspicions, he might throw me off his ship. I wouldn’t blame him. However, if we ourselves should come to lean affirmatively toward his proposal—joining company, you may be sure I would open up everything . . . extract the firmest of stipulations before any agreement was entered into. No doubt he’ll have a few of his own. Best to think about all this for a spell. I simply wanted that resource of his—his nuclear fuel—factored in. Now let’s leave this matter for the time being. Other questions?”