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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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“Cephas, what're you doing here? Oh, the secretary. Okay, Senior Chief. Cut it.”
Oakes positioned the bolt cutters and leaned on the handles. The jaws slipped through the hasp of the padlock and met with a click. Dawson hoisted the mattress, exposing the under-bunk locker, a three-by-six-foot slab of six-inch space. He started sorting things into a cardboard box, giving Cephas a running description. “Web belt, black, one. Blue chambray shirt, four.” In the personal compartment were a marking kit, a wallet, a key ring with three keys, the USS
Barrett
stationery kit that the ship's store sold, Sanderling's boot camp copy of
The Bluejacket's Manual
, and a mending kit.
“That's it. Mostly class-two and -five stuff.”
“What else we got?”
“Hanging locker, then the seabag locker,” said Dawson.
The upright locker held a reefer jacket and two sets of whites still in their dry-cleaning bags. By the time they were through inventorying it, the master-at-arms had the seabag locker open. The duffel stenciled B. G. SANDERLING USN held civilian clothes and carefully folded winter blues. It didn't look like it had been opened for a while.
“Anything else?”
Cephas cleared his throat. “Sir, there's a luggage locker some of the guys keep stuff in.”
They found a green suitcase with a chain tag marked “Benny Sanderling, 205 West Fifth Street, Eugene, Oregon.” It was locked, but a little stamped key on the ring opened it.
“Yeah, I figured we'd find something like this,” said Harper.
Dan looked down silently as Oakes snapped on a set of rubber gloves. He started laying the magazines and objects out on a piece of plastic.
“What do we do with this, sir? We don't want to send this … stuff back to his family, do we?”
“No,” said Dan. His face felt rigid. “Dump it overboard. Leave it off the inventory, Cephas.”
“Yes, sir,” said the yeoman.
“How about these magazines?” Harper picked one up, displayed a foldout page to the others. “How about it? Turn you guys on?”
“Put it down,” Dan snapped, and the chief warrant grinned and dropped it.
Oakes took the last magazine out of the suitcase, and there was the book. It said DIARY on it.
“Overboard,” said Dan. “Don't even open it.”
“Wait a second,” Harper said. “This might be evidence.”
“Senior Chief? What's the regs say about diaries?”
“Uh, I guess class five, sir. Miscellaneous personal stuff—”
Harper picked it up with the tips of his fingers, just as he had the magazine. He thumbed through several entries. He cleared his throat, then flattened it so they could read, underlining one passage with his fingernail.
July Fifth. Today me and the captain made love for the first
time. It was not like what I expected. He is a tender man … .
 
 
“Uh-oh,” muttered Oakes. His old face looked furrowed and resigned.
“I knew it,” said Harper. “I knew it. He's been cornholing this kid, and he couldn't take it anymore. So he jumped overboard. This is dynamite.”
“We better get the XO in on this,” Lenson said.
“Fuck we do! He's covering for him, if he isn't one himself. If it goes to Vysotsky, it'll disappear.” Harper turned to the master-at-arms. “Oakie?”
“I don't know, Mr. Harper. I don't know what to do.”
They looked at Dan. He picked the diary up and made himself look through it. It was Sanderling's all right. He recognized his handwriting from the special request chits, applications for officer training, protests of his evaluation marks. He turned to the last entry, dreading what he'd find. A farewell message, a declaration of love, a cry of revenge? … But there was no entry for that day, and not for several before that. The last entry was a poem he'd copied from somewhere: “Invictus.”
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul … .
He took a deep breath and put the diary in his back pocket. The others looked at him.
“The rest of this stuff, throw it overboard,” he said. Cephas rolled up the plastic, hefted it.
“Off to the fantail,” he said, and left.
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
T
HE hills loomed up like a rampart built across the sea. They stretched off gradually, dropping below the limits of sight, with no sign of human habitation except directly ahead. There, east of where the land opened, a water tower and antennas rose on the far side of what the chart named the Cuzco Hills.
Dan stood on the flying bridge, looking down and forward over the venturi bulwark. Behind him, two enlisted were cracking jokes as they greased the rotating barrels on the Phalanx.
“So the boatswain's mate gets a blow job from this fireman in the after machine shop. And when he's finished, the fireman spits the come into a jar. The boatswain asks him why he did that, and he says, ‘One of the radiomen's doing the same thing, and whoever gets his filled first gets to drink them both.'”
He moved away, feeling sick, but not just at the joke. He'd felt that way for the last two days, since the night Sanderling went overboard.
He'd read the diary, read it unwillingly, but he didn't see any other choice now that he'd taken custody. He'd thought he might send it back to the seaman's next of kin with the rest of his personal gear, maybe with a page or two missing. But now he'd read it, he knew he couldn't do that. He'd have to tear out most of the diary. He couldn't send it back to Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Sanderling, Eugene, Oregon—not with the things it described.
How strange that he knew the young seaman better dead than he'd ever known him alive.
Shit, he wished he could stop thinking about it. He leaned over the bulwark as
Barrett
passed between the two points that guarded the entrance to Guantánamo Bay and wheeled slowly right. Burdette Shuffert had the watch. Shuffert would be the general quarters
officer of the deck during the training. Dan, of course, would be TAO most of the time.
Now he looked down as
Barrett
felt her way in, the world rotating about her pivot point, Leeward Point Field and Hicacal Beach walking down the port side. A freighter came into view upriver, steaming down from the upper bay. The hills gradually moved apart to starboard, revealing behind them the buildings and water tanks of the harbor proper, inside Corinaso Point.
He'd been here before, and looking up at the dry steep hills, he remembered the history. Guantánamo was a small but strategically situated harbor on Cuba's southeast coast. The U.S. presence was a relic of the war of 1898, when the marines had landed to support operations against the Spanish at Santiago. A few years later, Teddy Roosevelt had leased the bay, not for a hundred years, like the bases in the Philippines, but without any terminating date, as long as the Navy needed it and paid the rent.
The gates dividing the base from the rest of Cuba had closed the day Fidel Castro took power. But the Navy had stubbornly maintained its toehold, building desalinization and power plants when the Cubans cut off electricity and water, and both sides had fortified and mined the boundary between the base and the rest of hilly, dry, sparsely populated Oriente Province.
Since it lay on both sides of the harbor entrance, the base was divided into Leeward and Windward sides. The main piers and repair facilities lay along the east, shielded from hurricanes. It wasn't entirely an armed camp. Dependents lived here; there was a high school and a fishing tournament. But it wasn't like being in Charleston or San Diego, either. The base only covered forty-five square miles, most of that water or rugged hills. And it was the only U.S. military installation actually in a Communist country.
That isolation made it a good place to train, and that was Gitmo's primary mission. Ships could go out in the morning, train and shoot all day in deep water, then be back pierside the same night—something they couldn't do anyplace else on the East Coast. Every ship in the Atlantic Fleet had to complete refresher training here before it deployed, shaking down crew and systems into a battle-trained whole. And as almost any sailor would tell you, deployment usually turned out less stressful than the four to six weeks at the hands of the Fleet Training Group.
The marks of the Hicacal Beach range began to diverge as the bow swung slowly right. The piers came into view, with another destroyer, a
Coontz-
class
,
and a
Newport
-class LST with its unmistakable “horns” at the bow. An oiler lay opposite the destroyer, and a small craft that looked like a PT or hydrofoil, but not a type he recognized.
As
Barrett
shaped her course the last few hundred yards to the pier, the freighter upriver grew larger. Dan saw the hammer and sickle on its stack. On its bridge, a stocky woman focused a camera. Dan glanced down;
Barrett
's officers, Shuffert, Leighty, Vysotsky, were on the starboard wing, concentrating on the pier.
He lifted a hand as the merchant swept past. He'd seen Russians at close range before, in the Med. Usually, you could get a wave and sometimes a grin out of them. But the stolid round faces looked through him as the stocky woman snapped off pictures. Then they were past, dwindling away, the wake rolling
Barrett
as she lined up for the final approach.
Sanderling's diary was a look into a world Dan hadn't known existed: of furtive couplings in bus station toilets, night-shrouded beaches, cheap motel rooms; of fear and longing, but also a kind of desperate joy, a passion that sometimes transcended itself into an existential freedom.
Some of it, Dan couldn't imagine. But some was the way he'd felt himself at Sanderling's age, the desperate, awkward, searching time when you looked for everything you needed outside yourself.
What he found strangest was the anonymity, the rapid succession of partners—strangers, maybe not even seen clearly. He couldn't understand it at first. Then he remembered Sibylla Baird. He'd met her … gone out to the garden … . What was so different?
No, the only real distinction was that Sanderling had loved men.
He wished now he'd tossed the diary overboard with the magazines. But Harper and Oakes knew he had it. If it had been purely a matter of Sanderling, he wouldn't have hesitated. He'd have called the other witnesses back to the fantail, shown them the diary, pitched it into the white boil of screw wash.
But it wasn't just Sanderling now.
And he had to decide what to do about it.
He resolved to do it now, today—to bite the bullet and get it over with just as soon as the lines went over and the brow went into place.
 
 
A battered white pickup was waiting for them at Pier L. Dan stood by it, waiting for Oakes. He looked down the side of the ship,
under
the ship. There were the twin rudders, the twin screws. Incredible how transparent the water was. He could see every pebble on the bottom.
Barrett
seemed to hover, not float, suspended in a medium only a little denser than air. From there, he glanced up at drylooking
bluffs dotted with cactus. The palms and the verandas gave the harbor a tropical feel.
“Ready, sir?” Senior Chief Oakes, already sweating, was coming down the brow carrying Sanderling's gear. Dan took the suitcase from him and threw it into the bed of the truck.
Commander, Naval Base headquarters, was a mile south of the piers, up the hill from the Blue Caribe Club. It was a World War II—era two-story, white paint flaking, with a tower that must have had something to do with the airfield once. The duty driver dropped them in front of the concrete-roofed entranceway. Dan told him to go back to the ship, figuring they could walk back once they got rid of the luggage.
A female petty officer was typing at a steel desk on the quarterdeck. He said, “Lieutenant Lenson, USS
Barrett.
We just pulled in. Is there a legal officer here?”
“Do you want that for a will, power of attorney—”
“No, this is official. We have to turn in some personal effects of a man who died en route, and I need to ask a couple of legal questions.”
“That would be the judge advocate general on the staff. Lieutenant Commander Arguilles is the officer in charge.”
 
 
ARGUILLES was a mountain in sloppy khakis. He had a big mustache and dark hair. Looking at Dan's name tag, he said as they shook hands, “Lenson. Lenson … You know a guy name of Johnstone? Stanley Fox Johnstone?”
“Yeah. The
Ryan
inquiry. He was the counsel for the court.”
“I served with him on the COMNAVFORCARIB staff. He mentioned you—the guy who asked to be punished, after they told him to go and sin no more. What do you think about that, Senior Chief?”
“The Navy ain't that big of an organization, sir.”
“I don't mean … well, never mind.” The JAG officer told them to sit down, said they could smoke if they wanted. “What can I do for you?” he said, propping his shoes on the desk.
“Well, sir—”
“Call me José.”
“Sir—José—I think we've got a problem aboard
Barrett
. And I thought maybe I'd better get some advice.”
“We got your message. About the kid who went missing, right?”
“Yeah.”
“This his gear? You sanitize everything? Take out the rubbers and cunt books?”
Dan took the inventory and forwarding letter out of its messenger
envelope and handed it over. Arguilles glanced down it, nodded, and flipped it into his in box. “Page two, next of kin's address, beneficiary form, looks good. Stack the stuff in the corner, my evil dwarfs will take it from here. That all?”
“Senior Chief, I'll see you back at the ship, okay?”
Oakes looked disappointed, but he stubbed out his butt. When he was gone, Dan cleared his throat.
“Ice water?”
“No thank you, sir. I don't know how to start this. I'm not sure I ought to be here. But I don't think keeping quiet is the right thing to do, either. And it might have a bearing on why Sanderling jumped.”
The phone rang. Arguilles picked it up, listened, said, “Tell her to come in. No, I can't advise her over the phone. Hold my calls, okay? Sorry, go ahead,” he said to Dan.
“Yeah, well … I don't know, like I say, if this is the right thing to do or not.”
“Why don't you tell me in confidence,” said Arguilles. “You say it's related to Sanderling's death.”
“It might be. We found … homosexual literature in the kid's effects.”
“You mean cock books—naked guys with big, big hard-ons.”
“Right. We also found a diary.”
“Go on.”
“The diary describes his acts with other people.” He cleared his throat again. “Including the captain.”
“Go on.”
He was puzzled by the lawyer's lack of reaction. “Well … that's about it.”
“Was there a final message, a note or letter? Anything that mentioned his intention to do away with himself?”
“No.”
“What did your commanding officer say when he saw this diary?”
“He hasn't.” Dan took it out of his pocket and placed it on the edge of the desk. “I didn't tell him or the XO about it.”
“Why not?”
“I wasn't sure it wouldn't disappear.”
“What happened to the other material?”
“I had it thrown overboard.”
“You this kid's division officer?”
“Department head.”
“He a good sailor?”
“Not the best I've ever seen. But not the worst, either.”
“Why do you say it might be related to his death? Does he write that in the diary?”
“No. The last entry was four days before he jumped. The diary was kept in the luggage room, by the way. So he couldn't get to it every day. He must have gotten the key now and then and brought it up to date.” Dan shifted in the chair. “The relationship to his death … well, it seems like you could make that inference.”
“That he committed suicide because he fucked the captain? Or that the captain fucked him? Or that the captain fucked him once but wouldn't do it again?” Arguilles grimaced. “Let's go back to why you didn't turn the diary in. Why did you think it might 'disappear'?”
“I don't know.”
“You don't trust your CO or XO not to destroy evidence.”
“I guess not,” Dan said. “Did you want to look at it?”
“No,” said Arguilles.
“You don't want to see it?”
“For the moment, I want to be able to say I've never seen it. Okay?”
“I guess.”
“So what do you want me to do?”

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