The Caine Mutiny (35 page)

A third party included all the other officers, with Keefer as ringleader. A strong open detestation of Queeg began to serve as a bond of affection among them, and they passed hours in sarcastic joking about him. The new officers, Jorgensen and Ducely, quickly absorbed the air of the wardroom and were soon in full cry after Queeg with the rest. Willie Keith was regarded as the captain’s pet, and was the target of much joking for it; and, in point of fact, Queeg was warmer and pleasanter in manner to Willie than to any of the others. But he joined vigorously in satirizing the captain. Maryk alone took no part in the ribaldry. He either kept silence or tried to defend Queeg, and if the jokes became too prolonged he would leave the wardroom.

This was the condition of the U.S.S.
Caine
when it crossed the mythical line on the broad sea, five days out of Pearl Harbor, and steamed into Japanese waters.

CHAPTER 20

The Yellow Stain

The evening before the fleet was due to arrive at Kwajalein, Willie had the eight-to-midnight watch. He observed an increased tension among the sailors on the bridge. Silence, even in the captain’s absence, hung heavily in the wheelhouse. The perpetual discussion of sex in the black radar shack, among ghostly faces lit by the dim green glow of the scopes, had not ceased; but it was sluggish, and dwelt mainly on venereal disease. The signal gang crouched on the flagbags over cups of rancid coffee, muttering.

There had been no official word passed that the ship would be at Kwajalein in the morning, but the crew had its intelligence agent in the quartermaster who solved the star sights each night with Maryk. They knew the distance from the objective as well as the captain.

Willie did not share the general gloom. His mood was buoyant and devilish. Within twelve hours he would be in battle; within twenty-four hours he would be a man who had risked his life for his country. He felt invulnerable. He was rolling toward an edge of danger, he knew, but it seemed an entertaining kind of danger, like a jump over a high hurdle on horseback. He was proud of his lack of fear, and this buoyed him yet more.

He alone, beside the captain, knew that the
Caine
was going to perform a hazardous mission at dawn. One of the top-secret guard-mail letters had contained new orders. The minesweeper was to shepherd a wave of attack boats from their transport to a line of departure only a thousand yards from the beach, fairly into the muzzles of the shore batteries; the reason being that correct navigation would be hard for the low-lying boats by themselves. Willie plumed himself on being in better spirits than the men though they were combat veterans and he wasn’t; though he knew of a great impending risk and they didn’t.

His optimism was really founded on a cunning estimate of his position (but a completely unconscious one) made by his viscera and nerves. He was not going to land on any beach; there was no risk of face-to-face encounter with stocky little yellow men brandishing bayonets. What confronted him was an increased likelihood of some crippling misfortune befalling the
Caine
, in the shape of a shell, a torpedo, or a mine. The odds in favor of his living through the next twenty-four hours had dropped from, say, a normal ten thousand to one to a smaller but still comfortable figure: seventy or eighty to one, maybe. So reasoned Willie’s nervous tissue; whereupon it sent up to his brain some stimulating fluid that produced the ensign’s glow of bravery.

The nerves of the crew made less cheerful calculations for a simple reason. The crew had seen the results of misfortunes of battle; ships burning red and yellow, ships sinking, men scrambling over dripping slanted hulls, men soaked in oil, men ripped bloody, and floating dead men. They were inclined to think less of the odds than of the disagreeable possibilities.

“Officer of the deck!” It was the voice of Queeg, resonating in the speaking tube from the charthouse. Surprised, Willie glanced at the dim phosphorescent clockface. Ten-thirty, time for the captain to be in his cabin. He stooped to the conical brass mouthpiece of the tube.

“Keith, aye aye.”

“Come in here, Willie.”

The captain, fully clothed, with his life jacket on, had crawled into the canvas bunk that hung over the navigator’s table. This picture flashed on Willie when he closed the door of the charthouse, automatically lighting the room with one red shaded bulb on the bulkhead. The air was foul with cigarette smoke. “How are things going, Willie?”

“Everything normal, sir.”

The captain rolled over on his side and peered at the ensign. His face was drawn and bristly in the red light. “You read my night orders?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Call me if there’s anything the least bit unusual, do you understand? Don’t worry about interrupting my beauty sleep.
Call
me.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

But the watch passed in the routine of pinging, zigzagging, and maintaining station. Harding stumbled up to him in the breezy gloom of the starboard wing at a quarter to twelve. “Ready to relieve you,” he said sadly, exhaling a faint fragrance of coffee.

“Well, forty miles to go, and still nothing.”

Willie hesitated before going below, and considered curling up in a corner of the main deck. Coming down the bridge ladder, he saw that half the crew had had the same idea. There were no corners left on the deck, and no very wide pathways for walking. The sight made Willie disdainful and bold. He went below, took off his clothes, and slipped between the sheets. Despite the hour, it felt queer to be in his bunk, somewhat as though he had fallen ill and taken to bed in the daytime. He was still congratulating himself on his hardihood when he fell asleep.

GHANG, ghang, ghang, ghang, ghang ...

The general alarm had not yet stopped ringing when he came bolting out on deck in his underwear, clutching shoes, socks, shirt, and trousers. He saw a calm sea, a starry black sky, and ships crisscrossing here and there in the melting formation. Sailors went thundering through the murky passageways and up and down ladders; no need to penalize any of them this time for not wearing helmet and life jacket! As Willie stepped into his pants the hatchway to the wardroom clanged shut behind him, and sailors of the forward repair party dogged it down hard. The ensign slipped his shoes on his naked feet and scrambled up the bridge ladder. The clock in the wheelhouse showed three-thirty. The little space was crowded with shadowy figures. Willie could hear the rasping of steel balls rubbed together. He took his life jacket and helmet from a hook and approached the stoop-shouldered form of Harding. “Ready to relieve you. What’s up?”

“Nothing. We’re there.” Harding pointed off the port bow and handed Willie the glasses. Willie saw, at the horizon, on the line between sea and sky, a thin irregular smudge, perhaps a fingernail wide. “Roi-Namur,” said Harding.

Tiny yellow flashes appeared along the smudge. Willie said, “What’s that?”

“The battle wagons peeled off and went ahead a couple of hours ago. I guess maybe that’s them. Or maybe it’s planes. Somebody’s giving that beach hell.”

“Well, this is it,” said Willie, a little annoyed at the thumping of his heart. “If there’s no change, I relieve you.”

“No change.”

Harding shuffled off the bridge. Now the sound of the shore bombardment came rolling across the sea to Willie’s ears, but at this distance it was a mere trivial thumping, as though sailors were beating out mattresses on the ship’s forecastle. Willie told himself that these vague noises and little colored flashes represented hellish destruction that was being rained on the Japs, and tried for a moment to imagine himself as a slant-eyed soldier crouching and shivering in a flaming jungle, but the picture had the unsatisfying false effect of a magazine story about the war. In plain fact, Willie’s first glimpse of combat was a disappointment. It appeared to be an unimportant night gunnery exercise on a very small scale.

The night paled to blue-gray, the stars disappeared; and day was brightening over the sea when the fleet came to a halt, three miles offshore. Attack boats began to drop from the davits of the transports, clustering and swarming on the water like beetles.

And now Willie Keith found himself in an honest-to-goodness war; one-sided, because there was still no firing from the beach, but the real deadly business, none the less. The green islands trimmed with white sand were already aflame and smoking in many spots. Tubby old battleships, targets of so many journalists’ sneers in peacetime, were briskly justifying thirty years of expensive existence by volleying tons of shells into the tropic shrubbery every few seconds, with thundering concussions. Cruisers and destroyers ranged beside them, peppering at the atoll. Now and then the naval fire stopped, and squadrons of planes filed overhead and dived one by one at the islands, raising clouds of white smoke and round bursts of flame, and sometimes a skyscraping mushroom of black, as an oil dump or ammunition pile went up with a blast which jarred the decks of the
Caine
. All the while the transports kept disgorging attack boats, which were fanning out along the gray choppy water in neat ranks. The sun rose, white and steamy.

The appearance of the atoll was not yet marred by the attack. The orange billows of flame here and there were decorative touches to the pleasant verdant islands, and so were the freshly blossoming clouds of black and white smoke. The smell of powder drifted in the air, and, for Willie, somehow completed the festive and gay effect of the morning. He could not have said why. Actually, it was because the odor, with the incessant banging, reminded him of fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Keefer paused beside him for a moment on the port wing. Wisps of black hair hung out from under the gray dome of the novelist’s helmet. His eyes glittered in their deep shadowed sockets, showing all the whites. “Like the show, Willie? Seems to be all ours.”

Willie swept an arm around at the swarms of ships closed in on the frail-looking islands in the pearly sunrise. “Multitudes, multitudes. What do you think of the Navy at this point, Tom?”

Keefer grinned, twisting one side of his mouth. “Christ,” he said, “the taxpayers ought to be getting something for their hundred billion dollars.” He bounded up the ladder to the flying bridge.

Queeg appeared, hunched almost to a crouch, his head moving ceaselessly to and fro over the bulky collar of his kapok life jacket. His eyes were squinted nearly shut, and he seemed to be smiling gaily. “Kay, Mr. OOD. Where’s this bunch of LVT’s we’re supposed to take in to the beach?”

“Well, I guess it’s that bunch there, sir, by APA 17.” Willie pointed to a huge gray transport some four thousand yards off the port bow.

“APA 17, hey? You’re sure that’s the ship they’re supposed to come from?”

“That’s what the orders said, sir. Jacob Group Four from APA 17.”

“Kay. Let’s get over to APA 17. Standard speed. You keep the conn.”

The captain vanished behind the bridgehouse. Willie stalked into the wheelhouse, swelling with self-importance, and began barking orders. The
Caine
dropped out of the screen and headed toward the transports. The roaring and blasting of the battleship salvos grew louder with each hundred yards that the
Caine
moved inward. The ensign was feeling a little dizzy and exalted, as though he had drunk a highball too quickly. He went from wing to wing, taking bearings on the APA, calling for radar ranges, shouting rudder changes with inebriated confidence.

A long line of attack boats emerged from the clusters around the APA and headed for the old minesweeper. Willie went looking for the captain and found him perched on a flagbag, out of sight of the transports and the beach, smoking, and chatting casually with Engstrand. “Sir, Jacob Group Four seems to be heading our way.”

“Kay.” Queeg glanced vaguely out to sea, and puffed at his cigarette.

Willie said, “What shall I do, sir?”

“Whatever you please,” said the captain, and giggled.

The ensign stared at his commanding officer. Queeg resumed telling an anecdote about the invasion of Attu to the signalman. Engstrand rolled his eyes momentarily at the officer of the deck, and shrugged.

Willie returned to the pilothouse. The attack boats were bumping toward the
Caine
in showers of spray. Peering through binoculars, Willie could see an officer standing in the stern of the leading boat with a large green megaphone under his arm. Spray flew all over his life jacket and khakis, and drenched the backs of the crouching marines in front of him. The glasses gave a prismatic blurriness to the boat and its occupants. Willie could see the men shouting at each other but could hear no sound; it was like a glimpse of a worn-out silent movie. He didn’t know what to do next. He thought the ship ought to be stopped but he was afraid to make such a command decision.

Maryk came into the wheelhouse. “Say, where’s the captain? We’re going to run those birds down!”

The ensign pointed out of the starboard doorway with his thumb. Maryk strode across and glanced back at the flagbag. “Well,” he said quickly. “All engines stop.” He took a battered red cardboard megaphone from a bracket under the port window, and walked out on the wing. The
Caine
slowed and rocked. “Boat-a-hoy,” Maryk called.

The officer in the attack boat called back, in a voice that came faintly over the water, young, strained, and unmistakably Southern, “Jacob Group Four. Ready to proceed to point of departure.”

Queeg poked his face in at the doorway of the pilothouse, exclaiming irritably, “What’s going on here? Who said anything about stopping? Who’s yelling to whom here?”

The executive officer shouted to the captain from the other wing, “Sorry, sir, it looked like we were overshooting these boys, so I stopped. It’s Jacob Four. They’re ready to proceed.”

“Well, all right,” called the captain. “Let’s get it over with, then. What’s course and distance to the point of departure?”

“Course 175, distance 4000, sir.”

“Kay, Steve. You take the conn and get us there.” Queeg disappeared. Maryk turned toward the attack boat, and the boat officer put his megaphone to his ear to catch the message. “We-will-proceed,” the executive officer boomed. “Follow-us. Good-luck.”