The Circle

by David Poyer

  It was tricky and unforgiving, and the seawall’s creosoted timbers and the reinforced bows of the YPs were dented and gouged. But you had to learn it. Because pretty soon, you’d be doing it at sea with ships ten or fifty times bigger, and far less maneuverable.

  Now he watched openmouthed as Ryan came right slowly, smashed her way through a sea, came right again. Till she was beam-on, and fighting her way yard by yard closer to the reeling submarine.

  It was an incredible demonstration of sheer shiphandling seamanship. As each swell approached, the bow swung right with just enough momentum to meet it, take the blow, and reel back still lined up for the approach. He’s coming in upwind, Dan thought. The wind’ll blow us down, pin us against the sub. But could Packer fight the old destroyer free again once she was alongside? What if one of the Soviet’s planes or screw blades tore through her paper-thin, rusty sides?

  “Stand by to port.”

  “Stand by,” he screamed. He bent over the rail, looking down again.

  The kapok floats, fat little yellow pillows at the foot of the net, streamed the mesh out ten or twenty feet from the destroyer’s sheer, like a drapery hanging from a balcony. If Packer could lay her alongside gently enough, close enough, it might cover most of the distance between the ship and the sub.

  Unfortunately, Ryan was picking up the period of the swell now. The incandescent rods of the searchlights swayed down, then up again, losing their quarry as they probed up into the squall.

  Then they dropped again, and glided over the steel reef. He squinted. Something different, wrong about the hatches. But the lights moved aft, converging on the vertical stern plane, the rudder, that stuck up above the seas like a raked black tombstone. Then Ryan pendulumed to starboard and they swayed up again, canting crazily across the sky.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Popeye, you ever done this before?”

  “Never, sir. Don’t want to do it now, either.”

  “Think the net’ll reach?”

  “It ain’t that’s what’s bothering me, sir. It’s going alongside that bitch. The captain screws up and we’ll land on top of her. Bust our back. Snap the keel. Sink us all.”

  “Well, it looks like he’s—”

  “Mr. Lenson! What you want us to do?”

  He turned and screamed downwind, “I want three guys with me, three guys with axes. Bring that grapnel, somebody. When we get there, claw it along the side, check there’s nothing trailing underwater. If there is, fish it up and cut it. Understand?”

  A light came on on the submarine, high on the sail, and swept around the sea like a two-handed sword. It steadied for a moment on the white blur to port that was AGI, then rotated round toward Ryan.

  When it hit them, he shielded his eyes and peered down. The beam lighted the narrowing blackness between them. Solid steel, he thought, on both sides, and between them a little rope and a little flesh and bone. He didn’t want to be the filling in this sandwich. His left hand fumbled across his life vest, checking that the straps were tight. His right reached under it to check the pistol. It was sliding down, and he hauled it up and wedged it in tighter under his belt, the spur hammer digging into his navel.

  Under his breath he muttered, hardly aware of it, “Bring her in, Captain, goddamn it!”

  Ryan eased forward slowly, incredibly slowly. A sea burst over her starboard side, throwing spray high into the night. Her bow swung left, lifted by the impact of hundreds of tons of water. For a moment it looked as if she’d ride the submarine down. Then she came slowly, slowly, back to starboard.

  She crept the last few yards and came to a crazily rolling, pitching halt, thirty yards upwind of the hulk and perfectly aligned fore and aft. The narrow strip of black water between them foamed. Then it began to narrow.

  Ryan nosed forward a little more. She rose and fell, rolled and pitched madly; then for a moment lay almost still, like an exhausted whale tired of fighting rope and iron. A dragging clang came from aft.

  “On the fo’c’sle: Away the boarding party, to port, away.”

  Then despite himself he was cheering hoarsely, heard the men around him yelling too. He threw his leg over the lifeline, rolled over, and was starting down when he saw he wasn’t the first. A round little figure was plucking its way down the net ahead of him.

  The ship rolled, and his hands cramped on rough wet hemp as his boots brushed the sea. Then he was jerked upward, flying through the air. A kapok float danced about his legs like a puppy.

  The net slammed down again. Above him the others clung grimly, heads bent. With sudden horror, he realized none of them had rifles. They’d forgotten them in the rush forward. He’d forgotten, too. Should he order them back … no, too late, they were committed.

  Almost there. He wound one arm into the ropework, and twisted around to look.

  A pudgy figure poised itself, stepped out, and disappeared from his line of sight between the ship and the submarine.

  “Vogel!” he yelled, letting himself down another foot or two, shielding his eyes against the insane glare of the searchlights.

  The sub rolled away. Across from him, on rounded wave-washed steel, the departmental yeoman was running aft. He wasn’t on the deck flat, but the curved pressure hull. The submarine rolled back, and he dropped to his knees, holding to some intake or protrusion Dan couldn’t see. Then he was up again. He gained the stern and disappeared around the missile fairing.

  It was too far now to leap after him. Ryan’s stern was being blown down against the submarine, but her bow was pivoting away. He was getting ready to try anyway when Vogelpohl reappeared, above them now, swinging the grapnel. He tucked it under his arm for a moment, coiling the line, then hurled the bitter end across the black gap of sea toward Dan.

  It uncoiled in the air and lashed across his chest, wet and heavy. He snatched at it and almost lost. Then he had it. He whipped it through the net and bent it on with two half hitches, using his free hand and his teeth. When he looked up again, Vogelpohl was doubled, hauling it taut, then stooping to make it fast to some cleat or grating on the deck.

  “Follow me,” Dan screamed up at the other terrified faces. He waited for the roll, then made a clumsy half leap, half-pulling himself along the line.

  His boots hit not painted steel but some sort of rubber coating. It gave for an inch or two, then went solid. He leaned into it, hauling himself hand over hand up the line.

  Halfway across, the pistol slipped out of his belt and burrowed down his pants leg. There was nothing he could do about it. It made a thud like a handball as it hit the rubber, bounced, and disappeared into the sea.

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  Then he was up, hauling himself the last couple of feet up onto the missile deck, and Vogelpohl was leaning down with his hand out. Lenson staggered upright, stumbling as his reflexes misjudged the roll.

  He stood on a reeling rectangle twenty feet wide and seventy long. At the forward end towered the sail. Two horizontal diving planes stretched out from it, the tips nearly touching the sea at the extremity of each roll. Aft of it, reaching toward him, two deep grooves ran along the top of the missile bay, then sloped behind him, disappearing into a welter of white water around the tail fin.

  That was all—except for Ryan looming over them, flinging herself from side to side so desperately the sea surged out in great white billows over the even more desperately rolling sub.

  Greenwald came off the net and scrambled toward him. Then Coffey. They both had axes, the handles stuffed down the backs of their jackets. He waited till Rambaugh got across, too, then waved them forward and aft.

  Okay, first order of business … he ran ten steps forward, then came to a hopping, cursing halt as his toe caught the edge of one of the hatches. “What the fuck?” he muttered, bending down.

  It was opening, very slowly. He could hear gears grinding beneath him in the fairing.

  He bent closer, wishing for a hand light. But in the flicker glare, black then brill
iant, of the searchlights, he could still make out the foot-thick tapered steel plug of a missile hatch. It was hinged on the outboard edge. He could hear gears grinding somewhere, driving it slowly up. He couldn’t see what was beneath it. But he could guess. A waterproof, frangible diaphragm, to keep out any stray leaks submerged.

  Then the blunt ablative snout of a submarine-launched ballistic missile.

  “Nothin’ hung up aft, far as I can see. What you got there, sir?”

  Greenwald. He looked up, and their eyes met. Then Dan’s shifted to what the seaman carried over his shoulder.

  When the ax head was down as far as he could reach in the gap of the massive hinge, he straightened. They watched as the hatch edge drove gradually back into it.

  The inch-thick hardened steel ax head buckled slowly, like warm chocolate. The oak haft splintered with a crack like a pistol shot.

  He spun to face the ship. Across fifty yards of black water, he stared into the triple suns of the searchlights. When he shaded his eyes, though, he could see them. The after five-inches.

  Pointed right at him.

  Destroy B41 immediately if sonar indicates imminent missile launch.

  “What’s next, man?”

  “They’re trying to launch these things, Rocky.”

  “Yeah? We better—”

  Rambaugh jogged up. He squinted at the hatch, then at Dan. “What you want us to do, sir?”

  They were all looking at him: Coffey and Greenwald, Vogelpohl and Rambaugh.

  There was only one thing left, and it was probably useless. Whoever was up there would probably just shoot them. But do nothing, and they’d all die for sure.

  They had to try to take the submarine.

  He shouted “Follow me,” and began running toward the sail. Boots thudded behind him, but he didn’t look back to see how many.

  Coming around the sail, he ran full tilt into a man in black foul-weather gear coming down ladder rungs welded on the outboard side. “Kto eto?” he said. For a second, they gaped at each other.

  Then he was swinging a clumsy fist, missing Dan by a good six inches. Dan grabbed the Russian’s jacket as he followed through, spun with him as his balance vanished, then let go, releasing him overboard as a sea roared over the rounded bow. It forced him and Rambaugh, behind him, to grab the ladder rungs and each other, clinging against the freezing seconds-long body slam of the Arctic sea.

  When it dropped away, the man he’d shoved overboard was no longer there, but another was climbing down in his place. Dan punched him in the head before he could step away from the ladder. The crewman waggled his chin and dropped into a crouch, grabbing a handhold on the sail as they rolled violently. Dan tried to punch him in the face. This time the man parried the blow like a kitten batting away a dust ball. He was big as Isaacs, big as any man aboard Ryan. Dan fell back along the narrow deck, wishing more than he’d ever wished for anything before that he’d been more careful with the .45.

  He couldn’t just keep retreating. He had to get up that ladder, into the sail, interrupt the launch somehow. It didn’t matter what happened to him then. He had to.

  But more men were sliding down now behind the big one, jumping from above onto the diving plane, then sliding down the ladder to the rolling, heaving deck. On the narrow, wave-drenched catwalk between the sail and the sea, there was room for only one at a time.

  The hulk growled. He let go of the cleat and came at Lenson, and Rambaugh shouted, “Behind you, sir! The ax!”

  Dan grabbed it and lunged into a roundhouse swing. The Soviet leaped back and the blade slammed into the sail, snapping off the haft. Dan gaped at it as someone shouted angrily above them, harsh peremptory barks of command.

  The giant growled again and rushed him, and without thinking at all, Dan checked him Naval Academy lacrosse-style in the gut with the splintered end of the ax handle. He fell, but tore the haft from Lenson’s hands as he went down. The others charged over him, shouting, and Dan turned and ran.

  When he got back to the fairing, it was packed with Russians. Apparently there was a hatch astern, over the engine room. He was quickly surrounded. Fists and clubs hit him in the back and sides. His life jacket soaked up the first blows, but then he caught a seaboot in the crotch.

  The flare of agony blotted out the night. He fell into the water that swirled around the staggering, battling men. He lay there unable to breathe, gagging, waiting for the kicks that would finish him.

  They didn’t come. He forced his eyes open at last, to see that his assailants, and the fight, had moved aft.

  The rolling deck was covered with reeling, punching, splashing sailors, a despairing, drunken barroom brawl swept by thigh-deep seas. Greenwald ducked under a pale-faced Russian’s swing, then literally waded into him, long arms flailing. Coffey had a half nelson on the one Dan had dropped, but who’d come back, apparently, for more; the seaman’s arm pistoned as he rabbit-punched him. Vogelpohl was keeping two staggering crewmen at bay with the grapnel. Still the Ryan sailors were outnumbered. The Soviets were closing in on them, forcing them back toward the stern.

  He jerked his attention back to the sail—to two men up there watching the melee. They had rifles. What were they doing? They could sweep this whole deck with fire.

  Christ, he thought, I’ve got to do something. He sucked air into the vacuum in his belly and pried himself to his knees. He balanced there, gasping, in a weaving, uncertain stance.

  Suddenly something small, and round, and dark arched upward from Ryan’s decks. It arched and then dropped, falling directly for him. He froze. It seemed to slow, and he watched it fall, and his breath stopped in his throat.

  He struggled to his feet, caught it, and spun. It splashed into the sea off the port side before he realized it wasn’t what he thought it was.

  More of them fell out of the searchlight glare, a volley of them. This time they were aimed at the Russians. The sub’s crew fell back, shouting warnings to each other as the spheres hit, bounced across the deck, and rolled into the raging water. Some of them doubled abruptly, vomiting into the seas that rolled back and forth over the deck.

  A ragged cheer came from aft.

  When he turned, a second wave was leaping off the nets. Gunner’s mates, quartermasters, messmen from Ryan, hastily dressed out in peacoats and foul-weather jackets, carrying baseball bats, chipping hammers, ball-peen hammers, dogging wrenches. They carried more of the round things, too. There was the windup; the peg—and another volley of Idaho potatoes mowed into the Soviet sailors, low and vicious this time, hardball pitches. He heard them thud home on chests and heads.

  The line of seasick Russians wavered, bowed, then fell back under the onrush of shouting destroyermen.

  Dan turned and sprinted forward, toward a suddenly empty section of deck below the great wings of the diving planes. Spray blew across the deck, isolating him briefly. When he came out of it, he was at the sail, and there, stretching upward, were welded steel rungs.

  He grabbed them, not stopping to think, and began climbing as fast as he could.

  It took longer than he expected. He was still weak from the groin shot. He was wheezing when he saw the turn of the sail outlined above him by a smear of light on wet metal. Someone was shouting on the far side.

  For a moment he wondered: Is this smart? Then he remembered that there were no other options. He crouched for a second, listening, then poked his head over the coaming.

  Black silhouettes. The vertical shafts of periscopes to his right. Confused shapes.

  Then his eye made sense of them.

  The men ranged by the periscope stands had guns, but they weren’t firing. Someone between him and them was shouting at them. Instead of obeying, though, they were just looking down, their backs to him. One had slung his rifle and was clinging to the shears, gagging.

  Dan grabbed the last rung and hauled himself with a convulsive shudder up and over the top of the sail.

  Into a sort of wet steel cockpit, with folded-dow
n windshields, and instruments, and loudspeakers bolted to the bulkheads. Gratings rattled faintly under his boots. And there was light, a round yellow circle of it just in front of him—leading down.

  At that moment, one of Ryan’s searchlights licked up, right into his eyes. He flung his hand up, blinded. Then it flicked away, and he made out the man opposite him.

  At the far side of the cockpit, a Soviet officer in a blue peaked cap leaned against the coaming. He was shouting at the men on the shears. His face was livid, enraged, his voice was cracking, but they didn’t stir.

  Then he bent to the open hatch, and the light from below glinted from the gold braid, from the red star.

  He looked to be Packer’s age. Under dark wet hair his rounded face was deathly white, with great bruises of fatigue. His mouth was a knife cut angled down, working angrily, screaming into the trunk. But again there was no response Dan could see.

  The officer straightened, and looked out at Ryan again. His back was still to Dan. His profile moved against the glare of the searchlights, turning from the American destroyer to the smaller outline of the Soviet AGI, which was moving in now, Dan saw, to make up on the sub’s leeward side.

  The captain wheeled suddenly, and their gazes locked across the cockpit. The exhausted, swollen eyes widened, but only for an instant. Then he didn’t look surprised anymore. He just looked … tired.

  His right hand came up. Dan saw that it held a pistol.

  “No!” Lenson shouted, and lunged forward. He was almost there when his boot hit ice, a slick patch on the grating, and his feet flew out from under him.

  He hit with stunning force at the same moment that he heard the flat pop of a shot, faint even this close, and whipped away instantly by the freezing wind.

  * * *

  HE woke into blackness and the sounds of a ship in a heavy seaway. He was flat on his back in the dark. His fingers crept across his chest like exploring roaches. They slid along rope. Was he a prisoner? Then they found the familiar switch of his own bunk light.