The Circle (41 page)

“Mind if I come? I don't think we've done one of those since—what—since the war—”

“No. I need you on the falls. Somebody's got to see we lower right, or we'll all end up in the water.”

Dan waddled up the ladder and pushed his way back toward the boat's helm. That answered one question, at least. He grabbed the monkey lines as
Ryan
rolled. Okay, he'd better make sure … “Coxswain! Who's my coxswain?”

“Here, sir.” Rambaugh.

“We ready to lower, Popeye? Are the uh, are the plugs in?” The second-class nodded. “Engineer?”

A voice, a face he didn't know. A snipe. Dan made sure he'd checked the fuel and oil.

“Bow hook?”

“Vogel's bow hook, Ensign.”

“Vogelpohl, you big enough for that?”

“Been doing it for two years, sir.”

“Okay, just checking. We got a light? Chief, I need a couple more battle lanterns.… Hey! You!” he shouted. “Yeah, I'm talking to you! Put that under the seat, sailor!

“Now the rest of you listen up; here's the word on what we gotta do.”

When he was done, nobody seemed to have any questions. They stood and sat and shivered, muttering with the blaspheming patience of sailors in the rain and spray, clinging grimly to the knotted hand lines.

“Boat to the rail,” bawled the phone talker.

Dan couldn't follow everything that happened in the next minutes. Bloch shouted commands. The sleet fell harder than ever, driving down out of the night. The whips and steadying lines came taut.

The boat trembled under him, then lifted, swaying, from the cradle. The chief bawled, “Release guys! Release gripes! Hoist away!” Dan grabbed for the gunwale, then remembered and shifted his clutch to the knotted hemp of the monkey line.

“Hold fast,” he shouted. The bent down-curving davits, like the hooks of two upright canes, pivoted outboard and aft. The boat swung aft, then out, then forward, weaving its way around them.

Then they were hanging out over the sea, the blocks and lines creaking taut above them, the ship's side a sea-stained wall in the rain-haloed work lights. The crew stood upright, swaying from the line. If the falls broke, dropping the boat, the men with good grips would be left dangling like a line of cured hams, to be swung back inboard. The others would plunge straight down. On the ship, Jones and Isaacs flipped fenders over opposite them. The steadying lines came taut fore and aft, and the men on them set their heels as
Ryan
rolled. Bloch was shouting something about a safety runner.

Lenson leaned over the gunwales and looked down at a sea like used motor oil. It rose dizzyingly swift, fell away, then surged back, its surface black and dull and somehow viscid, gruel-like, under the speckling impact of the rain, as if it were kept from solidity only by unending motion. And out beyond it, a swell and another swell and after that utter dark and dark and a thousand miles of dark till the coast of Norway.

Looking forward, he saw faces staring down from the bridge wing. Any minute, he thought. Away the motor whaleboat, away. Ten or eleven things had to happen at once when the keel slammed down. Cast off aft, cast off forward, trip the slings clear of the prop; take a strain on the sea painter; start the engine, put it in gear, meanwhile keeping clear of the side with the rudder, but not too far out, or the painter would haul the bow around and they'd crash into the gray wall of hull. And all the time soaring up and dropping, one moment opposite the helo deck, the next eye-to-eye with the copper red of bottom paint. They'd have to sheer away gradually, and watch every wave. Any of them could dump him and all these men out into the lightless, freezing sea.

Thinking this, he struggled to his feet, bracing himself on the shoulders of those beside him. Hands reached up, steadying him. He barely felt them. He was counting heads: twelve, including himself. “When we going, sir?” somebody called. He didn't answer, counting them all again: twelve. Okay, he was as ready as he'd ever be. He shaded his eyes against a lashing of spray and looked to the bridge again.

But minute after minute went by, and still they swayed there, halfway between sea and sky, between ship and sea.

“Somebody closing, off to port,” said Rambaugh, touching his shoulder. He pointed between
Ryan
's stacks. “See him, sir?”

He screened his eyes again to see two small lights close together off to port. He watched incuriously for a few seconds. The lights grew brighter, farther apart, and sharper, but stayed in the same relative position between the stacks. The pistol was digging into his gut. Having the muzzle pointing at his balls made him nervous. He mined around under his jacket, trying to shift it, then glanced up again.

Then he was struggling back to his feet, shouting at the talker.
Ryan
loomed above the alien lights. In the rainy mist their halos lighted sea-swept decks, a shadowy array of masts and aerials, the hammer and sickle and star, painted on her stack.

Ryan
's horn burst into a nasal drone. One, two, three, four, five short, rapid blasts.

The Soviet trawler swayed, and the distance between her lights shortened. All at once, he understood.
Ryan,
longer and heavier, was shouldering the smaller ship away, forcing her to sheer off to port.

His attention was jerked away by the talker's frantic gestures. He cupped his hand to his ear. “… up forward,” was all he caught.

Dan leaned across empty space and shouted, “Chief, what's he trying to tell me?”

Bloch grabbed the earphones. His bull-like bawl cut the rattle of rain and the blast of wind. “Everybody out of the boat, to the fo'c'sle, on the double! Going to board over the lifesaving nets.”

“Shit fire,” Dan muttered. “Goddamn it.…
On your feet!
Everybody out of the boat, to the fo'c'sle, on the double!”

The men slipped and stumbled, chilled through by sleet and wind. Heat loss tripled when you were wet. One seaman tripped on the rub rail, would have taken the long dive if Rambaugh hadn't caught his collar.

He tossed one backward glance. Abandoned, empty, the boat swung like a huge slow pendulum at the end of its whips, and the dangling monkey lines capered dripping in the wind.

Forward, forward. He ran in staggering, shambling exhaustion. Men caromed off him in fatigued slow motion, like padded ninepins. They fell and fought down the port-side ladder, then splashed clumsily forward through sliding pools on the main deck. Saltwater jetted out of Coffey's boots, ahead of him, with each of the seaman's steps.

Pettus was on the forecastle when they got there, sawing frantically at the lashings of the life nets, broad mats of woven rope rigged along the sides. As Dan reached him, the starboard one fell away, unrolling down into the foaming sea like a venetian blind. He leaned out over the lifeline, blinking against the salt sting. His face felt like a cast in acrylic resin.

To port the lights of the AGI heaved up and down, reeled right and left. She was making heavy weather. He ignored her, running his eyes above his guess at horizon. Was there something there? Something blacker than blackness, out ahead? Or was it only his tired, obedient sight telling him what he expected to see? “Got anything, sir?” Rambaugh shouted, at his shoulder. “Not yet,” he shouted back. “Should be just ahead, though, a few hundred yards now—”

“Flare!”

He snapped his eyes front. A green comet climbed for the black bellies of the clouds, a shooting star that slowed and faded even as he watched. Then spray wiped it out.

A sea smashed into the stern, and
Ryan
reeled so violently he staggered into the lifeline. The breaker cascaded the length of the forecastle, spraying the men like a crowd of protesters being fire-hosed. They bent their heads under it, clinging to the lifelines with one hand, the other clutching their axes.

Another flare soared, and all at once he made out the submarine. It was blacker than he'd expected—a hole in the night sea. Then the squall parted, the sleet and rain swept on, and suddenly it was close, a great low shadow length. So dark, he couldn't tell whether it was bow-on, or stern to
Ryan.
He suddenly missed the battle lanterns. He cursed himself; he'd left them in the boat.

Suddenly the sun rose. No, three of them, behind and above him. Dazzled, he threw his arm up. Over their heads,
Reynolds Ryan
's searchlights burned like white-hot swords thrust through a black curtain. Rain and spray blew through them, making them solid, like hot shafts of just-cast glass. He blinked away wind tears and squinted.

The submarine was enormous, much longer than
Ryan.
The seas broke over her like a black iceberg. Her conning tower—it was called a “sail” now—was lower and longer than that of U.S. subs. Behind it was a squat squared-off fairing, part of the deck, but raised ten or twelve feet above the pressure hull. It sloped downward as it ran aft, till it merged with the tapered spindle of the tail. Along its upper surface were the outlines of huge hatches. A double raised line ran along it. It looked like a railroad track.

The submarine canted far over to starboard, then whiplashed back. It was rolling violently, beam to the seas.
Ryan
wasn't rolling, but she was pitching hard. Each time she drove downward, she smashed the sea to cream under her forefoot. Not only were the two ships out of synchronization; they responded differently to the sea. The great swells swept over the submarine like a tide-scoured rock, but they lifted and tossed
Ryan
like a rubber duck in a child's tub.

He stared down the dangling breadth of the net, its bottom buoyed up by yellow kapok floats that bobbed in the churn. His mouth was metallic dry. They weren't going to make it down that. They'd be shaken like ants off a picnic blanket, dropped into the boiling sea, and crushed to pulp between the hammer of
Ryan
's fore keel and the black anvil of the pressure hull.

“On the fo'c'sle,” an immense voice spoke through the blinding dark. He squinted up at the wing, a reluctant actor on a brightly lighted stage, and lifted his arm.

“On the fo'c'sle … Mr. Lenson. Down the nets, to port, make your preparations to board.”

*   *   *

AT Annapolis, he remembered, the drill they sweated most was pier approaches in the YPs, hundred-foot diesel craft, like miniature destroyers. No one could teach you how to maneuver a ship. You had to discover it yourself. Had to anticipate the inertia of hundreds of tons of steel, the freakish and conflicting thrusts of wind, tide, current, rudder, engines, even the direction the screw turned. You couldn't do close-quarters maneuvering by rote. You had to integrate it all faster than any computer could do vector analysis, then apply power and direction to bring the ship alongside and stop, dead in the water, ten feet off the pier.

It was tricky and unforgiving, and the seawall's creosoted timbers and the reinforced bows of the YPs were dented and gouged. But you had to learn it. Because pretty soon, you'd be doing it at sea with ships ten or fifty times bigger, and far less maneuverable.

Now he watched openmouthed as
Ryan
came right slowly, smashed her way through a sea, came right again. Till she was beam-on, and fighting her way yard by yard closer to the reeling submarine.

It was an incredible demonstration of sheer shiphandling seamanship. As each swell approached, the bow swung right with just enough momentum to meet it, take the blow, and reel back still lined up for the approach. He's coming in upwind, Dan thought. The wind'll blow us down, pin us against the sub. But could Packer fight the old destroyer free again once she was alongside? What if one of the Soviet's planes or screw blades tore through her paper-thin, rusty sides?

“Stand by to port.”

“Stand by,” he screamed. He bent over the rail, looking down again.

The kapok floats, fat little yellow pillows at the foot of the net, streamed the mesh out ten or twenty feet from the destroyer's sheer, like a drapery hanging from a balcony. If Packer could lay her alongside gently enough, close enough, it might cover most of the distance between the ship and the sub.

Unfortunately,
Ryan
was picking up the period of the swell now. The incandescent rods of the searchlights swayed down, then up again, losing their quarry as they probed up into the squall.

Then they dropped again, and glided over the steel reef. He squinted. Something different, wrong about the hatches. But the lights moved aft, converging on the vertical stern plane, the rudder, that stuck up above the seas like a raked black tombstone. Then
Ryan
pendulumed to starboard and they swayed up again, canting crazily across the sky.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Popeye, you ever done this before?”

“Never, sir. Don't want to do it now, either.”

“Think the net'll reach?”

“It ain't that's what's bothering me, sir. It's going alongside that bitch. The captain screws up and we'll land on top of her. Bust our back. Snap the keel. Sink us all.”

“Well, it looks like he's—”

“Mr. Lenson! What you want us to do?”

He turned and screamed downwind, “I want three guys with me, three guys with axes. Bring that grapnel, somebody. When we get there, claw it along the side, check there's nothing trailing underwater. If there is, fish it up and cut it. Understand?”

A light came on on the submarine, high on the sail, and swept around the sea like a two-handed sword. It steadied for a moment on the white blur to port that was AGI, then rotated round toward
Ryan.

When it hit them, he shielded his eyes and peered down. The beam lighted the narrowing blackness between them. Solid steel, he thought, on both sides, and between them a little rope and a little flesh and bone. He didn't want to be the filling in this sandwich. His left hand fumbled across his life vest, checking that the straps were tight. His right reached under it to check the pistol. It was sliding down, and he hauled it up and wedged it in tighter under his belt, the spur hammer digging into his navel.