Excerpt from: THE CIRCLE
 

Published by: St. Martin's Press, New York

CHAPTER ONE
Newport, Rhode Island
 
 

    Thirty feet below him the graygreen sea surged restlessly between splintered oak and painted steel.  The water was murky, flecked with harbor scum.  But at its surface a thin slick of oil sliced the sunlight of a clear December morning into dancing rainbows.
 Dan leaned forward, tranced by the mobile light.  In that play of chance reflection, of everchanging form, one might see suddenly and with total clarity anything, past or future, real or imagined.  Might see his own face, as it would be at the hour of death.
    But only for a moment, even as it too shattered again into that eternal dancing brilliance.
    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 Two, 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.  At the seaward end of the pier seamen were unfrapping the mooring lines, triple strands of dirty nylon, each 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 dirty manila.  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 underway."
    "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's'le 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 loud 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 the 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's'le, fantail report all lines taken in."
     "Very well.  Rudder amidships, all ahead one third.  Bo's'n, shift colors; give me one long blast."
    Through the window he watched the helmsman flip the wheel into a blur.  "Ruddermidships 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 underway 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.  "Goodbye, Betts," he whispered.
    The lieutenant gave the helmsman his first course to steer.  They moved past the gullgray citadels of tenders, the sleek black sharkbacks 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 Sixty-six 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 screwwash 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 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 bay 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, that 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 sea.  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.
    He was examining a ship's bell green as the Statue of Liberty when the sailor came back.  "Exec says for you to go on up to his stateroom."
     "Where's that?"
     "Forward along the main deck, last door, around the handling room, port side."
     He hesitated.  They'd told him that when an officer reported aboard his bags should be carried for him.  It was supposed to make the right impression.  But the sailor was staring out across the bay.  He made no move to help.  In fact, it looked like he'd forgotten Dan's existence.
 "Say.  How about taking care of my bags?"
     "No problem," said the petty officer.  The motion of his mouth was gum, Dan saw.  "I'll keep an eye on 'em.  You can come back for 'em after you see Commander Bryce.  Shit!  This wind's a mother, ain't it?"  He went around the corner again, leaving Dan alone.
     Okay, he thought, so the real Navy's not like what they told you at Annapolis.  You knew that anyway.  Right?  Right.  He picked up his bags and struggled forward with them.
     He undogged the hatch and found himself in darkness.  His B-4 snagged on blackout curtains.  When he got it free the miniature maze led out onto a narrow passageway, hot, humid, grimy, and so low his cap scraped the pipes that covered the overhead.  It smelled of fried food and oil and roach spray.  The air grew even hotter as he battled his way forward, shoving his bags ahead of him.
    When he came to the tarnished plaque that said XO he set his bags down, wiped his forehead, and tucked his cap under his arm.  He checked his uniform and knocked.  Then opened the door, took two steps in and came to attention.  "Ensign Daniel Lenson, sir, reporting for duty."
     "Lenson?"  A heavy man in his mid-forties looked up from a foldout desk.  He was in long-sleeved cotton khakis, not blues, and for a moment Dan wondered if he himself was in the wrong uniform.  But no, he'd seen men in blues on the other ships he'd passed.  Gold oak leaves gleamed at the XO's opened collar.  Dark patches showed at his neck and under his arms.  He held out a damp soft hand without rising.  "Commander Bryce, executive officer.  Welcome aboard."
     "Thank you, sir."
     "Sit down.  Take your coat off.  Coffee?"
     "Thank you, sir."
     "Help yourself.  Pot's over there."
     Dan valved coffee from an urn and spooned sugar and cream substitute from battered silver cruets.  The air in the tiny compartment was close and hot after the December dawn.  His spoon rattled on the saucer.  Take it easy, he told himself, breathing deeply again.  He eased himself down on a leather settee, balancing the cup and saucer on his thigh.
     Bryce had bent his head to the papers, smiling down at them as if they contained delicious secrets.  Dan could see his scalp through the sparse veil combed over it.  He sipped, letting his eyes wander.  The stateroom was cramped to the point of claustrophobia.  Steel desk, steel chair, wall locker, a door that must lead to a head.  He guessed that the settee converted to a bunk.  The bulkheads were green.  The only things on them were a rack of pubs, a metal locked box, and Bryce's cap.  His eyes came back to the XO to find him smiling at him again.  Dan smiled back uneasily.
    "So, you're one of these Annapolis men, eh?"
     "Yes sir."
     "Worked my way up from a right-arm rate myself.  No, up from a red clay farm, studyin' the south end of a mule."  Bryce looked to the side, his jowls quivering around a chuckle.  Then the eyes returned, small and black and suspicious.  "This where I'm supposed to ask you what sports you played, that so?"
    "Uh  -- Track and lacrosse, mostly, sir.  A little tennis.  Some fencing."
    "Uh huh, real Joe College, eh?   Understand you didn't have all smooth sailing down there, though."
    Dan set the cup carefully on its blue-rimmed saucer.  Perspiration prickled his face.  What was Bryce hinting at?  He'd earned his share of demerits, sure.  Caught out after taps, squeaked by on aptitude, bucketed a couple of semesters of calculus.  He was no high greaser, but few of them went to destroyers; they flew, or joined Rickover's whiz-kid nuclear Navy.  Could he mean Susan?  Was that his record Bryce was looking at?
     "A little," he said carefully.  "Nothing out of the ordinary, sir."
     "You went to damage control and gunnery schools enroute here, correct?"
     "Yes, sir.  They were good, I learned a lot."
     "Sounds like you from up North."
     "Pennsylvania, sir."
     "From Georgia myself.  Biggest state in the Union east of the Mississippi.  Know that?"
     "No sir."
     "So, just get into town?"
     "Yes sir, movers got here yesterday."
     "Married?"
     "Yes sir."
     "Long?"
     "Six months, sir."
     "Oh my."  The exec's eyes sought the overhead.  "You'll be glad to get to sea, build up your strength again.  Cigarette?"
     "No thank you, sir."
     "Don't smoke?"
     "Maybe a cigar once in a while, sir."
     "A cigar?"  The eyebrows rose; the smile became intimate.  "Open that drawer.  No, to the right.  Push the button, it'll unlock."
     The box held a dozen black coronas.  He didn't want one, but it seemed impolitic to refuse.  He took one at random and bent it to the smoky flare of the XO's Zippo.
    The first puff filled his mouth with dead mice, old socks, and gasoline.  "How you like that?  Pretty good?" said Bryce, scorching the end of a Camel.
     Through instantaneous nausea Dan said, "Is this Georgia tobacco, sir?"
     The exec squinted at him.  "What?  No!  Jamaica.  Nigger come aboard in Ocho Rios with a case of those for the wardroom.  So, you know all the right forks to use, that right?"
    "I guess so, sir.  Just start from the outside and work in."
     "That's the trick, eh?  Always wondered about that.  They still handin' out that duty, honor, country stuff?"
     "I guess so, sir," he said again.  He was trying not to inhale any more of the smoke.  "There's still an honor code, and all that."
    "Things aren't that cut and dried in real life, my friend.  Get a few years on you, you'll realize that."
    "Well, it sounds good to me, sir," he said.  They looked at each other.
 Bryce glanced at his watch, became brisk.  "Well, I'm going to have to cut this short.  I see you brought your gear.  That's good.  We're getting underway at zero-nine-hundred."
     "Today?"  He sat up, dropping ash into his coffee.
     "Yeah.  At-sea trial for the VDS fish.  Our playmate's out there waiting.  Hope your wife's settled in.  Might want to call her before we cast off."
     Dan stared at the cigar.  It burned with little pops and sputters.  Betts would be pissed.  She was anything but "settled in;" the duplex was three boxes deep in books, clothes, old furniture her parents had given them disassembled.  And what were "VDS fishes" and "playmates?"  "How long, uh, will we be out, sir?"
     "Three weeks's my guess.  Week up, a week operating, one week back.  Slated to be back by Christmas.  But it's elastic."  Bryce waved away a month with his cigarette.  "Anyway, about your billet -- you bring your orders?"
     "Here, sir."
     "I know they assigned you as gunnery officer, but the CO and I talked it over, and we're going to break you in as first lieutenant instead.  Deck gang, bo's'n's mates.  We had a jaygee there but he ran afoul of somebody's husband over in base housing and the legal beagles have got him deep dished.  Rather than move another man over, we'll leave Ohlmeyer as Guns and plug you into First Division.  Any problems with that?"
      "No sir.  Sir, I hoped I'd get some navigating experience, I -- "
 "All our junior officers navigate.  You'll get enough time on the bridge, if that's what you want -- Dick?"
     "Dan, sir."
     "Dan.  Daniel Lenson."  Bryce gave him an odd glance; it might have been suspicion, but then he seemed to dismiss it.  "We're standing one in three now.  I'll tell Evlin to put you on tonight as jay-oh-oh-dee.  Jimmy John, that's Captain Packer, believes in shaking his ensigns down fast as they can take in slack.  You're a boat school type, I expect you to shine from day one.  And if you don't, well, let's just say you won't be spending many evenings with that hot new wife.  Understood?"
    "Yes sir.  I'll do my best."
     Bryce nodded.  He lifted his voice.  "Hey, 'Fredo!"
     Steps sounded outside the door.  "Sah?"
     "New boy here.  Fix him up in Mister Sullivan's bunk."
     "Mistah Sully, he be back?"
     "No.  If he's got any laundry, bring it here; I'll take care of it."
     "Sah."  The door banged shut at the same moment something squealed in the room, loud, like a small animal being hurt.  Bryce's hand found a telephone under the desk.  "XO," he said.  "Yes.  Yes.  Aye, sir.  Be right up."
     When he hung up Bryce sighed.  He flicked the lighter open and closed.  "So.  Follow Mabalacat.  He'll show you your room and issue your linen.  Report to the bridge when sea and anchor goes.  Your department head's name's Norden.  He's a Yankee too.  And a . . . anyway, you'll see him on the bridge."
     "Thank you, sir."  He waited a moment, then stood.  "I'm glad to be aboard, sir."
     "Good to have you."  Bryce shook hands quickly and stubbed the cigarette out in a brass shellbase.  When he stood his belly strained over his belt.  He banged the door open and motioned Lenson out.
      In the passageway Dan slipped the cigar into a butt kit.  He and his roommate had smoked a pack of Wolf Brothers once to kill the Severn mosquitoes, and gotten sick as dogs.  This was worse.  The back of his tongue tasted like sandpaper basted in creosote.
     "Sah?  This way to room."
     He stood beside his luggage, watching the steward's retreating back.  Again he thought, they told me to insist on service.  But they'd told him not to make threats to subordinates, too, and what Bryce had said sounded very much like a threat.  Well, maybe he was being too sensitive his first day aboard.
     He picked up the bags and followed the Filipino aft, into heat that, incredibly, kept increasing.  Hell, he thought.  Underway today.  Underway today!
    How was he going to break this to Susan?

                   #                   #                   #

    And now past the moving destroyer slid the snow-coated rocks of The Dumplings, the low hills of Fort Adams, the bare prickle of trees above granite.  The land was so close it seemed he could spit to it.  Somewhere to the east was fashionable Newport, the mansions of turn-of-the-century Vanderbilts and Oelrichs.  But he couldn't see them from here.  Ahead stretched the Narragansett, green-white and cold-looking, broken by a two-foot chop.  The channel was broad as a thirty-lane highway, its edges marked by two lines of buoys, red to port, black to starboard.  He watched one slide past.  It was bigger than he'd thought, easily eight feet in diameter.  Its steel side was hairy with barnacles.
     Wedging himself into a corner, he listened to the litany of the piloting team.
     "Navigator recommends steer two-two-zero."
     "Come left to two-two-zero."
     "Two-two-zero aye!  My rudder is left, coming to two-two-zero."
     "Very well.  Quartermaster, got a set and drift yet?"
     "Tide's behind us, sir.  About a knot and a half."
     Ryan's bridge was thirty feet wide and ten deep.  It was crammed with radar consoles, helm, engine order telegraph, plotting table.  Two leather chairs grew from pedestals to the left and right.  Neither was occupied at the moment.  In the space left over a dozen men stood shoulder to shoulder or bent over gear.  Officers in khakis or blues and foul weather jackets.  Enlisted in dungarees, some neat and new, more shabby and faded.  Most wore blue ball caps, though one had on the traditional white sailor hat.  Two of the windows were latched up.  The cold bright wind blew steadily in through them.  Ryan slid down the channel like a Lincoln on a new highway.  The steady vibration of her turbines tickled the soles of his feet.  He leaned against a bulkhead, feeling raw tactile pleasure as knobs and levers dug into his back.
     The lieutenant who'd given the course order -- the officer of the deck, he assumed -- stood in the center of the pilothouse, just ahead of the helm.  Short blond hair stuck up around the edges of his cap.  He was staring forward through a pair of heavy binoculars.  His hands were deeply freckled, the deepest Dan had ever seen, giving the effect of countershading.  Against it a green stone sparkled in a silvertoned class ring.  His slight shoulders were relaxed into the glasses, hips thrust forward.  Dan had a moment of envy.  He knew the basics of what was going on, but it was different from Tactics class, different from cruising around the Severn in Yard Patrol craft, making believe.
     He was thinking this when the lieutenant turned to the man at the wheel.  His pale blue eyes were overlaid with annoyance.  "Mind your helm, Coffey."
    "Am, sir.  Seems sloppy."
     "Doesn't respond?"
     "Some kind of give in it.  Like it ain't hooking up right."
     "You on the port system?"
     "Port pump, port synchro."
     "Shift to starboard."
     "Shift steering to starboard, aye."  The helmsman bent, flipped switches, straightened.  He grasped the wheel again and a puzzled expression took his face.  He moved it right, then left.
     "Lost steering!"
     The OOD had his glasses halfway to his face.  "Shift back to port system," he said instantly.  "Fo'c's'le, prepare anchor for letting go.  Jay-oh-dee, take a look astern, see if there's anybody coming up the channel.  Chief, how much water to starboard, beyond the buoys?  You" -- he pointed to Dan, who flinched -- "Crank twelve, get an auxiliaryman up here right now."
     The bridge exploded into activity.  The captain came in from the wing, lips compressed.  Dan found a sound-powered phone on the bulkhead behind him.  As he spun the crank three men began shouting at once.
     "Fo'c's'le reports ready for letting go!"
     "You have two hundred yards to shoal water to right of the channel, over a mile to the left."
     "Port pump on.  Rudder still doesn't respond!"
     "Freighter upchannel, coming around the point.  Maybe a mile back."
     The lieutenant reached above his head without looking.  "All engines stop," he said, and pushed a button twice.
     "After steering answers."
     "Engine room answers, all stop."
     "Sir," said Dan, "the auxiliaryman's on his way."
     "Very well," said the lieutenant, speaking rapidly yet calmly, still looking ahead.  The captain stood beside him, his pipe in his hand.  "After steering, steer by indicator.  Helmsman, indicate left standard rudder."
     "Indicate left standard, aye."
     "Is she answering?  We have a buoy ahead, Mr. Norden.  Have you shifted control aft?"
     "Yes sir, just shifted."
     "You should have called me."
     "Yes, sir.  Sorry, sir."
     Dan could see the buoy clearly.  It was perhaps a quarter mile ahead.  Ryan coasted toward it, driven through the water by momentum even though its screws were slowing.  The bridge was so quiet he could hear the gulls screaming as they rose from the black steel of their resting place.
     "After steering says, she's not answering."
     The captain had his mouth open, but the lieutenant was already in speech.  "Port engine back full.  Starboard engine, ahead full."
     "Port engine back full aye!  Starboard engine ahead full aye!  Engine room answers, port back, starboard ahead full!"
     "Very well.  What's the freighter doing?"
     "Still bearing down on us, sir."
     Norden reached up again.  The horn ripped through their ears.  One long blast.  Another, short.  Another, short.  He was talking on the intercom as the last blast died.  "Signal bridge, OOD.  Hoist 'not under command' as soon as possible."
     "Signal bridge, aye."
     The deck shuddered.  The buoy disappeared beneath the rise of the bow.  The ship began to pivot, twisted by her opposed screws, but very slowly.  The bridge was silent.  A ship's horn droned somewhere astern, three long blasts, the tone deeper than theirs.  Dan tensed, waiting for the collision.
     The buoy appeared to starboard and walked down the side of the ship about twenty yards off.  Seagull scat stained its rusty sides.  It moved heavily, thrusting itself in and out of the sea as it heaved on its submerged chain.
     "Straighten her out now, damn it," said the captain in a low voice.
     "All engines, ahead one third."
     The engine order telegraph pinged as the lee helmsman racked the handles back and forward.  "All engines, ahead one third.  Engineroom answers, ahead one third."
     "Where's the goddamn freighter?"
     "Coming up the port side, Captain."
     The merchant came into view, crowding the line of red buoys.  It swept by them, an orange cliff of hull, stacks of containers, haze whipping off her stack.  A tiny figure in a yellow windbreaker looked down on them.  VERTICORE, Panama City, said the stern.  "He didn't slow much," said Lieutenant Norden.
     "It'd cost him money," said Captain Packer.  "I bet he never backed one rpm, the bastard."
     "Sir!"
     "What?" said both men at once.
     "I think -- I have steering back, on the port pump."
     "Test it," snapped Norden.
     The sailor whipped the wheel left and right, arms bulging under rolled-up denim, studying the rudder indicator.  "Helm answers, sir."
     "Steer two-one-zero."
     "Two-one-zero, aye."
     The destroyer rolled to the freighter's bow wave.  The men braced themselves against gear, some reaching up to a brass rail that ran the width of the bridge.
     The captain ignored the motion, riding it out on wide-planted legs.  Dan's first impression of him, on the wing, had been of imperturbability.  He observed the captain closely now, from the side.
     James Packer was of moderate height, no more than forty.  Under crisply pressed khaki his chest and shoulders were those of a stevedore or truck driver, one who earned bread by heavy work.  Under the gold-crusted visor his face thrust forward from forehead to jaw, with prominent, almost Indian cheekbones, gray eyebrows above round ridges of brow, wide angry mouth.  Dan saw now that the impassivity of his first impression was a mistake -- or a mask.  Something less indurate was showing now.
     His teeth clamped on the stem of a short pipe, fists clenched, Packer was scowling after the receding stern of the freighter.
     He turned his head a moment later, searching for some instrument on the bulkhead, and saw Dan watching him.  Both men dropped their eyes.  Dan felt embarrassed, as if he were watching a man wake from a sleep he had every right to think unobserved.
     Packer stayed out on the wing the rest of the way out the channel.  When the sea buoy fell astern he went below.  Norden took off his hat the moment the skipper left the bridge.  Most of the enlisted did the same.  He blew out and grinned across the pilothouse at Dan.  "Almost put the fenders over for that one."
     "You did all right, I thought."
     "Like they say, as long as you remember port's left and starboard's right it's not that hard to drive a ship.  Something's wrong with that frigging steering.  But the skipper says there's no way he's putting out a fail to sail report . . . You our new ensign?"
     "Yes sir."
     "Come on up here, get acquainted.  Mark, you ready to take her?"  A black-bearded jaygee elbowed himself off the radar console.  "Mister Silver has the conn," Norden announced.
     The helmsman and lee helm carried on by rote, chanting out their course and speed.  Norden stepped aside.  Up close, Dan saw that his chin bristled with pale stubble.  He was six inches shorter than Lenson.  As they shook hands he kept an eye on the sea.  The slight-boned hand was strong.  "I'm Rich Norden.  Weapons officer.  You'll be working for me as first lieutenant."
     "Yes sir, that's what I understand from the XO."
     "You met him already?"
     "Yes sir, in his stateroom, just before we uh, cast off and got underway."
 It sounded a little too salty to Dan, but Norden just said, "He sucker you into one of his cigars?"
     "Oh . . . yeah.  I can still taste it, in fact."
     "Those things are probably old as this ship.  At least as old as the exec."
     "Yeah, they didn't seem too fresh."
     "Met the skipper?"
     "Not officially."
     "You ought to pretty quick, not go wandering around his ship like the horse with no name."  Before Dan could reply he had spun a crank; something squawked beneath their feet.  "Cap'n, Lieutenant Norden here.  We got a new ensign waitin' to meet you."
     Pause.  Dan looked out over the bow.  Plowing steadily ahead at fifteen knots, the destroyer was emerging from the embracing hills into a wide bay.  At its far end, sparkling with sunlight off deep blue, the jagged rim of the open Atlantic underlined the sky.
     Norden clanged the handset back into its holder.  "He's got some kind of manual to read.  Says he'll catch you later today."  He craned his neck to check the gyrocompass, then relaxed again.  Silver was by the chart table, muttering in his beard to the equally hirsute quartermaster chief.
     "So, they told you much about this cruise?"
     "Not much, sir."
     "Call me Rich.  Except on watch, and in front of the enlisted.  Well, we're out for three, four weeks, going to test the widget.  You seen it?  On the stern?"
     "I didn't notice anything special."
     "Yeah, there's a lot of shit on deck first time you see us, I guess.  It's new.  Close-hold information: a towed body on eight hundred feet of cable.  Gets down under the thermo layer, where the subs hide.  We're going up north of the Arctic Circle, give it a workout under operating conditions.  Know much about sonar?"
     "Not much."
     "Better learn.  We do a lot of antisub work."  His eyes tightened, the first crow-tracks incongruous above the freckled cheeks of a boy.  "But it gets harder for her every year."
     "What do you mean?"
     Norden's answer was to draw his lips back in a grimace.  After a moment he glanced at Silver, who had his head up again, and jerked his thumb toward the wing.
     In the sun it was almost warm.  Norden pushed back his cap and rubbed his forehead.  The freckles ended at his cheeks and nose; the cap band left a red line on fair skin.  "Look at that," he said, lifting his chin at the horizon.
     They were leaving the land behind.  Its forested and rocky arms were flung wide, like a woman releasing a dove.  Distance had softened pine green and earth brown to the hazy blue of Turner.  The old ship creaked, nodding to a ground swell.  From time to time it rolled a few degrees, just enough to make their shadows lean on the wooden grid of the deck.  The stacks breathed with a muffled roar, jetting a whiskey-colored haze.  On the forecastle chipping hammers clanged, slow, deliberate, like picks against stone.  From aft came a warning bell, faint and trivial against the immensity of sea and sky.
     "You superstitious?" Norden asked him.
     "Me?  I guess not."
     The weapons officer groped in his pocket, then leaned over the splinter shield.  The coin spun free of his thumb, twinkling in the sun, and they watched the glint arc out and down.  Dan watched it sink for a long time beneath clear blue, winking like a star, before the white roar of the bow wave swept over it.
     "Sailors used to offer silver to Poseidon at the beginning of a voyage."
     "You believe in that?"
     "Believe?  Hell no, I'm a devout atheist."
     "I get it."  Lenson looked back at the land, thinking that those men too had left behind expectant wives, babies, and not for weeks.  For years, in ships a quarter the length of this one.  In his pocket his fingers touched a milled edge.  He took it out, drew back his arm and threw.
     Tradition . . . yet he lived in an age of contempt for whatever had endured.  The Academy had cast him in a mold honored by time.  But sometimes he wondered if the alloy had changed.
 He saw the coin move outward, and for a moment saw it simultaneously in four different ways.  It was a gift to the gods, in whom he did not believe.  It was a link to the men who'd blazed the road he travelled now.  It was a remnant of primitive neurosis, a sop to forces that heeded no curse or prayer.  And at the same time he saw simply a moving mass losing its horizontal acceleration component as gravity took hold, bending its world-line like a fishing rod.
     It met the sea, and he could not tell which way of seeing was the truth, or even closest to it.
     "What did you mean, Rich?"
     "About what?"
     "You started to say something about the ship."
     "Oh, that."  Norden shook his head.  "Let's talk about it later.  There anything I can help you with personally, get you started off right?"
     "Uh -- how about uniforms?  I notice they're kind of mixed -- "
 "That's because we were getting underway.  In port it's generally winter blue, the blue shirt and tie.  Underway we wear wash khakis, long sleeves, open collar.  Where we're going you might want to wear blues on watch just 'cause they're warmer.  Is your stateroom okay?  Where have they got you?"
     "A little place back aft.  Three other bunks in it."
     "That's Boy's Town.  Junior officer bunkroom.  Only seniority or death gets you out of there."
     Dan looked at him sidewise.  His department head had lifted his closed eyes to the cold sun.  He envied Norden's air of mastery.  He remembered how swiftly and correctly he'd maneuvered when the steering went out, all the things he'd borne in mind and anticipated.  Yet he was friendly, easy to talk to.  He suddenly felt hopeful.  Norden would take care of him.
     "Norden -- that sounds familiar.  Isn't there a trophy at the Academy -- "
     "Yeah, the Norden Cup.  Best essay on tactics."
     "And an Admiral Norden -- "
     "Great-grandfather.  Spanish-American War.  None of that goes down too good with our worthy exec."
     "Commander Bryce doesn't seem to like Academy guys much."
     "You caught that?"
     "He made it real easy to pick up on."
     "Fortunately we're not alone.  There's a sizeable class of people in there with us.  But I think this is what principally hacks him off at me."
     Dan studied the picture.  A fair, rather aloof-looking young woman; Norden, grinning in a sports jacket and tie; an older child, a boy, fair-haired like his parents; a baby.  They were all smiling.  The baby was brown.  "Lin and I just adopted her.  Gabriela.  She's Mexican.  Cute, huh?"
     "She's a sweetheart."
     "Never thought I'd sign up for two of 'em.  But having a family changes a lot of things.  Having someone else to live for, not just yourself."
     He was about to ask Norden what exactly it changed when the 1MC said, "NOW SECURE THE SPECIAL SEA DETAIL.  SET THE NORMAL UNDERWAY WATCH.  ON DECK, WATCH SECTION ONE."
     "About time."  Norden set his cap again.  "Let's get me relieved, then we'll give you the fifty-cent tour."
     With a last look at the receding shore, Dan followed him inside.

Click Here to return to the David Poyer Home Page.