The Med

by David Poyer

  “What?”

  “That message.” He swallowed, and ran his hand over sun-gilded steel. “I think this time, we’re going to be playing for keeps.”

  13

  U.S.S. Spiegel Grove

  “Your target—splash, to port of the wake.”

  “Left, left left—on!”

  “Range, four hundred and opening.”

  Bravo Company was firing for practice from the fantail. Cutford’s face, dark and closed-off under the lip of a helmet, hunched itself into the sight of the mortar. Sweat gleamed and trickled down the back of his neck. “Left more,” he barked, then “Pull two bags—two—ready—”

  Behind him the team jerked into sudden furious activity behind the sky-slanted barrel. Hernandez spun the lid from a green plastic tube and slid out a shell. His fingers ripped at the foot-long cylinder. He threw the detached packets to the deck, away from the muzzle, and thrusted the readied round at Givens. Givens hefted it to the sunlight, checking the powder and fuze, hooked his finger in the pin and yanked it free; pulled free the retaining clamp; balanced the round poised, his eyes on the main gunner. “Half-load,” he shouted, as loud as he could. Cutford jerked away from the eyepiece and pulled off the sight, cradled it to his chest.

  “Fire.”

  Will opened his hand. The round left his glove and began to slide, scraping down into the tube like fingernails down a wall, and he ducked his face for the baseplate, thinking hunchback, clapping his hands over his ears under his helmet.

  Ploong. Part cork pulled from a bottle, part the toll of a gigantic bell, the muzzle blast banged his helmet awry and slapped his face. He bobbed up, grabbing the next round, and then froze. The others had their heads back, eyes high to the sky over the helo deck, watching as, far and small, the finned dot halted. They said in mortar school that you could only see that from two places: where you launched, or (God help you) where the nine-and-a-half-pound 81 mm high-explosive projectile was about to land.

  They gazed upward through a long hot ear-ringing instant. Far below the suspended projectile the sea gleamed and heaved in silvery silence, bright with sun under briefly parting cumulae. Half a thousand yards out from the old ship a gray splash of smoke and water was dying back into it, the spotting round second squad had just fired, and which they were using now as target for live-fire drill. The whirling dot hung suspended, a black star, and they watched for the whole aching instant that it took to decide for sea or sky.

  It decided, and began to fall. They lost it, but a moment later it reappeared in an abrupt vertical plume of dirty foam and smoke, well short in range of the first. The detonation, sea-muffled, tickled their ringing eardrums.

  “Ready again?” Sergeant Silkworth said, squatting down beside Cutford, who had removed a hand from the sight to wipe sweat from his cheek. It was hot and still on the open deck. The wind had dropped early that morning and now the intense, almost African heat was wringing sweat from them under the heavy utility jackets. “That last was a little short.”

  “Fucken tub was pitching,” grunted Cutford, screwing his eye once more into the sight. “Crazy fucken drill, shootin’ into the water … ready! Right, right, down down down fire!”

  The blanngg this time was louder, smacking him on the head like an angry teacher. He lifted his head to see the projectile dwelling high, too high. Like the black angel, he thought, the one they said came at the moment of death; and this angel, too, hesitated, looking down for the man whose name she carried, and then winked off as it gathered speed.

  It was so simple, he thought, as he did each time they fired the mortar. Beautiful in its simplicity. The mortar was nothing but a steel tube, closed at the bottom. There was not a moving part in it, nothing to foul or jam. You dropped in the shell, gravity took it down to impact on the fixed pin, and the bags of powder carried on the round itself fired and propelled it up, out, in a long curve toward what you never thought of as men but only as a target. He was remembering the parabolas in the physics book when the plume leapt upward, far beyond the others, out on the rolling smooth horizon; and his helmet made a hollow thock as Cutford’s gloved fist came off it. “Oreo, you fucken lunatic! What the fuck you dreamin’ about? That fucken shell—neither of you shitheads touched the charge!”

  “You didn’t say to, Cutford!”

  “No order, Private, then it’s the same setting as before,” Silkworth shouted, equally loud, into his opposite ear. Givens felt suddenly excited, sexually aroused. The shouting noncoms, Washman’s scared acned face, the firing-range stink of burnt propellant, all woke him into a sudden sense that he was here, he was alive, all this was real. Then Silkworth cuffed his helmet and he grabbed for the next round out of the pile of opened tubings, snarling, twisted off two of the waxed cotton bags himself, not waiting for the ammo handler, and poised it trembling above the mouth of the mortar. Along the deck the lieutenant yelled, “Get those rounds out there, Silkworth!” and Cutford laid his cheek to the sight and Harner twisted the elevation knob and Givens heard the command and shoved the round down, hit the gritty hot steel of the deck; the air banged. “Forget watching it, dickhead!” screamed Silkworth in his ear. “That’s the gunner’s job. Do yours and we’ll get hits.” Hernandez thrust another round into his hands, smooth metal, the yellow-striped olive drab of live explosive, a ten-pound egg finned like a fat arrow. A machine gun stuttered from behind him, farther along the deck, rattling cases out from the smoking receiver as the riflemen took their turns at familiarization firing.

  “Right … down … fire!”

  Blangg.

  “Fire!”

  The mortar tolled again. As each round went out, the baseplate, thirty pounds of cast iron, leaped up an inch from its cushion of sandbags.

  Another stutter from the 7.62 sewed sound into the hot air of the afterdeck. “Rounds complete,” bawled Silkworth in the lieutenant’s direction. “Permission to fire small arms, sir?”

  “Go ahead, Sergeant. One magazine apiece. Get your men aft of the safety line before you issue ammo.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The riflemen unslung their weapons, their faces lighting, and ducked under the line roped across the deck to join the squad that was already aiming with care and futility at a fifty-five-gallon drum bobbing back in the slow wake of the ship. Will looked across at Cutford. The corporal was drawing his pistol, the only hand weapon the mortarmen carried. He drew his, too and accepted a half-full box of ball from the armorer, who was hovering behind the firing line with his Mickey Mouse ears bulky atop a shaven head. Givens’ fingers trembled as he jammed rounds between the sharp lips of the magazine, and then he stepped to the deckedge, let the slide bang forward, and began to squeeze off slugs. After the mortar the pistol made a puny crack, like a child whacking a cheap drum. The riflemen fired, spewing tinkling brass out across the deck, where it rolled slowly with the ship, drifting up against the footknockers. Cutford fired rapidly, the automatic kicking up into the sky at each shot, his eyes squeezed so tight Givens wondered how he could see. The machine gunners cried out to each other, cursing at a jam, and flipped up feed mechanisms, slapped in a new belt. A faulty cartridge glittered end over end to disappear into the sea. Blue powder haze drifted over the churning wake, red arches of tracer burning holes into it. The armorer, eyes on the lieutenant, furtively passed out more ammunition as the clamor slackened and men glanced back, their rifles smoking empty.

  “CEASE FIRE AFT,” came over the deck loudspeakers. “CEASE FIRE AFT. ALL MARINE CORPS PERSONNEL LAY FORWARD TO THE CRANE AREA.”

  “Get back, men, back,” shouted the lieutenant.

  “Fucken butterbars,” Cutford said, out loud.

  Forward on the ship, two decks above them, Givens saw the squids lean forward on their metal bucket seats. The twin slim barrels of the ship’s guns pivoted suddenly toward him, serpent-swift, the ringing of an electric bell accompanied by a prolonged clanking of mechanism. A sailor silhouetted himself against a cloud, lifting a pointed ro
und, slamming it down into a hopper.

  “Get back, you stupid scumbags,” the Top shouted.

  The big gun fired, incredibly loud, first one barrel, then the other, and then the first again in a continuous blast of sound and orange fire. Brown smoke blotted out the whole port side and blew down on them, cordite smell and fluttering bits of paper filler like holiday confetti. The gun clanked and banged and fired, BLAM … BLAM … BLAM … BLAM. The noise slammed at his ears, sucked air from his lungs, and far aft the sea around the untouched drum erupted in black smoke and boiling spray.

  “Shit,” shouted Washman, beside him, his narrow, red-splotched face intense. “Shoot that fucker! That’s the kind of gun the Corps ought to have.”

  “You want to hump it ashore, Washout?”

  “They better save some of that shit. We might need it.”

  “This tub is packed with the stuff. And them destroyers carry more. Bigger, too—five-inch.”

  Still enthusiastic, they carried their hot weapons back belowdecks when the firing was over. “We ought to fire this sucker more often,” Washman said, rolling the baseplate to a halt against the bulkhead like a mechanic with a spare tire. “Even at sea—there’s something gets you about firing a mortar. A lot more than a rifle. But an eighty-one—”

  “Quit playing with that, Washout. It’s a weapon, not a toy.”

  “Yeah, I know. Will—” he paused, the elation ebbing from his face, replaced by a worried frown that Givens, remembering Palermo, thought he had seen before, at Lucy’s—“You think—well, you hear what the guys been saying. You think we might have to—you think we might go ashore?”

  “Heck, I don’t know, Washout. Captain don’t keep me abreast of things like he should.”

  “Yeah, he should tell us more, keep us up-to-date,” Washman agreed eagerly, missing the sarcasm. “But, geez—what about it? You think we’ll go in on, what did Cutford say, Cyprus?”

  “We might. Maybe that’s why they held the shoot, get us up to speed a little.” Givens broke the firing pin free and set to work cleaning it. This time there was reason to it, dirt and soot stained the rag as he scrubbed. Just six rounds, but the bore punch came out black, and he turned the rag and ran it through twice more before he was satisfied and tipped oil onto the cloth and wiped it down.

  “You think they’d shoot at us?” Washman asked him. “Where the hell is Cyprus, anyway? What do they talk there?”

  “It’s an island,” said Givens. “Out in the middle of the Med. Paul went there. They speak Greek.”

  “Greek, huh? Paul—Paul who?”

  “Saint Paul.”

  “You heard.” said Sergeant Silkworth, stopping by the card table, “about the Greek boy?”

  “What Greek boy, Sarge?” said Washman, his mouth open, swabbing away at his baseplate.

  “The one who left home. He didn’t like the way he was being reared.”

  “Oh yeah. Pretty good, Sarge,” said Washman.

  “But he come back later.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He couldn’t leave his brothers behind. Okay, listen up. You troopers got half an hour to get squared away and get that gear stowed. Then we got school call.”

  “School call, Sergeant?” Givens asked him.

  “Yeah. Whole company’s going to be there.”

  “What on, Sergeant?”

  “You’ll know when I do,” said Silkworth, and went on, stopping to talk to one of the second-platoon sergeants out by the ladderwell. They talked in low tones, but the two privates caught one word clear. It was “contingency.”

  “What’s that mean, Will?”

  “I don’t know, Washout. Maybe we’re going to get ashore this float after all.”

  The worried look returned to Washman’s face, and he bent it to the baseplate and scrubbed away, saying nothing more.

  * * *

  The school call turned out to be that most familiar thing, beside boredom, and waiting, in life as they had come to know it aboard ship, on this long and aimless float: an anticlimax. The men had not known what to except, but they had expected something. Some hot scoop from the exec; a rumor from the Top; anything that might give them some idea of what was happening out there, somewhere beyond the rolling horizon, even in what direction it lay they did not know. When the assistant company commander strolled in and they bolted upright into attention, they thought this was it.

  Instead, they got a lecture.

  “First thing we gathered you here to talk about,” the senior lieutenant began, after they had settled again to the hard deck, padding it with rolled shirts of lifejackets from a rack or even just their hands, “was a couple of things the ship’s captain has been passing on to us. We’re their guests here, you know, and when we’re aboard here he acts as our CO.

  “So it pays us to keep them happy.

  “The first thing is cleanliness. Not personal cleanliness—I know you all are doing the best you can considering the shortage of fresh water—but cleanliness of the ship. This is our home, and we’ve got to keep it clean. There’ve been too many butts found around, in the passageways, in the urinals, even up on the signal bridge. The Navy says they don’t throw butts on the deck, it must be the marines.”

  The troops groaned. He said quickly, “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But I want you all to know that cleanliness has got to be a habit, a way of life, here aboard the Spiegel Grove. That begins in the troop spaces, and goes wherever you go in the ship.…”

  The lieutenant droned on, and the men listened, lolling around the deck, most of them somewhere else inside their heads. The older troops had heard it all on floats before, knew that no matter how often they policed up, every piece of crap the squids found would be blamed on them. To the sailors the embarked marines were cargo, not unlike carrying a herd of cattle battened down in their pens below deck, and the marines returned their contempt with interest. They insulted each other and stole from each other, fought when they were ashore, and only the officers, who had to eat in the wardroom, repeated the fiction that they were all in the same service. The marines knew they were not in the Navy. Bunch of damned pussies in candyassed sailor suits. Behind their hands the corporals yawned, winking sarcastically at one another.

  “… That said, I’m going to turn you over to the Top for the afternoon lecture. Sergeant Bayerholt.”

  “Small-unit tactics,” bawled the Top, and the men relaxed again. Book drill. This they had all, even the boots, heard dozens of times before through long dozing afternoons. They could have predicted each of the sergeant’s sentences as he talked in a steady hoarse shout, going through it all, line by line, as if he had memorized it somewhere back in the years and it had never changed a syllable. Fire-team formations, skirmishing lines, hand signals and how to pass them along. Digging entrenchments. Camouflage. Movements, contact, conduct of battle, consolidation and reorganization. Givens, his head tilted back against a reel of hose, stared up at the maze of pipes and sprinklers and lights that lined the overhead like stenciled filigree.

  He was thinking about his guitar.

  The skill was coming back. His fingers remembered it like the scars in his dark-lined palms remembered the timber hooks. He had never thought much about music before. It was the books that had fascinated him with their abstruseness, their logic, the hints they held of a wider, fuller life. But now that had changed. It was not that he no longer cared about engineering. He did, he wanted to be an educated man. But music was different. He couldn’t tell what fascinated him about it, but there it was.

  His fingers moved against the rough fabric of his blouse, strumming out an inaudible chord, and he blinked sightlessly at the overhead.

  “… And last, remember your gas mask. Take care of it like you take care of your piece. You men carry rubbers? Think of your mask that way. If you need it, you’ll need it quick, and you won’t be able to borrow your buddy’s, ’cause he’ll be using his.”

  They laughed dutifully, then quieted a
s Bayerholt turned the lecture back to the officer. His first words made them sit up.

  “As you may have heard,” said the lieutenant, “there’s been some trouble recently in Cyprus.”

  Ha, Will thought. The scuttlebutt was right.

  “I won’t go into the politics. It’s pretty confused, like it is in most countries around the Med. There’ve been outbreaks of violence for a lot of years.

  “Normally, the U.S. tries not to get involved. We deal with it by diplomacy, try to influence the winners and keep them off whoever lost. But two factors complicate the situation here.

  “The first thing is, with the Soviet Fleet as strong in the Eastern Med now as ours, it’s even more important that we, with our allies, keep things calm. The Russians like nothing more than trouble. Then they have an excuse to step in, either directly or, more likely, by means of the internal political organizations they maintain in all the littoral countries. Terrorism and destabilization is in their interest, and against ours.

  “The second problem is that there are something like two thousand dependents and civilians there. Both Americans and British. There’s a big tourist trade, and commercial interests, as well as the diplomatic personnel. In case of unrest, we become responsible for guaranteeing that those people are in a safe location, or for getting them out safely if the local authorities lose control or turn against us.

  “There’s not a lot more to say at this point.” The lieutenant looked around at them. “Reports coming out are confused, as I said. Things like this happen all the time in the Med, that’s why we maintain a presence here. Most of the time they straighten themselves out and we aren’t needed. We don’t want to show force unless the time comes—that’s just as bad as no force at all—and that’s why we cleared out of Italy and are well out to sea. We want to stand by, stay at the ready. There are no plans to do anything for now; but if those people ashore need help they’ll need it fast, and that means us.