The Med

by David Poyer

  “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 s
he 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.

  Well, now we can see something worthwhile, Susan thought. She crammed herself into the little Fiat and pulled out into traffic, trying to keep in mind that she had to do everything backward—you drove British-style on the left in Cyprus. Not to mention struggling with a street map at the same time.

  “Mommy, where we going?”

  “We have to get some money, Bunny, and mail a letter. Then we’re going to see one of my old friends.”

  “Who?”

  “Her name’s Moira, dear. She’s an archaeologist. You’ll like her.”

  “Can we put the cold on, Mommy?”

  “We don’t have air conditioning in this car, baby. I’ll turn on the fan.”

  It didn’t work. A hundred bucks a week for this mousetrap, she thought viciously, and now this. She cranked down Nan’s window and the child settled more or less satisfied, looking out the window at the cars, the streams of pedestrians. By the time Susan found the cross street she wanted, and squeezed into a parking space two blocks away from the American Embassy, she felt wilted; perspiration was soggy under her arms, beading on her face.

  “Come on, darling. We’ll walk a little.”

  “Want to stay here. It’s too hot out.”

  “No. Somebody might steal you, Bunny.”

  She saw the frightened look cross her face, and thought: That was a terrific thing to say, Susan. Great, make her afraid of foreigners. “I was just joking. Nobody will hurt you. I just want you with me. Come on, dear.”

  “No.”

  No doubt about it, it was going to be a wonderful day. “Close that door,” she snapped. “Stay close to me. Don’t touch that puppy, you’ll get dog spit all over your hands.”

  “Look, there’s a man; he’s got a gun—”

  “He’s just a policeman. Come on, Bunny.”

  The embassy was cool and dark, marbled peaceful after the noise and heat of the street. Thankfully, too, the line at the service desk was short. The teller was a dark Greek she only fleetingly thought attractive. “Do you change money here?” she asked him.

  “Are you an American, ma’am?”

  “Yes, I am. Susan Lenson. Are there any messages for me?”

  “Just a moment … no, nothing at present.”

  She changed three hundred dollars to Cypriote pounds, big brown and blue notes, putting half in her purse and half in her jeans pocket, and handed over a letter for her parents.

  “Do you have any maps of the island?”

  “Where are you going, ma’am?”

  “Near Kakopetria.”

  “The skiing is not good in the mountains now. You want to go to the beaches. Kyrenia was good once, but now the Turks are there. You want to go to Larnaca—”

  “No. If I could have a map—”

  “Is this your child?” said the man, reaching over the counter to pat Nan on the head. She looked up, suspicious.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re here alone? I would not advise going about the island by yourself. There are rumors.”

  “Rumors? About what?”

  “It’s said there may be trouble again. I don’t know, it may be true. Now, you know, I go to Larnaca often. I have a small cottage there, on the sea. The beaches there are very good. Sunny, warm.”

  Ah, so it was the make. She should have recognized it long before this. “I have friends near Kakopetria. They’re expecting me,” she said sharply. “All I need is a map.”

  “A map, certainly you shall have a map. Here is one. You have a car? It’s only an hour away … here is a fine map,” said the man. “Have a pleasant trip, ma’am.” As she turned away he was already saying to the woman behind her, “Good morning, miss. You’re here alone?”

  “Mommy, why did he pat me like that?”

  “It’s his job, dear.”

  “Why’d he ask if we were Amer’cans?”

  Ah, Susan thought, she noticed. And how will you explain this one to your child, omniscient mother? Three generations now and we still must justify, still excuse our skin and our eyes. But we are so polite about it. To her surprise she heard herself say, “Because we’re prettier than other Americans, Bunny.”

  They were her own mother’s words, twenty years before.

  “Come on. We have a long way to drive.”

  Once they were on the road out of the city, her mood, which had been edging from annoyed to dangerous, began to lighten. The scenery was fine. Past the airport, a few miles west of the capital, the fuss of new building sank back to scattered houses, and the road wound through open foothills, gradually climbing. She had to keep her eyes on the road, but Nan exclaimed over an orchard-filled valley, and a little later clamored for her mother to look at the distant sea, blue and hazy. It was so pretty they had to stop and take a picture. Long before she was tired they stopped again in a little v
illage for a cold drink. She had lemonade and Nan was allowed a small cola. (Susan was careful with her caffeine and sugar.) They sipped them on a stone terrace under a shady arbor. Their waiter made them taste the grapes—they were fat and tart—and tried to tell them a story about them, but his English was very bad. She tried her college French on him, but he only looked puzzled. Nan laughed so hard at her mother that she spilled her drink and started to cry.

  “Don’ worry, don’ worry, I bring,” said the waiter, smiling, and brought them both fresh glasses.…

  They rolled through Kakopetria in the middle of the afternoon. It was a small town, high in the mountains, which stood like Crusader castles above the shaded square on every side. Susan thought she had never seen such a lovely place. They asked directions of a bearded priest, robed all in black despite the heat, and found the monastery west of town in the middle of an apple orchard.

  The dig was deserted. She looked uphill—at school they told you always to camp on a rise; it was more sanitary—and saw the tents. The first one they stopped at was Moira’s.

  Ten minutes later they were sitting in the midst of Real Archaeology. At a camp table in her college roommate’s tent, sipping watered St. John Commandaria, she examined the potsherds and corroded crosses, each one neatly labeled, that Moira Lieberman pulled excitedly from rag nests in biscuit tins. Her greatest treasure was a cork, miraculously preserved for eight centuries in a patch of dry sand. One end was still stained with ancient wine. Susan passed it to Nan, who held it gingerly, not quite understanding what it was, but knowing it was important. “It’s old, Bunny,” she said. “Real old. From long, long ago.”

  “Older than Grandma?”

  “Older than your grandma’s grandma’s grandma,” said Moira, and they smiled at each other over the child’s awed expression, her first intimation of the incredible span of years before her own existence.

  Later, after a tour of the dig, they shared a camp supper with the chief of excavation, on sabbatical from Michigan; the Cypriote resident; and four grad students. When the stewed lamb and fava beans were gone, the cheese pie demolished, night had fallen like a mauve blanket over the mountains. The men built up the campfire and produced bottles in honor of the visitors. The talk was obviously secondary to the ouzo, and the two women soon drifted back to the tent. They sat on a cot, side by side, and Susan thought how much it was like college; how many nights she and this dumpy brilliant girl had spent sitting together, just like this, talking about their lives to come, the wonderful discoveries they would make. In some ways she had never been closer to another person, and it made her sad to think they had spent years apart.