The Circle (9 page)

They rounded the corner, into Bloch's hoarse “Attention on deck!”

“Good morning, Chief. Have them stand at ease.”

“First Division, at ease.”

The triple line of sailors had straightened slightly at Bloch's bark. Now they slumped back into slouches. Lenson counted twenty-six, picking out the ones he knew. Coffey, Gonzales, Greenwald, Williams, Connolly, Lassard, Vogelpohl, Hardin, Jones. They swayed as the bow dipped, their jacket collars fluttering in the wind. A gull hovered behind them, as if uncertain whether to join the formation. He noted their ragged dungarees, the mix of dirty white hats and ball caps, the paint-stained boondockers. Here and there he caught an alert glance, a quirk of mouth or eyebrow. But most of the faces held only dullness, apathy, the slack lineaments of fatigue or despair. They looked like a chain gang.

He felt their examination, too, eyes flickering toward him, then away. He held himself straight, hands locked behind him, as Norden introduced him.

“Good morning,” he began, and stopped. His voice sounded high; he forced it louder, to overcome the wind. “I'm Ensign Daniel Lenson. Captain Packer has asked me to take over as first lieutenant.

“This is my first assignment on active duty. There's a lot I have to learn, just as you all had to learn the ropes once. I hope you'll help me out and then later I can help you.

“Neither the chief nor the lieutenant here have told me anything about you individually.” (Not precisely true, but …) “As far as I'm concerned, we'll all start with a clean slate. I expect seamanlike work and a seamanlike attitude. If I get it, I'll do everything I can to get you the things you need. If I don't, then we'll have to talk.

“If you have problems, personal or Navy, feel free to come to me with them at any time.

“I'm glad to be aboard, and glad to be assigned to this division.” He waited, but could think of nothing else. “I guess that's about all for now. Chief, go ahead with routine.”

Bloch nodded heavily. He removed his cap and wiped his baldness with a hairy arm. “Welcome aboard, sir, from the division. Okay, today's our first workday at sea. We got ichi-ban weather this morning. We won't where we're going. You three petty officers, we got to lay some primer today. Assholes and elbows! No shortcuts, no holidays, no gundecking. I want guys at the paint locker ten minutes after we break from quarters.”

The men regarded him stolidly, their bodies swaying toward him and then away. The moment of query had passed. Dan was part of their world now. Their faces were shut, hostile as a lee shore in a storm. For a moment he wished he'd spoken different words, something beyond the standard phrases, something ringing and electric. But when he tried to imagine what they would have been, he couldn't. The bow dipped and spray broke over it, blowing over them. The men flinched and cursed. “Can't do no painting in salt spray,” a voice grumbled from the back rank.

Bloch ignored it. “Isaacs, Rambaugh, Pettus, see me for a minute. Rest of you bastards”—he seemed to recall the officers' presence—“of you
personnel,
atten-
hut,
dismissed.” He gave a salute as a man might throw dung.

The formation broke. The men straggled aft. Norden left, too. Bloch turned to Lenson. “Sir, these here are the petty officers.”

Boatswain's Mate First Class Isaacs was big, graphite black, his movements slow and somehow tentative. BM2 Rambaugh was grizzled and wizened, with a tough jaw and tattoos like bad carbons of the chief's. Both were old enough to be Lenson's father. The third-class, Pettus, didn't look a clock tick over eighteen. His mouth worked like a cow's. Dan recognized him as the sailor on the quarterdeck when he'd arrived. “For topside maintenance, I divvied the ship into three parts,” Bloch was explaining, picking at the wrapping of a King Edward. “Put a PO in charge of each, with his own men. I've seen it work that way. But we're so goddamned undermanned—”

“Do you men feel you can make up what we missed in the yard?”

He saw the exchange of glances, saw them wait for the chief to speak. He decided to start with the junior. That encouraged honest opinions. “Pettus?” he prompted.

“Uh, it's gonna be rough, but, uh, we'll try.”

“
Sir,
” Bloch said.

“Sir.”

“Petty Officer Rambaugh?”

The second-class squinted at the passing sea as he answered. “Got a lot of gear midships, sir. Boats, unrep fittings. It's old. Keep it operating, takes a lot of work. We was just about keeping abreast before. Biggest problem is, we're short men. Division's allowance is forty. We got twenty-six.”

“How long has it been that low?”

Bloch turned back from a wind-cheating crouch, cigar lighted, flicking a smoking match to leeward. “Since the war got hot, sir. They took a draft of ten men off her year before last. Then we lost five more in the yard and got three recruits.”

“So it's not exactly news.”

“No, but that don't make it good.”

“Isaacs?”

The first-class lifted his shoulders and moved his feet. He was avoiding Dan's eyes; he realized Isaacs avoided all their eyes. At last his voice came up, deep and slow as a collapsing mine shaft. “We can catch up aft, sir. No problem there.”

He caught Bloch's lifted eyebrow, Rambaugh's glance away. Meaning? He didn't know. He didn't like the undercurrent here. Undertows could sweep you where you didn't want to go. But for the moment, he'd done what he had to do. Met them. Asked for cooperation. He could fly by wire for a day or two, see how things went.

He felt them weighing him. There was resentment. There was also a grudging attempt at respect—or at least tolerance. All in all, he figured they'd try to get the job done. But these were the senior enlisted, career men.

“Thanks. I'll be seeing you all on deck later.” He half-lifted his hand. They saluted, together, and he completed his salute. He walked aft, leaving the four men standing in a circle, surrounded by the sea. Halfway down the length of the ship, he stopped, looking at the brass turnbuckles of the lifelines, at the green crud that covered them, and pulled out the notebook.

But before he wrote, he leaned over the lifeline, not resting his weight on it but leaning, and looked out over the heaving blue.

He had a brief daydream.
Ryan,
former rust bucket, become the pride of the Atlantic Fleet. A taut ship, clean, hard-working. That was happiness; knowing what you had to do, how to do it, and going to it with all your strength. The conversation during the midwatch came back to him and he smiled, staring down into the hissing sea.

He lifted the notebook, feeling their eyes still on him, and began.

4

Latitude 57°–52′ North, Longitude 23°–21′ West: 300 Miles South of Iceland

SIX days later he narrowed his eyes to a freezing wind beneath a charcoal dawn. “Sir,” he said. “Morning fix is plotted.”

Lieutenant (jg) Aaron Reed turned his head from his contemplation of the passing sea. The taciturn, somber West Virginian was
Ryan
's antisubmarine officer, and stood OOD in Section III. “We on track?” he grunted.

“A little ahead, by loran.” Bryce expected the JOD to do a morning fix. Ostensibly, it was for training, but Dan wondered sourly whether the XO, who was officially the navigator, bothered to do his own at all. He hadn't seen Bryce on the bridge yet this cruise.

“Loran. No star fix?”

“No, sir. I looked for a break, but no luck. Solid overcast. So I worked out a TD.”

“Okay.” Reed turned away. A moment later the wind banged the pilothouse hatch shut behind him.

Dan lingered on the wing, snugging the zipper of his foul-weather jacket. He felt disappointed. Reed hadn't asked him what he was doing still up, or complimented him on doing his first time-difference fix. He seemed to care more for his sonars than for the people around him. Stop whining, he told himself sternly. They're still paying you, no matter how they treat you.

He looked down on a changed sea. A week before, he'd lingered out here, enjoying the winter sunlight. Now, under a sky poured solid as concrete with low, dark, amorphous clouds, he clung to the splinter shield with gloved hands against a buffeting wind.

At fifty-seven degrees, the latitude of Scotland, the Atlantic was not blue but gray-blue, the whitecapped rollers fifteen feet from crest to trough.
Ryan
cut her way through them like a huge, slow jigsaw. When the bullnose scooped a sea aboard, the solid water was smoky emerald for an instant, then suddenly white as spray exploded over the ground tackle. The wind, varying between twenty-four and twenty-seven knots, flapped the legs of his trousers and whistled in the taut lines and antennas on the signal bridge.

He'd watched the sea-change in fascination, standing above it eight to twelve hours out of twenty-four. Strange that water could present so many moods, that sky and sea together could mirror all the rages and softnesses of the human heart …

He caught his head drooping and shook himself. A shiver explored the backs of his legs. Yet he still lingered, relishing being free of duty, if only for a few minutes.

The days had passed like hours in continuous work. The beginning of the cruise already seemed distant, as if they'd been out for months. He was learning the ship in the traditional way. He'd memorized it from his stateroom to the bridge, bridge to the wardroom, wardroom to the head. He spent his time off watch reading equipment manuals, updating division records, and keeping his men at work. Four or five times a day, he'd stop by the office to get a form or a piece of advice from the eternally busy Vogelpohl, and he'd get called to Norden's room about as often.

A smoothly heaved hillock closed from ahead, crest ruffled like a child's hair by the driving wind. The old destroyer rose majestically, threatening the clouds with the stubby barrels of the forward mount. He felt his weight lessen as she hesitated at the peak of her bound. Then the bow dropped like a guillotine, tossing the sea up in two curved sheets the color of window glass seen end-on. He heard the crash through the hum of the rigging, felt the splinter shield tremble.

Jesus, he thought. This is getting to be serious weather. He found himself grinning.

His need for coffee became overwhelming, as did a related requirement for a leak. He turned, and slid down the ladder to the 01 level. The aluminum handrails left black semicircles on his palms. He headed aft, weaving as the ship pitched, glancing at the lashings of the life-raft containers.

In the shelter of the Asroc deck, one of the signalmen was lying on a coil of manila, spearing sardines out of mustard sauce with a marlinespike and drinking cola from a rusty can. Above them the wind whipped brown gas off the stack. To either side, Dan looked out over an immense heaving circle of empty ocean. Their last surface contact, the last ship they'd sighted, had been two days before, when they left the transatlantic latitudes. They were alone, and headed north.

His gaze traveled ahead to the whaleboat, and he paused, examining it with the critical eye he was developing under Norden's tutelage.

His scrutiny swept twenty-six feet of motorboat without the interruption of rust or dirt. The teak trim was smoothly varnished; the hull paint gleamed. A scarlet stripe separated gray from white. Even the brass letters on the bow had been polished. The releasing hooks at the bow and stern were slathered with fresh amber grease. When he bent, looking down the davit arm, the tint recurred at the turnbuckles, operating screw, and the hand crank used to lower away if power failed. The white paint, though, was a little dingy. Repaint? No, a scrub would do.

Even as he thought this, a man emerged from the half-cabin with a bucket in his hands. It was Greenwald. Unconscious of Lenson's gaze, he began scrubbing with a palmetto brush. Dan was about to speak, but just then someone inside started the boat's engine. It ran for thirty seconds, smooth and loud, then cut off.

Hard at work, and early, too, he thought. He thought of complimenting them but didn't. There was something about it he didn't like. It clashed too glaringly with the rest of
Ryan.
Instead, he shivered suddenly, and slid down the ladder to the main deck.

The narrow corridors were snug after the weather decks. He made his way to Boy's Town, tossed cap and flashlight into his desk, and looked around.

The anonymous cubicle was home now. He had a foldout desk, working surface two square feet, and a little safe with a broken lock. He was getting used to the speckled mirror, the dirty sink, the round-the-clock mess and jostle of four men working, dressing, coming off watch or getting ready to go on. The pipes and wireways made racks for his Gardner and Conrad, Dostoyevski, Wouk, Huxley, and Vonnegut.

And for her. Above his head, shielded so that only he could see it, he'd taped the photo of Susan he'd taken on the beach at Chincoteague early one morning. Two bands of white across a body that had spent the summer in a bikini. It was better not to think about her pale, small breasts, nipples erect with a want he'd satisfied between the dunes moments after laying the camera aside, wrapped in a beach towel against the blowing sand …

He pulled off jacket and shirt, and tried the faucet. One of the evaporators had gone down, and Bryce had set a quota for the crew and junior officers. He cupped the tepid trickle, lathered, and began to shave.

There were two things he hadn't gotten used to yet. The heat was one. It felt good when he came in from topside, but already sweat dotted his forehead in the mirror. Cummings had told him to tuck his socks under his pillow and put them on before jumping down. That gave him enough insulation to find his shoes. The second was the occasional visitor from the cable runs. He'd had no time to read, but his paperbacks came in handy as roach swatters.

He finished scraping and tried for a rinse. Too late. The faucet sucked air like an out-of-shape boxer punched in the gut. He wiped off lather and whiskers, pulled his shirt back on, and headed for the wardroom.