Pacific Interlude Page 17

  I know that I am bound down the Sound on a garbage barge, but what the hell, what the hell, there’s a dance in the old girl yet …

  Archie and Mehitable—he hadn’t thought of those poems about a cat and a cockroach for a long time and could not remember the author of them, but what the hell, what the hell—

  A resounding crash came from the tank deck. Syl quickly looked down to see a mad jumble of rolling drums. Sliding down the ladder to the wing of the bridge, he ran into the pilothouse, flicked on deck lights and the general alarm. The shriek of the Klaxon horn was drowned out by the din of the colliding oil and gasoline drums. Every time the ship rolled, more escaped the lashings. He saw that three stanchions had snapped. The steel drums were bashing cuts in each other and the deck gleamed wet with a lethal mixture of lube oil and gasoline, which filled the air with its fumes. Syl realized colliding steel drums could make sparks. The situation was so awful that for a moment he stood paralyzed. It seemed unreal.

  He was snapped back when Cramer, followed by three half-dressed seamen, stepped from the forecastle door, their bodies white in the glare of the deck lights. They immediately retreated as two drums rolled toward them with such force that they dented the steel frame of the doorway. Simpson came from the passageway aft, started onto the tank deck, and slipped in the oil. He slid on his back toward the rail, fortunately in the same direction as the rolling drums. Slithering like a snake, Simpson escaped on his belly along the waterway and stood in the after passageway looking out, his whole body and face black with oil.

  At this same moment Buller charged out on the tank deck and crouched there just short of the patch of oil that had sent Simpson spinning. He had a coil of line in his left hand, and threw the end with his right hand toward the forecastle door.

  “Grab it, Cramer,” he yelled.

  Cramer caught it, leaning out of the forecastle door.

  “Make it fast up there,” Buller shouted and soon tightened his end of it.

  The resulting line down the middle of the deck limited the action a little, but the drums still rolled and spun around with lethal force and the din hardly let up. Syl, clicking on the loud hailer, called, “Bedding. Throw all your mattresses and bedding out there. Life preservers too. Anything soft. Quick …”

  The men in the forecastle hurried to obey and a steady stream of bedding poured through the forecastle door, slowing the rolling drums. Simpson and Wydanski brought bedding from their cabins and threw it from the after passageways. Thirty life preservers followed, thrown from both ends of the ship. Gripping the center line he had rigged to keep his footing, Buller charged out on the deck, first kicking the bedding to distribute this mess evenly. Then he attacked the drums, which were moving slower now. Cramer ran from the forecastle with three seamen and helped him push the drums toward the broken rail and shove them overboard.

  Buller, his feet planted on a mass of bedding, picked up a leaking gas drum and hurled it over the side. More seamen appeared with lines, which they began rigging athwartships, crisscrossing the deck wherever they could, limiting the action of the barrels and providing additional handholds. Buller opened sections of the rail at both gangways and along with the others began pushing more leaking drums overboard. Soon the deck was cleared, except for a few undented drums which were lashed securely in corners.

  “Everything’s secure on deck, sir,” Cramer called out.

  Buller had disappeared. Syl turned off the decklights and the Klaxon horn. Simpson appeared beside him on the bridge, his face and uniform black with oil.

  “I thought we’d lost her that time,” he said. “It’s a wonder we didn’t get fire.”

  “Take over for a minute,” Syl told him.

  Syl went to Buller’s stateroom, but the big man was not there. Wearing only a pair of oil-soaked shorts, he was in the wardroom, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  “You want to put me back in my cage now?” he said with a half-grin when he saw Syl.

  “You helped save the ship, Mr. Buller.” Fair was fair.

  “Did you see old Simp? He was standing there the whole time scared out of his head. You could see the whites of his eyes rolling.”

  “He was almost killed. He wasn’t the only one scared stiff.”

  “Well, skipper, I got to give you credit. That bedding idea was a good one. Throwing all that stuff out there sure helped.”

  “The whole crew did great, and I’ll give you credit for getting them started.”

  “They’re a good bunch … skipper, will you have me court-martialed if I offer you a drink?”

  They went into his stateroom. Buller’s bottle of Jack Daniels tasted mellow.

  “Skipper,” he said, “I’ll try to do things more your way if you want to forget about all the shit we got into. Besides, I want to pile up a good military record. Hell, I’ll even try to love Mr. Wydanski and Mr. Simpson.”

  “I’ll log the fact that you were released from hack on account of unusual courage and initiative in an emergency. If those drums had sparked those fumes, we would have all gone up.”

  “Jesus, I never even thought of that. I was too scared of getting steamrollered.”

  “That’s what you tried on me.”

  Buller laughed. “Somehow I don’t think that works on you. There ain’t nobody going to steamroller you, skipper.”

  Buller, Syl decided, knew how and when to turn it on. Maybe it was a con, but he liked hearing it.

  When Syl returned to his bunk, he discovered that his bedding had been thrown out on the oily deck with all the others, and now there was nothing but a shallow board box which looked disconcertingly like a coffin. Rolling up some old shirts for a pillow, he put on a blue uniform to ward off the dampness and lay down. Everyone aboard the ship would sleep in similar misery.

  Simpson entered. “Mr. Buller said you turned him loose,” he said.

  “Don’t you think he deserved it?”

  “Cramer could have handled the job without him. That’s a bosun’s work—”

  “I’m much too tired to argue with you about it. Thank God we’re still afloat, is what I say.”

  “It was another miracle.”

  Simpson went to the head and was there a long time, scrubbing the oil off his thin face and body. When he came back, he knelt by his bunk and mumbled the Lord’s Prayer loud enough for Syl to follow the words, then rolled up some uniforms to make a pillow and climbed stiffly into his stripped bunk, mumbling incoherently.

  “Are you all right?” Syl asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I think all hands did fine tonight, you and the whole crew.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Five minutes of silence followed before Simpson began to snore. He sounded tortured even in his sleep.

  A little before five in the morning, Syl was awakened by a loud knock at the cabin door. Sitting up with a start, he wondered what the emergency was now.

  Wydanski staggered in and sank down in the chair at the desk. The engineer’s grease-stained face was pale and slack with exhaustion, almost corpselike, but his blue eyes glittered brightly and his voice was strong.

  “Done,” he said.

  Syl wasn’t sure whether he meant the pump was dead or fixed.

  “It’s working fine,” Wydanski continued, “like new. Mr. Buller said I could never do it. We had damn near nothing to work with but a hammer, a pair of pliers and some wire coathangers, but it’s done.”

  “That’s great,” Syl said. “Can we get underway now?”

  “Sure, start her up. I’ll have to watch it for an hour or so, but that son of a bitch is fixed.”

  Getting to his feet, he staggered back toward the engine room.

  “Congratulations,” Syl called after him.

  Wydanski turned with a weary grin. “This crazy old son of a bitch knows engines,” he said, and disappeared down the ladder to his metallic domain.

  The men on watch cheered as the engine-room telegraph jingled and the old Diese
l began its steady, reassuring beat.

  “Now we go to Point Baker,” Syl said to Simpson as he gave him the course. “It looks like we’ll be only a couple of days late.”

  It was October 19. Syl had been so preoccupied that he had paid little attention to the news reports received on the radio. But now he was curious and called the radio man Hathaway to the chartroom.

  “There’s more radio activity than I ever heard,” Hathaway reported. “Most of it’s coded, of course. The only official news is that the big battle wagons are shelling the beaches at Leyte and our planes are bombing hell out of the place.”

  “So it looks like it’s Leyte for sure?”

  “It could be a feint, I guess, but we’re not shelling any other place. There’s no news of any big sea battles yet, but all those big ships must be cooking up something.”

  Syl had read that the Japs had huge new battleships with eighteen-inch guns, bigger than anything any other navy had. If the whole American fleet was being concentrated at Leyte, those monsters and the big Jap aircraft carriers would have to attack or just let the Philippine Islands go. Studying the chart of Leyte Gulf, he felt his stomach contract again. Hundreds of Jap ships were now steaming toward this arena, no doubt, and thousands of planes were waiting to take off from flattops and airstrips hidden on all those islands which stretched from Mindanao to Luzon. This was going to be the big one, all right, and he was surprised to find that, in spite of his fears, he was glad he was headed that way. Not many old graduate students got a chance to see history made. Or have some part in it …

  At noon the next day Hathaway picked up official reports that the Americans were landing on Leyte at Dulag and Tacloban. The Americans reported little opposition, but Tokyo Rose said they were being “annihilated on the beaches.”

  “She always says that,” Hathaway added. “Trouble is, about half the time she turns out to be right.”

  The weather was clearing and the sea was so calm, quiet and peaceful that it was difficult to imagine the fight up ahead.

  “Hell, the fun will be all over by the time we get there,” Buller said. “They ain’t going to bring gas tankers in until the shooting stops.”

  Unless they capture airstrips fast, Syl remembered, but said nothing. The men off watch gathered around the open door of the radio shack and discussed the latest bulletins, reports of the Americans advancing inland against sporadic shelling read by announcers as if they were describing basketball or football games. Late that afternoon they were surprised when the grandiloquent tones of General MacArthur himself boomed through the Y-18’s vibrating speakers.

  “People of the Philippines,” the general said, “I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil … Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on. As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike … For your homes and hearths, strike. For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike. In the name of your sacred dead, strike!”

  “Jesus, that’s four strikes,” Buller said.

  Some of the men laughed but others were so mesmerized by the general’s oratory that they were actually doubling up their fists. As the general’s mellifluous voice continued Syl wondered whether he ever had the sensation that he was mostly acting out a part. More than a few had accused him of it.

  “Let no heart be faint,” the general continued. “Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory.”

  “Amen,” Simpson said, and his thin face looked almost radiant.

  “Now every arm is steeled, old Dugout Doug will go back to his quarters and drink champagne until the fighting is over,” Buller said. “That son of a bitch is smart—I have to hand it to him. I don’t know if he’s right when he says there are no atheists in foxholes, but there sure as hell are no generals there.”

  Simpson glared at him.

  “There were men who mocked Christ on the cross,” he said, and walked back to the bridge.

  In spite of Buller’s popularity, most of the men obviously sided with Simpson now and they melted away from Buller. Syl felt himself curiously split. He shared Buller’s dislike of MacArthur’s posturing, but still, if there ever was one, he guessed this was a time for “no heart to be faint” and for “every arm to be steeled.”

  CHAPTER 16

  OF COURSE, STEELED arms did not do much good aboard this gas tanker. Nothing but seagulls were visible in the sky, the horizon was empty all around. Somehow the radio reports did not seem to have anything to do with this ship. An hour later Hathaway was surprised to hear his call letters repeated. The message was in code from the escort commander of Convoy Charlie Fox Able. Buller, who was also communications officer, decoded it, pushing yellow strips of paper with the eraser of a pencil on a deciphering board: It said, “‘Report your position. What speed can you make?’”

  Syl replied and almost immediately received another message: “Proceed immediately to Leyte Gulf and Tacloban harbor at best speed by most direct course. Acknowledge.”

  Which meant that the army was already capturing airstrips and was hungry for gas. Angling directly into Leyte Gulf instead of detouring out to Point Baker would save the Y-18 about two hundred miles, a whole day of steaming at best speed.

  Great flights of American planes throbbed high in the sky overhead as they neared Leyte.

  “Mr. Simpson, you really better do some praying now for the guidance of divine God and the Holy Grail,” Buller said. “It looks like there are going to be fireworks up ahead.”

  “I will, Mr. Buller,” Simpson replied without humor. “But I doubt if we’re going to see much action here. General MacArthur wouldn’t bring gas tankers in unless he had everything under control.”

  Such optimism made Syl distinctly uneasy. Measuring off the miles with his needle-pointed dividers on the chart, he figured they could reach Leyte Gulf in about forty-eight hours, on the afternoon of October 22. The first waves of an invasion had it easy if they surprised the enemy, he had often heard it said, but the second and third waves …

  As the Y-18 approached Leyte Gulf she was passed by many convoys and steamed through fleets of high-sided empty vessels going in the opposite direction. They had already unloaded their cargos. So many destroyers and escort carriers were patrolling these waters, so many planes roared overhead tht it was not difficult to believe they were all invulnerable … but Syl could not forget that the very enormity of this invasion meant that the Japs also had to risk everything to stop it. Every ship and plane the enemy had must be headed toward this area. As he watched a sleek new cruiser speed by he felt the pang of regret that hit him every time he saw a real fighting ship. How much better to be training those huge guns on the enemy than standing on this tub with 220,000 gallons of gasoline swashing beneath his feet.

  There was a so-called joke that tanker men were lucky because they never had to worry about getting wounded and spending the rest of their lives in hospital wards.

  Some joke.

  At least navigation was easy. All the Y-18 had to do was follow the parade into Leyte Gulf and Tacloban harbor. The only problem here was weaving through the incredibly heavy traffic. Rows of fat landing ships nosed up on the beaches of the ruined city or frantically tried to back off, their screws churning, their engines screaming. Tugs with long chains of barges twisted through narrow channels and blew imperious whistles that scared off freighters fifty times their size.

  Following directions from a signal tower, Syl moored alongside a fuel barge, one of a string tied to the shore at the very head of Tacloban harbor. Even before he got his lines out or had a chance to look around, a chunky red-haired major jumped aboard and trotted to the bridge.

  “My name’s Harris,” he said to Syl. “I’m your boss here. Discharge your cargo immediately into this barge and go out to the tanker Garden City for more. She’s a twenty-thousand ton
merchantman and she’s anchored just about in the middle of San Pedro Bay.”

  “Can we go ashore and draw some stores first?” Buller asked. “We got no bedding in any of our bunks—”

  “Bedding? This is an emergency operation. If we don’t get this airstrip into operation right now you’ll be digging foxholes, not worrying about bedding, for Christ’s sake. We expect attacks any time and we’ve got to get planes in the air.”

  “Okay,” Syl said quickly. “Mr. Simpson, connect up the cargo hose.”

  “I want this ship shuttling gas in here day and night around the clock until further notice,” Harris said. “I’ve only got one other tanker on this run. By the time you get these barges filled we’ll have built tanks ashore. If we ever get this strip fixed we’ll have so many planes flying out of here you’ll never be able to keep those tanks full. Bust your ass. We got troops that need air cover. We got to keep an umbrella over a thousand ships. Don’t start thinking that the Japs are never going to come. The yellow bastards are just winding up.”

  Turning then, he almost ran ashore.

  “It’s nice to feel needed,” Buller said. “Skipper, how about I go ashore while you’re unloading? Maybe I can at least scrounge up some sleeping bags.”

  “Be back inside two hours, no matter what,” Syl said, and Buller went ashore as quickly as the major had.…

  While they were unloading, the Yankee Yo-Yo moored astern of them. After she had connected her hose to another barge, Mostell came to the bridge of the Y-18.