The Passage (39 page)

Read The Passage Online

Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
5.4Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
They weren't sailors. Most of them had never seen the sea before. They hadn't expected green waves taller than houses, or a sky gray as poured lead, with the flicker of lightning from low, menacing thunderheads.
But to their surprise, they weren't alone.
They'd expected that, to be alone. But other boats dotted the waves around them. They disappeared and reappeared as the waves shouldered under them. Some had sails up. Other were only specks. But they were all headed west. And they were all moving, borne along on an immense river in the sea itself.
Seasick and afraid, the fifteen people in the two little boats faced
the ocean with a hand-stitched sail, a toy compass, and a motor that against all expectation ran on and on, steady save for a choked, bubbling snarl when the violently pitching stern plunged it down into the foaming sea.
T
HE metal gangway that rattled under his boots, the quarterdeck he paused at were low compared with Barrett's. The fantail was small and cluttered. But the OOD looked squared away in summer whites. Dan saluted the flag, faced left, tapped off another. “Permission to come aboard?”
“Permission granted. Help you, sir?”
“Here to see Lieutenant Prince. He aboard?”
Waiting, snatching an hour away from the ship, he stood looking down the length of USS
Dahlgren,
DDG-43.
The
Coontz
class had started life as “destroyer leaders,” DLGs. Now they were guided-missile destroyers. Whatever you called them, he thought, they looked like warships. They had the big raked stacks that had descended in U.S. destroyers in a straight line from William Francis Gibbs's great liners. They bristled with guns, antennas, masts, directors. Most striking of all was the beautiful curve of their main deck. It swept in one rising line from counter to bullnose, then terminated abruptly in a bow like the nose of a mako. They looked capable and dangerous, as if they could punch through a sea or an enemy with equal ease.
And
Dahlgren
had. Her waffle-ironed hull plates showed where the seas of decades had hammered them in. Her rows of combat ribbons and the stenciled symbols on guns and directors showed that she had bombarded hostile coasts, guarded convoys, shot down enemy aircraft.
“Dan?”
“Hey. Larry!”
Larry Prince was one of the greatest épée fencers the Naval Academy had ever produced: Eastern Intercollegiate, NCAA, three times Maryland state champion, Princeton-Cornell Memorial
Fencing Champion. “Good to see you,” he said, shaking Dan's hand. “You're keeping yourself in shape.”
“Heard you were over here. Thought I'd come over, say hi.”
“Glad you did. How's Betts? Didn't you have a kid?”
“She left,” said Dan, and Prince looked at him for a moment. “Took my little girl with her.”
“I'm sorry to hear that. Well … come on up. Meet the guys.”
They ascended through decks and passageways, Dan feeling steadily more oppressed, as if the low cable-festooned overheads were pressing down on him. The hot fan-stirred air smelled of food and oil. Finally, Prince held a door open. Dan hung his cap on a wooden peg and went in.
The wardroom was half the size of
Barrett
's
,
with worn carpets and comfortable-looking metal chairs. Officers in khakis were sitting around drinking coffee, smoking, reading the
Guantánamo Bay Gazette
and limp worn copies of
Playboy
and the
Naval Engineers Journal
. They glanced up as Prince introduced him. “Dan came over from
Barrett,”
he finished. “What are you over there, Dan—Operations?”
“Combat systems.”
“What, plain old weapons officer ain't good enough anymore?” one of the men said.
“We don't have mess decks, either,” Dan said. “Now it's the ‘enlisted dining facility.'”
“You guys classmates?” a heavyset black guy asked, getting up, holding out a big soft hand. “Leo Abbott. I was a plebe when you were segundoes.”
“Not another frickin' ring-knocker,” said one of the smokers in the chairs.
“You're surrounded. Dan, this is Wilson Benedict, our tame mustang. Jaze Walberg, he's in charge of keeping all the scuttlebutts broke-dick.” Dan tried to register names as he shook hands. It was always disorienting going aboard another ship, as if the people you knew so well, the chief engineer, the comm officer, the bull ensign, had been reincarnated with different faces, different voices. It made you wonder how much of what you knew of any man was just a role.
“Want some eggs? Mess decks do eggs benedict Sundays, with hollandaise sauce. Gonna win us the Ney award one of these days. We grind our own coffee, too.”
“Sounds good. Thanks.” The messman set him a place and for a while they didn't say much.
“When you doing your battle problem, Dan?”
He said around a mouthful, “Friday. You?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Good luck.”
“I think we're ready,” said a lieutenant. “The skipper got Ming to promise the guys three days in Jamaica if we pass. I think we'll make it.”
“Ming?”
“Well, you call the chief engineer ‘Cheng,' right? We call the weps officer ‘Wang,' the ops officer ‘Fang.' That makes the exec—”
“Ming the Merciless. I get it.” Dan grinned with them. “How about the captain?”
“He's just ‘the captain.'”
“We got some sheet cake from last night. Want a piece?”
The others came over as Prince dipped a knife in a glass of water and subdivided the cake with navigational precision. The steward poured more coffee.
“Hear you got trouble over there,” said Abbott. “On BFB.”
“What's BFB?”
“Butt-fucking
Barrett,
” he said. The others laughed.
Dan laid his fork down. “What the fuck's that mean?”
“Take it easy. We heard you lost a queer, that's all. Isn't that why the kid jumped overboard?”
“We're not really sure.”
“Did you know him?”
“He was in my department. Yeah, I knew him.”
A lieutenant (jg) said, “Be tough on his parents, but you know, it was probably the best thing for him.”
“I don't see how,” said Dan. He didn't like hearing his ship put down, and he didn't like talking about Sanderling as if he were some kind of defective part best disposed of over the side. “I wish he'd talked to me before he did it. I've been … wondering how to look at it.”
“How to look at queers? Shit, it's unnatural.”
“Tell 'em, Marco.”
“What's it say in the Bible? I forget exactly, but it's against it. Like, isn't that why God destroyed Sodom?”
“‘For even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature; and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the women, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly.'”
“Wayne's our Protestant lay leader. Isn't it the worst sin there is, Wayne?”
“Not exactly, but you can't be a Christian and a practicing homosexual.”
“You mean God won't forgive them?” Dan asked him.
“God will forgive everyone, but only if they repent and have a sincere determination never to repeat their sin.”
“I'm not religious myself,” said the lieutenant (jg) they called
Marco. “I don't know about the theological stuff. I look at it from an evolutionary viewpoint. Like, nature doesn't do anything doesn't help the species to survive. You ever see two gay mallards together? Or a lion sucking another lion's dick? Faggots are sick, that's all. Doc, what do you think?”
“This is Doc Gehlen,” said Prince, nodding to the civilian who'd just come in, “our resident shrink. He's teaching one of those extension courses. What do you think, Doc? Ever run into any queers?”
“Lots,” said the civilian, helping himself to the cake. “Is it a sin? I don't believe in sin. Is it a sickness? The ones I've seen have all been disturbed individuals in one way or another. I would call it a … personality disorder. A compulsion, like pyromania or bestiality.” He took a bite, considered, then added, “Of course, my sample may be skewed. The happy ones might not bother coming to see me.”
“Are they born that way?”
“I don't buy Freud's theory that it's rooted in the relation with the maternal figure. But it happens early.”
Marco said, “Hey, whatever. I knew a guy—he was standing in the shower on the
Iowa
when this pansy comes up and just grabs his dick, you know? He told me they caught eight guys in a daisy chain on the Oh-four level one night. Every one of 'em tested positive.”
“Yeah, they all got that gay cancer. They just don't show it yet.”
“I don't want them around. What if they sneeze on you?”
“That's not what I joined the Navy for. I thought it was one place where you didn't have to put up with the fucking feminists and lesbos and gays.”
“They're security risks. Every spy we've ever had has been a homo.”
“Dan, no offense, but I heard there was more than one over on
Barrett.
”
Dan put his fork down again.
“Mr. Marco didn't mean that,” suggested one of the senior lieutenants.
“Uh, I guess not. It's just scuttlebutt, you know.”
The lieutenant turned to Dan. “It's not a complicated question. Homosexuals don't fit in, because the other guys aren't going to accept them. You get one in the berthing compartment, the other men don't want to sleep with him. They don't want to shower with him, or take orders from him, or have anything to do with him. Now, you feel guilty about your guy, the one who jumped. Think about this. If they'd have kicked him out, he'd still be alive.”
“Jack's right. I was on an LPD once; they found out they had some. They had marines embarked. They pulled liberty in Sydney,
and the marines went into this bar and found them there in drag. And they just beat the shit out of them.”
“They'd be happier on the outside, with their own kind.”
“Unless they had one ship, made it all gay.”
“Sure, put 'em all on one ship.”
“Then sink it.”
Dan said slowly, “But isn't that what they used to say back when they didn't want blacks in the service? And then women?”
“Hey.” The black officer put his hands on the table. “I resent that, man. I resent comparin' me to some faggot. It's natural bein' black. My dad was black. My ancestors was black. Guarantee you, their ancestors wasn't faggots.”
Prince said, “I see what you mean about women. But you keep men and women apart. You don't have guys showering with the girls. You want to bend over, with one of them behind you? Or four or five of them?”
“Let me tell you about the discharge board I was on,” said a supply officer. “Lebanon was getting hot; we just kept ironing out the water in the east Med. The captain was the junior skipper, so we kept getting hosed on liberty. We had such lousy liberty, we thought Soudha Bay was great. And this commissaryman starts seducing the kids in the galley. Eighteen, seventeen years old, they'd get detailed to mess duty. He'd take them down in the storeroom and tell them they didn't cooperate, they'd be there forever. Then he'd fuck them, till another kid came along he liked better. Finally one of them turned him in.”
“That's not seduction. That's rape.”
“Call it whatever you want. You just can't have seventeen-, eighteen-year-old kids in crowded berthing compartments with these people. Doc?”
“You've got a point. Young men often have profound doubts about their masculinity.”
“How are we gonna recruit? Nobody wants their kid going to sea with a bunch of fags. Maybe it ain't their fault. I don't know. But if they can't help hitting on them, that means you got to keep them away from normal people.”
The senior lieutenant said, “Bottom line: What are we out here for? Ships exist to sink other ships, okay? We need to focus on that, not get diverted by affairs among the crew. The day they let them in, they can let me out.”
“Not on my ship. Not in my Navy.”
“Yeah, at least with women you can put them all in the same compartment and have them indifferent to one another.”
“You never been on the
Norton Sound
. Fucking bull dykes, all of them.”
Dan looked around the table, at a wall of faces that had turned hostile.
“'Scuse me, gentlemen, I got to clear the table now.”
As they rose, he glanced at his watch. “Larry, I'm going diving this afternoon. Want to go? Any you guys want to come?”
“Not me. I don't go under the water unless I got a submarine around me. We got any divers?”
“Jonesy, but he got mono.”
Dan said so long, shook hands. A couple of the men left before he got to them. Prince grabbed his cap off the peg and held it out.
“I can find my way out. You got things to do.”
“No way. Gotta escort you, man. You could be one of those security tests.”
“Thanks for coming over,” Prince said when they got to the quarterdeck. “Stay in touch, hear? You goin' to the game this year?”

Other books

Afterlife (Afterlife Saga) by Hudson, Stephanie
Walker's Run by Mel Favreaux
The Dogs and the Wolves by Irene Nemirovsky