The Med (15 page)

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.