Rage of Battle

off South Korea. Ray, it was said by some, had lost control, giving the order to abandon ship when it was still salvageable. Others said he hadn’t given any such order — that one of the ship’s mates had mistaken a hand signal from Ray in the inferno that engulfed the Blaine’s bridge movements after impact. Whatever had happened, Ray no longer had a command. And only now, three months and eight operations later, did the tightly polished skin, grafted from thigh and buttocks, even begin to make his face look anywhere near human.

As the chief electrician’s mate and the next watch’s sonar operator turned and walked away with his sketch, Robert Brentwood got tough with himself. He didn’t agree with his father about a lot of things, including his view of psychiatrists, but he knew his father was right about the captain of a ship. He, Robert Jackson Brentwood, was supposed to be one of the navy’s best and brightest, commander of the most powerful warship in history and his country’s last line of defense. If he couldn’t handle it, he should hand it over to Zeldman right now. It was time to bury Evans.

“Excuse me,” he said briskly as he passed the electrician’s mate and the sonar operator, who were also headed for the stern section with the sketch of the MOSS. Without turning to them, Brentwood ordered, “Don’t wait until we finish with Evans. Get started on that right away.”

“Be a bit crowded, sir.”

“I know, but it can’t be helped. They’re still mopping up the forward torpedo room. I want it done in ten hours, well before the next scheduled TACAMO station.”

The mate frowned, the red glow accentuating his baldness as his hand swept from eyebrows to the back of his head. “Sir, I don’t know if we — I mean, we’ll have to use a torch and-”

“Ten hours!” said Brentwood.

Sonar turned to the mate. “He’s a hard bastard. Doesn’t give a shit about Evans.”

“Yeah, well,” said the chief. “Nothing we can do for Evans now, is there?”

“The skipper needn’t have given him that shot.”

“Old man’s call, Sonar.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Come on,” said the chief. “Can’t do the fucker by ourselves.” For a moment Sonar thought the chief meant Evans. When they got to the machine shop and showed him the sketch, the machinist shook his head, pointing at the skipper’s arrowed instructions with an oil rag. “No way, Chiefie. Not in ten hours.”

“Why?” asked the chief, surprising Sonar.

“That shank,” said the machinist, “is titanium-reinforced. Isn’t a fucking wiener.”

“What’s the matter? I thought you were Mr. fucking ‘Can-Do,’ “ said the mate.

“Can-Do,” a big, gangly man from West Virginia, fixed Sonar in his stare. “What do you think?”

Sonar made a face bordering on neutrality. One of the ROs came over, asking where the captain was.

“Aft torpedo room, I guess,” answered the Virginian.

The RO, who came from Utah and had only been aboard for one other patrol, was already known as “Mr. Clean” because of his pink baby-face complexion, despite him being in his early forties. He didn’t like Can-Do’s tone and bawled out the Virginian for wearing “booties,” the yellow rubber shoe covers worn by men as they entered the reactor room so as to prevent transporting any radioactive dust throughout the sub. “Take those back to the reactor room,” said the RO.

“Sorry, sir, I forgot,” said Can-Do, giving the RO an “up yours” sign as the officer walked out into the ruby sheen of the passageway.

“Crack in the coffeepot,” said Can-Do, reaching down for the yellow booties. “That’s why he’s so goddamned testy.”

“Bullshit!” said the electrician’s mate. “If the reactor had a fissure in it, we’d have a bright patch on our chest.” Sonar craned his neck, looking down for any color change in his dosimeter.

“I don’t mean the outer casing,” continued Can-Do. “The inner wall.”

“Christ — it’s the strongest thing on the boat,” said the mate.

“You telling me it’s impossible?” asked Can-Do.

“Un-fucking likely,” said the mate. “Anyway, keep it to yourself. You’ll frighten young Sonar here.”

Sonar was keeping right out of it, giving all his attention to the skipper’s diagram, knowing he’d have to test it when Can-Do was finished — if he was finished in time.

* * *

As it turned out, the Virginian was wrong — there wasn’t a fissure in the reactor, the officer was upset because he’d just heard Evans was about to be deep-sixed. The RO was a “mustang,” a man who’d come up through the ranks, and he identified more than most officers with the enlisted men. He was also a practicing Mormon, and though he hadn’t known Evans personally, he offered to help the burial party.

“Shroud has to be weighted heavily at this depth,” Brentwood told him. “Don’t want anything floating topside giving us away. Those Russians probably got a new noise signature from us after those depth charges. No good helping them to pinpoint our—”

“I’ll look after it, sir,” said the RO.

“Very well.”

The officer thought Brentwood could have shown a little more sensitivity about Evans rather than simply treating the corpse as a nuisance to get rid of. It didn’t jibe with what he’d heard about the skipper, who, among Roosevelt’s crew, was affectionately known as “Bing.” Something to do with Bing Crosby was it? — maybe the skipper sang in the shower or something. But apparently the nickname had nothing to do with his love of old-fashioned music, “Bing” deriving more from his old-fashioned nature. Rumor had it that, knowledgeable as he was about the world of the submarine, he was, despite his engagement to some Englishwoman, extraordinarily naive when it came to the opposite sex. Mr. Clean had never discovered precisely why the crew was convinced of this, other than it had something to do with what the English called a “trollop,” a woman of easy virtue, approaching him at some party in Scotland, and Brentwood, ever so polite, trying to gracefully decline her advances, whereupon the woman started screaming at him, calling him a straitlaced “old bastard”—a “Bing Crosby.” Had the revered crooner from the 1940s held rigid views about premarital sex? Anyway, the RO didn’t care whether the skipper was considered unpracticed in matters of sex. Maybe, in a world of AIDS, he was merely being careful. All the RO wanted to know was how good a sub captain the forty-three-year-old skipper was. Maybe his apparent lack of sensitivity as far as Evans was concerned might in fact be his preoccupation with the array of hard choices that confronted him if Roosevelt was to have any hope of survival. He saw the hospital corpsman walking down the passageway with what looked like two plastic garbage bags except for the glistening of the zippers on the body bags. Two of the men wounded in the depth charge attack had died.

* * *

Aboard the Yumashev, Captain Stasky was breaking radio silence. He knew that, slowed down as he was and with his general position probably known because of the explosions of the few depth charges that had worked, there wasn’t much chance of the enemy not knowing where he was. But even if this were not so, Stasky knew it was his duty, regardless of his own safety and that of his crew, to inform Northern Fleet headquarters immediately that more than half the depth charges he’d dropped had been duds.

It was not merely for the sake of the safety of the other ships in the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Pacific Fleets, however, that Stasky ordered the coded message be sent without delay — but because of his own status as commander of a cruiser bearing the coveted white-backed red star with four black circles, the highest antisubmarine warfare efficiency rating awarded by the fleet commander. His own career was at stake.

* * *

Aboard the USS Roosevelt, six men crammed in around the torpedoes, their caps off as Robert Brentwood began the service, the men’s faces showing the strain of the Yumashev’s depth attack on them, lines of tension etched deeply in their faces in the red battle light, several of the men gripping their blue baseball-style caps. Only the reactor room officer appeared calm, a serenity about him that Brentwood found more disconcerting man helpful, especially when, as captain, he was trying to present the coolest demeanor he could while reciting the age-old prayer for those killed at sea. At such moments, Brentwood, though he was the one speaking, often felt outside himself, more an observer, he thought, than a participant in the