The Last Ship (81 page)

The day we were to leave the Jesuit and I took a walk.

 *  *  * 

Already the days have begun to shorten, the long darkness approaches. We walked away from the base, the ice beginning to turn hard, crunching not at all under our feet, our destination Observation Hill, about 750 feet high and quite steep, our objective to get in some hard exercise before the approaching long months of confinement in the submarine and also to view the place itself a last time. We cleared the summit and stood a moment before the great wooden cross erected in memory of the English polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his four companions. It commanded McMurdo Sound on one side where they had lived in their hut, still present, visible from here; and the Great Ice Barrier on the other where they had died returning from their conquest of the Pole. We read the inscription from Tennyson’s
Ulysses:
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Rocks of all sizes were everywhere and we sat on one of the larger ones. I checked my watch. It was almost straight up midnight. Far below us, against the pier, stood
Pushkin,
tiny figures moving about, final preparations. She would cast off at exactly 0300.

Earlier there had been a cold wind but now it had died away and we sat in the great Antarctic silence, reluctant to break into it. The sun, low now in the sky, seemed to wish to create some ultimate effect of splendor before it departed for the long winter months, a vivid red enfolding the northern sky, a soft indigo the southern, a delicate pink the great range of the Transantarctica Mountains to the west, gleaming splashes of emerald and sapphire and of diaphanous blues rolling off the endless white peaks and precipices, snowfields and glaciers, in a stunning opalescence, everywhere the snow dazzling with reflected light, and all under a pale blue heaven. We sat in silence trying to comprehend the vastness and magnificence of this strange place, the remotest earth knew, its unutterable beauty. Looking out over it, I thought of the great cleanness and purity of the continent which even man had not been able to desecrate; stood in boundless admiration of it that it had resisted the contamination, valiantly held on to its pure and sacred air. It was like the sea in that. It stood victor: it and the timeless unconquerable sea stretching before us to the north; both noble, both incorruptible. We looked up. A lone skua bird, its great wings outspread, riding an air current, soared high above, then took a pass over us, flew away.

Our eyes following the circumference came upon McMurdo Sound, twilight blue, clear and sparkling in the near distance, leading northward on the course we were about to follow, mottled with the “young ice” that had begun to form, telling us that winter will be very soon, time to leave. As we sat looking at the prospect, still wondrous to us after all these months, other thoughts, memories, with myself and with him as well I knew, seemed to throng in upon us. I said it quietly.

“She was a good ship. Brought us through.”

“Aye, she was that.”

“I never knew a better one. Or a better ship’s company.”

For weeks afterward I had gone over it in my mind, a thousand times, every possibility, rational or irrational, logic or fantasy, having its moment . . . repeatedly attempting to discern what was behind those last words of the OOD, telling me the astonishing thing that Thurlow, commanding, was not immediately available . . . thinking of every conceivable thing that could have happened after that; the remotest connections taking their brutally tormenting turns in my mind, even Thurlow’s Russian-speaking ability, knowing Russian seamen and officers were aboard: I went so far as to attempt to determine if I could discover anything in that. Zero, as with countless other speculations, conjectures, most of them as preposterous as that one, leading nowhere.

As to the physical facts, in one of those self-inquisitions I had kept my mind orderly enough to come up with a sequence of events that bordered on the rational, using that strange word from the point of view of the perpetrators. It went as follows: The intent being to jettison all missiles they—whoever “they” were—had commenced sending off the TLAM-C’s, the conventional Tomahawks, once they had reached a safe place high in the skies detonating them with a signal from the ship. To jettison the nuclear Tomahawks, they had only to leave them nonarmed—the arming being done by the same keys that launched the missiles. This they had succeeded in doing. Then something had happened with only one missile. Quite possibly, because of an inexactitude in the programming by someone not so exquisitely honed in the highly refined skills required by the procedure, inadvertently arming this single Tomahawk. The missile exploding, it had thereupon sent its neutrons back to the nonarmed missile trailing it, exploding the fissionable material in its warhead, this one then doing the exact same thing to the missile behind it; the sequence continuing through all the nonarmed nuclear-warhead missiles that followed. These deductions, initially occurring, seemed to me the first ones of a clear reasoning and in my desperateness for explanation I seized on them, assorted doubts, vicious in character, continuing to stab at me. Too neat—it was all too neat. And yet it carried all logic. As far as the explosion on the ship was concerned, the violence of it almost dictated that it could have been only one thing. The VLS—the missile launcher, the cells containing the missiles—had blown up. One or both of them. Blown up from some kind of malfunction perhaps having to do with operations to which it was not accustomed. Blown up not from explosion of nuclear warheads which had to be armed to do so, but from the many conventional missiles in its magazines—Tomahawks, Standards, Harpoons—all lethal by any but nuclear standards. A malfunction.

These various conjectures helped—but stopped far short of bringing me any kind of peace. The suspicion that hovered over all three of those whose very images kept passing relentlessly through my mind, each having expressed at one time or another that preference, being so obvious as to make one suspicious of the theory itself: that one or all had meant only to jettison, do away with the missiles, that something then had gone monstrously wrong. That only one had decided actually to attempt that goal the more likely theory, that he could have secured the necessary cooperation of the one with the other key . . . the mind fiercely resisted. Myself at first driven to the very edge by the effort to sort out, to untangle what could never be solved, as in some impossible feat of marlinspike seamanship . . . Delaney knowing the location of Girard’s key, Thurlow of mine, Girard also knowing the latter . . . it had taken me a while to remember that, a seemingly distant memory which I realized I was perhaps keeping deliberately shrouded in uncertainty, in imprecision, an intentional failure to remember, lest itself move me across that line, of a conversation in the cave in which having told me the location of her key, she had asked me almost playfully the corresponding information as to mine; the idea having occurred these past weeks that what had seemed at the time so lighthearted and happenstance had in fact been deliberate and purposeful on her part; this idea so freighted with horror that I banished it as a threat to sanity, along with one even more terrible, that the murders of eight sister shipmates had in some inexplicable way pushed her to what she judged to be an act of atonement for what the ship had done long ago . . . such speculations spawning other memories of what had taken place in that cave between us, these rushing in savagely to attack me. I had trembled on the brink of the chasm. And something else. Herself helplessly a part of the enigma, each time it rose in my mind, so did she, many other times as well; and each time myself, crossing unknown frontiers of sorrow, seized with a pain so great I knew I would not survive if I continued to allow it such free access to my soul. Her, the gone ship, the gone shipmates, all of it.

I had decided that it would serve no purpose to tell anyone of my and Girard’s backup arrangement, that Delaney had known the location of one missile-launch key, Thurlow of the other. So much was unknown, the knowledge might harm the memory of the innocent. But then, after all this time, I had determined on one possible exception to this vow of silence: the Jesuit, swearing him to secrecy. I had waited. Now I decided it was best for him to know; but more important, feeling that the act of telling him would somehow make possible what I so desperately desired: not to erase entirely the last shred of remembrance—I could not hope for that, did not even wish it; but to stop the interminable questioning in my soul, as acts of confession are said to do. And so, on this hillside in Antarctica I related the circumstances, most specifically as to who had had access to the keys, while he listened in a silence deep as that of the great white spaces that surrounded us.

“An accident,” I said, ending the account, surprised at the something like harshness in my voice. “It had to have been an accident.”

I felt I could live with that; not at all sure I could with anything else; suddenly aware that he, the most percipient of men, knew this to the finest degree of sensibility.

“I prefer to think it was an accident,” I said more quietly.

“I understand, sir.” He waited a moment. “The damned things were never safe.”

Somehow—who can ever explain the simplicities of these mysteries?—it was as if some intolerable burden were lifted from me; that I turned away from it; indeed that we both did. Faced a new direction. As if to say so, that the matter was closed, that the past was gone as all pasts must and we need concern ourselves only with the future, he spoke of another thing, even his voice wonderfully changed, in it an altogether bright if quiet tone.

“It looks as if we made it, Captain,” he said. “The babies.”

Some of that extra space in
Pushkin
will be a nursery. Three of the women are now pregnant. Ensign Martin, Signalman Bixby, Seaman Thornberg. The doc reporting that they are coming along fine. Their children will be Russian-American, American-Russian: Take your choice. Selmon was right about that, too, as he was right about so much: The next fathers of mankind are to be submariners.

He would never say it so I did, not excessively irreverently or sacrilegiously, I felt; perhaps a certain wryness in my voice.

“You mean God is going to give us a second chance?”

He allowed himself a soft smile. “Remember you said that, Captain. Personally, I never presume to go around quoting Him. But it does look that way, doesn’t it?”

Suddenly the profound Antarctic stillness was shattered by the three loud blasts of
Pushkin
’s foghorn: striking haunting and lonely over the great solitude of the world around us, seeming to roll and echo off the nearby whitened peaks. It was the two-hour signal before getting underway that had been arranged; summoning sailors to the sea.

“Time to climb down,” I said, rising. “We don’t want to be left behind.”

“Great Christ no, sir,” he said, quite vigorously, standing up alongside me. “It’s going to be much too interesting a voyage to be left behind. Just imagine. To find out what’s out there . . .”

His voice trailed away. We started down the hill and made our way toward
Pushkin,
her two ensigns fluttering in the cold wind that had begun to come off the ice cap, the ship ready to cast off on her voyage to rediscover the world . . . But that is another book.