Trial by Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Cabling? Why?”

  “Because of the stuffing tubes.”

  The captain gave a pained expression. “What the hell is a stuffing tube?”

  “The ship is divided into hundreds of watertight and airtight compartments, sir. When a cable run has to penetrate a watertight bulkhead or deck, it goes through a stuffing tube, which lets the cable through but not water or smoke. The tubes are sized to the diameter of the cable or the bundle of cables going through it, then welded into the bulkhead.”

  “So?” the captain asked, impatiently.

  “I’m hearing rumors that there’s not enough room in the existing stuffing tubes to pass all the new cabling through,” Walt said.

  “And so, the yard is putting in additional tubes, right?”

  “Apparently, nobody at BuShips thought about that. There aren’t any tubes available.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said the captain. “XO, did you know about this?”

  George shook his head. “The ship’s supe hasn’t mentioned it to me, Captain. I’ll run this down.”

  “Goddamn right you will, XO,” the captain growled. “Look, you’re supposed to be on top of this entire yard availability. Corral the department heads and get me a reading, especially on shit like this. I do not want any more surprises, got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” George said, even as he wondered if the captain knew just how many repair and modernization projects were under way in Franklin. For that matter, he doubted that even the department heads knew.

  “And you, Cheng,” the captain continued. “You can stop hiding behind your boilers and turbines. We’re not running a union shop here. If your main-hole work is done, get involved in tracking the combat system stuff. You’re a ship driver. The XO, air boss, and the navigator are aviators, like me. We depend on you black-shoes to keep track of what’s being done to the ship. All of it. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Walt said.

  “I want a report in forty-eight hours,” the captain said. “That’s all.”

  They left Captain’s Country, trying to ignore the sympathetic looks from the Marine sentries and office yeomen. The captain had a voice to match his oversized frame and they’d undoubtedly heard every word. George headed for his office down below; the chief engineer fled to the Engineering Log Room.

  George called a quick department head meeting in his office thirty minutes later. The navigator, Commander Alvin “Big Al” Frost; the air boss, Commander William “Billy-B” Perkins; the chief engineer; and the supply officer, Lieutenant Commander Benton “Chop” Crockett, Supply Corps, arrived fifteen minutes later. George cleared the office of yeomen, told the department heads what the captain wanted, and then waited for the bitching to start. He gave them a minute to squawk and then held up his hand.

  “Easy way or hard way, gentlemen,” he declared. “Easy way is for all of you to get around the table and go over all the jobs. I’ll chair it, and we’ll comb every one of the projects for surprises. The alternative is that I’ll send you each individually to see the captain, so he can, ahem, share his thinking with you, and you with him.”

  That stopped the noise, and then George explained exactly how he wanted to do this. Two hours later they were all pretty much on the same page, so George ended the meeting. He told the duty yeomen that he was going ashore and, if anybody asked where he was, to tell them he’d taken the ferry over to Seattle in search of whiskey, wild women, and maybe even an opium den. The guys pretended to take all of that seriously. One of them even asked him how to spell opium.

  It took five minutes to get from his office, up to the hangar bay, out onto one of the sponson decks, down the hundred-foot-long brow, and out onto the actual pier. It was, of course, raining, but his thoughts were on a much-needed Scotch. And maybe even a phone call to Karen, he thought, although it would be pretty late back East. God damn this war and everything Japanese, he muttered, as he slouched through the eternal Pacific Northwest rain, taking care not to step in crane tracks on his way to the BOQ. He could see the flash of welding arcs through Franklin’s open hangar bay doors as he made his way down her port side to the head of the drydock. The carrier was afloat in the drydock, her underwater hull having already been sandblasted and recoated with anti-fouling paint. The 100-foot-high pier cranes rose into the rainy mist, their white lights casting cones of jittering lights and shadows against the carrier’s sides.

  Karen had once brought a nephew down to the Portsmouth piers. The little boy had been five and he’d looked up at the towering mass of gray-painted steel and declared: that’s a really big boat. It had become an inside, personal joke between them. Karen would never refer to Franklin by name, only by the term: really big boat. It was one of her endearing features, he thought, and then jumped sideways when a crane right next to him got under way with a clamor of warning bells.

  He chided himself. I should have just stayed aboard and gone to bed, he thought. On the other hand, there were no buzzers in the BOQ. And there was his increasingly good friend, a jug of twelve-year-old Macallan. He hoped Karen would still be awake and not elbow deep in some gory procedure or another. He’d often speculated as to whether they were “in love” or just a man and a woman who were very comfortable with each other. Their few experiences in the bedroom had been entirely satisfactory but hardly scenes of great passion.

  The problem was this Goddamned war. When they could manage to get together after work, they’d both been exhausted, she by the demands of wartime surgery as the fighting climaxed in Europe, and he by the avalanche of admin and personnel problems attendant to bringing a huge ship to life. Captain Shoemaker was hardly a slave driver, but the sheer scale of activating such a large ship and crew wore them both down. As often as not an evening together consisted of dinner in the Portsmouth Naval Hospital BOQ dining room, followed by a hot shower, a quick cuddle, some preliminary moves, and then instant sleep. Everyone in the Navy was tired, with no end in sight for the foreseeable future. Hanging over all that had been the certain knowledge that he was going to sail away to the far Western Pacific in a few weeks, coming back, if he came back, God only knew when. They’d both wondered aloud how all those gorgeous characters in those wartime romances portrayed by Hollywood had found the Goddamned time.

  5

  Three weeks later, not two, George stood on the starboard bridgewing as ten tugboats extracted Franklin out of the drydock. It was raining, of course, but George was wearing his regulation black Navy trench coat and his “brass” hat, so he was relatively dry. The sailors manning their sea-detail stations wore peacoats, but their white “Dixie Cup” hats did little to keep their faces dry. The captain sat in his chair behind him, staring straight ahead. George thought he looked hungover. He hadn’t said two words to the yard’s harbor pilot who was wrangling the tugs on an FM radio. Every time the pilot gave an order the tugs would acknowledge with a hoot of their horns. The ship was on her own power now, but the main engines wouldn’t be used to execute the delicate maneuver of sliding a 36,000-ton aircraft carrier out of a drydock that allowed only eighteen feet of room between her steel sides and the waiting granite edges of the dock.

  George was just as happy with that arrangement. The captain had insisted that he would conn the ship alongside the pier in Bremerton when they’d arrived from Pearl. He’d made a hash of it, damaging the pier and parting several mooring lines, much to the embarrassment of the crew lining the flight deck. The shipyard pilot, whose services the captain had imperiously rejected, remained standing on the bridge with one of the best stone faces George had ever seen, appearing to enjoy the scenery. It had been a clear day for once and the Olympic mountain range had been in full view. Today George was quietly grateful for the rule that required a yard pilot for any evolution involving a drydock.

  The one-week delay had been caused by a laundry list of relatively small projects, and of course, it had been George’s fault for not having employed the lash to make the shipyard workers go faster. The captain’
s daily tantrums had actually had the opposite effect among the civilian shipyard workers, who’d begun to bait him as he stood there criticizing. Their favorite trick was to see him coming, wink and nod, and then all of them stop working. When he’d approach and demand to know why, the foreman would tell him that they were waiting for a particular tool that, unfortunately, was being used in another ship. The foreman would declare, with a perfectly straight face, that they couldn’t proceed until they got their hands on the frammus or whatever, and, unfortunately, the yard owned only one frammus. The captain would then stomp off to call the shipyard’s commanding officer, and then everyone would get back to what they’d been doing. Walt Forrest had been the one who told George that this was going on. By then George, seasoned aviator that he was, knew that there was absolutely zero point in his raising hell with the much-maligned ship’s superintendent.

  But now Big Ben was actually moving, although more like a glacier than a fast attack carrier. She was being moved to a regular pier, where she’d be fueled and provisioned, a two-day task. Then there’d be a sea trial to make sure everything worked, after which she’d sail back to Pearl with a four-destroyer escort. George knew that this would be no holiday cruise to Hawaii. The captain had written up a nonstop refresher training program that would introduce all the new crewmen to the business of operating such a big ship. Then, once they got to Pearl, the air group would embark, and then there’d be another two weeks at sea while the various squadrons were integrated into the ship’s operations.

  The captain’s training program proposed a punishing pace, which George actually thought was entirely appropriate. Once they left Pearl for the Western Pacific, all the drills and exercises would become real all too soon and this would no longer be a training cruise. Besides, the admirals would expect Big Ben to arrive on station off Japan ready to fight and fight hard on the very first day. He knew that those expectations might be really hard to meet. Franklin had been there before, right from the beginning of her operational life, through several of the 1944 island campaigns, but George wondered if the big brass realized how many of the carrier’s new crew had never even been to sea.

  “XO?”

  George turned around. “Yes, sir?”

  “You see that man sitting on that ammo locker down there, starboard side, forward?”

  George looked down at the 300 feet of flight deck stretching out in front of the island. The crew had been ordered to “man the rails,” which meant they were supposed to line up on the edge of the flight deck, facing outward, and stand at parade rest. Way up toward the forward edge of the flight deck one sailor had decided to rest his feet.

  “Put that man on report, XO,” the captain said. “I won’t tolerate lollygagging when they’re supposed to be on Goddamn man-the-sides parade, got it?”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” George said mechanically, and reached for a phone to call the master-at-arms office. The harbor pilot was standing near the centerline conning console waiting for the carrier’s bow to clear the sill of the drydock. George saw him give a slow-motion sympathetic shake of his head as he watched George make the call. They exchanged a quick look. Lucky you, the pilot’s expression said.

  6

  Four days later, not the predicted two, Gary stood in one corner of the boiler-front area in number two fireroom, watching his snipes prepare to light off 3B boiler. It was a comfortable eighty-five degrees in the fireroom, courtesy of January temperatures outside and the fact that neither boiler was as yet on the line. He reviewed the preliminary steps to actually lighting fires: valve and piping lineups, filling the boiler with hot feedwater, circulating fuel oil through the steam heaters for one hour, water tests on the feedwater and the deareating (DA) feed tank, high-pressure and low-pressure drains lineups, and the main steam valves closed to build pressure. The list went on, but he knew every step of it, as did the chief boilertender and his senior petty officers. The new boots, so-called because many of them had come to the ship directly from boot camp, were nervously following orders without having the first idea of what they were doing or why.

  The boilers were Babcock & Wilcox M-types. The front of the boiler supported the burners: four on the left side to make steam; three more on the right side to superheat that steam from 450 degrees to 850 degrees. It was a two-stage process, because some of the machinery needed saturated steam to run their turbines, while the turbo-generators, the main engines, and certain large turbine-driven pumps needed superheated steam. The burner’s job was to mix hot oil and pressurized air to form a cone of vaporized fuel oil going into the firebox. To light off the boiler required four things: the boiler filled with purified feedwater and with all steam discharge valves shut, an electric motor-driven blower to force air into the firebox through the burner assemblies, and hot fuel oil available; the fourth thing was the torch, which, given the mechanical complexity of a steam plant, was something of a crude throwback. Until recently, the torch had been made up using a standard Navy mophead, soaked in diesel and gasoline, attached to a long wooden handle. Now it was a metal rod with a cotton head, but still soaked in a mixture of diesel oil and gasoline.

  When everything was ready, one of the snipes would open the lightoff port while another lit the torch. Since the firebox was being pressurized by the incoming air, inserting the flaming torch would inevitably create a tongue of fire blasting back up the handle, thus making it a perfect job for a brand-new fireman. Once the torch was inside the firebox, and still burning, the chief would cut in the fuel oil, which resulted in a small and relatively controlled explosion within the firebox. The torch would be withdrawn once the chief heard the thump of ignition and the boot was dancing around on the deckplates, desperately trying to avoid the serious flame front that was coming out of the lightoff port, much to the delight of the experienced hands.

  Then the boiler began the heat-up phase. Over the course of the next hour, the fires would be controlled to bring the boiler up to setpoint temperature and pressure by cutting in more burners, but slowly enough that the internal piping, firebox brickwork, and insulation had time to flex and expand. After that, steam would then be sent to the auxiliaries—feedwater pumps, the DA tank, fuel oil pumps, and to warm up the steam-driven forced-draft blowers.

  Gary noted the time and then made the traditional log entry: fires lighted under number three Baker boiler. He stood there for a while, watching the color of the light emanating from the firebox peephole, the various gauges as pressure began to climb, the boiler water level sight glass to make sure it wasn’t dropping, the smoke periscope to make sure he wasn’t blanketing the shipyard in a cloud of black boiler smoke. Or worse: a cloud of white smoke, which meant that a boiler explosion was imminent. He also listened carefully to the auxiliaries as they came on line, one by one, adding their noise to a familiar chorus of happy machines.

  Experienced steam-plant engineers needed only their ears to detect a mechanical problem in the making. He remembered that the skippers of his two destroyers had been able to hear a problem in the main plant before he did just from a change in the machinery sound, and to do so while they were on the bridge, three decks away. He grinned as the boot tried to figure out how to extinguish the still-burning torch and then yelled at him when he moved to snuff it out in an oil can. He intervened only because the chief of this firehouse was perfectly capable of letting the boot do that to teach him an indelible lesson, but Gary didn’t need a fire down here, if only because he didn’t want to attract the captain’s attention.

  The new captain had been on the warpath ever since the promised two-day departure date for sea trials had not materialized. There was a whole lot of khaki between Gary and the captain and, from what he’d heard about the new CO, he was more than happy to keep it that way. The chief engineer had told all the officers in the department just to keep their heads down and do their jobs to the best of their ability. Everybody be smart, he’d said: Let the Heroes deal with the Hero-in-Chief. Once we get to WestPac, I guarantee you’ll h
ave other things to think about, and most of those things will be bent on killing you.

  Gary saw that the boot, now looking very pleased with himself, was safely out of the way. He nodded to the chief. “Okay,” he said. “Now: light off three-Able boiler.”

  7

  J.R. McCauley saw his two sacrificial ensigns, both shanghaied from the weapons department, headed his way. He’d first met with them the day after the ship came out of the drydock, courtesy of an arrangement made between Lieutenant Commander Forrest and the weapons officer, Lieutenant Commander T.K. Hood. They’d been assigned to J.R.’s systems-trace project for two hours of every day; their divisional duties back in the weapons department awaited them when they were done. One had introduced himself as Chuck Sweet; the other as Bill Sauer. Both of them were ninety-day wonders, one from Iowa, the other from upstate New York, and fresh out of OCS. Even J.R. thought they looked like a couple of high school kids dressed for a costume party in their ill-fitting borrowed overalls. It had taken the Log Room yeomen about five minutes to start referring to them as the “sweet and sour” twins. The two ensigns were, for the moment, blissfully unaware of their nicknames. More importantly, they’d just completed their first hand-over-hand survey of one of the hangar bay fire-main systems. They had news.

  “It’s probably because we don’t know exactly what we’re doing,” Chuck said. He was the taller of the two, with a somewhat cherubic face. “But the stuff we looked at doesn’t match what’s shown on this plan.”

  “At all?” J.R. asked with a sinking feeling.