“Goodbye, Commodore,” she said, and hung up.
She had sat in the kitchen for almost two hours, letting her emotions range from a flood of tears to red faced anger at the whole Navy system. Mike was going to be pilloried somehow for being right about the submarine, and the club they would use on him, if no other weapon could be found, was going to be his affair with her. Somehow she knew in her bones that Navy officialdom would rally around J.W.,
the wronged husband, never mind that he had been carrying on with another woman in Norfolk for God knows how long. She had mixed herself a strong drink, and then poured it down the drain. Maybe the Commodore was right; maybe she should just get out of Dodge until the whole thing was resolved.
But what about Mike? How would he feel when the shit hit the fan and she was gone? He had said he loved her, and she felt the same way about him. He had brought her back to life, revived her as a woman and as a person after her long stint in the unemotional, one dimensional desert of life as Mrs. Chief of Staff. Where she really wanted to run to was the old houseboat, to be there when he got in, and to hell with what the Navy establishment thought about it. But that might, no, certainly would, make it extremely tough on Mike. She was still fretting about it when the phone had rung again. She had just stared at it for the first four rings, a feeling of apprehension growing in her stomach, and then she had snatched it up.
“Yes, hello?” she answered breathlessly.
“Diane? This is Margaret Forrest at the Gray Lady office at NAS. Diane, can you come in to the hospital? We’ve been receiving a lot of injured people from that accident on the river, but now we’ve been told that apparently something awful has happened to one of the Mayport ships out at sea, and we’ve been told to get every able body we can down here right away.”
Diane’s mouth went dry. Her heart began to pound. She could hardly get the next words out.
“Which—ship?” she asked in a whisper.
“The Gold-something, I can’t remember the name. But they’re talking about two hundred casualties, so it’s very serious. Can you come in?”
Diane had almost fainted.
“Yes,” she had said weakly, “yes, right away.”
The third gurney bumped through the doors, its passenger unconscious and connected to an IV that was being carried alongside by a corpsman. She looked back out into the darkness, and saw them wheeling the last gurney in
from the pad as the helicopter made ready to take off. The wind from its rotor blades almost blew the doors shut and flung sharp bits of sand in her face. As the gurney rolled through the doors, she caught a momentary glimpse of Mike’s face, and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out.
His face, or that part of it that was visible, was black with encrusted, dried blood, one eye puffed and shut tight, his head covered in a huge battle dressing that was itself black with blood, with two thin, scarlet streams of bright red blood visible running down his neck. At the other end there were two round cylinders of splints and dressings where his lower legs should have been.
The corpsmen rolled the gurney down the hall, with Diane following them like a robot, her face ashen. One of them turned to see why she was following them. She pointed down to the inert form.
“That’s the Captain,” she said.
They stopped rolling the gurney, and the other two corpsmen turned around to look at the obviously distressed, pretty woman in the Gray Lady uniform following them.
“What’s that?” one asked.
“That’s the Captain of the ship. Captain Montgomery.”
“Holy shit,” said the corpsman. He looked around for an officer.
The triage team headed by the CO of the hospital was backing out of a room nearby. The corpsman called to the CO.
“Sir, this is the Captain of the ship,” he said.
The tall doctor walked over swiftly, and did a quick, professional appraisal. There was a tag in a plastic page protector tied to the stokes litter, containing the field diagnosis. He studied it briefly, lifted the bandage on Mike’s head, and shook his head.
“Probable skull fracture, both legs and ankles fractured, possible sub-dural hematoma, considerable blood loss,” he intoned, while an intern wrote it all down.
He glanced over at Diane for a brief instant, and then back at the senior corpsman.
“Upstairs. OR. Stat.,” he ordered.
The corpsmen started back down the hall, and Diane tried to follow but the florid faced Captain stepped in front of her.
“We need you down here, Mrs.—?”
“Martinson,” she replied blankly. “But—”
“I understand, Mrs. Martinson, and I assume you know the patient, but we need the help down here, all the help we can get, as you can see, and you won’t be able to see him where he’s going right now, possibly not for several hours. Perhaps you can find his wife out there and inform her that he’s here in the hospital. But then, please come back. OK?”
She nodded silently, fighting back sudden tears, as the triage team swept away again into the next set of rooms. One of the interns gave her a curious glance as they left, and then a nurse grabbed her and asked for help getting a patient off a gurney and into a bed.
NAS Jacksonville Hospital, Saturday, 10 May; 0530
Diane was awakened by the sound of the night call bell on the counter of the intensive care suite waiting room. She had fallen asleep on the sagging, imitation leather couch in the dark corner of the waiting room. Her entire body was stiff and aching. She sat up slowly and looked around the darkened room. The other three women who had been waiting in the room with her had gone; they had probably turned out the lights when they had seen she was asleep.
She tried to remember details from the night before. After Mike’s gurney had gone upstairs, she had been swept up in the press of tending to the flood of casualties for two and a half hours before breaking free to try to find Mike. The exhausted OR staff on the fifth floor had told her that Mike had undergone three hours of surgery and was now in ICU on the third floor. She held back in the ICU lounge
while several other dependents, legitimate dependents, she remembered thinking, had sought after news of husbands and sons. Finally she had steeled herself to step up to the desk and ask. If the corpsman had had any curiosity about why she was asking, he had given no sign. Commander Montgomery was stable, following major surgery. Was she his wife? Only a spouse or other close next of kin would be allowed bedside; she was welcome to wait and ask for reports throughout the night if she liked. The last report she was able to wring out of the ICU staff was that he was stable, and barring complications, would pull through. She heard the bell again.
An officer was at the darkened counter, obviously looking for the corpsman on duty. The waiting room and the adjacent hallway were darkened down to night lights. She stretched and yawned, fighting off her fatigue and the stiff ness of sleeping on a couch. The officer rang the bell again, impatiently, but still no one came out of the stainless steel, swinging doors leading into the ICU. She switched on a table lamp.
“They’ll come out when they can,” she called across the room. “Sometimes they get busy.”
The Gray Lady speaks, she thought irreverently. Support the staff.
The officer turned, and she recognized the Commodore. He was in khakis, and his face was shadowed by the beginnings of a heavy, dark gray beard. His uniform was rumpled, and he looked like he had been up all night. He stared at her for a moment, and then walked over, pitching his heavy, gold braid encrusted hat onto a chair. He examined the coffee pot as he walked over, but it was long since empty. The waiting room and the hallway were dead quiet.
“Well,” he said. “I see you didn’t take my advice.” His voice sounded weary, but he spoke without rancor.
“I was called up,” she said. “They needed everybody.”
“I can believe that. Christ, what a night. What a day and a night. What’s his status?” he asked, sitting down heavily on the other end of the couch.
“Fractured skull, legs broken, ankles broken, lost lots of blood, beat all to hell.”
“Sounds just like Goldsborough,” he said, sadly.
“They finished surgery sometime after midnight,” she continued. “They told me that he was stable after surgery, and that they were watching the head wound. I drifted off sometime after two, I guess. They said they’d call me if there was a change.”
She shook her head to clear the cobwebs. She desperately wanted a shower and some coffee. She got up from the couch, partly to get away from the Commodore’s disapproving gaze, to see if the makings for coffee were in the cabinet beneath the pot. They were.
“How about you getting the water, and I’ll make the coffee?” she said.
He nodded. “First useful thing I’ll have done in the past twenty-four hours.”
He took the pot up the hall to the men’s room. She fixed the filter basket, and started up the pot when he brought it back. They both sat down again to watch the coffee maker go through its cycle, the smell of freshly brewing coffee bringing a ray of life to the dreadful room. Outside, the first hints of daybreak began to dilute the stark blackness of the windows. There were still no sounds from the ICU.
“So,” she said. “What in God’s name happened out there?”
He closed his eyes and leaned back into the couch. At first she thought he was ignoring her question and going to sleep. But then he began to tell her.
“They got the Goldsborough back in. By the skin of everyone’s teeth, and she still may have sunk at the pier by now. Because the seas were flat calm, the two Spruances decided not to wait for any tugs but simply made up double lines to Goldsborough, made a Goldy sandwich, and steamed back in at five knots with guys holding axes standing by the lines in case she went down on them. The ship is apparently shattered, literally—hundreds of cracks in the hull, most of the main machinery dumped on the deck, and
damned near all hands here in the hospital or downtown at Duvall General.”
He looked over at her. “And we don’t know what did it.”
“Surely the submarine did it,” she said.
He smiled at her, closing his eyes again.
“Ah, yes, the submarine. The mysterious, improbable, most unlikely, hardly credible, submarine.”
He was silent for a moment, as if waiting for her.
“They’re going to cover it up, aren’t they,” she said.
He laughed this time, an unhealthy sound.
“You’re as smart as you are good looking,” he said admiringly. “Right to the heart of the matter.”
He sat back up and rubbed his eyes again.
“Because that is the heart of the matter. I spent a very unpleasant few hours yesterday, last night, between the first reports of the action at sea and the beginning of the full scale medevac and salvage operation. Got to participate in several politically toxic conference calls between Norfolk, the Type Commander, the Fleet Commander, the Joint Staff in Washington, Group Twelve, and us little fish in Mayport. Your husband, by the way, is back—flew in on a helo from Coral Sea. The carrier’s coming in around seven or so this morning, but your husband could not wait. No matter that they needed the seat for some of the injured.”
“That’s my J.W.,” she murmured.
“The submarine that wasn’t there,” he continued, as if he had not heard her. “We have reports from the Coral Sea helicopter pilots who were assigned to Goldsborough when he gained contact. They confirm that torpedoes were fired. They confirmed some electric torpedoes from Goldsborough, which they could hear on their dipping sonar, and some great big fucking torpedoes, their words, excuse my French, which they could see from some unknown source fired at the carrier. Apparently Mike turned his ship across their track and laid a pattern of depth charges in their way, and countermined three of them. One kept going, and the helo pilots saw its wake heading over the horizon in the direction of the carrier.
“Then the helo got a contact on its dipping sonar—a
good contact, according to them, running west at high speed. Just like sonar school, they said—a good, solid contact. Another torpedo was fired by Goldsborough—they heard it running, and they heard it fizzle out, probably on the bottom in that shallow water. The helo didn’t have any weapons onboard. Then the contact turned around east towards Goldsborough, and the helo was ordered to break contact and position itself between Goldy and where the carrier had vamoosed to. They broke dip, got out on the 5000 yard fence as ordered, and then somebody set off a small nuke, that’s the way both of them described it—a small nuke, underwater, on Goldy’s port quarter. The explosion was so big that Goldy disappeared in the water plume, and you need to keep in mind Goldy’s masthead height is 117 feet. That’s how big the plume from the explosion had to be. The pilot activated his wire cutter, jettisoned his $200,000 dipping sonar, and lifted the helo off the surface to avoid the wave getting him too. Big fucking wave. Big fucking underwater blast. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think the bastard had a mine left after his little visit to the river. Because the mines that got the Toyota Maru in the river picked that 60,000 ton ship up, 60,000 tons, that’s fifteen times the size of Goldsborough, and nearly threw her out of the channel. We have Navy witnesses to that. That plus the fact that no one could find any big holes in Goldy. Just a zillion little holes and cracks, and everyone onboard with busted legs and heads, like Mike in there. A massive shock wave. Mine guys said that big mines can deliver a 20 to 30 G-force shock wave if they’re placed right.”
“A mine,” she said. “But from the submarine. Who also laid the other mines in the channel.”
“Yeah. I think the mines in the channel were insurance, or maybe even the primary weapon. The whole bit about attacking the carrier was always risky—she could have been expected to have escorts, and it was only a fluke that she didn’t. And the water is really shallow for submarine work
—300, 400 foot out there. Not much room to maneuver a sewer pipe. I think the mines were meant for the carrier, only they got the wrong carrier. And thirty seven Nipponese along with it—nobody survived what happened out there on the river.”
“I saw that thing go up,” she said. “It was terrible.”
“Yeah. I was in Deyo in the CIC, and it rained car carrier for a full minute when all the gas tanks let go. Big mines. We sent a minesweeper out, after it was all over, naturally. They didn’t find any more mines, but the river is ninety feet, that’s ninety goddamned feet deeper than it used to be where it happened. The mine guys say these had to be monster mines, three, maybe four thousand pounds, more than likely gas boosted explosives, to make those kinds of holes. And that’s what I think this guy fired at Goldsborough as Mike went in to kill him with his depth charges, the only weapons he had that might work against this guy, because our side’s torpedoes had locked on to the bottom.” “But what would happen to the submarine if he was close to an explosion like that—wouldn’t it be just like a much bigger version of a depth bomb?”
The Commodore smiled again.
“You want a job?” he asked. “I take it back—brains are dangerous on a staff. Yes, of course. The submarine, being completely submerged, would have taken just as big a hammering as the tin can did, maybe even worse. It probably went down within a mile of Goldsborough.”
“Which means that the Navy can truthfully say that a mine got the Goldsborough, just like the Toyota carrier, but that all this talk of a submarine is fiction, because we don’t habeas a submarine corpus.”
“Precisely. Although they are looking. Boy, are they looking. They’ve got one of the new minehunters down from Charleston, got five sonars on him and frogmen, too, sailed an hour after the Toyota went up, and the Coast Guard has the tethered eye out there. The water depth is between three and four hundred feet, plus or minus, and they are looking very hard indeed. But the bottom is riddied
with canyons and ravines, so it’s going to be very tough.”
“But, either way, they’re not going to find anything, are they?”
“I suspect they are not.”
“And how will they explain the mines?”
The Commodore looked up at the ceiling.
“If I were a public affairs officer, I would speculate, not announce, mind you, but speculate that a cluster of World War II mines, from some long ago minefield, have been bumping along the bottom inshore of the Gulf Stream, where there’s known to be a counter current, for lo, these many years, and that they finally did some damage. There will be a great deal of minehunting along the northeastern coasts of Florida for a while.”
Diane got up to check the coffee, and poured them each a paper cup. She sat back down, and eyed the Commodore over the rim of her coffee cup.
“And what will happen to Goldsborough?”
“She’ll be decommissioned; she’s beyond repair. And then she’ll be scrapped.”
“And Mike?” she asked softly.
The Commodore drank his coffee in noisy little sips for a minute.
“That’s a hard one, and it kinda depends,” he said finally. “He saved the Coral Sea. There’s no doubt about that. If those were Russian steam torpedoes, and they probably were, they had plenty of legs to run out there and chase down the bird farm. But Mike called the Coral Sea when the radio message from Norfolk warning the carrier first came out, confirming it as Coral Sea first showed up in the kill zone, mentioning mines by the way, and got him going in the away direction. He also sent them a critical warning to turn north when the torpedoes were detected, which took the carrier off axis enough to escape detection when the one survivor made it out to where the carrier had been. And, of course, Mike’s maneuver with the depth charges was decisive in thinning out the spread to one fourth of its original size. And if Goldy hadn’t been out
there in the first place, the gomer could have hit Coral Sea with a spread of six torpedoes, and the mines might yet be waiting for the survivor of that.”
“But by saving Coral Sea, he’s demonstrated that the Group not only guessed wrong, but kept silent when the possibility that there was a submarine out there surfaced.”
He nodded slowly at her, his eyes lidded.
“And that, politically speaking, career-wise speaking, is a major crime,” she said.
He nodded again, sipping his coffee, watching her work it out.