Джон Болл - The First Team

He was in his office well before nine, going through the reports which had accumulated on his desk, searching every one of them for the vital piece of information he needed. He was two-thirds of the way finished with this task when he read again with incredulity the words before him and then slammed his clenched fist hard against the desk top. If he felt any pain he was unaware of it. “Fools!” he screamed aloud. “Fools!”

Disbelief racked him: somehow, in some manner, his people in charge of a West Coast shipyard where a fully armed, nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarine was berthed had allowed more than eighty unidentified Americans to board the potent ship at one time and to occupy it throughout an entire night. The colonel was in a frenzy; his rage boiled like liquid oxygen as he grabbed for the telephone. All of *his persistent questions about what had been going on behind the fagade of nothingness were answered; the Americans were preying on the gross stupidity of his people.

He got on the line with blazing fury and demanded an instant connection to San Francisco.

At precisely minus six minutes the commander of the yard, who had caught a brief catnap in his office, arrived with his overseer in his vehicle and climbed out in the thinning darkness. He first read the meter to determine the radiation level and then called to a man who was patiently hosing down the deck. In response a message was passed to the supervisor on board the submarine, and moments later Morrison came across the brow. As the three men met, a slow-moving, flatbed truck appeared rumbling its way down the pier. It had aboard one of the massive dumpsters used in the yard, a steel open-topped container used to collect scrap and waste material. Laboriously the truck turned around and backed into position somewhere near to the submarine’s stern.

“We’ve got things under control now,” Morrison reported. “Another four hours and we’ll be able to shut down.”

The commander wiped his sleeve across his brow. “We’ll be safe, then?”

“That’s right; no problem. We’ve called the day workmen onto the job. Some of them have responded, the rest want to go home.”

“God damn them!” the commander exploded. “They’re working for me; let me handle this. Mind if I go on board?”

“Be my guest.”

In visibly mounting rage the commander strode rapidly across the brow and clambered down the front hatchway. The overseer started to follow, but Morrison held up his hand. “He’ll be right back,” he promised.

Less than a half minute after the commander had disappeared the first of the day crewmen began to come up. Stiff-jointed and still shaking off the effects of sleep, they came across the brow and waited on the pier for directions. They sat on convenient bollards, one or two of them yawning and rubbing the upper part of their legs, the others contenting themselves by staring across the water. They were men who had slept in their clothes and who had no desire to be up to witness the first light of the day.

Far above them the overhead crane came alive. The sling slowly descended from the end of the boom as the whole upper assembly began to rotate to the left. The maneuver was neatly done; the cables hung in almost perfect position to be hooked onto the pier dumpster. Since it was almost half the size of a boxcar the truck driver beckoned for help; two of the day workmen responded and gave a hand in fitting the hooks into the four corner shackles. When the brief job was done the driver stepped back and signaled to the operator far overhead.

In response the cable came tight and the dumpster with its load lifted off the concrete. Again the whole massive upper structure of the high crane began to turn to the left, the dumpster hanging at the end of a hundred feet of extended cable. The turning motion increased slightly, then stopped abruptly. Because of the long cable, the dumpster continued in motion, arcing forward lazily over the water off the north side of the pier.

Then the crane mechanism began to rotate in the opposite direction, and with gradually increasing speed. The dumpster resisted the change in direction, but as the angle of the cable increased, its inertia was overcome and it began to swing back. Its momentum built up rapidly; someone shouted, but the boom continued to turn and at the same time to come down a few degrees in angle.

The dumpster swept across the pier just above the concrete with inexorable power directly toward the heavy mobile field gun mounted at the end. Its speed was not too great, but its sheer mass was overpowering. The gun crew had less than five seconds of actual warning; one man jumped successfully flat onto his face — then a violent terrible crash of steel against steel tore the still air. Despite its tons of weight, the gun and its carriage were driven by the impact over the edge of the dock; there was a second’s pause, then a massive splash as it disappeared into the water.

At that precise moment action erupted among the men on the pier. The workmen who had been resting against the bollards grabbed the lines which held the submarine and threw them over; the truck driver raced for the brow. On top of the sail two men suddenly appeared holding automatic weapons in their hands. One of them fired a short warning burst over the heads of the startled enemy guards, then he leveled his weapon in an unmistakable command. The man toward whom he aimed threw up his arms; he had no chance otherwise and he knew it. Quickly his colleagues understood and did the same. They stood frozen as the few workmen on the dock ran one after the other back across the brow onto the deck. Then, very slowly, the long black shape of the U.S.S. Ramon Magsaysay began to creep forward.

The brow began to turn, lost its support, and fell clumsily down between the pier and the moving submarine. On the deck some of the workmen were rapidly pulling in the lines while those not needed lost no time in getting down the hatchways.

On the middle of the pier one man who was being left behind came abruptly to life; suddenly he lunged forward and started sprinting toward the ship with desperate speed. When he reached the edge of the concrete he jumped with all the strength he had, hurling himself toward the sharply curved, smooth deck of the submarine. A workman saw him coming, braced himself as best he could, and grabbed him as he landed. He had no idea who the jumper was, but the man’s face was a mask of fright. The workman had not a moment for anything but his assigned duty on the lines; he grabbed them up again and jerked his head toward the hatchway.

In the enemy security office the direct-line telephone rang. The chief picked it up, listened for a few seconds, then paled in sudden alarm. He jumped to his feet, yelled out an order, spoke rapidly into the phone, and then dashed out of his office. With urgent gestures he assembled his total force on hand, then he got behind the wheel of a vehicle as fast as he could and turned the key with shaking fingers.

At the bottom of the hatch ladder the commander of the shipyard confronted his overseer, who had just jumped for his life. “Keep out of my way!” he roared, and cursed the luck that had allowed the man to come on board. Then he thrust his head through the hatch to check on what was happening.

On the bridge atop the sail more men appeared. A coolly efficient Officer of the Deck was already directing the still very slow forward progress of the submarine. There had been no opportunity to warp away from the dock, and moving this close to the edge of the pier was dangerous. The bow was already past the end, which relieved the pressure somewhat; once the stern could be swung a safe distance away from the piling the acute hazard would be over.

The captain stood silently on the bridge, watching everything that was going on. The phone talker who was also there was young but determined; he relayed the orders crisply and showed no signs of fear.