The Last Ship (73 page)

Despite that lovely Russian expression, other words would still need to be spoken, and with all forthrightness. And in their simplicity I felt would be fully understood. Now we spoke of our experiences. His asking me, I told him of our passage through the dark and the cold. Then he related the story of what had happened during the long months when we thought he and
Pushkin
were lost. When he had finished I hardly knew which of our ordeals had been the worse.

“Once we saw our motherland,” he said, “something like a madness took possession of us—I confess that to you, Captain.”

What had happened was not just a meticulous but a weird and repetitive exploration of the enormous Russian coastline from Murmansk to Vladivostok, back and forth over the same course, the Northern Sea Route. This not once but a number of times. Including, lest they miss an available inch, up and around Norway and into the Baltic Sea, there approaching Latvian and Lithuanian towns. The reason for this excess was not unlike that which I sometimes had imagined might have overtaken us had we decided to return to our own country. Now that they were in native waters, off the cities and towns which were the homes of many of them, ship’s company “begged, entreated—I had neither heart nor will to resist them”—that they do this endless inspection of wherever any part of Russia could be viewed, to determine if there was life there; when they found none, still not giving up, but insisting on going back again and again to see if any had appeared since their previous visit. “I myself got caught up in this mad business,” he said. “It was as if nothing could convince us.” A horror had followed. “We continued to investigate coastal towns. Never sighting one live human being. Sighting sometimes untouched towns. Makarova, I remember for one, Babrovskaye—there were others. All the houses, buildings still standing. Just nobody in sight. One of these was a place called Tobseda, the hometown of a
starshima
—petty officer—of mine named Suslova. We had surfaced some miles offshore. I had let Suslova look through some binoculars, see his town. There was not a scratch on it. I remember his lowering the glasses, still looking at the town, saying something like, ‘They must all be asleep, Captain. There—see that house?—the red brick one halfway up the hill—that’s my house. My wife, my child must be asleep in there.’ It was around noontime. I knew it at that second. Readings where we were being dangerously high, I was about to give the order to submerge anyhow and tell him to get below. Before I could he had his shoes off and was gone overboard, started swimming to his town. I waited until I saw him step on the shore. He turned and waved back, then started into the town. I gave the order to dive.”

He paused a beat. “What Suslova had done seemed to give the men ideas . . .”
Pushkin
had lost over a period of time eighteen men as she got near their towns. After that he had stopped surfacing anytime the ship was in swimming distance of the shore. His voice took on a tone that sent a chill up the spine. “What was odd was—I could even understand it. If your own town was right in front of you, and everything was still standing, the houses, the shops and all, it was almost irresistible not to go have a look. Something pulled you in there. I was glad Orel was inland. I might have done it myself. I knew then I had to get us out of there.”

A tremor seemed to go through him—and through me. During one of their criss-crossings of the Northern Sea Route they had put into the secret nuclear fuel depot at Karsavina, found there the fuel he had anticipated finding (along with enough uncontaminated food in deep storage vaults to permit him to do exactly what he was doing, the repeated reconnoitering). Meantime he had received our message that we had found a habitable island. Now he used this to persuade his crew to give up this insane enterprise; explaining that we had discovered a place that would accept men, were awaiting them as promised. “Even so, it was all I could do to tear them away from Russia.” No way to tell us the correspondingly immense news that he had the fuel and was coming. Earlier he had taken me aboard
Pushkin
and showed me precisely why that was. Navigating the sometimes narrow waters, his VLF antenna, which trailed a couple hundred feet in the submarine’s wake, had been severed—a sunken ship, he had speculated, one of numerous derelicts now occupying both surface and undersurface of these choked sea-lanes; thereby immobilizing the channels on which alone we could communicate. Whatever had done it, it was as simple and awful as that.

“Russia.” The name fell on the island air as he concluded his account. “A terrible place. You are fortunate, Captain, in never having had to take your men to their own country. Just seeing it . . . it came close to costing me my crew, my ship.”

Then silence. Then something that seemed like a shudder, a trembling, but was not. An unspoken signal of desiring urgently to leave the past in that sense of any intelligent man’s doing so, and especially if it be such a one as his and his ship’s, in that the past is beyond man’s changing, beyond his redemption; of wishing only to look ahead; the future being the only thing possibly subject to man’s control, what might ours be? He looked out at the horizon.

“Do you believe there are people out there?”

It had become an immutable fact of our existence, sometimes extracting terrible tolls. Whenever I myself had come here and gazed out into that boundlessness of waters, the thought had never failed to occur; or if there were another with me, to occur to both of us. It had kept me from paying as many visits as I would have liked to this place which, save for that, had become a comfort to me. There was no getting away from it; the thought was imperishable, appearing to have established not just a permanent dwelling place in one’s subconscious but to pop up, like one of those chronic itches brought on by certain stimuli, every time one sat, as now, simply gazing out to sea, as though that horizon plucked it forth and set it buzzing in one’s head, attacking one, sometimes producing something one felt not all that distant from madness. The circumference so huge, as if all the universe lay directly before our eyes, nothing preventing our viewing it in every detail, what had happened, what was happening even now, except that terrible horizon of nothingness which took on the aspect of an immense and opaque, an impossibly cruel window blind. It seemed to taunt one in its sadism. If only it would rise, even for a moment, and give us a glimpse! I was in no way surprised that he had asked the identical question, looking out into the infinity of naked ocean, looking at the horizon and as it were over it—the question which would never go away, eternal as the sea itself—what was now beyond? Even the answer always the same, as in some unvarying responsive reading in a churchly ritual, out of the Book of Common Prayer.

“There have to be,” I said.

Until now, the thought could only have been speculation hypothetical in the entire, impossible of verification; a helpless game of the mind one played, whether one wished to play it or not. Even now, trapped in this fixed liturgy, mind dulled by it, protectively so, it did not immediately occur to me that it could be more than a thought, burst free from that theorem-exploring category where it had so long resided. With an active jolt, realizing even as he said it that matters might well now be different, conjecture subject to actual authentication . . . even so, comprehending only in part . . . it was still, so fixed were the old ways, difficult to grasp as reality as opposed to phantasm.

“The fuel,” he said. “What do you intend doing with it?”

I sat and looked at the sea, down the coastline at the tiny particles of the two ships, trying to shake the old thinking. I simply didn’t know. I felt I would have to have time. A certain interval in which to permit the new conditions, new realities, to take hold. Perhaps the island was getting to me, beginning to exert its hold, its claim—had it not given us everything, held back nothing, nourished us? Life was coming to be quite good here, more so every day it sometimes seemed, settling into a pattern by no means without its attractions, its beguilements; something he might not understand: We had been here months, himself days. Unable to give any real answer to the question he had asked, I fell back on equivocation, on platitudes.

“I don’t know. The idea hasn’t settled in. It was always . . . the thought that of course we must find out—had to find out. If we could. We couldn’t. That was that. So . . . it was very unreal . . .”

My own words fuzzy, his came much more focused, almost as if verbally shaking me, his tone close to sharp.

“It isn’t unreal anymore, Captain.”

“Understand, we had given up expecting you . . . and the fuel. Now . . . yes, we have the means to go looking. Now, thanks to yourself, we have . . .” It was as if I were saying the words not to him, who understood it, but to myself, who didn’t quite and was now trying to make himself do so . . . “We have a ship which can do that. Go find out.”

“We have two ships which can do that,” he said.

Again, as if prompted to do so by a lookout’s sighting, we simultaneously looked down the shore to where both of them lay anchored. Why that thought—of not one, but two ships available for the purpose—had not occurred to me seemed even more astonishing. I found myself appraising the submarine in the distance; her lines, something unusual about her.

“Captain, I have seen many submarines. Ours; some of yours. I have never seen one that size!”

“She was the largest ever built,” he said, the barest touch, not excessive, of pride. He seemed to be studying her thoughtfully himself, even as he concisely, routinely, furnished me her salient naval aspects. “Two propellor shafts. Two reactors, three hundred and sixty MW each. Five hundred and sixty-one feet overall, eighty-five-foot beam, displacement twenty-five thousand tons submerged. Twenty-six, eight-warhead, five hundred-kt SS-N-20 missiles.”

I thought of the
Nathan James
’s 8,200-ton displacement. Of our own missile power, relatively so small. I had always regarded us as a powerful ship; but compared with
Pushkin . . .

“You make us seem a lifeboat,” I said.

“Of course, two-thirds of that space is for the SS-N-20’s. As you’ve seen . . .”

He had more to say of her. “Oh, yes, her speed. Since there are no secrets anymore, Captain,” he said whimsically. “Forty knots.”

“Forty
knots. On the surface?”

“Submerged.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Captain, you have impressed me.”

“Good. I was trying to do just that.”

I found myself continuing to study that long black shape strung out on sheltered waters. A distinct aspect . . .

“You find something else unusual in her, Captain?” he asked, almost, I felt, teasing me along.

“Yes, I do. I see now. The sail area. That stub sail. I have never seen another like that. And one other thing. The hull. Much more of a . . . of a high rise to it.”

“Very clever, Captain. You are almost on to her real secret.”

I thought a bit, continuing to analyze her. “I wish I could say I were. I am not.”

It was rather as if we were playing some parlor game in which I was to say, “I give up.” I didn’t say that. But unable to pin it down, I might as well have done so.

“Well, sir, I will have to reveal all,” he said with that same Attic wit, as if giving away closely held secrets. “And risk a court-martial.
Pushkin
was built explicitly for operation in the Arctic ice pack. The high-rise hull—the stub sail structure: Both were to permit us to break through the ice for missile launch. Forward diving planes—you can’t see that from here—mounted on the bow so they could be retracted to prevent ice damage—submersibles of course normally having sail-mounted diving planes.”

“How stupid of me not to have figured that out,” I said.

“In fact, our permanent station was there—the Arctic.”

I reflected how we might well have been near each other more than once on our station in the Barents, his transiting that sea to the Arctic; how he might have seen us through his periscope, how in turn he might have been one of the submarines that not infrequently turned up on our sonar gear.

“But when you launched . . . ?”

“A fluke. We happened to be in the Atlantic, just off Brittany. On our way back at flank speed to the Arctic. We had been sent rather abruptly on a mission unusual for us—to the Mediterranean—to keep an eye on your
Theodore Roosevelt,
which had suddenly showed up. What a monster! Stuck our scope up a hundred times to have a look at her. Biggest
carrier
ever built. I used to think, her sitting there in the cross hairs of
Pushkin
’s scope—forgive me, Captain . . . I believe you have an expression—shooting fish in a barrel. We have one something like . . . a single torpedo . . . Strange, we’ve still got all of
those
aboard . . . nuclear-warhead C-533’s . . . never expended a blessed one,” he said in what seemed a peculiar aside; picked up again. “Anyhow, then we were relieved on station by one of our other subs—Sierra class, as you called them—we didn’t need a submarine like
Pushkin
to do that job, if it became necessary—and ordered back to our proper duty—the Arctic.”

He turned to me, as in a confiding manner, his voice exceptionally quiet.

“Captain, let me ask you something. Did you know it was going to happen sometime? Know to a certainty? I mean in the sense of knowing that the sun would rise tomorrow?”

It seemed an important point to him, why I could not tell. It was easy enough to answer.

“Yes,” I said. “I knew that.” I suddenly felt I understood what he was getting at and added: “I would imagine that everyone in our position—yours, mine . . . or something like it . . . knew it, don’t you? Everybody . . . on both sides . . . who was out there looking down the other’s throat.” I thought back a moment, trying to recall, to be as accurate as possible, since the matter seemed to be of some concern to him. “So much so that we almost never talked about it . . . Right now, I can’t recall a single conversation of that kind.”

“Just so,” he said, as if that were the answer he sought, for reasons known only to himself. “To men like us—both sides as you say—doing what we were doing, it was only a matter of when, wasn’t it? One thing we were certain of—we’d never see the end of the century. Nobody so much as mentioning that”—an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders—“for the very good reason of: What in the world good would it have done? Who was there to hear?”