“Report!”
“Vents opened!” Boohan shouted.
“Inboard and outboard main exhaust valves closed.”
“Switch to battery?” Shipley asked.
“Still on snorkel, sir. You want us to switch?”
“Not yet.”
“Bow planes rigged out, Captain,” Boohan reported.
“Christmas Tree?” Shipley asked, referring to the board where a series of red and green lights told the watch if a value or hatch was secured or opened.
“Control room,” Lieutenant Commander Arneau Benjamin, Shipley’s executive officer, called into the intercom between the conning tower where they stood and the control room below. “Christmas Tree?”
“One red; else all green, sir,” came the reply.
Shipley recognized the voice in the control room as Lieutenant Weaver, his operations officer. Good; he had the top men on his boat in the right locations.
“All secure, Captain, with exception of snorkel,” Arneau Benjamin said.
On board a warship, regardless of the commanding officer’s rank, the skipper was referred to as “Captain.” Chad Shipley’s silver commander oak leaves still had the shine on them, but he was still the Squallfish’s skipper: the captain.
“Very well, XO. Make your depth sixty feet. Then level off so we can check the radar, the periscopes, and the snorkel.”
“Recommend snorkel first, Skipper,” Benjamin offered. “We’re still on diesels at this time.”
“Very well, XO. Make it so.”
Shipley’s eyebrows furrowed as they always did when he was giving serious thought to a problem. He and his former XO, Daigus Blackfurn — whose name was a mouthful, so everyone called him “Mouthful”—had a great relationship. Mouthful knew what he wanted before he even asked.
This was Shipley’s second patrol with the new and untested lieutenant commander. The man was Jewish. Shipley bit his upper lip. He mentally shrugged. It mattered naught to him, he told himself. Old man Kahn, who owned the corner store in the neighborhood where he grew up, had been Jewish. Shipley thought of the few times the old man had given gumballs to him and the others after a game of sandlot baseball in the vacant field across from the store. The man would sit on his chair on the front porch of the store and watch them. He was their audience. Shipley wondered if Kahn was still alive. He had been gray, bent, and old way back then.
Would he and Arneau meld the way he and Mouthful had? Another strike? No, the only strike against the new XO so far was that Benjamin had come from the skimming Navy — the surface warships. Worse yet, the man had been a destroyerman — a killer of submarines. A skimmer who switches to bubblehead was viewed as shaky material in the wardrooms of the subsurface Navy. No one volunteers for submarines after a tour on a surface ship. They were too used to the fresh, open air of the sea. What would he do if Benjamin started screaming and trying to open the hatches while they were underwater?
Shipley recalled a young sailor during a West Pacific mission losing it during a long period of depth charges. Someone took one of the shaft wrenches and clanged him upside the head, knocking him out.
So he inherited an officer who had switched to submarines less than a year ago. An officer BUPERS had ordered into an XO billet on board his submarine — an officer who was a skimmer. BUPERS was the Navy acronym for Bureau of Naval Personnel, on a hill alongside Arlington National Cemetery overlooking the Pentagon.
Shipley reached up and wrapped his hand around a two-inch water pipe running along the bulkhead of the conning tower. He wriggled his fingers. This was his ship, and BUPERS had given it to him. “God praise BUPERS,” he said in a prayer parody.
“Sorry, Skipper; did you say something?”
“No, XO; just thinking out loud. Depth?”
“Forty-three feet. Trim her?”
“Trim her.”
Every officer, chief, and sailor in the Navy depended on the paper pushers at BUPERS to decide who went where and when. Why they had to assign a skimmer to be the XO on his submarine was beyond his comprehension.
“Coming up on sixty feet, sir.”
“Very well, XO,” Shipley responded. As long as his new XO kept asking before executing, they might understand each other. Friday before they sailed, the man had refused to socialize with the wardroom at the Holy Loch Officers Club. Any man who refused to have a drink or two so the skipper could judge the cut of his jib had something to hide, in his opinion. What did Arneau Benjamin have to hide? Everyone had something to hide.
“Sixty feet,” the helmsman said.
“Trim sixty,” Benjamin said.
“Watch the snorkel,” Shipley cautioned.
The two men controlling the planes worked to level the boat. The planes control positions were aft of the helmsman along the port bulkhead. Shipley tightened his grip for a moment on the pipe.
“Final trim,” Boohan reported.
Shipley relaxed his grip on the pipe. His feet remained level, and he felt neither a tilt to the right nor the left. Good trim, he thought.
“Good call, COB,” he said to Boohan.
“Sixty feet, Skipper,” Arneau said.
“Snorkel?”
Arneau glanced at the gauges. “Snorkel raised and functioning, sir.”
“Check with Lieutenant Bleecker and see what Greaser has to say,” he corrected.
Arneau pressed the button on the intercom and called the engine room.
“CHENG here,” the steady voice of the mustang chief engineer responded. A mustang was a Navy officer who had risen through the ranks from enlisted to a commissioned officer. It was hard to do, and few enlisted ever managed to break the intrinsic barrier between the enlisted ranks and the hard Annapolis door leading to the wardroom.
“Report status.”
“Snorkel running. Main induction vents closed as the Christmas Tree must have shown, or we’d be treading water by now. Engines one through three connected to the motors. Engine four diverted to keeping the charge topped within forward and aft battery compartments.”
With his free hand, Shipley jerked the microphone from its cradle. “Lieutenant Bleecker, Captain here. Everything look okay to you?”
“Aye, Skipper. All four diesels up and running. What a damn fine bunch of Fairchilds, sir. Three on propulsion. Fourth topping off the charge in the batteries, as I reported.”
Shipley gave a weak grin at hearing the voice of the mustang lieutenant, Danny “Greaser” Bleecker — his chief engineer — the Squallfish’s CHENG. In his mind he saw an older man with sometimes a shaven face; yellow, smoke-stained teeth; and a grease-stained T-shirt pressing the talk button on the intercom box. Fact was, even though Bleecker looked older, both of them were World War II veterans, and Shipley was a year older. Without doubt, a long, grease-stained rag was hanging from Bleecker’s back pocket.
Greaser Bleecker never saw a khaki shirt he liked. It took a direct order from Shipley to get the CHENG in a khaki uniform shirt, and then it had to be for a command appearance such as an award ceremony. Otherwise, Greaser Bleecker and his black gang lived, ate, and slept in and around those diesel engines. No one slept near the batteries.
The grease- and sweat-stained T-shirt was the uniform of the heat-racked world of the black gang. Bleecker would be lightly scratching the front of the T-shirt, alternating between scratching and pulling the front away for a moment to free it.
Arneau edged around the periscope tube to check the helmsman, the planesmen, and to read the ballast gauges.
Shipley shrugged. The black gang could look any way they wanted as long as they were belowdecks. They could go naked if they wanted. He didn’t care as long as he had power when he needed it. He’d wander down later when he did his walk-through. Management through walking was a key leadership trait learned from his first submarine captain, Commander Mark Anastos. He shook his head. The idea of naked snipes and, even worse, Greaser Bleecker, was too much even for him.