by Robb White
Peter ran down from the bridge to the starboard rack where Goldberg was on his knees beside Britches, trying to shield the boy from the falling rain.
In the pitch-darkness it looked to Peter as though Britches had been torn apart and was now just a mass of blood.
"Is he dead?" Goldberg asked in a faint, remote voice. "Peter, is he dead?"
Peter felt down into the warm blood and found Britches' throat with his fingertips. "No. He's alive." Peter stood up and called over to the Preacher. "Preacher, help Gerry get the boy below." Then he said to Goldberg, "I've got to see to the boat. I'll bring the first-aid kit."
Goldberg slid his arms under the boy and lifted him, saying, "I don't need any help."
As Peter went down the forward hatch on the double he heard Archer yelling, "Don't leave your battle stations without orders."
This sudden loud voice seemed to daze and paralyze the men who had begun to drift away from the guns. They stopped moving and looked up at Archer who was still standing on the bridge, the wheel in his hands as though Slewfoot were still alive.
Except Goldberg. Britches seemed weightless in the big man's arms as he strode through the rain toward the amidships hatch.
Archer came down from the bridge and stood, blocking Goldberg's passage.
What Archer intended to say or intended to do no one would ever know. The men stood in silence, watching, as Goldberg came on through the rain and found Archer standing there, blocking the way.
Goldberg did not strike the officer. All he did, as the men would swear, was shift his grip on Britches so he could carry him with one arm and then, with his freed arm, he put his big hand on Archer's chest and pushed.
Archer moved straight aft, his two feet sliding along on the wet deck, for about four feet before he went over backwards.
As Goldberg went down the hatch with Britches, Mitch and Stucky came forward to where Archer was lying, flat on his back. They got him under the armpits and jerked him straight up and set him down on his feet.
"Did you see that?" Archer demanded. "Did you see Goldberg … "
Mitch stepped around in front of him and interrupted him in a quiet, firm voice. "You tripped on that stanchion," Mitch said, "and fell."
Stucky said, "Just tripped and fell."
"No! Goldberg … "
"You tripped, Mr. Archer," Mitch said.
Archer looked at the two men for a moment and then, silently, he pushed past them and went to the bridge. There he seemed to become himself again. "Secure from battle stations. Divisions report casualties and damage."
Willie got the emergency lights on as Peter entered the engine room. Skeeter's face was covered with blood but it was all coming from a small slit in his forehead made either by a fragment of the shell or a flying gear tooth.
Sko was aft, shaking his head at the sight.
"Can we get under way?" Peter asked, looking at the mess of torn and broken metal, rubber belts, shorn gear teeth lying in a bath of oil.
Sko rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. "If we had a paddle."
"What happened?" the Professor asked. "Sounded to me like they got in the first shot."
"They did," Peter said and turned back to Sko. "How about the engines?"
"They were going like banshees," Sko told him. "If they've got any bearings left it'll be a miracle."
"Anything you can rig up to get us moving?"
"Not before daylight," Sko told him. "If ever."
"Do the best you can. We won't look good out here in the daylight." He turned toward the door, saying, "Britches got hit."
"Oh, no!" the Professor said. "Bad?"
"I don't know," Peter said, leaving.
Peter stopped by the captain's cabin for the first-aid kit. A bullet coming through the hull had struck the silver-framed picture of Jonesy's parents, he noticed, as he got the kit and hurried into the dayroom.
It was an awful wound. The heavy-caliber bullet must have ricocheted off the torpedo rack for it had torn upward through Britches' left arm and shoulder and then up the side of his neck, leaving a bloody furrow to beyond his ear.
In the dim emergency light Goldberg's face looked like ashes, and he was standing beside the bunk rocking back and forth and making a moaning sound in his throat.
Peter glanced at him and felt, as Goldberg did, helpless. In a flash thought he remembered Jonesy, and so many other PT-boat skippers, angrily saying that at the school in Rhode Island they should have been taught a lot less naval etiquette and a lot more about how to save a man's life when he'd been hit.
"He's going to die," Goldberg said in the same remote small voice. "The kid's going to die if we don't do something."
Then Archer's voice was loud and harsh behind them. "Stop blubbering, Goldberg. Are you just going to stand there and let him bleed to death, Mr. Brent?"
He pushed between them and leaned over to look at the wound. "Get out of the light!" he snapped as he picked up the torn arm.
It took Goldberg a moment to react, then he moved toward Archer. "If you hurt him … "
Archer looked over his shoulder and said, "I'm going to hurt him, so shut up." Then he turned to Peter, who was holding the first-aid kit. "Well, open it!" he said.
Peter got the tin top open and Archer, looking as though he knew what he was doing, got out the rubber tourniquet and deftly wrapped it around Britches' arm, tightening it with the little handle. "Hold this," he told Goldberg. "Just tight enough to stop that blood."
Goldberg took the handles in his big hands and held them, staring down at the arm until the blood stopped pumping out.
"Sam!" Archer yelled. "Boil some water."
"Yes, sir," Sam said and they could hear him rattling pots in the galley. Suddenly there was no more rattling. "There isn't any water," Sam said. "The tanks got hit and it's gone."
Archer turned for a moment to look at Sam and he seemed to have forgotten Britches. "Tell Mitch to spread a tarpaulin and catch this rain in anything that'll hold it," Archer told Sam.
Peter said, "I read somewhere that you don't need to wash out a wound if it's clean. So why waste time for water?"
"I'm not wasting time, Mr. Brent. Britches will need that water to drink."
He turned back to Britches, sprinkling the sulfa powder from the little can into the long wound. "We'd better be ready to give him a shot," he said to Peter. "You stand by with it."
"A shot?" Peter asked.
"Morphine! If it isn't in there I'm going to court-martial this crew."
The little Syrettes were there. Peter got one out and broke the glass nipple off.
"I'll be back in a minute," Archer said. "If he comes to, give him the morphine."
"Where're you going?" Goldberg demanded. "You can't leave him like this."
"To wash my hands," Archer said, taking the little cake of surgical soap out of the kit and going up through the hatch.
Peter and Goldberg looked at each other. "Do you think he knows what he's doing?" Goldberg asked.
"I don't know. But it's more than I know."
"I guess he'll die if we don't do something," Goldberg said.
"I guess so," Peter agreed.
Archer, dripping with rainwater, came awkwardly down through the hatch holding his hands up and away from him and not touching anything. "Get that needle out of there. The big one," he said, pointing with his elbow at the brown canvas surgical kit.
Peter unfolded the kit, which contained a flat metal box of various sized scalpels, some scissors and hemostats, tweezers, probe, and a packet of surgical needles. Peter's hands were trembling a little as he tore open the sterile wrapping. Somehow the needles fell out, landing on the bloody bunk.
Archer looked at him coldly and said, with heavy sarcasm, "Nice going, Doctor Kildare. Who's got a lighter?"
Goldberg fished one out of his wet dungarees.
"All right, Mr. Brent," Archer said like a schoolteacher. "Hold that needle with the tweezers and heat it with th
e lighter. When it's cool, give it to me."
Goldberg held the lighter while Peter picked one of the needles out of the blood and held it in the flame with the tweezers. He started to blow on it to cool it, but Archer said, "Don't blow your dirty breath on it! Wave it around."
When it was cool enough Peter gave it to him. "All right," Archer said, "now unwrap the thread and try not to drop it or let it touch anything. Including your hands."
This time Peter wasn't shaking. Archer took the thread and very deftly threaded it through the eye of the long, curved needle. Then, holding the thread clear of everything he bent over Britches. "Now," he said, "you two hold the flesh together so I can sew it up. Just press the edges where it's raw."
Peter looked down at the long, jagged-edged wound with blood still seeping all through it. He could see the muscles, a pale, awful gray, and at one place the bone, a startling white. Then he looked up at Archer. "Do you know what you're doing, Adrian?"
"Do you know a better way?" Archer asked.
"No."
"Then let's do it my way," Archer said.
Peter and Goldberg leaned together.
The blood was slick and warm under their fingers, but they managed somehow to push the torn edges of the flesh together.
It was the most terrible thing Peter had ever seen. Archer seemed to have no feeling as he jammed the needle through the edges of Britches' flesh, the sharp, blackened point stabbing in past the hairs on the arm and coming out into the bloody area, then jabbing into the other side and coming out through the hairs. But then, with a marvelously deft and quick movement of his fingers, Archer spun a knot into the thread with one hand, the other holding the thread clear, and drew it tight. Then the stabbing needle again;
He had made half a dozen stitches when he suddenly stopped. "Give him a shot," he told Peter. "He's coming to."
Without thinking, Peter wiped his bloody hands on his trousers and got the morphine Syrette. He put the sharp point against Britches' other arm and watched it indent the flesh. And then Peter could not push it on in. He looked up helplessly to find Archer staring at him coldly.
Peter pushed it in and watched the colorless fluid leaving the Syrette. "All of it?" he asked.
"All of it. We've got a long way to go," Archer said.
The brutal stabbing and then the jerking and tightening of the thread went on up Britches' arm. Jason and the Preacher came in and watched; then Sko and Skeeter, the Professor, Mitch, Stucky—all of them. Archer seemed not to know that they were there as he went on stabbing and making the quick, sure knots. "All right," he said finally. "We can hold the rest together with tape."
With swabs and bandage and adhesive, Archer closed the rest of the wound and then gave Britches a shot of penicillin as Goldberg moved him from the bloody bunk to a clean one.
For a moment Goldberg stood looking down at Britches, and then he turned to Archer. "You did a good job," he said.
Archer finished putting away the kit before he turned to Goldberg and said, "Now there're some matters I want to take up with you, Goldberg. You struck me."
Mitch came out of the shadows in one long stride. He pushed Goldberg aside with a sweep of his arm and stood in front of Archer. "I told you, Mr. Archer, you tripped. We all saw you trip."
"What's this all about?" Peter asked.
"He tripped," Mitch said. "On the stanchion."
"And fell," Stucky said. "We saw him."
Archer ignored them and said, "I'll take this up with you later, Goldberg."
"You do that," Goldberg said, turning back to Britches.
Peter broke the strained silence. "Any chance of moving, Sko?"
"None," Sko said.
"Why not?" Archer demanded.
Sko looked at him, the cigar pointing at him like an accusing finger. "The only place this boat is going is … down."
3
As the storm swept into the Bismarck Sea the wind began to blow from the south-south-east, slanting rain across the wallowing deck and driving Slewfoot northward. Archer insisted on a watch being kept on deck, and Murphy was appointed for the hours from midnight until two in the morning. He stood on the bridge now, huddled against the ice-cold rain, and silently cursed the Captain. In the pitch-dark and driving rain he couldn't have seen Grant's Tomb ten feet away. And the entire Japanese Navy couldn't have seen Slewfoot, as her gray hull blended with the driving gray sea, her low silhouette blanketed by the waves sweeping past her.
In the engine room it was hard to stay on your feet, for the deck plates were slimy with oil from the reduction-gear box and the motion of the boat was completely different from that when she was under way. This was a violent, corkscrew motion, awkward and jerky with no indication from which direction the next movement would come.
Peter—stripped down to his rolled-up trousers—Sko, the Professor, and Skeeter were working on the wreckage. They cleared away the broken pieces of the gear box and steering mechanism, gathered up the teeth and parts, and finally got the oil cleaned up enough to see how severely the whole drive mechanism from the engine shafts to the logs had been damaged.
Peter looked at it in dismay. The belts of both V-drives had been torn to pieces, the reduction-gear box had first been broken open by the shell burst, and then the gears and shafts had been totally wrecked by the engines running wild.
"Nothing a week in dry dock won't fix," the Professor said.
Sko pointed the cigar at him. "So where's the dry dock?"
With a wrench and hammer Peter disconnected the tangled remote steering mechanism and connected the balanced rudders to the manual system. As he finished, he said cheerfully, "At least we can steer her." But when he tried to swing the rudders, nothing moved. Sko and then the Professor and Skeeter came to help him, but the four of them could not force either rudder to move an inch. "It must be jammed on the outside," Peter decided.
"Then the shafts are, too," Sko guessed. "We're in trouble, Peter."
They looked at each other. Peter felt as though he had a black curtain across his mind. He could think about right now; even think about the next hour or, by trying, the next day. But the curtain was drawn down black and stern against any thinking beyond that.
At two in the morning Jason, the gunner, went on deck to relieve Murph. The storm was steady now, the rain pouring down, the wind strong and gusty from the south. Jason climbed up the rolling and pitching bridge where Murph was making no attempt to look around as he squatted in the lee of the structure. Jason joined him and Murph said, "Why don't we get moving? Are we going to sit out here all night?"
"We're going to sit out here longer than that," Jason told him. "The engines are wrecked and so is the steering."
"What's going to happen at daylight?" Murph asked, alarmed.
"Some Jap plane'll sink us," Jason said. "Okay, I relieve you."
Murph got stiffly to his feet. "Watch out for the porpoises," he said and made his way across the wild deck to the hatch.
Murph, starving, went into the galley and found Archer giving Sam a bad time. Sam had brought along only enough supplies to make a snack for the night's patrol. There was bread, some cans of Spam, some grease they called butter, a few tins of sardines, two dozen tasteless chocolate bars, four pounds of ground coffee, six cans of peaches, a packet of two dozen dried eggs, and six little tins of condensed milk.
Sam was trying to explain that he had taken the main food supplies ashore while the boat was on the mudbank to keep them from being ruined, but Archer would not accept that as an excuse. Sam should have put them back aboard, Archer declared.
While those two were busy with their argument, Murph filched one of the chocolate bars—for he felt sure Archer was not going to let Sam make any sandwiches this night—and wandered on into the dayroom where the rest of the deck gang were patching up the bullet holes.
At three-thirty in the morning Peter left the engine room to Sko and climbed up to the radar shack.
Willie had the radio transmitter o
ut of the rack, opened up, and spread out on the chart board. He looked tired and defeated as he turned to watch Peter come in.
"How's it going?" Peter asked.
"You push a bullet through one of these things and somehow it doesn't work so good any more,' He showed Peter where the bullet had gone through the vitals of the transmitter.
"Can you fix it?"
"I only had six weeks of radio school," Willie reminded him, "and this is a mess."
"How about the spare-parts kit?"
"All I've got are some tubes and condensers and resistors; but, you see, all these sockets are ruined and the whole tuning end is messed up."
"How about the radar?"
"That's okay."
"Well, that's something. Do what you can, Willie. It'd be nice to be able to talk to somebody."
"You're not just beating your gums," Willie said glumly as he turned back to the tangled wreck,
Peter went on up to the bridge, the cold rain feeling good on his bare skin for a moment—then it got too cold. Jason was ducking the flying spray and peering uselessly out into the wet darkness when Peter stepped up beside him.
Slewfoot was not built for this kind of going. With her long, high-bowed speedboat hull, squared-off stern and flat bottom, she rode miserably when she was powerless in a seaway. The waves, which she could have taken in stride with the engines going, were breaking over her, the running water slamming against the racks and turrets and bridge adding spray to the driving rain.
Nor would she stay quartered to the wind as a sailboat, or a sea gulL would have. Instead, the wind blew her this way and that, driving her sometimes head on into the sea, sometimes stern first, oftener just leaving her wallowing, the seas pouring over her.
"Why don't you stand the rest of the watch in the chart house?" Peter yelled through the sounds of rain and sea. Then he added, knowing that Jason was asking a silent question, "I'll tell the Captain."
"Thanks," Jason said, his teeth chattering as he worked his way aft to the comfort of the chart house.
Hanging on to anything he could grab, Peter made his way forward, trying in the darkness to see if the seas were damaging the boat. He couldn't be sure, but as he reached the hatch he thought that Slewfoot was taking it pretty well. He came down through the hatch between waves, letting in only a shower of rainwater.