Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“You’ll come tomorrow?” he asked. “Please?” He was like a child again.

“Yes, I’ll come back tomorrow.” Before she left, she asked him about his mother — about how it was possible that—

“Mum never asks where money comes from,” Wilkins cut in. “She thinks I hate him anyway.”

“Do you?”

He was reaching toward the mobile tray across the bed for the paper cup of water. Rosemary passed it to him.

“He’s not my dad,” he said. “Not really.”

Rosemary looked back at him, her hand on the door. “Are you sure of what you’ve told me? That it’s not simply your dislike of your—”

“He’s not my father. I can show them the money. Everything. But you’ll have to hurry, miss. He could be home by morning.” Rosemary felt her stomach tightening again.” All right. I’ll — I’ll attend to it. Immediately. I promise. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Miss?”

“Yes?”

His eyes met hers in a look that was unmistakably sexual. She was shocked. And flattered.

By the time Rosemary rejoined Georgina, her father, and the headmaster, it was still raining, the wind continuing its mournful wail in the sodden oaks that surrounded the school. With the blackout curtains drawn, the school’s lights seemed strangely dimmer and more depressing than usual. Graciously brushing the headmaster’s apology aside, Rosemary told him she was glad he had called.

Their feet crunching on the wet gravel as they walked toward the Wolsley, she apologized to Georgina and her father for her “thoroughly foul mood.”

“All right, Rose,” said Richard. “We’re all under stress these days, I’m afraid.”

“Yes,” said Rosemary. “We are.”

Georgina said she didn’t want to intrude, but did Rosemary think the Wilkins boy would try it again?

“I don’t think so,” said Rosemary. “It was—” She turned around in the darkness, the dim reflections of the slit headlights not enough to illuminate their faces, for which Rosemary was glad. It made her confession easier. “You were right, Georgina. I think he does have what I suppose you would call a ‘crush’ on me, though I blush to admit it.”

“What?” asked Richard Spence. “At his age?”

“He’s almost seventeen, Daddy,” said Rosemary.

Richard mumbled his disapproval, but Rosemary barely heard him. She had far more to worry about than dealing with a schoolboy’s infatuation.

In the backseat, so dark that the lights of the Audi’s dash seemed far-off pinpricks of light, Georgina tried to imagine what had transpired in the boy’s room. Slipping her shoes off, crossing one foot over the other, and stretching so that her stocking feet were pressing hard on the padded foot bar, she laid her head back on the soft imitation learner, reveling in its smell. Depressing the door lock, her left hand gripping the strap, she slipped her right hand beneath her black pleated skirt and, with the steady hum of the windshield wipers’ rhythm in the background, closed her eyes in the darkness. Dreamily she heard Rosemary asking their father how late the Oxshott police station stayed open at night.

Robert Brentwood knew something the navy never mentioned to the public, not even to the enlisted submariners: that the incidence of men going insane because of depth charge attack was the highest of any group in the armed services. The crack-up following depth charge attacks was not always a sudden madness, a single snapping of nerve, but more a gradual unraveling, like a tight ball of gut slowly but irrevocably undone, strung out, until its ability to spring back was permanently impaired. It made him grateful for, though puzzled by, the number of depth charges that the Roosevelt’s sensors had picked up splashing off the cruiser but which had failed to explode. Had the Russians’ military passion for quantity overwhelming quality meant that much of their ordnance was highly unreliable? If so, Brentwood knew he should get the information to Washington as soon as possible.

But the Roosevelt could not send a message if it was sunk. He would have to get to Holy Loch. Or had there simply been a miscalculation in the setting of the fuses — which would testify to the efficacy of Roosevelt’s silent running confusing the cruiser’s sonar?

Although he was no longer in the navy, or even on the reserve list, Adm. John Brentwood, retired, felt that his job as one of the managing directors of the New York Port Authority inextricably linked him with two of his three sons and his daughter. The connection with his son Robert on the Roosevelt was obvious to anyone familiar with the U.S. Navy’s “rollover” policy. This “sea lift” of men and materiel to reinforce Western Europe depended heavily on both the day-to-day administration of the U.S. home ports as well as on the protection afforded the convoys by submarines like the Roosevelt.

It was not a glamorous job at the Port Authority — not much media coverage. It was visual, all right, with the scores of ships passing through, but once you’d shot that, the real bureaucratic work of the Port Authority disappeared into overcrowded offices and banks of computers spewing out availability of loading cranes, tonnage, union liaison status boards, availability of docks, tide changes, and the other thousands of seagoing craft that had to be kept clear of the convoy-marshaling areas, where everything from condoms and microchips to yeast, sugar, and howitzer shells had to be crated, stored, counted, loaded, and transported as fast and efficiently as possible — while at the same time taking care to vary the departure times and convoy routes as much as possible to confuse any enemy sub packs lying in wait in the deep Atlantic trenches off the eastern seaboard.

It wasn’t glamorous work for John Brentwood and his staff, their responsibilities disproportionate to the pay and the virtual lack of recognition. Yet for every dozen ships they managed to load and send off without a hitch, one mistake could make the news, and if the navy censor cut the story it would quickly get around the docks anyway, making the Port Authority a butt of more jokes about bureaucratic inefficiency.

One ship, the MV Nagata, a fifty-thousand-ton “Combo” or multipurpose oil/bulk cargo/container vessel, its bridge and stack in a stern housing and co-owned by a Japanese-U.S. conglomerate, was a case in point. The ship left New York harbor as part of Convoy 24 on the night of October 2, bound for Antwerp. Thirty-two hours and 461 miles later, the Nagata was off New England. While maintaining radio transmission silence, she received word from ACLANT— Allied Command Atlantic — that Russian and East German divisions, thrusting west from Hanover and wheeling on Osnabruck, had driven a wedge between the westernmost perimeter of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket and the ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Antwerp. While the ports had not yet surrendered, it was believed this would only be a matter of time, so that now the convoys would have to head to Ostend seventy miles farmer west on the Belgian coast, to Dunkirk twenty-seven miles farther south, just over the Belgian-French border, or to Calais, another thirty-odd miles southwest of Dunkirk.

By this time, the MV Nagata was no longer over the relatively shallow Georges Bank but had passed over the divide between the continental shelf and the continental slope, and was now over the continental rise. In two hours she had passed from water no more than five hundred feet deep to the nine-thousand-foot depths of Heezen Canyon. While their sudden passage from shallow to deep water beneath them was unknown to most of the crew, on the bridge the watch knew, their silence palpable as they waited anxiously to reach the more powerful current of the Gulf Stream. This would aid the thirty-ship convoy as it passed over the undersea mountains that lay before the Sohm Abyssal Plain, where the greatest danger was a submarine that could be lying undetected for weeks, even since before the war started, sonar pulses from any convoy escort vessel looking for subs scattered by the natural obstruction of the undersea mountains.