Pacific Interlude

by Sloan Wilson

  “Words … all I know is it would make more sense than getting killed when the war is practically over.”

  “Do you know that you could be court-martialed for even saying this? And what if everybody thought the way you do? Every ship out here would be sabotaged—”

  “Never happen. Too many glory boys around to let that happen. You know damn well I’m no coward, skipper, but I’ve got work to do in my life and I don’t want to die out here before I can even get started. This engine is old. No one could blame you if it burned out a bearing. If you told that crazy Polack, I mean Mr. Wydanski, that we’d get towed back to his Mildred, he’d chew the bearings out with his false teeth.”

  “I think you’re serious—”

  “Skipper, if you try to push this gas bucket up to Manila and all the way to Japan, what chance do you think we’ll have?”

  “I don’t know, but if you really mean this shit, you’re either a traitor or psycho. Best thing I can do is send you ashore for a medical examination and recommendation for a Section Eight—”

  “No Section Eight for me, skipper. It would look like hell on my record. The voters wouldn’t like it. If I can’t talk any sense into you I’ll just have to hope that damn engine breaks down by itself—”

  “You stay away from it. Stay out of the engine room, and if I catch you talking this way to any man aboard I’ll hang you. I goddamn well mean it.”

  Buller allowed a sly smile to come over his thick features. “Hey, come on, skipper … we’re just having a private little joke, ain’t we? Of course I didn’t mean a thing I said about running the engine without oil. Shoot, like you say, a man would have to be crazy to come up with an idea like that …”

  CHAPTER 19

  ABOUT TWO WEEKS later the Y-18 received orders to take a load of gas to an airstrip that had just been built at Guiuan on the southern tip of the neighboring island of Samar. That was only about seventy miles away but anything was a welcome change from the shuttle run.

  “Take it easy around there,” Major Williams said. “There are a lot of coral reefs. A navy AOG got in but ran aground trying to get out. She’s still stuck, so be careful—we can’t afford to lose any more tankers.”

  They started at dawn on December 2, and during the nine-hour run the men were unusually cheerful. The cook used this long period to roast turkeys, and the air-conditioning unit, which had finally been installed, was given a chance to run long enough to show what it could do. With the sun beating hard on the steel decks, it lowered the temperature only to about seventy-eight degrees, but that was a welcome change. They had the only air-conditioned forecastle in the fleet and wrote letters home to boast about it. Buller, in a deck chair he had put in the forecastle, sat like a king receiving the plaudits of his subjects.

  Syl studied the chart and noted that the fuel barge where he was to unload lay in the middle of a mass of shoals so close to shore that no depths of water were given. He would have to send in the motorboat ahead of him with a leadsman. It was the kind of job he especially liked—unhurried, difficult but safe enough if done right. He told Cramer to ready some life preservers, some light lines and pipe joints that could be used as anchors with which the boat could buoy a channel the tanker could follow. For once he was beginning an operation without any morbid premonition of disaster.

  The sky was clear when they arrived off Guiuan that afternoon, and the sun was sinking toward the land well to their left as he headed in, not glaring into his eyes. The network of shoals appeared in various patches of green, yellow and brown with pretzel-like natural channels of blue water weaving among them. The gray AOG, which was bigger, newer and much more impressive looking than the Y-18, lay with her bow up on one of these reefs. Her crew watched without signaling as the little green army tanker anchored well clear and sent the boat in to buoy a channel. Syl felt sorry for her captain.

  As he slowly followed his boat in Syl saw that the fuel barge lay at the foot of a high bluff on which camouflaged storage tanks for the gasoline had been built. A thick pipe ran down the face of the bluff across pontoons to the barge. He wondered how gasoline could be forced up such a steep incline, but when he came alongside the barge he saw through an open end of a plywood shack a rusty pump and a Diesel engine that looked as though it had been taken from a landing barge. The whole rig looked cobbled together, but that was the army’s business. The corporal and sergeant who took their lines admitted the pump was giving them trouble but told them to fill up the barge anyway. They immediately left for shore in an assault boat, and as though that were a signal, two dugout canoes put out from the beach. Because they sold wine and, especially in isolated places like this, might carry a Jap straggler with a hand grenade, Syl usually shouted such native craft away, but these canoes were paddled by children and their cargo was large stalks of bananas, which the crew loved, and monkeys, which were tethered by collars and strings. An old man in the bow of the nearest canoe spoke English.

  “Monkeys, very tame monkeys, make very good pets,” he called. “Bananas too. We trade for Spam, sugar, any food …”

  “I want a monkey,” Rhinehart, the youngest of the seamen, said to Simpson. “I’ll take care of it—”

  “Them monkeys will wreck a ship, tear up everything and you can’t housebreak ’em.”

  “We’d keep him on deck and in the forecastle when it rains. We could make him a little house—”

  “They bite,” Simpson said. “They’re impossible to tame and they always die before long. That’s the only good part about ’em.”

  “Come on,” Buller said, coming from the forecastle. “Didn’t you ever want a monkey when you were a kid?”

  “My family had trouble enough feeding kids, never mind monkeys.”

  “The ship needs a mascot,” Buller said. “How about it, skipper? Good for morale.”

  Before Syl could say anything the old man released a monkey about the size of a big cat. It leaped to the ship and scrambled up the rigging of the stubby mast.

  “Damn it, he let that thing go on purpose, get the thing and give it back to him,” Simpson ordered.

  Welcoming the pursuit, a half dozen seamen sprang into the rigging. Trapped at the top of the mast, the little animal scampered across the aerial which led to the truck of the small signal mast of the flying bridge. When more men tried to catch him there, he retreated to the middle of the aerial, where he hung swinging and jabbering.

  “You got our monkey,” the old man called. “You pay twenty cans of Spam.”

  Syl made a command decision, as he wryly thought of it. “It looks like we’ve got a monkey, give the people the Spam and tell ’em to clear off.”

  The cook, apparently pro-monkey, immediately appeared with an apron full of cans of Spam, which the men all hated anyway.

  “Now you need bananas, bananas for the monkey,” the old man chanted. “Ten more cans for bananas!”

  The cans were quickly exchanged for five stalks of bananas. The canoes headed back for shore while Rhinehart climbed the mast and held a banana toward the monkey, still swinging from the aerial.

  “Come here, Lucky,” he called. “Come on, Lucky.”

  The monkey ignored him, but the Lucky Eighteen had obviously acquired a mascot, which noting that the signal mast was now free, scampered there and leapt to the flying bridge. With the men in hot pursuit, it ducked down the hatch of the lazaret, which the cook had left open, and disappeared into the bowels of the ship.

  “He’ll come out when he gets hungry,” Buller said. “Just leave a banana and a pan of water by that hatch.”

  Rhinehart did.

  “All right, you deck apes,” Cramer said, “just because we got one more monkey, don’t knock off work. Let’s get that cargo hose connected and coil up these lines …”

  As the sun went down and twilight deepened Syl decided not to try to follow the crooked channel he had buoyed in darkness. This appeared to be as safe a place to spend the night as he could imagine. The surrounding reef
s protected the ship from any blow, and enemy planes were not apt to see her in the shadow of that bluff. After the cargo pump had sucked the tanks dry he had the hose disconnected and told all hands except for a bridge watch to get a good night’s sleep. He turned in early. He couldn’t remember when he’d had eight hours of uninterrupted rest …

  Shortly after midnight he was awakened by a Niagara-like roar. Running to the bridge, he saw a geyser of gasoline shooting up from the rusty pump on the barge. In the light of a quarter-moon it rose like gigantic fountain. Balanced on top of it, like a glass ball in a shooting gallery, was the plywood shack, which tumbled into the sea as Syl stared. A fine spray of gasoline was wetting the decks of the Y-18 and dripping from the awning over the after-end of the flying bridge. It stung the eyes, filled the nose and was cold on the skin. Its deathly stench was overpowering. The men who had followed Syl to the deck started to gag and cough. A few threw up.

  The gas in the tank on the high bluff had backed up with enough pressure to burst a connection on the pump. There was no point in trying to fix it until the valve at the tank could be cut off. He would not try to radio the base—his transmitter would make sparks. His first impulse was to start the engine and get out of there, but the starter would make sparks and even the engine room must be full of gas, which was raining down the vents. He could lower the motorboat and tow the ship away, but the starter of that engine would spark. Make a decision fast …

  Buller was shouting in his ear to abandon ship. Simpson was so choked by the gas he wanted to take a chance and start the main engine.

  Syl ignored them. “Lower the lifeboat, Mr. Simpson. The men can pull her away from here. If you connect up enough lines they can get out from under this spray before they take a strain.”

  “You’re crazy,” Buller said, “we can just go and come back—”

  “Shut up, Mr. Buller. Roust out all the mooring lines. The anchor chain is too heavy. Cramer, you go as coxswain. Mr. Simpson, drop that boat. Now.”

  Coughing and wiping their streaming eyes, the men turned to. Buller finally leaped into the boat to take an oar. In the dim moonlight Syl could see his huge form crouched on the thwart and heard him urging the other rowers on.

  The maneuver worked better than Syl had dared hope, nevermind how confident he’d sounded when he had ordered it. As soon as the boat was lowered he cast loose from the barge. The boat soon strained the towline and the ship slowly began to move away from the lethal rain. Once in the clear, Syl rang for slow speed ahead, and after casting off the towline, circled to find the first of the life preservers he had left as buoys. In the dim moonlight they were invisible. He was almost sure to run aground here, he realized, but he was going so slowly that little damage would be done. The important thing was to get far enough away from the gas barge if it blew. Trying to gauge the channel, almost impossible to locate in the darkness, he prayed for time as the ship crept slowly away from the fountain of spray. Ten minutes ticked by before the inevitable grounding happened, and then it came so softly that he noticed it only when they were motionless.

  “We’re at least safe here,” Syl said, satisfied with the half mile he had put between the ship and the fountain of gasoline which still sprayed into the night. “We hit too easy to hurt. We’ll stay here until we figure out where to go next. Call in the boat and sound a way to a place we can anchor.”

  “Can I open up on the radio now?” Hathaway asked.

  “Yes. Tell the base what happened and ask them to shut that son of a bitch off.”

  After the boat led the way, Syl backed off the shoal and anchored two thousand yards away. Soon the geyser of gasoline shrank and seemed to retreat into the barge like a bad genie into a bottle.

  “The guys at the base say very sorry,” Hathaway reported with a grimace. “Some crazy son of a bitch up at the tank turned the wrong valve.”

  “Could have been famous last words for us,” Syl said. “Mr. Simpson, tell Cramer to put all hands to work hosing down the ship. Keep spark-free conditions in effect until we get her cleaned off.”

  “All right,” Cramer shouted through cupped hands. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up.”

  Assorted coughs were his answer.

  “Let’s get her hosed down,” Cramer bellowed. “Then we got to pick up the boat and get all these lines coiled. So get a move on. Move it, move it, move it.”

  As the men went to work Syl went to his cabin. Buller followed him, his face flushed.

  Syl sat down in his desk chair.

  “Can I talk straight or are you going to pull rank on me?”

  “Talk straight.”

  “This whole operation was crazy, from the time that gas spouted right up to now.”

  “Saved the ship. You got complaints about that?”

  “You’re fucking A I do. You risked the lives of twenty-two men just to save a bunch of scrap iron. We could have just rowed off and come back when that gas was shut off. That wouldn’t even have hurt your precious ship—”

  “You could be right, Mr. Buller. At a time like that I go by instinct. My instinct was to save the ship, not abandon her and lose men in the process. Assuming we could have made it, it would have taken time to get up that cliff or find a way around it in the dark. Men would have got hurt doing that. And every minute that fountain spouted there was a good chance the whole area would go off—”

  “You could have run her on a reef hard. No one could have blamed you in a spot like that. You were in uncharted waters. The grounding of that navy tanker proved that. Any board of investigation would have cleared you. If your instinct had told you to do that, we’d all be headed home on survival leave now instead of sitting on this time bomb waiting for it to go off—”

  “You’re talking about sabotage again. Look, Buller. Last time. Right now I have this tanker to run. My job is not to burn out her engine or put her on a reef. But it may be my job to jail an officer who talks sabotage. Do you talk this shit to the men?”

  “Skipper, I wouldn’t want to get a nice bunch of simple guys all upset.”

  “I thought you were the man of the people, Mr. Buller. You and ol’ Huey. Apparently that’s a crock too …”

  “If you’re saying I ain’t as dumb as I look, or sometimes act, you’re right. But you go by the regs. Don’t they say a captain should file a grounding report every time his ship touches bottom?”

  “We barely touched, I don’t want to get into a lot of useless paperwork—”

  “Simpson said the salt water has been eating from the outside, the gas from the inside. This ship’s limber as a rubber raft so her bottom plates got to be thin. It must have been coral we touched. That could slice a plate without giving a jolt.”

  “We’d be taking water if that happened. I’ll check the bilge.”

  Syl called the engine room, talked to Wydanski, turned to Buller. “Like I thought, we’re taking no more water than usual. We touched too light to do any damage. But I’ll file a grounding report.”

  “If you just say we hit coral and you don’t know how much damage was done, they’d have to haul us. They might even send us back to Brisbane.”

  “You never give up, do you, Buller? Anyway, they’d just send a diver down.”

  “If they have one around here. Anyway, we’d get off that shuttle run for a few days while we waited. The men could get some rest, they need it—”

  “Spare me your talk about the men. There’s one man in your life, Mr. Buller. You …”

  Buller started to answer, Syl rode over him. “Another thing, right or wrong, don’t ever argue with me again during an emergency. If I have to, I’ll shoot you right through your fucking bullshit heart.” Opening a drawer, he slid his forty-five automatic onto the desk.

  “You going to start shooting on a gas tanker?”

  “I’m making a point. Don’t forget it. I may be crazier than you are.” And he even forced a smile when he said it.

  “Jesus,” Buller said, “I think you are.” He
left without another word.

  CHAPTER 20

  SYL SLEPT LIKE a dead man that night. He was awakened shortly after dawn by excited talking on deck. When he got there, he saw Rhinehart cuddling the monkey under his chin, an oddly Madonna-like tableau. Surprised that the creature was so tame, Syl suddenly realized that it was dead.

  “The thing must have climbed up the signal mast in all the excitement last night,” Simpson said. “We found it on the flying bridge. I guess the gas fumes got it. They don’t have lungs like men.”

  Rhinehart, almost in tears, wanted to have a regular service and bury him at sea.

  “We ain’t a bunch of kids,” Cramer said. “Throw the damn thing overboard. We got work to do.”

  “No.”

  “If you can’t get rid of it, I will,” Cramer said, reaching for the tail of the monkey.

  “Give him to me,” Buller said, his deep voice abruptly gentle.

  He held out his big hands and Rhinehard trustingly put the monkey in them.

  “I’m afraid he’s dead, all right,” Buller said. “Poor little feller is already stiff. Tell you what, I’ll take care of burying him proper at the right time. You wouldn’t want it in this bay.”

  “I guess Lucky wasn’t so lucky after all,” Rhinehart said.

  There was a moment of silence. Syl and all the men were thinking the same might apply to the Lucky Eighteen. It was a bad sign to lose a mascot so soon.

  “All right, come on, you deck apes,” Cramer shouted. “Let’s get the cover on that lifeboat and air bedding.”

  “You want me to put the monkey in the freezer?” the cook asked.

  “Wrap it up good,” Buller said, and handed it to him.

  “Thank you,” Rhinehart said before following Cramer to the boat deck.

  With a casual wave, Buller walked toward his stateroom. Syl followed him, catching up to him near the door.

  “Mr. Buller, I like the way you handled that.”

  “Now all I got to do is wash the monkey piss off my hands,” Buller said, and disappeared into his cabin.