Operation Malacca by Joe Poyer Read Free Book Online Page A

the feeling. He helped someone in need because it made him feel good. He was patriotic because it satisfied what was left of his almost atrophied herd instincts. Charlie took this one step further. Man did not live on a rational level, but on an emotional level.
    Charlie's people, on the other hand, more closely approached the rational level, and he was discovering, in reviewing his past life now that he had the mental tool – vocabulary
    – to work with, that in the dolphin, emotions were almost atrophied and the herd worked and existed together on a rational level.
    Now that he was discovering the effects of emotions, he was beginning to realize just how strong they could be.
    Not far away, the silence was shattered by the passage of a patrol boat touring the net perimeter. Startled, he dove, suddenly aware of the dangers to which he had left himself open. He executed a fast 36o° turn, sonar and hearing tuned to the sharpest possible degree. The images were familiar: the tower; odd schools of fish, nothing big; the patrol boat; and dimly, the Bradley. The submarine was completely out of range now.
    He watched the patrol boat, and as soon as it was far enough away, he cleared the nets in one jump and headed quickly back to the Bradley.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The lights went up in the crowded wardroom, highlighting the wreaths of cigarette and pipe smoke coiling suddenly in the steaming air. Keilty sat to one side of the long captain's table, silently listening to the quiet arguing of the gathered officers and civilians.
    Keilty's contempt for the military and civil service mind had never been stronger. They had been sitting for hours in the crowded wardroom, all through the hot, sticky late afternoon, debating the pros and cons of the information that Charlie had brought back. It was all there for them to see, but some remained stubbornly unconvinced. Sitting next to him, almost wilting in the heat, was a slight, balding man. He drummed nervously on a small sheaf of papers until they were almost unreadable – the penciled calculations were smeared and blurred with perspiration.
    Keilty had been on deck earlier in the evening, shortly after Charlie had returned, when the MTh had come sliding up alongside the Bradley. Lines were secured as he slouched on the railing, watching. The American secretaries of State and Defense, the British Foreign Secretary and Minister of War, and their Australian, Malaysian, New Zealand and Indonesian counterparts, and respective retinues came aboard the destroyer. The seas were beginning to pick up and the ship was rolling heavily in the increasing swells. They had gone below, some of them already green, and a few moments later a messenger had come for him. Keilty finished his cigarette and went below. They were waiting for him, impatiently, and with a barrage of questions.
    He produced an extremely black Connecticut-broadleafwrappered and foul-smelling cigar, and lit up. Puffing on it with relish, he began to answer questions. The small wardroom soon filled with the cloying stench but the questions went on and on. Finally Keilty had to admit defeat. The smoke was getting to him as well. As unobtrusively as possible, he extinguished the cigar and covered it with an empty paper cup. Later, the tapes were produced and he narrated the now-familiar scenes as Charlie approached the station, examined the structure and support columns, the blur of motion as he surfaced and tried
    to rinse the taste of the oil from his mouth, and the underwater shots of the bomb housing.
    The silence was nearly complete when he finished, broken only by the whirring of the overworked and totally ineffective air conditioner.
    `There, gentlemen, you have it. It's as plain as the warts on a hog what is going on. What'
    s to be done is now your bailiwick.' And he sat down.
    As the argument renewed and dragged on, he talked quietly with the balding man next to him. It turned out that he was Dr. Iver Jensen, a Pentagon expert on