“Yeah, but you spoiled it,” Hinman said. “You Reserves have no respect for Naval tradition. You’re supposed to laugh when the Captain tells a joke and when you find a rubber spider in your bunk you’re supposed to holler and carry on!”
“The Talmud teaches logic and reason, among many other things, Captain,” Cohen said. “Both argued against the presence of a tarantula on a submarine, especially a spider with only six legs instead of the eight it should have.”
Dusty Rhodes walked into the Forward Torpedo Room where Ginty had just taken over the morning four-to-eight watch at the torpedo tubes. Ginty was sitting in a canvas chair in front of the tubes, sipping at a cup of coffee.
“What the hell you doin’ up, Chief? They’s another chair over there outboard of that warhead. Get it out and sit a bit. Grabby Grabnas brought me up a fresh pitcher of coffee. Another cup around here someplace. Damned coffee is strong enough to kill you! I think that fuckin’ cook back there makes it double strong on the morning watch so the son of a bitch can stay awake long enough to cook chow! Put this stuff in a fish the son of a bitch would run at ninety knots!”
Rhodes unfolded the chair and sat down and took the cup of coffee Ginty poured for him.
“Buncha shit, this modifying the exploders is okay if you operate out of Pearl but put ‘em back the way they were if you go into Australia!” Ginty growled. “Lotta fuckin’ work, Chief! Why in the hell can’t those people get their heads together and say the exploders is ding boo how and fix ‘em so they’ll work?
“Hell, Grilley told me that even after Cap’n Rudd fired those exercise fish out of Plunger and found the fish runnin’ eight to fourteen feet deeper than the depth setting, Grilley told me that those Admirals didn’t believe it! Hell, any damned fool of a third class torpedoman could tell you that if you put a bigger warhead out in front of that fish that it’s gotta run deeper than it would with the regular warhead on it! Those fuckin’ Admirals are going to ruin this man’s Navy!”
“Admirals live in a different world, Ginch,” Rhodes said, his voice patient. “Any Admiral who’s a member of the Gun Club, any of those people who spent any time in ordnance work, design and testing torpedoes, is going to think that whatever Newport says is the Holy Gospel. Haines, that Warrant who runs the exploder shop at Pearl, told me that Rudd is putting together so much evidence about the exploders and the deep running that pretty soon even the Gun Club will have to sit up and take notice.” He paused. “I saw the Old Man up here again yesterday afternoon.”
“Yeah,” Ginty said. “He comes up every afternoon after he wakes up. Bullshits with all hands. Messes up my daily work routines. Tells his lousy jokes and expects everyone to laugh. He likes to keep everyone loose as a goose.”
“He’s got the whole ship loose,” Rhodes said. “Worries me. I laid into DeLucia back aft the other day for letting stuff get adrift in his room and Hindu tells me that after I went forward the people back there started calling me ‘Mealey Junior!’ ”
“Shit!” Ginty growled. “Keep crackin’ down! Some of these war-time sailors, an officer smiles at ‘em and says hello and they think they can throw the soojie rag in the bucket and knock off scrubbin’ paintwork! Some of these Fleet-boat sailors ought to do some time in an S-boat where you got four times as much work to do and only half as many men. The Old Man gonna stay on the surface again today? We got to be gettin’ close enough to the Islands to be divin’ mornings and runnin’ submerged all day. They must have so many Japs in those Islands by now that there’s two in every coconut tree along the beaches!”
“I hear he’s going to stay on the surface as long as he can,” Rhodes said. “That’s a change that Captain Rudd made. Rudd says that some skippers start all-day dives one day out of Pearl and waste too much time getting on station.” He stood up and stretched his arms until his big shoulder muscles cracked.
“Thanks for the coffee. You’d better check the room and tie down everything that might come loose. The Radio people say there’s a big storm to the west. Someone over there, forget which boat, reported it. We might be in it in a day or two. Can’t be a typhoon this time of year.”
“Don’t shit yourself!” Ginty said. “I put sixteen years out here on the Asiatic Station and I seen typhoons in every damned month of the year! Typhoons ain’t anything to fuck with, Chief. On the S-37 we run into one had seas a hundred feet high and I shit you not! Fuckin’ wind blew the wind gauge right off’n the periscope shears, musta been blowin’ a hundred and twenty knots! Couldn’t submerge because when we tried it we’d be at a hundred feet one minute and then we’d be down to two hundred and fifty feet. So we had to ride it out rigged for dive on the surface. You want misery you ride an S-boat in that kind of weather!”
Rhodes nodded and went aft to the Crew’s Mess to see what Johnny Johnson, the Ship’s Cook, had made for the morning meal. Usually the dour cook whipped up a batch of doughnuts or sweet rolls. This morning it was doughnuts. Rhodes picked up two of the doughnuts, drew a cup of coffee from the urn and went in to sit at a table in the mess room. Chief John Barber was sitting there with a cup of coffee. One of his off-duty firemen sat at another table. Barber stared at the man until he got the message and picked up his coffee cup and left the compartment.
“Get your fuel injector problem licked?” Rhodes asked.
“Yeah,” Barber grunted. “You got to tell these people the same things over and over every day. And even then they’ll forget to clean the fuel strainers. Gonna start kicking me some ass pretty damned soon. Damned people are getting sloppy!” He got up and drew another cup of coffee for himself.
“Wanted to talk to you before this but I couldn’t find the time when we were alone,” Barber said as he sat down. He dropped his voice so the ship’s cook, busy in his tiny galley, couldn’t hear.
“I had a pretty bad time after the last run. I hit that kid Richards a little too hard. Didn’t mean to do that, no way! But when he started beating on the deck plates with that hammer and hollering for the Japs to come and get us, after all that depth charging we’d taken, it did something to me inside. I never felt that way before about anything or anyone! I hit him too hard with that wrench.
“I was pretty shook up afterward. Had bad dreams. Finally I had to tell Dottie about it and she told your wife and June came right over to the house. She asked me and Dottie to go into the bedroom with her and we sat on the bed and she sat on the floor and she never left the room or moved but she sort of went away. You know what I mean?”
“She meditates,” Rhodes said. “That’s what she calls it. She talks to the old gods.”
“Yeah,” Barber grunted. “Spooky as hell! She gets that blank look and she doesn’t hear anything you say to her. Finally she got up and went out in the kitchen and Dottie made coffee and then June sat there and told me that Richards was all right. She said that what I did had been planned that way, that Richards was supposed to go back to wherever he came from and that I was the one who was supposed to send him back. Dusty, that’s spooky!
“Then she got up and she put her hands on my head and she said I wouldn’t have any more dreams and by God, I didn’t have any of those dreams anymore! How does she do that?”
“I don’t know,” Rhodes said. “All I know is that what she does is called ‘Kahuna,’ and it’s very, very old. Her people have been doing it for hundreds and hundreds of years. She’s been able to do it since she was about ten years old.
“Now let me tell you something. The day we got in from the last patrol she met me at the dock, you were there. When we got home and I’d seen the kids she took me out in the kitchen.