COLD WAR CANOE CLUB

Stories

Jeffery Hess

PRAISE FOR COLD WAR CANOE CLUB

Jeffery Hess combines a flair for gripping storytelling with a powerful lyrical sensibility to produce that rarest of birds: a book full of page-turners that read like literary fiction. Like Tim O’Brien and Kevin Powers, Hess writes with absolute authority about the military men whose lives he sees with utter clarity and intimacy.

—Pinckney Benedict, author of

Miracle Boy, The Wrecking Yard, and Town Smokes

"Eerily timely and rendered with gritty realism, Cold War Canoe Club beckons us to recall a time when actions and attitudes appeared motivated by an entire world perpetually hovering along the brink of utter destruction. Each tightly woven gem of a short story represents a microcosm of the Cold War macrocosm, and dares to expose Hess as a genius for his artful juxtaposition of humanity’s brash boldness with humanity’s amnesic naiveté."

—Tracy Crow, author of

Eyes Right: Confessions from a Woman Marine

Hess is one of those rare talents who tells a great story with compelling characters, pacing and action.

—Terrence McCauley, author of

The Devil Dogs of Belleau Wood

"Cold War Canoe Club presents an eclectic array of situations and stories all tied together by Hess’s hard-edged prose style and deeply-developed characters. In the smart, snappy tradition of Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke, Hess is a writer who pulls no punches and delivers authenticity in rapid-fire doses."

—Steph Post, author of

Lightwood

Smart, poignant, often slyly funny, these are stories that will both take your breath away and take you places you’ve never been before. A true and honest salute to much more than those who serve in the Navy, rich with history real and imagined.

—Fred Leebron, author of

Welcome to Christiania

Jeffery Hess reminds of the glory days or noir: wayward women, brawling sailors, and shadow-lurking heroes who were too hung over when redemption dawned. If you want a quick literary jab to your heart, any of Hess’s short fiction will do. Just finish burying that body, pal, and read.

—James R. Duncan, author of

Blood Republic

Collection Copyright © 2017 by Jeffery Hess

All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Cover design by James R. Tuck

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cold War Canoe Club: Stories

Strong to Save

Cold War Canoe Club

Last Battle Aboard the Old Pro

Smiles

The Pit Sword Room

Here Today, Guam Tomorrow

Last Night in Hong Kong

The Compound

Fleet Week

The Greatest Danger of All Would Be to Do Nothing

Attention on Deck

Random Acts

Official Ship’s Stationery

Cash for Go_d

Weight of the Moment

Military Clean

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by the Author

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For those in peril on the sea

Strong to Save

August 25, 1949

In that moment before the explosion aboard the submarine USS Cochino, Thom Dwyer held his Navy-issue coffee mug in one hand and in the other, a photograph he’d received at mail call a few days prior. He sat at his station in the radio room with headphone cans over his ears, listening for Soviet telemetry transmissions, while staring at a picture of Norma and Lawrence beneath the garden arbor he’d built the summer before last. He imagined the boy falling in the grass every few steps and the way Norma clucked around behind him like a worried hen. Dwyer preferred to let him fall as a way to toughen him up. Thinking about it made him wish he’d woken up with them in Groton, Connecticut instead of somewhere off the coast of Murmansk.

The explosion in the aft battery compartment sounded like a dull thud, like nothing more than someone dropping a box of teletype paper on the deck behind Dwyer’s chair. The explosion reverberated the hull enough to spill coffee all over Dwyer’s patrol reports. In that instant, his ears popped like with a stabbing pain in each, as if a jolt of electricity surged through the wires and into the cans, down his ear canals, and fried his brain. The pain—immediate and all consuming—doubled him over. He grunted, fearing his head would explode and he’d be taken from Norma and his son. In the moment it took him to raise his hands to his head, the pain eased by half. He tugged off the cans and checked for blood coming from his inner ears. He exhaled relief at his dry fingers.

The Cochino shook from the explosion. The danger, at that depth for a Balao-class submarine, was exponential, but Dwyer was confident in the boat’s construction. Then again, there was little choice. They were submerged beyond snorkel depth in the Barents Sea with a weather forecast predicting polar storms. The Cochino measured little more than three hundred feet. Rough seas could toss her around like a hot potato.

As the boat stopped shaking, the Cochino lost engine power. Stillness crept over Dwyer. There was no vibration other than his pounding heart. The boat remained level, submerged. The other radiomen braced themselves against their consoles in anticipation of another impact. If they spoke, Dwyer didn’t hear anything.

What the hell was that? he yelled. He thought he yelled, didn’t hear his own words, couldn’t hear anything. His ears felt like they had cotton wads jammed in by ice picks.

The four other men in the radio room released their holds on their consoles and sprang into motion. Dwyer didn’t hear the alarm, but he felt the amplified gongs of General Quarters pulse into his ribs.

***

Norma was a fine woman. Honest and virtuous. And if Dwyer squinted, she could pass for Ava Gardner’s sister—even had a similar melody in her voice. Dwyer missed her, but his heart didn’t ache for her. She was a few years older than Dwyer and loved to dance to Tommy Dorsey music. She never kissed the backs of the letters she sent, but would start doing so if he asked, specifically. All her enthusiasm was spent on Lawrence during his every waking moment. Dwyer never protested or complained. The boy was their mutual priority.

If he were back home, he’d have had a belly full of Norma’s sausage gravy and biscuits instead of powdered eggs and overdone toast. If he were back home, he might’ve been at a ballgame. The Yankees were having a swell season. He could make the drive from Groton to the Bronx in less than three hours for weekend games. He planned to take Lawrence with him soon. He was still a little young, but DiMaggio wasn’t going to be around forever and the boy needed to see the Yankee Clipper play. Besides ballgames and training on base, Dwyer spent a lot of time in the garden, pulling carrots out of the ground with his clumsy four-year-old helper.

Norma didn’t understand why he took the time to grow produce when he had so many responsibilities on base. He’d bent down one day, grabbed a fistful of moist topsoil and held it in his palm before her. Don’t you see? he asked, smiling at her and cradling the clump of dirt as if it were gold. This combined with water and sun nourishes the plants that nourish us.

***

Dwyer, newly assigned to the Cochino, was paired to work with an even newer arrival named Red Austin. As stout and stern a man as Dwyer had ever seen, Red Austin was a real-life spy. They were assembled aboard this sub as a team. Dwyer didn’t understand Russian, but he knew it when he heard it and could make out the Cyrillic alphabet of Morse code. His job was to hit a button to record information electronically into a gray box that looked more suited to holding a woman’s hat than Soviet transmissions. Red would analyze the information in a cubicle they’d set up for him between the control room and the radio shack.

Their antennas were set to pick up high-end frequencies—the kind the Soviets used to launch missiles. It was a dream job, assisting a spook like Red in sniffing out the enemy’s secret plans to launch missiles from their base in Murmansk or from submarines of their own, just off shore. Red was the only guy Dwyer had met who was as excited by his job as Dwyer.

Most of the seventy-eight crew members aboard believed they’d left England to perform exercises with their sister boat, the USS Tusk. Dwyer was one of only three enlisted men who knew the truth about their more important mission. This was one of the first subs to undertake this kind of mission and Dwyer was thrilled about being lucky enough to be part of it.

***

After the explosion, Dwyer’s first priority was not his pain, failed hearing, or the reason for the alarm, but rather his wife and son. Norma didn’t approve of his job that took him away from her, and was adamant that he return home safely. She’d lost her first husband, Dwyer’s brother, Earl, in the war and couldn’t lose him, too. Earl had been killed in action in France and the younger Dwyer had stepped up to marry Norma when he was only seventeen. Her son needed a father. The boy was born a Dwyer and needed to be raised by one. And Thom Dwyer didn’t need to be even half the hero his brother became, he just needed to return home in one piece.

To this end, he’d convinced Norma that the Navy, in peacetime, was safer than the Army during war and had brought her to live with him in Groton, where he’d been stationed for training. She’d never been out of Alabama before. Heck, he hadn’t either until he went to boot camp in Chicago.

It wasn’t his being in the military that made Norma’s skin break out in hives—that happened when he shipped out.

***

The air in the Cochino’s main passageway hung thick and acrid as men scrambled. Without power, they had to rely on dim emergency lighting fed from a bank of batteries. Some late-shift workers jumped out of their bunks without wasting the time to put on their pants. The entire crew seemed to fill the one main passageway, tending to firefighting gear and flooding equipment. Feet moved and mouths wagged, but all was muted to Dwyer. It was like watching a silent movie. Dwyer tried to remove the cans from his ears, and gasped with the realization he already had.

Everything appeared to happen in slow motion. The smell in the air wasn’t diesel fuel burning, but rather something more biting and chemical. Something must’ve happened to one of the large battery compartments, which meant that smell in the passageways was toxic. Without fresh air, they would all be killed.

Minutes after the explosion, the planesmen blew ballast and the boat pitched beneath Dwyer’s boots. He grabbed onto a DC light stanchion to keep himself in place as the boat rose from cruising depth toward the surface. His ears usually popped with this change of depth, but nothing happened now.

Once the boat surfaced, she leveled off. A number of the crew pushed and shoved past him. Dwyer couldn’t hear what they said, but he followed the others as fast as he could down the narrow passageway like cattle fleeing slaughter. They bunched up at the ladder behind the sail. They were going topside—up on deck. Dwyer had never been out on deck while at sea. Under different circumstances he might’ve enjoyed the prospect, but now his only interest was breathing clean air. As the main hatch opened, the crew was splashed by a wave, two or three stories tall, that crashed across the deck and smacked the sailors, who had their sea legs tested in the most aggressive way possible. They filed onto the deck, trusting the black, non-skid surface to hold their steps, and faced the elements in the frigid waters just a mere hundred miles from two Soviet fleet bases. They had no choice. With the toxic gasses below, the sub could easily become an iron casket for all of them. Trapped on deck they were nothing more than ants on a log in the rapids.

The sky hung clouded, the sun unable to break through. The hazy light gave Dwyer the opportunity to see how isolated they were. Without the ability to hear, Dwyer felt even more alone. A torpedoman grabbed Dwyer’s shoulder to turn him around. The guy pointed and his mouth moved quickly, but Dwyer couldn’t read his lips. Dwyer pointed to his ears and shook his head. Tried to tell the guy that he’d lost his hearing, but the torpedoman stopped him mid-sentence, nodded and disappeared into the crowd.

Other sailors appeared to holler. Their faces tensed and their mouths moved, though Dwyer didn’t get a single word. There was nothing getting in his ears except cold air and sea water. But he watched them and did what they did, tying a six-foot length of line around his waist and lashing himself to the cable lifeline on deck with a four-inch lanyard hook.

The wind whipped from every direction. Cold bit through Dwyer’s neck and the backs of his arms. He flipped up his shirt collar and rolled down his sleeves, but that did nothing to warm him. He wished they’d had time to get their foul weather gear, or even their blue jackets. Dwyer considered himself better off than those guys who’d been rousted from their racks and came straight out in T-shirts and skivvies, some barefoot, a few with blankets wrapped around them.

Dwyer kept an eye on the hatch to see if anyone emerged with gathered up coats to distribute to everyone topside, but no one did. That was an eventuality that no one addressed in drills.

The wind and sea spray cut across the deck. It swirled and clawed at them and there was no way to buffer themselves from the polar storm. Dwyer’s lungs burned from the cold, but it was a healthier burn than the one caused by the toxic fumes below deck. He shivered. His jaw vibrated, his teeth chattered, though he couldn’t hear them.

***

Before his brother got killed, Dwyer had been a churchgoer. The two occasions he’d been since the funeral he was hungover both times. Worse than the headaches was the bitterness in his throat. Bitterness not just that his brother had been taken from him, but that a little boy’s father had been taken from him.

A buddy back home had tried to convince Dwyer that he could do other things than take responsibility that way. Dwyer saw matters differently because of something he learned from his history teacher, sophomore year. She had been a sturdy woman in her forties who wore a hat and walked to school every day. Each morning upon arriving in her classroom, she removed her hat and placed it on her chair. She then spent the entire day on her feet. One day, while studying the British monarchy, she expanded on a trait of young King Henry VIII—used the opportunity to teach her class about the rich tradition of marrying your brother’s widow. She taught them about its prevalence in the 1860s following the Civil War. That the Jews called their version Levirate marriage and had elaborate ceremonies to go through. Other foreign cultures, from the Indians to the Arabs, had their own versions, too. Then the teacher lowered her voice and looked toward the window for a moment. She held the class’s attention as she explained the Battle of Belleau Wood and how she lost her first husband that June day in 1918. She had the class on the edge of their seats as she revealed that as awful as that was for her, it was also sort of a gift. The man she’d been married to for the past twenty-five years was once her brother-in-law. She said she’d been happy and proud ever since. A couple girls in the class had cried.

For the first time ever, Dwyer had made the connection between the history book and real life.

After they buried Earl, Dwyer figured it was his turn to be part of living history. He remembered how things didn’t work out too well for old Henry Tudor, but that didn’t give Dwyer pause. He moved without hesitation, same as when he enlisted in the Navy. As if he couldn’t help himself.

Now, his responsibility was to stay alive so he could make it back home and take care of them. To prevent that little boy from losing another father and becoming the last in a long line of Dwyers at such a young age.

***

Out on the Cochino’s deck, the cold and wet rendered Dwyer’s hands numb but he managed to hold onto the lifeline cable while the deck gyrated beneath his boots. Those boots had kept his feet from numbing, and he felt the diesel engines restart through the vibrations beneath them. The familiar rumble replaced the stillness, the emptiness of being dead in the water. Engine power meant hope.

More crewmembers crowded up on deck. A number of officers huddled together on the bridge inside the sail. What little footing the crew had on deck ran slick from saltwater spray that rained down and splashed around the hull.

After a few minutes, one of the cooks, a guy named Morgan, emerged from the hatch. In the midst of the wind and spray and the pitching and rolling, he lost his footing and tap danced backward along the deck. His arms swung in circles as he tried to regain his balance. Dwyer saw him going and groaned his panic in an attempt to alert the others nearest him. One of the guys reached for Morgan, got hold of his arm, but the sea spray made it slick and Morgan reared back like a foal trying to stand on a sheet of ice until he fell overboard. With the wind and the violent waves, Dwyer doubted anyone heard Morgan’s splash. They saw him fall and perhaps they heard his cries for help. A number of guys unlashed themselves from the rail and someone, he couldn’t tell who, jumped into the icy water after Morgan. Dwyer didn’t move. He couldn’t move. His only thought was the preservation of his own life. Not for his sake, but for Norma and the boy.

The pressure in his head peaked then. No sound got in, and none of the pressure was able to get out either. Someone tossed a life preserver into the water. Somebody else threw two life jackets in an attempt to help Morgan and the guy who went into the icy drink after him.

As it had been a while since Dwyer had been to church, his mind was blank of any prayers to pray. To occupy the silence in his head, he recited the Navy hymn:

Eternal Father, strong to save,

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep;

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the Sea!

Before he got to the second verse, they heaved and tugged Morgan out of the drink and back onto the deck. The poor bastard curled himself into a ball and shivered. They snatched the other guy onto the deck, too. He did the same thing. Dwyer was no longer dry by this point, but he had not been submerged. As cold as he was, he couldn’t imagine being any colder and surviving.

Four guys carted their soaked and frozen shipmates inside—better odds to risk the toxic and combustible gasses filling the passageways than hypothermia.

Oh Christ! Whose voice the waters heard

And hushed the raging at thy word,

Who walked’st on the foaming deep,

And calm amidst its rage didst sleep;

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!

After what felt like hours, standing on the Cochino’s deck, lashed to the life rail and reciting the hymn a thousand times, one of the other guys pointed and sprung from his knees. Dwyer didn’t know what the fuss was about, but he welcomed the distraction from the pain in his head, his shivering discomfort, and the salt chafe on his face.

The guy pointing must’ve hollered something, and all the others pointed as well and waved their arms over their heads.

Dwyer had no way of knowing what was said, but that first sight of the dark silhouette of a submarine’s sail, and then its hull as it broke the surface only a few hundred yards off their port bow, lifted every cell in his body. Everyone must have felt the way he did because they all jumped and waved, grateful for their sister boat, the USS Tusk, arriving to lend assistance. Dwyer suddenly felt less alone. There was strength in numbers.

Shortly after, he noticed diesel fuel pumping out of the Cochino. At first he thought it was a leak, but then he realized the captain was working to create an oil slick in an attempt to calm the roaring waves.

Someone on the Tusk shot a line over their heads. The first attempt landed perfectly and a number of the Cochino’s crew secured the line and heaved a thicker line back across with coordinated precision despite the wind and the waves that challenged their balance. Dwyer breathed easier and felt slightly less cold.

The Tusk then sent an unmanned raft filled with two first-aid footlockers.

During this time, Dwyer felt more dull thuds beneath the soles of his boots, the vibrations working up his legs and into his throat. Another explosion, he feared.

The life raft’s return trip looked set to carry two brave souls named Shelton and Philo to the Tusk. Dwyer didn’t know why or what the plan might be, but he watched as they climbed in and the raft was lowered. He wanted to know the purpose of their efforts, but most of all, he hoped that they would make it across.

The oil did little other than to stain the water. Within seconds, the waves rose up and the raft overturned. Shelton and Philo clutched onto straps that ran across the raft’s bottom. Wind and waves pounded Philo into the Tusk’s hull. Shelton was grabbed in the crest of a wave and tossed, as if by magic, up on deck. He landed awkwardly on his shoulder and was drenched from the splash that followed, but he was alive. Philo didn’t have that kind of luck.

Guys on the Tusk pulled the line leading the raft toward them. Her crew wore foul-weather gear. Dwyer envied the warmth of such outer garments and those who wore them—all but the guys who’d jumped in to help retrieve Philo.

Dwyer watched the rescue and forgot about the cold as he focused on the retrieval from the sea. The ordeal simultaneously gave him hope and made him realize how doomed they all might be. The waves slapped the hull violently and broke topside, beating them savagely. The two subs could collide and crack open like eggs and sink to the bottom at any second.

As the guys on the Tusk worked to rescue Philo, a wave mammoth enough to fill Dwyer’s peripheral vision reared up and made the Tusk look like a toy. The wave crashed down, bent life rail stanchions, swept some crewmembers off the Tusk’s deck and scattered