Ian Slater: Rage of Battle

From the redded-out control room beneath the USS Roosevelt’s sail, Capt. Robert Brentwood reached the forward torpedo room in under ten seconds. Stepping into the compartment, he saw Evans, previously one of the quietest and best-behaved seamen aboard the sub, backed into a corner near the number one torpedo tube, slashing the air with a long, thin screwdriver, screaming, “Fucking snakes! Get ‘em away — get ‘em away!”

The bosun and another crewman, an electrician first-class, were moving in on Evans, the bosun trying to shush him. “For Christ’s sake! They’ll hear you in Moscow!”

“Where’s the hospital corpsman?” Robert Brentwood asked quietly.

“In sick bay,” the bosun told him. “Down with the flu. What I reckon, Evans has probably—”

Brentwood knew there was only one thing to do but felt queasy even as he gave the order. “Get a syringe here fast. Valium — twenty milligrams.”

“Yes, sir,” the bosun answered, and was gone.

The electrician was so alarmed by Evans’s fit and screaming that he didn’t notice the fine beads of sweat breaking out on Brentwood’s forehead as he’d given the order for the hypodermic. It was a secret fear, one shared only by Robert Brentwood’s two younger brothers and sister, Lana, a navy nurse. He hadn’t even told Rosemary Spence, his fiancée back in England. For the quietly competent graduate of Annapolis, top of his class and commander of the most awesome weapons launcher in history, a confession to Rosemary or to his crew that the very thought of a hypodermic made him weak at the knees would have been nothing less than an abject humiliation. Whenever he had to have a blood test, he’d always looked away, out the window, at a painting, a piece of fly dirt on the wall — anything to avoid the sight of the cold steel puncturing taut skin, sliding into the vein. But now, with the hospital corpsman out of it with the virulent influenza that had been rampant in the United Kingdom and which Brentwood believed might have temporarily unhinged Evans, it would be up to him as captain to remember his officer training in subcutaneous and intramuscular injections, to push the needle into the wild-eyed sailor who was still yelling, the long, thin screwdriver keeping Brentwood and the electrician at bay. The problem would be to talk Evans down, to get him calm or preoccupied enough to give him the shot.

“What’s all the racket?” the corpsman asked the bosun groggily, his eyes all but closed in the grip of fever.

“Evans!” explained the bosun. “Off his fucking head. Wake up the dead, let alone the Russians. Where’s the Valium?”

“Diazepam,” the corpsman corrected him, full of self-importance despite his malaise. “How much did you say?”

“Ah — twenty ccs.”

“Who you want to kill?” drawled the corpsman, shuffling toward the locked drug cabinet. “Evans or the whole fucking crew?”

“What?”

“Twenty milligrams, you mean. Not ccs.”

“Give me the fucking vial — and a syringe.”

When the bosun reentered the torpedo room, there was a strong chemical smell. Everything in the “rigged for red” glow seemed pink. Evans was on the deck — the foam from a carbon dioxide extinguisher Brentwood had used so they could get near him stained with blood from a bad gash on the left side of Evans’s head. The bosun almost slipped, the deck slicked with foam. “What the—” he began.

“Quickly!” ordered Brentwood. “Give me the syringe.” He wished to God his sister, Lana, were here. Slippery from the foam, Evans’s arm kept eluding Brentwood’s grip. “Goddamn it!” It was the first time the bosun had heard the skipper use any kind of profanity since he’d taken command of the Roosevelt two years before. Brentwood lowered Evans’s arm and stepped over him to his right side.

“Pull down his pants,” Brentwood ordered. Gritting his teeth, Brentwood plunged the hypodermic into the torpedo man’s buttocks and pushed the plunger in, surprised by the resistance, looking away, focusing on the stainless steel prop of one of the thirty-five-hundred-pound Mk-48 torpedoes until he felt the plunger wouldn’t depress any farther.

“All right,” he said, his breathing short and hard as if he’d just sprinted a hundred yards. “Get him to sick bay. Restraining straps. One of you stay with him.”

“What happens when he wakes up, sir?” asked the electrician. “He’s gonna start up again.”

Brentwood handed the emptied hypodermic to the bosun. “Tell the corpsman — if he’s well enough — to keep Evans heavily sedated until further notice. If the corpsman’s not up to it — come and tell me.”

“What you think’s wrong with him?” asked the electrician, looking apprehensively from Brentwood to the bosun.

“Darned if I know,” said the bosun.

“Bosun,” ordered Brentwood, “you’d better get a stretcher. Watch yourself on this deck. I’ll send someone down to dry it off.”

The hospital corpsman said he drought it must be the DTs— “Delirium tremens.”

“Bullshit!” said the bosun. “He doesn’t even smell of booze. Anyway, we left Holy Loch over twenty hours ago—”

“Worst time,” said the corpsman in a tone calculated to impress the electrician, who’d helped carry Evans on the stretcher. The corpsman tried to stifle a racking cough with one hand, giving the restraining straps for the stretcher to the bosun with the other. “Secret boozer maybe,” he continued. “So long as they get their daily dose, they’re okay. Miss one, and brother — they see snakes, elephants, you name it.”

“The sub’s dry,” said the bosun impatiently.

“Right,” said the corpsman, “and I’m Scarlett O’Hara. Engine room solvents, cough medicine—” The corpsman stopped. “Man, they’ll drink anything.”

“Uh-huh,” said the bosun, recalling the corpsman’s smartass crack about twenty ccs instead of twenty milligrams. The bosun tapped the antiroll-secured drug cabinet above the corpsman’s head. “Better check your supplies, Doctor. I’ll bet tits for bits you’ve got some water in your alcohol jars. You being in sick bay yourself is probably what stopped him getting his daily shot of booze. If you’re right.”

“Well,” responded the corpsman, weighing the possibility of having to explain any alcohol missing from the sick bay. “Maybe he has the flu.”

“Right,” said the bosun, “and I’m Scarlett O’Hara.”

“Scarlett,” said the electrician, “will you marry me?”

“Piss off,” said the bosun, “and get back to the fucking torpedo room. After the racket Evans made, it’s a fucking wonder if their whole fucking Northern Fleet didn’t hear.”

As well as being profane, the bosun was quite wrong. The Northern Fleet hadn’t heard them. But with the sound waves from Evans’s commotion racing out through the underwater world at four times the speed of sound in the air, a Russian cruiser, on silent station — her orders to find and kill the Roosevelt — had heard them, her sonar now locked on to the American sub.

Like his crew, Ivan Stasky, captain of the Russian cruiser Admiral Yumashev, had never paid much attention to politics — to the fact that the honeymoon between Moscow and Washington, and Gorbachev’s Nobel Prize for peace, were long past, that the American government had been as naive about what would happen after Gorbachev as it had been about Deng’s “Open Door” policy in China — until the door slammed shut, Tiananmen Square awash in blood.