The Med (22 page)

Foster was on the bridge. He knew that even before he saw the captain's length, still in whites, slumped in his chair, his gold-encrusted cap tipped down over his face, unlit corncob drooping from his teeth. Wronowicz looked around the pilothouse, hoping for Lieutenant Jay, but aside from the enlisted men there was only the operations officer and Ensign Callin. Callin was standing dead amidships, gripping his binoculars and staring straight ahead. Wronowicz approached his division officer warily. He always felt uncertain on the bridge. Here the officers were in charge; everything was waxed and polished, clean and squared away, and most intimidating of all, quiet. He took a quick look out the windows, blinking in the cloudy light, but saw no other ships. Steaming alone, then. Good. But how long would it last?

“Mr. Callin?”

“Yes, sir,” snapped Callin, turning. They were both startled. “Oh. What is it, Chief? Something wrong down below?”

“Oh, no sir. We just got your full bell. I wondered if you knew how long we'll be at this speed.”

“Can't we handle it?”

“Of course we can handle it,” said Wronowicz, thinking What does he think we do down there? Play with ourselves? “It's just that we had just took one boiler off the line and I wondered if we should bring it up again.”

“I don't know,” said the ensign, glancing toward where the captain, still slumped in his chair, had aimed his pipe in their direction. “Look, I'm busy. I got the conn right now. Maybe you just better bring it up anyway.”

“It costs us more water that way. And fuel. If we're going to slow again in a little while—”

“Chief,” said the captain.

Well, here we go, thought Wronowicz. He pulled his cap down a little more and swaggered over, putting his dirty hands behind him. “Yeah, Cap'n?”

“How's the plant holding up?”

“Pretty good, sir. Maybe a slight vibration in the port shaft. We could use some time alongside the tender, though. Getting some insulation dryout, and we need some gaskets replaced, and we got to get some more packing for the main feed pumps.” He could feel Callin listening. Captain should be asking him this stuff, he thought. “We're using more turns than we should for the knots, though.”

“How come?”

“We been out of the yard for over a year, Cap'n. Getting a lot of barnacles and crap on the bottom. It ain't the engines.”

“I know that, Chief.” Foster smiled and took his pipe out of his mouth. “You run a tight engineroom. Say, you mentioned the port shaft, vibration. Could that be a delayed result of the bottoming? Is there anything I ought to know?”

Wronowicz hesitated, choosing his words; you had to be so goddamn diplomatic up here, all this frigging gold braid. He decided the unvarnished truth would be easiest. “I don't know. I've been keeping an eye on all the bearings since Naples. I dint want to bother Ensign Callin, 'cause—”

“You better bother him,” said the captain, but smiling. “You better bother the hell out of him. I want him to come out of that hole in a year the best goddamn snipe j.g. in the Fleet.”

“Aye aye,” said Wronowicz, grinning back.

“Mr. Callin, you hear that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Captain,” said Wronowicz, “Are we going to be at this speed for a while? How long are we going to be out? I need to know to keep feed-water consumption down, stay off water hours as long as we can.”

“Boy, that's a tough one,” said Foster, biting his pipe and looking wry. “We're on our way now to catch up with the MARG. I wanted to take it easy, spare the plant, but CTF 61 just told us to move our rendezvous time up. You know we're on alert status now.”

“Is that right, sir?” said Wronowicz innocently, although he, along with everyone else aboard, had been trading scuttlebutt about it all day. “Where's it for?”

“I don't know, Chief. Frankly, they haven't told me yet. To answer your question, I'd plan for full speed from now till we join up this afternoon, then slack back to ten or fifteen knots. For the long run, I can't say. We could be out here for a couple of weeks, or even longer.”

“We'd have to refuel.”

“I think you can leave arrangements for that to me and the squadron staff. All right?”

“Suits me, Cap'n.”

“You're sure the port shaft is okay?”

“It's not perfect, but it should take flank speed, sir.”

“For how long?”

Till it breaks, Wronowicz thought. How the hell should I know? Do I look like a goddamn gypsy? But aloud he only said, “I think it'll hold, sir. And we got a spare bearing aboard if that one craps out.”

Foster nodded thoughtfully, and at last turned back to the sea. Wronowicz glanced at Callin; the ensign had his head buried in the radarscope. Taking that as dismissal, he left the officers to themselves and went down a level to the chartroom. Blood was there, fiddling with a complicated piece of radio gear.

“What's the good word, Unc?”

“Pussy. Spread the word.”

“Funny,” said Wronowicz. For some reason Blood's ribaldry did not amuse him today.

“What you doing up here, Kelly? Thought snipes got a nosebleed at high altitudes like this.”

“Come up to figure how long we had before you ran us into Gibraltar.”

“Not with this baby.” Blood patted the chuckling machine affectionately. “Gives you a fix a minute, accurate to within a mile.”

Wronowicz regarded it with suspicion. He distrusted anything you could not fix with a hammer. “Oh yeah? I always thought you used a Ouija board.”

“Get out of here, Wronkoffsky. There are people on this ship got to work, you know.”

“Tell me, Unc,” said Wronowicz. “You ever get crabs in your eyebrows?”

“In my
eyebrows?
No.”

“Lucky cocksucker.”

“Get out of here, Wronowicz. Go polish the propellers, or something.”

He escaped to the weather deck instead, aft of Mount 52, unwilling to go below again just yet. It was pleasant there, far above the waterline, in the light and wind. I don't come topside enough, he thought.

The rail was a steel balcony, swaying above the sea. Here the roar of the engines was a distant hum; the hollow crash of the bow wave was louder. It must be easy, he thought, standing your watches up here, to forget the oil-soaked bastards who labored like apprenticed devils far below. But the black gang made the ship go. They were the human energy turning the whirling shafts that drove this steel hive so smoothly over the face of the waves.…

The seas were coming from ahead, he saw, so that the bow dipped every few seconds, then lifted its head arrogantly again, like the bulls he had seen in Sevilla. He hoped they stayed on this course for a while. When they hit you from the beam these old destroyers rolled like pigs. They'd lost a couple of them in the Pacific in typhoons just from that, waves knocking them over so far the sea came down the stacks and doused the fires. He thought for a moment of going back to the chartroom, asking Blood what the weather looked like for the next few days, then decided not to. It would come whether he knew about it or not, and with this goddamn thing brewing—where the hell were they going anyway?—they would probably end up steaming around in the middle of a storm for weeks on end.

Callin came out on the wing, glanced down at him, but said nothing. He swept the horizon with his glasses and went back in. Wronowicz looked at the horizon, too. He saw nothing out there, only jaggedness, and then the blur of the edge of the world. Getting nearsighted, he thought. Have to start wearing glasses soon, like Chapman. The thought depressed him.

He leaned over the rail and watched the sea slide past. The white line of burble, where the smooth flow broke against the roughness of the hull. Stealing my power, he thought. Slowing me down. And the longer they stayed at sea the harder he would have to drive his engines to make thirty, then twenty-nine, then twenty-eight knots.…

Callin came out again, as he had known he would. “Captain's been talking about holding general quarters this evening,” he said. “Thought you might like to know. Get the men ready.”

“They're ready for drills, sir.” He watched the ensign hesitate, curious to see if his too-casual reply would provoke something. But this time it did not; Callin turned without saying anything more and went back inside. Wronowicz turned back to the sea.

Wronowicz, Callin, Foster, Jay, Steurnagel, even Blaney … he had a sudden unaccustomed image of the ship not as a ship, not as a mass of machinery with fire in its heart and electricity in its veins, but as a pyramid of men. The captain at its apex. Then the officers; then the chiefs, the ones who made it go. A multitude of hands, skilled and unskilled, adept and lazy, a cross section of the society that had built it in a shipyard noisy as the engineroom at speed. That had sent it here, to this far corner of the earth.

But to do what, in the end? To protect or punish whom? He read in the papers about arms shipments and wars, reprisals, juntas, international debt, and he did not understand what it was about, what it had to do with him. But somehow it did. For somehow he had helped send this machine and these men ten thousand miles, through pulling a lever every two years, like cranking his hopes and apprehensions into an engine-order telegraph so immense and ramified it took years to come up to speed or change its course.

He had no idea where they were going. But coming from the engine spaces as he did, everything down there logical, clear, laid out from the beginning in crackling blueprints, he had to believe that there was a good reason for it. The ship was machine, he and the others were men, but they were all parts of the larger machine that he himself had helped give motion and now maintained on its course forward to wherever those at the helm of state sent it.

Yeah. It had to make sense. Maybe not to Machinist's Mate Chief Wronowicz, he thought, but to somebody. He hoped it made sense to somebody.

He started thinking about the woman again then, and shortly thereafter went below.

11

Nicosia, Cyprus

The street was solid with sunlight and the smoky fumes of diesel buses. Pedestrians and tiny cars jostled shoulder to fender, making it hard to distinguish roadway from sidewalk. The bray of horns, the cries of street vendors, pressed inward to her faintly through a film of glass.

Susan Lenson hesitated in the air-conditioned cool of the hotel lobby. Shouting, arguing, singing, the bright swift life of the Mediterranean pulsed past, so foreign it fascinated, but so intense that it daunted her.

She had not expected this. Moira Lieberman's letters had been filled with scenery. The peach orchards of the Solea Valley; the secluded charm of the hills, where she was excavating a twelfth-century monastery. But that was an hour to the west. Here in the capital, for all the charm and solitude she could see, she and Nan could just as well have stayed in Rome.

When she swung the door open the afternoon sun hit her like a heated hammer. The air cut her breath off, clotting like cotton behind her tongue. She unlocked the car and looked back. The child was lagging back, looking stubborn. She shielded her eyes and studied her daughter.

At three Nancy Lenson was sturdy and compact, her brown eyes tarsier-solemn behind the glasses she had worn for a year now. Her way of silently inspecting people through them sometimes intimidated grown-ups. Her hair was the color of a chestnut horse, cut short except for a bang in front, and because of that and her stockiness—her mother worried sometimes about her weight—she had been mistaken more than once for a boy. She looked like one now, in the bib jeans and T-shirt Susan dressed her in for traveling. But today her solemnity was a scowl, and she looked drawn, her hair damp where it fell across her forehead.

“Bunny, are you feeling all right?”

“No,” said the little girl.

“Don't you want to go? Come on, baby. Let's jump in the car.”

“I don't wan' go anyplace. Can't we stay here? I want a Coke.”

“Damn—darn it, get in the car, Nan.” She reached for her daughter's arm, felt its heat as she bundled her into the blue Fiat she had rented at the airport. So hot … she paused to feel her daughter's forehead. Nan jerked away, whining, but she persisted, finally satisfying herself that though she was sweating it was only the sun. God, for her to get sick, that was all she needed. Already she half-regretted coming to the island.

But Cyprus had been so ruggedly lovely, from the air.…

She and Nan had arrived the day before, on an Air Greece flight out of Athens. It had finally become impossible to stay with the other wives. They meant well. But they were too—she searched for a word in place of “dull”—too conventional. Too safe.

And they were always
there.
There were five in their group, she and Alicia from the staff, the other three wives of the
Guam
's middle-grade officers; and they were all older than she. For most of them this was their third or fourth trip to the Med, and they wanted to revisit the places they knew. They wanted to buy jewelry or lace or clothes, dicker for hours with shopkeepers, and eat. Nan was the only child, and although the other women praised Susan for bringing her, she had the feeling that they thought she was wrong, that at some level they resented it.

There was no question that it was harder with her along. You had to watch her and cater to her, and Nan, though she was generally as good as you could expect a child of her age to be, didn't like strange foods (except for
gelati
). Susan had thought it all through months before, though. Nan would start kindergarten soon. This would be their only chance to travel for a long time, and she felt it would be good for both of them.

The other wives also made remarks about Susan's studying, and she, in turn, thought they were empty-headed. Oh, she knew that was unfair, they were all nice, but most of them did nothing but keep house, although Alicia was a librarian. They could share her fascination with cathedrals and museums; they liked to feel “arty” occasionally, but when she proposed renting a van and driving off to some obscure village in the hills to look at a dig they begged off. They would rather shop.