The Circle (5 page)

“Good morning, sir.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

Norden continued down the passageway, talking over his shoulder. “They built her in Seattle in '44. She's three hundred ninety feet long. Forty feet, ten inches beam. Twenty-two hundred fifty tons nominal displacement, thirty-five hundred full load. Crew of two hundred eighty. Two General Electric geared turbines with sixty thousand shaft horsepower from four six-hundred-pound oil-fired Babcock and Wilcox boilers. Range, three thousand miles at cruising speed. Flank speed, thirty-two and a half knots. At least when she was new.

“We got the standard four-department breakdown aboard: operations, weapons, engineering, supply. I'll introduce you to the department heads at lunch.

“Okay, our department, weapons. They built her with six five-inch guns, torpedo tubes, forty and twenty-millimeter, but that's changed over the years. We got four five-inchers left, torpedoes, and the Asroc—antisubmarine rockets, that's the box launcher between the stacks. The pad aft was for these little radio-controlled helicopters they were playing with a few years ago, but they didn't work out. Kept flying off over the horizon and nobody ever saw them again.”

“They must have been smaller then.”

“Helicopters?”

“The crew.” Dan looked at the overhead, noting the crust of cracked paint and painted dirt on the foot-thick bundles of cable that lined it. “Everything's so cramped.”

“You get used to it. But you're right, it isn't as roomy as the new destroyers.”

“Was she in the Pacific?”

“Okinawa. Caught a kamikaze on the stern. It took the cap off the after stack and wiped out one of the quad forties. Killed six guys. They mothballed her when the war was over, then dragged her out again for Korea. She's been steaming ever since.”

They threaded their way past sailors lined up for haircuts, past the galley. As soon as Dan was sure he was lost, Norden hauled up a spring-loaded scuttle in the deck.

As it clamped shut above them, he caught his breath at the sudden crush of humid heat. It was like being wrapped in a blanket soaked in boiling water. Noise battered his ears. The handrail burned his palms. It led down and down, debouching at last on a slick steel grating. “Forward fire-room,” Norden shouted over the din. “Also known as Number One. Two boilers here, two more in the after fireroom, Number Two. You can cross-connect them to either set of turbines for split plant operations. You got all this at the Academy, right?”

Lenson had to cup his hands around his mouth. “Some of it … yes, sir.”

“Then you recognize most of this.” Norden stabbed his finger rapidly around them. “You're on what's called the boiler flat. Over there's reserve feed-water tank and fresh-water tank. On the boiler, steam drum, economizer elements, soot blower heads, safety valves, checkman's glass, et cetera. These are
M
-type boilers with separately fired superheaters. You'll want to memorize superheat and speed combinations: two boilers, twenty-two knots without, twenty-seven with; four boilers, twenty-eight without, thirty-two with, so on, so forth. Now for the lower level.”

Dan followed him along a shoulder-wide catwalk. He could see no relation between the diagrams he'd studied in Isherwood Hall and this roaring insanity. Some agoraphobic engineer had taken a thirty-by-forty sauna and crammed it with machinery, webbed it with dripping pipes, roofed it with I beams, and stuffed every remaining cubic inch with asbestos sheathing. The air burned his skin when he moved. Ahead of him, the lieutenant veronicaed around a steam-hissing valve stem and slid down a ladder, all one motion, his boots dangling in space until they slammed into the deck plates. He followed clumsily, feeling as if he was sinking through boiling liquid.

On either side, the boilers roared steadily, looming out of sight above. A tornado of white flame whirled behind a blue-tinted sight glass. Beneath his feet, through open steel grillwork, he could see oily water eddying between deep frames as the ship rolled. A black fireman in a T-shirt cut off at armpit level twisted past, not looking at them, carrying a clipboard, flashlight, and rag. His face was closed, his knotted belly sheened with sweat.

Norden paused under a blower. The blast of air from topside was icy. Dan shivered at the sudden transition, tropical Brazil to New England winter. “You'll qualify down here later,” the lieutenant shouted. “Just wanted to show you Ed Talliaferro's sneak preview of hell.”

“He's the engineering officer?”

“Right. Now we're going to Number One engine room. To get there, you've got to go up to the main deck, aft in the passageway, and down again. There isn't any direct access from the other waterline spaces. That way, if she takes a hit, we might stay afloat long enough to get off a message.”

The engine room was almost as hot and even noisier. The air was murky with oil fumes and flaking insulation. Men glanced at them from a central control station, then returned their attention to gauges and handwheels. He ducked his head under pipes and barked his elbows on valves as Norden pointed out the main steam lines from the firerooms, the low- and high-pressure turbines, the main electrical switchboard, and the number-one turbogenerator, evaporator, deaerating feed tank, and main reduction gearing, along with assorted lube oil heaters, pumps, purifiers, and test stations. A spinning shaft sixteen inches thick, slick and gleaming under brilliant overheads, led out a weeping seal aft to its propeller. “Twin screws,” he bawled into Lenson's ear over the tooth-chattering hum of gears and the
tappa-tappa
of air compressors and the steady whispering drip of steamy water from taped-up couplings. “And the engine rooms are completely separate. They built two of everything into these. As long as we can float, we can probably limp back.”

Down another ladder, and he was lost now as he was introduced to the main condenser, two main feed pumps, and the auxiliary condenser. The lieutenant's arm traced a bronze casting like an oak growing up through the deck plates. “This here's the main intake. Goes right through the bottom of the ship. Crack in this guy, engine room'd flood in about a minute.”

Dan stared. A rivulet wormed downward from what looked like a hasty solder job. He turned, checking the location of the ladder up, then, realizing Norden was watching him, jerked his eyes back. He searched a suddenly vacant skull for a question to ask. “What's the, ah, operating pressure?”

“Of the steam plant? Standard. Six hundred pounds. Like I said.” Norden squinted at him.

“Oh. Sure.”

They climbed out of the engineering spaces, past the glances of pimpled messmen stirring soup, out onto the weather decks. He sucked cold air gratefully, looking around as Norden dogged the door behind them. He had to look hard to make out the land, now only a violet line astern. Shearwaters scaled across the waves on rigid dark wings. To the southeast, ahead, the sea was a mass of gold.
Ryan
had increased speed, slicing through light seas with a hissing burble.

The weapons officer led him forward, leaning into the wind. “Forward five-inch mount,” he said. “Got a new fiberglass shield on it, testing it out.”

“Right.”

The deck narrowed as they approached the bullnose. They stepped over massive chains toward the ground gear. He recognized some of it from the books. Pelican hooks, chain stoppers. The rest was just rusty iron to him.

“Okay, we get to your shit now,” Norden said. He crouched, putting the capstan between him and the wind. Dan bent, too. “You'll be in charge up here during sea detail. You got two stockless anchors, five ton and seven ton. Five hundred fifty fathoms of chain, five-inch diameter, thirty tons breaking strain.… Don't you have a wheel book?”

“Uh, not yet.”

“Get one.” He pulled a green notebook from his back pocket and slapped it. “Can't remember everything. You'll be responsible for a lot of gear. So write it down! Wildcat and brake. Electric drive, ten thousand foot-pounds of torque.…”

They finished the forecastle and headed aft. Dan, his head busy scrambling numbers, glanced up at the bridge as they passed beneath its windowed gaze. Someone was staring down at them. It was the captain. “Torpedo tubes here, port and starboard,” said Norden, reclaiming his attention. “And up there, aft of the stack, the Asroc launcher.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Boat deck to starboard. The whaleboat's yours, too.”

Dan nodded. They continued aft, under a portico formed by an overhang of the helicopter pad; Norden called it a “Dash deck.” The weapons officer looked about with a critical eye as they passed kneeling men in dungarees and jackets. Hand irons clattered. The sailors glanced up, sweating despite the cold, then bent to work again. Norden stopped at each fire-fighting station and underway replenishment point. He pointed out corroded nozzles, frayed hoses, patches of bare primer, rusted scuppers, missing fittings. His voice edged toward reproach. It was as if, Dan thought, their condition was already his fault. His stomach tightened.

Two-thirds of the way aft, the lieutenant paused, looking over the lifeline into the sea. Then he put his foot on the scupper. Dan hesitated. You weren't supposed to lean on lifelines. After a moment, he put his hand on it, not trusting it with his weight.

“Now that you've seen her, what do you think?”

“Things look … worn.”

“Very diplomatic. She's a piece of junk.”

“Oh.”

“This is a wartime class. They built them to last five, ten years. They've been steaming for thirty. They put a lot of gear on the weather decks. It rusts. Even the interior spaces are going. Machinist's mate on
Ault
dropped a ball peen in the engine room and it went right through the bottom. Fortunately, they were in dry dock at the time. Everything aboard's been rebuilt fifteen, twenty times. Half the time when you order parts, the company that made them's out of business.”

“She seems to steam okay.”

“Oh, Ed does miracles down below. But she's wearing out. The main condensate pump casing cracked last year off Cape Henry. No spare for that—nobody expects a casing to crack. But metal fatigues.”

He nodded. Norden went on. “On top of that—well, the war's been sucking cash and men to Westpac for six years. They keep saying withdrawal on the news, Vietnamization, but we're not seeing it yet. We're on a short string for operating funds. And we're undermanned—especially in the deck gang.

“I suppose the XO already told you this, but first lieutenant's no strawberry-pie billet. Not on
Ryan.
You're in charge of preservation and painting of everything topside, plus all the deck evolutions—anchoring, underway replenishment, mooring, towing, operating boats and winches. You can see the kind of shape the weather decks are in. We were supposed to get a complete blast to bare metal and repaint in the yard, but they pulled us out halfway through overhaul. Just ran out of money. The chief got a coat of red lead on the worst places, but basically we got to strip it and do the preservation ourselves before we get north of sixty.”

“Sixty?”

“Degrees latitude. It'll be too rough to paint after that.” Norden rubbed his chin, frowning.

“How much longer has she got?”

“What, in commission? I don't know what they're planning long-term. Squadron staff was saying when I came aboard that us and
Bordelon
—we're the only
Gearings
left on this coast—were slated for decommission and scrap. But that was two years ago.” Norden shrugged; his face darkened. “She's like an old clunker nobody bothers to fix anymore or cares about. You just keep adding ten-weight till it craps out, then take the plates and leave it by the side of the road. Bloch, that's your boatswain's mate chief, he's good. But you're going to have to exercise leadership. We got some hard cases—guys been busted in rate, brig rats, that kind of shit. Anybody can't hack it in the other division, they shitcan them to you.”

“I see.”

“I don't mean to turn you off. We can use some youthful enthusiasm. But I want you to go in with your eyes open. You'll get a lot of sob stories from the deck apes. But our job's to keep this ship running somehow.”

“I'll do my best, sir.”

“I know that. Just wanted to give you the straight skinny.”

“I appreciate that—Rich.”

They walked aft, around the turn of the deckhouse, into a knot of shouting men. Dan caught one of the voices: “… don't got a fuckin' clue what's really going down—”

“Whoa,” said Norden into sudden silence. “What's going on?”

“Nothing, sir,” said several voices. The shouters moved apart warily, then drifted aft. The one who remained put his fists on his hips and looked expectantly at Norden. He was the man Dan had watched on the forecastle.

“Ensign Dan Lenson, meet Boatswain's Mate Chief Harvey Bloch.”

“Pleased to meet you, Chief.”

“Welcome aboard, sir.”

Dan looked at him eye-to-eye, but height was the only dimension he matched this man in. Bloch seemed as thick as he was wide. His bare head was bald, whether naturally or shaved, Dan couldn't tell. His stomach bulged, turning the waistband of his trousers, and a nest of black hair showed at his neck. A knot of keys was clipped to his belt. He looked exhausted and angry.

“You our new division officer, sir?”

“That's what they tell me, Chief.”

“Mr. Sullivan's not coming back?”

“No, he's gone for good,” said Norden. “He really stepped on his crank this time.”

“Too bad,” said Bloch, looking off to sea. “I liked him.” His left hand slapped a chipping hammer into his right. It disappeared when he wrapped his fingers around it. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows. Dan stared at a blurred Betty Boop in a sailor cap, skirt lifted and bodice open, showing purple breasts larger than her head. On the other arm, a scroll—the letters too seeped and faded to read—disappeared under the sleeve.