Scorpion in the Sea

by P. T. Deutermann

  Above the noise of helicopters he could hear the raucous buzzing of what sounded like several P-250 engines, and the hubbub created by dozens of men working, chain saws cutting up shoring timbers, sledgehammers banging balks of timber up against sagging bulkheads, the rush of seawater going over the side from the black P-250 dewatering hoses, the clatter of diesel engines from the boats alongside, and much shouting.

  The stretcher team lifted him up and he was carried out the port side door, the downhill door it appeared, because the stretcher bearers had to struggle to keep him level against the list on the ship. He could not tell if the list was worse or not. He could barely see anything at all in the blinding lights from all the spotlights on the ships alongside. The noise of the damage control teams echoed up between the slab sides of the big ships alongside like echoes in a canyon. Again he tried to talk, but his lips would not work, and his mouth was very dry.

  After they got him down the two ladders to the main deck, he thought he saw the Exec talking to another officer, the two of them standing in a cone of white light, but he was unable to call over to him, and then the Exec was gone. A powerful stink of gasoline engine exhaust fumes, fuel oil, steam, and salt water swept over him as they landed on the main deck. He had smelled it on the bridge, but it was much stronger down here, and he could see other stretchers lined up on the main deck, each with an attendant. The men carrying Mike did not stop, however, walking aft, stepping over the forms on the deck, until they reached the area of the after officer’s passageway door. Mike was amazed to see that the main deck aft of that point was awash; the stretcher bearers were standing in water up to their knees, and the ship’s lifelines were sticking up out of the black water, drawing a curving line showing where the hull was under water, disappearing where the quarterdeck and the fantail should have been. A motor whaleboat was tied alongside to a lifeline stanchion, and before Mike could take it all in, he was lifted over the partially submerged lifeline and the stretcher set down in the boat, which cast off right away. He heard another boat making its approach as his pulled away. He closed his eyes against the dazzling confusion in his brain.

  Minutes later he was being loaded aboard a helicopter which was turning up on the flight deck of one of the ships alongside. The helicopter was white and had a broad orange diagonal stripe painted down its side, indicating it was a Coast Guard helicopter. Once again, he was surrounded by officers who were talking to him, and thought he recognized the I.V., of all people, but the lights and the noise overwhelmed him and he closed his eyes. He heard the deepening roar of the helicopter engines, and felt the helo lift off, hover for an instant, and then bank away into the darkness. There were other stretchered forms on the deck of the helicopter cabin, and two young women in uniform tending to some IV bottles. One of them saw him watching and came over.

  “Everything OK, sailor?” she shouted above the din of the rotor blades overhead.

  He tried to nod, but his head was strapped in. He still could not open his lips. She saw his predicament, and brought a damp cloth, wiping some of the dried blood off his face and his lips, and then offering a small water container with a bent, steel spout. He drank some of the water gratefully and then lay back. It hurt his teeth, and it tasted salty. Just like the bosun’s coffee. She slipped a small pillow under his head, easing the straps around his forehead, and then went back to the men with the IV’s. Mike drifted off again, wondering curiously who was taking care of the ship.

  EIGHTY

  Jacksonville Naval Air Station Hospital, 2130

  “Mrs. Martinson,” said the pretty young Corps Wave from the Admissions Desk. “I think that guy you were asking about is being brought in now. They’re radioing in the names as the helicopters come in. We’re trying to, like, keep a list. The next one to land has a Montgomery on it.”

  “Thanks, Sally,” said Diane.

  She hurriedly finished stacking the pile of sterile bandage packages on the steel trolley table, pushed it out into the hall, and then hurried down the hall towards the ER. The hospital was at general quarters, with all staff and every volunteer on the list called in to handle the avalanche of casualties from the Goldsborough. The official story circulating within the hospital was that the ship had struck an old, World War II mine and had nearly sunk. There were supposedly over two hundred casualties. Coming on top of some of the injuries transported earlier from the Mayport Naval Station, the hospital was approaching saturation. As Diane hurried down the green hallway, she could see that every room had its lights on, and there were dozens of people, staff and volunteers, scurrying about to make them ready for incoming casualties. The hospital’s announcing system was going continuously, paging doctors and directing the movement of medical equipment and supplies. The announcing system was competing with the urgent instructions being called from desk to doorway along the hallway. There was a sense of barely controlled pandemonium in the air.

  As Diane arrived at the ER vestibule she saw a large crowd of dependents milling about outside the double glass doors, pale faces trying frantically to see into the ER operations area, which had been screened off with several portable screens. There was a hastily painted sign saying “Triage,” with a red arrow indicating the holding area in the north wing. There were several security police standing around both inside the ER vestibule as well as outside in the ambulance driveway, trying to keep people from coming into the ER. There was a pair of officers in khakis surrounded by a small mob of anxious dependents while they consulted clipboards.

  She thanked God that she was a volunteer; only her Gray Lady uniform would gain her access to the mob scene inside the E.R., but what she really wanted to do was get to the triage area. She scooped up a stack of blankets from a waiting trolley, and pushed her way through the glass doors. A harried looking orderly intercepted her immediately.

  “These have to go to the triage area,” she said authoritatively from behind the stack of blankets, not stopping for questions.

  “Uh, OK, Ma’am, triage is right through there. They’re using the whole north wing, I think.”

  “Thank you,” she said in a sing song voice, trying to sound like the nurses, hurrying around him before it occurred to him to ask why triage needed blankets on a hot night. She glanced into the ER itself as she went by and saw barely organized chaos in there behind the screens, with dozens of doctors and corpsmen working over patients, standing amidst piles of bloody dungarees and other clothes on the floor as they processed each casualty. The normal four bays of the ER had been drawn back, and there were at least twenty gurneys all rolled together haphazardly, leaving only enough space for the medical people to work and for corpsmen to dodge the debris on the floor as they grabbed for bandages, drips, IV stands, and instruments. She caught a brief, shocking glimpse of bare, bloody skin amongst all the green gowns and bandages.

  She hurried through another set of double glass doors, and into what was normally an infrequently used medical holding wing. A set of metal double doors was opened at the end of the hallway in the back, and the buzzing sound of a helicopter out on the pad next to the hospital could be heard echoing down the hall. The rooms on either side were filled with more people, four beds shoved into rooms designed for two, and two triage teams going from room to room deciding who was next into the ER and who could be sent upstairs to wait. She saw the red faced, overweight CO of the hospital, gowned up as if for surgery, steering a small knot of interns from gurney to gurney, pointing to injuries and making his decisions while the interns poked and probed the lumpy forms under the sometimes bloody sheets.

  All the lights were on, and Diane found herself blinking rapidly in the sudden, hot glare. Medical corpsmen and nurses brushed and bumped by her without noticing her, shouting to orderlies and junior corpsmen to bring this or that equipment or medicines. She threaded her way down the hall past rolling gurneys, loaded with gray, young, pain filled faces, some with their eyes open, most with them shut. Many had their heads bandaged with green dressings,
some of these showing large, dark stains. Diane held on to her load of blankets, trying not to stare while fighting down a rising sense of panic, and made her way steadily through the traffic to the end of the hall nearest the helicopter pad. She gripped the blankets tightly, keeping them between herself and the horrors all around, trying not to panic.

  As she got closer, the helo on the pad changed its pitch, and the roaring, buzzing craft lifted into the dark sky, a rotating red light under its tail painting the open doors with scarlet flashes. It was replaced by the next helo almost at once, a flare of noise and the blaze of its landing lights dazzling the doorway. A new crowd of orderlies swept past her, headed for the pad, pulling squealing gurneys behind them into the square perimeter of amber ground lights outlining the landing zone.

  Trying to stay inconspicuous, she put the blankets down in a corner, and waited by the side of the doors. She was terrified that someone would give her an urgent order, that she might miss him. The helo touched down with a light bounce, the rotors changed pitch, and the gurneys were rolled up to the sliding hatch, a rectangular dark hole in the white sides of the helicopter. After a minute, the gurneys began to stream back in from the pad, each propelled by one corpsman. Diane watched frantically, her heart in her mouth, where it had been for most of the afternoon, ever since the car carrier had blown up in the river and the subsequent call from the Commodore.

  She had been talking on the phone to her friend in Orlando when the first blast boomed over the peaceful, Friday afternoon routine of the base, followed by two more in quick succession, the explosions bellowing across the flat expanse of the naval station. She had been startled enough to drop the phone, and, oblivious to the squeaking shouts of her friend, she had raced to the window to look towards the basin. The officers’ quarters were on the beach area south of the carrier basin; the river was on the north side. She had seen the gray-black column of writhing smoke pushing skyward above the palms like some kind of movie monster, dwarfing the distant masts of the ships, growing impossibly large by the second, looking like the cloud that had come off the St. Helens volcano. A long minute later, there had been another blast, which drove a bright orange fireball up into the cloud, making it even bigger and giving it the shape of an atomic cloud rising into the afternoon air.

  The second explosion had been followed thirty seconds later by the sound of a metallic hail rattling through the palm trees and onto the flat, tar and pebble roofs of the quarters. She had grabbed the phone and told her friend that she had to go, that something terrible had happened on the base, and hung up as the sound of sirens began to rise from the area of the carrier basin.

  She had wanted to get in the car and drive down there, but realized that this would be foolish. The huge cloud of now all black smoke continued to boil up from just beyond the carrier piers, punctuated by dull thumps which produced smaller orange fireballs. From her kitchen door she could no longer see the top of the smoke column. She heard voices out on the lawns as her neighbors gathered on the grass to watch and pick through the glittering debris. It was evident by now that whatever had happened had happened out on the river and not on the base.

  She slipped out the back door, and found twinkling bits of what looked like confetti all over the lush grass, with some pieces of metal almost big enough to identify. Realizing she was barefoot, she went back into the house to get shoes, and then hurried out onto the beach behind the house, and started down the white sand beach towards the river junction. It took her twenty minutes at a fast walk to get down to the stone jetties, where the rumbling, towering cloud of smoke and flames began to fan her face with its hot, burning petroleum breath. There were sirens sounding all over the base, and dozens of flashing blue lights visible down on the destroyer piers. The beach was littered with progressively larger pieces of debris as she got closer to the jetties, most of it metal, but also a great deal of glass and what looked like bits of automobiles. From one of the big rocks on the jetty she could see what looked like the blackened remains of a large ship at the base of the firestorm, the flat stern recognizable because of the funnels and the rudder jutting up out of the water. The funnels leaned in towards each other, looking as if they had been made of lace, with bright orange flames rippling through the latticed steel.

  As other people came down the beach to see the wreck, a security pickup truck came bumping out over the sand dunes, the driver angrily ordering everyone to get off the beach and return to their quarters. A fresh series of explosions from the river impelled all the sightseers to obey the orders.

  She had returned to the quarters and watched the smoke column boil and rumble for the next hour, trading theories with her neighbors, some of whom had figured out that there must have been damage and injuries down on the piers. Finally the phone had begun to ring inside. Diane was not alarmed, as she knew her husband was safe at sea onboard the Coral Sea. She had answered on the fifth ring, and was surprised to hear the voice of Commodore Aronson. She felt a thrill of guilty fear in her stomach as she thought quickly about her call to Norfolk. She realized that the Commodore must have been having less than a really nice day, even before something went bang out on the river.

  “Mrs. Martinson? This is Eli Aronson.”

  “Yes, Commodore?”

  She had tried to think of something else to say, but could not. He let her hang there in silence for a few seconds.

  “I understand you made a call to CincLantFleet this morning,” he said.

  “Yes, I did.” She swallowed. “I’m sorry if—”

  “No matter; this thing was bound to come out anyway, and it appears to me that what’s just happened might be part of it.”

  “Exactly what did happen out there, Commodore?”

  “Our picture is pretty fragmentary, but we know one of those big Toyota car carriers came into the river junction on what looked like a routine transit upriver. We have witnesses who say that it looked like she was torpedoed—three big, underwater blasts along her port side that were big enough to shove her halfway across the river. She began to roll to port right after, turned over within seconds, and started to burn from stem to stern. She was packed with cars, which means a couple of thousand gas tanks all crammed inside, and we think that’s what finally blew her to bits. We’ve had a lot injuries on the piers and around the base, and the station dispensary is going to be pretty busy. But that’s not why I called.”

  Diane swallowed again, but did not say anything. In a sense, she had probably wrecked the Commodore’s career with her phone call.

  “Are you there, Mrs. Martinson?” His voice was hard. “I’m calling because I think that ship out there was mined, not torpedoed. The river entrance is much too shallow for torpedo work. Which tells me that our little submarine theory is probably not a figment. Thanks to your call, the Atlantic Fleet commanders are grappling with that little problem as we speak. It also means that Goldsborough is probably going to turn over a nasty rock out there in an hour or so. If we’re all lucky, Coral Sea will be warned in time to divert, but we can’t count on it. That’s up to Norfolk. But the Admiral, that’s CincLantFleet, Admiral Denniston, is certain to order a full investigation if he hasn’t already done so. I wanted to alert you to the fact that whatever relationship you have going with Mike Montgomery is bound to be dragged across a long green table, Mrs. Martinson. From the way the big guys were talking up in Norfolk, it won’t be a pretty process. For either you or Mike.”

  “I understand,” she replied in a small voice.

  “Do you? I don’t really think you do, but I’ve got problems of my own just now, as will Mike.”

  “Thanks to my call.”

  “Well, I admit I indulged in some creative language when I found out about the call. But I’ve been telling myself it’s for the best; I would have had to tell them what we thought was going on when the Toyota carrier went to heaven. But I’m going to offer you some advice: when Mike gets back in, there’s going to be hell to pay. I like the guy, and had hopes of g
etting him promoted. That’s still possible, depending on what happens out there. But it’s not possible, not even thinkable, if it becomes known that he was involved with the Chief of Staffs wife. If ever you planned to take a trip, go visit your mother, whatever, this would be a good time to do it. I don’t know anything about the status of your marriage to J.W. Martinson, but if you take a powder, it might help young Michael get through the shit storm that’s coming.”

  Diane was silent. She truly could not tell if the Commodore had Mike’s best interests at heart, or had figured out a particularly vicious way of getting back at her for spilling his secret into official navy channels. The sound of some more secondary explosions boomed in through the kitchen windows. She could think of absolutely nothing to say.

  “Goodbye, Commodore,” she said, and hung up.