Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“Un-fucking likely,” said the mate. “Anyway, keep it to yourself. You’ll frighten young Sonar here.”

Sonar was keeping right out of it, giving all his attention to the skipper’s diagram, knowing he’d have to test it when Can-Do was finished — if he was finished in time.

As it turned out, the Virginian was wrong — there wasn’t a fissure in the reactor, the officer was upset because he’d just heard Evans was about to be deep-sixed. The RO was a “mustang,” a man who’d come up through the ranks, and he identified more than most officers with the enlisted men. He was also a practicing Mormon, and though he hadn’t known Evans personally, he offered to help the burial party.

“Shroud has to be weighted heavily at this depth,” Brentwood told him. “Don’t want anything floating topside giving us away. Those Russians probably got a new noise signature from us after those depth charges. No good helping them to pinpoint our—”

“I’ll look after it, sir,” said the RO.

“Very well.”

The officer thought Brentwood could have shown a little more sensitivity about Evans rather than simply treating the corpse as a nuisance to get rid of. It didn’t jibe with what he’d heard about the skipper, who, among Roosevelt’s crew, was affectionately known as “Bing.” Something to do with Bing Crosby was it? — maybe the skipper sang in the shower or something. But apparently the nickname had nothing to do with his love of old-fashioned music, “Bing” deriving more from his old-fashioned nature. Rumor had it that, knowledgeable as he was about the world of the submarine, he was, despite his engagement to some Englishwoman, extraordinarily naive when it came to the opposite sex. Mr. Clean had never discovered precisely why the crew was convinced of this, other than it had something to do with what the English called a “trollop,” a woman of easy virtue, approaching him at some party in Scotland, and Brentwood, ever so polite, trying to gracefully decline her advances, whereupon the woman started screaming at him, calling him a straitlaced “old bastard”—a “Bing Crosby.” Had the revered crooner from the 1940s held rigid views about premarital sex? Anyway, the RO didn’t care whether the skipper was considered unpracticed in matters of sex. Maybe, in a world of AIDS, he was merely being careful. All the RO wanted to know was how good a sub captain the forty-three-year-old skipper was. Maybe his apparent lack of sensitivity as far as Evans was concerned might in fact be his preoccupation with the array of hard choices that confronted him if Roosevelt was to have any hope of survival. He saw the hospital corpsman walking down the passageway with what looked like two plastic garbage bags except for the glistening of the zippers on the body bags. Two of the men wounded in the depth charge attack had died.

Aboard the Yumashev, Captain Stasky was breaking radio silence. He knew that, slowed down as he was and with his general position probably known because of the explosions of the few depth charges that had worked, there wasn’t much chance of the enemy not knowing where he was. But even if this were not so, Stasky knew it was his duty, regardless of his own safety and that of his crew, to inform Northern Fleet headquarters immediately that more than half the depth charges he’d dropped had been duds.

It was not merely for the sake of the safety of the other ships in the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Pacific Fleets, however, that Stasky ordered the coded message be sent without delay — but because of his own status as commander of a cruiser bearing the coveted white-backed red star with four black circles, the highest antisubmarine warfare efficiency rating awarded by the fleet commander. His own career was at stake.

Aboard the USS Roosevelt, six men crammed in around the torpedoes, their caps off as Robert Brentwood began the service, the men’s faces showing the strain of the Yumashev’s depth attack on them, lines of tension etched deeply in their faces in the red battle light, several of the men gripping their blue baseball-style caps. Only the reactor room officer appeared calm, a serenity about him that Brentwood found more disconcerting man helpful, especially when, as captain, he was trying to present the coolest demeanor he could while reciting the age-old prayer for those killed at sea. At such moments, Brentwood, though he was the one speaking, often felt outside himself, more an observer, he thought, than a participant in the proceedings.

As he closed the prayer book, Brentwood nodded to the torpedoman’s mate. The mate palmed the clearing control for tubes seven and eight. There was a dull thud, a gush of water like a toilet flushing, then a hiss of compressed air as the shrouds were shot out, the mate immediately venting the tubes, readying them to receive Mark-48 torpedoes. There were tears in Brentwood’s eyes. He turned away and cleared his throat, then turned to the small clump of men before he left for the eighty-two-yard walk back to control. “Thank you for being here.”

There was an awkward murmured response, one of the men, a yeoman, watching intently as Brentwood stepped over the sill of the watertight door, past the reactor room, heading into “Sherwood Forest,” where the six Trident C missiles stood, their silos dwarfing their human controllers.

“Thanks for being here?” said the yeoman. “Where the hell else would we be? On Coney Island?” He glanced across at a young quartermaster to get his reaction. The quartermaster gave a noncommittal shrug. He was enjoying the show.

“He meant thanks for coming, you asshole,” chimed in an off-duty planesman.

“I fucking know that,” said the yeoman.

“Then what are you bitching about?”

The yeoman didn’t know specifically, only that Brentwood’s tears disturbed him. Perhaps Brentwood reminded him too much of his old man, a typewriter salesman, who’d always cut an imposing figure most of the time. A no-nonsense, strong type — a heap of quiet self-confidence— before computers. Too old to change, and sometimes he’d start thanking you for doing the simplest thing when it was your job. Got all weepy and scared the hell out of you — whole world seemed it would come apart and just swallow you up. It meant he was against the ropes about something — couldn’t handle it himself anymore.

“Little things are important,” the yeoman answered the planesman obliquely. With his old man, it hadn’t been anything spectacular at first — nothing you’d really notice. Just a few drinks to begin with. Then a few pills to “calm my nerves.” Then he couldn’t get up mornings. Pretty soon he was incapable of making any important decision. “See your mom” became the cry. The yeoman told the planesman the scuttlebutt from the hospital corpsman was that Captain “Bing” had been white as a toilet, hand shaking, as he’d given Evans the shot. What the yeoman didn’t tell the planesman was that his rather had been scared shitless of needles too. And so was he. That’s what was wrong — pretty soon his old man had started freaking him out too. The planesman dismissed the scuttlebutt. “Aw, shit — corpsmen always like to make things bigger than they are. Makes ‘em feel important. Hell, I know plenty of guys who don’t like getting shots. Go weak at the knees. So what? What do you want? Joe Montana?”

“Fucking right,” said the yeoman.

“Then, buddy,” put in a torpedoman, “you’re on the wrong friggin’ boat.”

“That’s what I’m thinkin’.”

“Well — what are you planning to do about it?” the planesman said. “Swim?”

“Nothing you can do, is there?” replied the yeoman.