The Last Ship (79 page)

As the klaxon commenced its piercing, honking sound, seeming to rise discordantly over the peaceful green of a mystified island, I saw sailors moving rapidly toward the Tower. The Russian captain and I both from our near-cliffside observation post then looking a moment at the distant skies filling with those great curling waves of blackness; the thought unspoken flashing through me, surely through him, that an old enemy, one which both of us knew all too well and had engaged in previous battles, had returned to confront us again, no discussion therefore needed between us as to its nature; knowing further that every sailor standing before us knew, in a terrible awareness, its identity, its lethalness; saving time, no need to explain anything to anybody. Around us came men, not running, but walking rapidly toward us, American and Russian sailors. I looked at him.

“Captain.
Pushkin?
”

“Yes. At once. Everybody aboard.”

I spotted Preston, told him to find the boat details and to proceed down the ladder to prepare to take on the crew. I turned and shouted the order in English and almost simultaneously heard his Russian obviously saying the same to his own crew. The men of both of the nationalities now moving quickly to the cliffside ladders, and starting down them. First down, the Russian captain. In orderly fashion, the men and women simply forming a line at the ladders, the moment one had his foot on the first rung, the next stepping forward and commencing the steep descent himself. Looking down I could see the ladders occupied from top to bottom by solid chains of moving sailors. Hitting the beach, each moving rapidly to the boats already manned, including the lifeboats under oars, a loaded boat heading toward
Pushkin.
I looked and saw the first figure emerge from the first boat, start up the Jacob’s ladder, from there down a deck hatch and, I knew, to the sail, even making out his form from the near distance, as the submarine captain, knowing also that his first command would be to make all preparations to get underway. I waited. Waited for the first man from the Farm to emerge from the bush. Message received, Bixby had called down to me, the Farm detail was on its way. Silva and his crew of three fishing today somewhere on the waters off the other side of the island: Porterfield telling me he could not pick him up with Big Eyes. “Keep trying,” I said. The waiting for the Farm people while otherwise seeming another eternity somewhat lessened by the knowledge that their arrival would coincide, more or less, with the time required to ready the
Pushkin
for sea, a species of grasping comfort in the realization thereby that these extra men, mostly Americans, a few Russians, would not be the cause of any delay in the urgent need for the submarine to get underway as quickly as possible. I looked up at the sky, seeing in a flash of thought all apocalyptic, as if we had been given all the close calls we were ever to be allotted, our measure of them run out, that this time it was at last all coming to an end, the great menacing pall forming; yet even now a thin blue line of hope from the fact that a good deal of clean sea still stood between that black thing and the island, a kind of wild reassurance at how it seemed almost to be standing still, the winds in our favor, or rather virtually no wind at all, recognizing this immense stroke of fortune, perhaps salvation itself, giving us time to abandon the island, the pall powered not by the wind but by its own engine force, pushing outward in all directions to propel itself with consummate indolence to all points of the compass, not intent particularly on attacking the island, its merely being a part of everything in its path it would soon engulf.

Behind me in the bush I heard a rustle and turned to see the Farm detail beginning to emerge from the thick growth; thirty-odd men and women in all, breathing heavily from a swift pace. No orders needed by myself—they had eyes to see, too, and of a certainty from the Farm itself the skies had told them of something that had gone terribly wrong. Now they, too, proceeded swiftly to the ladders. I stood alone, looking around, a last check. The grounds, the buildings . . . Nobody anywhere. Glanced up at the high Lookout Tower. Porterfield, Bixby, Garber still manning their posts.

“Silva?” I called up.

Porterfield was still bent to Big Eyes. He had never stopped glassing. He raised up.

“He’s nowhere, Captain.”

It hit me like a terrible pain even as I said it.

“We’ll have to leave them. The ship needs us. Come down. On the double. All of you.”

Shooing them ahead of me, I followed them across the space and onto the rungs, the last four of us descending together, alongside, almost in a measured beat. We stepped off the ladders onto the sand, moving quickly to join the others in the last boat, this presently pulling alongside
Pushkin,
where the only safety lay, a strange and, to the American sailors, alien sort of vessel, alien not from being of another nationality, that of no importance at all now, but such an opposite type of ship from their own, in fact their ancient enemy (not the Russians but the type of vessel itself), they destroyer men, the last ones now boarding the submarine, Russian sailors standing at the top of the Jacob’s ladder, directing them through the forward and aft hatchways. I swung up the ladder and went to the top of the sail, joining the Russian captain. I stood a moment looking up for the last time at the settlement atop the steep Pompeiianred cliff. The island stood deserted; our neat buildings all silent; stood as if in poignant resignation, as if saying good-bye.

“Is everybody aboard, Captain?” he said.

“Everybody I could find, Captain.” And I turned my back on the island.

He spoke into the bridge telephone, the
Pushkin
swung and stood out to sea. He must have ordered flank, the submarine soon racing through the waters and straight toward that huge black mantle to all appearances moving not so much as an inch. Presently he spoke again into the phone—one would know he was asking for a sounding. He took one more look at the shroud in the high sky; ordered the ship slowed; turned to me.

“Time to dive. Let’s go below, Captain.”

I started down the ladder, could feel him behind me, hear the hatch closing. We emerged into the submarine’s control room. In a matter of a minute he had given the command and we headed down into the safety of the ocean depths.

 *  *  * 

“If the periscope sensor will permit,” the Russian captain said, “we can surface. At best it will likely have to be brief.”

I stood, the only American there, in the control room, before the extensive array of panels not unlike our own. I was listening more than watching, hearing the pings of the sonar bouncing off the
Nathan James,
shortening all the time. We were proceeding very slowly—eight knots, another gauge showed. I heard one of the Russian watch-standers speak, then the captain, to me.

“Range four miles. Bearing zero eight seven.”

He gave a command and I could see the depth-gauge start the other way, feel the submarine slowly ascend, finally leveling off. Another command and I could hear the periscope move up under hydraulic pressure. He sighted through the eyepiece, turned to me.

“Have a look at your ship, Captain.”

I bent and peered through. The
James
lay as dead in the water as if she were at anchor. She looked absolutely untouched, not a scratch, all beautiful. Not a soul could be seen on her decks. Then suddenly there was a certain quiver of the submarine—not all that great actually, steadying quickly; myself continuing to look through. She was no longer there. For a moment I thought something had gone wrong with my eyes. Then that something had happened to the periscope eyepiece, as though it had burst. The screen filling with a chaos of wildly flying obstacles. Then the screen came all clear again, nothing wrong with the periscope. I could see blue water very clearly and scattered everywhere across it a vast debris, and somehow the feeling of the most immense stillness I had ever known, and the instant, impossible knowledge: She had blown up; disintegrated. “No,” I heard my own voice as from a distance. “No.” I could feel my hands tighten on the hand grips as if I were holding on to life itself; something move through my body as of the very tremor of madness but lasting as briefly as a single scar of lightning lasts and then gone, any force of will I had applied to kill it all unconscious, reflexive. I gave the scope back to the captain and even as he was looking heard him say, “My God,” then heard him repeat a similarly brief phrase in Russian, perhaps, curiously, the identical expression. He raised up. He seemed as pale as a man could possibly be, but then that had always been his complexion. I said, astonished to find my own mind working, my voice steady.

“Can we surface? For survivors?”

“Survivors?” He turned from the scope, looked at me, the idea that there could be any. Then he was turning back and reading the control-room repeater of the periscope-mounted radiation sensor.

“Tolerable,” he said. “It’s still in the skies. Taking its time drifting down. Of course, Captain.”

He gave the command and presently I could feel the submarine begin to rise, then break free of the waters. I followed him up the ladder, feeling others behind me; emerged atop the conning tower.

Aware first of a great blackness, darker than the most starless night, covering, in full occupation of the heavens, but yet below it, stretching in great circumference, the sea unbroken to all horizons; then, eyes bearing on the near-scene, all around the submarine, beginning to surround and envelop it in a kind of huge separate lake of debris, what had been a ship. Seemingly thousands of pieces, some curious sense of realization in a far-off part of the mind, and of astonishment, of how small they all were, nothing of size anywhere, the naked testimony of a clear fact: The explosion must have been one of unimaginable violence. A profound quiescence hung like a requiem over the scene. I became aware that the submarine was making its way with infinite slowness, the most precise care, through it all, and of Russian lookouts and as many of our own crew as the submarine’s curving spine could accommodate, these having come quickly topside, scanning everywhere, with binoculars, with the naked eye—both for shipmates; myself on that large roster of lookouts. Seeing only the incredible amount of detritus, pushing languidly against the submarine’s hull. We commenced quartering the area.

Nothing.

We quartered once more; a third time. Unnumbered eyes zealously searching. Conscious always of that huge weight of blackness descending slowly toward us. Finally the Russian captain saying something into the bridge phone, listening a moment. He turned to me, on his face an unutterable poignancy.

“I’m sorry, sir. The readings . . . they are moving fast toward unacceptable levels. Very probably this is going to be the most contaminated place on earth, quite shortly. We’ve got to submerge and get out of here. I suggest south.”

“Yes,” I said, hearing myself as of another’s voice. “South.”

V
ivid in my memory as the time it happened, three months back now, is that moment when the great submarine
Pushkin
rose from the ocean depths, breaking with ease through a covering of ice floes, and there burst upon our vision a place so strange as to be unlike anything else we had ever seen. Stretching away in front of us lay a world of the utmost grandeur, its immensity of white, and of astonishing blues and greens of the greatest delicacy, dazzling in the refracted brilliance of its light. A great stillness held everywhere, the only sound the swish of our ship on dead slow advancing southward, as she did the pageant, unimaginable, majestic, unfolding before mute sailors. Soon far in the distance, ascending out of the wilderness of ice, showed a great chain of white mountains connected by glistening glaciers; then, most awesome of all, filling the entire horizon, rose across the waters, straight out of the sea, the Great Ice Barrier, shimmering regally in the sunlight, thrusting to the south as far as the eye took one. We stood in to examine this wonder, the ship proceeding cautiously, for a spell taking us directly along the seemingly endless wall of solid ice, towering high above the ship, the universal hush broken by the swell of the sea pounding and roaring against it in cascades of spume; the face of the Barrier broken now and then with fabulous ice caves of the purest bright blue. The Russian captain had not a moment’s time to enjoy these marvels. Himself at the conn, he was taking the ship with extreme care between ostensibly minor icebergs whose underwater aspects we nevertheless could not know; glancing at him in his calm concentration, picking his way through the bergs, I thought, as a fellow ship’s captain, how fortunate we were to have an experienced Arctic Circle mariner commanding.

Pushkin
’s course now away from the Barrier, we moved slowly through the stilled waters of the Ross Sea, broken by scattered ice floes. Ourselves able to see great distances due to the fact that the curvature of the earth here flattened out, this world of silence and solitude seemed to come the more overpoweringly at us; its scale, its vastness; its virginal purity, undefiled, mystical. Nothing could have prepared us for the feelings that now took possession of us. The strange white world, the whiteness relieved by the most haunting range of colors, colors one felt one had never before seen, luminous greens, a soft amethyst, faint magentas, lavenders, delicate jades, reflected off ice and glacier, pale blues splashing off alabastrine peaks, as we proceeded through it casting as it were a spell over us so that we gazed awestruck, hushed as itself, into its stillness, spoke words as few as those one might have murmured at High Mass in some mighty Gothic cathedral; a feeling weirdly enhanced even by the great stately snowy-white icebergs we encountered, as many as two-score counted at one time from the conning tower, from sapphire pedestals soaring like huge pillars over a hundred feet in height, reaching upward to support the vaulted ceiling of an azurine sky; a world radiant in a kind of ultimate and primeval mystery, surely never more so than to these refugee sailors breathing in the purest air earth had ever held, inexpressible gratitude conscious beyond anything else, its embodying our very redemption, of how that sublime aspect now stood more true than ever.

Presently, passing Cape Bird off our port bow, a lookout sang out and as we stood in a host of Adélie penguins waddled out onto the ice to greet us, standing there squawking, exuberantly flapping their flippers, in all health. This was the greatest sight of all for it told us something all glorious, that all was as it had always been in this white world and that they had never so much as heard of what had happened elsewhere on earth. Saying good-bye to them, we stood out again, proceeding around Ross Island, next day sighting fin whales spouting lustily, if more evidence were needed that the contamination had not reached here: this, of course, imparted to us even before by the readings on the submarine’s sensors; still it was wondrous to see the live evidence in the penguins and the whales.

Long curlings of plume-like vapors now identified our destination, rising languidly from the volcanic cone on its summit; Mount Erebus, two and a half miles high, directly beneath it McMurdo Sound, which we presently entered, a waterway forty miles across at the entrance and fifty miles long, sculpted out of ice; beyond, the vast ice plain running unbroken to the South Pole. McMurdo Station: From the first there was agreement that it was for this one place we should make course, and not just that it was an American naval installation. The Russian captain, myself, and a number of others aboard were acutely conscious of what for some years had been in progress on the white continent. As it happened, Chaplain Cavendish was able to fill in the blanks, knowing as much about it as anyone aboard, by way of a fellow Georgetown Jesuit—as I mentioned earlier—who had done a number of tours there, not as a priest but as an ice geologist. Twelve nations had remarkably somehow been able to enter into an agreement not to exploit Antarctica, only explore it; some 1,500 scientists, mostly men, a few women, of that number of nationalities, glaciologists, paleontologists, marine biologists, oceanographers, meteorologists, microbiologists, cartographers, atmospheric physicists, a score of other fields, pursued their discrete inquiries all over its vast space during the Antarctic summer, a fraction of that number staying on through the Antarctic winter; McMurdo Station the largest on the continent, the center of American logistic and scientific activity; a thousand souls, two-thirds of all the continent’s population, stationed there. Two questions seized us. The first, were any of them there now? Our greatest curiosity lay in the answer to that question. Closely behind it, in the answer to another: The extent of the stores—food, medicines and the like—which would have been stockpiled for such large numbers of human beings. Back on the island,
Pushkin,
in preparation for her intended global voyage, had been stuffed to the last cubic inch of her available spaces with supplies of food—with present ship’s company, about six months’ worth, we now estimated. After that, no island any longer to return to, we depended entirely on the great unknown of what lay elsewhere on the earth—other than possibly here, no place giving any promise of filling bellies due to become empty in one-half year. Only Antarctica held out hope. Our curiosity—our vested interest—was great as to both questions. The first as much as the second; the longing to know that others of our kind were alive, actually to encounter them, was astonishingly strong in the last soul of us, American and Russian; a fervor, an obsession; it was as though their very existence would offer a comfort, a reassurance, so deeply sought, so sublime, as to be beyond the limits of language to express. To discover these and to find stores would be as if in one stroke, by one place, we had been granted the most immense spiritual reward and the most immense bodily one that could possibly be our good fortune.

To update the reader’s calendar: Approximately two years had passed since the launchings. Meaning that they had occurred during the Antarctic summer when the continent would have supported its greatest concentration of people. These scattered over it, bent to their various scientific projects, it was reasonable to assume that something like the following may have happened: Hearing the news, they had all proceeded at once to the McMurdo Sound base; further news, more explicitly the possible absence of any news due to the communications blackout created by the Electromagnetic Pulse, convincing them of the prudence of passing the Antarctic winter there, awaiting developments; another summer come, the intelligence quite clear at this point that there was nothing in any of their dozen nations to which to return; rationally, they had settled in to wait, to winter over again; to ponder some course of action, their stockpile of stores affording them plenty of time to reach a decision as to one. This was our general speculation, awaiting on-site verification, which we now commenced.

As we slowly penetrated McMurdo Sound that morning, the submarine proceeding at dead slow, topside in the sail were the Russian captain, myself, two watch officers, and two lookouts training binoculars on the base up ahead.
Pushkin
pushing gently through waters the blue of some flawless gem, broken only by decorative particles of ice. Temperature 15° F., the bridge thermometer read, quite comfortably cold for former Barents sailors (ourselves) and former Arctic sailors (
Pushkin
’s company), all now bundled cozily in this gear from the ship’s stores. Across the water, below great snow mountains, we could begin to make out the installation, the slate-colored buildings of sundry sizes huddled on the shore, their mass sitting there intrusively, as any mark of man would of necessity in this chaste world, which he had altered so infinitely less than he had any other space on earth; beyond the settlement, the great continent seeming to go on forever in an epic white emptiness. In the spectral silence that lay over the scene, all of us glassing meticulously the considerable expanse of the base for a period of at least five minutes, the Russian captain at the longer-range telescope, no one saying a word during it. He straightened up.

“Will you please try, Captain?”

I bent, swept carefully the entire diameter of the base, larger and more detailed in the telescopic lens, swept each building, slowly, once, twice, three times. Stood up, looked at him.

“Nothing that moves,” I said.

“Strange,” he said, the tones equally of bafflement and of initial disappointment in his voice.

“Aye. Strange.”

We stood thoughtfully, both regarding it now with the naked eye across the water.

“I would have expected something . . . somebody.”

“Maybe they’re inside.” I gave that dim hope.

“They would have seen us.” Steadily we were closing the base. “Nevertheless . . .”

He spoke to a messenger who ducked below, soon produced a loud hailer.

“All of them would know English. Only ours Russian. You do it, Captain.”

The English words, booming out through the hailer in a startling volume, shattered the silent scene. Briefly I identified ourselves as friendly, as a Russian submarine with crew Russian and American (we were flying both ensigns): Was anybody there? The buildings stood mute, unresponsive, before this assault, no figures emerging from any one of them. I brought the hailer down.

“Well, we’ll just have a look,” the Russian said, the undertones of enigma clinging to his voice. “It doesn’t make sense. We’ll just look,” he said again. “All right, Captain?”

“By all means. Let’s look.”

Ahead was an ice pier. The Russian captain gave an order through the bridge intercom and presently Russian sailors with mooring lines were on the hull. He nosed her in with a perfection of seamanship and soon she stood tied up alongside the pier.

Searching through that cluster of buildings—the party of about a dozen, both Russian and American sailors, led by the two captains—was like proceeding through some ghost town, the spooky effect heightened by the enclosing whiteness of the setting, by the fervent stillness that presided everywhere. Our slow progress, one kept on edge as by the imminent prospect of a figure—a naval officer, a lone scientist—emerging and explaining all. Nothing. Nobody.

“When it happened, they cleared out.”

“They would have done better to stay where they were,” I said.

“Aye.”

We stepped outside, stood looking around in the white silence, still pondering.

“Those must be the storehouses,” he said, indicating the two large, warehouse-looking structures set in the snow at the far edge of the cluster. We had gone then into one, then the other of them; come upon as overwhelming a sight as, save for live people, could have been presented us.

Stretching down row after long row stood hundreds of shelves filled with stores. Brought to a halt for a moment in our dumbstruckness, we then began to wander in speechless awe up and down the aisles. Everything was here. First of all, food in great quantities; principally in the large freeze-dried ration containers used on U.S. Navy ships, along with hundred-pound bags of assorted foods, flour, beans, sugar, rice; also in huge freezers, one or two of which we opened, filled with great sides of beef, other meats, hanging in splendid long ranks. Shelves also filled with medicines; vitamins; cold-weather clothing; much else. Everything it seemed needful for a considerable community to live in a decidedly civilized and undeprived fashion. Where necessary, the stores especially packed for these regions and temperatures, thus in perfect condition. (Preservation of food being no problem in Antarctica, some of us familiar with the polar-exploration accounts of food of previous expeditions half a century old found on it, perfectly preserved, entirely edible.) We came to a halt in an open space and stood, still not a word said, stood in marvel contemplating this fantastic prospect, trying to assimilate the two emotions following on the two discoveries and pulling us in different directions. The immense sadness at the absence of ones like ourselves, human beings, these being what we wished more than anything else to see. The immeasurable, welling-up thrill of all that stood before us and all it represented. Rather than being able to count on but six months of assured supply of stores, of food . . . well, if one had had to pull some wild figure out of a hat, one would have probably guessed what indeed our later precise inventories and calculations showed to be just about the case. Something like a two-year supply for a thousand souls. For a company of 159 of the
Pushkin,
approximately a twelve-year supply. It was almost too much for us to comprehend. Taken together with our ten-year fuel supply for the submarine, these seemed to lift terrible chains from around us, the life prospects of quite potentially doomed men extended in a stroke to uncounted years. Men fear nothing so much as the spectre of hunger. Now that most horrible of all foes seemed vanquished virtually forever. The most enormous lifting of spirits took possession of us, something little short of an ecstasy on witnessing an epiphany—surely the long rows harboring all our needs deserved that appellation.