Patricia Ratto - Proceed with Caution - Stories and a Novella

The others are in bed, each one in his bunk, calm, quiet, eyes closed, trying to sleep. I’m in my bunk, too, but I still can’t fall asleep, I’m staring upward, the bottom of the bunk above me is like a ceiling, or a cover, for mine; I look up and see that bunk, knowing that mine is beneath it and underneath mine, in turn, there’s another, with someone who’s also sleeping or trying to sleep; we’re all piled up, maybe all of us are dead, one coffin on top of another, only we don’t realize it yet. Is it possible for someone to die and not know it?

I wake up startled; I’ve had nightmares again, some dreams are repeated. They’re more or less the same, with small variations. There’s activity in the sonar area, something’s going on. I head for the galley to get a coffee; Almaraz is pouring himself a cup from one of the little steel pitchers, and just as the coffee reaches the middle of the cup, they call us to our battle stations. I forget about the coffee. Almaraz takes a gulp from his cup, leaves it in the sink, and starts out toward the control compartment; he’s handling the stern planer in combat. I head for the engine room and on the way I see the three sonar operators working: Elizalde and Medrano seated, with their earphones on; Cuéllar, standing, takes the earphones from Medrano to confirm a sound and then returns them to him. They’re really not there in the sonar, they’re not here, they’re outside, in the water, all ears, penetrating the depths of a labyrinth of echoes and sounds, waiting for whatever the sea will bring them. Hydrophonic sound detected at azimuth zero seven nine, says Cuéllar after consulting Elizalde and Medrano, and they begin plotting for classification of the target. Direction zero seven zero, turn forty degrees to port, the CO orders, and we set course for the enemy ship, following the sonar operators’ estimates. Albaredo, Soria, and Torres are in the engine room; the crew for this shift is complete yet again, I don’t understand why the hell there’s someone extra every time, probably someone got confused when they were setting up the shifts. In any case I take a walk around to check the engines, even though I’m sure Albaredo’s done it already, I need to be busy, like everyone else, during the wait, this time of “we’ll see what happens.” Just then I discover that my boots are no longer where I left them, that prank again, no doubt they took them to the usual place, but now that’s the least of our worries: we’re definitely at war, the enemy is approaching, and who knows how the hell this will all turn out. And so I stick around here in case they need me, but looking out a little toward the rudder area, and with my ear alert to what the sonar operator might be saying so as to detect the tiniest gesture. They must be listening to the beating of the ship’s motor blades and trying to detect… Destroyer, type twenty-one or twenty-two, Medrano suddenly whispers toward the control room. A sonar emission, type one eight four, he adds. And everything grows silent and slow, only gestures, movements synched to the rhythm of our waiting. The CO orders us to turn in the direction of the target—Almaraz and Polski operate the diving planes; Navarrete, the rudder—and to increase speed to the maximum in order to shorten the distance, engines going full blast and in the control room there’s a lot of activity. The CO orders the combat periscope up; an officer stands next to him; now he prepares to look outside, trying to sight the target. There’s a lot of fog, the CO says to the officer, and while the officer, in turn, looks through the periscope, I tell myself that maybe it’s that same fog that hid our departure from the port, the same one that’s always surrounded us and sails with us like just another silent crew member. Down periscope, orders the CO; the officer wasn’t able to see anything, either, nothing beside the fog. The target is operating with choppers, Elizalde announces toward the control room, at a speed of eighteen knots, he adds. Now, even though nobody says anything, we all know that it’s going to be a tricky business; it won’t be easy to fire a torpedo and then flee from the choppers. I walk slowly forward. Rocha comes out of the head and walks toward his post. Egea crosses my path with a tray holding two empty glasses and walks into the galley; I keep on going, the cook is lying in his bunk, reading a Nippur of Lagash comic book; farther along, on the table opposite the torpedoes, a pencil wobbles, swaying lightly, nervously back and forth, unable to decide if it should roll toward one side or the other. From the bow I see Olivero leaning against one of the torpedo launcher tubes. Grunwald and Heredia sit on the bench on the port side, their profiles toward the torpedoes; I stop a few steps away from them. The CO’S order to fire a torpedo at the detected target reaches us. It will be a manual launch because the fire control computer still doesn’t work. The sub’s engines are shut down in order to be able to operate and do the calculations more precisely. An officer appears with the necessary data: Olivero starts the maneuvers, opens the valve to flood the tube; you can hear the torpedo propellers start up with a dull hiss; the launching hatch opens. Behind me the others carefully begin to disassemble the bunks and pile them up at starboard so as to leave access open to the torpedo room. Grunwald looks at Heredia: we have to give it a name, he says; it’s the first real torpedo launched by the Argentine Navy. A name? Heredia asks. Yeah, for the torpedo— Mar del Plata , let’s call it Mar del Plata , and let’s cross our fingers for it to hit the target. No doubt Marini has just pushed the launch button on the computer (which actually works, the launch command, but not the firing calculations), because I hear the rotor blades speed up and the torpedo shoots off, it tips a little as it enters the sea, remains suspended in the water for a fraction of a second, and then speeds toward the target, connected to the boat by a thread, an umbilical cord that feeds it with data so it can find its objective, unwinding to let it advance. We wait in anticipation, the others behind me have stopped, each in the middle of what he was doing, at the exact moment the torpedo took off, speechless, staring toward Olivero, toward the tube, now empty of the torpedo and full of water. It cut the thread, Olivero whispers, and now we all know that it will be guided by its acoustic head searching for a noise to attack. And then I imagine what it might be like, that thing we’ll never see from this enclosed, blind ship, the torpedo explosion against the enemy boat, the fire, the smoke, the shock, the wounds, the blood, things we sometimes see in movies but which now can happen in reality, though how can we know it, we won’t see anything, we’ll just sense the echo of the blast and maybe feel a kind of jolt, but not the screams, the screams of pain and fear, the noise of death silenced by the water, the others—those outside–floating by. But the detonation doesn’t happen, minutes go by and nothing, maybe the torpedo kept on going, maybe its battery ran out and it sank to the bottom of the sea, deactivated, dead. Then I see Grunwald elbowing Heredia and pointing upward, tracing circles in the air with his raised index finger: I can hear them too, chopper rotors, the convoy of choppers that escort the boat we’re trying to hit have detected the wake of our torpedo from the air and are looking for us. Just then Grunwald closes his eyes, opens them with a start, and says to Heredia: Hey, buddy, your wife had the baby, a boy, look at the time, you’ll see exactly when he was born. Heredia checks his watch and hugs him. Evasive maneuvers begin. We dive. The others go back to their work of dismantling the bunks; soon they’ll have to load another torpedo. I decide to return to the engine room. The boat lists, the curtain behind the aft table falls open a little and I can see my boots. We’re diving deeper and deeper, you can hear the rotors of the choppers, a little muffled, but we know they’re still there.