The Last Ship (22 page)

Thus back and forth we coursed, waiting for the summons if ever it should come. Thinking, now and then, rather fondly, almost longingly, of our city, picturing how it must be at the moment and what her people might be about, their daily tasks, the market shopping they might be doing, the glittering ballet attending, the ice skating on her parks’ frozen ponds, our city lying beyond the harsh waves of the Barents; locked in an indissoluble embrace of ship and city. Waiting. Deep inside us, knowing, I doubt not, all of us, what would happen one day. It would have taken an inconceivably ignorant person not to know, there being no rule of life or of all his recorded history more immutable. To know this: What man invents, man uses.

Both the cryptography ordering it and the methods of actual execution were laced at every step with an exactitude designed with one purpose in mind, to avoid “falseness”—the official, all-embracing demon word adopted by the Navy—of whatever kind. As to the former: An exchange of three messages was required, employing as many different ciphers, known as TSP (Trinity Security Procedures), all three changed every twenty-four hours, each so top secret as not to be held even by the communications officer and reserved for one matter alone; in the case of two of these the cipher being in the possession only of the captain and the decoding and the encoding having to be done personally by him; and as a final precaution (against the captain) the third cipher in this deliberate and inexorably ascending chain being divided into two halves, one held by the captain and the other by the combat systems officer, so that the code using it could not be broken without their joint participation. The essential speed was achieved by a highly advanced communications channel termed VHSI (very high speed integrated-circuit) and a remarkable, almost instant-acting cryptographic machine, itself top secret and unlike any other aboard ship, designed for this usage alone, housed in the captain’s cabin in a safe to which only he held the combination. As for actual launching, again the captain and the combat systems officer each held in his sole possession a key, and the launch could not be accomplished without each inserting his key on consoles placed far enough apart that no one person could reach both, then both turning keys simultaneously, all within a time frame of ten seconds. The Navy, I can state zealously from my own experience, had done everything it seemed the mind of man could conceive to avoid aberrations of whatever nature, whether by accident, rogue signals, human derangement, or anything else that might menace a valid order.

Shortly after 1300 on December 21, on a day of only gentle swells on the Barents, and not long from the expiration of our routine thirty-day patrol and return to our Norwegian port home, Ensign Martin, an assistant communications officer, brought to me a message in a code to which her department did not possess the deciphering mechanism. I happened at the time to be working on the annual task of filling out officers’ fitness reports, not the least trying of a captain’s chores. Laying these aside, I instructed her to stand by outside, closed my cabin door, alerted my CSO Lieutenant Commander Chatham on the intercom, stepped to the aft bulkhead, and, using the combination, unlocked a door, exposing the machine, actually a microcomputer known simply as Verify. From the safe I also brought forth a sealed envelope, opened it, determined the key for the twenty-first of December, fed the message into the computer, and then punched in this designated cipher. The message emerged instantly on a tiny screen.

SOURCE: NCA 211059Z

FLASH

FM: CINCLANTFLT NORFOLK VA

TO: USS NATHAN JAMES

BT

TOP SECRET

SUBJ: OPERATION ARCHANGEL

1. (TS) LAUNCH ORDERS

A. TIME—IMMEDIATE

B. NUMBER—TWELVE

C. TARGET PACKAGE—SABLE 1-12

2. (TS) LAUNCH VERIFICATION—YV1.

REPEAT YANKEE VICTOR ONE

3
. (U) CONFIRM RECEIPT VIA CKT CHARLIE

BT

Employing the differentiated unlocking cipher for the same day, obtained also from the envelope, I fed into Verify the following message which the device brought back in two forms, plain and encoded.

FLASH
211104
Z

FM: USS NATHAN JAMES

TO: CINCLANTFLT NORFOLK VA

BT

TOP SECRET

SUBJ: OPERATION ARCHANCEL

A. CINCLANTFLT NORFOLK VA
211059
Z

1
. (TS) CONFIRM REF A., LAUNCH ORDERS

A. TIME: IMMEDIATE

B. NUMBER: TWELVE

C. TARGET PACKAGE: SABLE
1-12

2
. (U) TOR:
211102
Z

BT

I opened the cabin door, handed the encoded sheet to the communications officer waiting there with instructions to send it at once on the channel reserved exclusively for this series of messages, its VLF arteries believed through a further top-secret process to be ironclad invulnerable to contamination from whatever source. Standing alongside her was the CSO, who now entered my cabin. I closed the door, showing him in plain the message I had received and the one I had sent. I stepped to the safe and removed a second sealed envelope and turned to see him standing with an identical envelope in his hand, extracted I knew from a safe in his own stateroom to which he alone, even the captain excluded, held the combination. This had scarcely been done when Martin was back. She handed me an encoded message and again took up her position of attendance just outside the cabin. I closed the door and fed in the message, the CSO and I each opened his envelope, each looked at the designated separate cipher key it contained, and each punched his into Verify, which at once gave us the following:

SOURCE: NCA                                    211109Z

FM: CINCLANTFLT NORFOLK VA

TO: USS NATHAN JAMES

BT

TOP SECRET

SUBJ: OPERATION ARCHANGEL

A. CINCLANTFLT NORFOLK VA 2        11059Z

1. (U) REF A CONFIRMED, VERIFY EXECUTION

IMMEDIATELY

2. (U) ARGONAUT, ARGONAUT, ARGONAUT

BT

all times being given in Greenwich mean.

The last word was the one that leapt out at us, forming a direct and unswerving line between itself and our resolutely attentive eyes. It also was changed daily, held within the highest secrecy of all, and was the final and incontrovertible seal and imprimatur, meant to remove any remaining shred of doubt a ship’s captain might harbor that he had been the victim of an accident, or of mental derangement in the message’s sender, or that it was a rogue message or any other species of falseness—that it was anything other than a valid order to execute; its thrice-repeated use being a further part of this assurance. I had already determined in the sealed envelope the correct operable word, and the CSO the same in his separate sealed envelope. We now showed these to each other and once more looked at the message on the screen, our eyes focused in unison on its single final word. The ultimate trinity of verifications was in place, in accord.

All of this procedure had been accomplished in less time than it takes to tell it here. During it Chatham and I spoke scarcely a word, conserving all of our faculties solely for the task unfolding. We simply worked, calm in the entire I believe, knowing the unforgoable necessity for the orderly, for concord, for the exclusion of the extraneous, links as we were in a fastidious procedure, impervious to interruption, into which we, the ship and her company, were now inescapably locked, a procedure not subject to consideration or even thought, each door we went through shutting behind us like a watertight door with the lock then slung, each step requiring its own precision and making all steps before it irreversible unless halted by a final callback procedure as secret as the others. I may once have caught Chatham’s eyes—if it were so, I found there only a stolid if alert impassiveness, devoid of all comment whatsoever, free of the disturbed, a honed and imperturbable naval officer concerned with the one thing and nothing else of carrying out the series of measures for which he had in every respect been so meticulously trained and conditioned; I had not even the thought that I could have expected anything other than this essential composure. Indeed, looking back, I can think only of the professional naval coolness and competence, by all hands, the concentration in absolute on the matter itself, with which the ladder of steps was executed from the start. It was not just that this was possible; it was that it was ordained and anything other would have been the surprising, the aberrant, the unthinkable; ordained by one implacable fact: that, this being our sole reason for existence, we had been through the punctiliously undeviating procedure countless times on dummy runs. These were intensely familiar transactions to us, unalien in entire. So that our faculties now behaved to a cellular circumspection, in a manner almost prelapsarian, as during the functions we all had performed so often. With one difference, a new species of tension quickly to appear; distinct yet suppressed, felt throughout the entire crew, even from the ship herself, in the unspoken awareness that we were about to do what we had spent our lives trained to do and hoped we would never have to do: that it was going to happen. The act about to be committed itself bearable in the companion realization that it was out of our hands, out of our control. Myself working with the same consonant, almost removed attention to the task as did all other hands, with the possible exception only of a distant consciousness of one possibility stuck undisturbingly in a far corner of my mind: that there could yet be a callback. This had no effect whatsoever on my systematic, scrupulous actions. Immediately I had read the message I turned and spoke to the bridge through my cabin intercom.

“Mr. Sedgwick, sound Launch General Quarters.”

The ship had been rigged with not just the usual General Quarters devised for bringing men to battle stations but also with a second system, readily distinguishable in sound from the first and both instantly identifiable to ship’s company through regular drills. The first was the familiar GQ klaxon used by all naval vessels for the emergencies which traditionally men-of-war encounter in peril on the seas: hostile ships or aircraft sighted, the sonar picking up a possible submarine, an attack in extremis from the sea herself. The second was reserved solely to bring hands to launching stations. Even as the honking sound with its pulsating beat commenced throughout the ship, the CSO and I proceeded down two ladders and entered CIC amidships. We inserted our keys in the weapons control console. I said, “Three-two-one-Mark,” and we turned the keys simultaneously. He remained there in attendance on the keys while I returned topside to the pilot house and went through it to the chartroom. My navigator, Lieutenant Thurlow, was already there, holding his parallel rulers, bent over the chart table, the Mercator projection of the region, sea and land, laid out under a bright light from overhead. He was just finishing up his plotting of cross-penciled lines on the compass rose. His work had nothing to do with the imminent flights of the missiles. Tomahawk did not have to be pointed at its target. We could launch it from any position, then it was on its own. All that was required before booster ignition was that the ship’s fire-control system correspond the missile with our present position and set the gyroscope in the missile’s inertial navigation system: procedures already underway beginning with our coming to launching GQ. No, Thurlow was engaged in something else altogether: plotting the most direct and advantageous course out of the Barents. It was urgent to get this matter settled and ourselves on the desired heading before matters concerned with the launch began to consume us. Under the harsh light I leaned over and with him studied it. I said, “Very well, Mr. Thurlow” and stepped into the pilot house and looked at the gyro repeater.

“Come left twenty degrees, Mr. Sedgwick,” I said to the officer of the deck.

“Left twenty degrees rudder,” he said to the helmsman, Porterfield.

“Left twenty degrees rudder, aye, sir,” I heard Porterfield repeat. I felt the ship swerve with easy assurance to port, then Porterfield: “Rudder is left twenty degrees, sir.”

Sedgwick: “Steady on course two nine zero.”

Porterfield: “Steady on course two nine zero, aye, sir. Checking two nine four magnetic.”

I said to the OOD: “All ahead one-third, Mr. Sedgwick.”

Sedgwick spoke to Seaman Thornberg at the lee helm. “All engines ahead one-third. Indicate three zero revolutions for five knots.”

Thornberg: “All engines ahead one-third. . . .” I heard the clank of the engine-order telegraph as she pushed it over then felt the ship pliantly slow down . . . “Engine room answers all ahead one-third. Indicating three zero revolutions for five knots, sir.”

Both accomplished, the ship already on a course out of the Barents, the slower speed most favorable for launching set, after which we would go to flank. I stepped out to the starboard bridge wing and picked up the 21MC intercom from beneath the coaming of the bulwark. The air was cold, a piercing blue December day, the wind-free sky pristine, the waters offering us a spondaic series of soft swells which gave a gentle roll and pitch, so synchronized as to make the ship seem for once in fraternal rapport with the sea and to move through it with a serene swish. The sea all about lying in a melancholy splendor, a luminous stillness, the universe seeming held in hands of tranquillity. I looked down first toward the after launcher, then the forward one, both standing silently in the wintry sun, in full loneliness. The launchers would be controlled, their tasks performed, from below, by men who could not see them. Indeed the launchers and I stood in a solitude complete, not a soul else anywhere on the weather decks. I lifted the speaker to my mouth and spoke to CIC. Abruptly, with no premeditated intent, or even thought, I diverged from the prescribed procedure in an act not provided for in it but from which I decided no harm could follow. No, not that. I knew harm, in a proceeding such as this, could come from any variation, however slight. Tiny as it was—a matter of five seconds—it could have brought me to general court-martial, justifiably so, constituting as it did a change in an operation of utmost consequence, whose processes had been worked out long since by men of care to a final and infinitely painstaking precision and perfection of detail which counted on the scrupulous absence of all divagations whatever. I did it nonetheless.