Cap'n Fatso

by Daniel V Gallery

  “That oughta get them looking this way,” observed Fatso.

  “Yeah,” said Scuttlebutt. “It’s like the old story about the mule trainer who used to always start off by clouting the mule over the head with a two-by-four. He said the first thing you always gotta do is to attract the animal’s attention.”

  “Same idea,” agreed Fatso, putting his glass on the flagship.

  Pretty soon he said, “Hah! They’re manning their radars over there now. There they go swinging their dish around to get on the balloon.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Scuttlebutt. “Every ship over there has get their bridge spyglasses manned watching that thing.”

  Five minutes later, when they were sure all eyes in the fleet were on them, the Turtle hove to and put the gig in the water. The gig went off about a hundred yards, dropped the sonobuoy overboard, and returned.

  “They see it,” said Fatso as the gig was being hoisted In. “Half a dozen of ‘em have got their glasses on it.”

  “You think they know what it’s supposed to be?” asked Scuttlebutt.

  “Sure,” said Fatso. “Their snoopers have picked up dozens of our sonobuoys. They know all about ‘em - and just what frequencies to tune in on.”

  Then the Professor and Judge went into a routine designed to make the Russians think they were talking to a Polaris submarine via the buoy. Using the sonobuoy frequency, the Professor said into his walkie-talkie mike,

  One, two, three, four ... four, three, two, one ... Turtle testing ... calling Nautilus ... how do you hear? ... over.”

  He repeated this message a half a dozen times, as you would normally do when calling on a cold circuit. This gave the Russians time to fire up and get on the right frequency.

  Judge, who was seated at a console nearby with phones clamped to his ears, said “I’m getting beeps and squawks all over the dial from snooper sets tuning in. I think they’re about ready now.”

  “Okay,” said the Professor. “Let’s go with the underwater phone.”

  Judge pressed the button on the mike to his submerged phone and also to a walkie-talkie and said, “Turtle, Turtle, this is Nautilus. Hear you loud and clear ... How me? ... over.”

  “Turtle to Nautilus. Hear you five-by-five,” was the reply. “What is your present position?”

  “Nautilus to Turtle. My position one mile east of Russian ships. I am at periscope depth taking photographs.”

  For the next ten minutes there was a constant flow of “information” back and forth between Nautilus and Turtle. Turtle gave a report on the number and type of Russian ships present and on the state of the surface weather. Turtle informed her submerged friend she would remain in the area as long as needed. Nautilus came back and said she intended to stay here for the next week and would like to have Turtle stay, too.

  The Turtle side of this conversation went out by walkie-talkie on the sonobuoy frequency. The Nautilus side came back simultaneously by underwater phone and radio, as if it were being sent by a submarine, picked up, and rebroadcast by the sonobuoy. The underwater part was, of course, picked up by several alert Russian sonar operators. A dozen radios were tuned in on the other part.

  Soon Fatso said, “Hey! Look at the smoke pouring out of that tin can’s stacks alongside the tender. I think they’re lighting off more boilers to get underway.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Scuttlebutt. “That’s what they’re doin’, all right.”

  In a few minutes the destroyer confirmed this by casting off, backing clear of the tender, and heading east. A mile east of the group she began steaming slowly back and forth, pinging away on her sonar which was clearly audible in Turtle’s underwater phones.

  “Get another position on Nautilus,” yelled Fatso at Judge. “Put her three miles east of the fleet now, and take her down to three hundred feet.”

  Judge and the Professor went through their rigamorole and added the information from Nautilus, “We had to move on account of that destroyer.”

  By this time Judge had found the frequency of the Russian voice transmitters. He reported, “There’s quite a hassle going on between that tin can and her tender ... too bad we can’t understand Russian.”

  “Hell, you don’t have to speak Roosian to know what they’re saying,” observed Fatso. “The tin can is reporting there isn’t a gahdam thing out there, and the tender is telling them they’re stupid.”

  Soon a new voice came out of the loudspeaker with a blast of excited, emphatic language. “That’s the Admiral,” observed Fatso, “telling them to dig the crap out of their sonar operator’s ears or the whole bunch of them will wind up in the salt mines.”

  After an hour of this, a motor launch was sighted coming out from the Russian fleet and heading for the sonobuoy.

  “I think they’re going to pick it up,” said Fatso. “Go into your warning routine.”

  The Judge swung his signal searchlight around, pointed it at the boat, and started blinking the international danger signal. Flags fluttered up to the Turtle’s yardarm saying “Danger. Keep clear.” Fatso fired a couple of Very stars to draw attention to them. The Professor broadcast on the Russian frequency, “Danger. Keep clear of our buoy. Do not pick up the buoy. Danger.”

  The Russians paid no attention to his foolishness. Their boat proceeded direct to the buoy, picked it up, and returned to the ship.

  The tin can continued its search to the east, gradually increasing the area as the day wore on.

  Later, in the messroom, Fatso and the boys held a critique of the day’s operations. “How long do you think it will be,” he asked, “before they find out that buoy is a phony?”

  “I don’t think these guys here will ever find out,” replied the Professor. “The circuits we rigged up in it all look real official, as if they ought to do something. If a thing like that was dumped in my lap it might take even me three or four days to find out that all those transistors, tubes, and stuff don’t do a gahdam thing. I think their local experts will give up, and they’ll have to send it back to Russia for the real long-hairs to look at it.”

  “Okay,” said Fatso. “Now. Whose job is it to rig up the one for tomorrow?”

  “That’s my department, Cap’n,” said Webfoot, who was the Underwater Demolition expert.

  “How big a charge are you gonna hang on it?” asked Fatso.

  “Oh-h-h - I think about ten or fifteen pounds of TNT should be pretty near enough,” said Webfoot judicially.

  “And how are you gonna rig it?”

  “I’m gonna hang it on a wire about thirty feet long from the bottom of the buoy. I got a hydrostatic fuse that will fire it when anybody pulls it up to a depth of ten feet.”

  “Ten feet?” said Fatso. “Sounds like that’s too close to me. Hadn’t you better hang it at fifty and make it go off at twenty-five? We don’t want to blast the whole damn boat into orbit.”

  “Ten feet oughta be all right, Cap’n.”

  “Would you want to be in the boat picking it up?” demanded Fatso.

  “Hell, no! But that’s different. I can’t stand being close to TNT when it goes off. Makes me nervous. But it won’t really hurt those guys. It will ruin their boat. But the boat will absorb most of the blast. The boys in it will just get shook up a little.”

  “Okay,” said Fatso. “We’ll make a big try at warning ‘em away again. And we’ll have the gig ready to rescue them in case their boat sinks.”

  “It’ll sink all right - after the pieces come down,” said Webfoot.

  All hands feathered their ears as the Armed Forces Radio came on with the news.

  “Jerusalem: The high command announced today that so many Arabs are trying to surrender that Israel’s victorious armies have been forced to slow down. The plight of the defeated enemy soldiers is so pitiful that we cannot leave them in the desert, hungry, thirsty, and barefooted.”

  “I told you so!” gloated Ginsberg.

  “Glory be,” said Satchmo. “They beat ‘em the way Joe Louis klobbered Schmeling! .
.. in the second fight, I mean,” he added.

  The radio continued:

  “Cairo: The Egyptians announced today that their air force had been treacherously attacked on the ground by U.S. Navy planes from the Sixth Fleet and the British RAF, which came sneaking in over the sea. President Gamal Nasser says, ‘Our soldiers in the desert are fighting bravely against great odds and taking a heavy toll from the aggressors.’”

  “Looks like some of them may not make it to Jerusalem,” observed the Judge.

  “A lot of ‘em will get there,” observed Ginsberg. “With their hands in the air and a bayonet prodding them in the ass.”

  “I wonder if our airplanes did help them,” said Jughaid.

  “They must of,” declared Scuttlebutt. “How the hell else could the Israelis beat forty million Arabs unless they had outside help?”

  “Hah!” snorted Ginsberg. “You just wait another day or so. They’re going to capture Cairo the way Grant took Richmond.”

  Next morning at two bells they went through the business of putting another buoy in the water and tuning it on the Nautilus again. This time, the Nautilus claimed to be two miles west of the group. This stirred up a lot of chatter on the Russian frequencies, and the destroyer, which had been rooting around to the east all night, barged through the fleet heading west.

  “I’m sure glad I ain’t a sonar operator on that bucket,” observed Scuttlebutt.

  “Yeah,” said Fatso. “They’ll all be working for the skipper of the Vosnik pretty soon in that salt mine out in Siberia.”

  Shortly after this, a motorboat with three sailors in it shoved off from the tender heading for the buoy. The Turtle made a great show of trying to warn the Russians of danger. They filled the yardarms with emergency flag signals; they fired a dozen red Very stars; they blinked frantically with the searchlight. The Professor went on the air calling to the tender and warning them to have their boat keep clear. Fatso himself pointed a powerful loudspeaker at the buoy and kept yelling, “Opastnost ... Opastnost.” This was the closest he could come to pronouncing the Russian word for “danger,” which they had looked up in their pocket dictionary.

  The boat barged ahead, right up to the buoy; it hauled it aboard, and started heaving in on the wire attached to the bottom.

  When they hauled in twenty feet of wire, Webfoot’s fifteen pounds of TNT let go with a hell of a wham. A sledge-hammer blow split the bottom of the boat and little drops of water shot straight up in the air from an area twenty feet in diameter around the boat. A split second later the water bulged up and a geyser erupted, lifting the boat about five feet in the air.

  “Just a l-e-e-etle bit on the strong side,” observed Webfoot judicially. “Maybe ten pounds would of been enough.”

  When the boat hit the water again, it broke in two, leaving three dazed Russians paddling around in the mess of wreckage.

  The Turtle’s gig had been standing by on the lee side, out of sight. It immediately darted out and boiled over to the scene of the disaster, hauled the stunned muzhiks aboard, and brought them to the Turtle.

  As they were helped aboard, Scuttlebutt handed each a half tumbler of rye whiskey, which they tossed off almost at one gulp.

  As soon as this took effect, the senior survivor, who spoke a little English, shook his head and said, “She’s blow up. Boom!”

  “That’s probably what happened, all right,” agreed Scuttlebutt solemnly. “We tried to warn you to keep clear.

  In a few minutes another Russian boat came alongside, the rescued seamen were helped aboard, and they started back to their ship.

  “I’ll betcha the Admiral has them up in the cabin the minute they get aboard,” observed Fatso.

  Scuttlebutt was keeping his glass on the boat as she made her way back. Presently he began chuckling and shaking his head. “They’ll never make it to the Admiral’s cabin,” he said. “In fact I doubt if they can hold out till they get aboard. All three are squirming already as if they had ants in their pants.”

  “How do you mean,” demanded Fatso. “It didn’t look to me like there was anything wrong when we got ‘em aboard.”

  “There wasn’t,” said Scuttlebutt. “But I put a hell of a slug of physic in each one of them drinks ... It’s gonna take five more minutes to get to the ship. They’ll never make it.”

  “Hmmmm!” said Fatso. “I think we better get out of here. Head south,” he yelled at the pilothouse. “Make turns for fifteen knots. There’s apt to be a stink about this.”

  At that very moment, the USS Santee was entering the Straits of Gibraltar, eastbound to join the Fleet. The Santee was a brand-new supply ship on her maiden voyage after her shakedown cruise. As the Sixth Fleet would soon find out, there were a lot of things new and different about her.

  Her job was to supply the fleet with everything it needed except fuel and explosives. Anything else: food, clothing, spare parts, paint, rope, canvas, monkey wrenches, transistors, anti-stink lotion ... you name it. The Santee had it.

  Of course, most supply ships can produce at least one of nearly any article used aboard ship - if you give them time enough to rummage around in their holds and find it. But the Santee had a mechanical brain with memory circuits that kept track of everything on board - its catalog number, what shelf it was stowed on, whether it had right-or left-hand threads, and anything else you wanted to know about it. She had the very latest cargo-handling gear for getting things out of the storerooms and up on deck. She had high-speed cargo winches, booms, and king posts to whip supplies over by high-line to a ship alongside at sea. She even had whirlybirds which could flutter over to an outlying destroyer in the screen and lower a whole cargo net full of stuff to the tin can’s fantail.

  During a replenishment operation, the skipper of a carrier could holler over at the Captain of the Santee and say, “Hey, George, we need half a dozen twenty-four-volt sixty-cycle flip-flops for our XSQ radar. Have you got ‘em?” The Captain would phone down to the supply office, the yeoman would punch a few buttons, and the mechanical brain would go zoop-zoop-zoop. Then a teletype would start chattering in the proper storeroom down below, and a fork-lift truck would appear at the door. In not much more than a minute, a cargo net would swoop down on the carrier’s hangar deck with six twenty-four-volt flip-flops. It was the same story whether you wanted a crate of eggs, two tons of potatoes, or a dozen brown shoelaces.

  The Santee was the naval version of a supermarket, Sears Roebuck, and a shopping center-drugstore all rolled into one, computerized, automated, and shined up like the President’s yacht. All hands were proud of her.

  Her skipper, Captain Gates, was a gung-ho type. He was, of course, a line officer, and had at times, when he commanded combatant ships, been burned up by supply department red tape in trying to draw stores that he needed to get on with his job. He wasn’t going to have any of that kind of stuff on this ship. He announced the day the ship went into commission that the Santee’s motto would be SERVICE TO THE FLEET AND CAN DO. He was determined to make bums out of all the other supply ships in the Med, win the Santee the coveted gold E for efficiency, and maybe even a promotion for her skipper.

  The Supply Officer went along with most of this too, although perhaps not quite as whole hog as the skipper did. He believed in cutting red tape. But not in heaving the whole damn ball of it overboard. After all, the supply officer is supposed to keep some kind of tabs on the government property entrusted to his care. If he loses track of too much of it, the Inspector General can get very stuffy about it. But he didn’t look for any real trouble on that score. The battery of IBMs in his office could grind out invoices, requisitions, and vouchers almost as fast as the new winches on deck could handle freight.

  Everybody from the Captain down to the Jack of the Dust was looking forward to their first replenishment job. They were bent on showing the Sixth Fleet that a new era had dawned in the prosaic business of supply.

  So the USS Santee headed east for her first rendezvous with the fleet, ful
l of piss, vinegar, and supplies of every kind you can think of.

  Chapter Seven

  Charley Noble

  As Greece was dropping out of sight astern of the Turtle, a destroyer came boiling after with a great bone in her teeth.

  “Oh-oh!” said Fatso. “This guy may be looking for trouble.”

  “Shall I unlimber the main battery, Cap’n?” asked the Professor.

  “Whaddya mean, main battery? Those twenty millimeter machine guns we got?” demanded Fatso.

  “No indeed,” said the Professor. “That tank we got aboard has a 90 mm gun and two hundred rounds of ammunition. I’ve been looking it over and can handle it without any trouble any time you say.”

  “That’s fine,” said Fatso. “That gives us a good ace in the hole. Let’s keep it in the hole - for a while, anyways.”

  The destroyer came up about a hundred yards abeam of the Turtle and settled down there for a few minutes as if gauging her speed. Then she poured on the coal again and zigzagged several times close aboard, across the Turtle’s bow.

  “Looks like they want to play chicken again,” observed Scuttlebutt.

  “Yeah,” replied Fatso. “This puts us in a class with our big ships. They’ve done the same thing with some of our cruisers and carriers.”

  “We gonna do anything about it?” asked Scuttlebutt.

  “Maybe. Let’s see what else he does,” said Fatso.

  After a final zig across the bow on which the miss distance was too close for comfort, the Russian took station abeam to starboard again and came easing in till the sides of the two ships almost touched. She stayed there for some minutes, with the distance varying from ten feet to no more than an arm’s length. Then she zigzagged across the bow a few more times and finally took station about a mile astern and stayed there.

  At this time, so far as anyone could see, no one on the destroyer paid any attention to the Turtle. There were no rubbernecks topside. No signals were exchanged. Everyone on the bridge just stared straight ahead, except for the OOD who occasionally took a quick peek when they got in close.