As the first commanding officer of Athena, Rensselaer had the privilege of originating the ship’s motto and crest, which the ship and its crew would own, and which would not change. For the crest he chose a gold-leaf-rimmed oval, with Athena seated at its center on a field of blue. She wore a flowing white gown, and, rather than helmeted, she was depicted in the style of an early twentieth-century Gibson Girl, so classically beautiful and gracious that the sailors would often stare at her.
As she was Athena, goddess, inter alia, of wisdom and strategy, a little owl peered calmly from the bottom folds of her robes. Until one was mesmerized by her face, most striking of all was that in her right hand she held an upright spear with a golden tip. Arcing around the top of the oval, also in gold, was the Greek, ’Αθηνά Πρόμαχος, or, “Athena Who Fights in the Front Line,” which was written at the bottom of the oval in English, in white against the blue field, resting on the gold rim, descending and then ascending.
Per custom, Rensselaer worked with the Army’s Institute of Heraldry, which did very well except that at first Athena was made to look like the centurion on the American Express card. Rensselaer’s exchange with them went something like, “She’s a woman. Make her like a beautiful Gibson Girl.”
“A what?”
“Look it up.”
“More feminine?”
“For sure. She’s Athena. Yes, she’s beautiful, but you don’t want to mess with her.”
It was a magnificent crest, and really it was all because he was in love with Katy.
They took refuge in the Garden District, lost in it and as separated from the continent and all its cares as if they were at sea. The vegetation that surrounded them had a life of its own: it moved in the wind, it folded and unfolded, furling at night and unfurling in the sun. Perpetually fragrant, it engaged in a duet with raindrops and strong breezes.
In the dilapidated and tranquil Garden District are corners where you can stand for an hour and no one will pass. At night, breezes and rain flow and fall as if to wash away the day. And when time no longer matters, it’s easier to see and feel one’s essence and that of another.
For good reason, from experience, and for the sake of her independence, Katy held on to her house and its garden. She kept most of her clothes there, her books, and other things, but almost every evening and every night she stayed with Rensselaer. They made dinner over an open fire as often as if they were Australians or Africans, who seem not to be able to do without it. They cooked not with charcoal but rather with the orange coals of wood at its most even heat, between the wild flame of the beginning and the senescence of the end. As the outside light disappeared, the coals would pulse, and the smoke of the wood and the grilling was calming. Never was a Rensselaer or a Farrar so content, they agreed, than at evening, outdoors, under a veil of semi-darkness, by a fire.
And then, lost and safe in the copse of thick leaves that registered each raindrop, they lay together before they slept. The rain came down, pattering on the leaves—you could almost hear them bend when struck—tattooing the tin roof, running musically along the metal gutters and rushing through downspouts and runnels like half a dozen wilderness streams.
“If it wouldn’t ruin us,” she said, “and it would, I would just stay here. I wouldn’t go to work. You’d stupidly resign your commission just before retirement.”
“I think there are people in these parts,” he answered, “who’ve done things like that. You don’t see them much, but when you do you can tell. They’ve let go, because they wanted to stay forever in what we’ve got right now. But they can’t. Without the contrast, it’s as if they’re in the world of the dead. You can be an alcoholic, you can be a heroin addict, or you can stay forever in the Garden District.”
“The attraction, the temptation . . . ” she said. “It’s true. But you wouldn’t. . . . ”
“No. I don’t want anything I haven’t earned, and we haven’t earned this. There’s more to do.”
He turned away from her, switched on a bedside lamp, and turned back. She was exquisite in the nude, with the placid yet assertive dignity of a Greek marble. “Tell me about that.” He loved to hear her speak. Even at ease, she was concise and captivating. Her eyes sparkled with the light of the lamp, and for a moment the rain came down really hard as strong, humid breezes forced their way through the louvers and cooled the room.
“My mother told me,” she said, “that falling in love—and I suppose as we are in middle age we tend to doubt the very fact of falling in love—is like trapping moonlight in a box. If you open a box of moonlight in anything but bright moonlight itself, it evaporates faster than the eye can see. Love, she said, is like that. When you first fall in love you’re in a kind of dazzling moonlight, and the world keeps the box full. Later, it can be like opening it in darkness, and nothing is in it—except that when the love is real it passes the test, and the dark room is miraculously lit in white by rays that love has privileged to last.
“When the Athena is finished and you take her to Little Creek, and then maybe the Middle East—God, I hope not—you’ll be away for no one knows how many months. I have to stay here. I’ll go back to work, in the life I had before you. The three Brooks Brothers, the suited suitors, will pester me, and the law firm will offer refuge and security. All as before. You’ll be taken up by the excitement of the sea, your duties, your life before you knew me.
“That’ll be the dark room in which we’ll open the boxes to see if—contrary to what the world might say—the light is there. Then we will have earned it, it will be real, and anything will be possible.”
Like every good ship, Athena was seductive and all-absorbing in the way of a woman, because she promised the flashes and ignitions of new worlds through new eyes. Fitting her out was somewhat like what a bullfighter does when ceremoniously donning his traditional costume, and picking up his sword with the knowledge that it was the fine, silver line between his life and that of the bull. Something there is that calls you fully awake when preparing for war. It lights up life so that you love it in a way that those who are forever safe never can.
First and last in her line, a ship like no other by dint of her birth, Athena was meant for daring. A one-off, she was designed to surprise, to risk—and to be expendable. The rake of her bows and the un-modern bristling of her weapons proclaimed this almost impudently. She was fast, and she was lethal. For those interested primarily in the story, it continues on this page. For those who might be intrigued by the genius of this little ship, let us count the ways.
Whereas the Cyclone-class patrol coastals were near-duplicates of British craft built for Egypt and Kenya, Athena, similar in appearance and purpose, was an American modification and design. Computational advances in fluid dynamics over the thirty-five years between the laying of the first Vosper Thornycroft keel in Britain and Bollinger Lockport’s keel for Athena allowed her an extra six knots speed even assuming the same horsepower and screws as the Cyclones she would supersede. Perhaps most remarkably, the new hull design and screw placement allowed something close to the skating turns associated with a boat rather than with any ship of Athena’s size. Her stern could slide without digging, reducing heel to ten degrees even in a top speed turn. Such maneuverability would be confounding to the informed and reasonable expectation of an opponent in combat.
She exceeded the Cyclones’ 180-foot length by another thirty feet, and their twenty-five-foot beam by five feet. This gave her far more carrying capacity than her sisters—in fuel, armor, weaponry, and stores. Electric drive extended her range yet more, because the turbine generators turned at a constant rate rather than in fuel-guzzling surges. For example, the standard endurance of the Cyclones was ten days unsupported. Athena upped that to twenty-five days, depending upon crew size and how an extra 15 percent stowage in weight and 8 percent in volume might be utilized on each cruise.
The Cyclones had steel hulls with aluminum superstructures shielded only in part by one-inch steel armor. Their displacement at full load was 330 tons. Athena’s displacement was just short of 400 tons, and a great deal of it in comparison to that of the Cyclones was usable for additional load. This was attributable to metallurgical advances that made the armor lighter yet stronger, and to the use of carbon-fiber composites for non-structural interior components.
Designed for the standard Cyclone complement of four officers, twenty-four enlisted seamen, and nine SEALs, because of her increased size and carrying capacity Athena had more comfortable and private berthing spaces, a bigger cabin for the captain, and two officers’ cabins. Nothing was lost to carrying capacity, however, in that the ship’s balance and trim required lighter spaces in some areas, which were precisely where the more capacious living quarters were then situated.
Deployed mostly in the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and other areas of high heat, the Cyclone class was notably uncomfortable. Following on this experience, Athena was designed with better air-conditioning and more water—a distillation capability of six thousand gallons per day as opposed to four thousand—for longer, cooling showers to bring down the body’s core temperatures elevated by the fierce Arabian sun.
Occupying the same volume as the Cyclones’ four 13,400-horsepower diesels, Athena’s power plant (two generators and four advanced-induction electric motors with the samarium-cobalt and neodymium-iron-boron magnets) was able with less weight per horsepower to put out not 53,600 horsepower but 80,000 running at full load. This and the astounding instantaneous torques of the advanced-induction motors allowed unheard-of acceleration, and exceeded the Cyclones’ maximum speed of thirty-five knots by fifteen, to more than fifty in a cooperative sea; that is, more than fifty-eight miles per hour. Due to the best horsepower-to-weight ratio in the Navy, this speed was reached in an astonishing forty seconds, speed and acceleration that by habit and observation no enemy would attribute to a ship of Athena’s size and appearance even if apprised of it. An enemy’s training and tactics would then lock him into reactions Athena could counter.
Her main armament was divided between a forward-mounted MK-46 30mm chain gun, eight short-range Griffin missiles, and, unprecedented for a PC, two Harpoon missiles, which allowed Athena to punch far above her weight. The gun, firing at 250 rounds per minute from a dual-feed, 400-round magazine, had an effective range of a mile and a half, and, depending upon the type of ammunition used, a maximum reach of more than two miles. Mounted forward of the bridge, it was directed by a low-light optical sight, a forward-looking infrared sensor, and a laser rangefinder. Its high-explosive, or armor-piercing, incendiary, or airburst ammunition, delivered at range, gave it impressive power.
A volley of accurately aimed airburst rounds, for example, could cripple or destroy an enemy patrol boat’s communications and sensing systems, and kill everyone on deck. Following this, armor-piercing rounds might strike the innards, the magazines, fire control, and propulsion, and blow holes at the waterline. High-explosive rounds might shatter the bridge and the deck-mounted weapons. Illustrative of the gun’s capabilities is that, hypothetically, mounted on the U.S. Capitol it could with a long burst reliably destroy a townhouse in Georgetown. Emptying its magazine on the White House, one-half the distance to Georgetown even if for many tourists too far to walk (especially in summer), it would by explosion and fire eventually turn the executive mansion into something like a plantation wreck out of Gone with the Wind.
Because the United States since the Second World War has suffered so few casualties at sea other than by accidents, many—not least sailors themselves—have come to believe that war at sea is clean and safe. It isn’t. Ships are compact containers full of flammable fuels, volatile chemicals, and high explosives. The sailor may enjoy more comforts than the infantryman, but when his ship is in harm’s way he can be blown to bits, exsanguinated from severed limbs, burned to death, or drowned in numbingly cold water—either trapped in the ship as it goes down or as part of it is inundated, or swallowed by the open sea.
The Griffin missile had a slightly greater range than the main gun, and delivered a single, high-explosive warhead of thirteen pounds either horizontally or in a power dive from above to exploit an unarmored deck or roof. Eight of these were mounted amidships for vertical launch. As an example of their destructive potential, straight on or in a downward trajectory, one would completely blow apart a cabin cruiser, or render useless, though not sink, a tugboat.
The Harpoon missile, of which Athena carried two, was something else entirely. A casual observer from the beginning of the Cold War into the first years of the twenty-first century would immediately see that Soviet and Warsaw Pact (then Russian and Eastern European militaries and their third-world client states) fielded warships—from heavy cruisers to motor torpedo boats—freakishly laden with a large number of missile tubes nearly monopolizing their decks. That is, they went all-in on missilery.
After the battleship era, Western vessels never looked as fierce. In fact, when below-deck VLS (vertical launch systems) were introduced, the ships took on the appearance of defenseless yachts. They were hardly so, but, nonetheless, smaller craft such as Athena, which hadn’t the depth below decks or the volume to carry VLS, were not fitted with the bigger missiles carried by their Soviet-style counterparts.
NATO and allied navies concentrated instead on defensive means such as electronic jamming, misdirection, and kinetic interception, none of which required much space or weight, and created the capacity to bear a fuller spectrum of weapon systems, sustainment, and defenses. But precisely because the PCs had such heavy responsibilities in the Persian Gulf and frequently encountered much larger Iranian warships, the Athena class would carry two Harpoons.
Originally designed as a response to Egypt’s Soviet Styx missiles’ sinking the Israeli destroyer Eilat, until the Athena the Harpoon was not deployed on patrol coastals. Each a full fifteen feet long, not far from the Griffin boxes the pair was mounted amidships like crossed swords. A Harpoon weighed more than three-quarters of a ton (the Griffin only thirty-five pounds), and required a devoted fire-control system that was expensive and complicated. The Harpoon’s range was sixty miles, far beyond Athena’s radar horizon, necessitating the use of an unmanned aerial vehicle to provide terminal guidance to target.
The Stalker UAV, the largest UAV Athena could carry without impinging on other requirements, had a recoverable range of 12.5 miles and a sacrificial range of twenty-five. With a good tailwind the Stalker’s range could be doubled in the sacrificial mode, but with cross or headwinds both recoverable and sacrificial ranges were reduced. As the sacrificial range was the default and there were two Harpoons, Athena would carry two Stalkers, giving each missile the maximum effective range, in ideal wind conditions for its targeting drone, of fifty miles. Arriving at Mach 0.71, the Harpoon’s nearly 500-pound, high-explosive warhead was enough to put a ship four times Athena’s size out of commission or, with a lucky shot, send it to the bottom.
Such a ship, however, would have a more distant radar horizon, likely longer-range missiles, a faster surveillance and terminal guidance drone, and electronic countermeasures of its own. But given Athena’s defensive capabilities, that was not the end of the story. She would carry eight shoulder-fired Stinger missiles for defense against low-flying aircraft, helicopters, and large drones. Every crewman was qualified with and issued an M4 rifle and a sidearm. The SEALs carried their own idiosyncratic, sometimes exotic, and ever-evolving weaponry, even in regard to knives, an arsenal which, as a lawyer such as Katy might have said, included but was not limited to such things as .50-caliber Barrett sniper rifles, light machine guns, various types of automatic rifles, sidearms, grenades, and even Claymore mines should they be needed in combat.
Athena’s chief secondary armament was the .50-caliber Browning very heavy machine gun. She had six twin versions and two singles—two twins on the port side, two on the starboard, one each on the stern starboard and port sides, and a single-barreled .50-caliber on each of the bridge wings. With a cyclical rate of fire of 750–1,000 rounds per minute, and a maximum effective range of a little over a mile, this gun had so many different types of ammunition—nineteen and counting—that the gunners’ mates labored to keep accessible the various combinations of ball, tracer, incendiary, armor-piercing, and practice rounds they had to load into their fourteen barrels, keeping in mind that, for example, a saboted, light-armor penetrator could pierce 1.34 inches of steel plate at 500 meters but only 0.91 inches at 1,200 meters, at a cost of $10 per round, whereas a saboted, light-armor-piercing tracer had somewhat different characteristics and cost $15 per round.
The effect the hail of fire these guns had at range was devastating, but at Rensselaer’s urging, modifications were made to Athena to make it even more so. On both the port and starboard sides, where two twin-barreled guns were mounted, he installed two empty mounts, and each bridge wing had an extra mount. He made sure that in the box of tools and accessories flush against the bulkhead behind the guns were heavy, heat-insulated gloves, so that on command the crew on one side could detach and carry their weapons to the other side. (The stern guns remained fixed in place.) Thus, Athena was capable of a broadside of thirteen .50-caliber barrels at a prodigious rate of fire, spitting out bullets of varying and complementary function.
Supplementing the .50-calibers were three 7.62mm M-134 miniguns, one of which could be mounted at the bow of the SEALs’ twenty-foot rigid-hull inflatable boat (RHIB) carried on and launched from Athena’s stern ramp. Less than a yard long and weighing only thirty-five pounds, the minigun had an effective range of three-quarters of a mile and could spit out NATO-standard 7.62mm rifle bullets at the astounding rate of up to six thousand rounds per minute. That is, a hundred shots per second. The miniguns, too, had double mounts on each side.
Despite being the smallest ship (rather than boat) in the Navy, Athena was the only ship designed to accomplish by herself the ancient maneuver of crossing the T—bringing her full broadside to bear upon an enemy ship’s bow or stern, where the number of guns was perforce limited. Long abandoned in modern naval warfare, it was resurrected to deal with Iranian small-boat swarming tactics, shore bombardment, or wherever concentrated kinetic fires were needed. The deadly mass of machine-gun fire was combined with the 30mm chain gun and two grenade launchers capable of lobbing 350 grenades per minute out to a mile. Athena’s gun power was an example of how, at limited ranges, quantity can have a quality all its own.
As with all else, power was limited by its own appetites. At one point after Rensselaer and Katy knew that each was as in love as the other, when this had been professed, and then the wonderful shock and inimitable high of being in requited love took hold, they had gone out on a Saturday night to dinner and a movie, although during both they were almost oblivious of everything but one another. During dinner, their eyes had locked and rarely separated. Other diners noticed the upright, semi-hypnotized posture of newly obsessed lovers, the kind who were in love even with the pattern and drape of material as it is carried on the other’s body.
The movie had many a scene with automatic weapons fired by impossibly muscular men, and impossibly thin women who could impossibly toss the impossibly muscular men into the air. Although Katy shut Rensselaer up during the movie, batting his arm as if they had been married for forty years—even that, he found wonderful—he explained afterward the popular misconception (like so many others, arisen in Hollywood) that automatic weapons had magical loads of ammunition which issued from them like water from a garden hose.
A garden hose, if connected to a municipal system, has a giant network of reservoirs, dams, and pumping stations that allows it to pour out water continuously. If supplied from a well, it has an aquifer, a pump, water lines, a pressure tank, and regulators. No such source of supply exists for the submachine guns and semi-automatic pistols in the movies, which, in real life, if set at the movie rate of fire, would empty—the Uzi or the M4, for example—in three seconds. Thus the need for one of the several types of fire discipline to husband ammunition.
In regard to this, a ship presents a multifaceted picture. It can carry immensely more ammunition than either the infantryman or the typical support unit that supplies him. Yet it lacks a continuous supply train, and when its magazines are emptied, something known as “going Winchester,” it must seek underway replenishment or return to port. Thus, the more ammunition or missile reloads it can carry, the better. But as in balancing the ever-present conflicting demands required by offensive armament, armor, speed, and endurance, aboard ship all things are limited by weight and volume. Athena could not be as fast as she was and have the endurance at sea that she had, and yet simultaneously supply her weapons as fully as she might have had she existed in a world unbounded by limitations. Still, her size and displacement in contrast to those of the Cyclone class enabled her to draw upon greater reserves of ammunition, even if not upon stored missilery.
Whereas the Cyclones carried 2,000 rounds of 25mm ammunition for their big guns, Athena carried 4,000 rounds of 30mm for hers. At an average weight of 1.5 pounds, without either metal boxes or the breakable links that arranged it in belts, it weighed three tons. The Cyclone’s 2,000 .50-caliber rounds became Athena’s 10,000, or, at approximately 0.25 pounds apiece, 1.25 tons. Ten thousand—as opposed to 2,000—7.62mm rounds for the minigun weighed in at 625 pounds. And 4,000—as opposed to 1,000—grenades at half a pound apiece weighed a ton. All told, with belts and containers, Athena’s ammunition load was almost seven tons.
This made her more vulnerable in terms of her magazines should they be struck, though less vulnerable in that she could defend herself with more than a little shock and awe.
Unlike as in other ships, 10 percent of each deployment’s ammunition was devoted to live-fire practice, as nothing improves marksmanship like live fire.
Other than armor, speed, maneuverability, intelligence support supplying a battle picture of the surrounding ocean or jagged littorals, and frequent practice in damage control, Athena’s defensive measures consisted primarily of classified and arcane electronic warfare systems that could jam, redirect, and in other ways incapacitate hostile missiles. Non-electronically, incoming missiles were met with flares and metallic chaff launched in quick volleys: flares to seduce infrared seekers and chaff to confuse active-radar homing. Such things didn’t always work, but when they did it was dramatic. An incoming missile—death itself moving fast—would as if suborned by conscience make a strange turn and dive into the sea. All forms of passive defense, however, were irrelevant to wire-guided missiles or aimed ballistic projectiles, whether anti-tank missiles or rocket-propelled grenades.
These latter weapons, of relatively short range, were best dealt with by suppressive fire. But RPGs tended to pop up as if from nowhere, the first salvo from skiffs or ships that, before such a surprise, presented no justification for attack. One defense against RPGs was maneuverability: were they launched from sufficient distance, were the screws already turning at a high rate, were the helmsman alert, and were the ship lucky. Maneuverability had little effect on a wire-guided missile unless the gun crews could react fast enough to kill the man guiding it. The solution, and last resort, was what the sailors referred to as the Hip Pocket, one of which was mounted amidships atop each side of the superstructure.
Originally developed for the Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicle, these were small and light. Always alert, they could sense the flash of an RPG launch and automatically slew to fire a two-foot-diameter cloud of .22-caliber pellets. Rensselaer planned to augment them with 12-gauge shotguns. An RPG stays within a tight window of approach rather than crossing in front of the shooter like a clay pigeon. To hit the clay, a shooter would have a second or less, but five or six seconds to hit an RPG. Whether either the Hip Pockets or the shotguns had any effect against a heavier anti-tank missile was an open and perhaps dubious question.
In Condition I (ready for battle, if not necessarily called to general quarters), Condition II (modified battle readiness situationally dependent), and Condition III (deployed readiness, i.e., not expecting but prepared), Athena’s bridge, bigger than a Cyclone’s, would be active and crowded. Ten sailors or more might be at work, depending upon what was happening: what weapons might be fired and from where; if a translator were necessary; if the captain were on the bridge; if the incoming and outgoing officers of the deck (the OODs) were both there, briefing in transition; if someone were waiting for orders before going below.
So many systems required operation and monitoring that just to list them, much less gracefully integrate them into a holistic picture of the ship’s status, environment, challenges, and potentials, might change the view of someone who from either prejudice or ignorance or both might think of a line officer not as the equivalent of a civilian professional but rather as something like Popeye’s great-grandson.
To wit: surface search radar; navigational radar; video systems; Loran C; Omega; emergency indication radio beacon; depth sounder; speed log; WESMAR scanning sonar; Gyro Compass; magnetic compass; autopilot; anemometer; forward-looking infrared; six separate VHF/UHF transceivers; LOS/SATCOM transceivers; three separate cryptological consoles (in COMMS, not on the bridge); an infrared signal set; weapons and fire control consoles for the 30mm gun, the Harpoon missiles, the Griffins, and the Hip Pockets; two internal communication systems; engines and steering controls; lights; horns; hailers; technical reference books; shipboard management computers; logs; etc.
However, Rensselaer had learned from his command of DDGs (guided-missle destroyers) that integrated bridge and navigation systems had gone too far, and for no good reason, in the incorporation of touch screens and trackballs. Much like the new cars that required navigating a cursor across a computer screen to select options thereon rather than keeping one’s eyes on the road and, without looking, adjusting the heat or the radio by turning knobs, the touch-screen throttles and trackball cursors of integrated bridge systems were absurd ways to drive a ship. On Athena the throttles would be physical levers, and the rudders would be moved by wheels.
On his way to New Orleans, Rensselaer had gone to Northrop-Grumman in Charlottesville and made himself so ubiquitous and insistent that just to get rid of him they agreed to retrofit Athena’s bridge system, as he requested, with old throttles, of which they had a large and useless stock. It didn’t hurt that he was in charge of Athena’s fitting out, and that they didn’t know it would be the last of its class, especially since he told him that he had had conversations with the Secretary of the Navy and the president, and that he had always recommended a very large buy of follow-on vessels. So although Athena had quite a few touch screens and trackballs, not a one was for ship driving, which would be done the old-fashioned way.
During his years of effort and by making use of a lifetime of connections in the Navy, Rensselaer added to such things both his own invention and his insistence on preserving the ability to navigate and maneuver without the aid of electronics. His invention, which he funded by convincing the integration contractors that it might be used elsewhere and thus be profitable to them, was a means of lengthening the radar and optical horizon of the Athena beyond the Cyclone’s eight and five miles respectively to eleven and eleven. This he did by installing a telescopic mast that when extended was roughly twenty-six feet above the surface search radar and more than forty feet above the topside observation deck. At the top of the mast was an off-the-shelf commercial radar of the type one might find on a medium-sized yacht, and a ball mount for high-magnification, low-light optics. The three miles of radar and six miles of visual increase were mainly important in terms of situational awareness. Although this system required several laptops that further crowded the bridge, it could provide an extra ten minutes warning of, for example, an enemy speedboat approaching at sixty knots, or twenty minutes warning and maneuver time in the case of a patrol boat at thirty knots. In combat, twenty minutes is a lifetime.
And then, Rensselaer thought to knit all this together ineffably with music. He decided to install powerful, high-quality speakers at every combat station aboard so that in the fight music would coordinate reactions and make them more precise. He set very little store in his request to Washington to finance this, and, not surprisingly, the bureaucrats did not respond positively to a change order that included the sentences: “Bagpipes made the British Empire, and, before that, swept the Celts through France. Music focuses the mind and brings courage even to the mediocre heart.” But Katy liked it, and other things as well.
To her satisfaction and heightened regard—as it illuminated something she found admirable in Rensselaer’s character—he had always insisted that his crew navigate not only by the integrated bridge systems but with paper charts, chronometer, and sextant. Further cramping the bridge, and the cause in future of many bruises, was a chart table and maneuvering board. Should all the electronics fail, no officer or chief under his command would be unable to steer the ship, find relative-motion solutions, or vector for wind and currents. He had a genuine love for the maneuvering board, an erasable surface over a large compass rose, upon which true headings, multiple bearings, and vectored intercepts were plotted with precise, differently colored lines—just as they were instantly plotted on the flat screens of the electronic bridge systems, but on the maneuvering board only after careful consideration, calculation, and verification. Results came more slowly but more surely, as they included one’s thought and experience. When at home Rensselaer would attend to his double-entry banking ledger, he did the calculations first mentally, and then with a calculator. The incidence of mistakes in data entry, though rare, roughly equaled the errors in his mental arithmetic. This habit of double-checking was extended into the use of the maneuvering board in conjunction with its electronic descendants.
Katy believed that patient and steady regard to tradition was the sign of something in a man that she could count on. The stately, plump, preppy lawyers smitten with her thought tradition was something you could buy, wear, drive, ride, sit on, or drink. Rensselaer’s view of tradition, she understood, was as something for which you might die but that nonetheless was less likely to require your death than to save your life. This was, for her, beguiling and reassuring. It was strange, but she felt that both he and she would have been essentially the same had they lived in any era of history, never quite fitting in if only because they were quietly adamantine in regard to what they believed was beautiful, right, and true, and their conviction was thoroughly independent of the pressures, fashions, and disappointments of their life and times. It bound them together more than they had been bound to anyone else in all their lives.
At the beginning of May, Katy was at her desk quietly parsing the Internal Revenue Code in several thick volumes opened in front of her. Exactly the same sections were displayed on three computer screens, but she preferred paper and ink. She had to absorb parts of the code thoroughly before she then would turn to the regulations, revenue rulings, and court cases. The phone rang. She was concentrating so hard she almost didn’t hear it. Still staring at the text, she picked it up and said, “This is Katy.”
He loved when she answered that way. It was simultaneously so modest, confident, and poised. “This is Stephen,” he said, affectionately.
She looked up from the open books.
“I need to meet you at our bench.” He was referring to a quiet bench beneath huge oaks on a forgotten street close to downtown, where they often met for lunch.
“I had lunch two hours ago,” she said. “It’ll take some time to get there. Can it wait until evening?”
“It can’t.”
His answer and his tone made her nervous. “Now?”
“Yes.”
As she left the office, rode down in the elevator—or, as Stephen insisted when it was going down, the “descender”—and headed out, she grew increasingly upset. Hardly noticing anything around her as she made her way to the meeting place, she remembered a recent conversation.
“When I look back,” Stephen had said, “at all the struggles I’ve seen—they were never-ending—for recognition, position, wealth, prestige, power, fame . . . the stories they make were great and indispensable, but not their objectives. Were I magically made younger, I could see nothing but to strive once more, but now the tests, momentous actions, and touching scenes, stripped of sound and dimly seen, are little and diminished.”
“I know,” she answered. “The law is a system that can stumble upon the truth, but never seeks it directly. Tax law is just a game, like a psychotic, OCD-version of a pinball machine, and I play it all day. You know what’s infinitely better? When I look out the window and watch the river and the clouds. And in the evening, the shadows, the wind coming up Poydras, the clanging of the trolley bell. There’s more in those than in all my hours of work, maybe because they’re just lovely and effortless. They have no ambition—the deep shadow, the luffing wind, the clanging bell.”
“Katy, once I deliver Athena I’m done with the Navy, and I’ll come back to you.”
She walked fast toward the quiet street. A cool wind from a thunderstorm coming in from the west pushed her hair back and sometimes was strong enough to lift the lapels of her suit. Everything around her seemed to blur, and yet she was intensely aware of it and would never forget the colors, the midafternoon darkness of the oncoming storm, and the sound of normal things—traffic, the singing of the streetcar wires—that now took on new significance. Stephen was waiting at the bench, in his khakis, a duffel next to him. When he rose to embrace her, the embrace was the only thing that stopped the trembling that had begun when she saw the duffel.
“What?” she asked, although she knew. The west wind blew the newly fallen petals of a garden full of peonies down the street and briefly up in the air so that they looked like snow.
“The Iranians sank a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, and as two PCs sped to help they were met by dozens of shore-based anti-ship missiles and swarms of speedboats. They fought like hell, it seems, but they were sunk, and before anyone could get to them, the small boats machine-gunned the survivors in the water. More than fifty men. It’s probably on the news already. Right now, aircraft from Al-Udeid and the Vinson are attacking the Iranian coastal bases. We’ve lost a few planes. The whole Fifth Fleet is out in the Gulf. Ships are pouring out of Hampton Roads, San Diego, Hawaii, Japan, and Guam. It’s suicidal for the Iranians, but they have a culture of martyrdom and they’re going to stand up everything they’ve got.
“You needn’t cry,” he said, gently. “Millions of people have done this before.”
“I haven’t.”
“I know,” he told her. “Waiting is always the hardest.”
She didn’t have to say I love you. Nor did he. It was evident more than anything else. “When?” she asked, and then looked at the duffel. “Right now?” followed in protest.
“I got the call at the yard.”
“But you’ve just finished builder’s trials. You don’t have the full crew.”
“Athena did magnificently. With the wind astern we once made”—here he stopped to convert knots—“just shy of sixty miles an hour. And she can skid-turn like a speedboat. She’s a great ship. I couldn’t have a better one.”
“You’re taking her out . . . ?”
“She’s at the wharf, ready to go.”
“To the Persian Gulf?”
“To Norfolk, where we’ll load stores, ammunition, and missiles, take on a full crew, and then head out.”
“Have you left anything behind? Do you want me to. . . .”
“I dropped your things off at your house, but this is all I have. The rest is in Washington. When the tenant’s lease is up, you’ll see the house in Georgetown. You’ll like it. Washington is your city probably more than mine.”
She knew that at dusk she would watch Athena leave port and go down the river—not like a plane lifting from the runway and rising fast, but, rather, stately and slow. The stern light would take such a long time to fade into the darkness that it would come close to breaking her heart.
“Now, listen,” he said, “this has happened so many times before, and each time it does, for the one who leaves, and the one who waits, it changes and deepens everything. It can be borne.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. She knew what would come next, and that she would cry. He asked her to marry him. They embraced.
And she said yes.