Sweet Reason (9781590209011)

by Robert Littell

  “That’s it, Chief.” Boeth hollered down. “I count sixty-two.”

  “That’s it,” McTigue called back, and the trap door in the overhead clanged shut.

  Ohm Sounds Reveille

  Reveille sounded minutes later — a long shrill blast of Ohm’s bo’s’n’s pipe, followed by his grating voice speaking so close to the microphone everyone could hear him suck in air between phrases. “Now hear this, reveille, reveille, reveille, all hands heave out and trice up. Now the smoking lamp is lit in all authorized spaces. Sweepers, man your brooms. Make a clean sweep down fore and aft.”

  The Ebersole came alive with electric lights and yawning sailors and flushing toilets and aerosol cans of shaving cream and cigarettes and mess trays with one not quite rectangular compartment full of lukewarm scrambled eggs.

  Topside, deck apes in rubber boots scrubbed down the weather decks. As he did every morning, Boeth took a turn around the main deck checking for flying fish. The dead ones, their frail bluish wings folded stiffly back in rigor mortis, he tossed over the side; the live ones, squirming weakly from side to side, he gripped just behind their heads and banged sharply, cruelly against the railing. Then he tossed them overboard too.

  McTigue Feeds in the Ballistic Data

  With half an hour to go before General Quarters, McTigue made his way to Main Plot off the scullery on the mass deck. Main Plot housed the brain of the destroyer’s fire control system — an electro-mechanical computer that allowed the Ebersole’s main battery of six five-inch, .38 caliber guns to lob projectiles toward distant and generally unseen targets with a remarkably good chance of hitting them.

  The computer, designated Mark One Able in the navy idiom, was an old warhorse that had been directing the Ebersole’s guns since the first shells left their barrels back in 1945. Its components were so intricate that only Seaman Boeth, who had a scientific cast of mind to begin with and who had taken a four-month course on the Mark One Able before reporting aboard the Ebersole, really knew what went on beneath the green casing.

  McTigue understood the essentials. A delicate gyro kept track of the ship’s roll and pitch and made sure the guns compensated for them. Another gyro put in the destroyer’s course and speed, two other ingredients in the puzzle. But there was other ballistic data to feed into the computer and McTigue did that now. First he dialed in the temperature of the gunpowder, which he had noted in the magazine. The temperature affected the speed with which the powder burned, which in turn affected the distance the projectile would travel as well as its speed. Then McTigue called the chart room and got the morning readings on wind velocity and barometric pressure, both of which had a bearing on the performance of the projectile. The final pieces of information that would allow the Mark One Able to solve the problem of how to end the lives of enemies of the United States six or eight miles away — the range and bearing to the target — would be fed in later directly from the optical range finder on the main director.

  Richardson Makes an Exception for True Love

  In the wardroom the last of the officers were finishing breakfast. Hovering over them like an inobtrusive angel, True Love poured coffee from a plastic pitcher.

  Sipping lukewarm cocoa, Ensign de Bovenkamp thumbed through a copy of the charges he had brought against Angry Pettis and Waterman. “Charge:” (it read), “willful insubordination. Specification: In that Pettis Foreman, 337 93 33 USN and Jefferson Davis Waterman, 66o 70 92 USN on board the Eugene F. Ebersole DD722 on or about were will-fully insubordinate toward Ensign de Bovenkamp by subjecting him to ridicule and contempt …”

  Across the table Chaplain Rodgers, who had fought down his seasickness long enough to take breakfast in the wardroom, listened uneasily to Ensign Wallowitch. “My whole life,” Wallowitch was saying, muttering into his breakfast plate and toying with the cold scrambled eggs on it, “my whole life I’ve been asking, ‘Where were the good Germans?’ Well, I know where they were. They were paying taxes, that’s where they were.” Rodgers rested what he thought was a comforting palm on Wallowitch’s arm — it was a gesture he had picked up at chaplain’s school — and said encouragingly: “Listen, Wally, people get killed in war — that’s what war is all about. Besides, the other side has a record of atrocities as long as your arm —”

  Wallowitch shook off the Chaplain’s comforting palm. “The other side always has a record of atrocities as long as your arm. What else is new?”

  Just then the Executive Officer, breakfasting in the Captain’s chair, burst out laughing at something in the latest COMDESLANT all-ships directive, and Wallowitch, looking for trouble, told him, “You know something, XO, you laugh in all the wrong places.”

  The XO’s laughter dried up. The two men eyed each other across the table. Then the XO sidestepped the confrontation by taking Wallowitch’s comment as a joke too. “You’re really a card, One Shot, you really are,” he said lightly.

  “I told you to lay off that ‘One Shot’ business,” Wallowitch said quietly. Scraping back his chair, he walked heavily out of the wardroom.

  “What’s got into him?” the XO asked innocently. Without waiting for an answer, he started to complain about True Love emptying the dustpan into his urinal. True Love smiled like a child caught in the act of a not very serious crime and filled the XO’s cup with coffee.

  De Bovenkamp suddenly discovered a typing error in the charge sheet. “Heck, you’d think they —”

  De Bovenkamp was half out of his chair when the Ebersole rolled heavily to port. He clutched at the table and missed and went flying across the wardroom toward the couch. En route his flailing left arm knocked the model of the Ebersole off the shelf. The bottle smashed on the deck, and as de Bovenkamp sat up on the couch his foot came down on the model, shattering it into tiny pieces.

  “Gawddamn,” he cried, “I sure didn’t mean to do that.” De Bovenkamp looked around the room. “You guys won’t tell the Skipper it was me, will you?”

  True Love was sweeping up the pieces when Ralph Richardson, the supply officer, rolled up his napkin and inserted it into a plastic ring. “Excuse me, will you, gents,” he said, and headed aft.

  Just aft of the midship’s passageway Richardson pushed open the supply office door and settled into the upholstered easy chair he had acquired from a bumboat in Santo Domingo in return for some boxes of moldy beef. Richardson spread a batch of requisitions out carefully, overlapping them enough so that the line for the signature showed, and picked up his pen.

  Suddenly there was a sound at the door — a sound so vague that at first Richardson thought someone walking down the inboard passageway had inadvertently brushed against it. But the sound came again and Richardson recognized it as a knock and called for whoever was there to come in.

  The door opened a crack and a single worried eye appeared. Then, hinges squeaking, the door swung back, revealing True Love. He was wearing a white ankle-length cook’s apron over his dungarees and a tall, floppy chef’s hat that the other wardroom stewards had given him for his nineteenth birthday. They had intended it as a joke but he wore it as if it were a Congressional Medal of Honor.

  “Mistah Richardson,” True Love said. Smiling shyly, shifting his weight from foot to foot, he stood on the threshold with his head angled down so that his eyes had to peer through his lashes to see the supply officer. “Do you think Ah … do you think Ah could … could …”

  “Could what?” prompted Richardson. “Do I think you could what?”

  “Could talk … talk to you?” asked True Love.

  “Sure I think you could,” Richardson said. “Sure I do.” And he smiled warmly and motioned True Love in.

  Because True Love was black, Georgia-born-and-raised, the only boy in a family of nine girls and had an IQ of eighty-four, Richardson made allowances for him. And because he made allowances for him he was able to cope with True Love’s peculiar mixture of exquisite sweetness and exquisite slowness. When True Love (to cite one example) had infuriated the Executive O
fficer by emptying the sweepings from his cabin into his urinal, Richardson had approached the situation calmly. “True Love,” he had told him, “you can’t just dump the sweepings into the XO’s urinal — that clogs it up and causes the XO’s urine to overflow onto the deck, where it collects in small puddles and gets into the XO’s shoes. Do you think you understand?”

  True Love had nodded vigorously and had promised not to do it again. The very next day there were more sweepings in the XO’s urinal. When Richardson pointed this out True Love shook his head at the oversight and said, “Oh, Ah fergot, suh,” and promised not to do it again.

  It was a promise he had a great deal of difficulty keeping.

  Not surprisingly, True Love was an easy touch for the other wardroom stewards. It was True Love, for instance, who always lugged the fifty-pound crates of frozen hamburger up from the freezers below deck. And whenever the Ebersole hit port it was True Love who somehow wound up with the duty that first weekend. Actually, he didn’t mind the duty — it gave him a chance to parade around with his chef’s hat on and a cleaver in one hand. Because he didn’t know where to begin when it came to making a dinner, True Love had to borrow precooked meat and mashed potatoes and vegetables from the crew’s mess, reheat them in the wardroom platters and serve them as original creations. The officers knew where the food was coming from. But since everyone ( except the Captain and the XO) liked True Love, they went out of their way to make appreciative noises. “Who cooked this dinner?” the Poet demanded on one such occasion. True Love’s worried face appeared in the serving window leading from the wardroom to the pantry. “Me, suh,” he said nervously. At which point Joyce said, “My compliments to the chef” — a comment that left True Love grinning from ear to ear.

  “Well, True Love,” Richardson was saying, “what can I do for your”

  After a few false starts True Love explained that he had come to Richardson to confirm a rumor he had heard on the mess deck — the rumor being that the Ebersole had received a directive from BuPers ordering, as part of an economy drive, the immediate release of all navy personnel with IQs under ninety. When Richardson confirmed the rumor, tears welled up in True Love’s eyes.

  “Mistah Richardson, suh, what’ll Ah tell ’em, mah folks, if’n you de-mote me back to a civilian. Las’ time Ah wen’ home, why, everyone fer two streets turned out, me in mah dress blues wid mah boondocks all spit-polished an’ shinin’ like they was solid gold. Ah can’t never show mah face there ’gain if’n. Ah’m not in mah uni-form.” True Love wiped the tears away from his eyes with his hand and then dried his hand on his apron. “Mah pa …” he began, and broke down completely.

  Richardson stood up and put an arm around True Love’s shoulder. “Listen, True Love, the BuPers directive says that sailors with IQs under ninety are to be discharged unless they perform a job crucial to the operation of a ship or shore station. Now as far as I’m concerned the Ebersole wardroom can’t function without your services, and if the wardroom operation falls apart, they might have to take the ship off the line.”

  “You mean …”

  “I mean you can stay in the navy as long as I’m supply officer here. By the time the next supply officer takes over from me that BuPers directive will have long since been filed and forgotten, along with the hundreds of other directives we get every month. All right? You feel better now?”

  Nodding vigorously, True Love took Richardson’s hand and shook it. Then, with a smile beginning to find its way back onto his boyish face, he backed out of the supply office and closed the door.

  Richardson sat down and looked at the requisitions lined up on his desk. He was about to begin signing when, from force of habit, he reached down to the office safe and gave the combination lock a spin. Instead of running free it clicked to a stop. The door was closed but the safe was unlocked; it had been unlocked all night.

  A cold fright pushed Richardson back hard in his chair. The ship’s operating funds, which Richardson used to pay wages every two weeks and buy food and fuel in foreign ports, were in that safe. Trying to fight off an image of his navy career ending in jail, Richardson gingerly opened the safe door, afraid of what he wouldn’t find.

  The money was there all right — but was it all there? What with this Sweet Reason business, he couldn’t be too careful. Obviously he would have to count it, all $322,648.73 of it. Richardson bolted the door to the office from the inside, scooped up the requisitions and put them in a file basket. Then, still in a cold sweat, he piled the bound bundles of bills on the table. First came the seventy-three cents — two quarters, two dimes and three pennies. That much was fine. Then, trying to moisten his fingertips on his bone-dry tongue, Richardson started in on the bills: “Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred, a hundred ten …”

  The Ebersole Goes in for the Kill

  The clock in the pilot house showed four minutes to General Quarters when Captain Jones stepped onto the bridge.

  “Now the Captain is on the bridge,” Ohm growled into the ship’s loudspeaker system.

  “Morning, Captain,” Lustig said through the pilot house porthole. “I have land on radar dead ahead at sixteen miles.”

  “Very well, Mister Lustig,” the Skipper said. He started toward his sea chair on the starboard wing of the bridge. “I trust you’ll give us a good shoot today, my boy,” he called to Lustig. “We’ve come a long way to deliver the goods, so let’s deliver them expeditiously and accurately, irregardless of the obstacles, eh?” His eyebrows shot up to underscore the point.

  “Aye aye, sir,” Lustig said noncommittally.

  “A cup of pilot house java, Captain?” Ohm asked, pointing to the coffee pot on a small electric burner.

  Chewing nervously on the inside of his cheek, Jones ignored the offer and settled into his sea chair. The sun edged over the horizon now and Jones put on a pair of Polaroid sunglasses.

  “Morning, Skipper,” said the XO, saluting his image in the Captain’s sunglasses. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but de Bovenkamp knocked over the model of the Ebersole at breakfast this morning.”

  “Can it be repaired?”

  “I don’t think so, Captain. After he knocked it over he more or less stepped on it and, well, frankly, there isn’t much left to piece together.”

  Jones shook his head angrily. “I expected more from that boy,” he said. “First the whales, now this.”

  The Executive Officer coughed nervously. “It’s zero seven twenty, skipper,” he said.

  “Fine, XO, let ’er rip.”

  The XO walked across the pilot house to the alarm boxes and pushed down the handle on the general alarm. Again the DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG reverberated throughout the Ebersole.

  Ohm put the betting sheet on the morning’s shoot into his breast pocket (his rule was “all bets closed once GQ sounds”) and clicked on the microphone: “Now this is not a drill. This is not a drill. Now all hands, man your battle stations. Now set condition one Able throughout the ship.” Then he raced off to his battle station in Main Plot.

  The Executive Officer unlocked the cabinet under the navigator’s pilot house desk and passed out sidearms to each of the officers on the bridge, including the Captain.

  “Six minutes thirty-two seconds,” the XO said, punching his stopwatch as Wallowitch, looking particularly grim, disappeared into the Main Director.

  Jones fidgeted in his chair. “Heads up now, XO,” he called, “I don’t want to go inside the ten-fathom curve.”

  The XO studied the navigation chart, which showed the enemy coast from someplace called —— —— —— to someplace called —— ——.

  A fathometer reading — “11.5 fathoms” — came up from the chart house.

  “Recommend we come right to course zero two zero in, oh, three minutes, Captain,” the XO said. “That’ll put us parallel to the shore and six miles off target. You should be able to see —— —— light dead ahead soon as we turn.�
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  “Mister Moore, come right to zero two zero in three minutes,” the Skipper ordered.

  “Quartermaster, log this,” the XO called. “Zero seven twenty eight, crossed into free-fire zone.”

  Jones seemed to relax perceptibly.

  “Zero seven thirty, Captain,” said the XO. “Recommend we come right.”

  “All right, Mister Moore, you heard the man, come right,” the Skipper said. He was starting to get excited now; the feeling of his own racing pulse imparted a rhythm to events.

  “Right standard rudder, come to zero two zero,” called Moore.

  “Rudder is right standard, sir, coming to zero two zero. Steady on zero two zero.”

  “What speed you want, XO?” Moore asked.

  “What speed do you want, Captain?” the XO asked.

  “Give me twelve knots. With a following sea that should be enough to keep her steady on for the guns. But make sure the engine room has those superheats up in case they shoot back like last time and we need to hightail it out of here, eh? If I ring up flank speed I want flank speed.”

  “Turns for twelve knots,” Moore ordered.

  As the Ebersole steadied on its new heading, the early morning mist that had obscured the shore thinned and broke.

  “Can you see the target yet, Shrink?” Lustig asked, speaking into his headset that connected him with the Main Director, Main Plot and the gun mounts.