by Herman Wouk
Aster yelled down the hatch, “All ahead flank! Right full rudder!”
“Five miles,” Byron said. “Unless he zigzags, he’s made it.”
“Why? We can overtake him.”
Byron turned to peer at him. “You mean on the surface?”
Aster jerked his thumb up at the low thick cloud cover. “What kind of air searches can they be running in this?”
“Lady, those freighters took evasive action. There’s probably a full submarine alert on. You’ve got to assume that that freighter’s been reporting his course, speed, and position all night, and that planes are in the area.”
“Steady on one seven five!” Aster called.
Byron persisted, “They can swarm down like bees through any break in the clouds. What’s more, we don’t even know that they haven’t got airborne radar.”
The submarine was heeling and speeding up. Green water came crashing over the low forecastle, dousing everyone on the bridge with spray. Aster grinned at Byron, patted his arm, and snuffed the air. “Great morning, hey? Sound the happy hunting horn.”
“Listen, we’re still in the shipping lane, Lady. Plenty of other targets will be coming along. Let’s submerge.”
“That freighter’s our pigeon, Briny. We’ve been tracking him all night, and we’re going to get him.”
The surface chase lasted almost an hour. The lighter the day grew, the more nervous Byron felt, though the clouds stayed low and solid overhead. They came close to overtaking the freighter, close enough to confirm that it was certainly the same ship. Byron never saw the planes. He heard Mullen yell, “Aircraft dead astern, coming in low” and another, “Aircraft on the port—” The rest was drowned out in the stutter, whine, and zing! of many bullets. He threw himself on the deck, and as he did so a monstrous explosion almost broke his eardrums. Water showered over him; the heavy splash from a close miss, a bomb or a depth charge.
“Take her down! Dive, dive, dive!” Aster bawled.
Bullets went pinging all over the wallowing ship. The sailors and officers, staggering and leaping for the hatch, one by one dropped through in a rapid automatic routine. Within seconds the conning tower was crowded with the dripping deck watch.
BAMMMM!
Another close miss. Very close.
RAT-TAT-TAT! PING! PING! A hail of bullets topside. Solid water flooded down through the open hatch, sloshing all over the deck, wetting Byron to his knees.
“The captain! Where’s the captain?” he bellowed.
As though in answer, an anguished voice shouted out on the deck, “BYRON, I’M HIT! I CAN’T MAKE IT! TAKE HER DOWN!”
Stunned for an instant, then wildly glancing around, Byron shouted at the crew, “Anybody else missing?”
“Horseshoes is dead, Mr. Henry,” the quartermaster yelled at him. “He’s out on the cigarette deck. He got it in the face. I tried to bring him down, but he’s dead.”
Byron roared. “Captain, I’m coming up for you!” He darted into the water showering down the ladder and began to climb.
“Byron, I’m paralyzed. I can’t move!” Aster’s voice was a cracking scream. “You can’t help me. There’s five planes diving at this ship. TAKE HER DOWN!”
BAMM!
The Moray rolled far over to starboard.
A torrent of salt water cascaded through the hatch, flooding up against control instruments. Sparks flew in smoke and sudden stink. The crewmen were slipping and stumbling about in swirling water, white-rimmed eyes on Byron as he desperately calculated the time he would need to fight his way topside and drag the paralyzed captain to safety. In this attack, probably in seconds, the Moray would almost surely be lost with all hands.
“Take her down, Byron! I’m done for. I’m dying.” Aster’s voice was fading.
Byron thrust himself up the ladder against the foaming waterfall in a last effort to climb out. He could not do it. With terrific exertion he barely succeeded in slamming the hatch shut. Drenched, coughing salt water, his voice breaking with grief, he gave his first order in command of a submarine.
“Take her to three hundred feet!”
The only knell for Captain Aster was the sound he perhaps loved best, though nobody could know whether he heard it.
A-OOOGHA…A-OOOGHA…A-OOOGHA…
72
THE WHITE HOUSE
October 1,1943
Dear Pug:
Bill Standley has come home singing your praises. I am ever so grateful for all you’ve gotten done over there.
Now I have asked Harry to write the attached letter to you. At least it will get you out of Moscow! You have a feeling for facts, so please take on this job and do what you can. A cable about Tehran very soon would be much appreciated.
By the way, we are launching several splendid new battleships nowadays. One will be for you, as soon as we can shake you loose.
FDR
THIS was scrawled on one sheet of the familiar pale green notepaper. Hopkins’s typewritten letter was much longer.
Dear Pug:
You’ve certainly been doing some grand work with the Russians. Thanks to your survey of shuttle-bombing sites the Joint Chiefs’ planners are already working on the Poltava idea. General Fitzgerald wrote me a fine letter about you, and I sent the Bureau of Personnel a copy. Also, getting our servicemen’s hospital and rest center finished up at Murmansk was a triumph over the ways of their bureaucracy. I’m told it has improved convoy morale.
Now about the forthcoming heads of state conference: Stalin won’t travel farther than Tehran, just south of his Caucasus frontier. He claims he has to stay in close touch with his military situation. Whether that’s true, or he’s being coy, or worrying about his prestige we can’t tell, but he absolutely will not budge on this.
The President will travel almost anywhere to get this damnable war won, but Tehran poses a constitutional snag. If Congress passes a bill he wants to veto, he has to do this with his own hand in ten days, or it automatically becomes law. A cabled or telephoned veto won’t work. Tehran is reachable from Washington in less than ten days, with all equipment pushing in fair weather. But we’re told Tehran weather is unpredictable and horrendous. We’re also told it’s not all that bad. Nobody around here seems to know much about Persia. To Washington types it’s like the moon.
I suggested that you fly down there, look around, ask some questions, and shoot us a word on the weather prospects at the end of November, and on the security angle too, since we hear the place crawls with Axis spies. Also, the President is fortifying himself with facts and figures for talking with Stalin, and Lend-Lease is bound to come up. We have sheaves of reports, but we could use a good eyewitness account of how things are really going in the Persian supply corridor. Unlike most report-writers you have no axe to grind!
General Connolly is the man in charge at our Amirabad base outside Tehran. He’s a good man, an old Army engineer. I knew him well years ago when I headed the WPA and he handled some big construction projects. I have cabled him about you. Connolly will give you a rapid tour of our Lend-Lease port facilities, rail and truck routes, factories, and depots. You can ask any questions, go anywhere, talk to anybody. The President will want to see you before he meets Stalin; and if you can sum up your observations on one sheet of paper that will be a real help.
Incidentally, the landing craft problem has now reached a critical stage, as I foresaw. It’s the strangling bottleneck of all our strategic plans. Production is increasing, but it could be a lot better. However, you’ll soon be returning to your first love, the sea. The President is aware that you feel like a stranded whale.
Yours,
Harry Hopkins
The letters came as a cheering reprieve. Admiral Standley had not lasted long after his outburst; Harriman had succeeded him, bringing a large military mission headed by a three-star general, which spelled the end of Victor Henry’s job. But as yet he had received no orders, and he was beginning to think BuPers had lost track of him. Moscow was agai
n snowbound. He had not heard from Rhoda or his children in months. At last he could escape from the boredom of Spaso House talk, the bitching of the frustrated vodka-soaked American newspapermen, and the unfriendly deviousness and obduracy of the Russian bureacrats. The same afternoon that he got the letters he was on a Russian military plane to Kuibyshev, thanks to a last assist from General Yevlenko. Next day General Connolly met Pug at the airport, put him up in his own quarters on the huge newly built base in the desert, served him venison for dinner, and over coffee and brandy handed him an itinerary that made him blink.
“It’ll take you a week or so,” said Connolly, a bluff West Pointer in his sixties who bit out rapid words, “but then you’ll have something to tell old Harry Hopkins. What we’re doing here is sheer lunacy. One country, the U.S.A., is trying to deliver stuff to another country, the USSR, under the control, or rather interference, of a third country, England, through the territory of a fourth country, Persia, where none of us have any goddamned business being. And —”
“You lose me. Why should England interfere?”
“You’re new to the Middle East.” Connolly blew out an exasperated breath. “Let me try to explain. The British are here by right of invasion and occupation, see? So are the Russians. They partitioned this country by armed force back in 1941, so as to suppress German activity here. That was the reason given, anyhow. Now, follow me carefully. We have no right to be here, because we haven’t invaded Persia. See? Clear as mud, what? Theoretically we’re merely helping the British help Russia. The striped-pants boys are still dingdonging about all that. Meantime we’re just shoving the goods through any old way, insofar as the Limeys will let us, and the Persians don’t steal it, and the Russkis will come and get it. It keeps piling sky-high in the Soviet depots.”
“It does? But in Moscow they keep screaming for more.”
“Naturally. That has nothing to do with their own transport foul-up. It’s monumental. I had to call an eight-day rail embargo back in August, till they came and took away a mountain of stuff at the northern railhead. Once their pilots, drivers, and railroad men get out of the workers’ paradise they tend to linger outside. Being fresh from Moscow, you probably can’t understand that.”
“Beats me.” They grinned tart American grins at each other. Pug said, “I also have to look into the weather here.”
“What about the weather?”
As Pug described the President’s legal difficulty, General Connolly’s face wrinkled in a pained frown. “Are you kidding? Why didn’t somebody ask me? The weather’s changeable, and the dust storms are a nuisance, sure. But we’ve had maybe two scheduled military flights held up all year. He and Stalin must be playing games. Stalin wants to make him come all the way to his back fence, and the Great White Father is standing on his dignity. I hope he sticks to that. Old Joe should move his tail himself. Russians don’t admire people they can shove around.”
“General, there’s a lot of ignorance about Persia in Washington.”
“Christ, you said a mouthful. Well, look, even assuming big winter storms at both ends” — Connolly scratched his head with a hand holding a thick smoking cigar — “that bill he might want to veto could be delivered to Tunis in five days, and we could fly him there in a B-24. He’d go there and back and miss maybe one day here. It’s not a real problem.”
“Well, I’ll cable all that to Hopkins. I have to check into security here, too.”
“No sweat, I’ll give you the whole drill. How’s your backgammon game?” Connolly asked, pouring more brandy for both of them.
Pug had played a lot of acey-deucey over the years. He beat the general two games running, and was winning the third when Connolly said, looking up at him from the board and half-closing one eye, “Say, Henry, we have a mutual acquaintance, don’t we?”
“Who?”
“Hack Peters.” At Pug’s blank look he elaborated, “Colonel Harrison Peters, Engineers. Class of 1913. Big tall guy, bachelor.”
“Oh, right. I met him at the Army-Navy Club.”
Connolly heavily nodded. “He wrote me about this Navy captain who was Harry Hopkins’s boy in Moscow. Now here we meet in this godforsaken neck of the woods. Small world.”
Pug played on without further comment, and lost. The general happily folded away the elegantly inlaid board and the ivory counters. “Hack’s working on something that can end this war overnight. He’s cagey about it, but it’s the biggest job the Army engineers have ever tackled.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Bedding down in the chilly desert night on an austere Army-issue bed under three coarse blankets, Pug wondered what Colonel Peters could have written about him, after meeting him for a casual raucous hour of drinking champagne and wearing paper hats at a club table. Rhoda had mentioned Peters now and then as a church acquaintance. A possible connection with Palmer Kirby through the uranium bomb crossed Pug’s mind, giving him a sick ugly qualm. After all, why had Rhoda’s letters ceased? Communication with Moscow was difficult, but possible. Three silent months… His fatigue and the brandy helped him blot out these thoughts in sleep.
General Connolly’s itinerary called for Pug to traverse Iran, south to north, by railroad and truck convoy; a man from the British legation, Granville Seaton, would go along partway on the train trip. The truck convoys were an all-American show to back up the railroad, which suffered — so Connolly said — from sabotage, washouts, pilfering, breakdowns, collisions, hijacking raids, and the general inefficiency built in by the Germans, and compounded by Persian and British mismanagement.
“Granville Seaton really knows the whole Persian setup,” said Connolly. “He’s a history scholar, a strange duck, but worth listening to. He loves bourbon. I’ll give you some Old Crow to pack along.”
On the flight down to Abadan the small plane was too noisy for talk. In the long sweaty tour of an astonishingly large American airplane assembly plant on the desolate seaside flats, where the temperature must have been well over a hundred degrees, Granville Seaton trudged alongside Pug and the factory manager, smoking and saying nothing. Then they drove up to Bandar Shahpur, the rail terminal on the Persian Gulf. Seaton chatted over their dinner at a British officers’ mess, but the flutey sing-song words came out so blurry and strangled that he might as well have been talking Persian. Pug had never seen a man smoke so much. Seaton himself looked rather smoked; dried-out, brownish, weedy, with a wide gap between large yellow upper front teeth. Pug had the fancy that if injured the man would bleed brown as a tobacco stain.
Next day at breakfast Pug produced the bottle of Old Crow. At this Seaton smiled like a boy. “Most decadent,” he said, and held out his water glass.
The single-track railway crossed dead salt flats and twisted up toward dead mountains. Seen from an airplane the barrenness of this country was bad enough, but from a train window it was worse. No brush grew, miles without end; sand, sand, sand. The train halted to take on another diesel locomotive, and they got off to stretch their legs. Not so much as a jackrabbit or a lizard moved on the sand. Only flies swarmed.
“This may have been the actual garden of Eden,” Seaton suddenly spoke up. “It could be again, given water, energy, and a people to work the ground. But Iran lies on this landscape inert as a jellyfish on a rock. You Americans could help. And you had better.”
They got back aboard. Clanking and groaning, the train ascended a rocky gorge on a hairpin-turning roadbed. Seaton unwrapped Spam sandwiches, and Pug brought out the Old Crow.
“What should we do about Iran?” Pug asked, pouring bourbon into paper cups.
“Save her from the Russians,” replied Seaton. “Either because you’re as altruistic and anti-imperialist as you say, or because you’d rather not see the Soviet Union come out of this war dominating the earth.”
“Dominating the earth?” Pug asked skeptically. “Why? How?”
“The geography.” Seaton drank bourbon, giving Pug a severe stare. “That’s t
he key. The Iranian plateau bars Russia from warm-water ports. So she’s landlocked half the year. Also bars her from India. Lenin hungrily called India the depot of the world. Said it was the main prize of his policy in Asia. But Persia, jammed by a thoughtful Providence against the Caucasus like a huge plug, holds back the Bear. It’s as big as all western Europe, and mostly it’s harsh mountains and salt deserts, such as you’re looking at. The people are wild mountain tribes, nomads, feudal villagers, wily lowlanders, all very independent and unmanageable.” His paper cup was empty. Pug quickly poured more bourbon. “Ah, thank you. The prime truth of modern Persian history, Captain, is simply this and remember it: Russia’s enemy is Iran’s friend. That’s been the British role since 1800. Though on the whole we’ve bungled it, and come off as perfidious Albion.”
The train howled into a long inky tunnel. When it clattered back into the sunglare, Seaton was toying with his empty paper cup. Pug refilled it. “Ah, lovely.”
“Perfidious Albion, you were saying.”
“Just so. You see, from time to time we’ve needed Russia’s help in Europe — against Napoleon, against the Kaiser, and now against Hitler — and each time we’ve had to turn a blind eye to Persia, and the Bear each time has seized the chance to claw off a chunk. While we were allied against Napoleon, the Czar snatched the whole Caucasus. The Persians fought to regain their land, but we couldn’t support them just then, so they had to quit. That’s how Russia happens to possess the Baku and Maikop oil fields.”
“All this,” said Pug, “is complete news to me.”
“Well, the tale gets sorrier. In 1907, when Kaiser Bill was getting nasty, we needed Russia in Europe again. The Kaiser was probing the Middle East with his Berlin-Baghdad railway, so we and the Russians partitioned Persia: sphere of influence in the north for them, in the south for us, with a neutral desert belt in between. Quite without consulting the Persians. And now again we’ve divided the country by armed invasion. Not pretty, but the Shah was decidedly pro-German, and we had to do it to secure our Middle East position. Still, one can’t blame the Shah, can one? From his viewpoint, Hitler was striking at the two powers who’ve gnawed at Persia north and south for a century and a half.”