Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

In the meantime he decided to take her up halfway toward VLF depth, where any thermal patching would not be as recognizable via satellite and could be interpreted as local upwelling from one of the millions of oceanic springs venting from the sea floor.

In the quiet, redded-out control room the bulkhead was now beaded in flamingo-colored droplets of condensation.

He called for the chief electrician’s mate in charge of the stern torpedo room and also for the next shift’s sonar operator.

“Chief, I want you to get a MOSS. Here—” Brentwood showed him the drawing of the mobile submarine simulator. “Here, I’ve drawn a sketch of what I want you—”

“Sir!”

It was the hospital corpsman, looking worried. “We’re going to have to deal with Evans…”

For a second Brentwood thought Evans must be alive after all — awakening from a deep coma that they’d mistaken for death. Lord knows it had happened before. In the old days, navy regulations held that before placing a body in a canvas shroud, a stitch of catgut had to be made, passing the needle through the skin fold between the nose and lips — one of the most sensitive areas — to make sure the man was really dead. Dealing with Evans’s corpse was the last thing Brentwood wanted to think about, but he knew the corpsman was correct. Modern-day regulations made it mandatory that a body which may be harboring infectious disease must be frozen as soon as possible and while “in this condition must be dispatched” no matter what the state of sea.

“Very well,” Brentwood answered. “Ten minutes. Flag party astern.” But he wanted no part of it. All he knew for certain was that Evans had died shortly after he’d given him the shot of diazepam. Worst of all, quietening him had done no good — the Russian ship having zeroed in on the Roosevelt anyway. Evans’s death had achieved nothing but cast a pall of pessimism about the boat. Roosevelt was the world’s most modern vessel, but a death aboard was as bad an omen to its crew as it had been for the sailors of Vasco de Gama and Columbus. For many aboard the sub who did not have the religious faith of their seagoing forebears, it was worse. Not a warning but a prophecy.

For Brentwood, Evans’s death wasn’t the first he’d witnessed at sea, but it was the first in his command, the first he was directly responsible for. During the Russians’ attack, he’d forgotten about it, but now it returned with the corpsman and he felt it start to gnaw at him like an old childhood shame — a terrible thing said to one’s parents, an act of deliberate cruelty to a family pet — like something one conceals for years now rising up from a hidden deep. It was not Evans’s death alone that began eating away at Robert Brentwood but the sudden and totally unexpected loss of control he’d seen in the man — the putrid stench of the seaman’s body the unmistakable sign of a body having lost all self-control. Brentwood was determined he would put it out of his mind, but as with so many things hidden under great pressure, the childhood fear of losing control wormed its way back to consciousness. Brentwood kept talking about the MOSS. To dwell on death, his father had told him, was a surefire way to self-pity, and then you didn’t belong on a sub, you belonged on a couch. Couches, said the admiral, were places for people to escape from facing things head-on — the way some men went to sea to get away from their wives.

For a second Robert Brentwood thought of his brother Ray, captain of a guided missile frigate, who had been horribly burned after a swarm of North Korean missile boats had attacked his ship, the USS Blaine, off South Korea. Ray, it was said by some, had lost control, giving the order to abandon ship when it was still salvageable. Others said he hadn’t given any such order — that one of the ship’s mates had mistaken a hand signal from Ray in the inferno that engulfed the Blaine’s bridge movements after impact. Whatever had happened, Ray no longer had a command. And only now, three months and eight operations later, did the tightly polished skin, grafted from thigh and buttocks, even begin to make his face look anywhere near human.

As the chief electrician’s mate and the next watch’s sonar operator turned and walked away with his sketch, Robert Brentwood got tough with himself. He didn’t agree with his father about a lot of things, including his view of psychiatrists, but he knew his father was right about the captain of a ship. He, Robert Jackson Brentwood, was supposed to be one of the navy’s best and brightest, commander of the most powerful warship in history and his country’s last line of defense. If he couldn’t handle it, he should hand it over to Zeldman right now. It was time to bury Evans.

“Excuse me,” he said briskly as he passed the electrician’s mate and the sonar operator, who were also headed for the stern section with the sketch of the MOSS. Without turning to them, Brentwood ordered, “Don’t wait until we finish with Evans. Get started on that right away.”

“Be a bit crowded, sir.”

“I know, but it can’t be helped. They’re still mopping up the forward torpedo room. I want it done in ten hours, well before the next scheduled TACAMO station.”

The mate frowned, the red glow accentuating his baldness as his hand swept from eyebrows to the back of his head. “Sir, I don’t know if we — I mean, we’ll have to use a torch and-”

“Ten hours!” said Brentwood.

Sonar turned to the mate. “He’s a hard bastard. Doesn’t give a shit about Evans.”

“Yeah, well,” said the chief. “Nothing we can do for Evans now, is there?”

“The skipper needn’t have given him that shot.”

“Old man’s call, Sonar.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Come on,” said the chief. “Can’t do the fucker by ourselves.” For a moment Sonar thought the chief meant Evans. When they got to the machine shop and showed him the sketch, the machinist shook his head, pointing at the skipper’s arrowed instructions with an oil rag. “No way, Chiefie. Not in ten hours.”

“Why?” asked the chief, surprising Sonar.

“That shank,” said the machinist, “is titanium-reinforced. Isn’t a fucking wiener.”

“What’s the matter? I thought you were Mr. fucking ‘Can-Do,’ “ said the mate.

“Can-Do,” a big, gangly man from West Virginia, fixed Sonar in his stare. “What do you think?”

Sonar made a face bordering on neutrality. One of the ROs came over, asking where the captain was.

“Aft torpedo room, I guess,” answered the Virginian.

The RO, who came from Utah and had only been aboard for one other patrol, was already known as “Mr. Clean” because of his pink baby-face complexion, despite him being in his early forties. He didn’t like Can-Do’s tone and bawled out the Virginian for wearing “booties,” the yellow rubber shoe covers worn by men as they entered the reactor room so as to prevent transporting any radioactive dust throughout the sub. “Take those back to the reactor room,” said the RO.

“Sorry, sir, I forgot,” said Can-Do, giving the RO an “up yours” sign as the officer walked out into the ruby sheen of the passageway.

“Crack in the coffeepot,” said Can-Do, reaching down for the yellow booties. “That’s why he’s so goddamned testy.”

“Bullshit!” said the electrician’s mate. “If the reactor had a fissure in it, we’d have a bright patch on our chest.” Sonar craned his neck, looking down for any color change in his dosimeter.

“I don’t mean the outer casing,” continued Can-Do. “The inner wall.”

“Christ — it’s the strongest thing on the boat,” said the mate.

“You telling me it’s impossible?” asked Can-Do.