War and Remembrance (141 page)

Byron stood staring at Aster, rigid as an electrocuted man.

Aster resumed as the steward left, “Christ, man, with all your troubles, the idea of you eating out your heart because you’ve misled Janice! It would be hilarious, if it weren’t so pathetic.”

“For a year?” Byron repeated, dazedly shaking his head. “A year? You?”

Biting into the sandwich, Aster spoke with a half-full mouth. “Jesus, I’m hungry. Yes, I guess about a year. Since she got over the dengue fever. Between that, and your brother’s death, and you off in the Med, she was a mighty sad cookie at that time. Now, don’t get me wrong, she
likes
you, Byron. She missed you a lot when you were in the Med. Maybe she does
love you, but Christ, she’s
human.
I mean what harm have we done? She’s a great kid. We’ve had a lot of laughs. She’s been afraid of you and your father. Thought you’d disapprove.” He drank coffee, and took another bite, peering at the silent and unmoving Byron. “Well, maybe you do, at that. Do you? I still don’t know how your mind works. Just don’t waste any more energy feeling guilty about Janice. Okay?”

Byron abruptly left the bridge.

At three o’clock in the morning he came into the control room and found Aster at the plotting board with the plot party, smoking a stogie and looking white and tense. “Hi, Briny. The SJ radar has picked one hell of a time to fail. We’re socked in again. Visibility down to a thousand yards. We’re trying to track them by sonar, but listening conditions stink. Our last position on them is two hours old, and if they change course we can lose them.” Aster peered through smoke at Byron. “I don’t know why they would change course. Do you?”

“Not if they’re returning to port.”

“Okay. We agree. I’m holding course and speed.”

He followed Byron into the wardroom. Over coffee, after a lengthy silence, he asked, “Sleep?”

“Sure.”

“Sore at me?”

Byron gave him a straight hard look that reminded Aster of Captain Victor Henry. “Why? You took a load off my mind.”

“That was the idea.”

At dawn they were topside, straining their eyes through binoculars. The radar still was not functioning. The visibility had improved, though heavy clouds still hung low over the sea. The freighters were not in sight. It was Horseshoes Mullen, their best lookout, who sang out from the cigarette deck,
“Target! Broad on the starboard bow, range ten thousand!”

“Ten
thousand?” said Aster, swinging his binoculars to starboard. “Son of a bitch. They did change course. And one of them’s gone.”

Byron discerned in his glass the faint small gray shadow. “Yes, that’s one of those freighters. Same samson posts.”

Aster yelled down the hatch,
“All ahead flank! Right full rudder!”

“Five miles,” Byron said. “Unless he zigzags, he’s made it.”

“Why? We can overtake him.”

Byron turned to peer at him. “You mean on the
surface?”

Aster jerked his thumb up at the low thick cloud cover. “What kind of air searches can they be running in this?”

“Lady, those freighters took evasive action. There’s probably a full submarine alert on. You’ve got to assume that that freighter’s been reporting his course, speed, and position all night, and that planes are in the area.”

“Steady on one seven five!”
Aster called.

Byron persisted, “They can swarm down like bees through any break in the clouds. What’s more, we don’t even know that they haven’t got airborne radar.”

The submarine was heeling and speeding up. Green water came crashing over the low forecastle, dousing everyone on the bridge with spray. Aster grinned at Byron, patted his arm, and snuffed the air. “Great morning, hey? Sound the happy hunting horn.”

“Listen, we’re still in the shipping lane, Lady. Plenty of other targets will be coming along. Let’s submerge.”

“That freighter’s our pigeon, Briny. We’ve been tracking him all night, and we’re going to get him.”

The surface chase lasted almost an hour. The lighter the day grew, the more nervous Byron felt, though the clouds stayed low and solid overhead. They came close to overtaking the freighter, close enough to confirm that it was certainly the same ship. Byron never saw the planes. He heard Mullen yell,
“Aircraft dead astern, coming in low”
and another,
“Aircraft on the port
—” The rest was drowned out in the stutter, whine, and
zing!
of many bullets. He threw himself on the deck, and as he did so a monstrous explosion almost broke his eardrums. Water showered over him; the heavy splash from a close miss, a bomb or a depth charge.

“Take her down! Dive, dive, dive!”
Aster bawled.

Bullets went pinging all over the wallowing ship. The sailors and officers, staggering and leaping for the hatch, one by one dropped through in a rapid automatic routine. Within seconds the conning tower was crowded with the dripping deck watch.

BAMMMM!

Another close miss. Very close.

RAT-TAT-TAT! PING! PING!
A hail of bullets topside. Solid water flooded down through the open hatch, sloshing all over the deck, wetting Byron to his knees.

“The captain! Where’s the captain?” he bellowed.

As though in answer, an anguished voice shouted out on the deck, “BYRON, I’M HIT! I CAN’T MAKE IT!
TAKE HER DOWN!”

Stunned for an instant, then wildly glancing around, Byron shouted at the crew, “Anybody else missing?”

“Horseshoes is dead, Mr. Henry,” the quartermaster yelled at him. “He’s out on the cigarette deck. He got it in the face. I tried to bring him down, but he’s dead.”

Byron roared. “Captain, I’m coming up for you!” He darted into the water showering down the ladder and began to climb.

“Byron, I’m
paralyzed.
I can’t move!” Aster’s voice was a cracking
scream. “You can’t help me. There’s five planes diving at this ship. TAKE HER DOWN!”

BAMM!

The
Moray
rolled far over to starboard.

A torrent of salt water cascaded through the hatch, flooding up against control instruments. Sparks flew in smoke and sudden stink. The crewmen were slipping and stumbling about in swirling water, white-rimmed eyes on Byron as he desperately calculated the time he would need to fight his way topside and drag the paralyzed captain to safety. In this attack, probably in seconds, the
Moray
would almost surely be lost with all hands.

“Take her down, Byron! I’m done for. I’m dying.” Aster’s voice was fading.

Byron thrust himself up the ladder against the foaming waterfall in a last effort to climb out. He could not do it. With terrific exertion he barely succeeded in slamming the hatch shut. Drenched, coughing salt water, his voice breaking with grief, he gave his first order in command of a submarine.

“Take her to three hundred feet!”

The only knell for Captain Aster was the sound he perhaps loved best, though nobody could know whether he heard it.

A-OOOGHA
…
A-OOOGHA
…
A-OOOGHA
…

THE WHITE HOUSE

October 1,
1943

Dear Pug:

Bill Standley has come home singing your praises. I am ever so grateful for all you’ve gotten done over there.

Now I have asked Harry to write the attached letter to you. At least it will get you out of Moscow! You have a feeling for facts, so please take on this job and do what you can. A cable about Tehran very soon would be much appreciated.

By the way, we are launching several splendid new battleships nowadays. One will be for you, as soon as we can shake you loose.

FDR

T
HIS
was scrawled on one sheet of the familiar pale green notepaper. Hopkins’s typewritten letter was much longer.

Dear Pug:

You’ve certainly been doing some grand work with the Russians. Thanks to your survey of shuttle-bombing sites the Joint Chiefs’ planners are already working on the Poltava idea. General Fitzgerald wrote me a fine letter about you, and I sent the Bureau of Personnel a copy. Also, getting our servicemen’s hospital and rest center finished up at Murmansk was a triumph over the ways of their bureaucracy. I’m told it has improved convoy morale.

Now about the forthcoming heads of state conference: Stalin won’t travel farther than Tehran, just south of his Caucasus frontier. He claims he has to stay in close touch with his military situation. Whether that’s true, or he’s being coy, or worrying about his prestige we can’t tell, but he absolutely will not budge on this.

The President will travel almost anywhere to get this damnable war won, but Tehran poses a constitutional snag. If Congress passes a bill he wants to veto, he has to do this with his own hand in ten days, or it automatically becomes law. A cabled or telephoned veto won’t work. Tehran is reachable from Washington in less than ten days, with all equipment pushing in fair weather. But we’re told Tehran weather is unpredictable and horrendous. We’re also told it’s not all that bad. Nobody around here seems to know much about Persia. To Washington types it’s like the moon.

I suggested that you fly down there, look around, ask some questions, and shoot us a word on the weather prospects at the end of November, and on the security angle too, since we hear the place crawls with Axis spies. Also, the President is fortifying himself with facts and figures for talking with Stalin, and Lend-Lease is bound to come up. We have sheaves of reports, but we could use a good eyewitness account of how things are really going in the Persian supply corridor. Unlike most report-writers you have no axe to grind!

General Connolly is the man in charge at our Amirabad base outside Tehran. He’s a good man, an old Army engineer. I knew him well years ago when I headed the WPA and he handled some big construction projects. I have cabled him about you. Connolly will give you a rapid tour of our Lend-Lease port facilities, rail and truck routes, factories, and depots. You can ask any questions, go anywhere, talk to anybody. The President will want to see you before he meets Stalin; and if you can sum up your observations on one sheet of paper that will be a real help.

Incidentally, the landing craft problem has now reached a critical stage, as I foresaw. It’s the strangling bottleneck of all our strategic plans. Production is increasing, but it could be a lot better. However, you’ll soon be returning to your first love, the sea. The President is aware that you feel like a stranded whale.

Yours,

Harry Hopkins

The letters came as a cheering reprieve. Admiral Standley had not lasted long after his outburst; Harriman had succeeded him, bringing a large military mission headed by a three-star general, which spelled the end of Victor Henry’s job. But as yet he had received no orders, and he was beginning to think BuPers had lost track of him. Moscow was again snowbound. He had not heard from Rhoda or his children in months. At last he could escape from the boredom of Spaso House talk, the bitching of the frustrated vodka-soaked American newspapermen, and the unfriendly deviousness and obduracy of the Russian bureacrats. The same afternoon that he got the letters he was on a Russian military plane to Kuibyshev, thanks to a last assist from General Yevlenko. Next day General Connolly met Pug at the airport, put him up in his own quarters on the huge newly built base in the desert, served him venison for dinner, and over coffee and brandy handed him an itinerary that made him blink.

“It’ll take you a week or so,” said Connolly, a bluff West Pointer in his sixties who bit out rapid words, “but then you’ll have something to tell old Harry Hopkins. What we’re doing here is sheer lunacy. One country, the U.S.A., is trying to deliver stuff to another country, the USSR, under the control, or rather interference, of a third country, England, through the territory of a fourth country, Persia, where none of us have any goddamned business being. And —”

“You lose me. Why should England interfere?”

“You’re new to the Middle East.” Connolly blew out an exasperated breath. “Let me try to explain. The British are here by right of invasion and occupation, see? So are the Russians. They partitioned this country by armed force back in 1941, so as to suppress German activity here. That was the reason given, anyhow. Now, follow me carefully.
We
have no right to be here, because we
haven’t
invaded Persia. See? Clear as mud, what? Theoretically we’re merely helping the British help Russia. The striped-pants boys are still dingdonging about all that. Meantime we’re just shoving the goods through any old way, insofar as the Limeys will let us, and the Persians don’t steal it, and the Russkis will come and get it. It keeps piling sky-high in the Soviet depots.”

“It does? But in Moscow they keep screaming for more.”

“Naturally. That has nothing to do with their own transport foul-up. It’s monumental. I had to call an eight-day rail embargo back in August, till they came and took away a mountain of stuff at the northern railhead. Once their pilots, drivers, and railroad men get out of the workers’ paradise they tend to linger outside. Being fresh from Moscow, you probably can’t understand that.”