Scorpion in the Sea

EIGHTY

“Mrs. Martinson,” said the pretty young Corps Wave from the Admissions Desk. “I think that guy you were asking about is being brought in now. They’re radioing in the names as the helicopters come in. We’re trying to, like, keep a list. The next one to land has a Montgomery on it.”

“Thanks, Sally,” said Diane.

She hurriedly finished stacking the pile of sterile bandage packages on the steel trolley table, pushed it out into the hall, and then hurried down the hall towards the ER. The hospital was at general quarters, with all staff and every volunteer on the list called in to handle the avalanche of casualties from the Goldsborough. The official story circulating within the hospital was that the ship had struck an old, World War II mine and had nearly sunk. There were supposedly over two hundred casualties. Coming on top of some of the injuries transported earlier from the Mayport Naval Station, the hospital was approaching saturation. As Diane hurried down the green hallway, she could see that every room had its lights on, and there were dozens of people, staff and volunteers, scurrying about to make them ready for incoming casualties. The hospital’s announcing system was going continuously, paging doctors and directing the movement of medical equipment and supplies. The announcing system was competing with the urgent instructions being called from desk to doorway along the hallway. There was a sense of barely controlled pandemonium in the air.

As Diane arrived at the ER vestibule she saw a large crowd of dependents milling about outside the double glass doors, pale faces trying frantically to see into the ER operations area, which had been screened off with several portable screens. There was a hastily painted sign saying “Triage,” with a red arrow indicating the holding area in the north wing. There were several security police standing around both inside the ER vestibule as well as outside in the ambulance driveway, trying to keep people from coming into the ER. There was a pair of officers in khakis surrounded by a small mob of anxious dependents while they consulted clipboards.

She thanked God that she was a volunteer; only her Gray Lady uniform would gain her access to the mob scene inside the E.R., but what she really wanted to do was get to the triage area. She scooped up a stack of blankets from a waiting trolley, and pushed her way through the glass doors. A harried looking orderly intercepted her immediately.

“These have to go to the triage area,” she said authoritatively from behind the stack of blankets, not stopping for questions.

“Uh, OK, Ma’am, triage is right through there. They’re using the whole north wing, I think.”

“Thank you,” she said in a sing song voice, trying to sound like the nurses, hurrying around him before it occurred to him to ask why triage needed blankets on a hot night. She glanced into the ER itself as she went by and saw barely organized chaos in there behind the screens, with dozens of doctors and corpsmen working over patients, standing amidst piles of bloody dungarees and other clothes on the floor as they processed each casualty. The normal four bays of the ER had been drawn back, and there were at least twenty gurneys all rolled together haphazardly, leaving only enough space for the medical people to work and for corpsmen to dodge the debris on the floor as they grabbed for bandages, drips, IV stands, and instruments. She caught a brief, shocking glimpse of bare, bloody skin amongst all the green gowns and bandages.

She hurried through another set of double glass doors, and into what was normally an infrequently used medical holding wing. A set of metal double doors was opened at the end of the hallway in the back, and the buzzing sound of a helicopter out on the pad next to the hospital could be heard echoing down the hall. The rooms on either side were filled with more people, four beds shoved into rooms designed for two, and two triage teams going from room to room deciding who was next into the ER and who could be sent upstairs to wait. She saw the red faced, overweight CO of the hospital, gowned up as if for surgery, steering a small knot of interns from gurney to gurney, pointing to injuries and making his decisions while the interns poked and probed the lumpy forms under the sometimes bloody sheets.

All the lights were on, and Diane found herself blinking rapidly in the sudden, hot glare. Medical corpsmen and nurses brushed and bumped by her without noticing her, shouting to orderlies and junior corpsmen to bring this or that equipment or medicines. She threaded her way down the hall past rolling gurneys, loaded with gray, young, pain filled faces, some with their eyes open, most with them shut. Many had their heads bandaged with green dressings, some of these showing large, dark stains. Diane held on to her load of blankets, trying not to stare while fighting down a rising sense of panic, and made her way steadily through the traffic to the end of the hall nearest the helicopter pad. She gripped the blankets tightly, keeping them between herself and the horrors all around, trying not to panic.

As she got closer, the helo on the pad changed its pitch, and the roaring, buzzing craft lifted into the dark sky, a rotating red light under its tail painting the open doors with scarlet flashes. It was replaced by the next helo almost at once, a flare of noise and the blaze of its landing lights dazzling the doorway. A new crowd of orderlies swept past her, headed for the pad, pulling squealing gurneys behind them into the square perimeter of amber ground lights outlining the landing zone.

Trying to stay inconspicuous, she put the blankets down in a corner, and waited by the side of the doors. She was terrified that someone would give her an urgent order, that she might miss him. The helo touched down with a light bounce, the rotors changed pitch, and the gurneys were rolled up to the sliding hatch, a rectangular dark hole in the white sides of the helicopter. After a minute, the gurneys began to stream back in from the pad, each propelled by one corpsman. Diane watched frantically, her heart in her mouth, where it had been for most of the afternoon, ever since the car carrier had blown up in the river and the subsequent call from the Commodore.

She had been talking on the phone to her friend in Orlando when the first blast boomed over the peaceful, Friday afternoon routine of the base, followed by two more in quick succession, the explosions bellowing across the flat expanse of the naval station. She had been startled enough to drop the phone, and, oblivious to the squeaking shouts of her friend, she had raced to the window to look towards the basin. The officers’ quarters were on the beach area south of the carrier basin; the river was on the north side. She had seen the gray-black column of writhing smoke pushing skyward above the palms like some kind of movie monster, dwarfing the distant masts of the ships, growing impossibly large by the second, looking like the cloud that had come off the St. Helens volcano. A long minute later, there had been another blast, which drove a bright orange fireball up into the cloud, making it even bigger and giving it the shape of an atomic cloud rising into the afternoon air.

The second explosion had been followed thirty seconds later by the sound of a metallic hail rattling through the palm trees and onto the flat, tar and pebble roofs of the quarters. She had grabbed the phone and told her friend that she had to go, that something terrible had happened on the base, and hung up as the sound of sirens began to rise from the area of the carrier basin.

She had wanted to get in the car and drive down there, but realized that this would be foolish. The huge cloud of now all black smoke continued to boil up from just beyond the carrier piers, punctuated by dull thumps which produced smaller orange fireballs. From her kitchen door she could no longer see the top of the smoke column. She heard voices out on the lawns as her neighbors gathered on the grass to watch and pick through the glittering debris. It was evident by now that whatever had happened had happened out on the river and not on the base.

She slipped out the back door, and found twinkling bits of what looked like confetti all over the lush grass, with some pieces of metal almost big enough to identify. Realizing she was barefoot, she went back into the house to get shoes, and then hurried out onto the beach behind the house, and started down the white sand beach towards the river junction. It took her twenty minutes at a fast walk to get down to the stone jetties, where the rumbling, towering cloud of smoke and flames began to fan her face with its hot, burning petroleum breath. There were sirens sounding all over the base, and dozens of flashing blue lights visible down on the destroyer piers. The beach was littered with progressively larger pieces of debris as she got closer to the jetties, most of it metal, but also a great deal of glass and what looked like bits of automobiles. From one of the big rocks on the jetty she could see what looked like the blackened remains of a large ship at the base of the firestorm, the flat stern recognizable because of the funnels and the rudder jutting up out of the water. The funnels leaned in towards each other, looking as if they had been made of lace, with bright orange flames rippling through the latticed steel.

As other people came down the beach to see the wreck, a security pickup truck came bumping out over the sand dunes, the driver angrily ordering everyone to get off the beach and return to their quarters. A fresh series of explosions from the river impelled all the sightseers to obey the orders.

She had returned to the quarters and watched the smoke column boil and rumble for the next hour, trading theories with her neighbors, some of whom had figured out that there must have been damage and injuries down on the piers. Finally the phone had begun to ring inside. Diane was not alarmed, as she knew her husband was safe at sea onboard the Coral Sea. She had answered on the fifth ring, and was surprised to hear the voice of Commodore Aronson. She felt a thrill of guilty fear in her stomach as she thought quickly about her call to Norfolk. She realized that the Commodore must have been having less than a really nice day, even before something went bang out on the river.

“Mrs. Martinson? This is Eli Aronson.”

“Yes, Commodore?”

She had tried to think of something else to say, but could not. He let her hang there in silence for a few seconds.

“I understand you made a call to CincLantFleet this morning,” he said.

“Yes, I did.” She swallowed. “I’m sorry if—”

“No matter; this thing was bound to come out anyway, and it appears to me that what’s just happened might be part of it.”

“Exactly what did happen out there, Commodore?”

“Our picture is pretty fragmentary, but we know one of those big Toyota car carriers came into the river junction on what looked like a routine transit upriver. We have witnesses who say that it looked like she was torpedoed — three big, underwater blasts along her port side that were big enough to shove her halfway across the river. She began to roll to port right after, turned over within seconds, and started to burn from stem to stern. She was packed with cars, which means a couple of thousand gas tanks all crammed inside, and we think that’s what finally blew her to bits. We’ve had a lot injuries on the piers and around the base, and the station dispensary is going to be pretty busy. But that’s not why I called.”

Diane swallowed again, but did not say anything. In a sense, she had probably wrecked the Commodore’s career with her phone call.

“Are you there, Mrs. Martinson?” His voice was hard. “I’m calling because I think that ship out there was mined, not torpedoed. The river entrance is much too shallow for torpedo work. Which tells me that our little submarine theory is probably not a figment. Thanks to your call, the Atlantic Fleet commanders are grappling with that little problem as we speak. It also means that Goldsborough is probably going to turn over a nasty rock out there in an hour or so. If we’re all lucky, Coral Sea will be warned in time to divert, but we can’t count on it. That’s up to Norfolk. But the Admiral, that’s CincLantFleet, Admiral Denniston, is certain to order a full investigation if he hasn’t already done so. I wanted to alert you to the fact that whatever relationship you have going with Mike Montgomery is bound to be dragged across a long green table, Mrs. Martinson. From the way the big guys were talking up in Norfolk, it won’t be a pretty process. For either you or Mike.”

“I understand,” she replied in a small voice.

“Do you? I don’t really think you do, but I’ve got problems of my own just now, as will Mike.”

“Thanks to my call.”

“Well, I admit I indulged in some creative language when I found out about the call. But I’ve been telling myself it’s for the best; I would have had to tell them what we thought was going on when the Toyota carrier went to heaven. But I’m going to offer you some advice: when Mike gets back in, there’s going to be hell to pay. I like the guy, and had hopes of getting him promoted. That’s still possible, depending on what happens out there. But it’s not possible, not even thinkable, if it becomes known that he was involved with the Chief of Staffs wife. If ever you planned to take a trip, go visit your mother, whatever, this would be a good time to do it. I don’t know anything about the status of your marriage to J.W. Martinson, but if you take a powder, it might help young Michael get through the shit storm that’s coming.”

Diane was silent. She truly could not tell if the Commodore had Mike’s best interests at heart, or had figured out a particularly vicious way of getting back at her for spilling his secret into official navy channels. The sound of some more secondary explosions boomed in through the kitchen windows. She could think of absolutely nothing to say.

“Goodbye, Commodore,” she said, and hung up.

She had sat in the kitchen for almost two hours, letting her emotions range from a flood of tears to red faced anger at the whole Navy system. Mike was going to be pilloried somehow for being right about the submarine, and the club they would use on him, if no other weapon could be found, was going to be his affair with her. Somehow she knew in her bones that Navy officialdom would rally around J.W., the wronged husband, never mind that he had been carrying on with another woman in Norfolk for God knows how long. She had mixed herself a strong drink, and then poured it down the drain. Maybe the Commodore was right; maybe she should just get out of Dodge until the whole thing was resolved.

But what about Mike? How would he feel when the shit hit the fan and she was gone? He had said he loved her, and she felt the same way about him. He had brought her back to life, revived her as a woman and as a person after her long stint in the unemotional, one dimensional desert of life as Mrs. Chief of Staff. Where she really wanted to run to was the old houseboat, to be there when he got in, and to hell with what the Navy establishment thought about it. But that might, no, certainly would, make it extremely tough on Mike. She was still fretting about it when the phone had rung again. She had just stared at it for the first four rings, a feeling of apprehension growing in her stomach, and then she had snatched it up.

“Yes, hello?” she answered breathlessly.

“Diane? This is Margaret Forrest at the Gray Lady office at NAS. Diane, can you come in to the hospital? We’ve been receiving a lot of injured people from that accident on the river, but now we’ve been told that apparently something awful has happened to one of the Mayport ships out at sea, and we’ve been told to get every able body we can down here right away.”

Diane’s mouth went dry. Her heart began to pound. She could hardly get the next words out.

“Which — ship?” she asked in a whisper.

“The Gold-something, I can’t remember the name. But they’re talking about two hundred casualties, so it’s very serious. Can you come in?”

Diane had almost fainted.

“Yes,” she had said weakly, “yes, right away.”

The third gurney bumped through the doors, its passenger unconscious and connected to an IV that was being carried alongside by a corpsman. She looked back out into the darkness, and saw them wheeling the last gurney in from the pad as the helicopter made ready to take off. The wind from its rotor blades almost blew the doors shut and flung sharp bits of sand in her face. As the gurney rolled through the doors, she caught a momentary glimpse of Mike’s face, and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out.

His face, or that part of it that was visible, was black with encrusted, dried blood, one eye puffed and shut tight, his head covered in a huge battle dressing that was itself black with blood, with two thin, scarlet streams of bright red blood visible running down his neck. At the other end there were two round cylinders of splints and dressings where his lower legs should have been.

The corpsmen rolled the gurney down the hall, with Diane following them like a robot, her face ashen. One of them turned to see why she was following them. She pointed down to the inert form.

“That’s the Captain,” she said.

They stopped rolling the gurney, and the other two corpsmen turned around to look at the obviously distressed, pretty woman in the Gray Lady uniform following them.

“What’s that?” one asked.

“That’s the Captain of the ship. Captain Montgomery.”

“Holy shit,” said the corpsman. He looked around for an officer.

The triage team headed by the CO of the hospital was backing out of a room nearby. The corpsman called to the CO.

“Sir, this is the Captain of the ship,” he said.

The tall doctor walked over swiftly, and did a quick, professional appraisal. There was a tag in a plastic page protector tied to the stokes litter, containing the field diagnosis. He studied it briefly, lifted the bandage on Mike’s head, and shook his head.

“Probable skull fracture, both legs and ankles fractured, possible sub-dural hematoma, considerable blood loss,” he intoned, while an intern wrote it all down.

He glanced over at Diane for a brief instant, and then back at the senior corpsman.

“Upstairs. OR. Stat.,” he ordered.

The corpsmen started back down the hall, and Diane tried to follow but the florid faced Captain stepped in front of her.

“We need you down here, Mrs. — ?”

“Martinson,” she replied blankly. “But—”

“I understand, Mrs. Martinson, and I assume you know the patient, but we need the help down here, all the help we can get, as you can see, and you won’t be able to see him where he’s going right now, possibly not for several hours. Perhaps you can find his wife out there and inform her that he’s here in the hospital. But then, please come back. OK?”

She nodded silently, fighting back sudden tears, as the triage team swept away again into the next set of rooms. One of the interns gave her a curious glance as they left, and then a nurse grabbed her and asked for help getting a patient off a gurney and into a bed.