George Washington's Ghost

However, he was not quite so sure about the tiny electric shock; well, more of a persistent tingling of the band around his left wrist which warned him that there was about to be a boat-wide announcement which he was required to listen to, over the ether via the earpiece permanently in his right ear.

Apparently, unlike on surface ships, blaring alarms and exhortations over the boat’s speaker system were an ‘absolute no-no’ when the Surprise was creeping around several hundred feet beneath the surface trying very hard to be as stealthy as possible.

The wrist band also served the purpose of allowing the Officer of the Watch to establish exactly where every man was at a given moment. It was a court martial offence to remove the band while on board; likewise, woe betide a man who took out his earpiece, or mislaid it, or placed it more than the specified two-and-a-half seconds out of his immediate reach.

“This is the Captain!”

Abe put down his book. Today, he was ‘slumming it’ in the Petty Officer’s Mess, like every other compartment on the vessel far too small to swing a cat in – leastways, not enthusiastically – in his constant quest to not get under anybody’s feet. He was a lot better at that than Ted Forest, who, now that he was up and about – limping and on crutches – was a bundle of nervous energy keen to learn everything that was to be learned about the great mechanical whale, which had swallowed them off Little Inagua a fortnight ago. Abe would have been more curious but then that would have spoiled his friend’s fun; Ted clearly enjoyed explaining everything he had discovered to him of an evening, or morning, or whatever, one soon lost track of time, day, night and all that nonsense, on board a nuclear-powered submarine.

“You will all have been asking yourselves what we have been doing twiddling our thumbs the last couple of weeks,” the Captain prefaced, speaking quietly, as if each and every man on the boat was standing directly in front of him, “while our chums up top have been getting it in the neck. Other than ferrying our gang of half-tame Royal Marines ruffians to their next rendezvous with unpleasantness, that is!”

That ‘gang’ of ruffians were the only reason Abe and Ted were still alive. Ted would almost certainly have died of his wounds, infection for want of antibiotics back on Little Inagua, and Abe had not exactly been in tip top form by the time the Marines jumped on him.

The ‘ruffians’ had gone on another ‘excursion’ about a week ago; reporting back with no little satisfaction, or irony, that this time ‘the Royal Naval Air Service had been so good as to leave them some Cubans and Dominicans to kill.’

There had been much jocular banter in the Wardroom about how it hard been for the Marines to move around Little Inagua, ‘what with continually falling over all the dead bodies lying about everywhere!’

The Captain went on: “You may be aware that until now our rules of engagement have been to avoid detection and to not initiate contact with the enemy. At zero-one-zero-zero hours this morning GMT, we received new orders authorising us to attack and sink the Cuban submersible we have been tracking the last three days, and any other enemy submarine we encounter within a fifty-mile radius of any our surface units or bases ashore.”

The Captain paused, as if he was checking the deckhead chronometer in the Control Room.

“In approximately seven minutes the boat will come to Attack Stations. For your information all six bow tubes are loaded, with tubes One and Three already flooded down.”

Abe thought there was going to be more.

“That will be all.”

Submariners, Abe had learned, did not tend to make much of a fuss about anything in particular.

“Ah,” Ted Forest announced cheerfully, hobbling clumsily into the compartment, “there you are!”

Considering that he had a broken leg in a cast – and that he had had two, by no means minor, ‘tidying up’ surgeries on his abdominal bullet wound in the first forty-eight hours he had been aboard the Surprise – the boat’s surgeon had been frankly astonished that Ted was: one, so ‘chipper’; and two, up and about and obviously already so well ‘mended’.

Abe had told his medical colleague that you could not keep a good man down, and resisted all blandishment to try to persuade his friend to ‘take it easy’.

His own shoulder wound had healed nicely and like his still pink facial wounds, presently rather obvious given his sunburnt countenance and torso, would in time, fade.

‘No lasting damage,’ Surprise’s surgeon had concluded.

Abe put down his book and looked up.

“Well,” he frowned, “I could hardly get out and go for a walk outside, old man!”

Ted Forest maneuvered his ‘gammy’ leg under the Mess table and sat down beside Abe.

“This is true,” he agreed, chuckling. “Torps.” He explained confidentially, “says we’ll probably just creep up behind the other fellow and launch a homing fish at him from about a mile away.”