“How about his hands and feet?” Smirnov asked. The captain knew something about frostbite.
“We’re not even bothering about that,” Jameson answered. “We have cotton around the digits to prevent maceration. If he survives the next few days, we’ll get blebs and maybe have some tissue loss, but that’s the least of our problems. You guys know what his name is?” Petchkin’s head snapped around. “He wasn’t wearing any dogtags when he arrived. His clothes didn’t have the ship’s name. No wallet, no identification, not even any coins in the pockets. It doesn’t matter very much for his initial treatment, but I’d feel better if you could pull his medical records. It would be good to know if he has any allergies or underlying medical conditions. We don’t want him to go into shock from an allergic reaction to drug treatment.”
“What was he wearing?” Smirnov asked.
“A rubber exposure suit,” Jameson answered. “The guys who found him left it on him, thank God. I cut it off him when he arrived. Under that, shirt, pants, handerchief. Don’t you guys wear dogtags?”
“Yes,” Smirnov responded. “How did you find him?”
“From what I hear, it was pure luck. A helicopter off a frigate was patrolling and spotted him in the water. They didn’t have any rescue gear aboard, so they marked the spot with a dye marker and went back to their ship. A bosun volunteered to go in after him. They loaded him and a raft cannister into the chopper and flew him back, with the frigate hustling down south. The bosun kicked out the raft, jumped in after it — and landed on it. Bad luck. He broke both his legs, but he did get your sailor into the raft. The tin can picked them up an hour later and they were both flown directly here.”
“How is your man?”
“He’ll be all right. The left leg wasn’t too bad, but the right tibia was badly splintered,” Jameson went on. “He’ll recover in a few months. Won’t be doing much dancing for a while, though.”
The Russians thought the Americans had deliberately removed their man’s identification. Jameson and Tail suspected that the man had disposed of his tags, possibly hoping to defect. There was a red mark on the neck that indicated forcible removal.
“If it is permitted,” Smirnov said, “I would like to see your man, to thank him.”
“Permission granted, Captain,” Tail nodded. “That would be kind of you.”
“He must be a brave man.”
“A sailor doing his job. Your people would do the same thing.” Tail wondered if this were true. “We have our differences, gentlemen, but the sea doesn’t care about that. The sea — well, she tries to kill us all regardless what flag we fly.”
Petchkin was back looking through the window, trying to make out the patient’s face.
“Could we see his clothing and personal effects?” he asked.
“Sure, but it won’t tell you much. He’s a cook. That’s all we know,” Jameson said.
“A cook?” Petchkin turned around.
“The officer who listened in on the tape — obviously he was an intelligence officer, right? He looked at the number on his shirt and said it made him a cook.” The three-digit number indicated that the patient had been a member of the port watch, and that his battle station was damage control. Jameson wondered why the Russians numbered all their enlisted men. To be sure they didn’t trespass? Petchkin’s head, he noticed, was almost touching the glass pane.
“Dr. Ivanov, do you wish to attend the case?” Tail asked.
“Is this permitted?”
“It is.”
“When will he be released?” Petchkin inquired. “When may we speak with him?”
“Released?” Jameson snapped. “Sir, the only way he’ll be out of here in less than a month will be in a box. So far as consciousness is concerned, that’s anyone’s guess. That’s one very sick kid you have in there.”
“But we must speak to him!” the KGB agent protested.
Tail had to look up at the man. “Mr. Petchkin, I understand your desire to communicate with your man — but he is my patient now. We will do nothing, repeat nothing, that might interfere with his treatment and recovery. I got orders to fly down here to handle this. They tell me those orders came from the White House. Fine. Doctors Jameson and Ivanov will assist me, but that patient is now my responsibility, and my job is to see to it that he walks out of this hospital alive and well. Everything else is secondary to that objective. You will be extended every courtesy. But I make the rules here.” Tait paused. Diplomacy was not something he was good at. “Tell you what, you want to sit in there yourselves in relays, that’s fine with me. But you have to follow the rules. That means you scrub, change into sterile clothing, and follow the instructions of the duty nurse. Fair enough?”
Petchkin nodded. American doctors think they are gods, he said to himself.
Jameson, busy reexamining the blood analyzer printout, had ignored the sermon. “Can you gentlemen tell us what kind of sub he was on?”
“No,” Petchkin said at once.
“What are you thinking, Jamie?”
“The dropping white count and some of these other indicators are consistent with radiation exposure. The gross symptoms would have been masked by the overlying hypothermia.” Suddenly Jameson looked at the Soviets. “Gentlemen, we have to know this, was he on a nuclear sub?”
“Yes,” Smirnov answered, “he was on a nuclear-powered submarine.”
“Jamie, take his clothing to radiology. Have them check the buttons, zipper, anything metal for evidence of contamination.”
“Right.” Jameson went to collect the patient’s effects.
“May we be involved in this?” Smirnov asked.
“Yes, sir,” Tail responded, wondering what sort of people these were. The guy had to come off a nuclear submarine, didn’t he? Why hadn’t they told him at once? Didn’t they want him to recover?
Petchkin pondered the significance of this. Didn’t they know he had come off a nuclear-powered sub? Of course — he was trying to get Smirnov to blurt out that the man was off a missile submarine. They were trying to cloud the issue with this story about contamination. Nothing that would harm the patient, but something to confuse their class enemies. Clever. He’d always thought the Americans were clever. And he was supposed to report to the embassy in an hour — report what? How was he supposed to know who the sailor was?
Norfolk Naval Shipyard
The USS Ethan Alien was about at the end of her string. Commissioned in 1961, she had served her crews and her country for over twenty years, carrying Polaris sea-launched ballistic missiles in endless patrols through sunless seas. Now she was old enough to vote, and this was very old for a submarine. Her missile tubes had been filled with ballast and sealed months before. She had only a token maintenance crew while the Pentagon bureaucrats debated her future. There had been talk of a complicated cruise missile system to make her into a SSGN like the new Russian Oscars. This was judged too expensive. Ethan Alien’s was generation-old technology. Her S5W reactor was too dated for much more use. Nuclear radiation had bombarded the metal vessel and its internal fittings with many billions of neutrons. As recent examination of test strips had revealed, over time the character of the metal had changed, becoming dangerously brittle. The system had at most another three years of useful life. A new reactor would be too expensive. The Ethan Alien was doomed by her senescence.
The maintenance crew was made up of members of her last operational team, mainly old-timers looking forward to retirement, with a leavening of kids who needed education in repair skills. The Ethan Alien could still serve as a school, especially a repair school since so much of her equipment was worn out.
Admiral Gallery had come aboard early that morning. The chiefs had regarded that as particularly ominous. He had been her first skipper many years before, and admirals always seemed to visit their early commands — right before they were scrapped. He’d recognized some of the senior chiefs and asked them if the old girl had any life left in her. To a man, the chiefs said yes. A ship becomes more than a machine to her crew. Each of a hundred ships, built by the same men at the same yard to the same plans, will have her own special characteristics — most of them bad, really, but after her crew becomes accustomed to them they are spoken of affectionately, particularly in retrospect. The admiral had toured the entire length of the Ethan Alien’s hull, pausing to run his gnarled, arthritic hands over the periscope he had used to make certain that there really was a world outside the steel hull, to plan the rare “attack” against a ship hunting his sub — or a passing tanker, just for practice. He’d commanded the Ethan Alien for three years, alternating his gold crew with another officer’s blue crew, working out of Holy Loch, Scotland. Those were good years, he told himself, a damned sight better than sitting at a desk with a lot of vapid aides running around. It was the old navy game, up or out: just when you got something that you were really good at, something you really liked, it was gone. It made good organizational sense. You had to make room for the youngsters coming up — but, God! to be young again, to command one of the new ones that now he only had the opportunity to ride a few hours at a time, a courtesy to the skinny old bastard in Norfolk.