Pacific Interlude Read online

  “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

  WHEN 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.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked Cramer.

  “They put about a dozen barrels of lube oil in with the gas drums,” Cramer said. “One of them must be leaking. How the hell can we check them without loosening the lashings?”

  “Wait until morning. At least the oil is no fire hazard, but warn the men about walking here. The deck is like a skating rink.”

  That night all went well, but at dawn Wydanski announced, “Even at this speed the engine is heating up again. We’ve got to slow her down more.”

  At five knots the temperature gauge stood steady for only about an hour and then implacably rose to the red section of the dial.

  “It’s getting worse all the time,” Simpson said. “You better shut down for repairs before we drift clear over to China.”

  Syl studied the chart. God knew, they had plenty of sea room here—there was no land for hundreds of miles. “All right, Mr. Simpson, shut her down. Let’s get the damn thing fixed.”

  The engine-room telegraph jingled as Simpson pulled the handle and the silence was startling when the engine’s heartbeat suddenly died. The sound of waves hitting the bow diminished as the ship lost momentum and drifted, her big propeller keeping her stern into the wind. The pitching stopped but the rolling increased. Syl went on deck to check the gasoline and oil drums. Standing on end and closely packed together, they looked like a crowd of nervous people nudging and pushing each other. With the engine dead, the clicking of the drums was startling. The puddle of oil had enlarged, but Cramer had covered some of it with a pile
of rags. It was impossible to trace the source of the leak—it oozed beneath the closest drums but could be coming from any one of them. It was impossible to check the whole lot without untying them and that would produce chaos. It was better to leave bad enough alone.

  After ordering the lashings to be tightened again Syl went to the engine room. He found Wydanski squatting at the base of the gray Diesel working with a wrench on the offending pump. Three machinists looked on. The old engineer’s pale face was streaked by grease, but he looked calm and his hands moved with brisk confidence.

  “We’ll know what the trouble is before long,” he said.

  Syl stared at the engine, which looked like a small locomotive. He had never known anything about engines and had always hated them with the snobbery of a boy who had loved sail. Now he realized his mistake. If he had studied engines instead of history and Latin at college, he might be of more use now. He felt that Wydanski and the men resented him standing there staring at them, and he returned to the bridge.

  “Hathaway just got a weather report,” Simpson said. “Nothing too bad, but it looks like we might get a bit of a blow.”

  Syl read the yellow paper which Simpson handed to him. Apparently the wind was about to shift from the east and build to thirty knots. Hell, they had plenty of room in which to drift and there would be nothing to worry about except for those damn gasoline drums. Syl went to his cabin and lay down. How long would it take Wydanski to fix the damn pump? If repairs proved impossible and the thing failed entirely, he would have to break radio silence to ask for a tug. The Japs might get there first but that was, he hoped, unlikely—with this big invasion going on, the enemy ought to be busy elsewhere. So would all the tugs, but the Y-18 had enough food and water to drift for a month or more if necessary. There was not one damn thing he could do …

  Oddly, Syl found strength in his helplessness. At least no decisions to be made. Nothing required except patience. Filled with a curious kind of serenity, he almost slept. Finally Wydanski came in.

  “We got the thing apart, skipper,” he said. “It’s a damn mess. Maybe we can fix it, but we got to damn near manufacture a lot of parts. Don’t ask me how long it’s going to take. With the tools we got, we may need a couple of days or more.”

  “I guess you don’t need me to put pressure on you,” Syl said.

  “I don’t need anybody. Especially Mr. Buller. He’s driving us all crazy. He may be the world’s greatest expert on pumps but he can’t touch a wrench without dropping it into the bilge.”

  “Tell him to come see me,” Syl said.

  A moment later Buller appeared in the cabin. His face was smeared with grease.

  “That crazy Polack said you wanted to see me,” he began, putting a hand on the desk to steady himself against the rolling of the ship.

  “Let’s start by getting one thing straight,” Syl said. “Our engineer’s name is Mr. Wydanski. Call him that, not—”

  “I don’t care what you want me to call the son of a bitch, but we’re going to drift clear to China before he can fix that pump if I don’t show him how to do it and he won’t listen to me—”

  “I don’t know much about pumps, Mr. Buller, but you’re a deck officer and he’s an engineer. Stay out of the engine room.”

  “Damn it, I know pumps. We have pumps in oil fields. I’ve fixed hundreds of them—”

  “That may be, but this one is Mr. Wydanski’s responsibility. Let him handle it.”

  “Captain, you may want to drift around out here until the Japs pick us up, but I don’t.”

  Buller sounded afraid, almost panicky.

  “I doubt the Japs are sitting around worrying about how they can catch the Y-18.”

  “Jesus, I should have let them draft my ass into the real army,” Buller said, sitting down on Simpson’s bunk. “At least you can dig a hole in land and hide. Everybody on this damn ship is crazy. Old Simp is up on the bridge praying. Do you know that?”

  “No law against praying.”

  “He’s making a spectacle of himself and getting a lot of the kids to do it with him. He and his damn Baptists are holding a regular revival meeting in the pilothouse. Old Simp is really loco. Don’t you realize that?”

  “You figure you’re the only competent officer aboard this ship?”

  “Captain, I’ve been to sea for only four months, but I swear when they put me in command of a ship it won’t just drift around in the middle of the damn ocean going nowhere. I’m no sea scout like you, but I know engines and I know men—”

  “You’re never going to be captain of a ship, I guarantee you, unless you can at least learn to keep a civil tongue in your head, have a little respect for the next man.”

  “I may not talk fancy but I’m not ignorant about machinery. Isn’t knowing machinery part of a captain’s job?”

  “I don’t pretend to know everything, Mr. Buller. That’s why they give me an engineer. And a supply officer …”

  “You call that old Polack an engineer?”

  Syl took a deep breath. “Mr. Buller, I believe Mr. Wydanski will get the engine fixed if that can be done. Whatever happens, I can’t have a bunch of officers going at each other’s throats—”

  The ship gave a particularly vicious roll and Buller sat heavily on Simpson’s bunk.

  “The enlisted men think I’m right,” he said. “I suppose they don’t count. You don’t give a damn about them.”

  “I don’t try to be asshole buddies with them, you’re right. It’s usually a bad idea for discipline and morale. I know you think nautical customs are bull but—”

  “Nautical customs? You’re sitting here with me on a broken-down hulk that’s about to drift to nowhere and get itself blown up and you’re talking about nautical customs? What’s the nautical custom when we drift onto a Jap-held island? Do we use Jap etiquette or ours?”

  “Not funny, Mr. Buller. I’ve given you the message. If you don’t quit this shit I’m going to confine you for ten days—”

  “With that crazy Polack beating his meat over his kangaroo nurse? That would be cruel and unusual punishment, captain.”

  “Mr. Buller, it’s not just name-calling I won’t put up with any longer. It’s also insubordination—”

  “I pay a man the respect he deserves on a ship or anywhere else. If you really knew how to run this ship I’d call you admiral if you wanted, but you can’t sit here drifting in the middle of the damn ocean and expect me to salute. If you were any kind of a captain you’d kick that sonofabitch out of the engine room and lock him in his cabin. And you’d lock old Simp up with him.”

  “Mr. Buller,” Syl said, “for using abusive language about your superior officers and gross insubordination you are hereby confined to your quarters for ten days.”

  “Can I come out when we hit China?”

  “Go now.”

  “Do you think you can make me?”

  “That’s a child’s question.”

  “Just as a matter of curiosity, how would you make me if I didn’t play this little game with you?”

  “I’d call the master-at-arms.”

  “Do you think Cramer would push me around?”

  “Cramer and as many seamen as necessary would carry out my orders.”

  “Are you sure? All the men respect me a hell of a lot more than they do you.”

  “Mr. Buller, you’re playing with some very dangerous stuff here. If things get out of hand you’re looking at twenty years in jail.”

  “If we ever get in court I’ll have eighteen men on my side. You’ll have no one but that crazy Polack and old Simp.”

  “Mr. Buller, go now or I’m going to tell Cramer to get some men and put you there. Maybe he’ll side with you, and maybe he knows better. I’m betting he does. In any case, that would be the start of a long, bloody chain of events that no one could stop—”

  “Admiral, if you ever charge me with insubordination, I’ll charge you with incompetence. We damn near hit that big tanker in Br
isbane Bay. We had to drop out of the convoy and God knows how long we’ll be drifting around here. Your record ain’t so hot. And I got friends at home, men who get heard in Washington. If the shit hits the fan—”

  “Go right goddamn now,” Syl said between clenched teeth, “or that shit is going to hit the fan right now. I mean it.”

  Buller, the bully, backed off. “Okay, okay, I’ll play your silly game, for the time being,” and went to his quarters without another word.

  Syl sat down at the desk and rubbed his face. Then he went to the bridge. Simpson was sitting on a stool in the pilothouse, looking remarkably composed. The wheel was lashed and no one else was there.

  “Mr. Simpson, I just confined Mr. Buller for ten days for insubordination. Log it.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. If you don’t mind my comment, you couldn’t do anything else. It’s long overdue.”

  Syl shrugged, said only, “I’ll take his watch. Is there any more progress in the engine room?”

  “The boys are still working down there. No more word … I talked to the crew. They’ve all settled down pretty good.”

  Syl went back to his cabin and lay down again. Inaction put some men more on edge than combat did. Maybe he should have tried to eon Buller out of insulting Wydanski and Simpson, and himself, or found a better time to make an issue of it—no, damn it, the captain of a ship couldn’t allow himself to be steamrolled. When he was giving it to Buller, he at least knew he wasn’t acting. If he had been a son of a bitch, at least he had become the real thing.

  CHAPTER 15

  WHEN SYL STOOD Buller’s twelve-to-four watch that night he felt curiously peaceful, even though everything continued to go wrong. Wydanski hit his hand with a hammer when the Y-18 rolled quicker than he expected and now could hardly hold a wrench. But he was still supervising the repairs without sleep. The rolling kept getting worse as the tanker drifted before a rising wind, and the handrails on deck were bent by the strain of the increasingly restless gasoline and oil drums. There was no other way to secure them and a spiderweb of supplementary lines did not seem to steady them much. There was nothing Syl could do. He sent the men below and took the watch on the flying bridge himself. Clouds racing overhead cast moon shadows on the sea, dark patches of water that looked like shoals except that they kept moving. And even if they had been real shoals, there would be nothing he could do about it … Suddenly an old verse popped into his mind: