Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“For Christ’s sake, you’re making a big thing out of squat all.”

“Listen, man. It’s the little things that count. Right? Isn’t that how they weed everyone out at the school? Guy panics for a second in the dive tank and he’s out.”

“Balls!” said the torpedoman. “Don’t know anyone who liked being in the tank.”

“Yeah — but you didn’t show it, right?” pressed the yeoman.

“Hey,” said the torpedoman. “I’d rather the guy running this boat show a little compassion than have some hard-ass Quigg.”

“Who’s Quigg?” asked the yeoman.

The torpedoman looked across at the planesman disbelievingly. “He doesn’t know who Quigg was.”

“So?” said the yeoman. “You gonna tell me?”

“You don’t have to worry,” cut in the planesman. “Bing’ll get us out of this. He’ll get us home.”

“Yeah,” added the torpedoman. “We’ll be in Faslane before you know it.” Faslane was the village for Holy Loch.

“At five knots,” said the yeoman, “it’ll take a fucking year.”

“Not to worry, yeo, we’ve got enough food to—”

“Fuck! You told us that before. We’re crawlin’ along like some fucking turtle and you’re worried about goddamned chow. You can’t eat yourself out of a HUK pack. Their goddamned Alfas are faster than we are.”

The planesman slapped on his submariner’s cap and, without another word, left the torpedo room, making his way forward, the torpedoman following.

“Time he had furlough,” said the planesman, half-jokingly. “He’s more goddamned worried than the old man.”

“Not surprised,” said a voice behind them. The planesman saw it was a two-striper, the young quartermaster, who’d been draped against the torpedo, his neat dark beard matching the dark, short-sleeved uniform that distinguished him from the rest of the Roosevelt’s crew. He’d been so quiet, they’d almost forgotten he was there.

“What do you mean?” the torpedoman asked.

“He had a girl in Glasgow,” explained the quartermaster. “Killed in one of the rocket attacks.”

“Better keep an eye on him then,” said the planesman.

“Who?” said the quartermaster. “Me?”

“You seem to know all about him.”

“Hell, I hardly know him.”

It was one of the problems on the big pigboats — on any large vessel. Even though the seventy-day assignments meant they were together on the sub for forty days straight, with twenty-five days tied up alongside Holy Loch, some of the ship’s company, working eight hours on, twelve off, never met. Often all there was to know about a man apart from his technical qualification was whatever the scuttlebutt happened to pass on, and that was notoriously unreliable. “Hell,” said the quartermaster, “I don’t even know myself.” The other two laughed. They thought it was a joke.

“Come on,” said the torpedoman. “I’ve got to report to the chief up in the machine room. Bing’s got him working on some special rig.”

“What kind of rig?” inquired the planesman.

“I don’t know. All I do know is the old man wants it ready before the next TACAMO rendezvous.”

“There’ll be no rendezvous,” said the planesman. “Any of our E-6As come this way, the Russians’ll blow ‘em out of the sky.”

“I think maybe the old man knows that,” said the quartermaster.

“Then how we going to confirm our position?” argued the planesman. “Either way, we’ll have to go up with an aerial.”

“If the TACAMO comes, we can use the floater,” proffered the quartermaster. He meant the floating low-frequency wire.

“Still have to go up a ways,” said the planesman. “Takes too friggin’ long for data transmission. Russkies’ll be waiting for that. We need a burst message — a lot of data — quickly. Tell us where the fuck we are and what’s going on up there. For my money, that means sticking our UHF out of the water.”

“That’s no friggin’ good,” said the torpedoman. “They could spot that on SATCON. Our warm wave’d be too close to the surface anyway. They’d pick us up on the satellite’s infrared.”

“Satellite can’t cover the whole ocean,” said the quartermaster.

“They don’t have to with us doin’ three and a half knots,” put in the planesman.

“Shit!” said the quartermaster. “I thought that yeo was a rain face.”

“Ah—” said the torpedoman, “what the hell? We’re probably worrying about nothin’—right?”

No one answered.

Walking into his cabin, Robert Brentwood drew the green curtains shut, tossed his cap onto its hook, and stood for a minute studying the map of the North Atlantic taped to the bulkhead above the safe. Three things worried him. First, the navigation computer was malfunctioning as a result of the last depth charge, so that unless he had a clear sky for a star fix, it was imperative the TACAMO aircraft make its rendezvous to give them their exact position. Even as the sub rose via slow and quiet release of ballast, feeling its way toward the surface to wait for the TACAMO, it was already drifting off position. Second, once Roosevelt began to move under power of the “switchblade” prop now sheathed in the forward ballast tank, the resistance caused by the towed array, normally of no consequence when the sub was at full speed, would decrease its five knots to three. He was bothered, too, by a seemingly unimportant incident — the fact that the hospital corpsman had interrupted him about Evans when he was giving his instructions about the MOSS to the electronics mate and sonar operator. It wasn’t the corpsman’s cutting into the conversation that bothered Robert Brentwood, but the anxiety behind it. That could spread faster than the flu that had killed Evans. Or had it? And could the orders he had given the mate and Sonar be carried out before the scheduled TACAMO rendezvous?

He depressed the intercom button for “Control” and told Zeldman to wake him two hours before the ETA of the TACAMO aircraft.

“Will do,” came Zeldman’s breezy reply. Before he lay down on the bunk, Brentwood took off his rubber sneakers, the reason for them — no noise shorts — bringing back Evans’s terrified face. He tried to think of something else, but it wasn’t easy. Civilians, he mused, always thought you got used to seeing death. Maybe you did on the battlefield. Maybe his youngest David, who had fought in Korea shortly after the beginning of the war, was used to it. And Ray — well, no one could hope to know what Ray thought anymore. The photos of David and Ray were on his desk in the antiroll gimbals mounting, as were those of his mom and dad and Lana. Lana was really the loner in the family, but he felt closer to her than any of them. Maybe it was because she was the second oldest of the four. What had happened to her since the spate she’d gotten into in Halifax? What had happened to all of them? It would be months before he would know — if he ever did — his ship crippled somewhere west of the mid-Atlantic ridge, and Soviet Hunter/Killers breaking out through the Greenland-Iceland-Norway Gap. If he was a betting man, he thought he would sit this one out. But fate had thrown the dice and he had no choice.

He lay back and pulled out Rosemary’s picture from his shirt pocket. He had had it laminated with plastic in London. It was crazy, he knew, but if he went down forever — if he was to die in the Roosevelt— the thought of her photo eaten away by the salt, devoured by some shark or other blood-crazed denizen, bothered him. If anyone else saw it, they would just assume he’d laminated it for normal wear and tear. True, too. He kissed her, popped the photo in his pocket, and reached up for his Walkman earphones. They were cold and he held them in his hands to warm them. A dank, sour smell assailed his nostrils. He sat up, peeled off a sock, and sniffed—”Holy”—took the other one off, and, balling them, prepared to pop them in the laundry hamper at the foot of the bunk. The first one was a perfect basket. The next shot was to be the winning goal in sudden death overtime. Seattle and the Celtics, eighty-four apiece. It missed. An omen?