by Ian Slater
For a second Brentwood thought Evans must be alive after all — awakening from a deep coma that they’d mistaken for death. Lord knows it had happened before. In the old days, navy regulations held that before placing a body in a canvas shroud, a stitch of catgut had to be made, passing the needle through the skin fold between the nose and lips — one of the most sensitive areas — to make sure the man was really dead. Dealing with Evans’s corpse was the last thing Brentwood wanted to think about, but he knew the corpsman was correct. Modern-day regulations made it mandatory that a body which may be harboring infectious disease must be frozen as soon as possible and while “in this condition must be dispatched” no matter what the state of sea.
“Very well,” Brentwood answered. “Ten minutes. Flag party astern.” But he wanted no part of it. All he knew for certain was that Evans had died shortly after he’d given him the shot of diazepam. Worst of all, quietening him had done no good — the Russian ship having zeroed in on the Roosevelt anyway. Evans’s death had achieved nothing but cast a pall of pessimism about the boat. Roosevelt was the world’s most modern vessel, but a death aboard was as bad an omen to its crew as it had been for the sailors of Vasco de Gama and Columbus. For many aboard the sub who did not have the religious faith of their seagoing forebears, it was worse. Not a warning but a prophecy.
For Brentwood, Evans’s death wasn’t the first he’d witnessed at sea, but it was the first in his command, the first he was directly responsible for. During the Russians’ attack, he’d forgotten about it, but now it returned with the corpsman and he felt it start to gnaw at him like an old childhood shame — a terrible thing said to one’s parents, an act of deliberate cruelty to a family pet — like something one conceals for years now rising up from a hidden deep. It was not Evans’s death alone that began eating away at Robert Brentwood but the sudden and totally unexpected loss of control he’d seen in the man — the putrid stench of the seaman’s body the unmistakable sign of a body having lost all self-control. Brentwood was determined he would put it out of his mind, but as with so many things hidden under great pressure, the childhood fear of losing control wormed its way back to consciousness. Brentwood kept talking about the MOSS. To dwell on death, his father had told him, was a surefire way to self-pity, and then you didn’t belong on a sub, you belonged on a couch. Couches, said the admiral, were places for people to escape from facing things head-on — the way some men went to sea to get away from their wives.
For a second Robert Brentwood thought of his brother Ray, captain of a guided missile frigate, who had been horribly burned after a swarm of North Korean missile boats had attacked his ship, the USS Blaine, off South Korea. Ray, it was said by some, had lost control, giving the order to abandon ship when it was still salvageable. Others said he hadn’t given any such order — that one of the ship’s mates had mistaken a hand signal from Ray in the inferno that engulfed the Blaine’s bridge movements after impact. Whatever had happened, Ray no longer had a command. And only now, three months and eight operations later, did the tightly polished skin, grafted from thigh and buttocks, even begin to make his face look anywhere near human.
As the chief electrician’s mate and the next watch’s sonar operator turned and walked away with his sketch, Robert Brentwood got tough with himself. He didn’t agree with his father about a lot of things, including his view of psychiatrists, but he knew his father was right about the captain of a ship. He, Robert Jackson Brentwood, was supposed to be one of the navy’s best and brightest, commander of the most powerful warship in history and his country’s last line of defense. If he couldn’t handle it, he should hand it over to Zeldman right now. It was time to bury Evans.
“Excuse me,” he said briskly as he passed the electrician’s mate and the sonar operator, who were also headed for the stern section with the sketch of the MOSS. Without turning to them, Brentwood ordered, “Don’t wait until we finish with Evans. Get started on that right away.”
“Be a bit crowded, sir.”
“I know, but it can’t be helped. They’re still mopping up the forward torpedo room. I want it done in ten hours, well before the next scheduled TACAMO station.”
The mate frowned, the red glow accentuating his baldness as his hand swept from eyebrows to the back of his head. “Sir, I don’t know if we — I mean, we’ll have to use a torch and-”
“Ten hours!” said Brentwood.
Sonar turned to the mate. “He’s a hard bastard. Doesn’t give a shit about Evans.”
“Yeah, well,” said the chief. “Nothing we can do for Evans now, is there?”
“The skipper needn’t have given him that shot.”
“Old man’s call, Sonar.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Come on,” said the chief. “Can’t do the fucker by ourselves.” For a moment Sonar thought the chief meant Evans. When they got to the machine shop and showed him the sketch, the machinist shook his head, pointing at the skipper’s arrowed instructions with an oil rag. “No way, Chiefie. Not in ten hours.”
“Why?” asked the chief, surprising Sonar.
“That shank,” said the machinist, “is titanium-reinforced. Isn’t a fucking wiener.”
“What’s the matter? I thought you were Mr. fucking ‘Can-Do,’ “ said the mate.
“Can-Do,” a big, gangly man from West Virginia, fixed Sonar in his stare. “What do you think?”
Sonar made a face bordering on neutrality. One of the ROs came over, asking where the captain was.
“Aft torpedo room, I guess,” answered the Virginian.
The RO, who came from Utah and had only been aboard for one other patrol, was already known as “Mr. Clean” because of his pink baby-face complexion, despite him being in his early forties. He didn’t like Can-Do’s tone and bawled out the Virginian for wearing “booties,” the yellow rubber shoe covers worn by men as they entered the reactor room so as to prevent transporting any radioactive dust throughout the sub. “Take those back to the reactor room,” said the RO.
“Sorry, sir, I forgot,” said Can-Do, giving the RO an “up yours” sign as the officer walked out into the ruby sheen of the passageway.
“Crack in the coffeepot,” said Can-Do, reaching down for the yellow booties. “That’s why he’s so goddamned testy.”
“Bullshit!” said the electrician’s mate. “If the reactor had a fissure in it, we’d have a bright patch on our chest.” Sonar craned his neck, looking down for any color change in his dosimeter.
“I don’t mean the outer casing,” continued Can-Do. “The inner wall.”
“Christ — it’s the strongest thing on the boat,” said the mate.
“You telling me it’s impossible?” asked Can-Do.
“Un-fucking likely,” said the mate. “Anyway, keep it to yourself. You’ll frighten young Sonar here.”
Sonar was keeping right out of it, giving all his attention to the skipper’s diagram, knowing he’d have to test it when Can-Do was finished — if he was finished in time.
* * *
As it turned out, the Virginian was wrong — there wasn’t a fissure in the reactor, the officer was upset because he’d just heard Evans was about to be deep-sixed. The RO was a “mustang,” a man who’d come up through the ranks, and he identified more than most officers with the enlisted men. He was also a practicing Mormon, and though he hadn’t known Evans personally, he offered to help the burial party.
“Shroud has to be weighted heavily at this depth,” Brentwood told him. “Don’t want anything floating topside giving us away. Those Russians probably got a new noise signature from us after those depth charges. No good helping them to pinpoint our—”
“I’ll look after it, sir,” said the RO.
“Very well.”
The officer thought Brentwood could have shown a little more sensitivity about Evans rather than simply treating the corpse as a nuisance to get rid of. It didn’t jibe with what he’d heard about the skipper, who, among Roosevelt’s
crew, was affectionately known as “Bing.” Something to do with Bing Crosby was it? — maybe the skipper sang in the shower or something. But apparently the nickname had nothing to do with his love of old-fashioned music, “Bing” deriving more from his old-fashioned nature. Rumor had it that, knowledgeable as he was about the world of the submarine, he was, despite his engagement to some Englishwoman, extraordinarily naive when it came to the opposite sex. Mr. Clean had never discovered precisely why the crew was convinced of this, other than it had something to do with what the English called a “trollop,” a woman of easy virtue, approaching him at some party in Scotland, and Brentwood, ever so polite, trying to gracefully decline her advances, whereupon the woman started screaming at him, calling him a straitlaced “old bastard”—a “Bing Crosby.” Had the revered crooner from the 1940s held rigid views about premarital sex? Anyway, the RO didn’t care whether the skipper was considered unpracticed in matters of sex. Maybe, in a world of AIDS, he was merely being careful. All the RO wanted to know was how good a sub captain the forty-three-year-old skipper was. Maybe his apparent lack of sensitivity as far as Evans was concerned might in fact be his preoccupation with the array of hard choices that confronted him if Roosevelt was to have any hope of survival. He saw the hospital corpsman walking down the passageway with what looked like two plastic garbage bags except for the glistening of the zippers on the body bags. Two of the men wounded in the depth charge attack had died.
* * *
Aboard the Yumashev, Captain Stasky was breaking radio silence. He knew that, slowed down as he was and with his general position probably known because of the explosions of the few depth charges that had worked, there wasn’t much chance of the enemy not knowing where he was. But even if this were not so, Stasky knew it was his duty, regardless of his own safety and that of his crew, to inform Northern Fleet headquarters immediately that more than half the depth charges he’d dropped had been duds.
It was not merely for the sake of the safety of the other ships in the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Pacific Fleets, however, that Stasky ordered the coded message be sent without delay — but because of his own status as commander of a cruiser bearing the coveted white-backed red star with four black circles, the highest antisubmarine warfare efficiency rating awarded by the fleet commander. His own career was at stake.
* * *
Aboard the USS Roosevelt, six men crammed in around the torpedoes, their caps off as Robert Brentwood began the service, the men’s faces showing the strain of the Yumashev’s depth attack on them, lines of tension etched deeply in their faces in the red battle light, several of the men gripping their blue baseball-style caps. Only the reactor room officer appeared calm, a serenity about him that Brentwood found more disconcerting man helpful, especially when, as captain, he was trying to present the coolest demeanor he could while reciting the age-old prayer for those killed at sea. At such moments, Brentwood, though he was the one speaking, often felt outside himself, more an observer, he thought, than a participant in the proceedings.
As he closed the prayer book, Brentwood nodded to the torpedoman’s mate. The mate palmed the clearing control for tubes seven and eight. There was a dull thud, a gush of water like a toilet flushing, then a hiss of compressed air as the shrouds were shot out, the mate immediately venting the tubes, readying them to receive Mark-48 torpedoes. There were tears in Brentwood’s eyes. He turned away and cleared his throat, then turned to the small clump of men before he left for the eighty-two-yard walk back to control. “Thank you for being here.”
There was an awkward murmured response, one of the men, a yeoman, watching intently as Brentwood stepped over the sill of the watertight door, past the reactor room, heading into “Sherwood Forest,” where the six Trident C missiles stood, their silos dwarfing their human controllers.
“Thanks for being here?” said the yeoman. “Where the hell else would we be? On Coney Island?” He glanced across at a young quartermaster to get his reaction. The quartermaster gave a noncommittal shrug. He was enjoying the show.
“He meant thanks for coming, you asshole,” chimed in an off-duty planesman.
“I fucking know that,” said the yeoman.
“Then what are you bitching about?”
The yeoman didn’t know specifically, only that Brentwood’s tears disturbed him. Perhaps Brentwood reminded him too much of his old man, a typewriter salesman, who’d always cut an imposing figure most of the time. A no-nonsense, strong type — a heap of quiet self-confidence— before computers. Too old to change, and sometimes he’d start thanking you for doing the simplest thing when it was your job. Got all weepy and scared the hell out of you — whole world seemed it would come apart and just swallow you up. It meant he was against the ropes about something — couldn’t handle it himself anymore.
“Little things are important,” the yeoman answered the planesman obliquely. With his old man, it hadn’t been anything spectacular at first — nothing you’d really notice. Just a few drinks to begin with. Then a few pills to “calm my nerves.” Then he couldn’t get up mornings. Pretty soon he was incapable of making any important decision. “See your mom” became the cry. The yeoman told the planesman the scuttlebutt from the hospital corpsman was that Captain “Bing” had been white as a toilet, hand shaking, as he’d given Evans the shot. What the yeoman didn’t tell the planesman was that his rather had been scared shitless of needles too. And so was he. That’s what was wrong — pretty soon his old man had started freaking him out too. The planesman dismissed the scuttlebutt. “Aw, shit — corpsmen always like to make things bigger than they are. Makes ‘em feel important. Hell, I know plenty of guys who don’t like getting shots. Go weak at the knees. So what? What do you want? Joe Montana?”
“Fucking right,” said the yeoman.
“Then, buddy,” put in a torpedoman, “you’re on the wrong friggin’ boat.”
“That’s what I’m thinkin’.”
“Well — what are you planning to do about it?” the planesman said. “Swim?”
“Nothing you can do, is there?” replied the yeoman.
“For Christ’s sake, you’re making a big thing out of squat all.”
“Listen, man. It’s the little things that count. Right? Isn’t that how they weed everyone out at the school? Guy panics for a second in the dive tank and he’s out.”
“Balls!” said the torpedoman. “Don’t know anyone who liked being in the tank.”
“Yeah — but you didn’t show it, right?” pressed the yeoman.
“Hey,” said the torpedoman. “I’d rather the guy running this boat show a little compassion than have some hard-ass Quigg.”
“Who’s Quigg?” asked the yeoman.
The torpedoman looked across at the planesman disbelievingly. “He doesn’t know who Quigg was.”
“So?” said the yeoman. “You gonna tell me?”
“You don’t have to worry,” cut in the planesman. “Bing’ll get us out of this. He’ll get us home.”
“Yeah,” added the torpedoman. “We’ll be in Faslane before you know it.” Faslane was the village for Holy Loch.
“At five knots,” said the yeoman, “it’ll take a fucking year.”
“Not to worry, yeo, we’ve got enough food to—”
“Fuck! You told us that before. We’re crawlin’ along like some fucking turtle and you’re worried about goddamned chow. You can’t eat yourself out of a HUK pack. Their goddamned Alfas are faster than we are.”
The planesman slapped on his submariner’s cap and, without another word, left the torpedo room, making his way forward, the torpedoman following.
“Time he had furlough,” said the planesman, half-jokingly. “He’s more goddamned worried than the old man.”
“Not surprised,” said a voice behind them. The planesman saw it was a two-striper, the young quartermaster, who’d been draped against the torpedo, his neat dark beard matching the dark, short-sleeved uniform that distinguished him from the rest of the R
oosevelt’s crew. He’d been so quiet, they’d almost forgotten he was there.
“What do you mean?” the torpedoman asked.
“He had a girl in Glasgow,” explained the quartermaster. “Killed in one of the rocket attacks.”
“Better keep an eye on him then,” said the planesman.
“Who?” said the quartermaster. “Me?”
“You seem to know all about him.”
“Hell, I hardly know him.”
It was one of the problems on the big pigboats — on any large vessel. Even though the seventy-day assignments meant they were together on the sub for forty days straight, with twenty-five days tied up alongside Holy Loch, some of the ship’s company, working eight hours on, twelve off, never met. Often all there was to know about a man apart from his technical qualification was whatever the scuttlebutt happened to pass on, and that was notoriously unreliable. “Hell,” said the quartermaster, “I don’t even know myself.” The other two laughed. They thought it was a joke.
“Come on,” said the torpedoman. “I’ve got to report to the chief up in the machine room. Bing’s got him working on some special rig.”
“What kind of rig?” inquired the planesman.
“I don’t know. All I do know is the old man wants it ready before the next TACAMO rendezvous.”
“There’ll be no rendezvous,” said the planesman. “Any of our E-6As come this way, the Russians’ll blow ‘em out of the sky.”
“I think maybe the old man knows that,” said the quartermaster.
“Then how we going to confirm our position?” argued the planesman. “Either way, we’ll have to go up with an aerial.”
“If the TACAMO comes, we can use the floater,” proffered the quartermaster. He meant the floating low-frequency wire.
“Still have to go up a ways,” said the planesman. “Takes too friggin’ long for data transmission. Russkies’ll be waiting for that. We need a burst message — a lot of data — quickly. Tell us where the fuck we are and what’s going on up there. For my money, that means sticking our UHF out of the water.”