Run Silent, Run Deep - Страница 41

Without really thinking about it, I hoped the unceremonious salutation would help him get over his sickness. It did.

Wiping his lips with his white jumper, sleeve, he jumped back into the jeep while I duplicated the move on the other side.

We covered the three hundred yards to the little building in nothing flat. We were in luck; it was not a fire house, but an emergency dock pumping station, nearly as good. The door was locked, but the jeep's bumper took care of that. Madly we began to unreel hose. It was a monumental task for two men to get the equipment laid out, let alone start the pumping engine, and I had not really made any thoughtful plan of action.

All I was conscious of was that the cloud of smoke was reaching ever higher into the sky, and that I could not only see fire but also feel the heat of it along the side of the threatened ship.

One end of the hose, the suction end, would have to go into the water of the harbor, just beyond the dry-dock gate would be the closest place. But the pumper had been made to Pump the dock dry in emergency, not take a suction from outside it, and the suction hose was too short. It reached no closer than five feet of the water. I stood there wondering what to do next, when I felt an authoritative hand take it from me, and a familiar voice say, "Here, Captain, let's hook this to it!"

The voice was Kohler's, and I was never so glad to see any- one in my life. He carried another section of hose over his shoulder and several odd-shaped metal fittings in his hands.

One of them spanned the joint between the two dissimilar hoses, and in about two minutes we had a suction line of beautifully scrubbed white hose drinking thirstily of the filthy, oily waters of the harbor.

"I hadn't given thought, either, as to how the suction got started, but it was explained when we arrived back at the pumping station, for there stood Tom Schultz with Wilson, his leading Motor Machinist's Mate. The pump was churning up at a great rate, and more familiar faces were manning the nozzle, jumping down into the smoke of the dry dock, carry- ing tools, axes, carbon dioxide, fire extinguishers, and seeming- ly dozens of other pieces of paraphernalia. I lost myself in the mad swirl of events. Things happened in a kaleidoscopic sequence, and there is only one firm recollection of the remainder of that afternoon, the moment we could find no more fire to fight.

Jim was a sight, when I finally got a chance to talk calmly with him. He was splattered with black oil and completely soaked with dirty water. His trousers up to his knees were covered with black ooze from the bottom of the dock, and his shoes were filthy. I was not much better off. The fresh khakis we had put on only a few hours ago, in preparation for our return from patrol, how long ago that now seemed! — were com- pletely ruined.

"Some day, eh Jim? Thank God you were able to get off the ship when you did!"

Jim grinned. "We had a hell of a time. The crane operator was going to leave us right then and there, with our big gang- way in mid-air when the fire broke out. It took some quick talking to make him take the time to set it in place for us.

"How did you do it?"

"I let myself down into the dock with a rope, once Walrus was down solid on the blocks, and swam ashore." The light was dancing again in Jim's eyes, and he slammed his right fist into the palm of his left hand. I noticed the knuckles were bruised.

Following my look, Jim chuckled again. "He did take a little persuasion, but it was worth it. First time I've ever poked a guy that high in the air!"

"Good Lord, Jim! You didn't climb up into his cab?" I let the sentence die. Jim grinned again by way of answer.

We were approaching the heavy steel-and-wood gangway which spanned the distance from the side of our dry dock to Walrus' deck. A group of our crew was already gathered there, and more were straggling in. I used the opportunity to tell Jim of my interview with Captain Blunt and of his own impending qualification for command of submarines.

It was quite a long gangway, and Walrus lay propped upright many feet below us. "You'll have to draft the letter," I was finishing, "that can be your initiation to one of the more prosaic problems of command." My gaze wandered to our ship resting sedately in the now-pumped-out dry dock. There was no one to be seen on her decks. She was bare, deserted.

Not even a gangway watch.

"Jim!" I ejaculated, as I took it in, "didn't you leave a duty section aboard?"

"No, sir!" He looked me evenly in the eye. "I pulled them all off, every one! Right now there's not a soul down there!"

"You know what the Navy regulations say about that?"

"You're God damned right I do! We were on the keel blocks and shored up. That part was done. This was an emergency, that carrier is the most important ship in the Navy, right now, and I don't give a hoot in hell what the regulations say, and you can forget the qualification, too!" The defiant look had come back. He put his hands on his hips, waiting.

"Jim," I said honestly, "you're absolutely right. I'd have done the same thing." I didn't know whether I could have or not, but there was no question that the Navy could much better spare both me and the Walrus than it could the Enterprise.

Considering the stakes at issue, the personal risk to myself as Commanding Officer, or to Jim, since he had, in an unofficial way, temporarily relieved me, was as nothing compared to the larger importance of preserving our only effective aircraft carrier.

I grinned at him. "But now that the fire's out, let's get a watch section down in the ship before somebody comes and starts asking a lot of embarrassing questions."

Jim grinned back. "Roger!" he said.

9

The system evolved by ComSubPac gave us two weeks of freedom in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. A "relief crew," complete with skipper, my old friend Eddie Holt, who came with orders detaching me temporarily so that not even legal responsibility for Walrus remained, took over the ship in its entirety. They would see to the completion of our outstanding work items, clean the ship thoroughly after the refit, stand all necessary watches, and turn Walrus back to us as good as new. In the meantime, for two weeks the whole gang of us, crew and officers alike, were billeted in luxury, and had nothing to do except lie on the sand or sample the other pleasures of Waikiki Beach.

Jim and I, as skipper and Exec, drew a corner suite with a sitting room between our two bedrooms. The place was nicely furnished, though it was apparent that some of the more delicate furnishings had been removed. Still tacked to the inside of the door was a card giving the prewar rates. Our suite, we immediately noticed, had gone for seventy-five dollars a day.

We had been assessed a payment, ostensibly for linen, of one dollar per day each. Our crew, billeted in another wing, got theirs for twenty-five cents a day.

A long, soaking hot bath felt wonderful, after our workout in the fire, and so did the stacks of personal mail which had arrived for everyone. I had several from my — mother telling of the doings Of the little town in which I had spent my boyhood and of the difficulties of the ration system. There was a note from Stocker Kane, hoping we would meet somewhere in the Pacific, written just before departing on his first patrol and Hurry, his wife, had also written.

Hurry Kane's letter was chatty and- friendly. She occupied herself with war work, had joined the "Gray Ladies," took a turn at serving out coffee and doughnuts at the San Francisco USO, rolled bandages three days a week, and in general kept as busy as she could. She made no mention of her loneliness for Stocker, but it was there between the lines, the very fact that she had written to me at all, for the first time after our years of closer-than-average acquaintance, showed that.

The thing which most excited my interest was a paragraph halfway through her letter. "I saw quite a bit of Laura Bledsoe after you all left New London," she wrote. "Poor girt having Jim go off to war so soon after they were married was pretty rough on her. She stayed on in the Mohican Hotel for several days-just didn't seem to know what to do with herself. When she came over to the apartment to help me pack and follow Stocker, that was only the next week-I really felt sorry for her. You men will never be able to understand how it feels to be left behind."

I debated whether to mention the passage in Hurry's letter to Jim. There was no reason why I shouldn't I thought, picking it up. I crossed the sitting room, pushed open the door to Jim's room, found him sitting half-naked on his bed, smoking a cigarette, with mail strewn all around him. He had received much more than I, and among the pile were many in identical blue envelopes. "How's Laura?" I asked him.

"Fine. She's back at her, job in New Haven." Jim stretched his arms, stubbed his cigarette, and flopped back into the pillow. Most of his mail, including several of the blue envelopes, was still unopened and, carelessly pitched on the bed, was now crumpled beneath him. "What's that you've got there?" He wasn't interested, merely making conversation.

"I just heard from Stocker Kane," I side-stepped with a half- truth. "He might go to Australia, you know."

"The lucky stiff! One of my buddies from sub school is down there on the staff. He says there are twice as many women as men around, and they're all starved for affection. He's doing his best to help them out, and it keeps him pretty busy."

Jim stretched his arms to either side again, looked up at the ceiling. "Let's us try to get sent down there, too, skipper.