Pacific Interlude (20 page)

“Secure that skiff up there,” Syl shouted. “It's liable to get washed off.”

Rhinehart, a seaman who looked too young to be out of high school and Murphy, a stocky coxswain about twenty-five years old, ran to do this. After two weeks aboard, Syl was just starting to get the men's last names right. Still in defiance of custom, Buller called them by first names or nicknames.

“Hey, Bobbie,” Buller now called Rhinehart, “check under the seat of that skiff and see if there's a case of beer there. We're missing one.”

“It's here!” Rhinehart piped in a boyish voice.

“You can put it in the forecastle,” Buller shouted.

“The hell you can,” Simpson called. “I want all beer stowed in the lazaret. They'll be no drinking at sea.”

He glanced at Syl to see if this order would be countermanded.

“That's right,” Syl said. “Save the stuff for a beer bust ashore.”

The men groaned. Perhaps by accident, perhaps not, Rhinehart dropped the case as he carried it aft, and golden cans rolled along the passageway between rows of oil drums. Whooping, the crew scrambled after them.

“Put that damn beer in the lazaret, every can of it,” Simpson ordered.

Instead, the men began playing catch with the cans which glittered as they flashed about in the bright sunlight.

“Stow
it,” Simpson said, face turning red.

“Simp, we ain't drinking the stuff,” Buller said as he neatly fielded a can in his huge right hand. “Is there any law what says you can't throw beer cans around a ship?”

“Never mind the Simp,” the executive officer said. “And I want every can of that stuff stowed immediately or I'll put you all on report.”

The men obliged by throwing most of the cans toward the men on the fantail, but one hit the side of the pilothouse and burst, spraying the green paint with white foam.

No more of the shining missies flew through the air, but more went into bulging pockets than into the lazaret.

“Hey, Murph,” Buller shouted to the coxswain, who was still standing by the skiff on the boy, “catch this one.”

“No
more,”
Simpson said.

Buller wound up and delivered his pitch anyway, but it turned out that he had nothing in his hand. Falling into the spirit of this game, Murphy leaped into the air and pantomimed a miraculous catch. Soon the whole crew was laughing and acting out a comic baseball ballet, throwing and catching nothing but air as Simpson turned and beat a stiff retreat to the flying bridge.

This might be an unruly crew, but it was also one, Syl felt, with guts and spirit. What was really so bad about some horseplay for men setting out to ride gasoline into a major battle. To hell with Simpson … Syl was soon playing umpire as the invisible ball flew back to Buller, and Cramer pretended to slide home at his feet.

“Safe,” Syl shouted, throwing out his arms. “Safe at home plate!”

It all beat facing the truth of what lay ahead. It beat pissing in one's pants.

Syl's moment of unreal euphoria did not last long and neither did the crew's. As the twenty-four small ships which joined convoy Charlie Fox Able formed up, every one of them, even a tug with five two-thousand-ton barges, flew the red Baker flag, showing that they were carrying either ammunition or gasoline. They were such a decrepit-looking collection of rusty hulls that they looked as though they ought to be sailing to the ship breakers, not to battle. Even the destroyer
Talbot
, which escorted them, was a four-piper left over from the First World War and looked so seaworn that Syl wondered whether she had somehow got lost in the Battle of Jutland and had been wandering around looking for home ever since. This sad collection of floating junk appeared even more pathetic compared to the enormous convoys of new ships which kept speeding past them, their flanks protected by powerful new destroyers, sleek cruisers and small aircraft carriers. On the horizon a parade of battleships and aircraft carriers outdistanced them all. Feeling like a gaggle of ragamuffins following a parade, convoy Charlie Fox Able limped along, unable to make good even its scheduled eight knots against growing head seas.

“It looks like they put all their rotten eggs in one basket,” Buller observed. “Still, what Jap would bother with us when all these big boys are out looking for trouble?”

At the moment Syl was not worried about Japs. The gas drums jiggled and danced in their lashings as the ship pitched and yawed in a corkscrew roll. While he was studying their movements, he realized that the whole hull was flexing dangerously. It humped perceptibly in the middle on the crest of the seas and sagged in the troughs.

Simpson observed, “She's mighty limber, ain't she? Captain Carlson used to call her the Flexible Flyer.”

“What makes her do it, do you know?”

“Didn't I tell you that with the seawater eating from the outside and the gas from within, her plates have worn mighty thin?” And then, with an air of something like triumph, Simpson turned and went back to the flying bridge. Syl stood there watching the working of the hull in these steep but still moderate seas. How long could metal be bent back and forth like that before breaking, and what would happen if they hit really tough weather?

Seeing the worried expression on Syl's face, Buller came from the pilothouse and stood near him on the wing of the bridge.

“You worried about us having the bends?” he asked with a grin.

“I am. That's part of my job—”

“Wydanski said he doesn't think it's anything to worry about. That crazy old Polack don't know much, but he spent a lot of time aboard tankers back in the days when they had steam. He says most tankers have a lot of give in them. He's been on ships where the masts whipped back and forth so much they busted the radio aerial.”

“I've heard of that on big tankers. Not on one this size.”

“Well, I know some of those big old tankers keep going for thirty or forty years down in the Gulf. If their plates can take the punishment so long, why not ours?”

Perhaps because big tankers would have much thicker plates than small ones, Syl thought, but he'd try not to spread his pessimism. He wished that he had drilled the hull or found some more sophisticated way to determine its strength before leaving Australia. Spilt milk now. Forget it. As a matter of fact, it was pointless to stand here watching this Flexible Flyer do her odd little shimmy. If she wanted to break up, she'd break up and there was not a damn thing he could do about it. The gas drums, however, needed to have their lashings tightened up and he told Cramer to do just that and went to his cabin.

Where a new surprise waited for him. Buller had brought mail aboard and had put it on his bunk. Almost a hundred letters that had been following Syl around for three months had finally caught up with him. Most of them were from Sally, who had gotten into a nostalgic mood and begun writing to him almost every day. Her small white envelopes covered his graying sheet like a blizzard. Ever since his encounters with Angel and Teddy, he had been feeling some guilt whenever he thought about Sally, and this evidence of her apparent devotion while he was betraying her in Brisbane made him feel worse. He still hadn't fully recovered from his hangover and his head began to throb again. Simpson had recently applied a pungent new salve to the athlete's foot between his toes and the whole cabin reeked with a strong medicinal smell. As the helmsman wandered from his course the vessel took a particularly vicious series of rolls and Syl staggered, bracing himself with both hands on his desk. Right now he couldn't read a hundred letters from his lonely wife in Stamford, Connecticut, the trials of the insurance business and her hopes for “settling down” in the future. Future? He headed for the head.

“Captain,” Simpson called, coming into the cabin without a knock, “we're beginning to fall behind our station. Mr. Wydanski says he can't give us more RPM without the engine heating up. What do you want to do?”

“I'll be up to the bridge in a minute,” Syl said, coming out of the head. “I need an aspirin and a Bromo from the medicine chest. Get them for me, okay?”

Captain Courageous, he muttered to himself as Simpson went off.

CHAPTER 14

W
HEN SYL CLIMBED
to the bridge a few minutes later he saw that his ship had indeed fallen too far behind the freighter ahead and was so close to the
Yankee Yo-Yo
astern that Mostell was veering out of line to give more room. He called Wydanski on the voice tube.

“I need another half knot to keep station, maybe fifty more RPM,” he said. “What's this about the engine heating up?”

“I'm afraid we've got some kind of trouble with the water pump, skipper. She's
OK
up to about eighteen hundred turns, but if I push her past that the temperature gauge goes crazy.”

“Could the gauge be off?”

“Maybe a little, but I can feel the whole engine heat up.”

“What will she run at if you give me fifty more turns?”

“Close to two hundred degrees, maybe more.”

“How long can she run at that temperature?”

“I don't know. Sometimes for days but a bearing could go at any time.”

“Can you fix the water pump?”

“I'd have to take it off and break it down to see what's wrong with it. We have some spare parts, but not a whole set.”

“How long would you have to shut down to do that?”

“An hour, maybe much more. It will depend on what we find.”

“Captain, the escort commander is blinking at us,” Simpson called from the wing of the bridge. “Sorrel's got it.”

The escort commander would, of course, be telling him to close up and maintain station. He had to pick among three alternatives: he could add speed and take a chance on letting the engine burn out; he could limp along as best he could, letting the convoy slowly disappear ahead; or he could shut down the engine for repairs and drift until the damn thing was fixed. While he was trying to decide, Simpson came in.

“The commander wants us either to close up or drop out. You want my advice, skipper?”

“I'm dying for it … Go ahead, let's hear it.”

“Whatever we do, we can't stick with the convoy unless we take a chance on running hot, and that way we probably would lose the whole engine. Who knows how long we'd have to drift around waiting for a tow farther up the line? So I'd just shut down for repairs right now. If we can fix it right, we can go on alone. It not, we could put the thing back together and limp back to Hollandia slow. We're not that far away.”

“We could also keep on going at seven knots. That way we'd still get the gas there, even if a day or two late.”

“If that pump is failing it could get worse,” Simpson said in his sepulchral fashion. “It could quit cold anywhere along the line. We could drift right into Jap territory before a tug got to us.”

Good old Simpson … foresaw the worst possible in every thing.

“We can still make close to seven knots before it starts to heat up,” Syl said. “We have no right to go back.”

“Captain, you're taking a chance—”

“No kidding … all right, come left and circle around to take station astern.”

While this maneuver was being executed with appropriate signals Syl went to the flying bridge. He found Buller there.

“This damn thing never would have happened if that crazy Polack had been doing his job instead of humping that nurse in Brisbane.”

Syl shrugged. Hump, pump … “It's not easy to tell when a pump will quit—”

“I know a hell of a lot more about pumps than he does. Do you want me to go down there and check it out?”

“You've got advice, give it. But he's in charge of the engine room.”

“You ever try to give advice to a Polack?”

“Mr. Wydanski knows Diesels. He may not have been to sea much lately but he ran a generating plant ashore—”

“If he knows so much, why is this one heating up?”

“It's
old
, Mr. Buller. Yelling and name-calling isn't going to make it any younger, or solve anything.”

For once, Buller only shrugged and walked off.

After they took station astern, they gradually fell farther and farther behind. By late afternoon the convoy was so far ahead of them that it was hard for Sorrel to read the
Yankee Yo-Yo's
signal light when Mostell blinked, “Good luck, see you later.” Dusk blotted out all traces of the other ships, and when dawn came not even a wisp of smoke showed on the horizon ahead.

“What will we do when we get to Point Baker?” Buller asked.

“Stand by the radio for instructions.”

“What if none come?”

“They need gas. They won't let us wait out there forever.”

Having started with a convoy, it felt especially lonely out here on the empty sea.

“Maybe we can fall in with another convoy when we get close to where we're going,” Buller said.

“We're probably safer alone,” Syl told him. “What protection could that bunch of Flying Dutchmen have given us? A convoy like that is just bait for the Japs. Alone we're too insignificant to draw fire, even if we're spotted.”

That sounded good, and maybe there was even some truth in it.

For three days they steamed along on the convoy course and saw nothing except for a brief glimpse of an aircraft carrier speeding along on the horizon. The wind and seas on the starboard bow gradually increased, but the weather reports that Hathaway received on the radio were not bad. Their sun sights showed that they were making about seven knots and Syl figured they might even arrive at Point Baker in time to catch the convoy before it headed for the invasion beaches.

The gasoline drums, jostling each other in their lashings while the tanker rolled and pitched, continued to worry Syl, and he checked them every two or three hours, often ordering the lines tightened which held them against the rails. When he walked between rows of drums the third night his feet suddenly went out from under him and he fell, bruising his shoulder. As he picked himself up he saw in the pale light from a cloud-covered moon a dark stain on the green deck. It was oil.