Until the latter half of the twentieth century, naval officers could without any discomfort whatsoever avail themselves of the wardroom. The tradition began when boys attending Ivy League schools (which were not called by that name until the middle of the twentieth century) had their own slaves or servants, and when officers had cabins with mahogany furniture while sailors slept in hammocks temporarily attached to the overhead. Eventually the formality of the wardroom began to seem like a play acted out. The more time passed, the more class distinctions seemed unnatural even in light of necessary command distance.
Athena’s wardroom was so small the only furniture other than a simple dining table and chairs was a remarkably narrow sideboard along one wall, over which hung the ship’s emblem. Several tiny spotlights in the overhead had burned out, and there were no replacements of the right type, so to illuminate the windowless space a lamp had been placed at the center of the dining table. It made things more intimate, although in regard to intimacy the close quarters were more than sufficient.
Movius to the captain’s right, the other officers in no particular order. With Athena moving uneventfully south in the Indian Ocean, the officers had finished their dinner and were about to have coffee and dessert—a Sacher torte that by some miracle the cook had been able to bake, fill, and ice.
“Anything to report about crew morale?” Rensselaer inquired, of everyone.
“There was a little fight, a scuffle,” Movius reported. “One of the crew, no point in naming him, said to another, ‘What’s it like to get up in the morning to the smell of frying bacon and realize it’s you?’ This precipitated a physical response, but nothing serious.”
“Anything else? Mr. Holworthy? Why are you smiling?”
“Two nights ago,” Holworthy answered, “the guys were a little punchy. Someone said something when the first watch was trying to get to sleep, and someone else told him to shut up. Then someone told him to shut up. And on it went, including that somewhere in there it became, ‘Shut up, dog,’ and ‘Shut up, cat.’ This went on, I swear, for half an hour at least.”
“You didn’t stop it?”
“No, sir. I was enjoying it, because it was so nuts. So did they.”
As Velez cut a large piece of the Sacher torte and flew it to his plate, Rensselaer said, “Mr. Holworthy?”
“Sir.”
“Are you happier with the fighting now that we’ve had two engagements?”
“No, sir.”
“Really? It hasn’t been that long, and we’re headed for a third and potentially rather daunting one.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Holworthy said, “these are naval battles. We’re neither naval infantry nor Marines. There’s a war, and we’re not doing what we’re trained to do.”
“Which is?”
“Kill the enemy, sir, and eliminate his capacity to fight.”
“You’re in the Navy, Mr. Holworthy,” Rensselaer said. “One of the important differences shared by the Navy and the Air Force as opposed to the Army and Marines is that our task is almost exclusively to eliminate platforms rather than men. True, in doing so, men are killed—that’s for sure—but it isn’t the object, and only chance determines the human toll.”
“In the same way, Captain,” Holworthy countered, “the Army, Marines, and the NSW community’s first object is maneuver, not body counts.”
“That’s correct, but to accomplish that, the target is men, unavoidably. That’s why, as you just volunteered, you’re trained to kill.”
“Are you saying that’s wrong, sir?”
“Yes, I am. It may be necessary, as it often is, but of course it’s wrong. We kill to survive, but that doesn’t make killing right, just as we kill animals to survive. . . .”
“Unless you’re a vegan” (which he pronounced, with a short e and a soft g, vehjan, O’Connor interrupted, trying to take some of the tension from the air.
“That’s right, Lieutenant,” Rensselaer said, “unless you’re a vehjan, you kill—or benefit from the slaughter of—animals. To survive, but it isn’t right. Many things we do aren’t right. We’re imperfect.”
Hardly concealing his agitation, Holworthy continued the argument. “Captain, I heard, and I don’t know if it’s true, that one of the tests Israeli naval commandos must pass is to be put in a dark closet with a dozen cats, and in just a few minutes wring the necks of all of them.”
“Who told you that?” Movius asked. “A naval commando or a cat?”
“I heard it in the States. Some guys, perfectly capable in every other way, just can’t bring themselves to do it, so they get kicked out, because, if you can’t kill cats, how can you kill a man? You know, Movius, Jews are very sensitive: they all play the violin.”
“Even babies,” Movius replied, adding, “You think I’m kidding?”
“Your point, Mr. Holworthy?” Rensselaer asked. With the tension somewhat diffused, his question was more in the spirit of discussion.
“That if you have qualms like that, you may not do well in our job. You may hesitate in pulling the trigger, meaning that the mission may fail, and lots of us will die.”
“Or an innocent kid may live.”
“There’s a fine line.”
“There is. That’s why old men like me, who were once young men like you, are here to caution you and temper your enthusiasm.”
“But, sir, as untempered as that enthusiasm may be, it can be the difference between living and dying.”
“I know. I’m just telling you what eventually you’ll learn. Battle will come to you, you don’t have to seek it.”
“I respectfully disagree, sir. It’s proper for us to seek the initiative, and to strike first.”
“Of course, when engaged. But to yearn for engagement . . . ? Mr. Holworthy, have you been on a battlefield?”
“I’ve been in battle.”
“I mean after large formations clash, or on a ship that takes major hits?”
“No, sir, not on that scale.”
“Even on a small scale it isn’t something you want to see. Think of a death in the Middle Ages: in the cold, in the dark except for perhaps a tallow lamp, with filth and the smells of suppuration, vomitus, urine, feces, no anesthetic, shrieks of pain, unmitigated fear. That’s what a battlefield is like when there’s no medivac and you’re out of morphine. It’s not the Mayo Clinic.”
“I’ve always thought, Captain, that if I fight hard until the end I’d be too busy to die that way.”
“If you’re lucky. But things change when five AK-47 slugs carve a line across your stomach. You don’t always die fighting. And sometimes it takes a while.”
“You’ve seen that, sir?” Josephson asked.
“I have seen that.”
Movius ended the silence that followed by saying, “Gentlemen? Can I say that? The coffee and tea are getting cold.”
And then everyone ate cake.
*
Holworthy was incensed, and, with a growing contempt for Rensselaer, dreaded another meal in the wardroom. He told O’Connor, and then his men, that the captain’s softness, his indecisiveness, and perhaps his age were not only depriving them of their opportunity to achieve their potential in the war, it was putting them in danger. “I have no confidence,” he said, “that he’ll seize the initiative and strike before we’re struck, or that he’ll fight hard enough. Yeah, he was a SEAL. Yeah, he earned the Navy Cross. But that was then. Between then and now he’s had years in graduate school, and on staff—which is like running a fucking hotel—and three decades of aging.”
“Is there a single admiral who isn’t like that?” O’Connor asked him.
“No, but that’s the point. You don’t want an admiral, or a captain, commanding a PC. You need high confidence, no doubts, some recklessness, and a lot of testosterone. He doesn’t fit the bill. He’s the old guy who drives a Buick to Denny’s for the early bird special.”
“Okay,” said O’Connor. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Enjoy the French toast.”
“I’m going to talk to the XO again.”
O’Connor recoiled. “Oh no, no no no. Just don’t. If you go to him a second time. . . . Do you realize what you’re saying? Promise me that you will not do that.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
*
In midafternoon, the winds were crossing and strange, and a waterspout suddenly appeared a few degrees off the port bow a mile or so ahead. The helmsman asked Rensselaer, who had the con, “Should I alter course to avoid it, sir?”
“No.”
Josephson, who was the OOD, said, “Captain, it’s bearing right for us.”
“Right.”
“Wouldn’t it be wise to run perpendicular to its line of travel?”
“No.”
“Sir?”
“You’ll notice that it stops. And it sways this way and that way and sometimes backs up. It’s not really headed toward us, Mr. Josephson. It looks like it because we’re headed toward it. It moves analogously to Brownian motion; that is, with equal probabilities that it will lurch in any direction. The winds are highly variable, so to the extent that they’re strong enough to influence it, they add to the unpredictability.
“Right now, if held, our course would put us a quarter of a mile from its present position. It’ll be about four minutes until we reach that potential intercept. The waterspout is moving at about five miles an hour. That means that if it goes directly for the intercept it could reach it in three minutes. In four minutes, it could move, theoretically, a twelfth of a mile beyond that, or a total of roughly eighteen hundred feet: the radius of the circle in which it may travel randomly to any point. The area of that circle, πr2, is about ten million square feet. The footprint of the waterspout is about five hundred square feet. The chance that we would collide with that footprint in the ten-million-square-foot cantonment in which it can move in the time specified is one in twenty thousand.
“So it’s probable that we can continue course and speed and we won’t encounter it. And if it looks like we will, we can easily make an end run, hardly altering our course, as we can go twelve times faster than it can. Were we under sail it would be different.”
Rensselaer turned to the helmsman. “Steady as she goes, one-eighty.”
“Aye, sir, steady on course one, eight, zero.”
“Did they teach you that at the Academy, Captain?” Josephson asked. “We certainly didn’t get it in NROTC.”
“No, they didn’t say anything about waterspouts, as far as I can remember.”
“Where did you learn it, then, sir?”
“I learned it by watching waterspouts.”
“Oh.”
The waterspout, which seemed to hold its distance, was greenish gray. It shed seawater, like a fountain, and it shone in the afternoon sun.
In the passageway, just before Rensselaer repaired to his cabin, Movius asked in a low voice, almost a whisper, “What’s going on with Holworthy? Like a dog on a chain, he’s held back, but he seems to be lunging toward insubordination.”
“I don’t think the chain will break,” Rensselaer answered quietly.
“Really?”
Rensselaer shook his head dismissively. “A wayward mind entranced by dreams and incapable of transcending itself can be overruled by experience. Whether or not you call this wisdom, to see self-limitation and error overcome is one of the joys of existence. It’s called growing up. We’ll see if Holworthy does or not.”
*
By evening the weather had changed radically. Rensselaer, Movius, and Holworthy were once again on the bridge not long before the late sunset of high summer. Holworthy was the OOD, but by virtue of being there Rensselaer had the con, and Movius was as usual doing extra work, in this case recalibrating instruments to make sure that in the near- equatorial waters some magnetic anomaly or sea sprite hadn’t thrown them out of kilter.
To the west-southwest, a most extraordinary heavenly scrim, mesmerizing the three officers, had descended courtesy of the clouds, light, and setting sun. In a band conforming to the horizon, the sea was the darkest blue it could be before turning black. Closer in was a layer of sea much lighter in color—navy blue—and the chop, with, however, nary a visible whitecap, made it look like crêpe. Immediately above the horizon was a belt of glowing gold leaf, uneven at the top where falling rain—some of which reached the sea and some of which did not—painted the sky in a kind of semi-charcoal. And above this were successive layers of darker and darker blue until the topmost layer of heavy cloud somehow whitened. All in all there were eight bands of luminescent colors in a tranquilizing scene enlivened by the gold leafed horizon.
Rensselaer said, “The color of the sea looks like the dark, cool blue of the sea off the Greek isles, or a blue crêpe dress I saw on one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, at the embassy in Paris.”
“What were you doing at the embassy in Paris?” Movius asked.
“I accompanied Admiral Johnson to talk to the French about their SSBNs.”
“How old was she?”
“Couldn’t have been more than thirty. Maybe thirty-five. Nothing is as charming as a Frenchwoman. They’ve got that one all sewn up, and, I guess, a lock on the most magical indigo.”
“Did anything come of it?”
“Oh no, I was married, and besides, even had I not been, she was some sort of princess, and to most people like that, with my rank in a room full of admirals and ministers of state I was probably as easy to ignore as a doorman.”
Looking out—they were all looking out, astounded, and the helmsman found it hard to keep on course—Movius said, “It’s like a Rothko. Unbelievably so.”
“What’s a Rothko?” Holworthy asked.
“A painter,” Movius told him. “All his paintings are just like what you see ahead. As if he’s reporting from beyond death.”
“Not the pastels,” Rensselaer said. “I don’t like his pastels.”
“True, not the pastels, but what he can do with red, maroon, blue, and black.”
“I don’t get it,” Holworthy said.
“When you look at them,” Movius went on, “they still the soul. The guy has been to heaven and he’s been to hell. Supposedly it’s abstract and theoretical, but I don’t think so. I never thought so. I think they were illustrations.”
Not long after, the light dimmed to almost nothing and the bands of color unified. Then lightning broke out, heavy rain swept toward Athena, and as the windshield wipers struggled to sweep sheets of fresh water from blurring a vision of what lay ahead, the spell was broken.