Sweet Reason (25 page)

The money was there all right — but was it all there? What with this Sweet Reason business, he couldn’t be too
careful. Obviously he would have to count it, all $322,648.73 of it. Richardson bolted the door to the office from the inside, scooped up the requisitions and put them in a file basket. Then, still in a cold sweat, he piled the bound bundles of bills on the table. First came the seventy-three cents — two quarters, two dimes and three pennies. That much was fine. Then, trying to moisten his fingertips on his bone-dry tongue, Richardson started in on the bills: “Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred, a hundred ten …”

The
Ebersole
Goes in for the Kill

The clock in the pilot house showed four minutes to General Quarters when Captain Jones stepped onto the bridge.

“Now the Captain is on the bridge,” Ohm growled into the ship’s loudspeaker system.

“Morning, Captain,” Lustig said through the pilot house porthole. “I have land on radar dead ahead at sixteen miles.”

“Very well, Mister Lustig,” the Skipper said. He started toward his sea chair on the starboard wing of the bridge. “I trust you’ll give us a good shoot today, my boy,” he called to Lustig. “We’ve come a long way to deliver the goods, so let’s deliver them expeditiously and accurately, irregardless of the obstacles, eh?” His eyebrows shot up to underscore the point.

“Aye aye, sir,” Lustig said noncommittally.

“A cup of pilot house java, Captain?” Ohm asked, pointing to the coffee pot on a small electric burner.

Chewing nervously on the inside of his cheek, Jones ignored the offer and settled into his sea chair. The sun edged over the horizon now and Jones put on a pair of Polaroid sunglasses.

“Morning, Skipper,” said the XO, saluting his image in the Captain’s sunglasses. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but de Bovenkamp knocked over the model of the
Ebersole
at breakfast this morning.”

“Can it be repaired?”

“I don’t think so, Captain. After he knocked it over he more or less stepped on it and, well, frankly, there isn’t much left to piece together.”

Jones shook his head angrily. “I expected more from that boy,” he said. “First the whales, now this.”

The Executive Officer coughed nervously. “It’s zero seven twenty, skipper,” he said.

“Fine, XO, let ’er rip.”

The XO walked across the pilot house to the alarm boxes and pushed down the handle on the general alarm. Again the
DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG
reverberated throughout the
Ebersole
.

Ohm put the betting sheet on the morning’s shoot into his breast pocket (his rule was “all bets closed once GQ sounds”) and clicked on the microphone: “Now this is
not
a drill. This is
not
a drill. Now all hands, man your battle stations. Now set condition one Able throughout the ship.” Then he raced off to his battle station in Main Plot.

The Executive Officer unlocked the cabinet under the navigator’s pilot house desk and passed out sidearms to each of the officers on the bridge, including the Captain.

“Six minutes thirty-two seconds,” the XO said, punching his stopwatch as Wallowitch, looking particularly grim, disappeared into the Main Director.

Jones fidgeted in his chair. “Heads up now, XO,” he called, “I don’t want to go inside the ten-fathom curve.”

The XO studied the navigation chart, which showed the enemy coast from someplace called —— —— —— to someplace called —— ——.

A fathometer reading — “11.5 fathoms” — came up from the chart house.

“Recommend we come right to course zero two zero in, oh, three minutes, Captain,” the XO said. “That’ll put us parallel to the shore and six miles off target. You should be able to see —— —— light dead ahead soon as we turn.”

“Mister Moore, come right to zero two zero in three minutes,” the Skipper ordered.

“Quartermaster, log this,” the XO called. “Zero seven twenty eight, crossed into free-fire zone.”

Jones seemed to relax perceptibly.

“Zero seven thirty, Captain,” said the XO. “Recommend we come right.”

“All right, Mister Moore, you heard the man, come right,” the Skipper said. He was starting to get excited now; the feeling of his own racing pulse imparted a rhythm to events.

“Right standard rudder, come to zero two zero,” called Moore.

“Rudder is right standard, sir, coming to zero two zero. Steady on zero two zero.”

“What speed you want, XO?” Moore asked.

“What speed do you want, Captain?” the XO asked.

“Give me twelve knots. With a following sea that should be enough to keep her steady on for the guns. But make sure the engine room has those superheats up in case they shoot back like last time and we need to hightail it out of here, eh? If I ring up flank speed I
want
flank speed.”

“Turns for twelve knots,” Moore ordered.

As the
Ebersole
steadied on its new heading, the early morning mist that had obscured the shore thinned and broke.

“Can you see the target yet, Shrink?” Lustig asked, speaking into his headset that connected him with the Main Director, Main Plot and the gun mounts.

“Affirmative, I can see the target,” said Wallowitch,
perched overhead on the tractor seat in the director, his eyes pressed against the twenty-four-power eyepiece of the optical range finder. He twisted a knob and brought the split image of the target together so that he could find the range and shell it and split it into pieces again.

“What’s the matter with you, Wally?” Lustig asked. Something in Wallowitch’s tone was not quite right.

“I said I can see the fucking target, what else you want?”

(“Some human decency,” Lustig thought to say later.)

On the port wing of the bridge, Lustig, Moore and the Captain steadied their binoculars on the target; a small hamlet named —— —— —— clustered around either end of a steel and concrete bridge that straddled the —— —— River a hundred yards up from its mouth. On the right or higher side of the river were a handful of two-story cement buildings; on the left or lower side a score of thatched huts and a brick church. There was no movement in the town except for some streaks of sunlight glinting, like sparks from an anvil, off the single bell in the church tower and an old man and two small children fishing from the girders of the bridge. The old man seemed to be shading his eyes with his hand, leaning forward slightly, squinting out to sea toward the rising sun, toward the
Ebersole
.

—— —— —— was listed in the target assignments as a “key road junction.”

“Let’s get on to that church right away, eh?” the Captain ordered, his voice betraying his excitement. “They probably have their observation boys up there. Don’t want to give ’em a chance to zero in on us again.”

“Surface action port,” Lustig called into his headset. “Spot on the church, Shrink.”

The two forward five-inch mounts on the
Ebersole
jerked into life, fidgeted back and forth, then swung around to port. Mount 53 on the fantail, under the command of Ensign de Bovenkamp, started to starboard by mistake. “Jesus Christ
Almighty,” Lustig screamed into the headset, but before he could say anything else the offending mount froze and, like a mischievous child caught in the act, sheepishly began to make its way back around to port.

The computer in Main Plot, taking its range and bearing to the target from the Shrink’s optical range finder, generated a solution and sent it out automatically to the gun mounts.

“Solution,” Seaman Boeth, in charge of Main Plot during GQ, said tensely.

“Solution,” Ensign Joyce, who was standing next to Boeth, repeated into his headset.

Across the room Ohm unfolded his betting sheet and got ready to identify the winner.

“On target, Captain,” Lustig called. “Main Plot is generating a solution.”

The six five-inch guns, each 190 inches long and rifled to spiral projectiles out like footballs, seemed to take on a life of its own, moving up and down and back and forth in small, squared-off figure eights. Actually they had locked on the target; it was the 2200-ton destroyer that was moving around the guns.

The sun was full up now, shining squarely into the face of anyone ashore who might be looking out to sea.

Biting his nails, Captain Jones nodded toward Lustig.

“Stand by,” Lustig called into the headset. “We’ll put out a spotting round from the port barrel of Fifty-one.”

In the forward five-inch mount Chief McTigue nodded grimly and helmsman Carr hefted a twenty-eight-pound brass powder case, with the word “flashless” stenciled across it in large black letters, onto the port gun tray.

Cee-Dee, standing directly in front of Carr, stomped on a red pedal, bringing VT frag projectiles crammed with fifty-four pounds of TNT up the hoist from the handling room. The system was so integrated that the fuses in the noses of the projectiles were set automatically at 14.4 seconds as they
came up the hoist on the basis of target information generated from Main Plot. Traveling at 2500 feet per second, the projectiles would take precisely that long to cover the distance between the
Ebersole
and —— —— ——. Seventy-five feet over the target the projectiles would explode, killing every living thing in the open within 100 feet.

The Captain, the XO, Mister Moore and the other men on the bridge stuffed small cotton wads into their ears; Tevepaugh, the messenger of the watch during GQ, was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get the cotton out again so he pressed his palms against the sides of his head.

Overhead the American flag and the
Ebersole’s
thin, tattered commissioning pennant snapped from the foretop. The air search radar antenna, an ancient apparatus that looked exactly like a bedspring, squeaked as it scanned the skies.

“All right, Mister Lustig,” the Captain said, doing a jig on one foot.
“The hell with Sweet Reason — let the bastards have it, eh?”

“Commence fire,” Lustig called into his headset. “Commence fire.”

Tevepaugh took one hand away from his ear and pushed down the lever on the 21MC marked “Director.”
“SHOOT, SHOOT, SHOOT,”
he screamed, and clamped the hand over his ear again.

Richardson Tries to Figure Out What It All Adds Up To

Two decks below Richardson worked his way with a single minded concentration through another stack of bills. “Twelve thousand eight hundred sixty; twelve thousand eight hundred eighty; twelve thousand nine hundred.”

And he reached over and put another tick in the hundreds column.

Lustig Invokes the Love of God

“Well, what are you waiting for, Shrink,” Lustig yelled into the sound-powered phone, “an engraved invitation? Commence fire, huh.”

“What’s the trouble?” the Captain asked impatiently. “What now?”

“We only have six minutes on target on this course, Captain,” the XO called from the pilot house.

“You can’t what, Shrink?” Lustig asked into the phone. “What do you mean you can’t?” As Lustig listened to the answer, his mouth fell open and his eyebrows arched up.