Pacific Interlude (21 page)

“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 Brisbane 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

W
HEN 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:

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.