Garret expected an order to begin cleaning ship, but instead, the XO simply said, “You men look hungry. Your breakfast is waiting,” and walked away towards the conning tower.
Garret sighed in relief, partially because Theo was no longer plastered to his side, and partially because, until the order was given, he didn’t realize that his stomach was growling. The rest of Garret’s gun crew walked past him. Theo tugged Garret’s sleeve, then attached himself to Fishy on the way by.
“Come on Lover Boy, get some food so you’ll have strength for all that pining you have to do.” It was Floyd. He was grinning.
Garret was too frazzled to think up a comeback, so he just tried to smile ruefully in return.
Ernest was bawling a loud laugh at something Fishy had said, but he spared a moment to swat Garret’s cover off on the way by.
Garret sighed, stooped, and picked it up. He jogged and caught up with them, and like the teenaged boys that they were, they were laughing and joking again before they’d made it back inside the citadel.
Chapter 8
Commander Andrew Sharpe stepped into the charthouse and shut the door. The charthouse stood atop the conning tower, just aft of the pilot house. The charthouse was beautifully paneled with wood. Navigation compasses and pencils were scattered across the tables, and unsurprisingly, the walls were hung with charts. None of that mattered at the moment, though. Maxwell had chosen the room because it had just enough space.
Andrew maintained a carefully neutral expression as he turned to face the room. As the Executive Officer, second in command to Captain Maxwell, the other officers would be looking to Andrew to see how he would respond to what had just occurred on deck.
Andrew would respond as he always did. Captain Maxwell’s methods were unorthodox, but he knew best. Depending on who you talked to, Maxwell was either a maverick or a legend. In Andrew’s mind, the man more than lived up to both titles. Not even Andrew yet knew the details of the mission. He knew little more than its grave nature, and the frightening tools they had been given to complete it—and that Captain Maxwell had asked for him personally. Beyond that, Maxwell’s word was enough for Andrew.
The charthouse was packed with officers. Even so it was a thin crowd. Barely twenty men. A ship the size of Kearsarge should have had an officer complement of closer to fifty. From the portholes to the rear bulkhead, they all stood heel to toe, but not too close to Captain Maxwell. They stayed back, opening a small circle around their commanding officer. He stood in the center of the room with arms folded. Apparently, he’d ordered the junior navigation officers out of the conning tower.
There wasn’t an enlisted man in sight. There was, however, the old man in the tweed suit. He was wearing so many layers of cloth, cut and folded, stitched and buttoned, that it looked like he was wearing personal dazzle camouflage. He had a pair of gold-rimmed glasses that sat crookedly on his face, and a silly looking polished walking cane.
Andrew tried not to frown at the old man. A walking cane on a battleship? This man has never been to sea before. What is he doing here?
The tension filling the room made the cane an easily forgettable gaff. It put Andrew in mind of the pressure cooker which his girl, Ida had recently begun using to preserve her mother’s tomatoes and persimmons.
Andrew had never seen nor heard of a Navy captain saying and doing what Maxwell had just done. By the varied expressions around the conning tower, he guessed none of the others had either. There were quite a few pale faces, expressions of bewilderment, astonishment, even fear. A couple of the officers stared at Captain Maxwell with open hostility.
The rotund chief engineer, Mr. Pauley was kneeling on the floor over something wrapped in canvas. It was a mechanical part of some sort, but Mr. Pauley appeared to be grieving it like a lost child. Maxwell stood by the wheel, cool and calm: a cougar lying in a tree, eyes half lidded, rhythmically curling just the tip of its tail.
A breathless second passed before the surgeon, who was normally a jolly sort, burst out, “Max, what have you done, man? I’ve no one trained to assist me in surgery now!”
The gunnery officer, a bear of a man who claimed to be American, but sounded as Russian as the Czar, said, “All of my best gunmen were still on their way when we cast off. Captain, I don’t have a capable turret crew in the lot.”
The surgeon was flushed above his white walrus moustache. He didn’t seem to notice that the Russian bear had interrupted him. He went on, hands open in entreaty, “There are still almost four hundred men on this ship, and you know what we’re sailing into, Max. Dr. Dobbs won’t be able to assist me most of the time, and the rest of the gentlemen here are telling me they can’t spare a soul for me to train as a field nurse. We could lose dozens of them to the flu, to say nothing of what will happen when combat injuries start coming in.”
The medical officer, Dr. Dobbs, was not in attendance. He must have had a medical emergency to disobey the captain’s order to report. Either that or the vampiric little physician was just skulking in a shadowy corner somewhere. Ah yes, there he was, aft starboard corner of the conning tower. Andrew tried not to glower.
The paymaster, a short, bored little man who always carried his log book and never got excited about anything, shrugged and said, “It’s Captain Maxwell. Casting off early was always a possibility. I have us well provisioned. Including your medical supplies, Sam.” He yawned. “Maybe the rest of you should have thought ahead.”
The surgeon flushed red as a beet with embarrassment.
The gunnery officer turned and stared down at the diminutive paymaster, who blinked slowly up at him, unimpressed. “Some of us,” the Russian bear rumbled, “didn’t have the luxury of time that you had. I was in the Newport News shipyards in Virginia at this time on Tuesday.”
The paymaster shrugged, clearly bored of the conversation.
The old man in the tweed suit stepped forward, tapped his cane on the deck and said in a weary tone, “Captain Maxwell, if I may—”
“You may not, Mr. Wilkes,” Maxwell replied.
The man shook his head and stepped back.
Simmering silence followed. Maxwell neither spoke nor moved. First Lieutenant Martin had not spoken a word, but neither had he taken his eyes off of Maxwell. His look was guarded, hiding everything but anger.
The engineering officer just knelt sadly by whatever was wrapped in the canvas on the floor.
Maxwell coolly addressed the room. “I selected all of you because you are the best. Because I knew that I could count on you when things got rough. Gentlemen, ‘rough’ hasn’t yet begun.” Maxwell’s expression darkened. “But if any of you gentlemen think I owe you an explanation for anything I do, I will give you the courtesy of this one reminder: I don’t.”
Then Maxwell nodded to the chief engineer, Mr. Pauley. Pauley, who was still kneeling on the floor, unwrapped the thing at his knees.
It was two short sections of pipe. Andrew leaned out to see better. It was oil pipe, judging by the slick black fluid oozing from the ends. Two pieces, four ends, all of them had been cut. But the two ends laid closest together had obviously been one piece in the recent past. The jagged line separating them was clumsy and hurried, but the ragged serrations would have fit together if they were touching.
“So that was the problem with the rudder, aye?” rumbled the Russian bear.
“No,” the engineer said with all the righteous martyrdom of a man with a violated wife. “This was not the problem!”
The rest of the officers stood there, waiting for that to make sense.
“Time is short,” Captain Maxwell said, crossly.
The engineer laid the two pieces together, proving the fit that Andrew could already see. The engineer petted the pipes gently as he spoke.
“When her rudder locked up, we knew it wasn’t the steam drive.” He looked at the Captain sincerely. “We take good care of Kearsarge, sir. So we started going through the carriage assembly as quic
k as we could. There are a lot of moving parts to check, all the double threads and clutches and pivots, but we didn’t have to go far.” He gestured to the pipes. “This was her main oil line to the rudder stock. That’s the shaft that her rudder rides on. It bears most of the weight of the ship when she’s turning. It’s a steel rod, fifteen feet long and three feet thick.”
“We know what the steering stock is, Mr. Pauley,” Maxwell said.
“So the rudder stock locked up for lack of lubrication,” the paymaster put in languidly.
“No!” the engineer exclaimed, tears in his eyes. “Aren’t you listening? This wasn’t the problem. Someone cut the oil line because it was in plain sight. If the oil line is cut and the rudder won’t move, then the problem’s obvious, right? That’s what we thought. That’s what anyone would have thought, and that’s why we almost ran her aground. We could have broken her back!”
Everyone waited while the engineer regained control of himself. “We threw buckets of oil on the stock and the stuffing box and even the connecting rods trying to get it freed up again. I tried kerosene as a penetrant. As we got close to shore I even let the boys pound on the stuffing box with sledges. Nothing we did worked. But something about the stuffing box was bothering me. That’s the casing that the rudder stock rides in. Then I realized the gland nut wasn’t in the same position as it had been before.”
“You recognize the position of every nut on this ship?” the Russian asked, raising a bushy, skeptical eyebrow.
“No not all of them,” the engineer huffed. “Just the ones in my care.”
“What is the gland nut?” someone in the back asked. It sounded like Lieutenant Bartram. Andrew was secretly glad he wasn’t the only one who didn’t know. He was even more glad that there was something that Lieutenant Bartram didn’t know.
“It’s the big nut that fits all the way around the rudder stock,” said the engineer. “It’s adjustable. But somebody had cranked it down, locking the rudder in position. Then they cut the oil line to make us think it had dried out and seized.”
Unable to contain himself any longer, the engineer burst out, “Someone tried to break her back, Captain. They tried to kill the Kearsarge.”
His accusation rang inside the conning tower, but before it died away, someone said, “But how did someone turn a nut like that? The torque required would be—”
“And where did they hide the wrench?” someone asked.
Someone else retorted, “There isn’t a wrench in the world big enough to—”
“Gentlemen,” said Maxwell. He didn’t say it loudly, but everyone stopped talking. Maxwell refolded his arms. “There is a saboteur somewhere on my ship.”
They all paused.
“Find him,” Maxwell said.
After giving that a moment to sink in, Maxwell shifted subjects.“Before we adjourn, there is another issue which needs addressed. There are several hundred crates in the hold and in other rooms nearby. They contain an experimental weapon, a gaseous form of cyanide. It is capable of killing every living thing on this ship. We did not have time to remove it before we were forced to cast off. Within one hour I expect you gentlemen so see to it that every man aboard this vessel knows not to touch those crates. They are lashed down well enough that Kearsarge could probably go down in a storm without breaking them open, but we will be taking no chances with our crew’s curiosity. Understood?”
Pale faced nods went around the conning tower.
“What is it doing here?” someone in the back asked again. The voice was quiet, snaky. Definitely Lieutenant Bartram.
Maxwell simply spread his hands, irritation and anger on his face. “Bureaucratic incompetence,” he said flatly. “Thanks to a fool who didn’t file paperwork on time, we have to haul it all the way out, and all the way back, and if we go into battle, all we can do is pray it doesn’t get hit by a shell and kill us all. Dismissed, gentlemen.”
A few seconds later, the last of the officers filed out, and Andrew shut the conning tower door behind them. The engineer had been one of the last to leave. Lieutenant Commander Donovan had virtually dragged the man away as he clung to the injured part of his beloved vessel.
Andrew turned the wheel, sealing the door, then faced his captain. The intensity with which Maxwell studied him made Andrew tighten to attention.
“Andrew, I have to be on the gun deck five minutes ago, so whatever you think you need to say, say it.”
That wasn’t exactly a grant of free speech, so Andrew took care with his phrasing. This probably wasn’t the time and place for this anyway. He needed to talk to his Captain alone, when they were both relaxed. As if that was likely to happen on this cruise.
“Captain… you know I will follow you to the end of this. You know I’ll follow you anywhere.”
Maxwell was impassive.
Andrew tried to be tactful. “Sir, it’s none of my business why you chose the officers you did.”
“That is correct,” Maxwell said, but no more. He was giving Andrew the floor.
Andrew was wondering why in the world he’d opened this conversation under these circumstances. “Sir, you know some of the officers, even your own line officers, don’t… well, they might question you. You knew that, but you chose them anyway?”
“I did.”
Andrew stuck a toe out onto thin ice. “Now we have a saboteur on board.”
“We do.”
Maxwell was relaxed, or at least he looked that way on the outside. Others saw about Captain Maxwell only what he wanted them to see. But Maxwell always knew. Whatever needed to be done, Maxwell always knew how to do it.
That had always been good enough for Andrew. He straightened and picked his voice up a notch. “Yes sir.”
Maxwell uncrossed his arms and took three steps to Andrew. Maxwell put a hand on Andrew’s shoulder and squeezed it solidly. His grip was powerful. Andrew relaxed.
“Come with me, Andrew. You need to see something.”
W
Garret and his friends filed back through the door into the citadel. Well, most of them filed through. Garret stumbled through because Curtis, who noticed that there were no officers watching, had given Garret a friendly shove that nearly launched him out their gun port.
“Drunken sailor!” Floyd called out as Garret stumbled past him. Since Garret was still doubled over from where Curtis had shoved him, Garret happened to notice that Floyd hadn’t double knotted the laces that held their pants up in the rear. Garret grabbed a loose end, yanked, then walked away whistling. Floyd caught his waistband just above his knees. Laughter rippled through the crewmen around them.
The portion of the main deck that was enclosed by the citadel actually served several purposes. First, since all of the 5”/40 guns were mounted there, it was a fighting deck. Second, since each gun crew slept with their gun, it also served as a berth deck for a portion of the crew, like Garret and his friends. (Most of the crew slept one deck below on the actual berth deck.)
Lastly, since both the officer’s and crew’s galleys were built into the center of the citadel, the large open areas down both sides also served as the mess hall. Their mess tables were normally stowed over their heads, flat against the underside of the upper deck, the legs and benches folded beneath them. Apparently, not everyone had attended Maxwell’s speech like Garret had thought, because while he’d been talking, someone had triced and stowed their hammocks and set out all of the mess tables. Now the citadel was crowded with dirty, hungry sailors.
“Did you hear the way Captain Maxwell talked,” Fishy muttered to Curtis as he dug in his ditty box for his mess kit. “I heard he used to be a professor.”
“I heard he used to be an assassin,” Curtis muttered back.
Twitch just shook his head as he took a seat at their mess table. Sweet Cheeks sat beside Twitch and laid a small book on the table, which he’d retrieved from his own ditty box. He flipped open to a blank page. It was a sketchbook. He pul
led a stub of a pencil out of his pocket.
After retrieving their mess kits, Garret and the rest racked their ditty boxes and clothes bags, then filled in the table around Twitch, Curtis, Sweet Cheeks, and Fishy.
“You draw?” Garret asked Sweet Cheeks as he sat down beside Theo.
“Eh, a little,” Sweet Cheeks replied, still sketching. He didn’t offer to show Garret what he was working on, so Garret didn’t ask. There were more pressing issues anyway, like filling his rumbling stomach. Mess stewards in their white shirts emerged from the galley carrying enormous pots and trays, steaming and heavy with breakfast. The citadel became rowdy as the rest of the crew filed in and sat at their assigned mess tables. The men were laughing and cat-calling each other like brothers who’d just gone through a group brawl and were now back-slapping.
Garret played hungrily with his mess kit, which consisted of a tin bowl, cup, fork, and spoon. There were conspicuous empty spots at most tables on the berth deck, but Garret’s gun crew hadn’t lost a man. And for that, Fishy, Floyd, and Pun’kin were more boisterous than usual.
First came the bread, fresh from Kearsarge’s ovens not an hour ago. The stewards set two whole loaves at each table, already sliced, and two round pats of yellow butter. Garret and his friends fell on the loaves like wolves. The butter melted down into the fluffy warm bread, while the crust crackled between their teeth. Garret tore off chunk after chunk of the buttery goodness, barely bothering to chew.
“I thought you were gonna jump ship with the lily-livers,” Pun’kin said loudly to Floyd. They both had butter on their chins.
Floyd frowned. “I’m a Callaghan,” he said properly. “We don’t jump anything when we’ve given our word.”
They hadn’t quite finished with the two loaves when the eggs and sausage arrived, heaped in mounds on the stewards’ trays. The eggs were fried, sunnyside up, with rich orange yolks from chickens that ran and pecked in sunny farmyards all day. The sausages were huge slabs of spicy meat, moist and zesty on the inside, but crispy around the edges. Garret didn’t let the steward stop serving him until the eggs and sausage were piled up out of his mess bowl.
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