Firespill

by Ian Slater

  Inside, the stench of sweat was so heavy it almost made Kyle gag. He was feeling so weak he could barely talk, and his voice seemed no more than a whisper to O’Brien, although the first officer wasn’t sure whether it was the captain’s voice or his hearing which had been affected. He strained to hear Kyle slowly repeat, “How’s the DF signal?”

  Sitting on the deck beneath the firing console, O’Brien rested his head against the periscope, gasping like a fish out of water, trying to summon the strength to reply. “We’ll have to cease…”

  “Sick report?”

  “Fourteen down—exhaustion.”

  The clock’s minute hand shot forward to 2212. Kyle, sweat lathering his face, looked around the control room in slow motion. He estimated that within the next thirty minutes almost half the crew would be completely prostrate with the heat, incapable of any movement beyond merely breathing and staying alive. And if the planes didn’t arrive before 2240, he knew that most of them would be dead; and through the acid imbalance that would send them into violent spasms those few alive would find it almost impossible to operate the sub, let alone operate it with the necessary speed. Perhaps a few exceptionally strong ones and those who had had a chance to go topside during the rescue could do the job, but even they had a limit in this heat.

  He began to think about the decisions he’d made in the past twenty-four hours, wondering if anything could have been done faster or better. Now the mutiny seemed far off in his memory, as if it had happened years ago. He wondered if he could somehow have forestalled the mutineers’ resistance. He had understood their fear. It occurred to him that he should have had them in the control room with him, where the sense of responsibility might have contained their anger and turned it instead to good account. But then he dismissed the idea, unable to picture Lambrecker not taking advantage of any situation.

  “The Vice-President?” said O’Brien.

  Kyle stared dumbly at him. The first officer repeated his question, adding, “How is she?”

  The captain moved his lips, but there was no sound.

  It was several seconds before O’Brien spoke again. “Think she’ll make it?”

  Kyle coughed to moisten his throat. “She’ll make it. Strong girl.”

  “Her friend—falling off. Does she—?”

  Kyle nodded.

  The radio operator, shuffling out from his communications cave, broke in. “Captain?” His voice sounded intolerably loud to the others in Control. As the captain turned towards him, the operator saw that his face was the color of damp chalk. “Sir, the last of our emergency running power is draining fast.”

  Kyle sipped tepid water from a tin cup by his side. “Can’t do anything about it, Sparks—got to keep receiving that DF signal so we know when they’re overhead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How much longer will the power last?”

  “Twelve minutes—maximum.”

  It was now 2216 plus 50 seconds. They would be out of subsurface running power at 2229—2230 at the latest.

  With considerable effort, Kyle managed a smile. “Well, let’s hope it’s enough, eh, sailor?”

  Sparks didn’t answer. He moved listlessly back into the blackness of the radio room, where a frantic cluster of tiny red lights flicked on and off like trapped insects.

  Kyle looked up as if trying to see through to the sky in defiance of the metal and burning sea between.

  The sick bay buzzer sounded. It was Richards. All that Kyle could make out was that the Vice-President was passing into delirium. He dragged himself up and began the long journey back down the passageway.

  In the cockpit of Ebony Leader it was now 2217, twenty-one minutes before E.T.A. with the sub.

  Unseen at first by the fliers as it approached the roaring Stratofortresses from the southwest, the quiet mass on the radar screen soon appeared like snowflakes streaming toward the windshield of a speeding car. The gunners pulled their triggers and the night exploded in a cacophony of sound and tracer lines as the first birds hit the bombers in a hail of smashing bone.

  None of the men had ever seen so many. Ebony I’s copilot shouted into the intercom, trying to make himself heard over the sound of the multiple collisions and the deep, choking fire of the heavy machine guns. Within seconds the windshields of the planes were bloody. Ebony III, running into a particularly thick concentration half a mile to the right of Burke’s plane, started to go down after a minute and a half, five of its eight engines clogged tight with dead gulls. At a thousand feet, unable to climb higher and too low to jettison its thirty thousand pounds of bombs without endangering the aircraft behind it, its captain had no choice but to give the order to eject and swing the plane out of the wave. By now the bomber was losing altitude fast and was three hundred feet above the water. The captain and copilot ejected out of the top hatch. The remainder of the crew were automatically ejected downwards, but needing at least four hundred feet for their chutes to open, they were killed on impact with the sea.

  As he watched the pilot’s and copilot’s chutes opening, Burke was giving the position to Canadian Air-Sea Rescue and to the NORAD base on Vancouver Island. His purpose was twofold: to arrange the immediate rescue of the men in the water and to have a Voodoo fighter wing sent out to disperse the birds by sonic boom lest they bring down civilian aircraft in their path over the mainland.

  Crewless, Ebony III struck the water with her left wing and cartwheeled for two miles, her bombs lighting the night sky in a giant fireworks display. The pilot and copilot were killed by the shock waves as they floated gently down beneath their burning parachutes.

  While the bombs from the crashed plane were exploding, Si Johnson in Ebony I sat rigidly in his seat, his hands tightly grasping its metal sides like a man in the throes of electrocution. As more birds struck and the firing increased, he brought his hands up to cover his ears. For the moment Peters did not notice, for in an effort to block out the fear of his first real action, the navigator was busying himself by calculating and checking the wave’s position, shutting everything else out of his mind.

  Si Johnson was back in Vietnam. In the flashback he saw himself during a bombing mission over Hué, crouching over the visual bombsight and listening to Burke through the din of cannon and surface-to-air missile fire, which he could not see from the claustrophobic blackness of his tiny cubicle. He could hear Burke starting the countdown: “125 seconds to go … 75 TG … 60 TG,” and himself, coolly advising Burke, “Hold it, steady … steady, Captain … one degree right … that’s good, hold it … a point to the right … that’s beautiful, Chief … hold her steady.” Then, as a Russian-built SAM streaked towards them and the electronics warfare officer began his countermeasures, Johnson could hear the tail gunner screaming, “For Christ’s sake drop ’em Si—drop ’em—let’s get the hell—” and himself calmly following procedure, taking over the count: “10 … 9 … 8 … 7…” just before the missile clipped the tail, tearing out the kingpin, ripping open the rear gunner’s canopy like the cap off a bottle, and sending the plane into a wild spin. As objects flashed past, sucked out by the slipstream, and his flying suit started flapping furiously about him, he heard the gunner screaming again, “Why … why the hell didn’t you drop ’em? … you stupid bastard!” The next instant Johnson had ejected with the rest of the forward crew. When the army chopper picked them up, the gunner’s body was found headless. All Si Johnson could hear for weeks afterwards was “Why … why the hell didn’t you drop ’em? … you stupid bastard!”

  Peters, summoning up his courage, was shaking Johnson. “Sir? Si—for Christ’s sake!” Si leaned back, his face streaked with sweat. The cannon fire was subsiding as they passed through the bird concentration. “Hey, Si—you were jabbering somethin’ awful. You okay?”

  Si looked about him. “What? Yeah—sure, sure I’m okay—Jesus!” He rose forward in his seat. “You didn’t have the intercom on, did you?”

  Peters had had his hand on the mouthpiece. “No,
but by Christ you oughta see about that.” Peters kept staring at Johnson. “Or I will.”

  Si started to object, but the youngster seemed suddenly to have grown older, so he said, “Okay—okay, I will. Never bothered me before.” Peters’s eyes were unrelenting. “Well,” said Johnson, “not on a mission, I mean. Sometimes at night … Okay, I’ll see about it. I wouldn’t risk the plane.”

  Peters relaxed, smiled, and yelled above the roar of the engines, “All right, Si. I believe you.” He slapped the veteran on the shoulder, as if in recognizing the radar navigator’s problem he had overcome his previous awe of him.

  The damage reports were soon coming in from the wave. Burke was asking whether anyone else had gone down.

  “Gold Leader to Ebony Leader. Jerry Tucker—L84.”

  “Survivors?”

  “Not a chance.”

  Tucker had been one of Burke’s closest pals. “Goddamn it,” he said. “Anyone else?”

  “Purple Leader here, Ebony One. Cell intact but I’m having difficulty with my right number two engine. I’m feathering it now. Think our Vernier deflectors are covered with muck. At any rate, we’re having some trouble with maneuverability. Apart from that, worst damage seems to be electron booster for the radar. Temperature’s way up. Forward cooling vent must be clogged with guts.”

  Burke crossed Purple I off his chart. “Right, Purple One. Return to base. Your problems might just be starting. Jettison bombs as soon as you can.”

  “Roger, Ebony Leader. See you boys at Freeth.”

  The injured bomber peeled out of formation, and the six remaining bombers closed up to fill the gaps while the crews continued the long prebomb check. Now and then, birds trailing the main flock would smack into a plane and startle a gunner into firing a burst or two. This kept the men on edge. Si came in on Ebony’s intercom. “Captain, the sub’s DF signal is fading fast.”

  “How far to target area?”

  “About a hundred and seventy miles. With this new head wind, we’ll reach their area in around … seventeen minutes. New E.T.A. 2238 plus fifty-five seconds.”

  “Give me E.T.A. for initial point of reference.”

  “Allowing for head wind … E.T.A. Cape Bingham eleven minutes thirty seconds.”

  Aboard Ebony I it was now 2221. Knowing that 2249 was the most optimistic estimate of the limit of the sub’s endurance, Burke cursed the advancing Arctic front for pushing them back almost a minute—nearly ten miles at their speed. He looked anxiously at his airspeed indicator. Once they turned south from Cape Bingham they should have the Arctic storm under their tails.

  “All right. Send the sub our new E.T.A. with instructions to fire flares at one-minute intervals, starting at E.T.A. minus five minutes. He can fire those from subsurface without electric power. And pray like hell we don’t hit any more birds.”

  Twenty-One

  Elaine’s head twisted from side to side in the tired orange light, throwing her hair over her face in a grotesque mask that was black and wet.

  Now and then the mask would stop its demented rhythm to stare into the near blackness—only to see another face mocking its every movement. Richards tried to comfort her, but he could not stand up for more than a few seconds at a time without losing his balance. Several times she called out for Walter, begging him to forgive her. The rest of her raving was unintelligible to Richards and barely audible. She thrashed the air with her arms as if trying to break out of the choking web that was stopping her breathing. As Kyle entered the sick bay, her head jerked from side to side while her back arched spasmodically. Gradually the movement in her body subsided and she lay very still. Kyle touched her arm gently. Her skin was again damp and clammy. The battle lantern held by Richards died to a faint glow.

  Kyle carefully moved the oily hair back from her cheeks. The face had lost its captivating smile, but the hazel eyes, though glazed, were still game and fiery with life. Not yet out of her delirium, the Vice-President of the United States looked dazed, like a child waking slowly in a foreign place. Several minutes passed before she saw the fuzzy outline of someone sitting by her in the darkness of the cramped space. “Walter,” she said. “Walter—hold me.”

  Kyle placed his hand on her forehead. It was cold.

  Then the attack subsided as suddenly as it had begun, and she slept. Kyle could hear her breathing rapidly. It did not seem possible that anyone’s heart could beat so fast after such a drop in temperature. Then he realized that he was hearing the quick thumping of his own heart.

  Within minutes Elaine was conscious, still dopey but surprisingly composed. Kyle had seen the same look before, as a malaria-ridden patient lay becalmed after the draining night fire of fever had passed sullenly into the dawn.

  The Vice-President looked around into the night, her eyes following the feeble beam of the flashlight that had replaced the dead lantern. She saw the dim shapes which only a little while before had terrified her—the cabinet, the sink, and the mocking mirror which had been a demented woman.

  Slowly she recognized Kyle, then Richards, hunched by the door. She felt a cool cloth on her forehead and reached for it, but there was no strength in her arm and it fell dangling beneath the bunk. Kyle offered her a paper cup half-full of tepid water. Pushing the pillow further under her, he raised her head to a drinking position. Her throat felt bruised and cramped as she swallowed hard. She let her head slide down the pillow again, fleeing the dizziness that lay in wait for her the moment she tried to lift her body. In the edge of the flashlight’s beam, she glimpsed a blurred photograph that Kyle had taken from his wallet. It was of a woman in her fifties, with graying hair and a smile which even in the poor light reflected cheerful composure, It was the kind of smile Clara Sutherland wore—a smile of unselfishness. Elaine lifted her hand weakly towards the photograph. “Your wife?” she murmured faintly, trying to take her mind off the waves of nausea which lapped tentatively about her and threatened to overwhelm her at any moment.

  “Yes,” answered Kyle.

  “What time—”

  Kyle inclined his wrist towards her. She stared at the watch but could not read the faintly luminescent dial, which appeared nothing more than a green smudge on the darkness.

  “2224—ten-twenty-four,” said Kyle.

  “The bombers—?” she asked, seeking as much information as she could while her mind was clear. Already she was starting to hallucinate; the outlines of Kyle’s face were shifting into the features of Walter Sutherland.

  “They’ll be here,” he said.

  She began vomiting, bringing up red-streaked bile.

  Feeling the nausea sweeping over her, flooding her abdomen with a hot, panic-driven flush, her mind tried to take hold of something, anything, that would anchor her consciousness and quiet the whirling dizziness that was engulfing her and sucking her down into a world of fevered shadows, twisted shapes, and nightmarish confusions of sound. She could feel Walter’s hand holding hers as he led her over the steaming, treacle lava and down to the cool, turquoise-swept shores. She thought of the calm green lagoons lying safely beyond, of the steady thunder of the surf casting its frothy nets over Kauai’s coral strands, of the gently bending palms in the soft trade wind, of cotton-ball dabs of cumulus lazily drifting above the emerald fronds and out over the endless undulating blue.

  Then the nausea swept her away in a savage wave, tearing her from his grasp and flinging her helpless and crumpled into a burning red sea. She no longer knew who or where she was. Kyle put his other hand across her body and took her far wrist, but the spasms were so severe that they shook him, and finally he had to let all his weight press down on her to prevent her from falling off the bunk.

  He heard a moan in the darkness from one of the sailors in the passageway, which like the sick bay was now filled with prostrate bodies. Kyle realized that if they could not surface soon, the Vice-President of the United States and many of his crew would be dead. The human system simply could not tolerate body temperatures of 104 to 105
degrees Fahrenheit for very long.

  He did not know how long he had been holding her down. It was possible that he, too, had passed out for some seconds at least. All he could remember was dreaming of Sarah and the kids. He was not sure of anything else, for the dream was constantly distorted; Sarah and Elaine seemed to be one, and yet somehow different, two reflections in a pool which in the trembling of the surface had momentarily merged into each other. But both had been smiling, and Sarah had been happier than he could ever remember. She was working in the rose garden, and then one of the roses, a vermilion-colored flower, was Elaine smiling. Sarah picked up the rose that someone had cut and left on the ground and placed it in her favorite spun-silver vase. While she stood admiring it, the rose blossomed even more, becoming more and more beautiful, and the water she poured into the vase overflowed. Kyle felt the water running down his cheek and awoke as the perspiration ran in tiny streams off his neck and face.

  The fever attack again subsided, leaving Elaine gasping for breath. Kyle glanced at his watch. It was 2226. He asked Richards to watch over her as best he could. “If she starts up again,” he said, “call me.” He did not know what more he could do.

  Although it had been only a dream, in the approaching delirium of his own fever he could not shake the feeling that Elaine and Sarah were somehow intimately connected. Though he and the Vice-President had exchanged only a few words, he felt that she could be his own daughter. Before he left the sick bay for the long trek up to the control room, he and Richards tried to tie her down, but they lacked the strength.

  Dragging himself forward by sheer will, James Kyle promised a nonexistent companion that when he got back to Sarah—if he got back—he would send Elaine Horton his finest rose. She was a fine girl. A truly fine girl.

  By the time he reached the control room and lowered himself to the base of the periscope column, the time was 2228. The phone buzzed. O’Brien laboriously lifted it off the cradle, dropping it on the deck and shattering the plastic earpiece. Even so, he could hear the man at the other end. O’Brien mumbled, “Yes? … Yes, I’ll tell him.” He slid to the floor against the slippery wet bulkhead. “Evers is dead.”