Firespill

by Ian Slater

  The bombers were less than thirty minutes from Cape Bingham as she began to prune the visible part of the rampant Van Vliet rosebush which in James’s absence had entwined itself about the porch, trailing off along the leeward side of the house where the thorny tentacles below the small, white pink blossoms laid claim to every projection and irregularity in the cedar surface. When James came home, she would ask him to prune it fully. Next, she moved to the Nocturne rose bed, giving it special attention in an effort to keep alive as many blossoms as possible, for these were his favorites.

  Less than a quarter of a mile away, in a condominium suite with an uninterrupted view of the Kyles’ house, Philip Limet, ex-commander of the Swordfish, who was still recovering from his near-fatal heart attack of three months before, became aware of a pungent, burning odor trailing from the kitchen. Alice Limet hadn’t been watching the warming milk very carefully, and before she could turn off the gas it had boiled up, frothing wildly onto the stove. Alice, who had seen the figure moving about in the Kyles’ backyard and who had just been able to identify her neighbor through the field binoculars she always kept handy, was in a quandary. She was trying to make up her mind as to whether she should ring Mrs. Kyle and tell her what one of the junior officers visiting from the Canadian Forces Esquimalt Base had told Philip a half hour earlier.

  During the twenty years of their marriage—even before they had been engaged—she had always wanted to know where her husband was. It was a trait she had inherited from her mother, another navy wife. Of course the navy hadn’t always told her, especially during the Korean War, but given the choice, she had always preferred to know the danger he was in rather than sit night after day waiting for the call that wives dread. But Alice knew that not all service wives felt like that.

  She had never been close to the Kyles, despite their physical proximity. They had met rarely and rather formally at that. Perhaps, she thought, Mrs. Kyle was one of those funny types who really do believe that no news is good news. But perhaps she wasn’t like that; perhaps she would like to know. The decision whether or not to ring Sarah Kyle was absorbing all her concentration. It was so hard to tell.

  “Do you think I should?” It was ten years since she had been in London, but her cockney accent still came back when she was worried.

  Philip sat reading the latest on the extent of the firespill under banner headlines in the Victoria Times. He didn’t want anything to do with it. “Please yourself. I don’t know what women think about these things.”

  “Then you think I shouldn’t?” called Alice, sacrificing her nightly capuccino so that Philip could have the salvaged milk.

  Limet turned the page. There were no new details about the fire other than its approximate composition and size, which the newspaper estimated was already approaching thirty thousand square miles. “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps you’d better leave it to H.Q. to tell her what they’re trying to do.”

  Alice’s opinion of H.Q. came through as a scornful “Huh!” from the kitchen. She whipped, rather than stirred, the coffee. “H.Q.? Informing her at this time of night? Are you serious? They won’t tell her anything till the morning, ducky. Till the morning. I’m surprised they don’t shut down the radar and everything at the weekends.” She looked up from the coffee. “I’ll never forget that time my dad was on that boat, remember?—that escort convoy to Archangel.”

  “Archangel?”

  “That’s what I said. In Russia. Well, they never told us a thing. Next morning Mum read that a whole convoy had been lost on that route. We thought he was gone, we truly did. And H.Q. didn’t say a thing.”

  Limet put down his paper in a flurry of frustration. “I’ve told you, Alice, it was probably for security reasons. Just like this plane business. I expect they’re keeping it quiet because it’s something to do with the Americans being involved. There’s nothing in the papers except a few aerial photos.”

  Alice was still thinking about the convoy to Archangel. “Security! The papers had if all in next morning. And how about our feelings? Don’t talk to me about security. H.Q. don’t care. If it wasn’t for that nice young man coming around to visit you this evening, we wouldn’t have heard about those planes. I’ll bet Mrs. Kyle hasn’t been told.”

  Limet frowned. “That ‘nice young man, ’ as you call him, had no business telling me anything. He probably thinks I’ll thank him for it. I won’t. He’s decided to act as his own classification officer.”

  “I noticed you didn’t stop him!”

  Philip Limet gave up and returned to his paper. “All right. Ring her if you like.”

  Alice almost dropped the phone in her eagerness to dial.

  “Hello.” The voice sounded strained and forlorn.

  “Oh, Mrs. Kyle?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Mrs. Limet here—Philip Limet’s wife.”

  Sarah Kyle began to object, but her caller was so full of sympathy, so concerned, so understanding that she never heard Sarah’s all-but-frantic plea to stop. For a moment Sarah thought of putting the phone down, but habit held her victim to politeness, and while she didn’t want to hear anything, once she had heard part of the rescue plan, she felt compelled to know all about it so that she could not deceive herself as to the full measure of danger.

  When she put down the receiver, the silence in the house overwhelmed her, and she began to cry. After a time she went out again, into the garden.

  Twenty

  The Swordfish lay motionless sixty feet below the surface. Except for the control room light, the only illumination came from the emergency battle lanterns. The temperature was now 124 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Every piece of metal was glistening with moisture. The men on watch sat inert beneath the dim red light, minds dulled and heads made heavy by the constant humidity from the evaporation of water in the bilges.

  In their effort to conserve what strength remained, the rest of the men lay strewn throughout the sub as if struck down by some quick and deadly virus. The silent, electrically driven engines kept radiating more heat into the wet, still air. And the batteries, like the men, were now all but completely exhausted; the danger of a cell reversal which would knock out all the batteries and perhaps cause fire was growing by the minute. If this happened they would no longer be able to transmit the DF signal, weak as it was, or receive further instructions about the rescue attempt.

  In the near darkness the small sick bay clock, half-hidden amid the angular silhouettes of medicine cabinets, clicked over. Kyle, sitting by the Vice-President’s bunk, lifted his head slowly to note the time. It was 2206. At the far forward end of the bay, beyond the silent shapes of the men who lay in fever in the other four bunks, Kyle could see a hump that was Evers, strapped down and heavily sedated. Kyle was feeling weak now, though not as much as most of the crew, who, unlike him, had not had a chance to get a change of air on the bridge during the rescue of the Vice-President. True, the air supply had been largely replenished, but the difference between breathing it topside and in the putrid reek below decks was the difference between feeling nearly exhausted and exhausted. The difference at least enabled Kyle to speak coherently with the Vice-President of the United States.

  Since being lowered down the after hatch, the Vice-President had said nothing, and for a few minutes Richards, the sick bay attendant, thought that the convective heat exhaustion would kill her. Like everyone aboard, she had developed the classic symptoms, but to a much worse degree because of her exposure to the radiant heat of the firespill and the severe bums on one side of her face and arm, which flushed her skin to an even deeper red than that of the crew. In dramatic contrast to the stupor evidenced in her glazed eyes, her heartbeat had jumped way above seventy-four beats a minute as the adrenaline raced to the brain, increasing the activity of the sweat glands for cooling and contracting the muscles and causing her skin to go momentarily cold and clammy as her breathing increased. Richards was convinced that the Vice-President was teetering on the verge of shoc
k. When she had been brought aboard he had immediately given her fifty milligrams of Demerol for the pain and tried to cool her with wet packs. Since then, he had periodically been giving her tomato juice, the best he could do after the salt had run out. But now, after caring for Evers as well, he was unable to carry on, and was slumped on the deck.

  Kyle sluggishly lifted the battle lantern from the deck, took another can of juice, pulled the tab off, and held it to the Vice-President’s lips, straining his eyes to see that he did not spill it. Not knowing where she was for a while, she continued to sip like someone having just emerged into the night from a general anesthetic. As she looked around the sick bay, Kyle could see her awareness gradually growing until her eyes, illuminated by the lantern’s dim light, began to focus on nearby objects in the compartment, first the squatting bulk of the chemical cabinet, then the shroudlike shape of a crumpled blanket on the floor, and finally, in the middle distance, sitting motionless like an old black-and-white negative, an elderly, fatherly-looking man with a cap.

  “The sub?” she said hoarsely.

  The cap nodded.

  To Kyle she looked like a child, still streaked here and there, despite Richards’s efforts, with oil, as if she had been plucked from play too near a condemned rig. She made him feel infinitely old but somehow strangely privileged, for in her tired hazel eyes there was trust more than alarm; a calmness which belied the rapid pumping of her heart and spoke more of the acceptance of adversity than of anger or despair. It was the look of the brave. For a moment it made him unreasonably happy. He thought that perhaps they could make it after all.

  After a few more minutes, Elaine spoke to him again in the growing gloom of the dying lantern. “Are we … going home?”

  He was on the point of saying yes and smiling, but he knew instinctively, as Harry had, that here was a person who would deal best with the truth. “I hope so,” he said. “They’re sending in planes.”

  “Helicopters?”

  “No. It’s still too black for them up there.” He raised his head skywards. “We’re still under the fire.” The lantern flickered, and momentarily she disappeared from his vision. The darkness made it easier to explain the risks. “We’re low on power. We can’t make it alone.” The lantern flickered again, and Richards’s fast and labored breathing came out of the darkness like the straining of wind through a long reed. Before Elaine could ask any more questions, Kyle went on, his heart pounding with the urgency of a steady, rhythmic drum. “Your air force are sending in bombers. They’re—”

  Richards could be heard retching.

  “You okay, Richards?”

  There was a roar as the toilet flushed. One of the men in the bunks began to cough uncontrollably.

  “Richards?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Kyle knew that he wasn’t, but there was nothing he could do to help him or the man coughing—or any of them. For a moment he felt dizzy and put his hand out to steady himself as the sub heaved in a roll. He felt Elaine’s hand grip his shoulder. It was the grip of a child. “Thanks,” he said, and patted her arm. The thought came to him that she could be president someday—probably would be president. She was no doubt a brilliant woman, yet here he was treating her as he did his married daughter—like a girl who had never grown up. He knew that she commanded men like him, thousands of them, but still he could not shake the conviction that beneath her grand and proper title there was an irrepressible innocence, which for him was far more impressive than her position, what she had done or what she was likely to do. He had seen it in her pictures, and it seemed to him a very unpolitical thing.

  “The bombers?”

  Her question started him from the reverie that had followed on the dizziness. “Yes. They’re going to bomb the fire. Blow a space out ahead of us so we can surface. Then we can run and recharge our batteries. If it works, they’ll try to bomb the whole fire out later.”

  “How will they know where we are?” Elaine’s nose was assailed by the rancid smell of perspiration from the bodies in the sick bay. Kyle wiped his forehead. The temperature was 129 degrees. “We’re sending out a DF signal,” he said, halting for breath and starting to feel dizzy again. “That’ll tell them where we are.”

  Elaine could still see the coal black sky which had enveloped the fishing boat. “It’ll have to be visual bombing, won’t it? They’ll have to fly low. A few bombs off course and they could blow us—”

  “They’re flying low,” cut in Kyle in an effort to reassure the Vice-President, “and we’ll fire marker flares through the smoke if they want. That’ll pinpoint us for them.”

  Kyle heard a deep groan and the slap of leather. It was Evers trying to roll over. Kyle strained his eyes into the darkness. He felt a heavy weight of guilt descend upon him. He was responsible for the man’s condition. At the very least, he was the cause of prolonging his agony and that of the other eighty-two men aboard Swordfish. If he had ignored the Vice-President, Evers would have been home by now, receiving proper attention.

  Elaine put her arm over her eyes to shield them from the weak light which seemed to pierce her like the blinding glare of a torture chamber. “How many are there?” she asked.

  “Nine,” he said. “Nine B-52’s.”

  “You said they’ll carpet bomb.”

  “Yes.”

  “How fast are they traveling?”

  “Six hundred miles an hour. That’s one thing in our favor.” Kyle knew that at that speed the timing of the drop would be critical; a few seconds either way would shift the entire bomb load a half mile off target. If the bombs were too close to the sub, they would damage her; but if they were dropped too early or too late, the fire would re-cover the break before the sub could get there. He said nothing of this to the Vice-President.

  Elaine felt her heart racing. “I hope they’re using small bombs,” she added weakly, trying to make light of it. But Kyle took her seriously. “No, small bombs wouldn’t be powerful enough to blast out a break; they would only stir the fire up a little. They’ll be using high-explosive blockbusters to make sure we have a large enough area to surface and recharge before the fire creeps back in.”

  Elaine was silent, and Kyle saw the pain misting her eyes. “Well,” he added, smiling as best he could, “it’s better than sending in A-bombs, I guess. They’d kill—well,” he added quickly, “those pilots know what they’re doing, Vice-President.”

  She managed a faint smile. “Call me Elaine.”

  Kyle returned the smile. “Those pilots know what they’re doing, Elaine.” He paused. “They’ll give us that fire break.”

  The captain’s mention of the fire break took her back to the fishing boat—to the Secret Servicemen—to Washington. She was thinking of Walter now, of whether she would ever see him again—of him having to make the terrible decision to risk the Canadians. She thought of all the people involved—of all the trouble she had—

  “Harry!” she said. “My God, where’s Harry?”

  Kyle’s head inclined slowly in the gloom, like that of an anguished confessor. “He’s dead—lost his balance. Looked as if he were trying to throw something overboard. It was too late. I’m—”

  Elaine turned her head away from Kyle. As her shoulders began to convulse, Kyle reached over, touched her arm, and turned off the battle lantern.

  The passageway was longer than Kyle had remembered it. After asking one of the less exhausted sailors to watch over the Vice-President, he half-stumbled forward, towards the control room. His heart felt as if it were about to explode from his chest, and the distorting veil of perspiration made it even more difficult for him to see in the leaden light cast by the fast-expiring lanterns. The long, bending shadows distorted his vision so that it seemed as if he were lost in some twisting subterranean tunnel.

  Lambrecker and his followers were now indistinguishable from everyone else on the Swordfish, felled by the killing heat and humidity. They lay still and wan, incapable of even a whimper of rebellion. Ra
msey had blacked out several times and was panting rapidly, like a stricken animal in its last moments. All they were interested in now was surviving. Kyle, sick and dizzy as he felt, had decided to press charges against the mutineers. He was not unmoved by their present condition, but he knew that if their energy had not been dissipated by this steaming oven Lambrecker would still be dangerous. No matter that Lambrecker had acted well in bringing the Vice-President aboard; he had tried to seize command of a ship. No captain in the Canadian Navy—or any other navy—would be in his right mind not to press for a court-martial.

  But for the moment the mutineers were no threat; besides, unless the bombers arrived and the Swordfish had a chance to surface, the problem of a court-martial was purely hypothetical.

  Passing the officers’ shower, Kyle heard a voice in the darkness murmur, “Happy now, Captain?”

  Another joined in. “Probably give ’im a medal for it.”

  Kyle smiled to himself and leaned against a bulkhead to rest. He was happy to hear the remarks from the disgruntled sailors, for he recalled an old service maxim from the Arctic convoys: “So long as they’re bitching, you have a chance. When they stop, you’re in Dutch.” He hoped a few more would still have enough energy to bitch. He walked resolutely forward and pushed back the cloth curtain of the control room as if it were a heavy sliding steel door.