Trial by Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Well, sir,” Chuck replied, pointing to the schematic. “We started at the fire-main control valve block in Bay One. It’s right where it’s supposed to be, starboard side, back end of the bay, deck-mounted. Six valve wheels, six twin connection pipes, and five hose lockers right next to them.”

  “Okay, and?”

  “Plan says there’s supposed to be eight connection pipes.”

  “Aw, shit,” J.R. muttered. “What else?”

  Bill Sauer took up the report. He was just over five-six and already showing signs of an incipient weight problem. He sported a razor-thin moustache on his upper lip, which made him look faintly ridiculous. “The five hose lockers are empty,” he said. “No fire hoses, no nozzles, no applicators. There’s also supposed to be something called a cage-stack for foam cans. Not there.”

  “Were you able to trace the actual lines that feed that control valve block?” J.R. asked, studying the plan again. “Should be a four-inch line coming up from the second deck that connects to the starboard-side fire main below the hangar deck.”

  “Um,” Chuck said. “Line? At OCS they told us line was the Navy word for rope?”

  J.R. took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “You said: pipes. In the Navy, piping is referred to as ‘lines.’ Main steam line. Hydraulic fluid lines. Fresh water lines. Like that. Wires are referred to as cabling or cable-bundles. Those square metal structures mounted on the overhead—that’s the ceiling—that supply ventilation air to a compartment? They’re called vent ducts. Where they meet or originate—that’s a plenum chamber. Those really big square ducts on the starboard side of the hangar bay, right under the island? They supply combustion air to the boilers. They’re called intakes. The big round pipes next to them that take the products of combustion back out of the boiler fireboxes? Those are called the uptakes.”

  The two ensigns nodded dutifully, with expressions on their faces that said: if you say so, sir.

  “Once again,” J.R. asked. “Was there a four-, maybe six-inch-diameter line coming up from the deck below connected to the bottom of that valve block?”

  The two youngsters looked at each other. They simultaneously produced another embarrassed “um.”

  “Okay, guys,” J.R. said. “You’re new to this. I understand. Your assignment is to take the plan or schematic I give you and physically lay hands on every valve, valve block, and line—pipe—shown on the plan. I’ll want you to do this one again.”

  “Yes, sir, sorry, sir,” Chuck said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” J.R. said. “You’ll get the hang of it pretty quick. By the way, what info you did bring back was vitally important, okay? Good work. My only concern is that there are three hundred fifty schematics to go. Preferably before we go back into Injun Country.”

  J.R. made some notes after they left. The empty lockers weren’t the yard’s fault. The ship was responsible for hoses, nozzles, and applicators. The missing two fire-main risers were a more serious problem, and they wouldn’t probably ever be fixed. One thing was clear: the sweet and sour twins’ first foray into systems verification had already uncovered some problems. He couldn’t imagine what they might find when they got into that conflagration station. He was reminded of something the ship’s superintendent, the engineering duty officer who’d been responsible for all the shipyard jobs on the carrier, had said after a meeting with the captain.

  He wants everything right now, doesn’t he. Gets all excited. Yells at people. Wants it really bad.

  Yes, we know, J.R. had said.

  There’s an old labor union rule, brother: if you want it bad, you’re probably going to get it bad, know what I mean?

  Now he did. He took a deep breath and went to find the cheng.

  8

  George watched in awe as the first Marine Corps F4U-1D Corsair came aboard. He’d heard the plane’s engine was so long that the pilot couldn’t actually see the flight deck just before landing. He had to approach the ramp at an oblique angle and then turn sharply to line up with the flight deck just before touching down. After that he had to depend entirely on the landing signal officer (LSO) to tell him when to cut the engine. The Marine Corsairs were configured as fighter-bombers these days, capable of defending the carrier or joining in a strike with bombs, rockets, and machine-gun fire. George was one of many watching the Franklin’s new air group come aboard twenty miles offshore of Pearl Harbor. He was standing inside the air boss’s control station, called Primary Flight Control and known as PriFly, which was mounted high up on the port side of the island. Billy-B, the air boss, and his mini boss, Lieutenant Commander Joe DeSantis, were wholly immersed in the complex business of landing an entire air group, 108 planes.

  Just aft of PriFly was an open-air gallery which everyone called vultures’ row, where various spectators lined a catwalk to watch the show. There were also two movie cameramen posted at the very back, whose job was to film each landing. Their film would be used to reconstruct events whenever there was an accident or even a rough-enough landing that the aircraft was damaged. George got to watch from inside PriFly only because he was the XO. It had the advantage of being out of the relative gale whistling over the flight deck at almost forty miles an hour. Being in PriFly instead of on the bridge also meant he didn’t have to listen to the captain criticize every landing with a string of nasty comments. Billy-B, knowing why George hung out there, had had a coffee mug with the letters XO painted on it hung on the bulkhead with the rest of the PriFly crew’s mugs.

  George was particularly interested in those Corsairs, because they’d had a rocky start in carrier aviation due to some technical problems with their landing gear and the pilot’s inability to see the actual landing threshold when coming aboard. The Navy had taken them off carriers and sent them to the Marines in the Solomons as land-based fighters, where they’d become famous. Now, with the landing gear problems resolved, they were replacing the trusty F6F Hellcat, mostly because of their impressive speed, armor, bomb capacity, and rate of climb. Their new air group had one Navy Corsair squadron and one Marine Corps Corsair squadron. A Corsair was immediately identifiable by its extra-long nose, which contained a 2800 horsepower Double Wasp engine, and its distinctive gull wings. The Navy was determined to get them back aboard the carriers because of their dual capability, fighter or bomber, or both.

  The next Corsair made its approach as the one which had just landed was hustled forward on the flight deck to the nearest available elevator. As soon as it was clear of the landing zone, the crash barrier netting rose up off the flight deck and locked back into position. The flight deck crews had to really hustle to get the barrier set back up in time for the next landing. Billy-B, standing at the window with a microphone in his hand, was focused on the approaching Corsair, evaluating the approach. Suddenly he was shaking his head. He keyed the mike: “No chance, Paddles; no chance.”

  His voice echoed over the entire flight deck through topside speakers. The LSO frantically began waving off the approaching pilot, who gunned his engine and, wings wobbling, clawed for altitude while banking left and away from the flight deck. George nodded. He’d thought the guy was too low, too. The wave-off flew away from the carrier and then began the process of rejoining the landing pattern. The next plane was already on short final and beginning his turn in toward the ramp. Then the hated buzzer went off. Billy rolled his eyes, then gestured for George to pick up; he had to stay focused on the approaching Corsair. The LSOs were in control, but the air boss had the final say as to whether or not an approach was good enough.

  “PriFly, XO speaking, sir,” George said.

  “Was that one of those damned Marines?” the captain asked.

  “I wasn’t paying attention to his markings, Captain, and I can’t see them now.”

  “I think it was,” the captain said. “Those guys can’t land for shit. If he gets waved off again, tell Boss to send him back to Pearl.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” George said.

  The next plane got abo
ard. It wasn’t pretty, but he made it without scaring anybody, at least not too much. And yes, George noted, it was one of the Marine aviators. He told Billy-B what the captain had said.

  “Man’s got a hard-on for those jungle bunnies,” Billy said. “Don’t know why.”

  Then he squinted at the next Corsair coming in and keyed his microphone again. “Power, power, power, Paddles!”

  The approaching plane appeared to be making the same mistake as the waved-off fighter. The pilot firewalled his throttle, his hose-nosed beast responded, and then he landed hard enough to burst both his tires, although he did manage to catch a wire. The flight deck crew signaled the pilot to ignore his flattened tires and taxi forward; the next Corsair was already making his approach. George decided he’d had enough excitement for one morning. He had several hundred carrier landings under his belt and watching the new guys was stomach-churning sometimes.

  He went into the island to the ladder well and then paused. He knew he really should go up to the bridge but he simply wasn’t up to listening to more of the captain’s constant carping and criticism. He decided to go down instead, all the way to the hangar deck. He wanted to observe how the hangar crews were handling the steady stream of fighters, torpedo planes, and bombers coming down from the flight deck. Not all of them would end up below; those that did had to be slotted carefully into parking positions with their wings folded. That required a noisy ballet of yellow-gear, as the plane-tugs were called. A plane would arrive at the threshold of the hangar bay, where a tug would hook it up and then pull it off the elevator and into the depths of the hangar bay according to a preassigned plan. The elevator would rise again amid a clamor of warning bells to grab the next customer.

  The whole scene was a blur of what looked like motorized chaos: planes, roaring tractor-tugs, gesturing wing-walkers, crawling tie-down crews, all hustling through an atmosphere of yellow-gear exhaust, shouting chief petty officers, a flurry of hand signals interspersed with the crash-bang sound of the next plane touching down up above. Each landing sounded like an actual crash to the uninitiated down on the hangar deck, but George had long ago learned to differentiate the sounds from the flight deck. There were enough new guys doing this that there seemed to be an inordinate amount of shouting, but, as he observed from a gallery platform above the actual hangar deck, it appeared to be coming together. That said, they weren’t ready for a visit from the captain. Fortunately, Himself was nailed to the bridge until flight operations ended. God willing.

  He spied two very young-looking officers amid all the frenetic activity, clambering over a nest of firefighting piping over on one side of the middle bay. One of them had a clipboard, the other a flashlight. They seemed to be doing a hand-over-hand inspection of some kind. Two ensigns: one loose with a pencil. He grinned when he remembered the old Navy saying: the three most dangerous things in the Navy were a boatswain’s mate with a brain, a yeoman with muscle, and an ensign with a pencil. He went on down to check them out. He was about eight feet away when one of them finally spotted him and snapped to attention, nearly hitting his head on an overhead cable bundle. The other one scrambled to straighten up and dropped his clipboard. Definitely ensigns.

  “At ease, gents,” George said. He had to almost shout to make himself heard over all the racket around them. “What’ya doing?”

  Ensign Sauer started to explain but it was hopeless with all the engine noises. George indicated a nearby hatch. They went through into one of the interior passageways where normal speech was possible. Sauer explained their mission. Way to go, Lieutenant McCauley, George thought.

  “What are you finding?” he asked. This time it was Ensign Sweet who replied.

  “Well, sir,” he began. “The fire-main system is sorta like the plans.”

  “Sorta like?”

  “Yes, sir. What we were told to do was take one branch and go back to where it starts, say at a main riser up against the side bulkhead of the hangar bay. Then we trace it all the way to the last branch and outlet where a fire hose could be attached.”

  “Makes sense,” George said, nodding. “How much of the system diagram is accurate?”

  Sweet looked at Sauer. “Fifty percent?” he said. “More or less. Unless we’re doing it wrong.”

  Good God, George thought. Fifty percent? “Do you think you’re doing it wrong?” he asked.

  “Um, no, sir,” Sweet said. “Mister McCauley said to trace the piping hand over hand, and then compare it with the drawings and plans. Where it didn’t jibe, correct the plans—in pencil.”

  He wondered if the cheng was aware of this. “Okay, guys,” he said. “Good work. Important, no, vital work. When things turn to shit, we have to know where to find firefighting water. I’d tell you to go faster, but in this case, accuracy trumps speed. Carry on.”

  They replied with a pair of aye, aye, sir’s, and went back to work. George pulled out his little green wheelbook and noted what he’d just heard. Fifty percent? The captain would have a cow. As he went back out into the hangar bay, he had an irreverent thought: if the captain had enough cows, they could have steaks forever. He laughed out loud, then sobered his face. Fifty percent wrong: Jee-zus. What about the rest of it—all the new electronics, the second catapult, the main plant upgrades? Had the captain’s constant bitching and moaning in the shipyard led to the realization of that old shipyard union rule?

  At that moment he heard the thump of another plane landing topside, except it seemed to come from too far back. The thump was followed by a prolonged screech of metal interspersed with the unmistakable sounds of a propeller chewing its way along the wooden flight deck. Then silence. Then the flight deck crash alarm.

  George hurried across to the starboard side of the hangar bay and then up a succession of gallery ladders to get to the flight deck. By then Klaxon horns were blaring and he could hear men running and shouting as he neared the hatch leading to the flight deck. He got out there in time to see the tail assembly of a Corsair going vertical and then right over the port side edge of the flight deck. There was no fire, but there were men down on the flight deck, probably victims of wooden splinters from that enormous prop taking 2800 horsepower bites out of the flight deck. The LSO was waving off the next plane in the pattern, so George made a run for it across the flight deck to the port side catwalks. He had to hop over an arresting wire that was coiling its way back to the landing area. He spotted the plane in the carrier’s wake as soon as he dropped down into a catwalk. Its nose was underwater and its tail was standing up. There was just enough chop in the sea that he couldn’t make out whether the canopy was open, and, of course, the carrier was already leaving the scene at twenty-seven knots. One of the escorting destroyers was closing in on the plane in the water, shooting off a big plume of steam from her stack as she crashed back to full astern in order to stop in time. Then they were just too far away to see what was happening back there.

  George knew the carrier wouldn’t stop—there were still more planes waiting to get aboard. If they delayed landings, the remaining airborne planes might have to abort due to low fuel and return to port. That would screw up the schedule big-time. If the pilot had gotten out after his crash landing the tin can would have him. If not, well, the show must go on. He decided to get out of the way and head to the bridge. He’d experienced one ditching in his torpedo squadron days. He vividly remembered the rib-crushing belly punch of the sudden stop, his forehead smacking the console as his plane stood on its head, that heavy engine seemingly anxious to play submarine, the mental confusion, the blood in his eyes, and then banging away at his strap release as water filled the cockpit and the ambient light began to turn green.

  “Was that another Goddamned Marine?” the captain bellowed at him as soon as he stepped into the pilothouse. His face was redder than usual and the bridge watch team were studiously not looking anywhere near in his direction.

  “I’ll find out, sir,” George said. “Lemme call PriFly.”

  “Then find
out who that LSO is. That guy was too low, much too low. Anybody could see that. We’re Goddamned lucky we didn’t have a ramp-strike. Tell Boss to resume flight operations. I haven’t got all Goddamned day. And get another LSO out there. Now, got it?”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” George said, as the captain strode back out onto the port bridgewing.

  George called PriFly, identified himself, and asked for the boss. “Yes, sir, XO?” Billy answered, obviously upset.

  “Captain says to resume flight ops and get the rest of this gaggle aboard, Billy. Was that a Marine Corsair?”

  “Yes, sir, it was. He was too low, firewalled the throttle and the engine hesitated. One second, but that was enough with his sink-rate. We’re lucky we didn’t get a ramp strike.”

  “Exactly what the captain said,” George said. “And he wants a new Paddles out there. Any word on the pilot?”

  “They got him,” Boss said. “He’s got a broken nose and he’s pretty shook up, but they got him back. Nugget, of course.”

  “Yeah, I assumed that. Okay. Anybody going dry up there?”

  “No, sir, not yet. They filled up at Hickam, so they should be good for another hour at least.”

  “I recommend you extend the interval, Billy,” George said. “Pretend we’re off P-Cola and that these are all nuggets.”

  “Pretend, XO?”

  “Okay, yeah, but get ’em all down in one piece, and then we’ll work on speeding up the land-launch cycle. Is the Marine squadron commander aboard yet?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Get him up to PriFly; put him on a land-launch circuit. Let him coach his shaky-Jakes.”

  “Understood, XO.”

  George hung up and went out to the port bridgewing, where the captain was watching the flight deck crew reset the arresting wires and sweep all the bits and pieces of wood off the flight deck. The wind coming across the flight deck was so strong that all they had to do was throw the splinters and pieces into the air and they were overboard in an instant. He looked into the sky and saw about twenty aircraft orbiting lazily outside of the pattern, waiting for the orders to land. That’s when he realized that there was indeed no pretending: the air group, just like the ship, was made up of lots and lots of new guys.