“What’s wrong with him?” Flanagan asked.
“He’s hyperventilating, Chief,” Wharton said. “He’s breathing so fast his lungs can’t get any oxygen, and that makes him black out. Excitement, that’s all. I’ve given him a weak shot of morphine, enough to knock him out for a little while so his breathing will slow down. He’ll be okay. We have to watch him until he comes back to normal, but he’s okay.”
Flanagan looked around the compartment. The crews of the deck guns were babbling excitedly, ignoring the Pharmacist’s Mate and his patient. The high they had been riding in the deck gun action was still with them.
“All right, you people,” Flanagan growled. “Let’s knock off this bullshit. You people sound like a zoo.”
John Wilkes Booth, the ship’s yeoman who had manned the 20-millimeter machine guns, grinned at Flanagan.
“Hell, Chief, it was just like a turkey shoot back home in Alabama. We just purely shot those bastards right outa water, didn’t we?”
Flanagan stared at the black-haired yeoman. “Next time we get into one of those flails I wish you’d keep your big mouth shut. It’s bad enough when those twin twenties of yours are hammering right over our heads on that forward deck gun, we don’t need you screaming like someone had shoved a big corn cob up your ass and sat you down hard!”
“I wasn’t screaming, that was my Rebel yell. You got to yell if you’re fighting, Chief. All us good of Suth’n boys give out with the Rebel yell when we get in a fight. Scares the damn Yankees outa their skulls!”
“You’d better Rebel yell your ass up to that cubbyhole you call an office,” Flanagan growled. “The Exec is writing up the contact report, and he’ll be looking for you to do a little fightin’ on that typewriter.”
Booth slid out from behind the mess table and looked at the second loader, whose head was resting on his arm on the table.
“Old Doc does pretty good with that needle for a Reservist who used to sing in front of some damned band, doesn’t he?”
“I didn’t sing in front of any band,” Wharton snapped. He ran his hand over his carefully combed wavy blond hair. “I was a featured ballroom dancer with a full orchestra. Not a band, an orchestra. There’s a hell of a difference. Shit, singers are a dime a dozen in show business. Dancers, good dancers, are hard to find.” He rolled his eyes upward. “Man, I had me a partner, a tall redhead, she was built like a brick shithouse! If you ever saw her, Booth, your gonads would shoot right up to your stomach. That is, if yeomen have gonads.”
Booth grinned at the Chief Pharmacist’s Mate. “All that good civilian background sure helps to make a submarine sailor, doesn’t it? Damned submarine navy is just like the Army. The Army takes a civilian who’s a first-rate restaurant cook and makes him into a truck driver.” He rinsed his coffee cup in the sink and put it back in the cup rack. “I guess that being a professional ballroom dancer is the right background for a bedpan cleaner.” He went forward and through the hatch as a gust of laughter swept the Crew’s Mess. Chief Wharton grinned and took the sleeping loader’s wrist in his hand and began to take his pulse.
“LaMark,” Flanagan said to the ship’s Gunner’s Mate. “The Exec wants a reading on how much ammunition we shot off and how much we got left. Like right now.”
“Got it right here, Chief,” LaMark said. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket.
“That isn’t going to do the Exec any good in your pocket,” Flanagan said.
“I’ll take it to the Wardroom right away. Man, that quad pom-pom is sure a fire hose, ain’t it? I could have cut that damned escort vessel right off at the water line if you people on the deck gun hadn’t got lucky and blew it up. I pure blew that ship’s bridge into firewood.”
Flanagan faced the people still sitting at the mess tables, his powerful sloping shoulders hunched belligerently.
“I want you people on the gun crews to know that for a bunch of sorry peckerheads you did a pretty damned good job.” He looked at Steve Petreshock, who was sitting with Fred Nelson, the torpedoman in charge of the After Torpedo Room.
“The torpedoes ran good. Like they are supposed to run. Old Man told me he was happy about that so you two people can feel happy. Just make sure the rest of the fish we still got run good. As soon as the Exec gives me the word I’ll be able to tell you when to start the reload.” Petreshock and Nelson grinned their appreciation.
“All the rest of you people” — Flanagan’s voice was a low rumble — “get your asses outa here. The baker’s got to have some room to mix his bread dough.” He drew a cup of steaming coffee from the urn as the men left the mess room. Scotty Rudolph came out of the galley with a smoking hot, freshly baked cheese Danish.
“Just out of the oven, Chief. They taste pretty good when the cheese is still hot, but don’t burn your damned tongue.” Flanagan nodded his thanks and sat down at a mess table. The ship’s cook sat down across from him.
“You people did an awful lot of yellin’ and a hell of a lot of shootin’ up there tonight. I like to broke my damn back shoving those shells up through the ammo chute. Those things are heavy.”
“Ninety-two pounds each,” Flanagan said.
“What in the hell was goin’ on?” the cook said.
“Well, I don’t rightly know what went on before the Old Man hollered for Battle Surface. But when I went over the bridge rail there were ships all around us and the Old Man is yellin’ at the Exec, he was aft on the cigaret deck, to shoot some damned target.”
“I wear the battle phones back here,” Rudolph said. “I know the Old Man hit two ships with fish from the Forward Room and the Exec knocked off one ship with a couple of fish from the After Room. But you don’t get any dope over the phones when there’s a Battle Surface going on.”
“Well,” Flanagan said. He sipped at his coffee and chewed a bite of the pastry. “We were manning both deck guns and doin’ nothing and all of a sudden the Old Man yells for the forward gun to take out an escort that was chargin’ at us from up forward on the port bow. We couldn’t get any radar ranges, radar was busy with gettin’ ship ranges for torpedo targets. Old Man yells for us to adjust range by shell splashes. That ain’t the easy way to do it, you know, because the gun keeps shooting longer for the first five, six rounds as the barrel heats up.
“But that number two baker of yours, that Willie Stevens we made pointer on the forward gun? He did a hell of a job. Got a hit with the third round and held the point of aim right in there and the escort is tryin’ to get away and we’re movin’ all the time.
“Once we tore that bastard all up the Old Man comes about and reverses course and both guns went to work on a freighter he’d hit with a torpedo. I guess we hit him with maybe fifteen, twenty rounds. We musta hit his engine room, the boilers, because he blew into two pieces. I tell you, Scotty, this Old Man is a heller. Not like the skipper I had on my first three patrols out of Brisbane. That bastard wouldn’t surface if there was an escort vessel within ten miles.” He pushed himself to his feet.
“I got to see the Exec and get the word on reloading the tubes. Like you said, they taste better when they’re hot. I like the way you put raisins in the cheese part.”
Captain Mike Brannon sat in his accustomed place at the head of the Wardroom table. He finished a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon that Mahaffey had put in front of him.
“I don’t see how you can eat those powdered eggs and that canned bacon and look as if you were enjoying it,” Olsen said. “I can’t get that stuff down.”
“I thought it tasted pretty good,” Brannon said. “I must have been hungry. Let’s get down to business. I want to get some sleep after they finish reloading the tubes.”