Pacific Standoff, page 8
“Sure, sure. My sister went back to my folks in Chicago after my wacky brother-in-law joined the Air Corps. Of course, in her case, she might end up staying. They’ve been married four years and no kids, so it figures there’s something wrong somewhere, doesn’t it? Air Corps, huh! Just a glorified grease-monkey is what it amounts to, but he has the nerve to act like he’s winning the war single-handed. I nearly decked him last time I was home, but it wouldn’t have been nice to Sis. Anyway, wait till we get to Brisbane and get a load of that quail, blonde and built and cleared for action. Even if you don’t want to pick up any for yourself, it can’t hurt you to look, can it? It beats hell out of watching gooney birds, I’ll tell you!”
* * * *
On their fifth day out of New London, just as the sun peeked above the eastern horizon, one of the lookouts shouted, “Land ho!”
“Where away?”
“Fine on the port bow!”
Lou turned his glasses slightly to the left. It was hard to tell, with all the clouds, but… Yes, there it was on the horizon. “Tell the captain we’ve sighted land,” he said to the messenger.
By the time Jack reached the bridge, the mountaintops of Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico were visible to the right and left of their course. Between the two islands lay the Mona Passage, one of the principal gateways to the Caribbean Sea. Once upon a time these waters had been the hunting grounds of buccaneers and freebooters, of Francis Drake and Henry Morgan and Blackbeard. Now they were haunted by U-boats, trying to stop the flow of bauxite from Jamaica and oil from Lake Maracaibo, and the movements of warships to and from the Panama Canal.
This route was a gamble. By taking the Windward Passage, between Cuba and Haiti, the Manta could have cut four hundred miles off her voyage to Panama, but that would have meant snaking through the Bahamas, then more hours of cruising through the constricted waters of the Jamaica Channel. In Jack’s view it was well worth the extra distance to have plenty of sea room for nearly the entire trip. The only bottleneck was the Mona Passage, and Jack intended to get past that as quickly as possible. Donitz’s hunters might be back in Occupied France, in their reinforced-concrete pens on the Bay of Biscay, refueling and reloading; but they might easily be just ahead, at the entrance to the passage, lurking at periscope depth for any target that sailed by.
“Come about to course 2-4-5,” said Jack, as they neared the green coast of Santo Domingo. “Cease zigzagging.” He spoke calmly and quietly, but his tension was shared by the others on the bridge. Flipping the selector switch, he leaned over the squawkbox. “Bridge to maneuvering.”
“Maneuvering, aye, aye,” replied Charlie’s voice.
“Maneuvering, I want flank speed until further notice, the maximum you can sustain for about two hours.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The roar of the engines inched up the scale, and the Manta’s stern seemed to settle a little lower in the water. From the conning tower a voice reported, “Twenty knots, skipper.”
“Aircraft off the port beam!” Three pairs of binoculars swung in that direction, and Black, the signalman, leaped to his blinker lamp.
The far-off dot to the southeast grew with surprising speed. Jack recognized, as he had expected to, the gull-wings of a PBY patrol plane. There were no enemy aircraft in these waters, though any aircraft might become an enemy. “Make the recognition signal,” he snapped. Black clicked the handle on the side of the lamp in a rhythmic pattern, paused, repeated it, paused again. Midway through the third repetition a bright light blinked from the nose of the seaplane and the gull-wings waggled an acknowledgement. The Catalina passed directly overhead, made a wide circle around the sub, then, with a parting dip of the wings, flew off to the northeast. The tension on the bridge eased a notch.
A few minutes later it eased more when Sam, the steward, scrambled up the ladder with mugs of coffee, reminding Jack that he had not stopped for breakfast on his way to the bridge. Accepting the mug, he asked Sam to come back with some sandwiches. He had no intention of leaving the bridge until they had cleared the passage. If nature called he would simply step over to the leeward side of the bridge and let fly; their next dive would take care of the flushing.
Just at the southern entrance to the passage, as Mona Island came into view, there was a screaming whine from somewhere aft. It was choked off at once, but it seemed to Jack that the roar of the diesels was less pronounced and the bow wave less striking. He was reaching for the squawk box when it crackled into life.
“Maneuvering to bridge!” Jack pushed the talk button once in acknowledgement. “Bridge, we’ve lost number three again. I am cutting back on number four to balance the amps.”
Jack had been in Washington the first time the engine had broken down, and he had assumed that the problem, whatever it was, had been corrected. He leaned over the speaker. “Charlie, Jack here. How bad is it?”
“Impossible to say without tearing it down, skipper, but it sounded like we lost the timing gear. That’s a dockyard job if I’m right.”
“It was number three that went last time, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“With number three off the line, what sustained speed can you give me?”
After a silence the engineering officer said, “I can shoot for sixteen knots, skipper, but it’ll put a lot of strain on the other engines. Fourteen would be safer.”
“It might be safer for the engines, but I don’t know about the boat. Make turns for fifteen knots, then. Can do?”
“Can do, skipper.”
They were nearly abreast of Mona Island. Ahead were the calm, deep blue waters of the Caribbean, and 950 nautical miles to the southwest were Colón and the Isthmus of Panama. “Helm,” Jack said, “resume zigzagging on base course 2-3-0, all ahead standard.”Paul appeared in the hatch just as eight bells sounded. “Permission to come to the bridge?”
Jack was no longer needed. He returned the conn to Lou and went below, leaving his officers to go through the ritual of changing the watch. As he crossed the control room on the way to his cabin, he glanced aft. The men coming off duty were settling in for breakfast, and a couple of them had already started a game of cribbage. He should drop a word in the yeoman’s ear about organizing a cribbage tournament; without some sort of diversion the long cruise across the Pacific would drive the men nuts.
Al Fiorentino dropped his plate of ham and eggs on the table across from Gene Hickman, one of the engine gang, and returned a moment later with two coffees. “Word has it,” he began, “that you boys really screwed things up back there.”
Hickman didn’t let him get any farther. “Screwed up? Like hell we did. It’s a wonder we nursed that piece of garbage as far as we did! And the other three are nearly as bad. If we make it to Panama at all, we’ll be stuck in the yard at least a week.”
“Well,” Fiorentino replied judiciously, “we could do a lot worse. Panama is a pretty good liberty town. I still remember a weekend there back in forty-one, I shacked up with this nightclub dancer from Europe somewhere, a refugee, you know? All she wanted to do was fuck and listen to stories about Chicago. By Sunday night I’d run dry both ways! Yeah, we could do a lot worse than Panama; did you ever call at Midway? Talk about the ass-end of the world! Thousands of flyboys and gyrenes and poor swabbies like us, and about four WAVE nurses who saved it all for the officers.”
“For Christ’s sake, Fiorentino, don’t you ever think about anything besides tail?”
“Like what, for example?”
Hickman lowered his voice. “Like for example is this a bad-luck boat we’re stuck on. I’m not saying it is, you understand, but add it up. That fire nearly got her before she was even commissioned, then we nearly got rammed twice during training, then Mr. Hunt disappeared just before we sailed, and now we’ve lost number three engine. That’s an awful lot to go wrong in less than six weeks.” He glanced around and lowered his voice still further. “I’ll tell you something else: I was talking to a guy back at the base, and he nearly died when I told him what boat I was on. He said the skipper is a real Jonah. Seems that years ago, back before the war, he took a boat out for the first time and she sank like a rock. The main induction valve didn’t close. The skipper’s own brother was back in the engine room, and he slammed the door and left him to drown. He didn’t want anybody to be saved because he hated the guy who had invented the rescue bell. Can you believe it? Only about half the guys survived, and that’s what we’ve got as a skipper. He’ll kill us all before he’s done.”
“Hickman, you’re full of shit,” said Fiorentino, red faced. “I did three patrols under Captain McCrary on the old Stickleback last year before I was rotated Stateside. You can take it from me, he’s no jinx. Shit, you should have seen all the Jap flags on our battle-flag! And the only joe that even got hurt was some asshole who went nuts while we were being depth-charged and the cook laid him out with a skillet upside the head! I never heard anything about that shit before the war, but it sounds like a load of crap to me. The Old Man may have you pissing your pants with some of the stunts he pulls, but the ones who’ll get hurt are the fucking Japs, so you can take that Jonah crap and shove it up your ass.”
“Hey, take it easy! I was just telling you what I heard, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, next time don’t listen! You ought to have the sense to think for yourself instead of buying any crap someone feeds you.”
“Still, you can’t get away from it, a lot’s gone wrong on this boat already. You ask me, that’s a bad sign.”
Fiorentino waved his fist, index finger extended, under Hickman’s nose. By now they had an audience. “Yeah, let’s take a look at that list of yours. There was that dock fire that might have damaged the boat—but the skipper saved her. Twice we nearly got rammed—and both times Mr. Hunt had the conn. Then Mr. Hunt transferred off—about time, too, if you ask me. And now you’ve blown one of the engines. That’s the only thing on your list that sounds bad to me, and you got your nerve trying to pass the blame on to the skipper. Are you saying he snuck back to the engine room while you were sacked out and did something to your poor engine?”
Hickman looked around for a supportive face and couldn’t find one. “Aw, look, you don’t have to jump on me like that. All I meant was it seemed funny, everything happening at once. And lay off that stuff about the engine—we’re doing all we can with what we got, and nobody can do more than that.”
“He’s right about that,” a motor machinist’s mate chipped in. “The way those H.O.R. mills are put together, it’s a wonder we’ve only got one down. Take it from me, this isn’t the last trouble they’ll give us.”
Chapter 8
As the Canal pilot steered the Manta from Cristobal harbor toward the first lock, Woody Stone gripped the coaming of the bridge and tried not to gape openly. As a boy he had read stories about the building of the Panama Canal, “the greatest engineering project in history,” and the struggles against heat and landslides and yellow fever, but none of the boyhood stories had prepared him for the sheer size of the thing. The lock they were sailing into was over three times the length and four times the width of the Manta, still—after thirty years—big enough to handle the largest liner or battleship in the world.
As the huge gates swung closed behind them, the foredeck started to fill up with curious sailors staring up the sheer stretch of slime-covered stone and chattering among themselves. To Woody it suddenly seemed that the submarine was trapped at the bottom of a well, but even as he thought that, giant valves were turning somewhere and the Manta was rising slowly toward the sky.
Eight hours and forty miles later they sailed into the Pacific Ocean and tied up at the Naval station. The commandant was waiting to greet them and to discuss the repairs the boat needed. Jack was dismayed, but not surprised, to hear that the work could take as much as a week, though Captain Bogan promised to speed it up as much as he could. He also invited Jack and his officers to dinner the following evening.
The next morning, for the first time, Jack found himself feeling the absence of Art Hunt. The men had to be kept occupied during these days in port. The engine-room gang would have their hands full, of course, and the torpedomen could be set to work cleaning and overhauling the boat’s load of warfish, but the rest posed a problem. There was only so much make-and-mend to go around on a boat that was fresh from the yard. Some shortcomings had made themselves known on the voyage south, but it would not take more than two watches to correct them. After puzzling over this for most of an hour Jack did what he should have done in the first place, sent for the chief of the boat.
“Have a seat, Chief.” Dutch van Meeringen lowered himself to the edge of Jack’s bunk, his upper body still in the state of relaxed readiness that is the veteran sailor’s version of “attention.”
“You may have heard that the repairs to number three may keep us here for up to a week.” Dutch nodded; he had probably known that before the skipper did. “I’m concerned about keeping the men busy while we’re stuck here. Do you have any ideas?”
The CPO furrowed his brow. “I don’t like the paint job they gave us at New London,” he said slowly. “We’ve got rust stains for’rard already. If we could draw from stores, the boys always like messing around with paint.” Jack made a note on his pad. “And we could use a couple of hours’ gun drill a day. Smoky won’t like it”—the magazine for gun ammunition was directly underneath the galley—”but we can speed up the ammo chain a lot, then work the gun crews themselves once we’re at sea again.”
“Good idea, Dutch. Anything else?”
“Well, skipper, it’s spring, isn’t it? If we divide the men into three or four baseball teams, we could have a round-robin tournament. Maybe the winning team could challenge the team here to a match.” He hesitated. “I hear the naval station has a skeet range, too, with clay pigeons and all. That’s supposed to be good practice for gunners, if we could get permission to use it.”
“I’ll speak to Captain Bogan this morning, about that and about drawing the paint we need,” Jack promised. “You and Mr. daCosta can start organizing the gun drills, and you can appoint captains for the baseball teams.”
“Aye, aye, sir. There was never a truer word than what they say about idle hands, but there’ll be none on my boat!”
* * * *
Charlie Andrews was elated. Just before they left for dinner at the commandant’s house, he was able to tell the skipper that the repairs could be finished in another three days, and that included preventive checks on the other three diesels. It was nice for a change to have good news from the engine rooms, but that wasn’t the only reason for his good mood. Charlie loved to mess around with the insides of engines, to follow, step by step, the thinking of the designer, and sometimes to see where he went off the track or missed the chance of an improvement. In high school he had worked afternoons and Saturdays in his dad’s garage. Every moment he could spare from the customers’ cars went into reviving a huge old Packard Twin-Six touring car that his dad had bought for scrap. He still thought about the afternoon when he climbed into the front seat, adjusted the fuel mixture and spark advance, and pressed the self-starter, to be rewarded immediately by a low, throaty growl of power from the twelve cylinders. Others noticed his talent; on graduation he was offered a scholarship to a well-known school of engineering. It was only after a long, painful debate with himself that he turned it down in favor of an appointment to the Naval Academy.
The skipper was introducing Lou to the commandant; Charlie knew it was his turn next. He glanced down at his hands, suddenly self-conscious about the ingrained grease marks around his fingernails.
“Lieutenant Andrews, sir,” the skipper was saying. “He’s our resident mechanical genius.”
Captain Bogan extended his hand. “Pleasure, Andrews,” he said gruffly. “The bar’s over there; help yourself.” He motioned toward a buffet where a Filipino steward presided over an array of bottles. Charlie thanked him and started in that direction, but halfway across the room his progress was interrupted.
“Charles, my lad, by all that’s holy! What ill wind blew you to Panama?”
He turned at the familiar voice and saw Michael Dorsey, a classmate from the Academy known to all as “Clark,” from a fancied resemblance to Clark Gable. As they shook hands and pounded shoulders, Dorsey continued. “No, don’t tell me. I see by your dolphins that you’re on a pigboat. The one that came through the Canal yesterday?” Charlie nodded. “And you’re off to the wars, I’ll bet. Lucky man!”
“What about you, Clark? Are you stationed here?”
The other man made a doleful face. “I’m defending our nation’s vital artery, the Panama Canal, against the sneaky Japs. In plain English, I’m exec on an escort vessel, formerly a yacht, consecrated to his country’s service by a patriotic movie mogul. If the Japs do show up, we’re supposed to frighten them away with our three-inch gun. If that doesn’t work, we throw rocks at them. Fortunately they haven’t kept the appointment yet. Come on, let’s get something to drink before dinner is called.”
Over bourbon and water they caught up on the news of the past couple of years. They were seated far apart at dinner, but afterwards Clark suggested that they form a party to visit one or two local night spots. Charlie, thinking of the next day’s work on Manta’s engine, turned him down, but he insisted.
“This is your first time in Latin America, isn’t it? Well, then, you owe it to your education—the music, the lights, the pretty senoritas… I’ll tell you, Charlie my boy, compared to Panama, those bars we used to go to in Baltimore look like a Methodist camp meeting! Have you ever seen an animal act?”
“You mean bears and lions? Sure, so what?”
Clark gave him a significant look. “No, not bears and lions.”
