The Circle (16 page)

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OFF watch. He paused inside the starboard breaker, looking out. Sixteen hundred, and already it had been dark for an hour. The foul-weather jacket Chow Hound Cummings had issued him was snug, his gloves warm, but his face was stiffening after only a few minutes in the open. According to the chart, they'd be crossing the Arctic Circle the next day.

CZ op area Kilo was even farther north, within the dotted line in the
Polar Atlas
that meant drifting ice.

Originally open to the weather, the breaker—the section of main deck to port and starboard below the pilothouse—had been half-walled with quarter-inch plate during one of
Ryan
's past transmogrifications (Transmongrelifications, he thought). In bad weather it offered little more than shelter from the wind. He glanced around it, stamping his feet as the icy steel siphoned warmth from his toes.

It looked as if Pettus's guys had gotten to red lead, then stopped. The half-finished patches glowed faintly in the side wash of the port running light. Flicking on the flashlight he carried now around the clock, he glanced behind the stringers for tools or paintbrushes. Good, he thought, I'm getting through to them at last.

The ship rolled as he emerged from the breaker, going aft. The spray and the wind hit him at the same moment. He skidded in the darkness, the hard leather soles slick on pebbled ice, and grabbed wildly for the rail. Even through the glove, it was like grabbing a bar of solid cold. He stared downward at the faintly glowing sea, trying to master his fear.

Here, halfway down the length of the ship, the bow wave left at fifteen knots a five-foot boundary of smooth water, at least in troughs; when the sea crested, it climbed straight up the hull. He pointed the light down at it. Directly below him, a discharge spewed water in a steady arc. Where the hull met sea, the green churned into white. He couldn't see past the layer of bubbles. The sea was dark, and not only with night. It was murky, opaque. He raised his eyes to where the horizon ought to be. But there was only the Arctic night, the Arctic blackness, till the icy wind melted it and it ran across his vision mixed with salt tears.

What had it been like to explore these seas, not with the vibrating rail of a destroyer under one's hand, but the ice-crusted rope of a sailing ship? To an old frigatesman or whaler,
Ryan
would have been enormous, palatial. And they'd done it with no heating, poor food, no power but the wind; unable, under these impenetrable clouds, even to know their position within a hundred miles.

He flicked the light around suddenly, and lit an empty port side. Below it was the faint charcoal line of the propeller guard. Then the sea obliterated it. He looked away and pushed himself off the rail.

Usually in the evening, men stood along the lifelines, smoking, shooting the bull, or simply staring down at the passing sea. Tonight he was alone. Too frigging cold, he thought. Might be one or two in the lee. He thought of checking the Asroc deck but decided not to. Most of that was Reed's, anyway. All that was his was the boat. And he knew who'd be there.

The kinnicks: Lassard, Gonzales, Greenwald, Coffey. Sometimes Lonnie “Brute Boy” Connolly, one of the new draft of Cat Fives, obese and slow-witted. What the hell did kinnick mean? He'd figured out why they'd been smoking cigars at GQ. I ought to check the whaleboat, check they're not smoking it up there right now, he thought again, stopping short and looking once again down into the sea. But again he didn't.

Are you afraid to? he asked himself.

The stern was deserted in the gloom. He walked quickly round it, following the beam of his light, splashing through slush that had accumulated in the dented plates. The lifeline was up and taut. He checked that the pins were in and seized with wire. He kicked the lashed-down flagstaff, checked the chocks and bitts, then headed forward along the port side. He glanced up, to see a shadow looming over him. The flash showed him Vogelpohl, the lookouts' earphones clamped to his round head. The departmental yeoman blinked in the sudden light.

As he'd expected, a few men were loafing in the lee of the deckhouse, cigarettes glowing. They stopped talking as he approached, withdrawing, with the slow, ostentatious obedience of sailors complying with stupid orders, their arms from the upper lifeline and their feet from the lower. The sweep of his light showed him pallid, unfamiliar faces: snipes, boilermen or enginemen, from the chthonic regions where Talliaferro reigned. Jesus, he thought, looking at their soaked T-shirts. There must be a hundred degrees' difference between where they worked and this open deck, more if you counted windchill.

“Evening,” he said.

“H'lo,” said one of them. The others waited till he was past, then leaned back on the lines.

Fire station. Hose stowed, nozzle free of crud and ice, turns off and on by hand, spanner wrench in its bracket. Hatch to paint stowage, dogged and locked, gas flood lever sealed, pressure gauge in normal limits. His light waned to a ruby spark as the batteries chilled. A white figure approached, carrying something beneath its arm, like the ghost of Anne Boleyn. As it cleared the breaker a gust snatched away its hat. The cap blew free of the ship, settled, then was caught by the wind and whirled out into the darkness with dizzying speed. The messman ducked his head and continued aft, clutching the sack of garbage against the wind's claws.

His light died. God, he thought as he undogged a door, as ice fell crackling from the gaskets, How much colder will it get north of here? Will we see the sun at all?

His stateroom was hot and humid as saturated steam. He stripped off jacket and gloves in the sweltering dark and was unbuttoning his shirt when Cummings sneezed from what seemed to be his assigned station aboard ship, his bunk. “God bless you,” Dan said.

“Uh. That you, Lenson?”

“Yeah.”

“Careful getting into your rack.”

“Huh?”

“You got a present. Look before you leap.”

He pulled himself up and banged the reading light. It buzzed and flickered and came on.

His bunk was filled with tools. Rusty scrapers, wire brushes, a ball peen, a two-foot length of wire rope, paintbrushes wrapped in paper towels but still bleeding red orange. He snatched them off the sheet, but they left a lurid stain. Beneath was a dustpan heaped with plain trash: cigar butts, Snickers wrappers, empty cigarette packages, a snuff tin.

“Where the fuck did all this shit come from?”

“Santa Claus.”

“I'm serious. Who put this crap in my rack?”

“Well, he's short, and blond, and wears two silver bars.”

“That bastard,” Dan muttered. His fartsack was covered with rust and oil. “I got to sleep in this. Norden did this? That shitheel.”

So that was why there wasn't anything left in the breakers. He felt his face go wooden. Suddenly, decisively, he pulled a towel out of the nest of pipes and began tossing things into it.

The chiefs' lounge was full of men waiting for evening chow, but Bloch wasn't there. He went through it, heedless of their looks, into the bunkroom, expecting to find him whittling. He wasn't there, either, but his rack was. Dan unrolled the towel over it. The tools made an unholy clatter; the brushes smeared orange like a hunter's coat. There, he thought viciously. Shit flows downhill? I'm not on the bottom anymore.

“Mr. Lenson? Lookin' for me, sir?”

Bloch stood behind him, bald head wet, belly bulging over a bath towel. His shoulders were blue with faded designs. His eye went past Lenson, and instantly registered understanding.

“Get that crap out of my rack, Ensign.”

“I told you about getting loose gear cleaned up after work.”

“Get it out of my rack! It doesn't belong there.”

“Put it in the petty officers'. Lieutenant Norden put it in mine.”

“No, that game stops here,” said Bloch. He stood without moving, an overweight, aging man with faded tattoos, in a towel. “Move it. Sir. Now.”

He understood then that he was in the wrong, though he didn't know why. For Norden to do it to him was, apparently, all right. For him to do it to Bloch wasn't. And worse, he couldn't make Bloch accept his wrongness. His mind cast desperately for a compromise, but there was none.

“Fuck it,” he said to Bloch's hard eyes, his sagging cheeks. His voice began to tremble. “Call Isaacs down to get it. I don't care. You clean it up!”

At the realization that he was shouting, a deadness clamped itself suddenly across the poles of emotion. He felt his mind separate; the rational observing part of it drew back and his body coasted free, weightless. His throat hurt. He turned and walked toward the door to the messroom, expecting, as he crossed the threshold into the waiting eyes, the clang of a thrown hammer; but from behind him, from all around him, there came no sound at all.

8

Latitude 67°–18′ North, Longitude 0°–31′ West: Operating Area Kilo, Norwegian Sea

“… AND get the filters in early; filter-cleaning shop will close at noon.”

The line of bored and hostile faces swung toward him and away, greenish and ashen under the fluorescent light. He swallowed nausea, looking down again at his wheel book. “The following is a message from the Captain.

“At dawn today, we will have steamed three thousand five hundred miles since passing Brenton Light. Despite bad weather and mechanical difficulties,
Ryan
continues to meet the demanding requirements of this special operation.

“Captain Packer asked the officers to pass his congratulations on to you, the crew. The number-one ship in the number-one Navy in the world can continue her long record of outstanding performance only as long as you perform with professionalism and excellence. He has every confidence that when we steam home past Point Judith, we'll do so with the good feeling that comes from having done our duty well and faithfully.”

Boredom and cynicism hung in the air like the smell of damp, unlaundered clothing on unwashed men. He turned to the silent figure beside him. “Chief?”

“That's all.”

“Any questions? Okay. Carry out—” A hand jiggled over the back row. “Lassard.”

“Tomorrow's Sunday, Ensign. We doin' so outstanding, you gonna give us the day off?”

He glanced at Bloch, but the chief's face gave him nothing back. “Well—I'll check. But I wouldn't expect it.”

“The other divisions got it off.”

“I said I'll get back to you on that.”

“Okay, then. See what you can do, Ensign.”

The men around Lassard snickered. Bastards, Dan thought. He said angrily, “That's all. Carry out the plan of the day.”

The front rank returned his salute sloppily. The rest made tentative motions toward their caps, or simply broke into a drifting mass headed for the doors at either end of the passageway. The petty officers moved in like border collies, cutting them out and assigning the day's work.

The day's work, he thought. It wouldn't be dawn for hours, and some of them would be up past midnight. Anger struggled with pity as he watched them. The captain's gung ho pat on the back, passed on by Bryce at officers' call, might go down with the snipes, the signalmen, the electronic technicians—sailors with pride in themselves, their work, and their ship, old as she was. But the deckhands had listened with the glazed eyes of slaves commended by Pharaoh. The deck apes were at the bottom of the pay and pecking order. A recruit assigned to First Division tried to get out as fast as he could, striking for gunner, personnelman, quartermaster. The ones who failed stayed, scraping rust, putting their backs to a line, or standing for hours behind binoculars in sleet or rain. They had no illusions about “professionalism.”

To make it worse, they were desperately overworked. They stood bridge and lookout watches, six to eight hours a day of wrestling the wheel or shivering on the main deck. In this constant spray, they had to grease the deck gear daily, wipe down bulkheads, check the securing lines rigged against the sea, lay sand and salt to keep the ice down. All of it was labor-intensive, on a ship built when labor was cheap. There was still more to do inside. Norden (direct from Bryce, Dan was sure) wanted the boatswain's locker and paint locker cleaned and painted out. The latest was an order to paint the bullnose blue, as tradition required north of the Arctic Circle. Dan shuddered. Half the time now, it was underwater.

If I had the assigned complement, he thought, forty instead of twenty-six, we might stay abreast. But his guys were putting in sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and the cramped berthing and unceasing motion were probably making what rest they got more like a dream-deprivation experiment.

He had no sympathy for the kinnicks. They were bad apples. But even the good men were being worn down to carelessness and apathy by chronic fatigue. He didn't need a leadership manual to tell him that was dangerous.

So why not give them a day off—rope-yarn Sunday, in sea lingo? They'd still stand watch, but they'd get a few more hours of sack time. He'd have said yes on the spot, but he knew Bryce would veto it. He'd heard the XO's philosophy before: “There are no Sundays at sea.”

I should have just said no, he thought bitterly. Now that he'd waffled, the men would discuss it, hope for it, and the inevitable disappointment would embitter them even more. Another too-long-delayed understanding of the situation.

He was still cursing himself when Bloch said, “Got anything more for me, sir?”

“Well, you know what we have to get done, Chief. Just keep them at it,” he said, frowning at a new scar on the toe of his shoe.

“That's what I told the POs before we formed up.”

“Well, carry on.”

“Aye, sir.”

He'd tried, the day after dumping the tools in his rack, to apologize to Bloch. The older man had said he understood, it wasn't easy coming aboard a ship like this fresh out of school. The words were right. But now there was a barrier, a reserve, that hadn't been there at first. And he'd caught looks from the other chiefs. I should have apologized in front of them, he thought. John Paul Jones's advice, memorized by every midshipman, was to commend in public and reprimand in private. To that, Dan thought, add apologize in public, too.