by a superstructure that looked as though it had been sculpted to sit atop a ship instead of a parking lot.
Morris was glad to see that things were informal. A youthful midshipman met them at the foot of the brow and escorted them aboard, explaining that the captain was on the radio at the moment. After the customary salutes of flag and duty officer, the midshipman led them into the ship's air-conditioned citadel, then forward to the wardroom.
'Hot damn, a piano!' O'Malley exclaimed. A battered upright was secured to the port bulkhead with two-inch line. Several officers rose and introduced themselves.
'Drinks, gentlemen?' a steward asked. O'Malley got himself a can of beer and moved toward the piano. A minute later he was battering his way through some Scott Joplin. The wardroom's forward door opened.
'Jerr-O!' a man with four stripes on his shoulder boards exclaimed.
'Doug!' O'Malley jumped up from the stool and ran to shake his hand. 'How the hell are you!'
'I knew it was your voice on the radio. 'Hammer' indeed. The American Navy's run out of competent pilots and scraped you up, eh?' Both men laughed out loud. O'Malley waved his captain over.
'Captain Ed Morris, meet Captain Doug Perrin, MBE, RN, and a shitload of other acronyms. Watch this turkey, skipper, he used to drive submarines before he went straight.'
'I see you guys know each other.'
'Some bloody fool decided to send him to lecture at HMS Dryad, our ASW school, when I was taking the advanced course. Set back our relations by at least a hundred years.'
'Is the Fox and Fence put back together yet?' O'Malley asked. 'Skipper, there was this pub about half a mile from the place, and one night Doug and me-'
'I am trying to forget that night, Jerr-O. Susan gave me hell about it for weeks.' He led them aft and got himself a drink. 'Marvelous job with that Victor last night! Captain Morris, I understand you did very well with your previous command.'
'Killed a Charlie and picked up two assists.'
'We stumbled across an Echo on our last convoy. Old boat, but she had a good driver. Took us six hours. But a pair of diesel submarines, probably Tangos, got inside and killed five ships and an escort. Diomede may have gotten one of them. We're not sure.'
'Was the Echo coming after you?' Morris asked.
'Possibly', Perrin answered. 'it does appear that Ivan's going after the escorts quite deliberately. We had two missiles shot at us by the last Backfire raid. One ran into our chaff cloud, and fortunately our Sea Wolf intercepted the other. Unfortunately, the one that exploded behind us amputated our towed array and we're down to just our 2016 sonar.'
'So you've been assigned to ride shotgun on us then?'
'It would seem so.'
The captains lapsed into shoptalk, which was the whole point of the dinner in any case. O'Malley found the English helicopter pilot while the tables were set, and they started the same thing while the American played the piano. Somewhere in the Royal Navy was a directive: when dealing with American naval officers, get them over early, get a drink in them first, then talk business.
Dinner was excellent, though the Americans, judgment was somewhat affected by the liquid refreshments. O'Malley listened closely as his captain described the loss of Pharris, the tactics employed by the Russians, and how he had failed to counter them properly. It was like listening to a man relate the death of his child.
'Under the circumstances, hard to see what you could have done differently,' Doug Perrin sympathized. 'Victor is a capable opponent, and he must have timed your coming off the sprint very carefully.'
Morris shook his head. 'No, we came off sprint well away from him, and that blew his solution right out the window. If I'd done things better, those men wouldn't be dead. I was the captain. It was my fault.'
Perrin said, 'I've been there in the submarine, you know. He has the advantage because he's already been tracking you.' He flashed O'Malley a look.
Dinner ended at eight. The escort commanders would meet the following afternoon, and the convoy would sail at sundown. O'Malley and Morris left together, but the pilot stopped at the brow.
'Forgot my hat. I'll be back in a minute.' He hurried back to the wardroom. Captain Perrin was still there.
'Doug, I need an opinion.'
'He shouldn't go back out in his current state. Sorry, Jerry, but that's how I see things.'
'You're right. There's one thing I can try.' O'Malley made a small purchase and rejoined Morris two minutes later.
'Captain, any particular reason you have to head right back to the ship?' he asked quietly. 'Something I need to talk about and I don't want to do it aboard. It's a personal thing. Okay?' The pilot looked very embarrassed.
'How about we take a little walk?' Morris agreed. The two officers walked east. O'Malley looked up and down the street, and found a waterfront bar with sailors going in and out. He steered Morris into it and they found a booth in the back.
'Two glasses', O'Malley told the barmaid. He unzipped the leg pocket of his flight suit and withdrew a bottle of Black Bush Irish whiskey.
'You want to drink here, you buy it here.' O'Malley handed her two twenty-dollar bills.
'Two glasses and ice.' His voice did not brook argument. 'And leave us alone.' Service was quick.
'I checked my logbook this afternoon,' O'Malley said after tossing off half his first drink. 'Four thousand three hundred sixty hours of stick time. Counting last night, three hundred eleven hours of combat time.'
'Vietnam. You said you were there.' Morris sipped at his own.
'Last day, last tour. Search-and-rescue mission for an A-7 pilot shot down twenty miles south of Haiphong.' He had never even told his wife this story. 'Saw a flash, made the mistake of ignoring it. Thought it was a reflection off a window or a stream or something. Kept going. Turned out it was probably a reflection of a gunsight, maybe a pair of binoculars. One minute later some hundred-millimeter flak goes off around us. Helo just comes apart. I get her down, we're on fire. Look left-copilot's torn apart, his brains are in my lap. My crew chief, a third-class named Ricky, he's in the back. I look. Both his legs are torn off. I think he was still alive then, but there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it-couldn't even get to him the way things were-and there's three people heading towards us. I just ran away. Maybe they didn't see me. Maybe they didn't care-hell, I don't know. Another helo found me twelve hours later.' He poured himself another drink and topped off the one for Morris. 'Don't make me drink alone.'
'I've had enough.'
'No, you haven't. And neither have I. It took me a year to get over that. You don't have a year. All you got's tonight. You gotta talk about it, Captain. I know. Think it's bad now? It gets worse.'
He took another pull on the drink. At least it was good stuff, O'Malley told himself He watched Morris sit there for five minutes, sipping at his drink and wondering if he should just go back to the ship. The proud captain. Like all captains, condemned to live alone, and this one was lonelier than most. He's afraid I'm right, O'Malley thought. He's afraid it will get worse. You poor bastard. If you only knew.
'Run through it' the pilot said quietly. 'Analyze it one step at a time.'
'You already did that for me.'
'I have a big mouth. Has to be for my feet to fit in it. You do it in your sleep, Ed. Might as well do it when you're awake.'
And, slowly, he did. O'Malley coached him through the sequence. Weather conditions, ship's course and speed. What sensors were operating. In an hour they were three quarters of the way down the bottle. Finally they got to the torpedoes. Morris's voice started to crack.
'There just wasn't anything else I could do! The Goddamned thing just came in. We only had one nixie out, and the first fish blew that the hell away. I tried to maneuver the ship, but-'
'But you were up against a homing torpedo. You can't outrun 'em and you can't outturn 'em.'
'I'm not supposed to let-'
'Oh, horseshit!' The pilot refilled the glasses. 'You think you're the first guy ever lost a 'can? Didn't you ever play ball, Ed? Hell, there's two sides, and both of 'em play to win. You expect those Russian sub skippers are just gonna sit there and say, 'Kill me, kill me'? You must be dumber 'n I thought.'
'My men-'
'Some of them are dead, most of them aren't. I'm sorry some're dead. I'm sorry Ricky died. Kid wasn't even nineteen yet. But I didn't kill him, and you didn't kill your men. You saved your ship. You brought her back with most
