Then the mustang lieutenant quickly passed through the control room before reaching officers’ country. Behind him, along his path, his presence had given a rise to crew morale, something he never recognized. If he had, he would never understand how.
When he stepped into officers’ country, the skipper was sitting at the wardroom table, going over papers and drinking coffee. Bleecker set the nearly empty cup from the crew’s mess on the rack beside the coffee urn.
He told Shipley what the black gang was doing and that he intended to catch a couple hours of sleep before lunch. Then, he’d make another inspection through his engineering domain to see how the troops were doing.
Bleecker gave Shipley a half salute as he left the mess. Bleecker loved the Navy. He loved the submarine service. And he loved the men who shared the cramped quarters of a submarine beneath the surface of the ocean. Everything was right with the world at that moment, that instant, and within his own being. Bleecker slipped off his shoes and slid into the bottom bunk of the small quarters he shared with Van Ness.
Bleecker put his hands beneath his head and wondered for a moment before sleep overtook him what he had missed in the quieten ship list. He looked forward to hearing what his sailors had discovered. He shut his eyes, and within seconds he was asleep. He never worried about oversleeping. Too many years of waking up on time.
“What a load of shit,” Potts said as he and Fromley stepped into the pump room. Tully and Lang were already inspecting the equipment. Otto Lang was holding a 3-M card in his hand. Several cards stuck out of his back pocket.
Potts flipped the cards from Lang’s back pocket, sending them fluttering onto the deck.
“Hey, Potts, don’t do that,” Lang said, bending over to pick them up.
“Or, what, Otto? You gonna beat my butt?”
Tully, lying on the deck with his arm beneath the bilge pump, pulled the arm out and sat up. “Naw, but I might if you and your idjit friend don’t get the hell out of here.”
“Whoa!” Potts said, continuing to walk forward, waving his hands back and forth. “I’m really scared, Tully.”
Potts and Fromley opened the hatch to the forward battery room. “Ah, home, sweet home,” Potts said. “Our own little kingdom. What a piece of shit.”
“At least it is ours.”
“From, they gave us the forward battery room because it was as far as they could send us without shooting us out of the forward torpedo tubes. Besides,” he said as he secured the hatch to the forward battery room, “Gledhill or the asshole lieutenant will come check what we’ve done anyway. They don’t trust us.”
“Bleecker’s gone to his rack. He’s taking a sleep.”
“How in the hell do you know that?”
“Because when he says he is going to be in his office, he means he is going to be in his rack.”
“Why didn’t I know that?”
Fromley shrugged. “I don’t know.” He picked up the logbook at the forward end of the battery compartment and laid the 3-M cards on top of it. “Which one you want to do first?”
Potts slapped the bottom of the logbook, sending the 3-M cards onto the deck. One of them landed sideways and slid through the narrow space between the narrow walkway and the battery rows.
“Ah, man; one of them fell beneath the batteries.”
Potts turned and squatted. “From, why the fuck didn’t you catch them?” He stuck his finger down but could barely touch the end of the card. After half a minute of trying, he quit and stood up. “Looks as if you may be in a world of shit if they realize we lost one of Anderson’s precious cards.”
Fromley squatted and started picking up the cards.
Potts reached down and jerked them from Fromley’s hand. “Let me have them before you lose any more.”
“I didn’t lose that one,” Fromley whined.
Potts slapped him upside the head, knocking the sailor against the batteries. “Don’t argue with me. I don’t like people who argue with me.”
“I’m sorry,” Fromley said, rubbing the side of his face. His eyes glistened.
“And, don’t you start crying on me.” Potts held the cards up. “What is this shit?” he asked, slapping the cards with the back of his hand, ignoring Fromley, who was still rubbing his cheek. He looked down and started through the cards. “Battery ventilation; check trickle discharge routine; airlift pump checks; battery inspection—”
“We can use the stuff we been putting in the battery record log,” Fromley offered.
Potts smiled, his eyes widening. “Fromley, you just knocked off”—he raised the card—“three hours of work. Whoever said you ate shit and chased rabbits never saw you in the woods.” Fromley smiled, scratching his head, his face confused. “Tommy, I don’t understand.”
“You ain’t supposed to. We got hundreds of cells, each cell producing about two volts of power. The way you write, it’ll take more than three hours for us to do this one.” He stuck the maintenance checklist for battery checks at the bottom of the stack. “Let’s see what else we got here: water-cooling system; battery test discharge.” Potts looked at Fromley. “This one sounds like part of battery checks to me; one hour.” He put the card beneath the others. “I’ve been thinking,” Fromley said.
“Don’t do that; it’ll cause you to have a headache.”
“No, listen to me, Tommy. If we don’t do these checks, then we’re going to finish ahead of Joe and Peter—”
“You mean Pedro, not Peter. He’s not American, he’s Mexican.”
Fromley reached out and touched Potts, then bit his lower lip. “I didn’t mean we gun-deck our 3-M, Tommy. I’m not serious. Gledhill will catch it if Anderson doesn’t and Bleecker — well, nothing gets by the lieutenant,” Fromley whined. “We have to do them.” He nodded several times, his head going up and down. “They’ll know we didn’t do our checks.”
Potts shook the hand away. “Oh, shut up, and let me worry about that.” He swept his arm around the compartment. “These things don’t move. They’re filled with acid eating away at copper and shit, producing electricity until they run out of the stuff. Then they quit. Why the Navy thinks we need to keep a continuous check on them comes from a bunch of desk jockeys in Washington with nothing to do but print up these things.” He held the cards up, pulled back as if to throw them, remembered the one stuck under the batteries, and brought them back down.
“Is that all?” Fromley asked.
Potts shuffled through the next few. “Naw, but the others seem easy to do and shouldn’t require much time.”
“Is the card for checking the electrolyte agitation system in there?” Fromley asked.
Potts opened his mouth to say something, but instead flipped through the cards. “Naw, I don’t see it. But we have never checked it yet, From, so why start now?”
Fromley looked down at the spot where the 3-M card had slid through the narrow opening. “I bet the card down there is the one for the electrolyte agitation system.”
“So what’s the big deal, shipmate?”
“I remember at A-school our instructor said the greatest danger to batteries is an improper electrolyte agitation system. We should check that.”
“From, your instructor lied to you. The greatest danger to the batteries is temperature greater than 130 degrees. They tend to blow up then.”
Fromley looked back at the spot where the card fell through the crack.
“From, forget it,” Potts said. Why in the hell did he put up with Fromley? Even the man’s name pissed him off. He doubted that when the chips came down — and come down they would— Fromley would be there. No, whatever he had to do, he was going to have to do on his own. Fromley would just piss his pants if he told him.