Ian Slater: Rage of Battle

“Your mother and I have never made any distinction—”

“The word’s love, Daddy. Or was that just for William?”

“You astound me.”

“Really?”

“What, pray, is that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve always known it, of course,” she said bitterly, putting the cup down hard.

“Known what?”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Father,” she said, vigorously folding and refolding her napkin on the table. “Rosey’s always had your heart.”

“Do you think—”

“I know,” cut in Georgina. “Ever since we were children. I’m not being churlish about it. It’s merely an observation anyone could—”

“I’ve always cared for you. Your mother and—”

“If,” said Georgina slowly, a tension clearly crackling in her voice, “you say cared once more, I’ll scream!”

The phone was ringing, and as Richard Spence got up to answer it, Georgina avoided his distracted gaze, her eyes brimming with tears. She heard her father only vaguely, yet despite her hurt, could tell that something was terribly wrong.

“I’ll tell her,” she could hear him say. “Yes. Yes. Thank you for calling.” He put down the receiver slowly and, turning, called for Rosemary.

“She’s gone out,” said Georgina, holding her teacup in both hands, elbows on the table, something Richard Spence could not abide.

“Where?” he asked her.

“I’ve no idea,” said Georgina.

Richard Spence went to the hall and opened the closet, taking out his mackintosh and gum boots. “If your mother asks, tell her I’ve gone looking for her.”

“What’s wrong?”

Her father scooped the keys from the hall stand, put on his deerstalker, and was gone.

Aboard the Roosevelt, submariner Evans had been silenced. Forever. Yet even in death he seemed to be screaming, his face an agony frozen in time, the cheek beneath his left eye swollen so that the eye was little more than a slit, the left side of his face appearing longer than his right, his mouth agape, right eye open and staring. His whole expression was one of terror, paralyzed before the second of impact. The bosun who had aided Robert Brentwood in giving the seaman the shot of Valium to quieten him down was trying to make sure the hospital corpsman had given him the correct dosage. Maybe the corpsman, unwell himself at the time, had somehow given him a larger dose than he meant to give him. But the corpsman shook his head, his tone adamant.

“No way, José. I didn’t give you an overdose. Don’t pin it on me. Here—” He turned away, trying to abort a sneeze-unsuccessfully. He took down the sick bay clipboard, tapping the day’s entry with his Vicks inhaler. “There it is, Chief. Twenty milligrams. You signed for it.”

“Then what the hell—” began the bosun, the corpsman using the inhaler to dismiss the bosun’s question.

“Who knows? Could’ve had a stroke. Heart attack. Combination of factors.”

“Skipper thinks he killed him.”

Despite his fever, the corpsman, though looking across at the bosun with rheumy eyes, still managed an air of a professional clinician. “Natural psychological reaction. Skipper’s not used to doing it.”

“Yeah, well, anybody kick off after you’ve given them a shot?”

“No.” The corpsman stared at him, then shifted his gaze to Evans, pulling back the sheet by the government-issue tag. “By the look of him — I’d say he died of fright. Pink elephants. Sure as hell didn’t die of a cold.”

“What the hell you mean?”

“Delirium tremens. Like I told you before. That’s where pink elephants come from.”

“Stop jerking me around.”

“Listen,” said the corpsman, sticking the Vicks inhaler into his nostril, one finger flattening the other nostril as he took a deep breath, “I’m telling you, Chief. Alcoholics who’re forced dry see more than pink elephants.”

The bosun remembered Evans screaming about snakes. Maybe the corpsman was right. “But I thought the Valium was supposed to calm him. Take the edge off?”

“Not enough,” said the corpsman. “Once you’ve flipped out, normal dose doesn’t do much for you. I could’ve told the old man that.”

“Why the hell didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t asked.”

“Shit, you weren’t there. Back here sittin’ on your ass.”

“Listen, man, I was pushing a one oh five.”

“What?”

“Temperature. Fever — or hadn’t you noticed?” With that, the corpsman took a thermometer from its sheath, glanced at it, shook the mercury column down before slipping it under his tongue. “ ‘Sides, I thought it best to keep away from everyone. It’s one mother of a virus.”

The corpsman, thermometer sticking out like a small cigarette from his mouth, looked down at his watch.

“Then,” said the bosun, pulling the sheet back over Evans’s face before they took him to a forward food freezer, “what the hell did kill Evans?”

The bosun has his thumb on the intercom button and asked someone to come up and help him with the corpse. Looking at Evans, still puzzled, he told the hospital corpsman, “You know, they say that flu in 1918 killed more guys than the war did.” He thought the hospital corpsman was going to bite the thermometer clean in half.

The bosun had merely meant it to take a little wind out of the corpsman’s sails, but later, when he entered the Roosevelt’s redded-out control room, which smelled like an auto showroom, unlike the disinfected sick bay, he saw the officer of the deck, First Mate Peter Zeldman, standing forward of Brentwood, directly behind the planesman’s console, and asked him if any of the crew on watch had gone off sick, reported a fever. But he didn’t get his answer, the sonar operator cutting in, “We have an unclassified surface vessel-five thousand yards. Closing.”

“Signature check?” Zeldman asked Sonar, conscious of Brentwood moving over from the periscope island, watching the “shattered ring” pulse on the pale green screen.

“No known signature,” replied Sonar, moving his head closer to the console, working the constant compromise between volume and tone needed to discriminate one noise from another in what nearly everyone but a sailor assumed to be a quiet domain. In reality the sea was a never-ending “frying pan” of energy, a night jungle of noise, countless billions of shrimp, microscopic organisms, clicking and sizzling amid the eerie haunting trumpets of the giant mammals in constant search for food.

“Could it be using baffles?” put in Brentwood.

“Signature pattern congruent with full hull, sir.” He meant that there was no sign of the kind of blistering effect on the outer ring of the echo pulse that might indicate symmetrical baffles.

“Put it on the PA,” Zeldman ordered Sonar. “Squelch button.” The next second all the crewmen in the control room could hear the muted engine sounds of the unknown surface vessel. Zeldman was ambivalent about the procedure. Sometimes he thought it only made everyone more edgy, but he’d been told by Brentwood how putting incoming noise on the PA, provided it wasn’t loud enough to send out its own pulse reverberating through the hull, could sometimes help the sonar operator. Those enlisted men who had been sailors in civilian life could not only help identify the vessel type but sometimes even luck out on its probable nationality. This could save a captain or his executive officer from ordering a preemptive launch of a torpedo or Tomahawk cruise missile, which, while it would almost certainly take out the oncoming vessel, would also end the submarine’s greatest weapon, its silence, revealing its exact location.