With a groan Moses let go and Taylor took the full weight, and he could not imagine how the coal passer had held it that long. Son of a bitch… “Burgess! Burgess!”
The Scotsman was there, ducking under the fractured pipe, and in his hand a jack. He ducked low, shoved the jack under the boiler, twisted the screw. Taylor felt the weight coming off the bar, off his arm muscles, and he breathed deep in relief.
All right…all right… The sound of the battle was louder now, with the roof of the engine room blown off, and it was rattling him. He heard the anchor chain rumbling through the hawsepipe. Drifting toward the Yankees. Bowater had dropped the hook. All right…think…
“Chief! Chief!”
What the hell…
“What!”
It was Tanner, looking down through the great hole that was the boat deck. “Captain needs a report, Chief! Will you be able to get steam up again?”
Steam? Got steam coming out our ass. Good thing that whore’s son didn’t ring the bell, I’d wring his fucking neck…
Think…think…
“Tell Bowater, turns on the screw in ten minutes!”
“Ten minutes, aye!”
Taylor looked around. The engine room was dark, a hellish place of choking black smoke and deadly steam. The main steam line was cut through and the return water was leaking as well, and steam was jetting out where a shell fragment had taken a steam pressure gauge clean off. There was hissing back by the engine, but Taylor could not see what was causing that.
It was all secondary to the main steam line. If the steam continued to jet out of the fracture rather than make its way to the cylinder, then the Cape Fear was going nowhere.
“Moses, rig up that fire hose and charge the line. Burgess, get me a mess of them croker sacks up by the ash hoist.”
“Wadda ’ell’s a croker sack?”
“Croker sack, croker sack, you know, them burlap bags up there!”
Burgess nodded, disappeared into the smoke. Taylor skirted the jet of steam, worked his way to the starboard side, the workbench. Steam and smoke swirled around, the smell of condensing water vapor mixed with the output of the firebox. The cloud twisted and swirled and sucked out of the hole in the boat deck above. Dull light from the sky overhead filtered down through the haze. The battle sounded loud, shells flying, bursting, big guns going off. Tommy was whimpering now.
Taylor bumped into the workbench before he saw it, reached out with his hand. The steam from the main steam line was hitting the bench square, but after flying the full width of the ship it had cooled enough that he could reach into it, quick.
His hand darted like a snake, fell on a wrench, pulled it back. The metal was hot and wet. He lashed out again. His hand hit the empty bench, he felt around, one second, two seconds, the steam was starting to hurt. His hand touched heavy leather gloves, and he snatched them and pulled them from the jet.
He pulled the gloves on. They were hot and wet too. He knelt down, reached back into the steam, felt around in the storage bins under the bench. Through the thick leather he felt fishplates—one for the return water pipe, another for the auxiliary steam, and finally one the diameter of the main steam pipe. He pulled it out, worked his way back to the port side.
Moses appeared like a phantom in the smoke. He held the fire hose. Water gushed out. The pump was driven by auxiliary steam not affected by the fractured main steam line. He directed the nozzle at the bilge.
Burgess was there with the croker sacks. “Wrap them around my arms, tight,” Taylor instructed.
“Lemme do this,” Burgess protested, but Taylor shook his head and Burgess knew there was no time to argue. He wrapped the croker sacks around Taylor’s arms, tied them in place with lengths of spun yarn.
Taylor turned to Moses Jones. “You keep that goddamned water on me while I’m near the steam. You know the drill.”
“Yes, boss.”
Taylor took the fishplate in hand. It looked like a short piece of pipe, cut in two lengthwise, with flanges on the edges. In cross section they looked like a flattened Greek. The two halves of the fishplate would go over the break in the main steam pipe. They would be secured together by bolts that fitted through holes in the flanges. A simple five-minute fix if you didn’t have to do it in a smoke-filled engine room with a jet of live steam in your face.
Taylor unscrewed the bolts and separated the two halves of the fishplate. He approached the hissing jet of steam and Moses turned the fire hose on him, soaking him down, keeping a constant stream of brackish water on him to prevent his being scalded by the steam.
Taylor blinked hard. The smoke burned his eyes and made it hard to see. The white plume that formed ten inches from the pipe was the water vapor, steam condensing in the air. That was not the problem. The actual steam coming out of the pipe was clear, invisible. It was that steam, which he could not see, that could turn him into a scalded horror, begging to die.
He reached up and clapped the fishplate over the main steam pipe, near the leak, inserted the bolts, threaded the nuts. It was clumsy work with the heavy gloves. Twice he dropped nuts, wasted six minutes finding them in the smoke.
His eyes burned and his throat burned and he felt faint for want of water, and from breathing smoke. The blast from the fire hose made it hard to stand, and sometimes his balance would shift and the water from the hose would knock him toward the hissing steam and he would have to fight to keep from being pushed into it.
And all the time he was braced for the pipe to break clean through, to hit him square with a blast of pure, invisible steam.
At last the fishplate was on, set loose, and Taylor slid it down the pipe toward the break. It moved easy, covered half the fracture. The note of the steam went up in pitch as the hole through which it passed was cut in half. Taylor pushed. It would go no farther.
Damn… He turned around. There was Burgess with a big hammer, holding it out to him. Taylor took the hammer, tapped it on the flange, tapped harder and harder still. He wound up, swung hard, and it occurred to him, midswing, that he could break the steam pipe that way, cripple them for good, put himself in the way of a faceful of steam.
Too late to check the swing; the hammer struck with a clang like a broken bell. The fishplate shifted six inches aft and the fracture was covered. The note went up again, the steam now squeezing out from behind the plate. Steam was a beast, it had to be contained, it fought to get loose, through any tiny place it could find. It was a malleable beast—no hole was too small. It was a deadly beast if you got too close.
Taylor reached up with the wrench, clapped it on the nuts, began to work them around. He could feel the steam—pure, invisible steam—on the leather gloves, and soon he had to jerk his hand away. Turn, turn, pull his hands away, working the wrench with the blast of water from the fire hose playing over his shoulders, his back, his head.
It took twenty minutes, all told, but finally it was over, the beast was back in the pipe. Taylor ran his leather-clad hand over the fishplate. He could feel no jet of steam, could see no white plume where the steam was condensing.
“That should hold us till the next time,” he announced. He stepped away from the pipe, and Moses directed the fire hose back to the bilge. The smoke was lifting up through the boat deck. Visibility in the engine room was better now.
“Good job,” Taylor said. He was burned, his eyes and throat raw. He was faint with the heat and he was soaked clean through.