Away Boarders

by Daniel V Gallery

  "So we steamed off and left him standing on the beach watching while the ship disappeared over the horizon. But the island was only about thirty miles from the entrance of the lagoon.

  Cap'n Bill knew we were only going to be there for a month and that when we came out, if we ever came out, we'd have to go right past that island on the way back to Noumea.

  "On the way back, we stopped and picked Johnson up. He was the happiest guy in the whole South Pacific when he saw that boat coming in. He swam out to meet it and didn't even want to go back in to the beach to pick up his gear.

  "When he came back aboard the Captain met him at the gangway and said, 'How about it, Johnson - you going to do as you're told now?' 'Yes sir, Cap'n - I sure am,' said Johnson. From that time on he was the best messboy in the whole Pacific Fleet. He stayed in after the war and I hear he's now a cabin steward."

  "That's right, Cap'n," said Satchmo. "I know him. Old Sam Johnson. He's flag steward for Com Air Lant now. And he runs a hell of a fine mess. And he won't stand for no monkey business from any of his messboys."

  That evening after dinner the boys gathered around the radio for the evening news.

  "Cairo: Nasser announced today that four Israeli airplanes attempting to bomb a hospital and a school have been shot down in flames by the Egyptian Air Force.

  "Jerusalem: The Israelis announced today that two Egyptian planes attempting to bomb a convent were shot down by Israeli planes. The Egyptian planes were piloted by Russians."

  "Hah!" said Ginsberg. "Even with Russians flying their planes they still can't do anything. Our pilots are just too good."

  "Peking: The Chinese Communists announced that a Russian force invading Chinese territory at Bing Ding has been repulsed with heavy losses."

  "Moscow: The Russian government announced that a Chinese force invading Russian territory at Bing Ding has been repulsed with heavy losses."

  "There seems to be a slight difference of opinion as to who did what at Bing Ding," observed the Judge.

  "Yeah," said the Professor. "You pays your money and you takes your choice. If things work out right, this could develop into a real big war between Russia and China."

  "In that case," observed Fatso, "we should give all-out military aid to both sides."

  Later that evening Fatso said to Scuttlebutt, "You know that shipment of liquor we got for the ambassador in Jerusalem?"

  "Yeah," said Scuttlebutt. "It's enough to stock a waterfront barroom for a year. The ambassador will have a hell of a time drinking all that up."

  "Don't worry about that," said Fatso. "That liquor is to feed junketing congressmen. It won't last more than a couple of months."

  "They can lap it up all right," observed Scuttlebutt.

  "Well, I notice we got six cases of Old Grand-Dad in this shipment," said Fatso. "I only want to give them five."

  "Good idea, skipper," said Scuttlebutt. "I'll take care of it. Do you think the embassy will squawk about it?"

  "No - I don't think so. They may never notice it. And, even if they do, they pay for this stuff out of counterpart funds. So it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to them."

  "What's counterpart funds?" asked Scuttlebutt.

  "Well, I can tell you what it is. But I can't explain it," said Fatso. "It's money that we get for the aid we give a country. But it can't be taken out of the country. It's got to be spent there. So the ambassador dishes it out to visiting congressmen and uses it to buy liquor for them."

  "Okay, skipper," said Scuttlebutt. "I'll hold out one case of Old Grand-Dad when we deliver the ambassador's booze."

  Next morning as they cruised along they met a British destroyer on opposite course which was going to pass close aboard. Fatso cast a seaman's eye around the upper works of LCU 1124 and had the boys belay a couple of Irish pennants so things would look shipshape when they passed abeam. Fatso called down on deck to the men working there: "I'm going to sound attention to starboard when we pass this guy abeam. I want all you guys to square your hats and stand at attention facing to starboard when we do. I want to let this guy know we're a real man o' war."

  The ships were passing about a hundred yards abeam. When the destroyer was broad on the starboard bow, Fatso blew one long blast on a police whistle. All hands stopped work and stood at attention facing the British ship. On the destroyer there was an answering whistle blast and all her men on deck stood at attention facing LCU 1124.

  Just as the ships came abeam, Fatso happened to glance up at the colors. They were at half mast. He jumped to the rail of the bridge and looked down on deck. There was Adams down there with the halyards in his hand, watching the British ship.

  "What in the goddamn hell are you doing?" yelled Fatso.

  "I'm dipping the colors to them, Cap'n," replied Adams.

  "Two block 'em," roared Fatso.

  Adams ran the colors up to the peak. "Now come up here," said Fatso.

  "Just what the hell was the idea of that stunt?" demanded Fatso, when Adams got up to the bridge.

  "Well, I was just dipping the colors to them," said Adams. "I thought friendly warships always dipped their colors to each other."

  Fatso counted ten before replying. Then he said, "Listen, stupid. Warships never dip to each other. They return the dip when merchant ships dip to them. The only time a warship ever hauls down its colors to another is when it surrenders. That Limey destroyer probably thinks we're nuts."

  "I'm sorry, skipper," said Adams. "On my old man's yacht we always dipped the colors."

  "On your old man's yacht?" said Fatso. "So that's where you learned how to handle a boat, I suppose?"

  "Yeah. My old man had a Chris-Craft. Seventy-five-foot cabin cruiser."

  "He must of been in the chips."

  "Yeah, he is. He's a vice president of General Motors."

  "Well, coming from a background like that, how the hell did you become a hippie?" asked Fatso.

  "I dunno. I guess the main thing was I wanted to be able to feel I was doing something worthwhile with my life."

  "Well, couldn't you do that by getting a job with your old man's company?"

  "Yeah. I suppose I could have worked for him if I wanted to. But we couldn't communicate. He made me go to college. But it all seemed irrelevant until I joined the SDS."

  "So then what did you do?"

  "Oh, I took part in demonstrations. I helped publish an underground newspaper. I was in a raid on the Dow Chemical Company's offices and I took part in a lot of other happenings."

  "Well - did you accomplish any of the things you set out to do?"

  "You can't tell yet," said Adams. "We got a lot of things started. But it takes time for them to eventuate. It's hard to tell where they will wind up."

  "Of course, what you guys are aiming at is revolution, and if that comes, Gawd help you. You'll have to go to work."

  "Oh no," said Adams. "What we're in favor of is love - share and share alike. We'll do away with poverty, with all class and race distinctions, and everybody will live the good life."

  "You mean to tell me you really believe that stuff?" asked Fatso.

  "Of course I do. Everybody will do his own thing, and everything will be peace, love, and prosperity."

  "Listen, buddy," said Fatso. "If you get your revolution, you'll wind up with what the Russians have got. Everybody but a few party officials will have to work like hell - no union hours and no overtime."

  "No, that's not the way we plan it. Everybody will do his own thing the way he wants to do it."

  "Lemme tell you a story, bud, that you better start thinking about," said Fatso. "There was this commie on a soap box at Hyde Park Corner in London. He was telling the crowd about how good things would be for the common people after the revolution. While he was talking, some high-toned lords and ladies came riding down the bridle path on fancy horses. He pointed at them, called them a lot of dirty names, and said, 'Come the revolution and those dirty capitalists won't be able to ride any more. We'll take their h
orses away from them and you, the people, will ride in the park.' A little Limey standing in the crowd piped up and said, 'Not me, my friend - I don't like to ride horses.' The commie fixed his eye on him, shook his fist, and said, 'Come the revolution - you'll do as you're told.' "

  That evening right after sunset Fatso, the Professor, and Satchmo were up on the bridge to get the evening fix. Fatso had a sextant, Satchmo a stop watch, and the Professor had a notebook and pencil. Fatso aimed his sextant at a bright star in the west, brought it carefully down to the horizon, and yelled, "Mark." Satchmo called out the reading of the stopwatch and the professor recorded it in his book. Fatso read the sextant and said, "Venus thirty degrees, fifteen minutes, eighteen seconds." The Professor recorded this in his book.

  Soon other stars began coming out. Fatso shot Pollux Regulus, Capella and Polaris, and the Professor duly recorded the altitudes and times. The Judge was over at the pelorus noting the bearings of the stars. Then they adjourned to the charthouse, where the Professor broke out the Nautical Almanac and went to work. With the present-day almanac it took only about five minutes to work out the five sights.

  Each one defined a line of position on the chart. A sight on one star never gives the navigator a fix. It gives him a line, and he can be anywhere along the line. This is because the altitude of the star at a certain instant of time will be the same for observers on a certain great circle around the earth at right angles to the bearing of the star. So to get a fix you have to shoot two stars and you are at the intersection of the two lines of position they give you. Since you can make mistakes in measuring altitudes, refraction of the horizon can vary erratically, and you can also make mistakes in arithmetic, prudent navigators like to shoot a number of stars and get a number of lines. These would all intersect in a point if everything were perfect, which it seldom is.

  When the Professor got his sights worked out they all gathered around the chart to lay down the lines of position. The Professor pricked a small hole in the chart at the dead-reckoning position he had used to work out the sights. Then he laid down the bearings of the stars and drew his lines of position at right angles to them. When he got through he had five lines of position, which formed a little hexagon about three miles west of his DR position. The hexagon would fit inside a circle two miles in diameter. The Professor made a prick in the center of the hexagon and said, "Well, there you are, Cap'n - about as pretty a fix as we've had in some time."

  "Yeah," said Fatso, "give or take about a mile, that's it. Wc ought to be off the entrance buoy about noon tomorrow."

  "You know, Cap'n," said Satchmo, "what I'd like to know is how do the astronauts navigate? Do they shoot the stars too, the same way we do?"

  "No," said the Professor. "This kind of navigation is only good on the earth. Each sight gives you a line around the earth that you know you're on. Out in space this is no good to you, and you can't measure altitudes anyway, because you've got no horizon. So they have inertial navigators."

  "What's that?" asked Satchmo.

  "It's a system that depends on gyros, accelerometers, and computers," said the Professor. "You know what a gyro is. It keeps pointing in the direction you set it, no matter what the thing it's mounted in does. Well, these astronauts have gyros that are out of this world to keep track of directions for them. Out in space you can't feel 'up' or 'down' any more, so you've got to have a gyro to keep track of it for you."

  "Yeah," said Satchmo. "When you get out in space you got zero gravity, so everything just floats around inside the capsule."

  "They've also got accelerometers," said the Professor. "You know what they are?"

  "No," said Satchmo.

  "Well," said the Professor, "you know when you're inside an elevator and it starts up or down, you can't see it move but you can tell when it starts up or down. This is on account of inertia. It's the same thing that tells you when you are turning one way or another in a car, even if you can't see the outside. These accelerometers are very, very accurate, and they measure the inertia. As long as you are going in a straight line at a constant speed, they don't register. But if your speed or heading changes the least bit, they feel it and feed it into a computer. The computer keeps figuring how fast you're going and in which direction, so it always knows where you are."

  "They've got the same thing for ships and planes now, haven't they?" asked Webfoot.

  "Yeah," said the Professor. "The Polaris subs were the first ones to get it. They've gotta have it because they run submerged all the time and never see the stars. They worked so well on the Polaris subs that all the big ships are getting them now - and even some of the big jet airliners."

  "How accurate are they?" asked Webfoot. "Can they tell you where you are as good as these sights we just worked out?"

  "Better," said the Professor. "Hell, the astronauts fly to the moon and back and splash down just two miles from the carrier that picks them up."

  "And what's this I hear about a satellite navigation system we got now that's just as accurate as the inertial system?" asked Webfoot.

  "Yeah," said the Professor. "We got a bunch of satellites in orbit now that go round the world going beep, beep, beep. A couple of them pass overhead or nearly so every few hours. The astronomers can predict their orbits just as accurately as they do the moon's. So you tune your radio in on the satellite and the radio feeds what it hears into a computer. You know the exact frequency of the beeps, but they don't come in at exactly that frequency on account of what they call the Doppler effect. This Doppler effect depends on just exactly where you arc with reference to the satellite. The computer docs some figuring on the Doppler effect and comes up with your exact latitude and longitude."

  "Uh huh," someone said.

  "And this thing works day or night, rain or shine. All you gotta do to get a fix off it is to hear it on the radio."

  "Is that what guides the Polaris missiles to their targets?" asked Satch.

  "No. Not satellites. An inertial system does that. The sub's navigation computer keeps feeding the ship's present position into the missiles. Each missile has its own computer on which the target position is set. When the missile is fired, its own accelerometers and computers take over, and put it on course to the target."

  "Do you think this Polaris system is as good as we claim it is?" asked Webfoot.

  "You're damn right it is," said the Professor. "There's no defense against it. Those submarines are moving around all the time, so the Russians never know where they are. They are ready to shoot on about one minute's notice at all times. Even if the Russians made a sneak attack and wiped out SAC and our Minute Man silos, Polaris would still be ready. And if they ever shoot, about 150 of Russia's biggest cities will go up in smoke."

  "But aren't they working on the same sort of thing, too? What happens when they get a Polaris system, too?"

  "That won't bother us much," said the Professor. "It will just be a standoff and we will both be able to wipe each other out - just as we are now, for that matter. The thing that would really upset the applecart would be if they should find some way of tracking our Polaris subs and knowing where they are, so they could knock them off in a sneak attack. But there's no sign of them getting anything like that yet."

  The night before they arrived in Tel Aviv, the boys gathered around the radio for the evening news.

  "Cairo: The Egyptians announced they have received modern radars, anti-aircraft missiles, and M 16 fighter planes from the Russians. Russian technicians are training the Egyptians in the use of this equipment."

  "Hoo boy!" said Jughaid. "That's apt to make a big difference in this war. The Israeli airplanes won't be able to run hog wild any more."

  "Jerusalem: The Israelis announced today that a commando raid yesterday across the Suez Canal surprised an Egyptian early-warning station. The station was equipped with the latest Russian radar and electronics gear. The commandos loaded ten trucks with the secret Russian equipment and brought it back to be evaluated by our experts."r />
  "Hah!" said Ginsberg. "The Russians will find out that giving that stuff to the Egyptians is just pouring it down a rat hole."

  "Washington: The President announced today that he was holding up the sale of forty Phantom jet fighters to the Israelis. He said this sale would disturb the balance of power in the Near East."

  "Balls," said Ginsberg. "We're selling planes to the Arabs in Libya. There are forty million Arabs and only two and a half million Israelis. The Russians are giving the Arabs all-out help. The real reason why we won't let the Israelis have those planes is Middle East oil. We get a hell of a lot of oil from the Arabs, and none from the Israelis."

  After the broadcast, Ginsberg said to Fatso, "Skipper, how would you like to get a real inside look at this country we're coming to and find out what this Arab-Israeli war is all about while we're in Tel Aviv?"

  "Sure," said Fatso. "Okay by me."

  "Well, I got a friend here," said Izzy. "A guy I used to go to school with back in Brooklyn. He's in the Israeli Army now and maybe he can show us around."

  CHAPTER TEN

  Arrive Tel Aviv

  Early next morning they were approaching the entrance to Tel Aviv, still about five miles offshore, when a PT boat came boiling over the horizon, circled around them, and hoisted a signal saying, "Heave to or I will fire." LCU 1124 had her colors flying and all hands were in their blue uniforms with white hats, ready for entering port.

  "Son of a bitch," said Fatso. "This is the way the Pueblo business started. Just who the hell does he think he is? We're in international waters. Pay no attention to him."

  LCU 1124 held her course and speed, and the PT circled them a couple of times at close range. An ensign on the bridge was looking them over with a pair of binoculars. Two fifty-caliber machine guns were manned and were kept pointed at LCU 1124.