Pacific Interlude (29 page)

“The pump is sucking air,” Simpson said. “Shall I call mooring stations to go out for a new load?”

“Are the men back from the sick bay yet?”

“No, sir. Mr. Buller went with them. I ain't making no charges but it wouldn't surprise me none if he had the same complaint.”

“Leave a message to wait for us here when we get back about thirteen hundred. You can start disconnecting the cargo hose.”

Five minutes later Syl heard the shrill call of Cramer's boatswain's whistle followed by the chiefs old song: “Mooring stations, mooring stations, so move it, move it, move it right along …”

They were back on the shuttle run. God knew how long it would last. Which in a way was a kind of blessing.

Less than two weeks later, on December 17, the
Y-18
received orders to join a convoy sailing to reinforce the invasion of the island of Mindoro, which had just begun two days earlier.

“They must have already taken an airstrip,” Schuman said. “I hear they're not running into too much opposition. The Japs ought to be saving everything they've got to try to save Manila.”

To his surprise, Schuman found that he was to remain on the shuttle run in Tacloban. “Hell, I wish I were going along with you,” he said to Syl, “but this one looks like it's going to be a piece of cake.”

Optimistic predictions always made Syl nervous. He reminded himself that he had often had dire premonitions before voyages which turned out to be safe and had felt no tinge of warning before recent disasters. Maybe this kind of foreboding was a good luck sign. Mindoro was only a little more than three hundred miles away on the route chosen for them, but because it was right next to the island of Luzon, where the Japs still had many airfields, the commodore of the convoy apparently shared Syl's belief that this trip was not going to be easy and told all the ships to be on the alert for suicide attacks by both planes and motorboats.

Buller appeared unusually glum when he came onto the bridge that morning soon after they sailed out of Leyte Gulf.

“You hear the latest?” he said to Syl. “The Krauts are counterattacking. I thought the bastards were all done.”

The Battle of the Bulge had started, and Hathaway brought frequent bulletins from the radio shack. “Damned if it doesn't look like this war could go on forever,” he said.

“No,” Buller told him, “the Krauts can't do much with the Russkies at their back, but I'd hoped they'd quit before Christmas and we all could be home before summer.”

The course they followed led them around the island of Samar, through San Bernardino Strait, where the Japanese fleet had so recently surprised the Americans before being turned back, and through a whole series of inland seas surrounded by mountainous islands. Each one of these was a potential danger because the Americans had occupied few of them. Any one could turn into a giant wasp's nest, pouring out suicide planes, but for the moment at least the spectacular panorama of Alp-like mountains rising steeply from the calm sea was eerily peaceful.

Standing on the flying bridge all day, Syl experienced a sense of exaltation, almost an epiphany in which the beauty of the jagged jungle-clad cliffs which rose up to the clouds seemed an affirmation. Nothing so glorious was meant to be bad, damn it. The water around him glowed a deep indigo blue and mirrored the towering peaks. He had heard that Eskimos sometimes went crazy while paddling their kayaks through seas which mirrored the icebergs all around them and seemed to turn their whole world upside down. Steaming through these reflected images of hills and cliffs, he felt a little dizzy, but it was more like being pleasurably drunk than going crazy.

A hard rain squall briefly erased the mountains above and below him. When it passed, the dense green foliage on the hillsides glittered in the sun as though it had been sheathed in ice. The fragrance of jungle plants was strong and sweet. In late afternoon clouds of mist descended and drifted low over the sea. They appeared to whisk some of the mountains away and then suddenly bring them back in a gigantic magic act. Syl was so fascinated that he had to keep reminding himself that these were ideal conditions for suicide planes and motor torpedo boats.

Still no attack came. A lopsided moon rose and cast a silver path on the sea that miraculously stayed abeam of the ship, as though it were skimming along over the water at eight knots to keep them company. It was bright enough to show the silhouettes of the surrounding islands, their beaches glowing yellow with white fringes where a ground swell came creaming in. In a few bays the fires and lamps of native villages flickered. If he were out here on his own boat in peacetime sipping cold beer with that perfect girl in the cockpit, they would stop to explore all those places and feast with the natives ashore. These Philippine islands were much more spectacular than he had expected. What about the rest of the world … he'd be crazy to let himself die before taking in as much of it as he could. Which thoughts heightened his anxiety about what lay ahead.

At noon the next day they approached Mindoro, where Mt. Halcon rose eight-and-a-half thousand feet in the air, miniaturizing the fleet of ships that huddled around the beaches they were invading. Here nature made even the greatest warships look like innocent toys.

Even when they grew near, the scene was surprisingly peaceful. Few sounds of battle could be heard and little seen except some soldiers unloading six big landing craft on the beaches. Some straw-hatted native fishermen in dugout canoes nearby were towing the ends of a big seine to make a circle around a school of fish that jumped and roiled the quiet water. They looked as though they had never heard of the war.

“It says in the pilot book that there are ‘major crocodile grounds' here,” Buller said. “I guess this is no place for a swimming party.”

Crocodiles appeared to be the worst danger as they followed orders blinked from a signal tower on the beach and discharged their cargo into a fuel barge moored in a quiet cove.

When their tanks were empty they were ordered to go alongside a big tanker named the
Merchant Prince
, which was anchored in the lee of the land about a thousand yards offshore. As their lines were put out and their cargo hose connected to take a new load Rhinehart saw a man on the bridge with a monkey on his shoulder. As he watched, the man gave a banana to the monkey, which delicately peeled it with its tiny black hands.

“Look how tame that monkey is,” Rhinehart said. “I'd like to go up and ask where he got it.”

“Sure, go ahead,” Syl said, and Rhinehart scampered up a rope ladder that swung on the high side of the big vessel.

Syl watched as the mate of the tanker, who owned the monkey, let Rhinehart take it into his arms, cradle it as he had his own dead pet.

“I hope that bastard don't try to sell him the damn thing,” Cramer said. “Old Rhinehart would give him his ass.”

A few minutes later Rhinehart returned to the
Y-18
. “That's just a regular monkey that he bought from the natives,” he said. “He tamed it himself—he said it didn't take long.”

“How much does he want for it?” Cramer asked.

“He won't sell, but he said he'd show me how to train one and he'll let me be around it as long as I want. Can I stay here while you go in and come back for another load?”

Syl said yes, and Rhinehart happily climbed to the bridge of the tanker again. As soon as the
Y-18
was full of gasoline, he pulled away from the big ship and returned to the barge in the cove. This might be just another shuttle run, but the scenery was surely prettier than Tacloban and there was nothing like the noise. While they were unloading, the men fished over the side, but minnows nibbled away the Spam they used as bait before they could get bigger bites. There was a flurry when Sorrel thought he saw a huge crocodile nosing toward the stern, but it proved to be only the end of a half-sunken log drifting with the slow current. It stuck under the fantail and Cramer pushed it away with a boathook before it could get into the propeller.

Floating logs were the only danger Syl was thinking about when he started to go back to the
Merchant Prince
for another load. The big tanker was quietly lying at her anchor and had lowered some staging to allow men to paint some streaks of rust under the anchor, which remained in her port hawsepipe. Syl was watching this, admiring it—when, without warning, a Jap plane that at first looked no larger than an insect, darted around the peak of the island and dived into the bridge of the
Merchant Prince
. Syl knew it must have carried a bomb because the whole superstructure of the
Prince
erupted with a roar terrifyingly familiar to the men of the
Y-18
only some five hundred yards away. The fire blazed, obviously beyond control.

“Take off the men,” Buller was shouting, echoing Syl's own unspoken first-thought. Yes, they'd have to go alongside, if they had time—

“You're
crazy,”
Simpson said. “She'll blow. They can jump, we can pick 'em up—”

Except they'd have a hell of a time getting any from the burning ship, Syl thought, and Buller again was echoing his thought aloud.

The
Y-18
was headed toward the big tanker in preparation for mooring and was going so fast that it took little more time to go alongside than it would have taken to turn. The men on the
Merchant Prince
lined the rails as the
Y-18
neared, lowered lines and scrambled down, some taking flying leaps into the rigging as the smaller ship scraped slowly by without fully stopping. When no more men could be seen at the rail, Syl ordered full-ahead emergency, flank speed. For some reason he felt no acute sense of danger and was all unreasonably sure that the
Merchant Prince
would not blow for another minute or two. His stomach started to feel queasy only when the
Y-18
was five hundred yards away, almost far enough to be safe, but not quite. One minute more, Lord, one more …

The prayer was answered. The
Lucky Eighteen
was not destroyed when the tanker blew, but she was so close that everyone on deck was knocked off his feet and an out-reaching tongue of pale yellow fire licked the paint on her stern, singeing it before withering. Burning fragments from the big tanker's boats and pilothouse, some of them several feet long, rained on the
Y-18's
deck along with a shower of broken glass. Syl's first words when he got back to his feet were, “Hoses, for Christ's sake, man the hoses, get the fires out …”

The crew hardly needed to be told. The hoses were already gushing their spray as Syl started to give his orders.

“Anyone hurt?” Simpson shouted.

An instant of silence before Cramer answered, “Nobody bad I can see.”

“Any officers here?” a burly boatswain from the
Prince
called, a plaintive note in his voice. “Did any of our officers make it?”

“I'm here,” a tall balding engineer replied. “I guess the skipper and the mates were on the bridge.”

“No, I'm here,” a tall, thin third mate who had been lying on the deck said as he climbed to his feet. “I was up forward.”

“Rhinehart? You here?” Buller shouted.

“Bobbie,
Bobbie,”
Sorrel called out, and ran to the forecastle. No answer. He ran aft, searched the whole ship, calling his friend's name while everyone else aboard listened silently.

“I guess Rhinehart's missing,” Simpson told Syl quietly.

A picture of young Rhinehart hugging his dead monkey flashed into Syl's mind. Now he was dead, but this time no burial at sea would be necessary. Astern the
Y-18
, the flaming hulk of the
Merchant Prince
was now sliding to the bottom stern-first, her fiery bow rising and pointing at the sky. With a great hissing sound and rising clouds of white steam, the whole ship disappeared, and nothing was left but burning bits of debris, none bigger than a man. There was a long minute of stunned silence aboard the
Y-18
while the men stared. The heavy-set boatswain, who had been wearing a blue watch cap, took it off, and a few of the others did likewise.

“Come left slow,” Syl said to the helmsman, and went to the voice tube. “Ahead full—no more emergency flank speed.”

“What's going on?” Wydanski said.

“The big tanker blew. The
Merchant Prince
… We got most of her men off …” He turned to the helmsman and added. “Steady on that point of land over there.”

“That tin can is signaling,” Simpson said, pointing at a destroyer racing toward them, a light flashing from the wing of her bridge. “Where the hell is Sorrel?”

“I'm here,” Sorrel said tonelessly.

He had been sitting on the deck, hugging his knees and rocking back and forth. Getting to his feet, he went to his signal light on the wing of the bridge and studied the destroyer.

“He says, ‘Well done,'” he added, his voice flat. “He wants to know if you want to put wounded aboard him. He has a doctor.”

“Anybody need a doctor?” Simpson called.

Four of the
Merchant Prince's
men stepped forward, one with a badly burned face.

“Stop the engine,” Syl said. “Stand by to lower the motorboat.”

The engine-room telegraph jingled.

“The engine is stopped, sir,” the quartermaster said.

“Thompson, get the names of those men we're putting off,” Simpson said. “I want to log them. Then get the names of everyone we took aboard.”

“All hands from the
Prince
muster here,” the third mate called from the crowded tank deck. “Starboard side.”

There were thirty-three.

The
Y-18
slowed to a stop, and her boat was launched and headed toward the destroyer with the wounded men. As it was returning, the destroyer signaled, “Return to Tacloban with survivors,” and headed toward the still peaceful-looking beaches of Mindoro.