Sweet Reason (7 page)

Ohm appeared at the pilot house door waving a scrap of paper that the messenger had just brought up from the Captain’s cabin. “Permission to pass the word?” he said.

“Granted, Ohm.”

Ohm clicked on the public-address system. “Now all hands with” — he studied the next word for a moment as if he didn’t believe it — “typewriters, lay aft to the after wardroom with same.”

Ohm’s voice was still echoing through the ship when the
jet fighter crashed three quarters of a mile from the
Ebersole
, bounced twice like a flat stone skidding off a lake and sank back into the sea.

As a great arc of sea spray with a rainbow through it settled gently around the plane, all hell broke loose on the
Ebersole
.

“Left full rudder, all engines ahead flank,” boomed Lustig, his pulse racing wildly. “Get the Captain up here.”

“Captain to the bridge,” Ohm yelled into the public-address system and listened to the words echo from speaker to speaker below deck: “Captain to the bridge, to the bridge, the bridge.”

Jones came bounding up the ladder as the
Ebersole
heeled hard over to port.

The voice of someone who fancied himself a radio announcer, supremely calm and dulcet-toned, clicked onto the primary tactical circuit from the carrier: “Elbow Room, Elbow Room, this is Isolated Camera. One of our pigeons is down, over.”

“Roger, Elbow Room on the way, out,” Lustig told the carrier.

“I have the conn,” cried the Captain. He lined up the downed plane in the cross hairs of the telescopic alidade. “Come back, Jesus, come back to two four seven,” he screamed at Carr, the helmsman.

“Nobody gave me no course to come to,” Carr muttered to anyone within earshot, and added: “Loony bin, goddamn loony bin.” He shifted the rudder and steadied on 247.

“Steady on two four seven,” he called out.

The Captain ignored him. “Tell main control to stand by to back down fast and give me all stop,” he yelled to Lustig.

“But Captain, we have superheats on,” Lustig said. It took ten or twelve minutes to lower the superheats to the point where main control could safely stop the engines without permanently damaging the boilers.

“What are the goddamn superheats doing on?” screamed Jones. He was dancing up and down now and pounding the railing with the flat of his hand.

“You ordered them on,” said Lustig.

“Well, get them off!”

The
Ebersole
’s bow knifed through the water toward the downed jet, 400 yards away.

“All back full,” yelled the Captain.

The gap closed rapidly.

“All back emergency,” Jones shrieked. “Give me everything you’ve got.”

The lee helmsman jiggled the bells to indicate emergency astern. The
Ebersole
began to lose way rapidly.

“You’d better alternate between ahead and astern bells, Skipper, or we’ll back away from her,” the XO whispered over the Captain’s shoulder.

“You think so, eh?” Jones said without turning around. “All engines ahead one third,” he called to the lee helmsman.

The
Ebersole
’s bow, with a rescue team poised on it ready to dive in and save the pilot, cut toward the plane. It looked as if the destroyer had come to a dead stop about twenty yards away when the one-third-ahead bell began to take effect.

“Back, back, Christ Almighty, all back full,” screamed the Captain — too late.

The bow lifted on the crest of a swell and sliced down like a cleaver, gashing the jet behind the cockpit. The swimmers from the
Ebersole
, long safety lines tied to their waists, leaped into the sea on top of the plane. With water pouring in through the gash in the fuselage the jet began to sink. One of the swimmers, Signalman Third Jefferson Waterman, yanked at the canopy, but it had been jammed shut in the crash with the
Ebersole
. The plane plunged
under now and the swimmers standing on it were in seawater up to their shoulders. Waterman made a last try, diving down and hammering on the cockpit with his bare fists, hammering and pulling and clawing at it until blood poured from his hands. Then he shot up gasping for air and crying like a baby.

The men on the bridge could still see the sinking jet, magnified and shimmering under twenty feet of clear blue water. The yellow flight helmet of the pilot, with a screaming eagle decalcomania on it, lay twisted at an odd angle from the body, bobbing gently up and down in the water-filled cockpit.

“He was probably dead anyhow,” the Captain said. “Chances are he was dead, eh?”

Jones Holds a Post-Mortem

“There’s no question he was dead when the plane hit, Captain,” the XO assured Jones later that afternoon. The two were sitting in the Captain’s cabin waiting for the department heads to assemble. “Admiral Haydens must have come to the same conclusion. Look at the way he phrased this cable. My God, there’s nothing ironic about it. ‘Good try Ebersole. We mightily impressed with the leadership qualities necessary bring veteran destroyer like Isolated Camera up to this level of performance Endit.’ ”

“It’s true, there’s not a word about us coming too close, to the jet I mean, eh?” the Captain said thoughtfully.

“Not a word, Skipper,” the XO agreed. “Anyhow, what is
too
close? According to the book, you’re supposed to deposit your swimmers as close as possible in the shortest time possible. As far as I can see, that’s precisely what you did.
It was hard luck that the jet sank before they could get the pilot out, that’s all.”

“I’d give anything to know who the sonovabitch was who advised me to ring up that one-third-ahead bell.” Jones licked his lips absent-mindedly, trying to identify the voice that had come floating over his shoulder in the midst of the excitement. “You’re sure it wasn’t Lustig, eh? Maybe it was Sweet Reason?”

“I doubt very much whether it was Sweet Reason, Captain.”

“Who else was on the bridge besides Lustig?”

“Wallowitch and Joyce were up there. So were de Bovenkamp and Richardson. Moore was too, I think. Just about everybody came up when the shit hit the fan. Want me to nose around, Skipper — discreetly, of course?”

Jones weighed the offer for a moment. “Negative,” he said finally, still trying to recreate the scene. “Negative. Since everything turned out for the best, let’s let it drop, eh? But I want you to keep the goddamn sightseers off the bridge, XO. Put a memo to that effect in the plan of the day, eh?”

Jones Meets the Department Heads

“That was tough luck, hitting the plane at the last second, Captain,” Richardson said solicitously as the department heads — Lustig for gunnery, Moore for engineering, the XO for operations and Richardson for supply — pulled up seats around the Captain’s desk.

“I wasn’t aware we hit the plane, Mister Richardson,” the Captain shot back coldly. “The object in an exercise like that is to get to the downed plane as quickly as possible.
And that’s what we did. You do a fine job in supply, Mister Richardson, but it seems to me that you could safely leave judgments about seamanship to those of us who have some considerable experience in such matters, eh?” And Jones nodded once to underscore the point that his tone of voice had already underscored.

“No offense intended, Captain,” Richardson said lamely.

“None taken, my boy, none taken,” the skipper responded.

Jones strung some long moments of silence together to create the right mood for what was to come. Lustig shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The others, afraid that their breathing would be the loudest in the room, held their breaths.

“I called this meeting,” the Captain began — and the department heads exhaled. “I called it to discuss the operational readiness of this ship. I have yesterday’s eight o’clock reports” — every day at twenty hundred hours the department heads compiled a list of equipment that was “down” and sent it to the Captain — “and it’s just plain ridiculous. If word of this ever got out the
Ebersole
would be pulled off the firing line within the hour. And you gentlemen are aware, I’m sure, of what that would mean for your careers.”

The list of “down” equipment was imposing, more so because there was a general tendency to omit items that were minor or were about to be repaired. The 21 MC, an internal communication system, was still too full of static to use from CIC or main control. The SPA-6 air search radar repeater in CIC had loose wiring. The SQS-40 sonar was overheating again; de Bovenkamp had tried channeling air to it from a nearby vent through a cutoff dungaree leg, but it hadn’t helped. The Mark 5 Mod 5 sonar fire control system was not getting a ship’s course input, which made problem solving impossible. Moore had shut down the number two boiler to inspect tubes after a possible low water incident; the striker who was supposed to watch the “glass”
had fallen asleep on the job. The port turbine reduction gear shaft had been shut down when the Chief Petty Officer detected a slight thump-thump; “bearing problem,” Moore had noted next to the item. Generator number one, an old workhorse that broke down regularly, was off the line. The main condenser seawater intake had clogged again, probably with fish. Two TED transmitters and a RED receiver had been shut down to replace tubes. The LORAN receiver was on the fritz. The Mark-25 director radar had been taken off the line for “routine preventive maintenance,” which was Lustig’s way of saying that it didn’t work and he didn’t know what was wrong. The entire MARK-56 director system, which controlled the two three-inch mounts aft, was inoperative; the fire control people thought the trouble had something to do with the parallax input, but they weren’t sure. The winch for the starboard anchor had jammed. The remote control signal bridge lever for releasing depth charges was inoperative; it hadn’t worked since before Captain Jones took command of the
Ebersole
, but nobody seemed to be able to track down the trouble. The port dredger hoist for Mount 51 worked — but with such a grinding noise that Chief McTigue had ordered it shut down for overhaul. Two of the three toilets in the after crew’s quarters refused to flush; something to do with the water pressure aft dropping. “And I have it on good authority,” the Captain added, “that the coin slot in the pay telephone amidships is stuffed with gum.”

The
Eugene F. Ebersole
’s Curriculum Vitae

The list in the Captain’s hand was the tip of the iceberg — the visible part of the
Ebersole
’s age and infirmity. In
cramped compartments and obscure corners, in crawl spaces between bulkheads and decks, in nooks and crannies that had not been inspected by anyone in years,
the ship leaked
— seawater, freshwater, steam, fuel oil, lube oil, hydraulic fluid, grease, compressed air, sewage, bilgewater, smoke.

Take the boilers. There were four of them on the
Ebersole
, four giant furnaces that converted freshwater into steam and then squeezed the steam through nozzles to spin the turbines that drove the main propulsion shaft that turned the two huge screws that pushed the ship through the water. It was supposed to be a closed system, one which converted the steam back into water at the end of the cycle and then started all over again. But there were so many water and steam leaks along the way that the
Ebersole
had to operate its condensers (which made freshwater out of seawater) overtime just to provide water for the boilers. And that left precious little for things like washing and laundry.