XII
"do what i do," I told Semyon, who was rubbernecking at the big ships in the wash. He glowered resentfully, but he followed orders.
We stepped into a submersible whaleboat and sat ourselves in the sternsheets while a couple of efficient seamen disposed of the crates containing the animals in the cargo space. They were almost all the baggage Semyon and I had between us; the orders had specified strip-ship condition. It meant battle stations; it meant the big-ship Navy and a combat mission; it meant, perhaps, getting somewhere near the east coast of Africa and Elsie.
We boarded Monmouth, a 40,000 ton carrier, by one of the three after gangways, and Semyon was so preoccupied watching the whaleboat carrying our animals to a forward gangway for loading that he almost forgot to salute the colors. I nudged him, and he looked at me blankly for a moment before he remembered our careful rehearsal. Josie and the apes were easier to train than Semyon Timiyazev.
Our quarters were small but comfortable; we shifted into dress blues and reported to the Executive Officer, and were sent immediately to see the Captain. I had almost forgotten such niceties of the naval service as the Captain's call. I would have felt like the wanderer coming home, except that I wasn't feeling much of anything except a queasiness in my stomach and a throbbing like Monmouth's main-drive engines in my head. But I got through the interview with the Captain all right, and so did Semyon. Having a hangover is not, after all, the worst thing that can happen to a naval officer on his first day at a new ship; it tends to make you concentrate on what you are doing.
But as soon as we had a moment to ourselves, we headed for the sick bay and wheedled vitamin shots out of one of the surgeons. He thought it was very funny. They helped, but I did not enjoy the surgeon's prescription for "helping to re-establish the intestinal flora" which he claimed the antibiotics had pretty well knocked out. It was yogurt, and I forced it down, but I almost lost it again when Semyon cried delightedly, "Schav! Please, Doctor—me too," and proceeded to swallow a pint of the stuff.
All in all, we were in pretty good shape for the briefing at 900 hrs, the next morning, except for Semyon's nagging worry about his beloved dogs. "Josie, of course," he told me fretfully. "They understand Josie, she is on the orders. And Sammy is all right, and the apes. But the little puppies, Logan, will they be all right? No orders for them, you know."
I chased him down to the whaleboat level to look them over.
Before sunrise we got under way. Monmouth slipped lines and stood out into the channel—on the surface, since Caodai radar didn't matter on our initial course in the Gulf. I was on deck in officer's country as we sailed, feeling useless, with reason. I had no part in the complicated task of getting a war vessel on course.
Faint dawn light was coming up behind us. Monmouth blinkered good-by to the harbor monitor through a gentle drizzle, and then the hailer gave all of us idlers the warning, Stand by to submerge. I found a spot out of the traffic lanes, near a running port; and I watched through the glass as the deck parties stripped and stowed the outboard gear. They did their job and disappeared in well under sixty seconds. Monmouth was a taut ship.
There was a hoot and jangling of bells, and Monmouth slid downward into the water. Green and blue waves bubbled up over my port; turned brackish gray; and then there was nothing at all to see, nothing but a faint sourceless light through the water outside.
I went to the briefing in a thoughtful mood, and was astonished at the number of officers there—nearly sixty.
The ship's Executive Officer rapped his knuckles against the standing microphone and called us to attention.
He looked at us queerly for a moment before he spoke. Then he waved a red-sealed envelope and said:
"Welcome aboard, gentlemen. You've all got quarters and you all know you're on a crash-priority mission, and half of you have been haunting my office ever since we got under way. Well, I couldn't tell you anything. I've been in this Navy for forty-six years, and I've heard of sealed orders, and I always thought they were something you read about in books." He slapped the envelope against the mike, and the amplified thud rolled around the room. "That's what we got here. Sealed orders. In—" he glanced at his watch—"in one minute the Captain's going to be opening his copy of these, and then we'll all know what we're up to. Until then, hold your breath."
He rocked back on his heels, calmly observing his watch. Then he leaned forward again, and I guess we all really did hold our breaths. He said: "I forgot to tell you, those of you that don't know it already, that Captain's Calls are suspended for the time being, so don't bother me for appointments."
There was a groan from the sixty of us, and he said: "All right, gentlemen. Here it is." And he stripped the seals off the envelope and began to read.
It was a crash-priority mission, all right. Even the weary old Exec stood straighter and seemed to come alive as he read the formal phrases from the orders.
It was—the Glotch—though that wasn't what the orders called it. Intelligence had come up with the conclusion that the Caodai Headquarters for the new weapon was not on the interdicted mainland, but on the island of Madagascar. Our sortie was to make reconnaissance, to find out what was there—and, if possible, to pulverize it.
"Target Gamma." That's what the orders called it—a point fixed with grid markings on a map. Something was there, something which the Caodais were trying as ably as they could to hide. We were going to take a look.
The Exec finished reading the orders, and folded the sheet.
"Specific assignments will be given out later, by sections," he said after a moment. "Gentlemen, this has been as much of a surprise to me as to you, as I mentioned earlier. But I suppose we all had an idea that it might have something to do with the Caodai weapon.
"I only want to add one thing to what you've just heard. It's no secret that the Cow-dyes have been hitting us pretty hard. Well, it's been worse than you think. Worse than we can stand, in fact." He licked his lips. "Gentlemen, you're in for some rough times, and only a fool would try to tell you that you're all going to come through them alive. But keep this in mind: This is for keeps. I have it from the Captain. If this doesn't work, the JCS's next recommendation to the President will be a declaration .of war. It's as serious as that.
"We've got to come through. Or else it means the satellite bombs for everybody."
That was that; we were dismissed. We left the briefing room silently, all of us too busy thinking about what the Exec had said and its implications to talk. . But we were not all thinking of the same implications. I raced from the briefing room to the chartroom, to confirm what I already knew but could hardly believe.
Our target was Madagascar, a long, fat island hanging off the east coast of Africa. And next above it, inches away on the map, another island—
Zanzibar!
And Zanzibar meant Elsie.
Semyon came chortling to me: "At last we are equals! I have been promoted, I am now considered as valuable as you and the animals!" He displayed what had just been issued to him, an aluminum helmet, protection against the Glotch. The whole ship was being fitted with them.
"We're late," I growled at him, and tugged him away to our special section briefing. I had been on edge ever since I had found out how close I was coming to AORD S-14, where my wife was eking out her days in the monotony of a prison camp. Incredible that I could come that close to her and not see her! But impossible that I could do anything else! For all of my months on Spruance I had been praying for just such a strike; and now that it was within grasp, it was worse than anything I could have imagined. So near, I said to myself—and for the first time understood how powerful the ragged, hackneyed clichés of speech had to be to survive so long—so near and yet so far.
Our special section briefing was very exclusive—the briefing officer, Semyon, and me. He began without preamble: "There will be three waves against Target Gamma, and you are in Wave One. There will be three groups in Wave One: Group A, air reconnaissance. That's radar-proof gliders, launched at sea, with infrared scanners and so on. Group B is intelligence officers—they're Oriental nationals, mostly from Hawaii, I think, for infiltration. Group C is animal penetration—that's you."
He closed his Plans book with a snap and said: "Your mission is to get your animals as close to Target Gamma as you can and get them back. You will spend the next seven days rehearsing them; they will have to learn to use small cameras, which they will carry around their necks, and they will take pictures of everything in the area. You two are expendable, but the animals are not—until they've got the pictures, anyway."
I glanced at Semyon—the briefing officer had just sunk Weems, and my visions of my first combat command. "How are we supposed to get the animals back if we're expendable?"
"We'll establish a rendezvous point where they can be picked up. Frankly, I think you two will get caught. Maybe it will be even better if you do get caught," he added callously, "because it'll give the Caodais something to do. You—" he nodded at Semyon "—may get by; you'll have cover papers as a Ukrainian neo-Bolshevik refugee, of which Intelligence thinks there is a small colony on Madagascar. But you—" that was me "—are going to have to just stay out of sight. Oh, we'll color up your skin and give you what looks like a prosthetic arm, and hope you may pass for a disabled Caodai veteran. But don't count on it. The dogs, remember—they're what's important. Unless there's been a worse security leak than we have any reason to believe, the Cow-dyes won't be on to the animal bit."
That was about all there was to it. Going back to our quarters I thought of the endless days on Weems, training the animals to operate a ship. Was it all camouflage? Were the guiding geniuses behind Project Mako trying to throw dust in the eyes of the Caodais, in case they penetrated our security?
Or was it merely that things had got tight, and whatever long-range plans COMINCH had for Project Mako had to be scrapped in favor of this all-or-nothing effort against Target Gamma?
Still, I thought, looking through the portholes at absolutely nothing—we were fathoms down and running light-less—maybe the prospects weren't so bad after all. Maybe the expendable unit in this operation—myself—might actually enjoy being expended.
It was all pretty far-fetched, I admitted to myself, but consider: If the Caodais nabbed me, say, the chances were that they would not shoot me out of hand. True, I would be a spy, and they certainly weren't going to pat me on the back and send me home with an ice-cream cone in one hand and a red balloon in the other.
But we weren't at war. We didn't shoot Caodai spies. We arrested them, and tried them, and threw them in jail or in concentration camps.
But would that be so bad—assuming, I mean, that the Caodais were as humane as we? Maybe the punishment would be something like imprisonment in a PW camp. And maybe, just maybe (but still, how conveniently close at hand it was!), the PW camp would be AORD S-14, the one which held the heart and soul of all the world . . .
We were supercargo, all of us expendables of the three waves, and we didn't have much to do except keep out of the way.
Semyon, grown queerly moody, spent most of his time slumped over a chessboard in our wardroom. I offered to play a game with him, and his refusal was a masterpiece of tact. Even tact didn't get him out of a game with the duty officer late one night, and Semyon trounced him so economically that I realized why he hadn't been greatly interested in playing against me.
I tried to make friends with some of the ship's officers, but they looked on us with something of the air Chicago's stockyard workers have toward the cattle. They didn't want to make friends, I did manage to get into a few bridge games in the ship's wardroom, but always with the feeling of being an interloper. And the ship's officers, for that matter, struck me as an eccentric lot, far below the standards of Spruance. The only one I cottoned to at all was a gunnery officer named Rooie, like myself a former scout-torp pilot on a Spruance-class cruiser, now on limited duty because of injuries which accounted for some of the three rows of ribbons on his chest. He was salty and amiable; but unfortunately the other officers of his duty section disliked me on sight. For a few days it was bearable, because they urgently needed a fourth for bridge. But after we went down five tricks, doubled and redoubled, after I had started with the Pratt convention (opening two-bid to show a void in a suit), my partner threw his cards on the floor. He was an ensign named Winnington, a beefy young redhead; and what he said about my bridge playing was bad enough, but what he said about me personally made it impossible to stay in the room.
So it all worked out for the best. Semyon and I spent tedious hours with Josie and Sammy, while the chimps asked ridiculous questions and the puppies got in the way; and they were all ready for the big performance. Heaven knows what sense they made out of the answers we gave to their "Whys"; but they knew their jobs.
From Florida we swept grandly south and east, as our course was lined out day by day in the chartroom. At 40 knots—not our best speed, but the one which made the least noise and fuss to alert Caodai sonars—we were clipping off nearly a thousand miles a day.
Each night we surfaced briefly to let the navigators obtain a fix, and for a few moments each time, half a dozen lucky souls were permitted out on the weather deck, perhaps to see the stars. But not me.
For eleven days I counted my fingers and thumbs, while we went from the Caribbean through the South Atlantic, and into the broad curve that grazed the Antarctic Ocean itself south of Good Hope. And then we were creeping up the eastern flank of Africa—slow and wary.
These were interdicted waters. If we were spotted here, we were dead; at the best, we would have to abort and run. Our orders were to avoid engagement unless it was forced on us, but there was a pretty fair chance that we might have no choice. Consequently the fire control stations were double manned around the clock, and we crept under the thermoplane, in the dense Antarctic Deep water, with our fingers crossed. It was dead reckoning now; the navigators had only the fragmentary charts of submarine configurations to help them get a fix; surfacing, even for a moment, was out of the question.
The strain was beginning to tell on the ship's crew.
I looked in on Lieutenant Rooie's wardroom, and it was like the condemned row in the death house. Rooie was there, watching a canned TV program in a film viewer, and when I tapped him on the shoulder he jumped. "Oh, Miller," he said, but his eyes were haunted and it was a moment before he smiled. "How are you?" He switched off the film viewer. "I don't know what the blasted thing is about, anyhow. Want some coffee?"
He signaled the mess attendant without waiting for me to answer. She was an enlisted WAVE, rather attractive looking from the rear; I didn't get a good look at her face as she went out for our coffee.
Winnington appeared from behind a bookshelf. "Hello," he said, a little stiffly.
"Hi." If he wanted to forget the fracas at the card table, I was willing. We all sat down and talked about nothing in particular. They were eager to talk, even Winnington. It is an ugly companion, the knowledge that at any time some wandering Caodai sonar beam may bounce off your ship's hull and lead a torpedo to you.
"Your coffee, sir." Winnington took a cup, and the girl turned to me. She was attractive from the front, too; only a Seaman 2/c, but young and fresh looking. She wore no makeup, but—
But I had seen her before.
I had seen her before, and then she had worn quite a lot of makeup—makeup and little else!
"Nina Merriam!" I said. There was no doubt in my mind; the last time I had seen her, her hair had been a different color; but it was the same girl—the ensign stripper from the Passion Pit. I couldn't believe it, but I couldn't doubt it. She was a spy!
I stood up so fast that I kicked my chair over backward. "What the devil are you doing here?" I bellowed at her. Rooie and Winnington were asking startled questions, and I filled them in. Their reaction was sharper than mine.
"Spy!" gasped Rooie. "Miller, you've caught yourself a spy! Look at her—American as you and me, selling out to those lousy, stinking—"
We took her at quick-march down to the ship's Executive Officer's quarters, leaving Winnington gaping foolishly after us. There was an armed guard at his door. I told him: "Watch her. She's probably a spy. Hold her here while we talk to the Exec."
The girl said sharply, "I'm not a spy!" But what else would she say? Rooie and I pushed our way into the Exec's office, careless of shipboard protocol, and blurted out our story.
We must have sounded like idiots, but nothing ruffled the Exec. He'd said he had been in the Navy forty-six years; I believed every year of it. He stared at us thoughtfully, and lit a cigarette.
"A spy, you say." He puffed on the cigarette in an infuriatingly meditative manner. He was past retirement age, the kind of grizzled old three-striper who keeps passing his fitness tests out of spite, refusing to be put out to pasture. And he kept looking at us.
"Sir," burst out Rooie, "she's right in your anteroom. Why don't you—"
He stopped—just barely in time. Thunderclouds were gathering over the Exec. Well, after all—he was the administrative officer for the ship of the Line, and Rooie was a very junior lieutenant. But the explosion looked like it was going to be a beaut.
It probably would have been, if we had heard it.
But we didn't. The loud-hailers in the passageway cut it off. They rattled with the klaxon ship's alarm, and then the voice from the bridge blared!
"Attention on deck! Attention on deck! Bandits in fleet strength detected on intersecting course. Condition Crash Red! Battle stations all. Repeat, Condition Crash Red!"