The Edge of Honor (59 page)

Down below on the forecastle, Brian could see the chief boatswain directing First Division in the final lash down of seamanship gear in anticipation of heavy weather. The mooring lines had been struck below and all the portable damage-control equipment and fenders were being lashed into place with twenty-one-thread manila line. The nylon webbing they called snaking, which was laced through the lifelines to catch a man before he was washed through the lines an dover the side, paradoxically had to be rolled up and struck below in the face of really heavy weather, or the waves would tear every bit of it off. The men staggered around the broad forecastle as the ship rolled. With the seas astern, the forecastle was still dry, but when the body of the storm caught up with them, Hood inevitably would have to come about and face the seas to keep from being swamped. By then, things could get very interesting, Brian thought, especially as this would probably happen at night. Brian waved to Jack Folsom and the chief boatswain as they checked over the lash-down on the forecastle. They both waved back, and then Brian felt the first hot breath of the typhoon and heard a moaning sound begin in the running rigging of the forward mast.

Brian bumped awake later that night hi momentary panic, his ribs wedged against the storm railing on the edge of his bunk, the aluminum rail pushed so tightly into his side that he could almost not breathe. While he was still gathering his wits, he was thrown to the other side of his rack, bouncing off the padded aluminum bulkhead, his head buffeted by his book collection that was slithering all around the top end of his bunk. As he tried to sit up, he was once again heaved over to port, the movement amplified by a stomach-hollowing drop in the bow, followed seconds later by the thrash of a large sea against the exterior bulkhead. He shook his head in the darkness, awake now, but the ship rolled again, this time way over to starboard, and he was flattened once more against the exterior bulkhead. Gotta get ahold of something, he thought. Gonna get pitched on the deck. He could not hear anything in the stateroom but the roar of the wind outside, a steady, sustained rush, with ghosts of sounds like thunder and crashing waves barely audible over the massive sound of the wind. Taifun.

He had met with Jack Folsom and the chief just after sunset on the flight deck, all of them wearing kapok life jackets and staying close to the inboard lifelines that had been rigged out in strategic places around the ship. The Clementine helo was tied down in the hangar. Hood had slowed to only ten knots. The horizon was a mass of boiling black clouds for nine-tenths of its circumference, flickering with distant lightning, with only one bloodred wedge of light showing to the west to confirm the sunset.

The ship still tried to claw her way west, but the seas were building rapidly, sometimes being engulfed by the giant swells, sometimes riding on top of them and crashing alongside in acres of seething foam, red in the light of the sunset. What was it the chief had said? “God’s on the move.” He lost his foothold in the bedding and cringed as he was thrown against the exterior bulkhead.

Sounds like God’s here, he thought, and He’s not happy.

He rolled onto his back and jammed himself diagonally in the bunk, wedging his feet on the bottom pan of the upper bunk to stabilize himself. The bow rose sharply, coming impossibly far up, then hung suspended for an instant before dropping into a watery Grand Canyon with a sickening rush, bottoming out finally in a huge wash of water that broke over the forecastle, loud enough to penetrate the shrieking wind for just an instant. Something hit him in the face: his red-lens flashlight. He grabbed for it as it almost rolled over the side of the bunk, lost his upside-down foothold, and was again thrown against the exterior bulkhead. Love my bulkhead.

It took him two roll cycles to stabilize, and he had to clench the flashlight under his chin. At one end of a roll, he switched it on, then had to grab metal again. The bobbing red light showed his room in a shambles, with chairs, uniforms, the wastebasket, and most of his paperwork sliding around on the deck. Only the boxes of WESTPAC Exchange goodies remained in place, the twenty-one-thread line doing its job. He looked at his watch; 0215. When he’d gone to bed at 2200, the ship had been rolling and pitching, but nothing like this.

Well, I guess it caught up with us, he thought, as the bow slammed into another monster wave with enough force to stop the ship in her tracks, quivering from end to end.

Then he heard another sound, but he could not quite place it as the wind rose in volume to a prolonged shriek before being drowned out by the roar of another wave crashing on deck. He figured it out: the telephone.

He thought he had heard the telephone ring. The phone was mounted on the bulkhead next to his desk. His heart fell: He would have to get out of his bunk to get it. No problem, he thought. Just let go. Ship’ll pitch you right over to the other side of the room, and then when you get flung back, you’ll be on the telephone … He jammed the flashlight into the space between mattress and bunk edge to provide some light, rolled over on his side, and grasped the storm rail along the side of his bunk with both hands. On the next roll to port, he half-slid, half-fell out of the bunk and onto the deck, where he hung suspended as the deck sloped thirty degrees down until the ship righted herself and rolled back over to starboard. On the next roll, he got up on his knees, put his right arm through the bunk’s storm rail, and reached up and grabbed the phone with his left. But he promptly dropped it when the ship lurched over to port for several seconds before bounding up under him into a corkscrew as the bow caught another greenie. He lost his grip on the rail and was rolled over under the steel sink, where he grabbed the sink supports and splayed his legs again to try to find a purchase. The phone, dangling from it cord, was bouncing against the small of his back, so he grabbed it and shouted his name.

“Mr. Holcomb, this is the OOD,” came a voice, barely audible above the howling wind outside. “The gig has broken loose in its skids. I got the chief and First Division comin’ up to the boat decks.”

“Where’s Mr. Folsom?”

“He’s got OOD; cap’n said to call you right away.”

“Okay,” Brian shouted. “I’ll try to get aft.”

He tried to hang the phone up but gave it up after cartwheeling around the room and banging his shins on an overturned chair. Moving between roll cycles, he crawled around the room to retrieve his uniform, then rolled over on his back on the rug to pull on his shirt and pants. It took him a few minutes to find his boots in all the debris on the deck and another minute to get his hands on the flashlight. That was the easy part. Getting through the ship to the boat decks would be the fun part.

The trek to the boat decks took him fifteen minutes of crawling and crabbing through the passageways, down one ladder and up another one before fetching up in a small vestibule in front of the hatch leading out to the weather decks. During the whole time, he had not encountered a single human being. He imagined that anyone not on watch was hanging on for dear life in his rack or on the deck in the berthing compartments. A lot of the crew’s berthing was up forward, where it must be pretty lively. He had managed to retain his flashlight, which was good, because a short circuit had taken out the red night lights in the vestibule. On the other side of the hatch, the wind and the seas were doing their best to batter their way in, even though this particular hatch faced aft. The hatch was dogged full down, but a slick of salt water sloshed the vestibule. The noise here was overwhelming and he had to work hard to find a wedging position that would allow him to remain in one place as the big ship bucked and heaved.

He felt his trouser leg being tugged and he looked down the ladder.

Chief Martinez grinned up at him in the light of the flashlight. He had one paw on the ladder railing; the other held the bitter end of a six-inch-circumference nylon mooring line. With a kapok life jacket and climbing harness on, the chief completely filled the ladder way, so he didn’t need to wedge in place. A coil of twenty-one-thread manila line was looped over his left shoulder. There were two deck apes behind and below him, wedged together in the bottom of the ladder way, their frightened faces white in the shadows. Brian tried to say something, but conversation was simply not possible in the wind noise. It was like standing next to a fighter with its jet engines running full out, a sustained roar interweaved with higher-frequency shrieks.

The chief pantomimed his intentions: I’m going out there. Brian shook his head. No way. The chief nodded vigorously and drew a picture in the air of the gig up on its davit skids, and then of him wrapping the mooring line around it, and then some men in the passageway below pulling on the huge line and securing the boat back in its skids. Brian knew that the gig weighed twelve tons. It had probably broken its gripes and was swinging free in its davit arms. If it broke all the way loose, it would careen down the starboard side, and, if they were lucky, it would be snatched clear of the ship by a passing wave.

If they were not, it could be picked up by a wave and thrown through the helo hangar or into the gun mounts aft. They could not just let it go.

The chief watched him work it out, then moved up into the hatchway vestibule, a space that was only four feet by three. The two men at the bottom of the ladder became four and then six as they heaved coils of the mooring line into the passageway below the ladder until there was about 150 feet of heavy nylon line coiled at the base. Brian caught an occasional glimpse of arms and legs flailing around on the deck as the men tried to hang on. The chief motioned for Brian to help him haul the coils up the ladder, recoiling it in front of the hatch, which was visibly vibrating on its coaming. The chief then signaled one of the men, who threw him a climbing harness, which he passed to Brian, indicating that he was to put it on. Brian complied and the chief snapped the stainless-steel clamps onto a fire-extinguisher bracket next to the hatch, leaving Brian about three feet of freedom. Martinez wrapped one coil of the six-inch nylon around his waist, laid the bitter end against the standing part, and secured it with twenty-one-thread line tied in a bowline. He signaled again and one of the men threw him a steel helmet, which he jammed on his head, securing it with a chin strap. He checked that his knife was accessible in his boot holster and pushed Brian back against the inner bulkhead of the vestibule. He lifted the hatch handle.

The thirty-pound hatch whipped open, banging all the way back against the exterior bulkhead, sucked out into the maelstrom by the pressure differential created by 120-knot winds. Then it blew back into their faces, nearly decapitating the chief, before flying back out again, this time catching on its holdback. Brian, stunned by the attack of the hatch, forgot to hold on and was himself sucked partway out onto the boat decks for what seemed like an eternity. While the chief was grabbing the back of his harness and trying to pull him in, Brian got a face-to face look at a typhoon.

The roaring wind overwhelmed all other sounds, including the incessant thunder and lightning. Although it was fully dark, the lightning was almost continuous, flaring in great sheets across the night sky and stabbing into the mountainous seas, raising blasts of steam that were instantly blown flat. The wind drew sheets of rain horizontally across the boat decks, lashing everything in sight, hitting Brian’s face so hard that he had to shield his eyes and curl his fingers against the stinging force of the rain. Every few seconds, a mountain of black water would stride down the side, followed by great sheets of spray as the bow blasted a way through the next wave.

All of the guy wires on the davits and replenishment gear crackled with blue-white static discharges. The boat decks looked like a mudflat as the tide comes in, with sheets of water sliding across the metal.

And then he was back inside the vestibule, wedged between the bulk of the chief and the bulkhead. Framed in the open hatch, they could see the port and starboard boat davits, each with two boats stacked one over the other. In the flare of lightning the gig, top boat in the starboard davits, swung out over the side with every roll to starboard and then lurched back, thumping into the skid when the ship went back to port.

Although he could not hear it, Brian thought that he could feel the boat hit the skids.

How in the hell was the chief going to get across the open boat decks?

He looked up at the chief and framed the question with his eyes, but Martinez just grinned, a flash of white teeth in that simian face. He poised in the hatch, waiting for the ship to finish a roll to port. As she started back, he ran straight out onto the boat decks, pointing aft along the centerline until the wind caught him. He then did a belly flop into the sheeting seawater, sliding almost to the after end of the boat decks. As the ship rolled, he slid with her, suspended on the wet deck by the mooring line, his body describing a great arc across to the starboard lifelines, where he grabbed on. A wave came aboard and buried him under ten feet of roaring water.

Brian grabbed the mooring line and started hauling in to take out the slack, gesturing for some of the men to climb the ladder to help. But the first man up into the vestibule was the exec, suited out in a kapok jacket, his khaki trousers, and a T-shirt. He backed Brian up on the line, peering out the hatch and shaking his head in disbelief at the scene outside. Three men came behind him to take a hand with the heavy mooring line. Looking out, Brian saw to his horror that the mooring line had gone over the starboard side, which meant that Martinez, if he was still there, was suspended over the side. Just then the next wave came sliding by and Martinez have into view above the lifeline, neck-deep in the crest of the wave and grappling along the line until he regained a hand hold in the lifelines. Brian and the exec pulled hard on the mooring line, which tightened under the lifeline, enabling Martinez to scrabble back under the lifeline, only to have the next roll start him on another great arc, this time to the port side.