Slave Ship

  "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!"

  XIII

  THE LIEUTENANT didn't even wait to say good-by; he was out of that place and on his way to his battle station before the klaxon had stopped blaring. The Exec was a moment slower, but not because he was paying any attention to us. He bellowed something into his intercom, listened for a second, bellowed again, and was gone. Even the guard and the Exec's secretary were gone; there was no one left but the girl and me.

  She said urgently: "Let me go, Lieutenant! You've got this all wrong. I've got to get out of here and—"

  I said: "Shut up!" I was feeling jittery. General Quarters is a powerful voice of command. I had no battle station on Monmouth; I was supercargo, as useless in an engagement and as undesirable .as the wardroom silver the old surface ships used to jettison before a fight. But I didn't want to be useless; I wanted to respond to the alarm, and all I could do was stay here and look ugly at a frail young girl. Bandits in fleet strength! It wasn't even a wanderer on picket duty or a cruising raider that we might hope to swamp before it could transmit a signal. It meant fleet action if they spotted us—and we were big enough for anybody to spot.

  I felt the angle of the deck change, and, simultaneously, a slowing in the throb of the screws. I could see, in my mind, just what was happening: We were reballasting our tanks, tipping our diving fins, slowing our propellers to a gentle wash as we headed for the bottom. Under a good thick blanket of the dense, cold Antarctic Deep water we might not be spotted. Sonar echoes took odd bounces off the interfaces between layers of water of differing densities; and of all the water in the earth's oceans, Antarctic Deep made the sharpest, cleanest interface. That much, at least, was good. . . .

  The girl was saying: "I tell you one more time, Lieutenant! Get out of my way. That's a direct order!"

  "What?" I stared at her. I was between her and the door, and I was going to stay there. It would have been nice if I had had a weapon; I felt a little foolish, standing there with my bare hands hanging at my sides; but of course I shouldn't really need any more than bare hands to subdue a little hundred-and-five pound girl.

  I said: "I'd appreciate it if you'd shut up until the Exec gets back. But you're not leaving here, understand that."

  "You bloody fool!" she raged. "Don't you even listen to me? I'm not a Cow-dye, you idiot; I'm Nina Willette of Navy Intelligence and you're keeping me from the most important job I've ever done!" She took a deep breath and fought for control of herself. She was, all at once, superbly beautiful as she stood glaring at me, her shoulders thrown back, her breasts lifted, her eyes filled with fury, and I suppose she knew it very well. They are actors by trade, these cloak and dagger people; how was a simple Line officer like myself to know whether she was telling the truth or not? She said, with an effort: "Look, Lieutenant, I'll explain it to you. I'm Counter-intelligence; I was on security duty when I was a stripper at Boca Raton; I'm on security duty now. There are pacifists in Monmouth's complement, Miller! Do you know what that means? Right now we're at battle stations; this is the time when I ought to be out on the prowl, making sure everybody's at his station, looking for trouble before it starts—and I'm here, waiting for a fat-headed j.g. to make up his mind to let me go. Move, boy! Get out of my way!"

  "Good try," I said, but I was shaken. "Stay where you are."

  Well, she was some kind of spy or-counter-spy, but she was only a girl, and a small one and a young one at that. All of a sudden her eyes filled with tears. She sobbed and leaned blindly forward; instinctively I reached out to help her. She clung to me, weeping, and it was like holding a fragrant, sad flower. I hadn't known that enlisted women used perfume; I felt odd stirrings in my middle, and suddenly the Exec and the encroaching Caodais seemed very remote, and I found myself patting her head and saying soothing things—And then the roof fell in.

  I came to with a lump behind my right ear, and there was no one in the Exec's office but me. Nina whatever-her-name-was was gone. Lord knows what she hit me with; but it was nothing to what the Exec hit me with when he came back for a brief racing second and found me standing dopily in the middle of the floor. I don't suppose he said more than twenty words to me, but every one of them dug deep under the skin and festered.

  It seems that she was, indeed, Naval Intelligence. And a full Commander at that.

  I saluted empty air; he was gone already. It seemed like a good place to be out of, so I left. In any case, even though I didn't have a real battle station there was a place where I was supposed to be. Semyon and I had been assigned a whaleboat, deep in the lower decks of the carrier, far below even the aircraft hangars, below the engineering sections, in the steel belly of the ship, surrounded by jet fuel for the aircraft and diesel oil for the torps and auxiliaries. It was where the animals were kept, for the whaleboat would be our assault vessel for the landing on Madagascar—if we ever got that far. And it was where I was supposed to be in any action.

  I headed for it through the roaring tumult of a capital ship at general quarters. There was plenty of noise aboard the Monmouth just then, but it was mostly vocal—the racket of the loud-hailers, the sharp orders of the officers with their working parties, the rattle of sighting orders as I passed the fire control compartments. But the engines were a gentle whisper, barely enough to maintain steerage way. For human voices would not penetrate the ship's hull to give us away to the enemies around us in the dense, chill water draining off the Antarctic ice pack; but the sounds of our screws most surely would. We were well into the Indian Ocean, surrounded by Caodai Africa, Caodai Asia and the in
hospitable ice; the Caodais thought of it as their private lake, as we the Caribbean, and with just as much reason. Even if the sighted Caodai vessels missed us, there would be others . . .

  Of course, we did have the curtain of the thermoplane over our heads, and that was a help. But it was as helpful to the Caodais now as to us. I was sympathizing with the men at the sonar stations, pinging into the dark deeps, charting and weighing the echoes that came back. There would be a vague splash of light in the sonar screen, warped by distance, almost obliterated by the thermoplane. Was it a blue whale, a school of fish—or a Caodai sub? Our real advantage was that we could fairly assume any sighting was a sub, whereas they might not expect to find us here.

  Semyon was already in the whaleboat, of course. He was sitting with the puppies in his lap, talking nervously to Josie; he blinked at me as I slid in through the entrance hatch.

  He scrambled to his feet, and then: "Oh," he said in relief, "it is you, Logan. I did not know but perhaps it was an admiral. In Krasnoye Army—"

  "—There were no admirals," I finished for him. "Are the animals all right?"

  "Oh," he said dourly, "they will perhaps survive if the rest of us do. Have you news, Logan? Are we to be in combat?"

  "Can't you hear the squawk box?" It was rattling a repetition of what it had been saying, at intervals, ever since the first alarm: Remain at stations. We have lost sonar contact, but the audic listening posts indicate the enemy still on course. Which meant that we had stopped pinging the waters for fear of having them hear our own sonars; but our directional microphones had a fix on the Caodai screws, not muffled as ours were because, it appeared, they did not know we were around. It was good; if only they didn't close to a point where even the curtain between the dense, cold water and the bottom and the lighter, warmer, saltier layers above no longer screened us from their sonars.