The Med

by David Poyer

  Whistling, he headed for the ladder. Lenson paused a moment, looking back toward the commodore’s stateroom, and then followed him down.

  10

  U.S.S. Ault

  “So you tell me,” said blood, pointing his beard in turn at each of the others over sloppy joes and fries and black java circles that became ellipses as the old destroyer paused at the crest of a sea, “why we scooted out of Naples like a cat on fire. You don’t think it means anything? Bullcrap, Kelly. There’s something going down. Something big.”

  Wronowicz wiped his chin free of gravy and readied his sandwich for another enormous bite. “Maybe,” he grunted.

  “Maybe, hell. Tell me if I’m wrong, but—”

  “You’re wrong,” said Chief Sullivan, lighting a cigar.

  “Not that fast, dammit.”

  The others chuckled. The chief’s mess, walled in by the bow so that it narrowed both forward and downward, was smaller but homier than the wardroom, more comfortable than the crew’s lounge. Now, at lunchtime, it smelled of cigars and coffee and hot greasy food.

  “No, I’m joking. Actually, seems to me Unc might be right,” said Sullivan, forking a last french fry. “Darn it, I was counting on those four days in port. We got running rust coming off the side scuppers. I don’t think even the exec knew we were getting underway till we got the word, because he told me to—”

  “They don’t tell you shit,” said Blood, meaning the officers. “I’ll tell you, if ignorance was bliss, all the chiefs on this ship would be one big blister. It’s always the same: balls to the wall for some big event, then spend the next two weeks with your thumb up your ass.”

  Wronowicz grunted. He was not really listening to the words they bandied, though he appreciated the camaraderie. He was far away. He was in a cramped room high above the back streets of Naples. In the greasy air he longed for a subtler scent. He felt suspended, empty, and to fill the void he ate. He was surprised to find only stains on his undershirt remaining of the ground-beef sandwich. He stretched over the table for another.

  “Whatever it is, I hope it don’t interfere with the chief’s initiation. Takes a lot of work to set up a good one.”

  “When’s that, Sully?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “The way they run this here peacetime Navy reminds me of the time I went over to Portsmouth Naval Hospital, few years ago,” said the radioman senior chief, Chapman, a small man with an anachronistic pencil mustache and glasses; he was the oldest man aboard. “I had this high temperature, this pain in the side.”

  “Pain where?” said Blood.

  “In the side. ‘Bowel obstruction,’ they called it on the ship. Anyway, they put me in bed, hook me up to this machine. Then the nurse calls the doctor in. He’s a lieutenant. He looks at the machine and calls another doctor in. He’s a commander. They call two more doctors in; they’re both captains.”

  “What we got for dessert?” Wronowicz asked the mess-man.

  “Cherr’ pie, Chief.”

  “Bring it on.”

  “So they’re all standing there with their mouths open, looking at the machine and then at me, and I’m looking back at them. Then this technician comes in. He looks at them and says, ‘Hey, why you using this gear? Can’t you see it’s busted?’ They wheel in another machine and it says my heart’s okay.” He leaned back and grinned.

  “So what did they do?” said Sullivan.

  “Ripped out my appendix.”

  “That’s the goddamn most pointless, most asinine story I’ve ever heard in eighteen years in the Navy,” whispered Blood to Wronowicz.

  “Most what?”

  “Never mind.”

  All right, said Wronowicz to himself, here goes. I don’t feel like it; I feel like crawling into my rack with those two cool bottles of Smirnoff I brought back, but that’s why I got to do it, because I don’t feel like it. “I heard a good one couple weeks ago,” he began heavily, shoving back his empty plate and reaching for the uncut pie. “Cowboy goes into this saloon—”

  “Not another cowboy joke.”

  “—Goes into this saloon,” Wronowicz continued, ignoring the interruption, “and there’s a sign over the bar. ‘Make our horse laugh and win fifty dollars.’ So he asks the bartender, is this on the level? Bartender says sure, it’s the white horse parked out front, just make it laugh and you win fifty bucks. So he leaves his drink and goes outside, and a couple seconds later this horse laugh comes through the door. Bartender goes outside, and the horse is laughing out loud, stomping its feet, about to roll over. He can’t believe it, but he gives the cowboy the fifty.”

  Eight bells sounded. Several of the men slurped at their coffee and got up, but lingered at the door to listen.

  “So a couple months later this same cowboy comes in from another drive, and there’s a new sign over the bar. ‘Make our horse cry, win a hundred dollars.’ He looks at it for a while, then goes outside. Couple seconds later the sound of bawling comes through the door, and the bartender goes out. Big tears are rolling down the horse’s cheeks.

  “‘Do I win?’ asks the cowboy.

  “‘You sure do,’ says the bartender, kind of teed off, because this is costing him money. He goes in and pays him, and then says, ‘Say, generally I wouldn’t ask, but you’re the same guy made the horse laugh before, ain’t you?’

  “‘That’s right,’ says the cowboy.

  “‘So tell me, how did you do it? Make him laugh, and then make him cry?’

  “‘Easy,’ says the cowboy. ‘First time, I told him my cock was bigger than his was. The second time, I showed him.’”

  Wronowicz leaned back as the other chiefs laughed, then shoved his chair away from the mess table. “Well, I got to get some work done today. That pie was real good, Manny.”

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  He dropped from the ladder into the clammy heat, the battering sound of number-one engineroom, with a feeling of relief. All day long he had been thinking of the woman, and he didn’t like thinking about women. Oh, he’d done his best to forget. He had gotten through almost a fifth of bourbon before going back aboard at 0200 that morning. Then Callin had woken him an hour later with orders to light off, they were getting underway.… The joking in the chief’s quarters helped too, but what he needed was work, to plunge himself into it with ferocity and absorption until he was no longer a man but just a pair of evaluating eyes, skilled greasy hands, a brain that thought only in microns and degrees and hundreds of pounds per square inch.

  Now he was home. The engines and pumps and compressors slammed at his ears like a dozen jackhammers revising a four-lane highway. He punched the insulation over number-one cruising turbine, feeling it crackle and give under his fist, and made a mental note to get it replaced when they went alongside the tender. He braced himself on a pump casing as the ship rolled, and headed up onto the main deck again to cross to the after engineroom. He slammed the hatch behind him, rattled down slippery treads, and paused, breathing deep of the hurricane roaring down from the blowers. Steurnagel, the first-class machinist’s mate, was standing in front of the throttleboard with his eyes soldered to the steam pressure gauge. “What are we at?” Wronowicz shouted, glancing at the RPM counter and then at the indicator.

  “Just dropped back to eighteen knots, Chief.”

  “How’s vacuum holding?”

  “Low for the speed. Say, we got to get this damn stop valve packed again. It’s drippin’ right down the back of my neck.”

  “I’ll put it on Santa’s list. What are the bearings doing?” he said, thinking of the shafts, the screws, and the slight tremor he had felt down here when the Ault, saying her hurried farewell to Italy, had slid for a moment across the muddy bottom of the Bay of Naples.

  “They’re okay.”

  “The log here says a hundred and thirty degrees on the main port.”

  “Yeah, but it’s steady.”

  “It was only running hundred, hundred and ten on the way over. Acros
s the pond, I mean.”

  The throttleman considered. “I guess you’re right,” he said at last. “But I been watching it. It goes any higher, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Okay. Just checking. Where’s your messenger?”

  “On rounds.”

  As if he’d heard, though of course nothing but a shout could penetrate the din of the engines, Blaney appeared at the top of the ladder from the lower level. Wronowicz felt instant anger. He was sure the nineteen-year-old fireman—this was his first ship—was on something illegal half the time, and plain stupid the rest. Even the other E-2s played jokes on him, sent him to find ten yards of waterline, or grease for the relative bearings. His eyes looked normal today, though. Marijuana was not exactly everywhere, but Kelly knew it was used. Drugs aboard ship … what was his goddamn Navy coming to.…

  And he was black. Wronowicz felt that he was as fair as the next man, but he had his private doubts. You couldn’t say so anymore; he knew they were supposed to be equal and all, but it didn’t stand to reason you could jerk them out of the jungle and expect them to understand complicated machinery. He snatched the logboard from an unresisting hand. “Stick your goddamn shirttail in,” he said.

  “What, Chief?” Blaney lifted one ear of his hearing protectors.

  “Stick your shirttail in!”

  “Sure, Chief.”

  “Stewie, keep these guys in uniform.”

  “Chief, it’s a hundred and twenty down here. A T-shirt ought to keep the exec satisfied.”

  Privately Wronowicz didn’t care if they walked around baby-naked with a hard-on, as long as the maintenance got done, but that wasn’t the way Captain Foster wanted his ship run. “Don’t give me any flareback, Steurnagel. Just do it.”

  “Whatever you say,” said the petty officer, reaching a pack of Camels off the superheat gauge.

  Wronowicz looked at the board for a minute more, then threw it back to Blaney. “I’ll be in the logroom,” he said. “Call me if anything changes.”

  “Okey doke, Chief.”

  DC Central, the engineering logroom, was empty except for a yeoman. Wronowicz grunted at him and then slid into his chair, reached into his box.

  Paperwork. Callin had written him a memo on training … he stuffed that back and took out a stack of maintenance forms. Every repair or overhaul the ship did had to be written up and sent back to the States for analysis. Wronowicz was convinced they went straight into a dumpster behind the Navy Annex, but they had to be filled out by the book or you got a nastygram from the computer. He worked on them for a while, setting aside a dozen for incorporation into the tender work package. That would be getting hot soon; that is, if they were really going into port for repairs in three weeks. Why, he wondered, couldn’t they set a schedule and keep to it? He had never been in the Med once where some flap hadn’t come up, upsetting every plan he made.

  He nursed the anger; it was better than regret. Too, the slightly elevated temperature on the port shaft kept nagging at his mind. After an hour of pushing the pencil he gave up, shoved the forms back into the desk, and went back below. Steurnagel was still on the job, head up. Thank Christ, he had a good first-class at least. “Any of your watch not busy?” he asked him.

  “Blaney,” said the throttleman, jerking his head backward, and Wronowicz turned and saw that the fireman was indeed sitting by the degaussing switchboard, doing nothing, looking as vacant and unconcerned as ever.

  “How come he don’t have anything to do?”

  “He’s been busy. He’s on his break.”

  “Come on,” Wronowicz said to Blaney. “I want to look at that port shaft.”

  “Sure, Chief,” said the fireman happily.

  Down in the lower level, near the vibrating stern, the two men stood on the catwalk, looking down at the spinning cylinder of the shaft. At eighteen knots, about half the destroyer’s maximum speed, it was rotating a hundred and twenty-five times a minute, a foot-and-a-half-thick rod of alloy that carried power from the port engine and reduction gear back through the hull to the propeller. The port shaft was a quarter as long as the starboard, which led forward to number-one engineroom, and only a single bearing supported it between the hull and the gears.

  Wronowicz knelt on the grating to get a better look. The bearing was a yard-wide ring of metal, set into the after watertight bulkhead. It had bolts so you could take it off to get to the bearing surface, a split ring lined to take the wear. He slid down into the bilge, hearing water splash as his boots hit the bottom of the hull, and put his hand gingerly to it. The bearing was warm, but not hot. The shaft whined steadily inches from his ear. A little louder? Maybe, maybe not. He turned his head till his ear was almost touching the spinning metal and squinted along its length. Every second or so a slight vibration wormed its way up it; he could see the spinning steel blur momentarily. So slightly, though, that it might have been there all along. It smelled all right, too. He checked the gauge. Hundred and thirty, just as the first-class had said.

  “You been checkin’ oil level on this?” he asked Blaney’s open mouth, hovering over the edge of the grating.

  “What, Chief?”

  “I said, YOU BEEN CHECKING OIL ON THIS REGULAR?”

  “Sure, Chief,” said Blaney, grinning. Wronowicz looked up at him for a moment, spat into the bilges, and then hauled himself up. He walked back toward the throttleboard, noting with satisfaction that one of his third-class was hard at work overhauling a spare reducing valve, that two of the electricians were rewiring a controller. Things were going okay, after all. He decided to get a diver in Crete to check out the prop. A nicked blade could cause a vibration like that. There was a floating drydock there, or maybe they could replace it just with divers and a medium-lift crane; he had seen it done that way once. That would be a hell of a job, though.

  Steurnagel was leaning in the same position, exhaling smoke and reading a paperback. He put it away quickly when Wronowicz came up.

  “Secure that crap on watch or you’ll be shitting shoelaces, Stewie.”

  “Aye aye, Chief.”

  “No bells, huh?”

  “Haven’t had a speed change since eleven-hundred.”

  The engine order telegraph pinged at that moment, and their eyes jerked to it. Ahead full. “Shit,” said the first-class, spinning the throttle open. “And they just took number-two boiler off the line.”

  “Oh yeah? Hey, I’m sick of playing mushroom down here. Call the boiler room. Tell ’em to stay with superheat for ten minutes more. I’m going up to the bridge.”

  “Okay, Chief.”

  “You’re doing a good job. Just watch those bearing temps.”

  “Right, Chief.”

  * * *

  Wronowicz emerged like a large badger from a scuttle by after officer’s country. Halfway to the bridge, three decks up and two hundred feet forward of the engineroom, he remembered his head was bare. Muttering to himself, he went back to chief’s quarters for his cap, then resumed his climb. Halfway up a dangling cable knocked it off his head. Wronowicz went down the ladder after it again, muttering a little louder. He stopped at the 01 level to catch his breath—it was a long way to drag his weight—and to tuck in his belly. His hands, filthy again, left black prints on his khakis, but he decided the brass would have to live with that. He squared his cap and went up the last few feet hand over hand.

  Foster was on the bridge. He knew that even before he saw the captain’s length, still in whites, slumped in his chair, his gold-encrusted cap tipped down over his face, unlit corncob drooping from his teeth. Wronowicz looked around the pilothouse, hoping for Lieutenant Jay, but aside from the enlisted men there was only the operations officer and Ensign Callin. Callin was standing dead amidships, gripping his binoculars and staring straight ahead. Wronowicz approached his division officer warily. He always felt uncertain on the bridge. Here the officers were in charge; everything was waxed and polished, clean and squared away, and most intimidating of all, quiet. He took a qu
ick look out the windows, blinking in the cloudy light, but saw no other ships. Steaming alone, then. Good. But how long would it last?

  “Mr. Callin?”

  “Yes, sir,” snapped Callin, turning. They were both startled. “Oh. What is it, Chief? Something wrong down below?”

  “Oh, no sir. We just got your full bell. I wondered if you knew how long we’ll be at this speed.”

  “Can’t we handle it?”

  “Of course we can handle it,” said Wronowicz, thinking What does he think we do down there? Play with ourselves? “It’s just that we had just took one boiler off the line and I wondered if we should bring it up again.”

  “I don’t know,” said the ensign, glancing toward where the captain, still slumped in his chair, had aimed his pipe in their direction. “Look, I’m busy. I got the conn right now. Maybe you just better bring it up anyway.”

  “It costs us more water that way. And fuel. If we’re going to slow again in a little while—”

  “Chief,” said the captain.

  Well, here we go, thought Wronowicz. He pulled his cap down a little more and swaggered over, putting his dirty hands behind him. “Yeah, Cap’n?”

  “How’s the plant holding up?”

  “Pretty good, sir. Maybe a slight vibration in the port shaft. We could use some time alongside the tender, though. Getting some insulation dryout, and we need some gaskets replaced, and we got to get some more packing for the main feed pumps.” He could feel Callin listening. Captain should be asking him this stuff, he thought. “We’re using more turns than we should for the knots, though.”

  “How come?”

  “We been out of the yard for over a year, Cap’n. Getting a lot of barnacles and crap on the bottom. It ain’t the engines.”

  “I know that, Chief.” Foster smiled and took his pipe out of his mouth. “You run a tight engineroom. Say, you mentioned the port shaft, vibration. Could that be a delayed result of the bottoming? Is there anything I ought to know?”

  Wronowicz hesitated, choosing his words; you had to be so goddamn diplomatic up here, all this frigging gold braid. He decided the unvarnished truth would be easiest. “I don’t know. I’ve been keeping an eye on all the bearings since Naples. I dint want to bother Ensign Callin, ’cause—”