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Authors: David Poyer

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BOOK: The Passage
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Yeah. He'd drunk himself into oblivion that first night, and a lot of nights after, too.
He couldn't understand, even now, how anyone could
stop loving
someone else. But apparently women could. Women … No matter what you did, they wanted more. They wanted you to devote your life to them, change for them. But if you did, they turned away in disgust; you were weak.
Since the divorce, he'd decided he didn't need anything from women he couldn't get in one night.
All is for the best.
Wasn't that what Alan Evlin had told him as
Reynolds Ryan
fought thirty-foot Arctic seas, the old destroyer foredoomed to a fiery death, and Evlin doomed with her?
Fucking Ay, Dan thought bitterly. Like Seaman Recruit Slick Lassard used to say on the old
Ryan.
Fucking Ay, it is.
 
 
AN admiral was speaking now. Which one, he didn't know, or care.
“The commissioning ceremony marks the acceptance of a ship as a unit of the operating forces of the United States Navy. At the moment of breaking the commissioning pennant, USS
Barrett,
DDG nine-ninety-eight, becomes the responsibility of her commanding officer. Together with the wardroom and crew, he has the
duty of making and keeping her ready for any service required by our nation in peace or war.
“The first USS
Barrett
was a response to the worldwide catastrophe of World War Two. Named for one of the first Navy men to fall at Pearl Harbor, she fought throughout the war in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and in the closing campaigns in the Pacific. We are delighted to welcome several of her old crew here today.
“These, too, are dark years. We stand guard against a determined enemy around the world. Just as we stand guard against another, more ancient enemy: the sea itself. No matter how advanced our technology, going to sea is an inherently dangerous venture. Today, in the North Pacific, Navy units are searching for another ship—USS
Threadfin,
a nuclear submarine overdue and presumed lost on a routine training cruise. Let us pause for a moment, thinking of them, and pray that the news will be good.
“The newest
Barrett,
built to face and outlast any sea and any enemy, is a symbol of the resurgence of America, of her return to the world scene after years of withdrawal.
“Not long ago, the Navy was in trouble. The mood of discontent was reflected in the fleet's decline to a low of two hundred and eighty-nine ships. By wide agreement, this number was inadequate to fulfill our commitments in two oceans. And with recent events in the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean has been added to our responsibilities.
“Today the Navy is coming back strong. We now number five hundred and forty total ships in the operating forces, and the fleet will stabilize at six hundred, centered around a powerful striking force of fourteen carriers.
Barrett,
with her ability to counter enemy attacks in every dimension, will be a stout shield to the battle group she is designed to defend.
“The ship we are commissioning today is the most formidable warship of her size ever to patrol the oceans. She blends the hull of a destroyer with the combat systems of a nuclear cruiser. The result is unique: a ship so quiet, she can operate offensively against submarines; the most sophisticated antiaircraft systems in the fleet, quick-reacting and highly accurate; and a deadly antiship weapons capability, as well. Able to deal simultaneously with air, surface, and subsurface attacks, she is designed to go in harm's way—and win.
“But even that does not completely describe her.
Barrett
is the first ship to incorporate a new automated combat direction system. So new that even its capabilities must be classified, it is truly a tremendous step toward the warship of the twenty-first century.”
 
 
DAN'S gaze moved to the faces in ranks below—his new shipmates: his division officers; the other department heads, his peers aboard
Barrett;
the chiefs and senior enlisted; the sailors, rank on rank. At parade rest in front stood the exec, Lieutenant Commander Vysotsky. Weird, he thought, having an XO with a Russian name.
He shifted his eyes to the dais. Behind the admiral, legs crossed, hands folded on the pommel of his sword, sat the slight, relaxed figure of Commander Thomas R. Leighty, USN,
Barrett'
s prospective commanding officer. Dan had met him only once so far, not long enough to form much of an impression.
He crossed to the starboard wing and swept his glasses up and down the channel again. The barge was still anchored. A crew boat was coming in, hugging the east bank. Satisfied, he looked into the sun, welcoming its warmth after a bitter Rhode Island winter. It seemed like a pleasant place, the Gulf Coast, but they'd be leaving right after the commissioning.
That was one thing you could count on in the Navy: You never served with anyone or went ashore anywhere for the last time. How many of the wizened geezers down there on the dais had figured they'd be back forty years after the big WW II, commissioning another USS
Barrett
?
 
 
WHEN he went back to the port wing, the senator was speaking, his tones booming out over the audience even when he turned away from the mike. He was saying something about how the Navy, and the nation, faced a critical time in world history. Dan watched the crew flexing their knees surreptitiously. Now the senator was off on how they stood at a crossroads of world events; how if America could stand up to this last pulse of Soviet expansionism, it might be the last gasp of the Evil Empire; but how the last innings were always the most dangerous, and the other team might still come from behind and win.
There was a stir in the ranks as someone toppled, buddies on either side catching and easing him down, corpsmen carrying him off to the ambulance.
At last, with a scattering of polite applause, the speeches ended. Everyone on the platform stood. The officers and men came to attention.
The supervisor of shipbuilding read the orders for the delivery. The dry official words bounced off steel and reverberated in expectant silence. The shipbuilder, in sentences just as arid, turned her over to the Navy.
The admiral turned to Leighty, and said quietly, “Commission USS
Barrett.”
The bugler sounded attention. Eyes swung as flags broke snapping against the sky: the national ensign, the red-and-white whip of the commissioning pennant, and, on the bow, the white stars on dark blue field of the jack.
Leighty strolled to the dais. He slowly unfolded his orders and read them. Finally, he faced the admiral. “I assume command of USS
Barrett,
sir.”
A salute, a handshake, then Leighty barked, “Commander Vysotsky, set the watch.”
A dozen boatswains' pipes keened and, simultaneously, the whiteuniformed ranks broke into a run. Boots clattered on steel. As each sailor reached the main deck, he broke left or right. The chiefs followed, slower, heavier of foot, and then the officers. When the thunder finally subsided, 350 men stood at parade rest along the main deck, the flight deck, the 03 level, the bridge wing. Leighty paused at the microphone, running an eye along them, before he announced, spacing the words dramatically, “USS
Barrett
—come alive!”
And together, all the train warning bells began to ring, the horn droned out a deep note, the radars began to rotate. Missile mounts elevated, signal flags leapt up their halyards, and every light came on from the stern to the man overboard and task lights high on the pole mast. The audience broke into applause.
 
 
THAT was the high point. After the benediction, the stands emptied; the limousines swung in again, embarking the guests for the reception. Dan wiped out his hatband with a glove. “Okay, that's it,” he told the enlisted. “You guys want to go over to the tent, punch and cake yourselves, make your bird. You can knock off from there, unless you're in the duty section. See you tomorrow.”
“Not coming, sir?”
“Think I'll stay aboard, get some reading in on the combat systems doctrine.”
A kid who looked about eighteen lingered shyly. He said, “Guess we got us a ship now, Lieutenant, huh?”
“Yeah, Sanderling. A brand-new one.”
He watched the technician look around proudly. Being part of a ship's first crew, a “plank owner,” was a title a sailor carried all his life—like the old men who'd put the first
Barrett
in commission when the skies were dark with war. Funny how he kept thinking of them. Had they ever been as young as Sanderling, as trusting, as thrilled, as dumb?
He grinned to himself, amused but also bitter. He'd been like that once himself.
The buzz of the A-phone brought him back. “Bridge, Lieutenant Lenson,” he said into it.
“Dan, this is the XO. I've been looking over this inventory, what you came up with versus what Sipple signed off for before his accident. Are you sure these figures are right?”
“The chief warrant and I counted everything twice, sir.”
“Well, I got some questions. Can you come down to my stateroom?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I'll be right down.”
Cooperative Cane Production Facility Number 176, Camagüey Province, Cuba
T
HE land sprawled like a sleeping child under the blanket of night, a vast plain unbroken by hill or mountain or city—only the land, naked to the wind. Across its black expanse, no cars, no vehicles moved in the last hour before dawn. Only at a huddle of concrete and tin buildings, at an intersection of the roads that led through the great plain, were a few lights coming on.
The woman woke drenched with sweat, a distant whistle still sounding in her ears. She lay unmoving on her pallet, looking up into the darkness as if listening to a voice only she could hear. Then she swung her bare feet out and set them gingerly on the floor.
The bed was pushed against the wall of a one-room house of unpainted palm boards, uninsulated and with one shuttered glassless window on the south. A colored picture of the Virgin, the kind that had been for sale everywhere before the revolution, was pinned up beside it. The floor was bare, swept concrete. Faint rustlings and scratchings came from the peaked darkness. Thatch from the
palma real
made a tight, waterproof roof, but it hosted mice and scorpions. For this reason, she slipped her feet into a pair of rubber-soled sandals, then got up. Moving quietly about the room, she lighted a small charcoal fire, poured water from a jar in the corner, and put a pan of it on to heat.
The woman was very thin. Her dark legs were scarred with a pale map of old cuts. She had wide shoulders and a short muscular neck. The arm she stretched up to screw in a dangling bulb was long and sinewy, the hand calloused. As harsh light stabbed into the corners of the hut, it cut the planes of her face from darkness. Her angular cheekbones and long eyes she owed to a Chinese grandfather. The rest of her features were a blend of African and European, mixed for centuries on an island without barriers between races. Her narrow lips were set, her expression sad, as if
she'd been waiting for something too long and now despaired of ever seeing it.
The water was warm now, heating quickly above the blue and yellow flames dancing on the charcoal, and she dipped a little out and set the rest back till it should boil. She washed her face carefully, then under her arms, her neck. Crossing the room to a row of nails, she took down a work shirt and cotton trousers. Then, easing a door open, she went outside, under the stars.
When she came back, the water was hissing and bubbling. She measured out a little ground coffee into a sieve, poured the water carefully into it, and set it aside to steep. She flicked a metal box open and set the bread on the table, which was, aside from the pallet and an old rawhide-and-hardwood chair, the only furniture. Then she took out a mirror. In the quiet, broken only by the steady drip of the coffee and the chirp of an awakened cricket, she brushed her hair back and tied it in place with a strip of red ribbon.
She sat at the table and ate the bread and drank the strong black coffee, stirred thick with two spoonfuls of coarse raw sugar. She didn't speak or look about, just stared in front of her as she ate.
When she was done, she washed the mug in the remains of the water and hung it on a nail. She put the other things back, the sugar, the remaining coffee, and scooped the crumbs off the table and tossed them into the fire. Sitting on the pallet again, she pulled on a heavy pair of black military boots with worn-down heels and tears in the sides sewn up with twine.
Getting up again, she took down from the thatch a two-foot-long, slightly curved blade of spring steel. Its cutting edge was wavy, concave and then convex, nicked and scarred with long use. From a handmade wooden haft dangled a loop of green cord.
She sat again at the table, poured water out on a small flat stone, and set to work sharpening the machete. Each stroke began with a grinding rasp and ended with a faint musical singing. From time to time, she tried the edge with her thumb. Finally, satisfied, she fitted a slit-open length of rubber hose over it, thrust it into her belt, and opened the door.
The hot dark wind came out of the night and fanned her sweating face. It brought with it the smells of smoke and dust and drying urine, but above all of the soil—a crisp checkerboard of cracks at the end of the dry season,
la seca.
The sky was gray to the east, over the next house, the door of which opened, and two shadows stepped out, as she just had.
“Buenos dias,
Augustín, Xiomara.”
“Graciela. You're working today? Feeling better, then?”
“Better, yes, thank you.”
A woman's voice, concerned: “Are you sure? If you don't, we'll let the comrade brigadier know—”
“I'm well enough to work,” she said again, sharply now, and they said nothing more.
As they spoke, more shadows emerged from other huts. They did not linger in the open area in front of the
batey,
the cluster of workers' dwellings, but turned up onto an unpaved dusty road that led away between the still-dark fields. She moved with them, unspeaking. Bare feet and shoes and boots scuffed along as a faint light began to diffuse downward from the eastern stars, gradually bringing out the silvery surface of the road. Gradually bringing into view the nothingness that surrounded them, great expanses of flat earth stretching off till they met the sky. A month before, she remembered, the cane had hemmed in the road like two black walls. Now the fields were stripped bare, shorn, littered with the detritus of harvest; the cane leaves were like discarded corn husks, crackling-dry on the parched ground, rustling like a million insects as the predawn wind scuttled over them. She moved with the other shadows at a steady pace, not brisk, not slow, following the deep powdery dust as it wound left and then right and then came out in a wide plaza lighted by bare bulbs on high poles. Beneath their light, huge shapes grumbled and chattered in the saurian speech of diesels. Wordlessly, the workers queued at the tailgates, the men climbing up first, then hauling the girls and boys, old people and women up by their arms.
“
Listos. Vamos,”
someone shouted outside, and, jolting and grunting, the trucks jerked into motion.
 
 
COOPERATIVE Cane Production Facility Number 176, Alcorcón, covered seventy-five square miles of fertile flatland that had been divided among fifteen small cattle ranches before the second agrarian reform law. Number 176 produced almost a hundred thousand tons of raw sugar a year, although this year it was running behind schedule. Cane did not sweeten fully till it dried, and an unseasonally wet January had extended the harvest a month beyond its usual termination. The
central
had its own worker housing, offices, machine station, railroad station, warehouses, store, staff housing, garage, and barracks for the army units, school groups, and urban workers who rotated through on “voluntary” work assignments during the cutting season. At the height of the
zafra,
the harvest, a thousand human beings rode out to the fields each morning before dawn.
One of them this dark morning, sitting silently on a wooden bench in the back of a swaying Soviet-made two-and-a-half-ton truck, was Graciela Gutiérrez.
 
 
THE trucks stopped at the edge of one of the last still-standing fields. The tailboards slammed down and the
macheteros
spilled off. Not speaking, they ranged themselves out across the road, facing the cane like soldiers staring down an enemy. Drawing on a pair of worn gloves, lacing on leather shin protectors, Graciela looked down at it from the road; a vast, slowly tossing green sea half a mile across. Her expression was hard, but she did not feel as determined as she looked. She felt a heaviness in her stomach, a steady pressure. It was unpleasant, but she didn't ask to be taken back to the
batey.
It was a heaviness; that was all.
The
jefe de brigada,
the overseer, glanced at his watch, then shouted, “Time to go to work,
compañeros.”
And in a ragged wave the workers moved forward, stepping down off the road and into the cane.
As she let herself down the slope, Graciela picked out the place she would begin. The cane, seven feet high and brownish green, came up from the dry soil in clumps of five or six stalks. Two feet away was another clump, then another. She took a deep breath and bent, folding herself awkwardly.
Stooped, she seized a two-inch-thick stalk in her left hand and slashed it through half an inch from the soil with a quick stroke of the razor-sharp blade. Then, lifting it, she quickly trimmed the leaves off. She lopped off the leafy top, laid the cane aside, took a step forward, and reached for the next stem.
Gradually, sweat broke under her clothing. Above her head even when she stood, the tops of the cane danced in the wind, but it was as if they absorbed the breeze. The air between them was dense and hot and filled with mosquitoes. They found her mouth and face. But the tender parts, the ankles and the back of the hands, she had covered. And she ignored the rest even as they settled and stung. Only occasionally did she pause long enough to blot the sweat from her eyes with the frayed cuff of her shirt.
When she had eight or ten trimmed stalks laid aside, enough that it was heavy to carry, she began a pile. As she cut on, moving slowly deeper into the field, the initial stiffness ebbed away. The machete hissed as it sliced through the cane, and drops of pale sugar milk bubbled at the cut roots. Such a useful tool, she thought. You could saw through the tough stalk, like the volunteers from the city did at first. Or, if you had a sharp-enough blade, you could slice through with a sudden, nearly invisible wrist flick that clipped through the tough fiber like a razor blade through a stalk of celery.
And gradually, her tight lips relaxed. She forgot what was past and what might come and swung the flat blade, dust-streaked now,
again and again. She merged with the work and the dry heat, the smoke and dust that drifted in golden sparkling, itching clouds between the stalks; with the endless stoop-slash-trim-toss, the steady progress across the fields, hearing and sometimes glimpsing at the edge of one's own gradually lengthening clearing the knotted kerchief or the plaited straw hat of a neighbor, the quick grin or averted eyes of another worker. Till all that existed in the world was the swaying, waiting cane, darker green at the base, then lighter, and finally a withered brown at the leaf tips. Each stalk shuddered as she grasped it, as if it sensed the moment had come when it would lose its grip on the earth and become raw material for the mills. She worked in silence, without joining in the shouts and encouragements of the other workers, or the songs. Although she listened, and sometimes her lips moved with the refrain.
¡Venceremos! Venceremos!
¡Guerrillero adelante, adelante!
After an hour, a boy made his way through the stalks, carrying galvanized buckets carefully balanced, one to each hand. When he came to her, she paused and lifted her head to the bright blue sky, put her hands to her back, wiped her face, and only then bent to the dipper of cool water that she drank a few swallows of, a few swallows only. She smiled at the thin, shy youth with the gaptoothed smile and big dark eyes that searched the ground as she spoke.
“Miguelito, this water is fresh? You didn't let the men piss in it?”
“No, Tia Graciela. How are you feeling?”
“I'll get through the day. Go on, along with you.” She gave him a playful tap with the back of the blade, then reached for the next stand of cane.
When she saw the shadow stretching forward from behind her, she thought at first that it was the boy again. She was thirsty, and she said sharply, not pausing, “Miguelito, bring it up here. I don't want to take one step backward today.”
“Spoken, at least, like a daughter of the revolution,” said an unfamiliar voice. Her hand went tight on the stalk it had already grasped, then released it.
He stood with the sun behind him, so she couldn't see his face. She could see that he was a large man, though. And what they called a
gallego—
light-skinned
.
He wore boots but not a uniform. His clothes didn't look ragged, though, as hers and all the other workers' did.
Suddenly, she shivered. A cold wind seemed to blow over her, like the icy breath from the heart of the approaching storm.
“Are you speaking to me,
compañero
? I'm working now.”
“I've been watching. You're a good worker.”
“Who are you? What do you want with me? I have a
meta
to meet.”
“I have a question for you,
mulata
—a question about certain worms.”
“What worms?”
“The question is: ‘The guitars, why do they sing to me of your tears, O Cuba?'”
She blinked sweat out of her eyes, staring into the sun and in front of it this blackness, this shadow, and suddenly she was so frightened, it was hard to breathe. He wasn't in uniform, so he wasn't from the army or the police. He carried a machete, but his boots were new and his clothes fit him and were not torn or patched, and he was muscular and well fed. So there was really only one thing he could be.
BOOK: The Passage
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