When the Puller started east on course for the Gulf, the lights on its grid-like superstructure sparkled like the lights of the Eiffel Tower when authored in gold. And then they began to go out, one group at a time. Long familiarity with the heavy steel switches on lighting panels meant that, as they watched, Athena’s crew could almost hear the slap as these were thrown open. Soon, the Puller was just a dark shape, and eventually its stern light became a star light, and disappeared into the distance as the curvature of the earth took it below the horizon.
Left becalmed in the Gulf of Aden, Athena turned in the confused currents as listlessly and perforce exactly like its compass rose. Rensselaer and Movius had documented in great detail Athena’s positions, actions, and casualties. The story was in the logs and in multiple reports filed as she had made to meet the Puller, after which she awaited further orders.
Every time Rensselaer took many steps forward in the estimation of the crew, he seemed to take at least a few back. They thought he was strange—different, anyway. And he certainly was different. He had no knowledge of spectator sports, and could neither make nor even understand the football analogies so often used in the military to clarify a proposition. And although he withstood the assault of certain kinds of what he termed the “non-music” chosen by the crew to enliven their workdays, even if he sometimes chose rock and roll that appealed to them as well, he liked classical music, something outside the experience of most of them.
Becalmed and waiting, they heard him over the 1MC. “This is the captain. What you will hear next over the music system is something really extraordinary: Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto as played by Glenn Gould, Leopold Stokowski conducting.”
A seaman coiling line looked up at another and said, “What? Is this Earth?”
“Think of music not as pictures in the mind, but rather as a whole new world: without associations, captivating and sufficient unto itself, the way mathematicians describe mathematics. Music can transcend human capacities, and briefly take us with it to another realm, perhaps the one where, in this case, Beethoven conceived it. The Gould recording does this, somehow, like no other. Let it move you in the purest sense. Captain out.”
“Yes,” someone opined disrespectfully, “to lunch.” Some, however, understood very well, and Movius had several opportunities to defend him when Movius was slyly questioned about what had happened. The little concert was irrelevant to naval warfare, but not at all to the magical abstractions of the sea—its dimensions, its colors, the chorus of the winds, the musical timing of the waves and the cadenzas falling from their breaking crests. And that was the point. It had an effect, because even the coarsest sailors had a relationship with the sea.
*
All U.S. commands were busy and stressed. Requirements changed by the hour and sometimes the minute. Athena, an afterthought of the fleet, much less the Navy, waited not for hours but for days. It seemed clear that she would be ordered either directly to the Gulf—the Holy Grail of the SEALs and, after the crew had been blooded in the first engagements and victory over Sahand, everyone else’s desired destination. But the ship was battered and low on stores, having received just a token amount from the Puller, which had to hurry on. The periscope contraption had been knocked out, as had the search radar and several antennae. The port bridge wing window was gone; bullet holes had peppered the aluminum superstructure; the temporary repairs below the waterline held but were not confidence inspiring; the oil smoke had made the ship look like a tramp; though Martin had fully recovered, two crew members were dead and had no replacement; fuel and food were 60 percent exhausted, and the decks were stained with blood and oil.
Much could be made whole and replenished at the end of the supply chain that stretched from Seventh Fleet in Asia all the way to the armada in the Arabian Sea, which was why the Gulf was still a possible assignment. A quick run to Lemonnier in Djibouti would be even more efficient in terms of repair and resupply. It was conceivable that Athena would be ordered to Haifa, Naples, or even home. In sinking the Sahand on her maiden deployment, Athena had assured a place for herself in history. She had already been awarded a commendation, and no one doubted that a jangle of medals would follow.
Without orders, Athena could only drift, her bow pointing alternately and slowly toward one destination or another: the Gulf, Lemonnier, Haifa, Naples, home. And then the new orders came through.
*
Poker-faced, Rensselaer read them, and seized the mic. “This is the captain. Our orders have arrived. The war in the Gulf and Russian provocations in the Baltic continue to mean that the Western Indian Ocean has not a single allied warship—except us. Meanwhile, because we are beaten up, and because we’re small and undervalued, the war can do without us, and we’re to patrol from the Gulf of Aden north of Somalia southward all the way to Mombasa, to suppress an expected surge of piracy.
“If a replenishment ship passes nearby, we’ll replenish. If not, we’ll head back to Lemonnier or another port when things run really low. Even without incident, boarding parties may get busy in the next few weeks, and, absent the unexpected, training will resume beginning with the morning watch tomorrow.
“We were supposed to be the sacrificial lamb that slowed and pinpointed Sahand. Instead, the lamb killed the wolf. When you recall this in your old age, my guess is that a slight smile will accompany both a surge of pride and a touch of sadness. As your commanding officer, I thank you and I congratulate you. Now we’ll head south and get back to work. Captain out.”
He turned to the quartermaster. “Buck?”
“Sir?”
“Use the databases to calculate the center point of all pirate incidents off the Somali coast in the last year. Assign attacks within six months a double weight, within three a triple weight, within the last month quadruple weight. Chart a course to that point. We’ll run there and then drift to save fuel.”
Once more he clicked on the 1MC. “This is the captain again. With the death of Ensign Josephson, Chiefs Rodriguez and Holt are going to serve frequently as officers of the deck, and Seamen Washington and Placa will fill in to assume the duties the chiefs cannot therefore perform. LT Di Loreto will also resume talking to dolphins as long as we are not engaged in combat. In case you didn’t know, that’s what he does at the bow, which may be why Athena is blessed by the sea. Carry on. Captain out.”
They turned south and steamed into the darkness. As usual, the stars over the seas adjacent to the desert were as crazily bright as they are in winter in the wilderness or at the poles. Though they seemed as cold as diamonds, their hard light when taken in was comforting and warm. Somehow, much like a loving embrace, it calms the heart. Rensselaer returned to his cabin and slept. As the ship rolled and pitched ever so slightly, he dreamt of Katy. At times he missed and desired her so intensely it was physically painful. In the dream, she was in New Orleans, in a garden, among flowers and patient greenery. Athena herself could not have been more beautiful and wise than Katy Farrar.
And that night, awakened by thunder, he eventually went out alone on deck and looked to see distant lightning flashes striking the sea. They illuminated the dark undersides of the clouds that had spawned them, so that momentarily the clouds looked like mountains. All the way to the horizon, patches of squall-darkened sea appeared and disappeared with each bolt of lightning.
*
When they reached the center point of the piracies—something that existed only in mathematical abstraction—they halted over it and once again started to train as they had on the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. In the hot sun, they did their best to clean oil and soot from the superstructure, to inventory and maintain their weapons, write new watch bills, and scrub the blood off the decks. Presiding over an Athena as restored as possible while alone and at sea was the flag, a shock of bright and unsullied color floating above the gray, battered ship. Despite the fascinating colors at sea, it was yet a fact that the eye was arrested by this striking ensign as by nothing else.
Athena sat upon the calculated center point both as bait and like a spider that—as if versed in operations analysis—sits at the center, the maximally advantageous position on its web. As busy as everyone was with training and repair, for several days and then a week out of action they had the opportunity for rest. Hardest at work was Velez and his striker, Ivoire, who had to man COMMS without cease, listening to a multiplicity of channels and monitoring many sources of intelligence. Everyone felt strengthened by the past combats. They felt an attraction to and yearning for battle, with full knowledge of the risks and dangers and yet none of the anxiety they had experienced in the beginning. As Athena drifted, in their impatience for action the sailors were now almost like the SEALs.
In the lee of the desert on one of the nights of flaring stars, Rensselaer returned to his cabin for the eight hours of sleep he had earned by exhausting himself during the day. As usual, he laid out his BDUs so as to be able to dress in seconds when called. No reading: there wasn’t time. No thinking upon a problem to be solved. He looked around the tiny cabin and, knowing that the ship was ready and armed, switched off the lights, lay back, and closed his eyes.
Half dreaming, half awake, he saw Athena’s statue atop the Acropolis, her golden spear-tip a second sun glistening over the sea and visible from afar to mariners. Like a lighthouse in daylight, it was a modest but persistent signal of warning to the florid, ambitious Persians. Though thousands of years had passed, the once seemingly remote and legendary wars of Greeks versus Persians—West versus East the fleets of two separate worlds clashing on cloudless summer seas—had once again arisen as if they had never ceased to exist. Though as a boy on the Hudson, Rensselaer would not have dreamt that his life would lead him to this, here he was, in the shadow of Athena’s diaphanous robes.
It seemed perfect and satisfactory that such a woman would be wielding a spear that captured the sunlight and shot its beams all the way to Sounion. As if confirmed by the near divinity of dreams, she seemed the answer to all things. Taking comfort from the imprecisely remembered lines that Lucretius had devoted to Venus, Rensselaer fell asleep as if in the presence of Athena, who “beneath the gliding stars of heaven, filled with her presence the sea that bears our ships, and governs the nature of all things that come forth into the shores of light.”
But hours later he awoke in distress, his heart pounding, his body moist with sweat despite the coolness of his cabin. He switched on the lights, dressed, and went on deck. Though he had fallen asleep in near bliss, he had been assaulted as he slept by something he had known for a long time but only now had struck as if a fatal blow.
It was a simple thing, and not at all unusual but nonetheless astoundingly grave. His line, which had started at the very beginning of life, would come to an end with him. He was an only child, as were both his parents. He had not even distant cousins of whom he was aware. His first wife had borne him no children. Nor would Katy, and Katy it would be. So, with him, the progression of millions of years would stop dead. It was as if everyone before him had been tossing a ball back and forth, ten billion times, and he was the one who would drop it.
The papers, the paintings, the letters . . . his decorations, photographs, and sword . . . would be burnt, sold, or buried in landfill. All the material things in which his identity had found an echo would either rot or be scattered into the hands of strangers. Even were a perfect record of a life accessible to anyone but God—every second, every thought, emotion, and impulse, every struggle, idea, and act—it would not do justice in other than a divine eye to their infinitely complex interplay with the ineffable soul. As everything would eventually disappear, were that divine eye absent, everything would then be nothing.
The OOD asked of the others on the bridge who was at the bow. It was the captain, he was told by a sailor who had lifted a night-vision binocular to his eyes. Everyone was silent, until the OOD said, “Let him be,” and they resumed their duties.