Scorpion in the Sea

by P. T. Deutermann

  How smug I was, she thought, not for the first time. Thought I had the guy figured out. Their love life had settled down to a routine that had become, after a few years and the tacit realization that the marriage would be barren, more an act of consideration than passion. He attacked his assignments with energy and tenacity, and would often drop into bed late at night without a sound, exhausted by the day and the prospect of getting up the next morning before dawn to be in the office before the current Admiral.

  While his career consumed and presumably fulfilled him, their marriage provided Diane with less and less. Without a family focus, she had become bored with Navy life. She disliked the highly structured and so very busy activities of the wives’ clubs on and off base, where too many of the wives slyly threw around their husband’s rank while pretending to be just one of the girls. Diane did not care for bridge, did not have to jog, and was hopeless at tennis; she preferred to curl up with a good book. When she did get roped into the wives’ functions, she would keep her distance and amuse herself by watching the political interplay.

  J.W. had occasionally sensed her restlessness. He would offer up the refrain that they had to play the game, Diane, if we’re going to succeed in this business; the top levels of the Navy have no room for non-conformists, characters, trouble-makers, or officers with controversial wives. But once they had come to Florida, she knew that if all she had to do was to lie around on the beach all day she would soon be driven to 11 A.M. vodka coolers like Mrs. Daniels next door, or to one of the bronzed young hunks who littered the Navy beach right behind her patio after four thirty. Hence the volunteering.

  She had occasionally imagined what it would be like, to go out on the beach one day and signal some direct, uncomplicated interest, bring some guy back to the quarters, and screw his brains out. And then what? The fantasy always came apart at the “then what.” But it made an exotic diversionary scene in her mind whenever her dear, dedicated, and extremely promising husband, the Chief of Staff, found a few minutes in his terribly exciting professional day to pay attention to his wife. Not that it ever led to much these days. And now she finally knew why.

  J.W. most definitely brought the office home with him. The first hour of his return from work was spent in a sort of debriefing, and she was always fascinated by the attention he paid to gossip; it made her wonder if senior officers in the Navy ever did any real work in the office. From his conversations at night, when he stayed awake long enough to talk, she had the impression that he spent much of the day keeping track of which of his contemporaries was going where and getting what plum assignments. Maybe that was why be brought those two briefcases home at night, and closeted himself in the study until the wee hours. The Admiral seemed to have a more balanced approach to life; he was on the base golf course by 5 P.M. every day. J.W. always said that the reason the Admiral could play golf was that the Chief of Staff did all the work, which was how it was supposed to be.

  She turned off the shower, and shook her hair out, attacking it vigorously with a hair dryer and styling brush, while she let the air conditioning dry her off. She could have pulled it off, the going through the motions, the dutiful wife routine, the polished facade, except for one little perturbation: the Wave Commander in Norfolk that had apparently been the real center of J.W.’s affections for two goddamn years!

  She continued to brush her hair while letting the waves of anger recede. She had found out about her husband’s girlfriend by accident. At first she had been terribly hurt, awash in feelings of inadequacy, bereft at the invasion of intimacy caused by another woman, wondering if he was compensating somehow for the absence of children in their marriage. But then the hurt had turned to anger as she had thought it through. J.W. was intimate with nothing but his own ambitions. She did not have a loving, caring marriage —she had a role, ironically much like the faceless woman in Norfolk had a role—written, directed, and produced by J.W. Martinson, III, in his pursuit of an Admiral’s flag. The Wave Commander worked in the inner sanctum, the executive offices of the Atlantic Fleet Commander himself. Diane knew in her bones that her dear husband was probably using his girlfriend and her unique access in exactly the same way that he was using her, to further his career.

  She had not decided what to do, if anything. Yet. She was pretty sure that J.W. did not know that she knew; he was sufficiently conceited to assume that she could not know. She had come to depend on the anger to sustain her when the hurt occasionally caught her unawares. She was finally recognizing that what really hurt was the lost opportunity to have had a real love in her life. At forty, the chances were getting pretty slim.

  She glanced at her watch. She had two hours before she had to get herself dressed and painted up for yet another reception at the Officers’ Club, in honor of yet another visiting fireman. She no longer kept track of who the various guests of honor were these days; J.W. always gave her a thorough briefing while he got dressed, and repeated it in the car. She would listen dutifully, fix a few key things in her mind so that she would have something intelligent to say to the great man of the hour, and then settle into the role of decorous prop while her husband cruised the party, getting his “face time” with the Admiral and checking the bases. Navy receptions, she had long ago decided, were designed to be exquisitely boring so that the men would ache to get back out to sea. Many of the other officers, inevitably married, who came on to her at the cocktail parties were dependably carbon copies of her husband, very busy, very important, and very interested in talking about themselves, their careers, their commands, and how everyone junior to them knew that they were someone to be reckoned with.

  She decided to take a nap. She stood nude by the bedroom window for a minute, staring out through the sheers at the line of silver blue sea visible over the dunes behind the house. The discovery that even her marriage had been compromised by J.W.’s pursuit of promotion had accentuated her deep need for some thing that was missing from her life, some passion, some vital element that would make her life as a woman and an individual come alive. She knew that it was part sexual and part intellectual, and also partly a desire for something to happen before she ran out of time, and yet the revelation of her husband’s infidelity had partially unnerved her, awakening doubts about her own self worth as a woman. She wondered if she would have the courage to go after whatever it was she was seeking, and the temerity to carry it through if she found it.

  Maybe, she thought, there really is no way around it: maybe she should just go out and have an affair of her own. And then she laughed at herself, and recalled the episode last year when one of her acquaintances on the base had “gone off the reservation,” as J.W. phrased it, and spent a three day weekend at one of the south Florida resorts with a “close friend” while her husband was deployed to the Mediterranean. The woman had eventually become a basket case, torn between her physical desire for a rematch and the terrible guilt, which was increasingly amplified by the everybody-knows syndrome inescapable on a small naval station like Mayport. The poor woman had eventually confessed all to her husband, against the somewhat cynical advice of her married friends (deny, deny, deny—it’s what they’re desperate to hear, dear), and then she, and her friends, had had to endure the emotional quagmire of their “getting it back together.” Diane shivered.

  She contemplated taking a Valium, but took an aspirin instead and slipped into bed, setting her alarm clock for four thirty. Fantasize, my dear, fantasize. Playing around was simply too hard, as J.W. was fond of saying, and J.W. ought to know, the son of a bitch. And, yet, she wondered. Her marriage was rapidly hollowing out to nothing more than going through the motions. But when she asked herself the vital questions, what would she do, where would she go, her mind failed completely. She realized as she drifted off to sleep that she was going to have to come to grips with her problem, but had not the slightest idea of what to do about it.

  FIVE

  The diesel-electric submarine Al Akrab, off the northeast coast of Florida; 10 April
; 1800

  The Captain sat in stony silence at the head of the minuscule wardroom table. There were five other officers in the wardroom: his Deputy Commander, who was also the political officer, the Operations officer, and the two department heads, the Weapons Officer and the Chief Engineer. Behind the Captain’s chair stood the Musaid, the senior Chief Petty Officer in the boat. The political officer was speaking. Still speaking.

  “The error, therefore, is a collective error. The fact that the watch officer lost depth control and broached the sail is nothing more or less than the grand summation of training errors, admittedly poor discipline on his part, and insufficient qualification time in his training program aboard Al Akrab. It is not politically responsible to blame only the watch officer. The operational error has its antecedents in the doings of the collective organization: just as the organization’s successes are always due to the efforts of the group, so are the organization’s errors also attributable to the organization as a whole. That is my doctrinal position.”

  He sat back, and folded his arms. The Captain refused to look at him, but continued to stare straight ahead, his black eyes focused on the opposite bulkhead. There were times when every submarine commander had wanted to put his political officer into a torpedo tube and fire him into the abyss. This was one of them.

  The Captain was a tall, thin man, with a walnut brown, hawk-like face, all angles, ridges of muscle, and corners of fine bone. His eyes were wide set and jet black under pronounced eyebrows, the legacy of some Turkoman in his Bedouin heritage. His nose was short and boldly hooked, reinforcing the resemblance to a raptor; his lips were thin and set in a rigid, flat line. There was an air of latent tension about him, in the way he stared at things and people, and in the way he carried his wiry body, leaning forward, hands in front and moving, as if ready to seize something.

  His silence drew out the tension. The entire mission depended precisely and exactly on not being detected, and all the political officer’s socialist cant did not change that fact. The Soviets had provided excellent training in their submarine school; they had offset that excellence by draping the burden of socialist political camel dung across the shoulders of every military commander in the form of his political officer.

  “Does anyone else wish to speak?” he asked, softly.

  The political officer, who simply loved to hear the sound of his own voice, sat forward as if to start again. The Captain held up one finger in his general direction, as if in warning. Gauging the look on the Captain’s taut face, the political officer subsided back into his chair.

  “Does anyone else wish to speak?”

  There was silence around the table. The hum of ventilator fans, and the occasional creaking of the hull from the pressure of 85 meters depth were the only sounds. Outside the curtained entrance to the tiny wardroom, a steward was arranging plates and cups on the tray table, waiting to set up the wardroom for the evening meal. The Captain looked at each one of them in turn.

  “Then I shall speak. And you shall listen. The mistake may be collective, but the punishment for the next such mistake shall be individually extreme. Most extreme.” He paused, while the four officers at the table looked at him in growing apprehension. Once again, the Deputy Commander opened his mouth as if to speak, and then shut it abruptly. The Captain continued, training his eyes around the table like a stereo-optic gunsight.

  “As all of you know, our mission here is to lurk in the sea, and to await the arrival of the American aircraft carrier Coral Sea, the carrier that bombed our homeland in 1986. Bombed the Jamahiriya, and killed a favorite child of the Colonel. Our sacred mission is to surprise that carrier, and to sink it if possible as it makes its way into port. The Coral Sea is now in the Caribbean. It will return soon to its base at Mayport. Our intelligence service knows approximately when the carrier is due back to this port, but not precisely when. We shall be informed in time to prepare. Until we receive that signal, our mission is to explore our attack patrol area and to remain undetected!”

  He paused for an instant.

  “I have told you all this before,” he reminded them.

  He paused again to sip from a glass of cold tea. None of the others moved.

  “If we are discovered before that date,” he continued, “all of this is for nothing. Our journey of four thousand miles, the hours and hours of training, the deception of all the Soviet advisors in our homeland, the stress of living submerged for endless days, the danger of discovery from all the American warships which train in this area, all for nothing. This crew has been handpicked, carefully indoctrinated, confirmed to be politically reliable, and supposedly trained to the highest degree of operational readiness. This submarine has been given every piece of replacement machinery we needed, and the other five boats of our Navy have been stripped as required to do this. We have their spare parts. We have their working torpedoes. We have some of their crew.”

  His voice was controlled, but flat with menace. The tension in his face made the words seem like bullets.

  “This mission has been three years in the planning. Three years. In great secrecy. At great expense. No one in the rest of our Navy knows where we are. Our Soviet advisors do not know—they think only that we are loose in the Gulf of Sidra. All of the Soviet submarine advisors have been taken to the South for a special hunting expedition, away from the base, away from the decoy that lies at our berth at Ras Hilal. If we are discovered out here by the Americans, 100 miles off the American coast, hiding in their own Navy operating areas, it will all be for nothing. And they will kill us. They will hunt us down and kill us, because our very presence will be an affront to the pride of the great American Navy. So.”

  He paused, moved back in his chair, and unsnapped the holster on his right hip. Behind him the Musaid tensed. Every Commanding Officer in the armed forces carried a sidearm, even aboard ship. He withdrew a large Russian automatic pistol, and set it down on the wardroom table. Four pairs of eyes looked down at it, and then back at him. He gestured towards the pistol with his chin.

  “I will personally execute,” he declared, “the next individual who does what the watch officer did this morning: exposes this mission, and this boat. He lost depth control less than a mile from a fishing boat at morning twilight. If anyone on that boat crew saw us, we may be in desperate trouble. Our only possible salvation is that their Navy will not believe it, and we must depend on their arrogance for that. Do you understand me? Shall I demonstrate my resolve for you?”

  The officers did not know whether to shake their heads or nod. They remained silent. Finally the Deputy spoke up.

  “Your orders are clear. We shall inform the entire crew. It will not happen again.”

  “Very well. I have nothing more to say.”

  They were interrupted by a tapping on the wardroom door coaming.

  “Enter,” ordered the Captain.

  A petty officer from the control room pushed aside the curtain, and entered nervously. The tension in the room was palpable. He handed the Captain a contact report, his eyes widening as he saw the pistol. The Captain opened the piece of paper, and scanned it quickly. His face darkened.

  “Very well. I have seen it. I will be there at once.”

  The messenger withdrew, fumbling with the curtains as he did so. The Captain looked around at the four faces again.

  “Now we shall see. We have detected an American destroyer which has begun to ping, to the north of us, where we were this morning when this collective mistake was made.”

  The political officer wet his lips, and seemed to shrink in his chair. There were no telephones to the political security directorate at headquarters out here, and that pistol was still on the table. The Captain was staring at them.

  “Go and tell every man what I have decreed.”

  They scrambled out of their chairs, and left the wardroom one after the other, being careful not to get too close to the Captain. When they were gone, the steward poked his head in through the curtain. He sa
w the Captain, and then he saw the black pistol. He made a squeaking noise, and hurriedly withdrew.

  The Captain sat there for a moment, gathering his thoughts. The fools. The simple fools. The contact report had caused his stomach to grab with cold fear. He felt sick that the whole thing might already be over. He forced himself to take a deep breath, and then another. Behind him the Musaid moved discreetly. The Captain pushed back his chair, and turned in it to look up at the Musaid.

  The Musaid was a bulky man with a coarse, Turkish face, a full black beard and moustache, and fierce eyes. He was not so much tall as broad, and he was ten years older than the Captain. He had been the Captain’s bodyguard and shadow for nine years, and had been his trusted confidant since he took command of the Al Akrab. They had gone through submarine training together in Sevastopol. The Captain looked up at him for a moment, and then nodded.

  “Musaid. You have something to say.”

  “Pasha,” he said, using the archaic title. “The crewmen are volunteers. This edict will make them something else. For fear of making a mistake, they may do nothing when the situation demands that they do something.” He seemed ready to say more, but then fell silent.

  The Captain had great respect for the senior Chief, who held a position roughly equivalent to what the American submarine Navy called Chief of the Boat. The Musaid had served in the submarine force right from the beginning, being one of the first non-commissioned officers recruited from the Army into the fledgling Navy, and one of the first group selected to be sent off for training in the Soviet Navy submarine force. He had more military experience than did the Captain.