The Med

by David Poyer

  “Tell her what?”

  “Tell her she smelled. She could’ve fixed that.”

  “Hell,” said Blood, grinning, “then some officer would’ve moved in. Talk about lube jobs! We’d go into the head in the acey-deucey club and she’d haul out my—”

  “She loved you, you asshole. What did you do when you were finished with her, walk away?”

  “Hey, what else could I do when the old lady arrived? I was married, man. See, here’s the way I see it. You got to grab every piece of it you can get. It might be your best, and it might be your last. Like you did with that cunt in Naples—”

  “Shut up, you fuckhead,” said Wronowicz, standing up. Something vicious rose in his chest. He slammed his fists down on the table, scattering the cards, and leaned over the astonished quartermaster like an avalanche. Confused feelings struggled in him, the urge to smash in the squinty eyes, the pointed, too-neat beard. Wronowicz didn’t understand why; he didn’t have the right words, though he had words, plenty of them, all obscene. But that was part of what enraged him, the relentless obscenity. He held his fists on the table with sheer will, and he and Blood stared at each other, the other two chiefs scrambling up from the sliding pile of cards and chips.

  “Kelly, take it easy—”

  “Cool it, Kelly. He’s just telling a story.”

  “Yeah? Well, I don’t want to hear another story out of him for this whole fuckin’ cruise,” Wronowicz said, looking down at Blood. The quartermaster slid back in his chair. The other chiefs moved unobtrusively behind the machinist, ready to grab him, but he did not move. Instead he held Blood’s eyes until they fell to the cards and then he turned and walked heavily down to chiefs’ berthing, listening to his heart thud in pace with his footsteps.

  Dangerous, he thought. Doc told me, blood pressure. Ah, to hell with it. He threw himself into his bunk, rocking the partition, and stared at the overhead, listening to himself pant.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  It was a foreign thought, frightening, from somewhere outside of him, and he pushed it away. He lay there for a few minutes, waiting for his pulse to still, and then got up in the darkened compartment and went to his locker. Back in the bunk, curtain drawn, he uncapped the fifth and took a deep drink of warm vodka. It fumed his throat like grease stripper, and he coughed and coughed and then took another long swallow and capped the bottle and snuggled it beside him, next to the bulkhead. Callin might come in, or Jay.… Fuck ’em if they do, he thought savagely. That fucking Blood. He took another drink, his gut warming to it, and reminded himself that he had only that bottle and one other to last God knew how long, till they made port again, and with this Cyprus horseshit that could be weeks.

  You shouldn’t’ve lost your temper, he told himself. But as he thought of it he got mad again, and cursed half-aloud there in the bunk till his mind went silent, emptied finally of words, and he lay still, lifting the bottle from time to time and listening to the distant foghorn.

  * * *

  “Chief.”

  “Yuh,” he grunted, rolling over. Something hard and rounded under him … he rubbed his face and squinted at his watch. It was zero-two-hundred.

  “Chief Wronowicz.” A hoarse whisper, half-familiar. The curtain slid aside and he saw Ensign Callin’s face, red in the darken-ship lights. He closed his eyes, opened them, but his division officer was still there.

  “Sir?”

  “We need you down in the hole, Chief.”

  “You got the watch, don’t you?” he said, and then a bad feeling came over him. Callin wouldn’t be here unless something was wrong. He wasn’t officially qualified yet, but he could handle most of the ordinary emergencies by now. So it must be serious. He swung his legs out, rolling the bottle back so the officer couldn’t see it. Good thing it was vodka, couldn’t smell it on his breath. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re not sure. Mr. Jay wants you down right away.”

  “… goddamn boots…”

  Number-two engineroom was oddly quiet to him, though to an outsider it would still have been an unbearable storm of sound. Following Callin down the after ladder, he knew it was the port shaft. That bearing, he thought, but Steurnagel and Lieutenant Jay and two of the firemen were standing beside the engine. “What is it?” he asked the first-class, coming up to them.

  “Vibration,” shouted Steurnagel. “Started all of a sudden. We cut to half rpm but it got worse. I told the bridge we had to shut down the port shaft.”

  “Yeah, good work. That bearing—”

  “It ain’t the shaft bearing, Chief. It’s still runnin’ warm, but that ain’t it.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Wronowicz.

  Lieutenant Jay came back around the engine casing, a flashlight in his hand. He was in khaki trousers and a T-shirt, already greasy. They must’ve got him up too, Wronowicz thought. “Any idea what it is?” he asked the chief, brushing a lock of blond hair off his forehead and leaving a black mark.

  “I just got here, sir. We’ll probably have to turn her over a few times, see what it was.”

  “Let’s do it,” said Jay. “Captain wants this cleared up ASAP. We’re in formation now; if we have to slow we’ll drop back.”

  “You guys know anything?” Wronowicz asked the oilers.

  “I seen it shaking,” said one man.

  “Where?”

  “Here.” He pointed to where the steel thickness of the shaft, immobile now, entered the reduction gear.

  “What’s the problem?”

  It was the XO, looking angry. Wronowicz stared at him. He seemed out of place in the engineroom; he seldom went there, spending most of his time in the administrative offices. “What is it?” he said again, looking at Jay and Callin.

  “We’re trying to find out now, sir.”

  “Let’s get it fixed. We have commitments to meet.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Wronowicz ignored the officers, gnawed at his beard for a moment, then turned to the first-class. “Keep an eye on me,” he said. “Unlock the shaft when I nod. Lock her up again when I wave my arm.”

  “You want steam?”

  “No, just let everything spin on the prop.”

  “Right.”

  Wronowicz waited, watching the huge steel casing that housed the massive gear. The three turbines (high pressure, low pressure, and cruising) of the main engine fed power to it through short shafts, and the complex of machinery took their thousands of rpm and geared it down to drive the screw, fifty feet behind them. Now the first-class, at the throttleboard, brought up astern steam pressure till he could disengage the jacking-gear lock. As he lowered pressure again the shaft eased slowly into motion. As it blurred Wronowicz saw it start to jump. A high squeal tore at his ears. “Shut it down!” he screamed, waving his arm, and immediately it slowed, turning from a blur into a spinning line of metal. The lock went in with a jolt, making the men around it jump back.

  “What’s wrong?” said the XO.

  “Shit,” said Wronowicz, staring at the gear.

  “I said—”

  “The chief’s figuring it out,” said Jay, a little too sharply. The XO shot him a glance and then stood silent, looking at Wronowicz. They all looked at Wronowicz.

  “It’s the reduction gear,” he said.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Jay.

  “The gear,” said Callin, as if he understood what they were talking about.

  “Yeah,” said Wronowicz, staring at the thing. He was still slightly drunk, somewhere back in his head, but it had long ago left his memory. Now he was totally here in the engineroom, inside the ten-by-twenty-foot padlocked cover of the gearbox, past steel and lube oil and into the meshing of intricate metal, the sliding biting transmission of power, so smooth and dependable it was usually un-thought of by anyone at all. “It wasn’t the line bearing that went. I was watching that. It’s like a pivot, though; the stress gets transmitted, and it went into the reduction gear. I figure we got a wiped bearing in there some
where.”

  “Well, let’s get it fixed,” said the XO.

  “It ain’t that simple, sir,” said Wronowicz. “We’d have to figure out which gear it is, get the load off it, then take out the bearing and replace it. The metal inside it rides on is gone.”

  The five men were standing there, looking at the reduction gear, when a clatter of feet came from the ladder. They turned. The gold-braided cap bobbed downward, glittered under fluorescent light, vanished behind the throttleboard, and then Captain Foster came up to them, pipe clenched in his teeth. “How long am I going to be at half power?” he asked.

  “The chief was just saying that’s not the problem, sir,” said Jay.

  “Well, what is the problem?”

  “We don’t have any spares for the reduction-gear bearings, sir,” said Wronowicz.

  “No spares?”

  “No sir.”

  “Why the devil don’t we have spares?”

  “They aren’t in our allowance, Captain,” said Jay.

  “Why not?”

  “They don’t break down that often, sir,” said Wronowicz. “If we carried an extra for everything, we’d have another goddamn ship aboard. And there’s another problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re not allowed to go into this gear, Cap’n.”

  “Who says?”

  “Navy Regs, sir. This is a shipyard job.”

  The captain stared at the gear, at the shaft, at the engines, at the XO, very briefly, and then turned to Jay. “Can I talk to you, Phil?” he said.

  “Certainly, sir.”

  The officers went forward. Steurnagel came up, wiping his hands on a piece of rag, and Wronowicz motioned at the gear. “Which one you figure it is?” he said. “You guys, get your heads in here and listen. You’re gonna need to know this someday.”

  “Uh … I don’t know.”

  “Think. We got three turbines and one shaft. Are the turbines jumping around?”

  “No.”

  “Then which one is it?”

  “The shaft bearing?”

  “Or one of the pinion bearings inside the gear, yeah. So how would we figure which one it is?”

  “Uh…” The petty officer thought about it. “Take up on the shaft so it doesn’t bear, and then engage the engine?”

  “That’s good, but it’d take too long. No, I’ll show you how to find the bad one with a screwdriver. By sound. Then we’ll pull it for a look.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Jay came back and squatted beside them. He looked somber. He was as dirty as any of them now, but the uncrossable gulf of rank made them wait for him to speak. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the picture. Captain Foster says we got to get the port shaft back on the line, just as soon as we can. If it’s against the regs to open her up, he says he’s the one that’ll swing, not you.”

  “Jesus, sir, without parts how the hell—”

  “I don’t care,” said Jay sharply. “You get me? Captain says it doesn’t matter if we wreck the engines, over the long run. Tomorrow, or the day after, the task force may be ordered to assault a defended beach. You understand? It’s a combat situation. We got to go in with them, to protect the amphibs. Then we got to patrol close in to the beach, to provide gunfire support if the grunts get in a jam ashore. To make it there with the rest we’ll need both shafts and every knot you can give us. We can limp back after that; we can go into the yard in Gibraltar; we’ll worry about that later. But we got to have both shafts.”

  “This bearing won’t take it, sir,” said Wronowicz. “That’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “Then you got to jury-rig it so it will,” said Jay. “You’re the chief machinist’s mate. We’ll give you all the help you need, but it’s got to be done.”

  Staring at the gear, Wronowicz saw it in his mind’s eye in all its complexity. It had been machined in a shop clean as an operating room, fitted by craftsmen with calipers and years of experience in their trade. The steel was the best American industry could make, each square inch alloyed to take thirty thousand horsepower for a billion revolutions. They were so dependable that the faraway experts who studied his maintenance reports had decided he didn’t even need spares for them.

  But everything failed sometime. He knew that. He was a machinist. Everything made of metal, everything that carried hydraulic fluid or electricity, everything made of flesh, everything that existed in time; they all failed, given enough years, enough stress. And that time had come, now, for something inside his ship; and it was for this night that the Navy had trained him and fed him and paid him and carried him a dozen times around the world.

  “Chief?” said Jay.

  “Yes sir,” said Wronowicz, taking a deep breath. “We’ll get right to work.”

  17

  U.S.S. Guam

  In the darkness steel cried aloud, twisted by the immense force of the sea. A helicopter carrier was a big ship, but its very weight made it flex, deform, as the waves heaved and tore at its flanks.

  The man lay awake, listening to the torment that came clearly through the metal to his ear. Rough weather, he thought. And getting worse. It was dark around him, as if the lightless ship, groaning in the implacable embrace of the sea, was already settling four thousand feet into the endless night below.

  He raised his hand, half-expecting the rough underside of a lid above his head. When it encountered nothing he let it fall back to the bunk. He swiveled his eyes to the luminous dial of a chronometer, and forgot Poe.

  It was almost midnight. Almost the magic instant when today became yesterday, tomorrow today.

  When I was a child …

  The thought came from nowhere, from the maelstrom of fancy and doubt that had filled his mind since he lay down. The man who lay in the dark did not often remember his childhood. But now, alone, he let a corner of that carefully wrapped past unfold.

  As a child he had waited for midnight, lying in his bunk bed with his older brother. It was the mark of adulthood, to stay up, and though their dad had ordered them to bed they could still, boylike, defy him by staying awake. They were determined to. And when, by the light of a toy flashlight, he had seen the hands join, he had whispered to his brother; but his only reply was a snore.

  Only Ike Sundstrom had kept his eyes open. To see, sliding across their ceiling, the headlights of the Hudson as his father drove off for the last time.

  Now, in the darkened stateroom, far at sea, he wished his brother were there. Or his wife. Anyone … anyone, that he might not be so alone.

  He turned over impatiently and fluffed his pillow for the dozenth time. Damn it, he thought, I knew this would be a bad night. He had never been able to sleep before important tests, interviews, or decisions. The steward had brought him milk, then been sent back to the pantry for a piece of pie. He didn’t need the calories, but he couldn’t sleep when he was hungry. Now he felt full.

  But that was not what kept him awake.

  His mind milled on like the wooden ducks one saw on the lawns of suburbs, beating the wind with their wings but going nowhere. It would not cease. All that night it had imagined difficulties, problems, conspiracies, accidents. Then it elaborated intricate plans to deal with each one. To some extent he enjoyed this. He believed that thinking through problems before they arose made you readier to deal with them. But now he was deadly tired, he wanted to rest and forget, and his mind would not let him. Despite his will it circled back again and again, like a faulty torpedo, to two things. One, the impending action. And two, the treachery and incompetence that surrounded him.

  This whole day has been an object lesson, he thought angrily, in how not to run a task force. At every turn Hogan, that clock-puncher, had obstructed him, as he had through the entire cruise. The chief staff officer’s job was to make the commodore’s easier, to act as an alter ego. Instead Hogan obtruded difficulties at every turn. He was always whining about the men, about maintenance, about his sacred “routine.”

  Sundst
rom closed his fists in the dark. The man had no conception of what real leadership meant. If everything ran by routine, why was there a squadron commander at all? No, his job was to upset routine, to jolt people into seeing their own error and carelessness, and to ready them for battle. That was what Sixth Fleet and the CINC expected, and that, by Christ, was what Ike Sundstrom was going to give them: a responsive, detail-oriented team, ready to do whatever needed doing. If he let the Hogan-types handle it, they would be caught with their pants down, every time—just as they had when the Soviet patrol plane showed up.

  Another stab of memory made him writhe under the sheets. The debacle that afternoon. First, their reaction had been incredibly slow. In the Pacific his destroyer had been buttoned up and ready for battle in seven minutes. These unwieldy amphibious ships took ten, twelve, fourteen minutes to report. He couldn’t believe it was that much more complicated for them. In three months of drills he had tried to hammer the time down, with only indifferent success. In that respect, today hadn’t been bad—what was it, ten minutes for the whole formation? That was progress, anyway.

  But the biggest problem was not his commanding officers. They were lackluster, that was certain. Sometimes he wondered if that was why he had been ordered here, to whip a slack organization back into shape. At other times he suspected that it was an exile, contrived by his enemies at the Bureau to hamstring his chances for making flag. But they were not the main problem. The main problem was his staff.

  Worthless was too kind a word for them. He’d realized that the minute he stepped aboard, four months before. MacInroe had let them go to pot, indulged them, and when he expected them to perform or face the consequences they reacted with resentment and what amounted almost to sabotage. The N-2, Byrne, was a fool, full of fancy phrases and quick only at avoiding real work. A limp-wrist type. The supply officer, Glazer, was too young to know the ropes. The engineering officer was a nonentity. Lenson … a possible exception; if he had a few more years under his belt, they might do something together. As it was, the operations officer was poisoning him with his slack attitude.