The Circle (2 page)

A diesel droned into life somewhere aft, and he came back to himself. Shivering in a raw wind off the Narragansett, he propped his elbows on the splinter shield, looking down the length of a
Gearing
-class destroyer, hull number 768, as she lay starboard side to Pier 2, U.S. Naval Base, Newport, Rhode Island.

It reminded him of backstage, the last minutes before the curtain rises. Sailors streamed up the gangway, some in dungarees, last-minute crates of frozen stores over their shoulders, a few still in liberty blues, toting suitcases and seabags. A forlorn-looking group of women and kids milled around at the foot of the pier. Three little girls waved to a petty officer, who blew a kiss from the stern. Engineers hauled cables and steam lines clear of the connection boxes. Seamen were unfrapping the mooring lines, triple strands of dirty nylon, as thick as a man's wrist.

“Excuse me, Ensign.”

He turned, then moved quickly aside for a middle-aged civilian in a windbreaker, a bullhorn under his arm. A slight lieutenant behind him shot Dan a glance. He moved farther aft, conscious of his newness, of being in the way.

The pilot glanced down at the ruffled surface, the dancing light. His eyes narrowed. “Wind's picking up,” he said. “Will he want to take her out himself?”

“Always does,” said the lieutenant.

A tug coasted into position fifty yards off the port side. On the forecastle, seamen in ragged dungarees rearranged long rows of flemished line. Dan craned over the splinter shield. A heavy figure in blues was directing them, bare-headed, bald-headed, the points of his open collar fluttering in the wind. His shout floated above the rumble of engines. “Don't
stand
on it, Connolly, you shithead! You're gonna be screwed, blued, and tattooed, one of them fuckin' lines pulls you through a chock!”

A swarthy, broad officer with his cap tilted back strolled out of the pilothouse. Gold flashed above gray eyebrows. His eyes measured and then moved past Lenson, dismissing him in favor of the bay, the tugs, the linehandlers. A different kind of chill came onto the wing with him, a crisp aura of business. An enlisted man in a peacoat followed him, adjusting a sound-powered telephone. The commander returned the lieutenant's salute.

“We ready to cast off, Mr. Norden?”

“Aye, Captain. All departments report ready to get under way.”

“Current?”

“Max ebb in an hour, sir.”

“Mr. Kerrigan, how are you this fine morning?”

“Fine, Captain. Taking her out yourself?”

“That's right, but it's nice to see you all the same. Grab some coffee and enjoy the show. Okay, Rich, let's go to sea.”

“Fo'c'sle and fantail, single up all lines. Engine room, bridge; ring up maneuvering, stand by to answer all bells,” said the lieutenant.

The talker dipped his mouth toward the phone, relaying the orders. Dan edged farther aft. Ahead, below, aft, forward, the ship was readying herself to move. The bridge was filling with crewmen and officers, clamping on headsets, adjusting binoculars, bending over charts and bearing circles. Maybe I should leave, he thought. But he didn't. He decided he'd stay till somebody ordered him below.

“Fo'c'sle and fantail report, all lines singled up, sir. Engine room answers, standing by to answer all bells.”

“Very well,” said the lieutenant. His voice was pitched just loudly enough to carry. He looked at the captain, who had clamped a pipe between his teeth. The older man nodded. “Right hard rudder. Take in lines one through five.”

On decks below, seamen bent in unison. Six-inch samson braid slithered in through the bullnose, dripping where it had kissed the oily water.

“Stand by on six,” muttered the captain. “You got wind, too. Ahead a touch on your port shaft.”

A narrow strip of dirty water appeared between the bow and the pier. “Port engine ahead one-third,” shouted the lieutenant into the pilothouse. Someone repeated it. A bell pinged. “Engine room answers, port ahead one-third.”

“That's enough.”

“All stop,” shouted the lieutenant.

“All stop, aye! Engine room answers all stop.”

“Take in six.”

“Take in six.… Fo'c'sle, fantail report all lines taken in.”

“Very well. Rudder amidships, all ahead one-third. Bos'n, shift colors; give me one long blast.”

Through the window, he watched the helmsman flip the wheel into a blur. “Rudder midships, aye … my rudder is amidships!”

The whistle let loose above them with a single note so vast thought ceased to exist. Dan had to cover his ears. No one else did. When it cut off, its echo came back from the hulls of ships and the walls of warehouses and barracks and then the hills rising beyond the piers. On the bow, a sailor hauled down the jack and tucked it under his arm.

The strip of dirty green widened between the steel sheer and the pilings, splintered and bent by generations of destroyermen. The pilot raised the bullhorn. “Sixty-six, pick me up to starboard,” he said across the forecastle. Lenson caught the chief's face below, square, pallid, lifted to the voice. He looked angry. The tug honked like a locomotive and dug her stern into the water, swinging right, disappearing from sight behind the superstructure.

“All ahead two-thirds. Left ten.”

“Left ten!”

“Left ten, aye. Rudder is left ten degrees, no course given.”

Ping. Ping.
“Engine room answers, all engines ahead two-thirds.”

Ryan
began swinging, massively, like a huge, heavy, finely hinged door. Dan had a sense less of acceleration than of the parting drift of continents. A sudden burst of waving came from the pier, and thin, barely audible cries of farewell. He searched the receding faces, suddenly conscious of departure.

Susan had been incredulous when he called to tell her he was getting under way today. Incredulous, then instantly furious. He remembered anxiously how she'd said, in that level detached tone he knew meant the worst, that if he left her to have this baby alone, he'd regret it. But he'd explained, and apologized, and at last she'd said she'd try to make it down to see him off. But the pier was too distant to make anyone out now, and all the binoculars seemed to be in use. He lifted his arm self-consciously, and, after a moment, let it drop. “Good-bye, Betts,” he whispered.

The lieutenant gave the helmsman his first course to steer. They moved past the gull gray citadels of tenders, the sleek black shark backs of submarines, the squat, chuffing tugs hove to off the piers like cops watching a parade. The channel out centered itself between the hills, flanked by rocky islets. Tug 66 came back into view, close aboard, edging in. Black smoke vomited suddenly from its stack. The hydrocarbon stink rasped his throat before the wind whipped it landward.

“Attention to port,” crackled the announcing system. A boatswain's pipe shrilled. From the corner of his eye, he gauged the men on the forecastle. They straightened wearily, formed a ragged line, hands thrust into the pockets of their jackets. Only two bothered to salute.

The pilot went below, escorted by the boatswain. The tug cast off and dropped astern as the destroyer gathered speed. Her jackstaff bisected the circle of the world into equal halves, the sea, the hills. Then it wheeled slowly to face the channel out. “All ahead standard,” the lieutenant shouted into the pilothouse. The lee helmsman repeated it in a bored tone. Astern, the screw wash scummed upward in bubbling roils, lighter than the rest of the bay. As
Ryan
surged forward, two wave trains formed behind her, sweeping outward toward the following shore. Her cutwater sliced the surface open with a hiss, shattering the glittering lay of morning sun into a mile-wide arrowhead of liquid topaz. A signal light clacked rapidly from the deck above.

And all at once, Dan Lenson found himself gripping the rail, sucking in icy air, wanting to shout aloud in glee and glory. He'd made it. He'd trained for four years for this. He'd pledged his youth, his ambition, and, if need be, his life.

And here you are, he thought. Graduation, commissioning, marriage, and now a kid on the way.

The exultation gave way instantly to anxiety.

It was the most enduring legacy of his childhood. When he was eight, his father had lost his place on the police force. Dan and his brothers had grown up dreading Vic Lenson's drunken anger. He'd escaped first into reading and sports, then discovered a more permanent deliverance: the Navy.

The knowledge that he had nothing else helped him endure Plebe Year and three more of the toughest engineering curriculum in the country. But even if he'd admitted his fear, he didn't know how to do anything about it. Or understand, as his roommate had told him once, that it lay at the root of his corrosive self-doubt.

The deck under his feet rose to the first long swell. He was afraid. At the same time, for the first time in his life, he felt he was where he belonged.

*   *   *

HE'D reported aboard that same morning. Susan had needed the car, a get-acquainted visit to the Navy obstetrician, and she dropped him with his gear at Gate 17. From the hill, he could make out only a gray prickly mass, a leafless jungle of masts, booms, and antennas, and beyond it the bay, fringed by ice. He showed his ID at the pass office and dragged his bags downhill, nodding to passing sailors; his hands were too full to salute back. Even when he reached the waterfront, sweating and feeling the strain in his arms, there were too many ships to tell which was his.

The pier guard directed him to an abused-looking structure of cracked concrete supported by tarred wood pilings. Ships lined it on either side. It smelled of oil, dead crabs, leaking steam, and garbage. He stared around as he picked his way past radar vans and generator carts, stumbling over vipers' nests of cables and hoses. Engines rumbled. Tractors grunted past him, towing dollies of crates and drums. Bells trilled and he watched a gun mount elevate. A mechanical arm lifted a missile canister like an offering.

He was examining a minesweeper when he noticed men looking down at him from its bridge. Faint laughter reached him over the clatter of an air-driven chipper. He flushed, dropping his eyes, and went on.

He had a sudden vision of himself from their perspective: an awkwardly tall, painfully thin young man in a new double-breasted blue bridge coat. He straightened a little. The single gold stripe and star on his shoulderboards were embarrassingly bright. To hell with them, he told himself.

When he saw the numbers 768 ahead, he stopped. The end of the pier, naturally. He settled the bags to the concrete and stretched, shaking fatigue from his shoulders. The wind from the sea numbed his cheeks and ears. He followed the delicate balancing of a gull, narrowing his eyes against the winter sun.

He knew already he'd always remember this. Along with the moment of birth, so dimly recalled; the morning he reported to Annapolis; the first time he'd lifted his face from Susan's, and kissed away the painful tears. The times of beginning, which would define the way he knew and saw himself forever.

Trying to quell his nerves, he slid his eyes slowly along the length of his first ship.

USS
Reynolds Ryan
was one of four
Gearing
-class destroyers left in the Fleet. She'd had a hundred sisters, but their keels lay now on sea bottoms across the Pacific and scrapyards across the world. She was built low and narrow, with a long sweep of main deck rising to a steep, slightly flared Atlantic bow. Next to the modern destroyers, she seemed small, old, and crammed with gear. But to his eyes, she still had the deadly grace of that most beautiful of all things hewn by man from the fabric of earth, a ship of war.

She was stern to him now and he saw with surprise that her main deck was barely five feet above the water. Her sides looked corrugated. The seas of decades had hammered in the thin shell plating between her ribs and stringers.

He wiped his palms on his coat and bent to dig out his orders. He took several deep breaths, staring at the bay. He glanced at his hands again. The trembling had lessened, though the square knot in his stomach remained. He picked up his gear and forced himself into motion again.

As he covered the last few yards, his B-4 bag punching his legs, 768's warlike rakishness gave way to the signs of age and hard use. Rust streaked her sides. Filthy water pulsed from a slime-encrusted overboard discharge. Her haze gray was patched with blue and orange primer. Steam leaked from the pierside connections in a hissing mist. He kneed his burdens ahead of him up the gangplank, into the fog.

For a moment he was alone, like an aviator in clouds. Icy droplets brushed his face. The steel grating was slick, and the hard leather soles of his new shoes suddenly went out from under him. He caught himself on the handrail, nearly losing the envelope into the scummy water.

Then he came out of the steam into clear air, stepped down, and was aboard. She was moving slightly, even alongside the pier. He dropped his gear with a grunt, lifted his arm to a wind-gnawed flag, then turned to salute the watch.

There was no one there. He held the salute, peering about. There was supposed to be someone on the quarterdeck. No one had ever told him what to do if there wasn't.

“Uh … anybody home?” It sounded silly, and he was instantly sorry he'd said it.

A face peered round the deckhouse, followed a moment later by the rest of a third-class petty officer in blues too big for him. He threw Lenson a casual salute, his mouth moving. Dan dropped his hand, uncertain again. There was supposed to be an officer, a chief at least, in charge on deck.

“Permission to come aboard?”

“Sure thing. Help you, buddy?”

“I'm reporting aboard. Midshipman—I mean, Ensign Lenson.” He held out the envelope. “My orders.”

“Just a minute.”

The petty officer disappeared. Dan stared round the quarterdeck, a narrow gap between the after five-inch mount, the lifelines, and the gangway. Steam blew between him and the shore. The wind skidded things past his new shoes. Cigarette butts. An Oh Henry wrapper. A Styrofoam cup with a peace symbol drawn on it. The nonskid decking curled under his feet, showing gray paint turning to chalk, salt stains, steel speckled with rust.