Unlike the vast Atlantic, the narrower Mediterranean offers frequent and changing views of islands and coasts, and is well endowed with subsurface features even if it is shallower and they are therefore less dramatic. Athena would pass through the Alboran Sea close to the Spanish coast, then hew to the African littoral all the way to the turn at Tunis. Then she would sail east-southeast, between Sicily and Malta, through the Ionian Sea and over the Hellenic Trough, south of Crete, above the Ptolemy, Pliny, and Strabo Trenches, north of the Herodotus Basin, and into the Middle East at Haifa.
Five days after she had put forth upon the open deep, Athena was gliding over swells (though sometimes lifting and dipping, with minor suction on the lift and a crushing of foam on the dip) as the sound of the Slave Chorus from Aida came over the Rensselaer-financed sound system. Of many kinds of music, this seemed most appropriate. Born of the Mediterranean, in dry, clear air, under a cloudless sky and strong sun, its rhythmic cadences elided ineffably with the roll of the sea.
In his cabin at midmorning, Rensselaer checked the weather at the junction of the Annaba and Tunisie forecast areas. Nothing to worry about. As he was doing this he thought he heard the faint strains of something other than Aida. Sometimes air catching on a metal edge, or a bulkhead vibrating in resonance with an engine or auxiliary motor, can sound like distant music, so he dismissed it and went on to review cables and reports. He then noticed a persistent yaw as the prow and stern oscillated rather more than a degree from side to side. It was so slight that someone with less time at sea might not have been aware of it. He put down his pen and looked up at the telltale. He was right. Athena would move a degree or two to port, then to starboard, and so on. He knew that this wasn’t a result of high winds, because winds high enough to pressure the ship even slightly off course would have driven swells deep and high enough to make a substantial pitch, and the pitch was still gentle.
The faint music grew steadily louder. Listening closely, he detected a beat, and then a backbeat, and then what could only have been words. Thinking that maybe the SEALs were using their own music for calisthenics, he went out on deck, where he saw that almost the entire crew had assembled on the port side. He looked toward the bridge. The bridge watch appeared to have drifted to the port side bridge wing. Anyone who had a binocular had pressed it to his face.
Sometimes, especially after long periods at sea, crews would behave this way on account of whales, a foreign warship, a tall ship, or the spectacular passage of an American carrier strike group. Realizing that the alien music came from off the port beam, and taking a few steps farther, Rensselaer saw an enormous yacht, bigger than Athena, from which the music was now booming. Running parallel with and a few knots slower, it was perhaps three hundred feet away on an eastward course into the Strait of Gibraltar.
Seizing a binocular from a boatswain’s mate (who had been too absorbed to salute), Rensselaer read Naughty Girl, London, just before Athena drew past the point where he would not have been able to see the Naughty Girl’s transom. And then he saw what had magnetized his crew: a dozen people were on the Naughty Girl’s starboard side, brightly illuminated in the sun. Half were men, even the fat ones, in absurd, thong-like, European “bathing suits,” and the other half were women, all of them young and variously slim or semi-voluptuous, also in thongs, some topless.
The women were lithe and tan, they held drinks in their hands, and a few of them were dancing to the lurid rock music, coyly and otherwise aware that they had taken momentary command of an American warship. To any sentient being it was clear that given the safety of three hundred feet of open water they were teasingly offering themselves to the sailors, who were painfully tortured—and enjoying it. The opera could no longer be heard.
The yacht was of a different world—loose, unthinkingly rich, soaked in pleasure and release, and entirely out of reach of everyone on Athena, most of whom were unable to turn away. An attractant so strong, this boatload of heroin in the sun drew every atom of their bodies.
“Who owns that boat?” a sailor asked Movius.
Without missing a beat, Movius answered, “Princess Olga, famous for her parties, her jewelry, and her magnificent balls.”
Amidst the laughter that ensued, Rensselaer stepped forward. No one was aware that he had entered. Even the OOD and the helmsman were looking chiefly to the side, with breaks to check ahead, their eyes fixed on the bikinis or abridgment thereof. Rensselaer cleared his throat. All turned—“Attention on deck!”—and saluted, but their eyes darted right back to port.
“I have the con,” Rensselaer said.
“The captain has the con,” the OOD confirmed.
“Helmsman, increase speed to fifty knots,” the captain commanded.
“Increase speed to fifty knots, aye, sir.”
Within seconds, like a sprinter from the blocks, Athena gained enormous speed and left Naughty Girl in her wake. This was Rensselaer’s way of restoring discipline and a sense of mission to his small company, asserting dominance over Naughty Girl, and affirming the dignity and seriousness of his ship.
Nothing more was said, and the crew probably had not imagined the desire flaring within their captain as well. Like them, he might have lost himself to the attraction of the women’s bronzed bodies in the sun, on an almost blindingly blue sea, beyond the jurisdiction of nations, beckoning in the heat. But leaving the yacht behind brought its own satisfactions—the wielding of power, the acceptance of duty, the love of Katy, and the wish to return home. Later, Rensselaer told the XO, “I looked her up in the registry. Naughty Girl belongs to Ian Carmichael, a hereditary peer who sits in the House of Lords. English aristocrats, including most royals, are decadent twits who fuck like bunnies and live like barbarians because others clean up the messes they make. But as far as I knew when I took the con, it belonged to Princess Olga, known for her magnificent balls, so that had nothing to do with it. It was just that someone had to look ahead, and I guess it was me.”
As soon as Athena had sufficiently separated from Naughty Girl, the lovely strains of the Slave Chorus reasserted themselves and mated once again with the smooth Mediterranean swell.
When Naughty Girl was no longer visible astern, and a sense of forward urgency had been restored, Athena slowed to thirty knots so she could make Haifa without refueling. Although they had not even begun to meet the tests of combat, and had not yet felt the full powers of the classical sea, much less of the waters off Arabia, they felt a sense of mission and history. The relatively shallow Mediterranean has an endlessly deep story, a life of its own. To fight in this sun, and on this sea. . . .
Athena and her little company pushed east against the track of the sun until, ahead, the great pillars came into view. Port and north was Gibraltar, Europe massively expressed as if recoiling from the immensity of Africa. Starboard and south was Jabal Musa in Morocco, the African gate, rising from the sea and taking on various shades of blue. With Europe to the left and Africa to the right, they glided forward. Jabal Musa rises almost three thousand feet from sea level. White clouds flow down its arid, blue sides cut with crags, valleys in beige, and scars of off-white. The northernmost emissary of the world beyond, all the way to the Southern Ocean, it seemed of such height as to lighten into the near nothingness of the clouds scudding over its summit.
*
At dinner, the day still bright, the officers assembled in their tiny ward-room. Training and watch routines were now running as intended, and this was the officers’ first formal meal. Over coffee and dessert—a chocolate mousse and gaufrettes more suitable to a flagship and that any sensible person would have thought far beyond the capabilities of a cook on a PC—Rensselaer began the first of many discussions, remnants from the nineteenth and even the eighteenth centuries, when officers were highborn and expected to be comfortable in a Georgetown or Beacon Hill drawing room. It was much less formal now, but still a proving ground for those who were assumed to value virtue and knowledge, where civilized discourse, professional or otherwise, was required. The universities only imagine that they have a monopoly on such things.
“Gentlemen, on a PC we’re lucky to have a wardroom even if it’s not that much bigger than a closet. We have no silver, no swords, no credenzas, no sideboards, no awards. What we do have is a space in which to separate ourselves in satisfaction of the unfortunate but necessary task, contrary to every democratic impulse, of maintaining separation from the crew.”
“Sir?” Josephson, the new ensign, asked, not because he didn’t know.
“The Chiefs are old enough to be your father, Mr. Josephson, and you have to show them due respect. You’ll seldom give them direct orders. Rather, you’ll say, ‘I think we should . . . ’ ‘Chief, will you . . . ?’ ‘Let’s . . . ’ ‘It’s time to . . . ’ Only when in combat, or when time is of the essence, or when following well-worn paradigms such as getting underway or docking will you give them direct orders. They know more than you do. But you have command. Were you not to maintain some distance, their age and experience would sandblast away the now fragile authority into which you have yet to grow, and then where would you be?”
Josephson smiled somewhat painfully.
“The same goes for the crew. Many ratings are farther along than you. Command must always be firm, always respectful, always confident. You need an artificial means to pull this off, especially when you’re young. Distance. Custom. The wardroom.”
Movius added, “It can’t help but be a class system. The only thing that maintains it is willingness and faith. If we don’t uphold it, they won’t either. You really have to practice it, or it’ll evaporate right in front of your eyes.”
“Sadly,” Rensselaer seconded, “he’s correct. It doesn’t comport with the way we’ve been brought up as Americans, at least if you’re not some kind of stupid snob, of whom there are plenty.”
“Who?” asked Marchetti, the weapons officer, wanting to lead his CO into interesting but perhaps fraught territory.
“They exist by the millions.” Rensselaer paused and then went on. “I love America, I miss it, I wish I were home. But do you know how many people have sprung up whose sustenance is to feel that they’re superior to everyone else?”
“Certainly,” Marchetti said. And then, wanting to be entertained, “Specifics, sir?”
Rensselaer obliged. “People who think they’re better because they drive a fancy car, live in a fancy house, went to a fancy college. I spent four years at Harvard getting a Ph.D., and I can tell you, they think they’re better than everyone else—in the whole world, except perhaps for Oxford and Cambridge. And you wouldn’t believe how many of them are actually idiots and glorified clerks. People who think manual labor, and therefore the people who do manual labor, are below them. People who think that people like us, and police, and firemen, are just suckers who put their lives on the line because we’re too stupid not to.”
“So why do we then, sir?” Josephson added. “We should all know. We should be absolutely clear.”
“You tell me.”
“To defend the Constitution, sir, to make a more perfect union.”
“To make a more perfect union, Mr. Josephson?”
“Yes, sir, that’s what the Constitution says.”
“Tell us what that means, exactly.”
“Well, we’ve got the Constitution, but then our job is to make the country more perfect in fulfillment of it.”
“Is that what they taught you at . . . ? I’ve forgotten.”
“William and Mary, sir. And in high school.”
“They still teach U.S. history in high school?”
“Mine did.”
“What is the union? Give a definition.”
Somewhat puzzled, Josephson said, “The United States, America, our country.”
“So we’re supposed to perfect our country, and Lincoln fought to perfect our country.”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Velez, the COMMS officer, confirmed, coming to the aid of his junior.
“No.”
“No?” Movius asked.
“No. The high school, and William—and Mary—were incorrect. The union is not the country. Neither the framers nor Lincoln would have agreed with Mr. Josephson, although they would have certainly appreciated his service,” Rensselaer added wryly.
They awaited further explanation. A spoon stirring sugar into a china cup made a rather tense, bell-like sound. Rensselaer said nothing, letting the tension build, because he knew that if he said nothing they would think he was a bit out of his mind. And because they didn’t know him, they did fear that he would leave the subject hanging.
But he didn’t. After a rather torturous minute (in silence, awaiting an answer, a minute is a long time), when the officers feared for the rest of the voyage, he said, “Contrary to uninformed opinion, the union is not our country, and never was a country; is not people or a people; is neither institutions nor territory nor even a government. As Hamilton, Madison, the Framers, and the people themselves understood it in 1789, when they spoke of a more perfect union, and as Lincoln knew, the union was the relationship and agreements among the states that allowed them to come together to form a country.
“The difficulty lay in accommodating the disparate interests, cultures, economies, and histories of the colonies. Our early history was always threatened by centrifugal forces, which is why Adams observed that the Articles of Confederation were more like a treaty than a constitution, and why the Continental Congress was called a congress, not a parliament.
“The union is the mechanism that enables the states to accommodate each other’s interests and come together in the federal structure that has become a country. Read The Federalist and see. Union is an abstract noun, and perfecting the union is perfecting the relationship between the states rather than the people or institutions within the states and, subsequently, the country. It has nothing to do with the Marxist dialectic that has lured people to believe that human nature is perfectible and can lead to the ‘new man.’ How much time has been wasted and blood shed for theorists and tyrants on their missions of perfection? But, yes, Mr. Josephson, we do what we do to defend the Constitution, and would die for it, as in fact we may. And we do what we do to defend that which we love and that which is worthy of love even if it is not our own.”
“A complicated subject, sir,” Movius said, “for any wardroom. Even on a carrier, with silver, stewards, and early American furniture.”
“Those are wonderful things, it’s true,” Rensselaer added, “but, here, we don’t need them. Our situation will be more than enough to augment the qualities of thought and action.”
*
Rensselaer was concerned that his wardroom instruction might have been preening. He had spoken as if in a high-numbered graduate seminar in which a certain fraction of the participants were themselves professors. There, the as-yet-uncertified doctoral candidates fed nitroglycerin into their engines in an all-out effort to speak eloquently, show mastery of the subject, and hide the fact that they were desperately auditioning for jobs. Even though at the time he had a job, in the Navy, and was being paid handsomely as he studied, Rensselaer himself had fallen into this—it was the spirit of the place—and had pirouetted with the best of them, speaking in well formed paragraphs and careful to exclude any of his idiosyncratic Western New England dialect in favor of a more standard English. Sometimes in the midst of this competition he would be overtaken with embarrassment and shame, and flush as red as someone undergoing a medical emergency. The authenticity and honesty of this never failed to attract fine women, who knew that calculating, manipulative men do not blush.
When he returned to his cabin after his disquisition on the Constitution he blushed like a space heater, as if Katy were right there, gently and without a word reprimanding him for having shown off in front of his officers. So, with the caution of someone who had suffered justified reproach, he started his first letter to her, which was written as if she and the women who more than once had silently reached out to him across seminar tables were one. That is, she and they had the magical quality—confined to women perhaps because they are in such need of it given the rougher nature of men—of loving-forgiveness.
“Dear Katy,” he wrote.
“I’d very much like to tell you where we are, what we’ve seen, and what we do, but I can’t. Of the various levels of EMCON (electronic emissions control), we’re now operating in perhaps the lowest, but we have mail censorship. I get to censor my own mail, and could myself censor the crew’s mail or assign it to an officer, but we’re such a small ship that I didn’t want anyone to have that kind of knowledge of the others. So although mine goes straight through, the rest will be reviewed off ship by someone who doesn’t know us.
“Patton was able to tell Beatrice, his wife, where he was, by saying, for example, ‘Where we saw the ducks.’ This wouldn’t have gotten past the censor, even though it didn’t give his position away, but he could do it because like me he could censor his own communications. There the resemblance stops, and I wouldn’t do what he did, not only because it would violate my oath, but because we didn’t see any ducks and on the open sea there are no ducks to see.
“My reportage must be limited, but there are certain specifics that will clear the bar.
“One of them is that day by day I’ve been learning the lesson—which applies to us and perhaps to all who love one another—taught by a courageous and brilliant being the size of a freckle and the weight of a few specks of dust. Like a politician’s, the brain of this being is so small that you’d need a microscope to see it.
“But unlike a politician, my tutor is much smarter and of better character. He’s a light-colored, almost translucent spider with legs much thinner than a hair. He may have joined us in New Orleans or in Norfolk, I don’t know, but he’s made his home inside a glass-fronted cabinet that holds a fire extinguisher and an axe. There’s no reason to have a glass front on a ship of war, but somehow this one has it. I have no idea how it got there. It’s the only one. It’s mounted on the mess deck, near an outside door. There’s a gap where it’s attached to the bulkhead. Flies get in, and so does the wind. The spider can survive for a long time on one fly, but the gap that allows the fly to enter also channels bursts of wind when the outside door is opened, and the wind attacks his web.
“I’m not going to repeat the famous lesson of Robert the Bruce, who watched a spider in his prison cell fall and patiently climb again and again. Rather, a different lesson. When the complex web (it’s a wonder: three-dimensional, a thousand elements) breaks, rather than rushing to rebuild it to its original complexity, the spider takes deliberate steps to shore up what’s left, and then he is content with it, knowing that it’s stronger than what came before. The wind has shown him what is strongest, and he sticks by it.
“So many people, as they’re worn down by the world, lose everything in an attempt to re-create what once they had, or wished for, rather than shoring up what they have at the moment. Somehow we found the wisdom of that spider, and in middle age have come close to the perfection we couldn’t reach even in youth. What a surprise it has been, how exciting, reassuring, and enjoyable. I keep on falling in love with you, and I don’t think it will ever end.
“That’s only an expression. It will end, and we know that, but, you know, think about it, on still nights wolves will still call in northern forests; snow will sweep across summit crests in glassy chains; the gem of the sun will never cease to glide across the sky; or waves break against unknown beaches; or grasses wave in the wind; and the whales will breach and sound. Until the sun burns out, life will never die. What could be a greater comfort? Although I have no solution to and no comfort for missing you.
“Except perhaps that we both believe that the quality of love is such that it springs over even the last great wall. I used to think that the candles lit in commemoration allowed the dead to speak in the dance of flame, and that the flame’s gyrations were the struggle of a voice that no one could hear as it called out to no avail. Now I have a different view. I think they are heard. I think now that this is not as naïve as I once would have thought, and although I have no proof but only faith, I believe that the quality of love is such that once truly liberated it cannot be forced into any kind of confinement, and that somehow we will always be together.
“Only faith, only love, can lead to such a belief, for which all great art is an insistent hint and all beauty a model of what’s to come. This doesn’t comport with the traditions of the Navy. We’re trained out of faith and into proof. We’re trained to be suspicious of many forms of perfection. Round numbers, for example, are said to be untrustworthy, a sign of someone’s guesses, or fudging.
“That is, it hardly comports with the traditions of the Navy except when burying someone at sea, when work, pride, and conscious effort pale before the unknown that reduces us to supplicants of hope and faith.
“What have I done? I don’t want to be serious in this way. All I want is to hold you. This is my last deployment. I see every mile and every inch of the ship’s progress however convoluted it may be, as distance covered on a course back to you. There’s so much to look forward to (including never ending a sentence with a preposition).
“I hope my letters get to you, and yours get to me. There’s no guarantee. We don’t have vertical replenishment, and mailbags are always getting rerouted and missing the ships for which they’re intended, especially as we have few port calls and those we have are subject to change.
“Stephen.”
*
Their orders were to get to the Gulf with dispatch, but dispatch is not a precise term. They had to weigh the urgency of reinforcing the Navy in a war that was grinding on longer than many had thought, against the necessity of arriving in a tight and ready ship. They didn’t want an engine problem that would take weeks to fix. So that, and conserving fuel to make it all the way to Haifa, capped their speed except in short exercises. And for morale as much as physical training, they had two swim calls in the Mediterranean, one in the Malta Channel and the other south of Crete.
In both, the sea was calm, the sun piercing, all-encompassing, its infrared felt in insistent pulses. In the Malta Channel they swam a mile. South of Crete it was two. The air above the water was hot and dry, the world below—and the sky—sapphire blue. Both swim calls were held after sailors not on watch had spent an hour or two moving ammunition, of which there was a great deal, to stock the magazines and load watertight storage containers on deck with various mixes of type. After such heavy work in ninety-degree heat, it was easy to get the men in the water—except for one, a gunner’s mate named George Washington, who was quite fearful, and inquired of Movius if it was safe in regard to sharks.
“Sir, I’m from New Jersey, and a hundred years ago there was a great white who swam up the creek and ate a coupla kids.”
“Mr. President,” Movius said, calling him what everyone else did, “virtually no one gets eaten by sharks in the Mediterranean. Remember those girls in bikinis? They had a swim platform on their yacht. If they’re not afraid, why should the father of our country be afraid?”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I’m not, but the captain is. He’s going in, too.”
Rensselaer swam the mile, and as he did he thought of Katy swimming. She swam every other day, alternating it with running. In a bathing suit, she was breathtaking. And then, off Crete, he swam the two miles, and he thought of Katy again, picturing her at the pool—lithe, light, serious, and strong, looking so beautiful as she concentrated upon her laps and speed.
*
One evening not long after the swim call, Rensselaer addressed the crew as a whole for the second time, the lookouts and bridge watch hearing him while attentive elsewhere. The sun was casting a golden light upon the east, and the sea, lightly breathing, its surface smooth, was rolling but not breaking.
“I know you want to hit your racks, so I’ll be brief. Not too brief. Our days are tiring, as they should be. We repeat things over and over, a thousand times over, so that they’ll become part of you by the time we’re on station. And the watch and training bills are complex and demanding. But you’ve done well. Master everything we exercise, until its practice isn’t a burden and it’s as fast as it can get. As your instructors have undoubtedly told you many times, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. With time, smooth gets faster and faster.
“We’ve done okay with naval customs, but on station they’ll be abridged. And given that we should train like we fight, we’ll abridge them starting now. I appreciate your salutes the first time in the day you see me. Drop them. We’re too small a ship. It wastes time, because, as you know, I’m everywhere. And if I or another officer goes ashore with you in combat, that venerable habit could cost us our lives. From now on, no need to come to attention unless it’s expressly called for.
“Do your jobs. Practice overkill. Before you sleep, think things out. Envision your weapons and your actions. We’ll push you hard, and then you should push yourselves harder. And know this: before battle, if we can help it, you’ll have had the opportunity to rest. There are two things in combat of which you can never have enough—sleep and ammunition. We have one more day until we get to Haifa, refuel, and take on provisions. In Haifa you’ll have ten hours liberty. That is, those of you lucky enough not to have pulled work detail. Enjoy yourselves, relax, and don’t get into trouble. If you fail to rejoin the ship when we cast off, you’ll get to know the Chesapeake brig. Tomorrow, push hard. By morning we’ll be anchoring in Asia, in a country that’s been at war since its birth. Like it or not, you’ll be representing the United States. Carry yourselves modestly and with dignity.”
*
The next day started with sparkling mist at sunrise, when the whole world, in deepened color, seemed lit as if by the special lights of a jeweler’s case. Soon enough, in a fiery sun north and east of Egypt, the crew sprinted into the last day of its training. Given the gunfire of the .50-calibers, miniguns, the MK-46, and the M4s, as well as the SEALs’ sniper rifles and machine guns, one would think they were already at war. In honing their accuracy, they exhausted thousands of rounds of ammunition. Even so, they would be left with a greater load than any PC, and would take on even more at Djibouti after transiting the Red Sea.
Not a moment passed when one group or another was not firing, practicing close-quarter combat, doing calisthenics, attending classes, calculating firing solutions, launching and recovering the RHIB, maintaining equipment, or standing watch. Taught and oppressed by common tasks, they came to know one another quickly.
The intensity of training encompassed all disciplines, but some examples might be illustrative. When not on watch, every sailor of the landing force—the volunteers of which had been winnowed down to twelve—carried his M4 all the time, so that it became almost part of him. He was given a little plastic bag with three sets of the tiny extractor, pin, and spring necessary for the operation of the M4 bolt and so easy to lose, and would carry them in a pocket. He had field stripped and reassembled the weapon over a hundred evolutions, the last twenty in total darkness. He was then trained in advanced marksmanship, combat reloading, fire discipline, and squad tactics. He fired two thousand rounds at moving targets. In close-quarter combat, he was taught the sequence of moves required to kill an opponent armed with a knife, and these were repeated, literally, a thousand times. Because of that, unlike so much else he had learned, he would never forget.
Everything was accomplished with similar urgency and intensity, and when the sailors collapsed into their racks they fell into a deep sleep within seconds. But it was a wonderful sleep, because they knew they were doing exactly what they should have been doing, and they had the satisfaction of giving it all they had.
*
Although they had not seen that much of its coasts, something about the Mediterranean spoke strongly even to those who knew little of its history. If land could speak or chant, every foot of its shoreline would have an incident to recall or a song to sing. Though no physical explanation could possibly be forthcoming, the quality of the water and the air, and above all the light, communicated indelibly that here civilization was born, God appeared to believers, and the stories of the West took shape with such power that they have continued to echo as if ongoing. And it was appropriate to the waters of the seas within this sea—the Tyrrhenian, Adriatic, Ionian, Mirtoan, Cretan, Aegean—that a ship named Athena glided upon them.
Looking up at the stars, which seemed to lurch across the sky back and forth as the ship rolled, the smoke from its stack dirtying for a moment air as sharp and bright as crystal, even the simplest of sailors was moved by the persistent radiance of so much that had come before.