by David Poyer
Dan fetched up against the helm and clung to it, looking out. The deckedge lights were still moving by above them, like a train on a high trestle. Then they were gone. The deck shuddered. Another explosion came from aft, a deep detonation that rattled the windows. The ship swayed back to vertical, then reeled to starboard with sickening ease. The deck took on a backward slant.
“Abandon ship,” the boatswain was yelling into the mike. But it was dead.
“Knock that off,” said Dan.
“Sir, we got to get off her—”
He ran to the port side. The carrier loomed abeam of them, a black cliff higher than their masttop. He craned aft over the splinter shield. Kerosene reeked the air. Flames were beginning to shoot up, with crackling rapid bangs, all along the asroc deck and down to the waterline. He saw a dark mass astern of them, not burning, but lit by the flames. It took a long time, two seconds perhaps, before he understood that it was the aft half of the Ryan.
When Dan turned back to the bridge he found the captain on the wing, looking aft. His pipe was still in his mouth. The OOD was with him, standing straight, both hands on his binoculars. “Abandon ship, sir?” Dan shouted above the rising roar of fire. The ship lurched again, settling, and the slant steepened.
“She never responded to the emergency bell,” said Packer. His face was emotionless in the growing firelight.
“She’s cut in two aft, Captain.”
“All right. Do it. Get the order around the ship by word of mouth. Let’s get as many off as we can.”
Lenson found himself on the main deck. He did not recall the process of getting there. Men shoved past him. He could see their faces clearly now in the glare from aft. Naked from the waist up, a man threw his legs over the lines and dropped, running in the air. “Abandon ship,” Dan shouted, fighting his way in the direction of the fire. He heard them repeating it as he left them.
The flames were coming up from the after deckhouse, licking swiftly forward. Their tips fluttered in the wind like bright pennants. He thought for a moment the metal itself was burning. The smoke was choking and he could feel the heat on his face.
He got abreast of the asroc launcher and then was forced back toward a hatch by smoke. Sailors pushed by him, going the wrong way. He shouted at them and grabbed their clothes but they tore away and went on. Lifejackets littered the deck, soft under his feet, like haunted houses where you pretend you are walking on bodies. The deck was bright as noon, lit by an immense soaring pyre, slanted by the wind, shedding sparks at its apex. The sea was burning behind it. He turned and looked upward at the bridge, expecting to see the captain still there. But the wing was empty.
Almost helplessly he turned again, like a moth in a forest fire, toward the mountain of flame. It occurred to him it was time he thought of abandoning. His assigned raft? No, it was in the heart of the fire. The bow would be best. He ran forward.
On the fo’c’sle a knot of sailors, moving with no particular hurry, were dumping lifejackets out of a locker. He selected one and began strapping it on. His hands were shaking. He tried the waterproof light pinned to the vest. It didn’t work. Fortunately there were plenty of mae wests. He pulled two lights off them and stuck them in his pockets.
The bow was rising slowly. “You’d better get in the water,” Dan said to the sailors. “If she goes down sudden she may suck us under. Jump in and swim clear.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The men did not seem frightened, but neither did they move to obey. He picked up a lifejacket and threw it at one of them. “Get over the side,” he said again, and waited, eyes on the man, till he began buckling it on.
He threw his legs over the lifeline and looked down.
The sea was black, with highlights of fire. Heads bobbed here and there, faces bright, looking strangely peaceful. His hands gripped the lifeline. He tried to make them let go but they would not. “Jesus,” he said aloud, “I’ve got to get off this thing.”
He cast a glance aft. More men, black cutouts against the brilliance, were leaping now. He saw one hit on his stomach and disappear. The firesound was enormous but cheerful, like a big bonfire at a picnic. Someone was screaming above it.
The lifeline was biting into them, but his fingers would not let go. He pleaded silently with them and suddenly, to his surprise, they released. He teetered for a moment on the sheer strake and then kicked away weakly and plunged feetfirst into the sea.
The impact burst breath from him and icy water filled his mouth. He clawed at the darkness but it was the lifejacket that brought him up. He bobbed, panting with the shock of cold. The side of the ship was an arm’s-length away. A man hurtled over him and hit within spitting distance, sending cold spray into his face.
He began swimming then, starting instinctively with a dog paddle, then a crawl. The lifejacket dragged at him maddeningly. He swam as hard as he could for three dozen strokes and then was exhausted. He turned on his back and let the lifejacket hold him up and looked back at his ship.
Her forward half floated bow high, the deck listed toward him. She had moved. Still a little way left on her, then. From the forward stack aft a solid pyramid of white flame ran down along the sides, eating into the sea. Patches of inky darkness showed between the fires on the water. A few were still jumping and he saw one fat man in skivvy shorts standing calmly by the rail, looking out. Dan lifted his arm and turned the face of his watch to the flame. Only a few minutes had passed since the collision.
He became conscious now of the men around him. Some were shouting but most were quiet, tossed up and down by the four-foot seas. A few had turned on their lights. A sailor he did not recognize called out, “Think she’ll float, Mr. Lenson?”
“Not much longer,” Dan shouted back.
“She looks buoyant. Fire’ll get her first.”
“Maybe,” he shouted.
Good God, the sea was cold. He kicked his feet a few times and the numbness retreated. He was still looking at the man, trying to recall who he was, when the Ryan exploded.
He was in a tunnel of flame. It roared up on both sides, choking him with smoke and heated air. He could not breathe. When he raised his hands he saw that they were black with oil.
A strange thing happened to him then. He was drifting in a sea of fire, but at the same time he could see the whole bright circle on the sea, the forward half of the ship capsized and burning, the aft section dark and almost gone. Around them he saw the tiny bobbing heads. But he saw it all from above. He was Dan Lenson and at the same time he was all the men drifting and crying out and the men trapped inside, hammering at steel in the dark. He saw through a tunnel of flame a place cool and at the same time bright as the fire. He moved upward through the fire and it did not burn, and the brightness increased, and he went through oblivion into a place of clean cool wind.
* * *
Dan stared rigidly into the radarscope. Not long had passed; the pip had moved only a fraction of an inch along its greased track. Was it over? He lifted his head. Yes. They grieved no longer on the wind, those ghosts.
The recurrence, brief as it was, decided him. He would take no more chances. Compressing his lips, he pressed a buzzer. Beside him Glazer laid out plotting paper and dividers and began checking the solution.
“Yuh,” said a familiar voice in his ear. “Commodore. What is it?”
“Staff Watch Officer, sir, Lieutenant j.g. Lenson. We have an incoming contact.”
“Let’s have it,” said Sundstrom, sounding more awake.
Lenson repeated the range and course data from memory. “We’ve got thirty minutes till she’s inside Bowen, sir. I recommend bringing the formation left.”
“What will that open it to?”
Lenson had to pause only for a second. Every conning officer learned to do relative motion problems in his head, to accuracies of five degrees and a couple of thousand yards. Two decks down Sundstrom, pulled from sleep, was doing the same thing. At least Dan hoped he was. “If we come left fifty degree
s that will open her to seven thousand yards from the escort and twenty thousand from us, sir.”
“What’ll that do to Coronado?”
“He’s at the outer edge of his sector. Should pass eight to ten thousand yards outboard of him.”
“Do we have sea room to port? Any other contacts out there?”
“None on the scope, sir.”
“Did you look?” Sundstrom’s voice took on an edge.
“Yes sir, less than a minute ago. We’re clear to the north.”
“Okay then.” The voice subsided into drowsiness again.
“Come left fifty. Keep an eye on him, Dan. Don’t let him screw me up with some crazy course change.”
“No sir.”
“That’s all I need, a goddamn collision, just when things are heating up.”
“No sir,” said Lenson promptly, but he felt a shiver nonetheless. He did not like that word, and he liked the worried whine in Sundstrom’s voice even less. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled, sir.”
The receiver clicked in his ear. Lenson rattled it back into the holder and turned. “Stan—”
“I was listening. Here’s the signal.” Glazer flicked the red spot from his flashlight onto the plotting pad. “You want to put it over the net?”
“No. You do it. Good work.”
He bent to the ’scope again, half his mind listening to Glazer on the radio, the other half watching the pip on its slow slide along the grease-penciled line toward them. Straight and true. He hadn’t altered course yet. Probably hasn’t even seen us, Dan thought. Got his scope set in close. His attention flicked out, to all the men on the ships around them, on bridges as dark and tense as theirs, listening at that moment to the supply officer’s voice: calculating instantly in their minds how far that would put the contact, twenty or eighty thousand tons of knife-bowed metal rushing through the night, from their own hulls. “Stand by … execute,” Glazer said, popping the button on the radiotelephone, and listened as each ship answered in turn.
“All units acknowledge, sir.”
“Very well,” said Lenson, watching the faint glow of the rudder angle indicator. Any minute now the men on the bridge above, Guam’s own bridge, would begin the turn … there. The rudder began to swing, faster and faster, then eased to a stop at left fifteen. Beneath their feet the ship heeled, first outward, then in. A pencil clattered to the deck.
“Check the port side,” he said to Glazer.
“Right.”
He went to starboard himself. He lifted his glasses long enough to see Coronado’s lights begin to swing, then glanced at the gyro repeater and set his elbows to the rail. Twenty miles range; a clear night despite the overcast, no haze. He might be able to pick her up.…
There she was. A dancing double star in the darkness, masthead and range almost in line. Too far for sidelights yet. The inbound merchantman seemed still oblivious of the seven ships that now were turning together north to clear her.
“All ships to port turning to port,” said Glazer, at his side. “How long you going to hold them on this course?”
“Till this guy clears Coronado. Then we’ll come back.” Lenson let his binoculars drop, suddenly sleepy again now that the moment of action was over. He yawned, glancing at his watch. Another hour before their reliefs came up. “How about some coffee?” he asked Glazer.
“Saucers and all?”
“What?”
“Remember, he said no coffee on the bridge without saucers. Cup and saucer, from the wardroom.”
“How many hands have we got, Stan? One roll and they’ll be all over the deck. Send McQueen down for some of those Styrofoam cups.”
“All right,” said Glazer. He went back into the chartroom and Lenson relaxed, looking out to where the lights of the oncoming ship were visible now without the glasses.
Another night at sea. He had been afraid Ike would come up in his bathrobe and flipflops and start worrying. But tonight the old man had sounded bushed. Like all of us, Lenson thought, but he takes it worse. He was responsible, sure, but there were good men on the bridge of every ship; they had years of experience at sea, some of them more than the commodore; they could drive ships.
Tired, tired, tired … he stared down over the coaming, seventy feet down to the sea. Black, invisible save for the ripple of phosphorescence where the hull met water, it rushed past the ship like a subterranean river. A line of something rose to his mind … French class, the mids sitting row on row of dark uniforms. Apollinaire. Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine … et nos amours, faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne, La joie venait toujours après la peine.…
Joy comes always, only, after pain. Yes, he was tired now from two days without sleep. The flap had started as soon as they cleared Italy. Messages to get out, steaming orders to write, the rendezvous with the other units of the MARG, dozens of pubs to break out and study furiously, goaded by Sundstrom’s frantic orders. And they still did not know why they had gotten underway. Some of the officers thought it was Lebanon again, some Israel; Byrne, the only one apart from the commodore and possibly Hogan who knew what was going on, only smiled with his painful courtesy at their fishing. There was a lot of sea east of here, seven hundred miles of it, miles that slipped slowly under their keel hour by hour.
A lot of sea, a lot of beaches. If they had to put the marines ashore, there would be a hell of a lot to do, and not very much time to do it.
No, he thought. We won’t be landing. This would be just another famous Navy steam-around-and-wait exercise. Cruise in circles, night-steam off some anonymous stretch of land, keeping clear of shipping that seemed to take for granted that a civilian had right of way. That was the drill for the Sixth Fleet when trouble started anywhere in the Med. But then one of the older ships would break down, or somebody would run low on fuel, and they would detach first one ship and then another for the run to port; and then one day the message would come, it’s off, everything’s settled down now, and they would turn and head back for Spain or Tunisia or Southern France.
And this time, Susan and Nan would be waiting there for him.
Après la peine …
He raised the binoculars to forestall the tightening in his belly. But the image of her face close beneath his in the morning sunlight, of the smooth luxury of her, laid itself over the cold glitter of running lights on the waves.
La joie venait toujours …
“Here’s your coffee, Mr. Lenson,” said McQueen. “I didn’t put anything in it.”
“Thanks, Mac.” He accepted the cup and sucked hot brew, moving into the shelter of the bridge, glancing at the gyro and then the radar. Guam had steadied up; all ships were still on station; the skunk was tracking down the new relative motion line. Glazer and McQueen were huddled over the chart table, updating the dead reckoning plot for the oncoming watch. The fathometer pinged sleepily through the open door to the chartroom, where racks of Coastal Pilots and hydrographic charts lay sheathed in red light. He checked his watch, estimating time to turn back to base course—he could do that without waking Sundstrom again, he decided.
La joie … when they came back in, weary from the days or weeks at sea, she would be waiting. The wives had an intelligence network that would shame the KGB. They would know where the ships would put in, almost before Sixth Fleet had decided. Sardinia, Mallorca, Piraeus, it didn’t matter. There were hotels everywhere. Hotels and beds.
No, goddamn it, Lenson, you can’t start thinking of that again. He paced around, reshelved the signal books, and glanced over Glazer’s shoulder at the chart. The pencil line stretched out from the toe of Italy, reaching eastward past the open blue of the Ionian Sea, toward Crete. The island lay curled like a shrimp sixty miles north of them, the shallowing water inshore washed in lighter shades of blue and white. There the pencil line ended, hung in blue space.
Glazer felt his presence and turned his head. “Here we are,” he said, putting his finger on a half-circle marked 0400 DR. “But where the heck are we going?”
“Good question,” said Lenson, glad of the opening for talk. “Where would you like to go? Other than back to Taormina, I mean.”
“Anyplace except Libya. Too many MIGs there for me.”
“It’s been pretty quiet there this year, since what’s his face got the axe.”
“Where’s it hot?”
His eye traveled east, past the Libyan headlands into Egypt and the Sinai, past the scattered dots of the Dodecanese and Rhodes into a blue gulf. The eastern Med reached like a cupped hand between Asia Minor and Africa, the back of the hand Egypt, the outstretched fingers digging into the Middle East. And it was all their beat. They were the only American force prepared to move instantly, equipped to go ashore and stay. Aircraft could strike more quickly, but only to destroy. The Army could move in force, but it took months to gear up that sluggish machine. Only the Navy was ready now, marines and tanks and artillery, able with the guns of destroyers and air support from the carriers to land and hold ground.
And when you were ready, and the world knew it, most of the time the only action needed in a crisis was the sudden appearance of those gray ships offshore.
Somewhere east. Turkey? There had just been a coup there; a bellicose rightist government had taken power, but things seemed calm from the unclassified traffic he read every day on watch. The small countries, where strife never ended; Lebanon, Cyprus, Jordan? Or perhaps the Soviet clients, Syria, Iraq, the Palestinians. There were so many possibilities.
He put his finger on the coast. “I’d guess Lebanon again.”
“Yeah? We haven’t been there yet this float.”
“Let’s hope we don’t go.”
“Hey,” said a new voice, behind the three of them, and Lenson turned. “Ready to relieve,” said the round silhouette, not saluting.
He saluted back anyway. “Ready to be relieved. Hi, Red.”
They went over the tactical situation, course and speed, the surface picture. “You’ll want to come back to base course pretty soon,” Dan finished.
“Yeah. I went out and looked around before I came in here. Oscar’s the merchie off to starboard, green sidelight, right? Think I’ll come back around soon as we relieve.”