Sex and the High Command Read Online Free

billies on the quarterdeck, and bluejackets scurrying to catch the roll call. Ever so slightly, it seemed to Hansen, reality was out of focus.
    Commander Reed, the ship’s executive officer, entered bringing the eight o’clock reports. All were present and accounted for but Commander Johnson.
    “Probably fouled up in the Suffolk traffic,” the captain commented. “Send him to me when he reports in.”
    Hansen sipped his coffee and turned his attention to the ship’s paper. A digest of the international news carried the item that the Red Chinese had dropped another practice missile, this one close to Johnston Island. In ten years they’d be lobbing them ashore at Crescent City, California. On the second page of the paper, he found an item he considered raw:
According to skirmish reports coming from the port watch, Norfolk is having a cold wave in August. Only CWT McCormick scored, as expected. Go it, starboard!
    He’d have to speak to the recreation officer. This paper went into the homes of ratings who lived in the Norfolk area.
    Again the captain was interrupted, by the officer of the day who entered, hat under arm, visibly shaken. “Captain, I’ve just got the word that Commander Johnson killed himself.”
    “By heavens! Who told you that?”
    “His wife, sir. I called his house and asked Anne where he was and she said he was dead. She said he shot himself because she was pregnant. Sir, I was shocked. I said, ‘What are you going to do, Anne?’ and she answered, calm as you please, ‘Why, I’m going to bury him.’ Captain, I thought she was crazy. So I called the Suffolk sheriff’s office and the poop checked out.”
    “I would never have thought this,” the captain said. “Ralph Johnson was the Rock of Gibraltar. But it happened ashore, so it’s out of our hands. Notify Mr. Reed and the chaplain and enter it in your log.”
    “Aye, aye, sir.”
    Hansen sat down, far more upset than he had let the junior officer know. Improbabilities were happening faster than probabilities. Commander Johnson had been phlegmatic to a point where a dressing down or a “Well done” were all the same to him. It was inconceivable that Ralph could arouse himself to suicide. But if Hansen assumed that he had erred in his estimate of his navigator’s stability, there remained the wife’s infidelity.
    Anne Johnson had been a visitor at his home, but he would have remembered her if he had seen her only once. Legs as uniform as pipe cleaners balanced a pelvis relatively forward of a spine which, fortunately for her balance, was not top-heavy except in appearance—she wore her hair in a bun. Her most commendable feature was the manner in which her eyes followed her husband, not the eyes themselves, which were gray and bulbous. She hung on Ralph’s words, though they were few and commonplace, and even clung to his silences.
    Hansen felt that Anne was incapable of dalliance, even if she had been eager for it. He leaped to the idea that she might have been raped on a moonless night by a near-sighted sex lunatic, and as tenuous as the theory was, it was the only explanation of her pregnancy.
    Helga’s flirtation with a peace movement was easily dismissed as a passing fad. His wife read books. But the cold wave in Norfolk was perplexing. He could see a statistical improbability falling on any given day in a port such as Hamburg, Marseilles, or, remotely, Vallejo, but Norfolk? No!
    Hansen slowly shook his head. In his approach to his profession Hansen was practical, forthright, and logical. He analyzed ship movements with his viscera, and the problems of command had long ago been thought through, solutions found and tested. Extraneous problems he resented—if an officer came to him for guidance or advice on personal or domestic problems, Hansen would deliver a few homilies and ship the man out. Technical problems he delegated to specialists who were held responsible. Captain Hansen considered it his duty, as a naval officer, to