The Last Ship (32 page)

They caught their breath for a bit from that last element, then came on, randomlike. Girard:

“Captain, with all that fuel, wouldn’t you think he’d spend some of it having a look at his own place? At Russia? He doesn’t have our problem of choices.”

“Yes, Miss Girard, I would. I mentioned that. One reason only, he said. He was afraid that if he approached it . . . no matter what the rem readings . . . he was afraid some of the crew—maybe even most of them—would simply jump ship—pop off into the water, trying to make it ashore. May not be so farfetched. It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to see some of ours, in the same situation, doing the same thing.”

“Jesus-god,” Girard said.

“Captain?”

The voice hesitant: It was Ensign Jennings, a junior officer of the deck, seated furthest down on the left, in the lowliest chair; the first time he had spoken. At twenty-two he was the youngest officer aboard, the most junior in rank; married a week before the ship last sailed from Charleston harbor; home Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of those “deep interiors” of which Selmon had spoken. Of all the officers, there was none about whom I had been more concerned.

“Yes, Mr. Jennings?”

“Does that fuel of his mean we might do both?”

“Both?”

“Sir, I mean take a look at home—and still have enough left to look for—look for . . .” He almost stuttered. “Some new place . . .”

So that idea had at last penetrated their consciousness. I spoke gently. “I don’t think the logistics would work out that way. Many reasons: the first being I don’t believe the Russian captain’s idea of going along together would extend to making that kind of heading. If he won’t go to his own home he certainly won’t go to ours.”

“Captain, you say this is the same sub that followed us off Brittany?” From down the table, Chatham again. “Did he say what he was doing there?”

“Indeed he did. He’d taken out our submarine base at Rota. Also the three SAC bases around Zaragoza. He described these actions to me straight off. Do you have a point, Mr. Chatham?”

“I just wanted that made clear. What he’s already done to us.”

I dealt fast with this. “Clear as what we’ve done to them.”

“Sir, I’m having this problem of when we started believing Russians. I’m talking about the report itself—the one Mr. Selmon has so neatly based all his projections on.”

This statement, the questioning of all the assumptions, seemed to ripple down the table, past all officers, layering a residue of tangible disquiet. Suggesting a lurking eagerness even with them to reject or at least permit doubts as to the thing evidence suggested, believe the thing it went against; so strong was the pull. So dangerous was this, for a moment the words were on my lips to slap it down, to come back at him. I hove to. It was not the time for it. A wrong step could only stoke schism. Besides, all opinions must be here allowed. I looked thoughtfully down the table at him a long moment; making certain to speak quietly; at the same time to move away from it.

“Yes. Well, of course you have a right to your opinion, Mr. Chatham. I think that’s about it. We’ll talk again when I’ve seen him next. Oh, yes. I almost forgot. In the meantime he did offer us one thing we don’t have. A dentist.”

“Did you say dentist, sir?” the doc said.

“He was surprised we didn’t carry one. A little smug about his ship’s superiority in that respect, I think. I don’t know whether Russians have more problems with their teeth—I suggested as much as my comeback—but there it is.
Pushkin
carries a dentist in ship’s company. The captain offered his services for any dental problems we might have.”

“I’d like the first appointment.” Bainbridge spoke up. The communications officer had had recurrent dental troubles.

“Doc?”

“I’d say about a dozen cases in the crew, Captain. I mean needing dental attention quite badly.”

“Send him a signal, Doc,” I said. “He’s expecting it. Make arrangements to take the men over.”

“Will do, sir.”

“Anything else for the present? I don’t want to keep the men waiting.”

“Captain, I’d like to say something.”

“Say ahead, Mr. Chatham. Make it as brief as possible.”

“Speaking as CSO, and giving a general reaction, I have to be a shade alarmed about these . . . let us say, affiliations, interchanges. How do we know he’s not using them as a cover; planning to blow us out of the water?”

“I suppose in the same way he knows we’re not planning to blow him out of the water.”

“Is that good enough, sir?”

“I’m afraid it’ll have to be, Mr. Chatham. Unless our first priority is to blow each other up.”

“That wasn’t what I had in mind, sir.”

“I know what you have in mind, Mr. Chatham.” I spoke more sharply. I was trying in every way to remain open but I had had about enough for one day of the combat systems officer. “Even if it made any sense—it doesn’t—it wouldn’t work. He’d have a nuclear torpedo—he has quite a large supply on board, I inspected them . . . he’d have one of those C-533’s into our belly by the time the Harpoons landed on his sail area. He’s got lookouts all over, you may be certain of that, watching us, just as we have lookouts all over watching him. All his electronic gear zeroed in on us, exactly as ours is on him. He’s at point-blank range. His would be on its way a second after ours. They’d probably pass each other en route.”

“As a matter of fact,” Chatham said, “I was thinking of something else. We’ve got the superior forces. Deck firepower, no comparison. It’s just possible we might do it so as not to sink but capture him, with that fuel reserve. I think there are ways to pull it off, surprise him. I have in mind a plan, if I have the captain’s permission . . .”

“You do not have it,” I said. “Leave it, Mr. Chatham.”

“Henry, if you’re going to do anything like that,” Thurlow said, “let me know first, will you? I’d like to get off.”

For a moment Chatham’s line of thought had injected a certain tension in the air, and of a different kind than that before. It was not unnatural. Destroyer men and submariners: no more congenital mortal enemies exist on the seas, each committed to the annihilation of the other. Suspicion would die hard: it had by no means died in myself; though since preferring it to remain muted for the time being in order to give unfettered consideration to the Russian’s proposals, I was glad for Thurlow’s interjection, which broke the tension. I heard some small laughter from around the table. But it did not make Chatham himself happy.

“I’m sure that’s very witty, Mr. Thurlow. Myself, I think we’re being a little too much of the buddy-buddy with this Russkie. Or since that expression seems to bother you, is it comrade-comrade?”

“Jesus Christ, Henry!” the navigator suddenly exploded, turning hard in his chair on his fellow officer. “Does it make any difference?
Now?”

“Of course I don’t have your advantage,” Chatham said in that quiet, rasping voice of his which when he turned it on could have made saints growl, “of having spent all that time in Russia.”

“Too bad you didn’t, Henry,” Thurlow shot right back. “Might have loosened your bowels.”

From down the table I heard something between a smirk and a giggle from Lieutenant Girard.

“Come on, Mr. Chatham,” she said in that condescending air she employed seldom but often to great effect when she did. “They’re not going to eat us.”

“Not me, anyhow,” Chatham said, no slouch at this sort of thing himself. “You’d probably be their first course, Miss Girard . . .”

My hand hit the table, hard—coffee cups jumped.

“Gentlemen,” I said. “Miss Girard. That’s enough. Nobody’s being buddy-buddy here. We’re not simpletons. But nobody’s going to launch any ASROCs or Harpoons and we’re not going to mount any ‘surprise’ attacks either. Since we’re also not fools.”

“I still say instead of this cozening, we ought to be thinking about how to get him before he gets us.”

That did it. Unable any longer not to strike back—point-blank range myself, with all my authority, I looked straight down the table at him. I could hear my own voice, steely-quiet.

“I’ll say this just once, Mr. Chatham. You are to cease and desist: any such thinking. Starting right now. I don’t want to hear one more word in that direction. That’s an order. Is that clear to you, sir?”

Giving praise, it should be done in front of others; dressing an officer down, in private. It was a cardinal rule for a ship’s captain. Perhaps I should have taken him aside, afterward. I must have decided that the course he was pursuing had to be stopped, brought dead in the water, even that it had to be done in the presence of the other officers, since that was where he had raised the idea, lest they, or some of them, pick up on it; this in turn then spreading a virulence, an active hostility, in this ship toward the one lying so near, render us unable even to give thought to possible advantage in some kind of arrangement with her. Later I was to think that something had hardened in Lieutenant Commander Chatham at that moment; though, perhaps in self-assuagement, I judged it was bound to have happened in any case. For now I was aware of the taut air that had suddenly filled the wardroom; then Chatham’s response, one I never liked.

“As you say, sir.”

My own tone quiet and firm as before. “Let all officers understand exactly what our position is. If they mean us harm we’ll be ready for them. We’ll keep on full alert. Full manning of all sensors; extra lookouts. That’s it. No more, no less. He’s the only ship we’ve met, for God’s sake. The only one not full of corpses,” I said with a kind of cold savagery. “Those on that submarine are men, like us. They are human beings. Now let’s see what’s in that fact for us. For all of us. There aren’t enough around even to think about knocking each other off, for God’s sake. End of discussion.”

I was on the point of rising when Girard asked another question, in a voice that fell the more deeply after that exchange, for its softness of tone.

“Sir, did the Russian captain say how it started?”

For a moment I didn’t know what she meant. When I realized, I suppose I was faintly surprised; even startled. Of all the questions on our minds, I expect that was the one in which we had come to have the least interest; hardly a matter even of intellectual interest by now, grossly unimportant; become banal, I would say, to men intensely occupied with more pressing matters.

“Why, no, Miss Girard. He didn’t.” I seemed to speak as softly as had she. “I’m not sure the subject ever came up. With everything else, I guess we just never got around to it. I’ll try to remember to ask him next time; if he knows.”

“I was just wondering,” she said, almost apologetically.

“Right. Well, now. Let’s go,” I said, getting up. “Time to tell the men.”

 *  *  * 

They stood, every hand except the most minimal of watches (extra crew, however, keeping eyes both visual and electronic locked on the Russian submarine), crowded into the largest free space on the ship, the fantail; gazing up at me where I had mounted the after missile launcher. To a sailor no more deep-felt word exists in the language, and I used it now as my first.

“Shipmates,” I said.

I waited, gathering my thoughts. I had to tell it; there was no question as to that, of giving them anything other than the straight substance of it. The question facing me was rather whether to offer precisely the same report as that Selmon had the officers, in those same unrelenting terms. The only reason for not doing so was my fear that a certain number, enough so as to affect the welfare and even the operation of the ship, hearing it might cross over that line I was beginning to feel was already stretched dangerously thin, and becoming more so, with an increasing number of the crew, the line separating ability to function as men and as sailors and . . . I hardly dared say even to myself what lay on the other side of that line. I had come to this decision: to give them enough to understand what had happened, but not to assault them with the last brutal detail, not now. They were not a hundred percent without preparation: the failure of all our communications efforts to raise others had done an amount of that; by the same token had left the door of hope, by their nature close to inextinguishable, open. But here now were proclamations up by an order of magnitude: direct, positive reports asserting what had happened as opposed to the negative ones of silence. I further had a momentary hesitation as to how, thinking of simple tactics, to begin. Specifically, whether with the Frenchman or the Russian; deciding on the former; for a period of several minutes then, in the simplest way, recounting to them the information, the intelligence, contained in the two sources.

As I talked it seemed to me the silence only grew, became more piercing; deepened further, it may have been, by the total peace and silence of approaching eventide, the ship standing serenely, swinging not at all on her anchor, no wash even against her, the sea stretching away in a manner that first caught the ship’s image as in a looking glass and then mirrored out to all horizons: to Europe in the distance (the absence of the great landmark Gibraltar seeming strange, almost disorienting, to sailors who had been here before, nevertheless embraced by now in that ruthless acceptance which, greatest of gifts, had become part of us and—so far—kept steadfast); nearer, by the line of the north African strand sliding eastward toward Suez; a single object breaking those otherwise bereft waters, the Russian submarine lying visible to all five miles to the north-northwest. My words sounding bell-clear in that quietness, falling on ears, seemingly on the listening sea itself. When I had finished I waited, caught in a helpless caesura, looking down at them: their faces deliquescent with unutterable pain, assuaged only by bewilderment; frozen in the rictus of suppressed agony; a kind of slow-motion horror. I spoke to them.

“Of course we want to go home. The last one of us wants that.”

The stillness maintained, heightened now to levels almost intolerable, a stillness as if not made of this world, rising from among them and cannonading back upon me like a field of force. I waited some seconds more and then came on hard, not hard in my voice, which I made certain did not change, in tone, in manner, but hard inside, hard as spirit could be, as strengthening not of them but of myself, to say what had to be said.