The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  “Yes, sir. It’s understood.” Still a slightly sullen note. Never mind. He had got the word. Then, just as I had thought the matter finished, it hit me squarely in the face.

  “Captain, we want to participate in the decision.”

  I turned on him in as strong an anger as I had ever felt, or shown, since becoming a ship’s captain.

  “‘Participate’? ‘We’?”

  So it had gone this far. I waited a moment for the thing to settle in me, that inward hardness which, long since, entirely reflexive by now, had become my armament in extreme confrontation, every idea of indulgence toward this officer vanished.

  “Listen well, Mr. Chatham.” I could hear my own voice, quiet, cold, in the sudden hush, the deadly taut atmosphere, as if even the sea herself, always curious as to such developments in her domain, had paused to listen. “I intend for there to be not the slightest misunderstanding. As to ‘participate.’ This ship will continue to have a captain. He will reach his decisions as Navy ship’s captains do. With such counsel from ship’s officers as he feels needed, receiving it in the way it is always offered: when he asks for it. As to the ‘we’: I do not wish to know their names. But you may take that word back to them. The affairs of the ship will continue to be conducted in the manner just described. If all that is clear then let us speak no more of it. Do you understand me?”

  Out of the dark the simply monotonic, the voice of the subordinate returned, still sounding no more than the requisite. “As you say, sir. I understand you.”

  “Good night, Mr. Chatham.”

  “Good night, Captain.”

  Dismissed, he disappeared into the darkness forward.

  * * *

  I stayed awhile, the extra heartbeat receding before the assurance of the ship under me taking on the rising waters. Now the elements began to unfold for my pleasure a modest, unthreatening display of weather, nothing for her to worry about, the ship dipping into the deepening valleys of the sea, each time with a faint shudder that moved up through her keel, up through the spaces of the ship to the weather decks, up through my legs, my body. I could hear above and forward the wind slapping the halyards and see the glow of the running lights leading us on into the night. The rhythmic sound of the ship’s foghorn reaching down from the bridge—the routineness of the precaution, as if beyond the mists there was another ship closing on us, stabbing me like a physical pain. And suddenly I knew. Knew as surely as I stood there looking at the throbbing, lightning-illuminated sea, that Chatham was implicated. Deceit has almost a scent to it. No, not just that. Factiousness. Even the Jesuit had hinted as much. And putting all the signals together, an immense foreboding seized me; some disturbing and threatening element had come aboard, involving the CSO in some inexplicable manner. And the further thought, sending an icy chill crawling up and down my spine: If Chatham had been bold enough to approach me thus, argue with me as to the possibility of the impossible, what had he been saying to the others? Implanting hope for a place where all hope was gone? Prodding their thinking and their desires toward the most perilous and heartbreaking of expectations concerning their very home? Cruel this was.

  Big foaming seas had begun to come out of the blackness, the ship responding each time with a tremor, readily conforming, adjusting, my face wetted by the salt spray, seeming to clear my mind to see into the truth of things in this solipsistic darkness: the ship more and more becoming split into opposing camps; the shores of the Mediterranean continuing to signal us their refusal to offer safe habitation, the hard consequent fact that, barring still possible changes in that respect, at Suez we would have to commit ourselves, never looking back, to one of the two choices available as to course; despite anything that Chatham had put about or that any others of ship’s company might have led themselves independently to believe, that we were compelled to do one, fuel and food supplies dictating we could not do both—any seaman apprentice who used his head could figure that one out. Those who could not were simply identifying wish with fact: This tendency I accepted as natural in men and was one reason, among others, that it had never occurred to me seriously to consider any such notion as putting the matter to a vote.

  I had long since come to terms with the possibility, even probability, that in the case of one of the two courses, should I decide on it, the loyalty to myself of the most faithful and unswerving of men might well be put to the severest test. Refusal, if I should issue it despite whatever opposition, to obey a lawful order. An effort even to take the ship. Nothing could be ruled out. In my mind I could even understand it, told the awful finality of what the men would have to be told. Men informed they would never see home again: Who could predict how it would take them? An understanding which did not for one moment admit the possibility of allowing it to succeed. My resolve lay in the confidence in my ability to control it well before it reached any such state; to reason, to persuade, drawing on the trust I felt resided in them toward their captain; the decision set forth to them in that firm mastery which traditionally had brought obedience from sailors in the direst of circumstances, ships being able to function in no other known manner; yet knowing that simply to command, to give an order, was no longer enough. I must compel belief from them by what came down to an absolute moral assurance on my part (the Jesuit was right in that): my way at least offering hope, if against odds; the other guaranteeing disaster, no odds at all. Our fate had always seemed to me to rest absolutely on our remaining united, a band of brothers. Nothing in my thinking took into account that the lines would be rigidly drawn, certainly not to the extent of either group having a leader, and he an officer. That brought a sense of authentic fear, of a foreboding greatly enhanced that it should be this particular officer; the last officer I should wish to discover at that work, for the simple reason that, as I have remarked, short only of the captain he is the most powerful officer aboard. Combat systems officer. As such, the most potentially dangerous of officers in circumstances, if remote, still not at all hard to imagine as possibilities in our near future. I was allowed to hope that the admonitions just delivered would have effect, stop in its tracks a movement already clearly underway; I would be an idiot to count on it.

  I heard the ship under me, its very sound seeming to remind me of the true seat of my concern: the ship herself. The fact that we ourselves were such a stupendously dangerous device, racked up in magazines not far below where I stood 44 Tomahawks, each carrying a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead, a capability of destructiveness even I had really never attempted to comprehend; this infinite instrument able to go anywhere, do anything, now beyond any control other than that of the people aboard her. Yes, the truth was this: All of my anxiety, my dread, immense and profound, lay in not wanting another to gain dominion over this force, least of all an officer like Chatham, trusting no one but myself with such power. There it was.

  From the rising sea I could feel now and then a tossed-off spray touching my face; refreshing, freeing up, it seemed, the full faculties I now brought to bear as I undertook quietly to assess the circumstance, even allowing myself to stretch it to its extreme limits. I was positioned by the lifeline aft, a matter of feet away from the after missile launcher. Due perhaps in part to its proximity, I had for the first time a thought that sent through me a wave of shock quite unlike any I had ever experienced in regard to the ship and the people on it, or any one of them, relating to a matter I have touched on, my growing concern over the fact that Chatham held, jointly with myself, the key to the missiles themselves, and to the devices that would send them off . . . the mind halted, made a movement, opened a door, permitting something quite terrible to enter, an errant and wild thought of what might happen if they should fall into the hands of one bent—for whatever reason or cause, fancied or real enemies, madness, revenge upon the human race itself or what might be left of it if you took the ship across the seas looking for these remnants . . . Perhaps the thought itself was the truly mad thing; but perhaps not, one often hardly knew of late, the rational an
d the aberrant sometimes seeming separated by a line thin as a human hair: The mind had presented only what was after all factually, insofar as we had knowledge of it, a largely accomplished matter. What remained might be viewed as merely a mopping-up operation . . . of the species . . . Chatham, for instance—I had not the slightest doubt of this—would have blown that Russian sub out of the water . . . All doors now opened, I even remembered once, in some random wardroom conversation, his saying, “I am glad to be a member of the generation that will see the last of the human race,” a remark taken so unseriously at the time, viewed by all who heard as intended as shock treatment—perhaps Chatham angry at some mechanical problem aboard ship in his complex charges, the missiles, all of this long forgotten. Now suddenly even that surely ridiculous remark came back to repeat itself to me—preposterous that I should think of it just now; not able for a moment to bring myself to believe he, any man, could believe that literally. Still, the mind, recalling it, filled with a kind of distortion, a madness of its own . . .

  The mind stepped back from the horror, slammed the door: but not before imbedding in me an idea untainted by the slightest doubt, cold as truth could be, felt now infinitely more sharply, frighteningly, than before: I would not want the missiles . . . weaponry I had even considered jettisoning, an impossibility without the collaboration of his key, no way even to get them off the ship without it, something he was certain never to give; his more than touch of arrogance I had long felt could itself be traced to his feeling of proprietorship as to the missiles . . . I would not want them under the governance of Lieutenant Commander Chatham. After the initial brutal impact of the idea, with surely its excesses, this I judged not excessive at all. Though I tried to put it away. To no avail: It was to hang on, never to leave me, try as I did to make it do so. Rather to increase: myself to come in rather a short time almost to wish for some act on his part (Was it this? Was I actually hoping he would undertake to lead a party against my choice as to course?) that would justify my separating him from his key: the fact of our keys canceling each other, one impotent without the other, somehow seeming no longer adequate protection—if I was considering going after his, it was not a difficult step to imagine his contemplating going after mine; the first time, too, for that terrible thought.

  The mind halted, came to a full stop; aware that such imaginings, whatever their portion of truth, themselves could become the true danger. I looked up at the heavens. The clouds had opened up a small space, just sufficient to permit a handful of brave stars to gaze tremulously down, their abrupt appearance, sparkling as a cluster of diamonds on a black field, immediately somehow lifting my spirits. In their glow I reminded myself that we had not given up all hope on the Mediterranean. Some time back Selmon, in view of the absence of life on the beaches, had suggested a land foray of a kind not yet undertaken to establish perhaps conclusively the facts there, one way or the other. Involving a not inconsiderable personal risk, hence a risk for the ship, in his being such an indispensable officer, which had made me wish to think it over and to postpone decision. Now I decided to turn him loose on it tomorrow. It was something we had to know.

  With the conversation with the CSO I ceased my nightly rovings and returned to the traditional calm austerity, and a certain remoteness, of a ship’s captain. Just as well. Applicable to the ships that traverse the great oceans, there stands a small handful of rules, known to all mariners from times the most ancient, so validated by the centuries, on vessels of every description, ship’s companies of every origin, as to be immutable. Among these is that which states that the concept that some favorable result is to be achieved by a ship’s captain’s efforts to draw closer to his men through so-called familiarity, by an effort to diminish the distance between them which the all-knowing sea herself has long ago decreed, is but the most naïve of myths, in fact dangerous in the first magnitude to the ship’s very functioning, not least to the welfare of the men themselves, and the captain who attempts it a fool. If anything, the law held more firmly in our circumstance than ever. Men are to be commanded; and to be loved.

  * * *

  As stated, I had no intention of majority rule in the matter, not the remotest thought of instituting some shipboard seagoing plebiscitary system; the whole notion foolish in the extreme, perilous as a thing could be. But now, considering the possibility that I may have gone too far in my estimate of his potential for bringing disaster upon us; considering above all that unforgiving precept that a ship’s captain, in his sovereignty, his power, in the absence of the normal checks and balances that restrain men, carries in him by these very essentials of his position more capacity for being wrong than perhaps in any trade men follow and therefore must never forget that he may be . . . reminding myself of these verities, very soon I found myself actually having a look at Chatham’s proposal. Of allowing ship’s company to make this one decision on the moral idea that they had a right to decide something so irreversible as to their own future lives. For the first time since assuming command of this ship, I considered in all seriousness letting them do so. Nothing could have been more strange, the very act, the mechanics of it, so contrary to the world of ships and of sea life. How in the name of heaven would you go about it—call for a showing of hands, with the majority to rule? Even the visualizing of it made it seem a ludicrous thing: sailors raising their hands while the captain counts them as in some sort of town meeting voting whether they wished to do this instead of that. Its only virtue—and a compelling one—appeared to be that it was the one certain way of forestalling any possible revolt in the crew: They could hardly object to a course chosen by themselves. But on further consideration, even this supposed advantage appeared to have its inbuilt fallacy.

  What if the vote were close? You would then have a ship split against itself. I was far from sure ship’s company would even want to make the decision: Among other things it would force each hand to declare himself before his shipmates, the divisiveness then a known and permanent thing, brought starkly out in the open. Shipmates thereafter working alongside one another knowing that there existed a profound disagreement among themselves as to the most fundamental of matters: where the ship was taking them. A ship divided on such an issue: I could taste, as surely as I could tell the movements of stars, her pernicious fruits. Bitterness, rancor, dripping so into that incessant immensity of tasks, navigation, engineering, and the rest of it that constitute proper shiphandling, as to threaten the ship at every turn in a world that has always been constructed on the principle of unquestioned one-man rule: orders, commands, decisively given by the captain and obeyed unhesitatingly by all others aboard, men and officers alike. This at a time that called for men working together to the utmost, shipmates toward a goal desperate enough of achievement even so.

  As I continued to think on the matter, so many other objections presented themselves as to seem unending. To be allowed to make this decision might make them wish to make further ones; control of the ship and the course she should take slipping through the captain’s hands, and at the very moment, fuel and food headed inexorably toward the zero point, that we commenced our most perilous times. A ship soon to be without a rudder. I would not myself wish to be on such a vessel even as the lowliest seaman; would flee from her as from a death ship.

  And the final and greatest argument of all: They might make the wrong decision, based on false sentiments, unrealistic hopes; based on the wish that matters were a certain way, rather than on what they were; feeling confident I, the captain, could and would in the end turn away from such lures; much less certain that a diverse body of men given such authority would do the same.

  No. I would make this decision as I made all others; fully aware that that method also was not without risk; it not being inconceivable that those against whose preference the decision fell might go so far as to rise up. I did not believe so. But whether it should happen or not: No weight must the prospect be granted. For a sea captain, that a course having been chosen by him as in
his view the sole right one, has really no choice but to march into it; simply put, do the duty and take the burden that are lawfully his alone to carry out, his alone to bear.

  7

  The Animals

  Each day, it seems, I gain respect for his knowledge. No radar, no sonar, none of the ship’s supremely sophisticated devices for forecasting an enemy’s approach are of the slightest account here. The fineness of his judgments, telling us where we can go and where we cannot, defining what we can do at a place and for how long, what we can pick up in our foragings and what we must leave be, however useful to our future . . . Lieutenant (jg) Selmon is showing himself an officer of very high professionalism. His vocation is the new priesthood. We do nothing without first obtaining his approval—his blessing. Even the distance off we cruise—inshore or actually out of sight of all land—is determined by his calculations.

  Remembering the time, seeming so far back now, when quite a number of the learned felt they could predict with fair accuracy what would happen: The truth now stands clear that they had known virtually nothing of what they were talking about. In actual practice the nature of radioactive fallout turns out to be a matter of infinite, ever-changing complexities, of obscurity and treachery, of chimeras and realities, and the everlasting, mind-devouring difficulty of determining one from the other. A great deal, perhaps the major part of it, having to do with the winds, with currents of air—these, as any sailor knows, being the most permutable, undivinable of forces even in normal conditions, the importance of this fact tyrannically multiplied now that they have become the transportation system of our foe. The winds dictate now, deciding where the deadly substances shall go, and how much of them, and where they shall not; all of this deviable and unpredictable in the entire, the fancies, the mercuriality, the conceits of these deities of the atmosphere determining in great measure our every act and intention, what place it is not safe to be at all, what place it is safe to be for one hour, and what place for four. All of them at times existent in a narrow range of geography, sometimes a matter of only miles apart, and their individual statuses as to safety and peril constantly varying with the arrival of new atmospheric cargo, or even departure of the old, as the winds may decide. The one characteristic they have in common is that there is some contamination everywhere, enough so that no land we have yet approached permits us an indefinite stay, all proffering a hospitality measured at the most in hours. Every day we stand in to scan and test the shore and then return to sea where we wash down the ship with the system designed to seek out and send overboard whatever particles she may have attracted. It works well, Selmon’s radiac shows. But even at sea we constantly run into “pockets” of the toxicant (perhaps brought there by winds, then stalled by sudden windlessness)—the radiac is always manned, as much so as are the ship’s helm, her radar, her sonar—and have to scoot out of them and once more wash the ship down.