0300: UNDERWAY.
The ship moved steadily through a dark swell, miles from land; but she was not awake. Three-quarters of her crew were dead in their bunks. Cradled, muttering lost in dreams, they curled unconscious as the unborn within the metal womb that carried them.
Like the pelagic sharks far below her keel, despite her sleep she swam and dimly knew. Deep in her boiler rooms sweating men labored between tornadoes of oil-fed flame. Her enginerooms were solid with sound, the shafts whirling blurs. Levels above, her senses fingered the darkness, sweeping the surface of the sea and the heart of a clouding sky. Specialists leaned over radarscopes and plots. In radio central the receivers and teletypes hummed and clattered. On her bridge men stared warily into the night, and the captain napped restlessly in his leather chair.
On the flag bridge, high above the black sweep of the helicopter deck, Lenson balanced his binoculars on the port coaming. The night wind combed his hair, drying the sweat from his forehead. He did not like night watches. He spun the focusing knob, setting it by touch, and lowered his face to peer into the absolute darkness of open sea under overcast.
Ahead, one point off the port bow, a single dim star rode steady, glittering distant. Bowen, their one remaining escort. She probed an elder realm than the sky, her sonars singing whalelike down into four thousand feet of black Mediterranean.
Lenson shifted his binoculars, blinking to clear tired eyes. Nothing else marred the invisible sea ahead. Even the huge objectives of the night glasses gathered only a faint gray where the sea broke and sky began. He shifted again, searching aft in bites along the barely visible horizon. There; a second light, low on the dark circle of heaving water … Barnstable County. He watched her for a few minutes, glanced at the amber face of a gyrocompass, and shifted the glasses once more.
A greenish, faraway spark under the immense dome of sky, the flat bowl of sea across which they crawled … Charleston. She was eight points back, abeam of Guam, the guide and axis of this moving circle of ships. She seemed distant, but the night-steaming plan was a sector formation, each ship roaming within a moving segment of arc, and her radar range was well within its outer edge.
He shifted. Far astern, the second LST, Newport. He studied her for a long time. Her range light seemed dim. Then it shone out; the ship had yawed, bringing some line or fitting out from between the glowing filament and his distant eye.
Lenson yawned. The binoculars dangled, their weight digging into his neck after three hours of watch. He turned from the windy night into the red-lit cave of the flag bridge, high in the island above the slow-rolling bulk of the assault carrier.
Instantly he was surrounded by a small world; the separate, silent, almost holy heart of a ship at sea, a pilothouse at night.
The flag bridge was thirty feet wide and twenty deep. Around the night-filled windows was a mass of equipment: radiotelephone handsets, gyrocompass repeaters, rudder-angle indicators, status boards, IC phones, all invisible except for pilot lights of red or dim blue. Clipboards and publications had been wedged into their cabling. To the left, under a faint red radiance, a chart table was folded out of the bulkhead. In the center of the bridge the green flicker of a radar repeater picked out the face of a man bending over it. To the right, against the after bulkhead, a sheet of Plexiglas covered with numbers glowed dim as a phosphene; another man stood motionless behind it, sound-powered headset clamped to his ears, a grease pencil tentative in his upraised hand. To the far right was another hatchway, open, but with only night and the rushing wind beyond.
Lenson paced the narrow aisle before the windows twice, then stopped at the repeater, leaning against it. A flash of white light came from a small room behind the bridge.
“Quartermaster, keep that curtain closed.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
He leaned without moving for a silent while. A maddeningly deliberate clock, lit amber, shaved thin slices from the night. Since World War II, some detached portion of his brain reflected, the Navy had patrolled this ancient Hell’s Kitchen of the earth. He was the cop on the corner tonight. Did they sleep better at home, knowing these ships were here, that he stood nodding over a radarscope? He doubted it. But here they were just the same, obedient to their word.
“Everybody in station, Stan?” he asked suddenly.
Glazer glanced up. His face looked ascetic and gloomy in the verdigris glow of the scan. He stepped back to let Lenson dip his face to the night hood.
The fluorescent wand of the surface-search radar rotated tirelessly, sweeping across the dark glass that was, to his mind, the Central Med. Here and there were brief sparkles; sea return, the echo of peaking waves. But there were solid pips, too, fading slowly but returned to their hard brilliance moment after moment by the sweep of the scan. Glazer, the junior officer on watch, had drawn each ship’s night-steaming sector on the scope with yellow grease pencil. One glance told Lenson that all units of the task force were in their assigned areas. To starboard, two bright pips showed the remainder of the formation; Coronado; Spiegel Grove. Coronado was at the far edge of her sector, but her captain believed in active patrolling. Every ship had her quirks, her individuality, even on so remote and inhuman a device as a radarscope.
One station was empty: Ault’s. In the hurry to get underway her captain had taken her across a shoal in the dark. She had reported no apparent damage, but still had hove to, to check out her bottom, once she was clear. She was coming up astern, but at reduced speed. He felt the gap the old destroyer left in their screen as a sheep must the absence of a shepherd.
His hand felt for the range dial, and turned it up.
Now the formation itself shrank to the center of the screen. It could be covered by a quarter. The beam swept out fifty miles or more, and he watched it scan around.
Far ahead, a blurry green smear flared and disappeared at the very limits of the radar’s range. He stared at the blankness where it had been. Several sweeps later it painted again. He ratcheted the cursor for bearing and distance, marked it with the grease pencil, then lifted his head to look at the vertical plot. The messenger of the watch was stroking in characters, printing backward so the men in front could read. As he wrote he began to speak, his voice creeping into the silence, belonging there, like the muffled roar of the wind.
“CIC reports: Skunk “Oscar,” bearing zero-three-two true, range forty-eight thousand. Course one-five-five, speed ten. Closest Point of Approach; one-one-five, four thousand yards; time to CPA, 0335.”
“Very well,” muttered Lenson.
“That him?” said Glazer, sidling over to peer past his shoulder.
“Yeah,” he muttered, looking off into the darkness. The other ship, twenty-four miles distant, was headed south. Its closing rate, the algebraic sum of both ships’ speeds, and its relative motion would take it across the bows of the formation and through it. It would pass Guam, at the center, two miles to starboard. That would take it between Bowen and Barnstable County, past the guide, into Coronado’s sector and then Spiegel Grove’s … if it didn’t change course. If it was what he suspected, a merchantman or tanker bound for North Africa or Spain, it probably wouldn’t. On the other hand, no naval officer trusted a merchant skipper to do the reasonable thing. The formation had the right of way in this situation, but the possibilities of miscalculation were too great, the consequences too terrible, to take any chances at all.
He had seen once what could happen. Sometimes, on night watches like this, he could still hear the screams on the wind.
For just a moment then, remembering, Lenson heard them. He closed his eyes, gripping the pelorus till his fingers cramped, then opened them, driving into them the dim glow of the instruments, the dim deckedge lights, the iron fact that he was on Guam and not another ship that lay now two miles beneath the gray rollers of the North Atlantic. Not now, he prayed. I’m on watch, I have to be alert. As if in answer the screaming waned, grew faint. He stared into the radarscope, breathing swift and shallow, hoping he would not be forced to live it all again.
Then, as the bow of an aircraft carrier took shape before his helplessly fixed eyes, he knew that he had lost.
Dan, left on the Ryan’s wing, had stood frozen, staring at what had a moment before been empty night. Something seventy feet high had suddenly created itself there, filling half the sky, its running lights burning steady, the cruel gleam of its bow wave sparkling against black. He gripped the splinter shield, unable to move or breathe. Behind him a cry of “Stand by for collision!” was followed instantly by the electric clang of the alarm.
The Kennedy hit them a hundred feet behind the bridge. The destroyer heeled, knocking him onto the gratings. A terrifying shriek of tearing steel succeeded the blow. The ship whipped and shuddered under him and he hugged the deck mindlessly, binoculars biting into his stomach. The lights of the carrier, penumbraed by mist, slid by high above him. A scream of yielding metal, a roar of escaping steam blotted out the drone of her horn. Something exploded aft, jolting the deck and lighting the sea like sudden daylight.
He scrambled up and was propelled by the lean of the deck into the pilothouse. He blinked flash from his eyes to find its familiarity changed into something new and terrible. The boatswain was shouting into the 1MC, but nothing was audible above the din. The chart table light flickered and went out, as did the binnacle and the pilots on all the radios. The captain was clinging to his chair, staring out the starboard hatch.
Dan fetched up against the helm and clung to it, looking out. The deckedge lights were still moving by above them, like a train on a high trestle. Then they were gone. The deck shuddered. Another explosion came from aft, a deep detonation that rattled the windows. The ship swayed back to vertical, then reeled to starboard with sickening ease. The deck took on a backward slant.
“Abandon ship,” the boatswain was yelling into the mike. But it was dead.
“Knock that off,” said Dan.
“Sir, we got to get off her—”
He ran to the port side. The carrier loomed abeam of them, a black cliff higher than their masttop. He craned aft over the splinter shield. Kerosene reeked the air. Flames were beginning to shoot up, with crackling rapid bangs, all along the asroc deck and down to the waterline. He saw a dark mass astern of them, not burning, but lit by the flames. It took a long time, two seconds perhaps, before he understood that it was the aft half of the Ryan.
When Dan turned back to the bridge he found the captain on the wing, looking aft. His pipe was still in his mouth. The OOD was with him, standing straight, both hands on his binoculars. “Abandon ship, sir?” Dan shouted above the rising roar of fire. The ship lurched again, settling, and the slant steepened.
“She never responded to the emergency bell,” said Packer. His face was emotionless in the growing firelight.
“She’s cut in two aft, Captain.”
“All right. Do it. Get the order around the ship by word of mouth. Let’s get as many off as we can.”
Lenson found himself on the main deck. He did not recall the process of getting there. Men shoved past him. He could see their faces clearly now in the glare from aft. Naked from the waist up, a man threw his legs over the lines and dropped, running in the air. “Abandon ship,” Dan shouted, fighting his way in the direction of the fire. He heard them repeating it as he left them.
The flames were coming up from the after deckhouse, licking swiftly forward. Their tips fluttered in the wind like bright pennants. He thought for a moment the metal itself was burning. The smoke was choking and he could feel the heat on his face.
He got abreast of the asroc launcher and then was forced back toward a hatch by smoke. Sailors pushed by him, going the wrong way. He shouted at them and grabbed their clothes but they tore away and went on. Lifejackets littered the deck, soft under his feet, like haunted houses where you pretend you are walking on bodies. The deck was bright as noon, lit by an immense soaring pyre, slanted by the wind, shedding sparks at its apex. The sea was burning behind it. He turned and looked upward at the bridge, expecting to see the captain still there. But the wing was empty.
Almost helplessly he turned again, like a moth in a forest fire, toward the mountain of flame. It occurred to him it was time he thought of abandoning. His assigned raft? No, it was in the heart of the fire. The bow would be best. He ran forward.
On the fo’c’sle a knot of sailors, moving with no particular hurry, were dumping lifejackets out of a locker. He selected one and began strapping it on. His hands were shaking. He tried the waterproof light pinned to the vest. It didn’t work. Fortunately there were plenty of mae wests. He pulled two lights off them and stuck them in his pockets.
The bow was rising slowly. “You’d better get in the water,” Dan said to the sailors. “If she goes down sudden she may suck us under. Jump in and swim clear.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The men did not seem frightened, but neither did they move to obey. He picked up a lifejacket and threw it at one of them. “Get over the side,” he said again, and waited, eyes on the man, till he began buckling it on.
He threw his legs over the lifeline and looked down.
The sea was black, with highlights of fire. Heads bobbed here and there, faces bright, looking strangely peaceful. His hands gripped the lifeline. He tried to make them let go but they would not. “Jesus,” he said aloud, “I’ve got to get off this thing.”
He cast a glance aft. More men, black cutouts against the brilliance, were leaping now. He saw one hit on his stomach and disappear. The firesound was enormous but cheerful, like a big bonfire at a picnic. Someone was screaming above it.
The lifeline was biting into them, but his fingers would not let go. He pleaded silently with them and suddenly, to his surprise, they released. He teetered for a moment on the sheer strake and then kicked away weakly and plunged feetfirst into the sea.
The impact burst breath from him and icy water filled his mouth. He clawed at the darkness but it was the lifejacket that brought him up. He bobbed, panting with the shock of cold. The side of the ship was an arm’s-length away. A man hurtled over him and hit within spitting distance, sending cold spray into his face.
He began swimming then, starting instinctively with a dog paddle, then a crawl. The lifejacket dragged at him maddeningly. He swam as hard as he could for three dozen strokes and then was exhausted. He turned on his back and let the lifejacket hold him up and looked back at his ship.
Her forward half floated bow high, the deck listed toward him. She had moved. Still a little way left on her, then. From the forward stack aft a solid pyramid of white flame ran down along the sides, eating into the sea. Patches of inky darkness showed between the fires on the water. A few were still jumping and he saw one fat man in skivvy shorts standing calmly by the rail, looking out. Dan lifted his arm and turned the face of his watch to the flame. Only a few minutes had passed since the collision.
He became conscious now of the men around him. Some were shouting but most were quiet, tossed up and down by the four-foot seas. A few had turned on their lights. A sailor he did not recognize called out, “Think she’ll float, Mr. Lenson?”
“Not much longer,” Dan shouted back.
“She looks buoyant. Fire’ll get her first.”
“Maybe,” he shouted.
Good God, the sea was cold. He kicked his feet a few times and the numbness retreated. He was still looking at the man, trying to recall who he was, when the Ryan exploded.
He was in a tunnel of flame. It roared up on both sides, choking him with smoke and heated air. He could not breathe. When he raised his hands he saw that they were black with oil.
A strange thing happened to him then. He was drifting in a sea of fire, but at the same time he could see the whole bright circle on the sea, the forward half of the ship capsized and burning, the aft section dark and almost gone. Around them he saw the tiny bobbing heads. But he saw it all from above. He was Dan Lenson and at the same time he was all the men drifting and crying out and the men trapped inside, hammering at steel in the dark. He saw through a tunnel of flame a place cool and at the same time bright as the fire. He moved upward through the fire and it did not burn, and the brightness increased, and he went through oblivion into a place of clean cool wind.
Dan stared rigidly into the radarscope. Not long had passed; the pip had moved only a fraction of an inch along its greased track. Was it over? He lifted his head. Yes. They grieved no longer on the wind, those ghosts.
The recurrence, brief as it was, decided him. He would take no more chances. Compressing his lips, he pressed a buzzer. Beside him Glazer laid out plotting paper and dividers and began checking the solution.
“Yuh,” said a familiar voice in his ear. “Commodore. What is it?”
“Staff Watch Officer, sir, Lieutenant j.g. Lenson. We have an incoming contact.”
“Let’s have it,” said Sundstrom, sounding more awake.
Lenson repeated the range and course data from memory. “We’ve got thirty minutes till she’s inside Bowen, sir. I recommend bringing the formation left.”
“What will that open it to?”
Lenson had to pause only for a second. Every conning officer learned to do relative motion problems in his head, to accuracies of five degrees and a couple of thousand yards. Two decks down Sundstrom, pulled from sleep, was doing the same thing. At least Dan hoped he was. “If we come left fifty degrees that will open her to seven thousand yards from the escort and twenty thousand from us, sir.”
“What’ll that do to Coronado?”
“He’s at the outer edge of his sector. Should pass eight to ten thousand yards outboard of him.”
“Do we have sea room to port? Any other contacts out there?”
“None on the scope, sir.”
“Did you look?” Sundstrom’s voice took on an edge.
“Yes sir, less than a minute ago. We’re clear to the north.”
“Okay then.” The voice subsided into drowsiness again.
“Come left fifty. Keep an eye on him, Dan. Don’t let him screw me up with some crazy course change.”
“No sir.”
“That’s all I need, a goddamn collision, just when things are heating up.”
“No sir,” said Lenson promptly, but he felt a shiver nonetheless. He did not like that word, and he liked the worried whine in Sundstrom’s voice even less. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled, sir.”
The receiver clicked in his ear. Lenson rattled it back into the holder and turned. “Stan—”
“I was listening. Here’s the signal.” Glazer flicked the red spot from his flashlight onto the plotting pad. “You want to put it over the net?”
“No. You do it. Good work.”
He bent to the ’scope again, half his mind listening to Glazer on the radio, the other half watching the pip on its slow slide along the grease-penciled line toward them. Straight and true. He hadn’t altered course yet. Probably hasn’t even seen us, Dan thought. Got his scope set in close. His attention flicked out, to all the men on the ships around them, on bridges as dark and tense as theirs, listening at that moment to the supply officer’s voice: calculating instantly in their minds how far that would put the contact, twenty or eighty thousand tons of knife-bowed metal rushing through the night, from their own hulls. “Stand by … execute,” Glazer said, popping the button on the radiotelephone, and listened as each ship answered in turn.
“All units acknowledge, sir.”
“Very well,” said Lenson, watching the faint glow of the rudder angle indicator. Any minute now the men on the bridge above, Guam’s own bridge, would begin the turn … there. The rudder began to swing, faster and faster, then eased to a stop at left fifteen. Beneath their feet the ship heeled, first outward, then in. A pencil clattered to the deck.
“Check the port side,” he said to Glazer.
“Right.”
He went to starboard himself. He lifted his glasses long enough to see Coronado’s lights begin to swing, then glanced at the gyro repeater and set his elbows to the rail. Twenty miles range; a clear night despite the overcast, no haze. He might be able to pick her up.…
There she was. A dancing double star in the darkness, masthead and range almost in line. Too far for sidelights yet. The inbound merchantman seemed still oblivious of the seven ships that now were turning together north to clear her.
“All ships to port turning to port,” said Glazer, at his side. “How long you going to hold them on this course?”
“Till this guy clears Coronado. Then we’ll come back.” Lenson let his binoculars drop, suddenly sleepy again now that the moment of action was over. He yawned, glancing at his watch. Another hour before their reliefs came up. “How about some coffee?” he asked Glazer.
“Saucers and all?”
“What?”
“Remember, he said no coffee on the bridge without saucers. Cup and saucer, from the wardroom.”
“How many hands have we got, Stan? One roll and they’ll be all over the deck. Send McQueen down for some of those Styrofoam cups.”
“All right,” said Glazer. He went back into the chartroom and Lenson relaxed, looking out to where the lights of the oncoming ship were visible now without the glasses.
Another night at sea. He had been afraid Ike would come up in his bathrobe and flipflops and start worrying. But tonight the old man had sounded bushed. Like all of us, Lenson thought, but he takes it worse. He was responsible, sure, but there were good men on the bridge of every ship; they had years of experience at sea, some of them more than the commodore; they could drive ships.
Tired, tired, tired … he stared down over the coaming, seventy feet down to the sea. Black, invisible save for the ripple of phosphorescence where the hull met water, it rushed past the ship like a subterranean river. A line of something rose to his mind … French class, the mids sitting row on row of dark uniforms. Apollinaire. Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine … et nos amours, faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne, La joie venait toujours après la peine.…
Joy comes always, only, after pain. Yes, he was tired now from two days without sleep. The flap had started as soon as they cleared Italy. Messages to get out, steaming orders to write, the rendezvous with the other units of the MARG, dozens of pubs to break out and study furiously, goaded by Sundstrom’s frantic orders. And they still did not know why they had gotten underway. Some of the officers thought it was Lebanon again, some Israel; Byrne, the only one apart from the commodore and possibly Hogan who knew what was going on, only smiled with his painful courtesy at their fishing. There was a lot of sea east of here, seven hundred miles of it, miles that slipped slowly under their keel hour by hour.
A lot of sea, a lot of beaches. If they had to put the marines ashore, there would be a hell of a lot to do, and not very much time to do it.
No, he thought. We won’t be landing. This would be just another famous Navy steam-around-and-wait exercise. Cruise in circles, night-steam off some anonymous stretch of land, keeping clear of shipping that seemed to take for granted that a civilian had right of way. That was the drill for the Sixth Fleet when trouble started anywhere in the Med. But then one of the older ships would break down, or somebody would run low on fuel, and they would detach first one ship and then another for the run to port; and then one day the message would come, it’s off, everything’s settled down now, and they would turn and head back for Spain or Tunisia or Southern France.
And this time, Susan and Nan would be waiting there for him.
Après la peine …
He raised the binoculars to forestall the tightening in his belly. But the image of her face close beneath his in the morning sunlight, of the smooth luxury of her, laid itself over the cold glitter of running lights on the waves.
La joie venait toujours …
“Here’s your coffee, Mr. Lenson,” said McQueen. “I didn’t put anything in it.”
“Thanks, Mac.” He accepted the cup and sucked hot brew, moving into the shelter of the bridge, glancing at the gyro and then the radar. Guam had steadied up; all ships were still on station; the skunk was tracking down the new relative motion line. Glazer and McQueen were huddled over the chart table, updating the dead reckoning plot for the oncoming watch. The fathometer pinged sleepily through the open door to the chartroom, where racks of Coastal Pilots and hydrographic charts lay sheathed in red light. He checked his watch, estimating time to turn back to base course—he could do that without waking Sundstrom again, he decided.
La joie … when they came back in, weary from the days or weeks at sea, she would be waiting. The wives had an intelligence network that would shame the KGB. They would know where the ships would put in, almost before Sixth Fleet had decided. Sardinia, Mallorca, Piraeus, it didn’t matter. There were hotels everywhere. Hotels and beds.
No, goddamn it, Lenson, you can’t start thinking of that again. He paced around, reshelved the signal books, and glanced over Glazer’s shoulder at the chart. The pencil line stretched out from the toe of Italy, reaching eastward past the open blue of the Ionian Sea, toward Crete. The island lay curled like a shrimp sixty miles north of them, the shallowing water inshore washed in lighter shades of blue and white. There the pencil line ended, hung in blue space.
Glazer felt his presence and turned his head. “Here we are,” he said, putting his finger on a half-circle marked 0400 DR. “But where the heck are we going?”
“Good question,” said Lenson, glad of the opening for talk. “Where would you like to go? Other than back to Taormina, I mean.”
“Anyplace except Libya. Too many MIGs there for me.”
“It’s been pretty quiet there this year, since what’s his face got the axe.”
“Where’s it hot?”
His eye traveled east, past the Libyan headlands into Egypt and the Sinai, past the scattered dots of the Dodecanese and Rhodes into a blue gulf. The eastern Med reached like a cupped hand between Asia Minor and Africa, the back of the hand Egypt, the outstretched fingers digging into the Middle East. And it was all their beat. They were the only American force prepared to move instantly, equipped to go ashore and stay. Aircraft could strike more quickly, but only to destroy. The Army could move in force, but it took months to gear up that sluggish machine. Only the Navy was ready now, marines and tanks and artillery, able with the guns of destroyers and air support from the carriers to land and hold ground.
And when you were ready, and the world knew it, most of the time the only action needed in a crisis was the sudden appearance of those gray ships offshore.
Somewhere east. Turkey? There had just been a coup there; a bellicose rightist government had taken power, but things seemed calm from the unclassified traffic he read every day on watch. The small countries, where strife never ended; Lebanon, Cyprus, Jordan? Or perhaps the Soviet clients, Syria, Iraq, the Palestinians. There were so many possibilities.
He put his finger on the coast. “I’d guess Lebanon again.”
“Yeah? We haven’t been there yet this float.”
“Let’s hope we don’t go.”
“Hey,” said a new voice, behind the three of them, and Lenson turned. “Ready to relieve,” said the round silhouette, not saluting.
He saluted back anyway. “Ready to be relieved. Hi, Red.”
They went over the tactical situation, course and speed, the surface picture. “You’ll want to come back to base course pretty soon,” Dan finished.
“Yeah. I went out and looked around before I came in here. Oscar’s the merchie off to starboard, green sidelight, right? Think I’ll come back around soon as we relieve.”
“Sounds good.”
“What’s Ault doing?”
“She’s not on the scope yet.”
“That’s a hell of a note. You hear what happened?”
“She touched bottom getting underway, I heard.”
“That’s the short version.” Flasher leaned a little closer. “Want the straight poop? What really happened was, when Foster—that’s her CO—got our emergency sortie message, he came back and said he couldn’t raise a local pilot that time of night, that it was a difficult channel out, and unless otherwise directed he was going to wait till first light. Well, Sundstrom went crazy; he was screaming around up here about how everybody wanted to make him look bad; he wanted to report the task force clear of land by dawn. He sent Foster back a direct order to get underway immediately. So he did, but in the dark he got out of the main channel and went over a mudbank at ten knots.”
“Wow.”
“You said it. But then, when her grounding report came in, Ike said to hold on to it.”
“It hasn’t been forwarded to Sixth Fleet?”
“Nope. It’s sitting on his desk.”
“Wow,” said Dan again.
“Well, I got it,” said Flasher a moment later, turning away to the radarscope. Lenson saluted again, feeling relieved; he was always nervous on watch, on some subliminal level. But now Flasher was on deck. No matter that he looked like a bum and saluted like a seagull with a busted wing, he was the best watch officer on the staff, competent and unflappable. As he headed for the ladder Dan grinned suddenly in the darkness. Zero-four-hundred now, with staff quarters at seven; he could skip breakfast and get in a solid three hours in his rack. The thought was overpowering.
He reached for the door, knowing where the handle was just as he knew where all the instruments on the bridge were, by touch and not by sight, but even as he grasped it it turned under his hand. He stepped back, thinking it was another of the watch reliefs, and said, “Who’s that?”
The man didn’t answer, just shoved by him. “Hey,” said Lenson, annoyed, turning to follow. “I said—”
“Take it easy, Dan,” said Commodore Sundstrom.
Even in the dark Lenson could feel the silent shock of his presence run through the flag bridge. Glazer and McQueen, still briefing their reliefs around the chart table, straightened from their slouches. Cups disappeared in cleverly shielded prestidigitation. The messenger fitted himself behind the vertical plot with the instinctive dive of a rabbit. The drone of the gyros, hissing phones, the muffled roar of the wind took on a deeper tone without human voices. In the silence the commodore’s footsteps were audible, scuffing across the slowly slanting tiles of the deck. “Dan—what is this? I want my bridge watch to have their heads up. Who’s keeping an eye on the surface picture?”
“Sir—”
“What’s happened to that contact you called me about? What course are we on now?”
Oh hell, thought Lenson, fear and rage gluing his feet to the deck. Just now, just when he was going off watch. “Zero-one-zero, sir. I—”
“Excuse me, Commodore,” said Flasher’s voice, coming from the darkness of the wing. “I’ve got the watch now, sir. The surface picture is as follows: Oscar, that was the contact you were called about, is abeam of Coronado, starboard-to-starboard passage. They’re at a ten-thousand-yard CPA, and with your permission we’ll come back to base course now.”
Sundstrom ignored him. “Is that right, Dan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where’s the Ault?”
“She’s still somewhere astern, sir.”
“Christ.” Sundstrom sounded both angry and afraid. “That stupid bastard … well, fortunately there was no harm done. He’ll catch up with us. What about other contacts?”
“We have two skunks to the north, passing at over twelve miles. No visuals,” Flasher told him.
“Dan?” Sundstrom said again.
“Uh, those were too far out to call you about, sir. I was just going off watch—”
“I understand. Well, I’d like to see you for a moment before you go below; we have some things to do … Mister Flasher! Let’s stop wasting time. Get back to base course! We’re losing ground every minute we spend heading north.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said Flasher happily, and picked up the phone.
“Let’s go over here,” said the commodore, his voice dropping. As they leaned over the papers he placed on the ruddy dimness of the chart table, Lenson saw that, contrary to his usual nighttime custom, he was in uniform; faded wash khaki trousers, tight at the waist; khaki shirt, sparkling with eagles at the collars but sweaty and wrinkled. Under the bagged, tired eyes, the heavy chin, gray hairs curled over a triangle of T-shirt. The other officers disappeared about their business, moving to darker areas of the bridge.
“Before you hit the hay, Dan, I have a job for you. You did a fine job on the Sardinia oporder. You seem to have a knack for moving out on things, more than my other officers.” He pronounced the last three words with distaste. “So, though this is really the chief of staff’s and ops officer’s area of responsibility, I’d like you to take charge of it—just in case. I know you’re bushed, but can you take this by the horns and get it over the finish line for me?”
“Uh … yes sir,” Lenson said reluctantly. Writing an oporder could take weeks, but whenever Sundstrom wanted something he wanted it yesterday. He would be up the rest of the night, what little of it remained, and probably well into the next. Inevitably he would have to take shortcuts, make assumptions and guesses. Meanwhile the other officers, those whose job it was, would be sitting on their hands. Or worse, he thought bitterly, asleep. And then Ike would make changes, and be dissatisfied, and want it done over—
But even to think a complaint made him uneasy. Annapolis stamped the habit of obedience deep, far past logic. And didn’t the fact that the commodore wanted a draft oporder mean something might really be up? “Sir,” he said cautiously, “I’ll need some information. Number of supporting units, to write the schedule of fires with—a map—”
“Of course. See the N-2 for those. And the oparea map—here.”
Sundstrom slid it from its manila jacket under the scarlet light. Shielded by their bodies, it was hidden from the other men on watch. Lenson took the red folder hesitantly, flipped one corner of it back.
It was a 1:500,000 military map of Cyprus. He stared at the title with fatigue, then disbelief.
“Sir—”
“This is hush-hush, Dan,” Sundstrom muttered. “Discuss it only with Byrne, and then only if you have to. I don’t want people in this organization getting excited, riding off in all directions before we get the word to go. Thinking the problem through, and being ready for the worst case—being prepositioned, in an offensive aspect, when the need occurs—that’s what makes a professional, in my book.”
“Aye, sir,” he said, refolding the map. He was still sleepy, but now he felt excited, too. Beside him Sundstrom seemed for a moment a commander with foresight. The commodore slid the packet across the chart table to him, and as he did so his eyes dropped. Lenson saw him examining the chart, and then his head jerked up.
“Mister Flasher!”
“Yessir!”
“Come here. Look at this mess.” He laid his finger on a brown ring west of Pantelleria. “I gave specific orders that coffee wasn’t to be brought on the bridge without a saucer. That’s to prevent things like this—and just look!”
Flasher bent to look, his gut crowding Sundstrom away from the table. “Sorry, sir,” he said, and reached for a pencil.
“What are you doing, Lieutenant?”
“Erasing it, sir.”
Sundstrom stood rigid, his hand trembling on the chart table for a moment. The two officers waited. “Lieutenant Flasher,” he said at last, “there will be no more coffee on my flag bridge. None at all!” Then, before either of them could speak, he turned away suddenly, into the darkness.
“Commodore’s off the bridge,” the messenger sang out.
“Christ, I’m sorry, Red. It’s not Mac’s fault. I told him to bring it up. I didn’t think he’d be up here.”
“Ah, forget it,” said Red. “Excuse me. I got more important things to worry about than that crapola.”
He moved to the radarscope and fell into conversation with his assistant. Lenson looked after him for a moment, thinking that this was just the kind of thing that could ruin a career when you were around Isaac I. Sundstrom: the kind of thing that he would pore over for months, and showcase in Flasher’s next fitness report as “willful disregard of a plainly stated command policy.” He was responsible for the coffee—for the ring on the chart—but Flasher hadn’t said a thing, hadn’t even left him an opening to accept the blame.
He wondered, and then recalled the oporder. He gathered up the chart and headed below. It would be a long day, this one, after a second sleepless night. He found lukewarm coffee on the deserted mess decks. In his stateroom he rubbed his eyes as he bent over the charts and timetables. Nothing would happen. He was certain of that. Still, he had to do his best.
Bent close to his desk, he worked silently on into the dawn.