Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

by The Caine Mutiny(Lit)

  "No.... Any typhoons around?"

  "No. Mild disturbance to the southeast. We're probably catching the swell from it."

  "My wife is worried as hell about typhoons. She wrote me she keeps dreaming we get caught in one."

  "Well, hell, what if we do? We put the wind on our quarter or bow, depending where we are, and get the hell out. I hope that's our worst trouble on this cruise."

  They wedged their cups and saucers into the indented board on the side table, and went to their rooms. Willie decided against taking Phenobarbital. He switched on his bed lamp, read Dickens for about a minute, and fell asleep with the light shining in his face.

  "How the hell are they going to fuel in this sea?"

  Willie and Maryk stood on the careening port wing. It was ten o'clock in the morning. In the dismal yellow-gray daylight the sea was heaving and bubbling like black mud. White streaks of foam lay along the tops of the deep troughs. The wind pulled at Willie's eyelids. All around there was nothing to be seen but ridges and valleys of water, except at moments when the old minesweeper labored to the top of a swell. Then they caught glimpses of ships everywhere, the great battleships and carriers, the tankers, the destroyers, all plunging through waves which broke solidly on their forecastles and smashed into creamy streams. The Caine's forecastle was inches deep in water all the time. The anchors disappeared every few min-utes under black waves, and foam boiled down along the deck, piled against the bridgehouse, and sloshed over the side. It was not raining, but the air was like the air of a bathhouse. Dark gray clouds in masses tumbled overhead. The ship was rolling less than during the night, and pitching much more. The rising and dropping deck felt like the floor of an elevator.

  "I don't know," said the exec, "but the damned tankers are all flying Baker. They're going to try."

  "Mister officer of the deck," called the captain from the wheelhouse. "Barometer reading, please?"

  Willie shook his head wearily, went aft to glance at the in-strument, and reported at the door of the pilothouse, "Still steady at 29.42, sir."

  "Well, why do I have to keep asking for readings, here? You give me a report every ten minutes, now."

  "Christ," muttered Willie to the exec, "it's been steady for seven hours."

  Maryk trained his binoculars forward. The Caine shuddered for several seconds on the crest of a long swell, and dropped with a jarring splash into a trough. "Some can fueling from the New Jersey up there-broad on the bow-I think the fueling line parted-"

  Willie waited for the Caine to rise again, peering through his glasses. He saw the destroyer yawing violently near the battleship, trailing a snaky black hose. The fueling gear dan-gled crazily free from the battleship's main deck. "They're not going to get much fueling done here."

  "Well, maybe not, at that."

  Willie reported the accident to Queeg. The captain snuggled down in his chair, scratched his bristly chin, and said, "Well, that's their tough luck, not ours. I'd like some coffee."

  The task force kept up the attempt until early in the after-noon, at the cost of a lot of fueling hoses and steadying lines and dumped oil, while junior officers like Willie, on all the ships, made witty comments on the mental limitations of the fleet commander. They did not know, of course, that the ad-miral was committed to an air strike in support of a landing by General MacArthur on Mindoro, and had to fuel his ships, or else deprive the Army of air cover. At half-past one the task force discontinued fueling and began to run southwest to get out of the storm.

  Willie had the deck from eight to midnight. He came to the slow realization, during the watch, that this was extremely bad weather; weather to worry about; during a couple of steep rolls he had flickers of panic. He drew reassurance from the stolidity of the helmsman and the quartermasters, who hung onto their holds on wheel or engine-room telegraph, and droned obscene insults at each other in fatigued but calm tones, while the black wheelhouse rolled and fell and rose and trem-bled, and rain drummed on the windows, dripping inside in trickles on the deck. The other ships were invisible. Willie maintained station by radar ranges and bearings on the near-est tanker.

  At half-past eleven a drenched radioman staggered up to Willie with a storm warning. He read it and woke Maryk, who was dozing in the captain's chair, gripping the arms in his sleep to keep from pitching out. They went into the charthouse. Queeg, heavily asleep in the bunk over the desk, his mouth open, did not stir. "Hundred fifty miles away now, almost due east," Maryk murmured, pricking the chart with dividers.

  "Well, then, we're over in the navigable semicircle," said Willie. "By morning we'll be pretty well out of it."

  "Could be."

  "I'll be glad to see the sun again."

  "So will I."

  When Willie returned to his room after being relieved, he derived a curious warm confidence from the familiar surround-ings. Nothing had come adrift. The room was tidy, the desk lamp glowed brightly, and his favorite books stood firm and friendly on the shelf. The green curtain and a dirty pair of khaki trousers on a hook swayed back and forth with each groaning roll of the ship, sticking out at queer angles as though blown by a strong wind. Willie wanted very much to sleep deeply and wake to a smiling day, with all bad weather behind. He swallowed a Phenobarbital capsule, and was soon unconscious.

  He was awakened by loud crashing, smashing sounds from the wardroom. He started up and jumped to the deck, and noticed that it was slanting steeply to starboard; very steeply; so steeply that he could not stand on it. With horror he realized, through the fog of sleep, that this was not merely a roll. The deck was remaining slanted.

  Naked, he ran frantically to the dim red-lit wardroom, hold-ing himself off the starboard side of the passageway with both hands. The deck began slowly to come level again. All the wardroom chairs were piled up on the starboard bulkhead in a shadowy tangle of legs and backs and seats. As Willie came into the wardroom they started sliding to the deck again, re-peating the wild clatter. The pantry door hung open. The china cupboard had broken loose and pitched its contents to the deck. The wardroom crockery was a tinkling, sliding heap of pieces.

  The ship came upright, and dipped to port. The chairs stopped sliding. Willie checked the impulse to flee naked top-side. He ran back to his room and began pulling on trousers.

  Once more the deck heaved up and fell to starboard, and before Willie knew what was happening he had tumbled through the air into his bunk, and lay on the clammy hull it-self, his sheeted mattress like a white wall beside him, leaning over him more and more. He believed for an instant that he was going to die in a capsized ship. But slowly, slowly, the old minesweeper labored back to port again. This was like no roll-ing Willie had ever experienced. It was not rolling. It was death, working up momentum. He grabbed shoes and a shirt and scampered to the half deck and up the ladder.

  He cracked his head against the closed hatch; he felt a hot dizzying pain and saw zigzag lights. He had thought that the blackness at the top of the ladder was open night. Now he glanced at his watch. It was seven o'clock in the morning.

  For a few moments he scrabbled wildly at the hatch with his nails. Then he came to himself and remembered that there was a small round scuttle in the hatch cover. He twisted the lock wheel with shaking hands. The scuttle opened, and Willie threw his shoes and shirt through and wriggled out to the main deck. The gray light made him blink. Needles of flying water stung his skin. He caught a glimpse of sailors packed in the passageways of the galley deckhouse, staring at him with white round eyes. Forgetting his clothes, he darted up the bridge ladder in bare feet, but halfway up he had to stop and hang on for his life as the Caine rolled over to starboard again. He would have fallen straight downward into a gray-green bub-bling sea had he not clutched the handrail and hugged it with arms and legs.

  Even as he hung there he heard the voice of Queeg, shrill and anguished on the loudspeaker, "You down in the forward engine room, I want power, POWER, on this goddamn star-board engine, do you hear, emergency flank POWER
if you don't want this goddamn ship to go down!"

  Willie dragged himself up to the bridge, hand over hand, while the ship rose and fell on huge swells, still leaning steeply. The bridge was clustered with men and officers, all clutching flagbag rails or bulwarks or cleats on the bridgehouse, all with the staring white-rimmed eyes Willie had seen in the men on deck. He grabbed Keefer's arm. The novelist's long face was gray.

  "What the hell goes on?"

  "Where have you been? Better put on your life jacket-"

  Willie heard the helmsman yell in the wheelhouse, "She's beginning to answer, sir. Heading 087!"

  "Very well. Hold her at hard left." Queeg's voice was al-most falsetto.

  "Zero eight six, sir, sir! Zero eight five! She's coming around now."

  "Thank Christ," said Keefer, chewing his lips.

  The ship veered back to port, and as it did so a violent wind from the port side tore at Willie's face and hair. "Tom, what's happening? What is it?"

  "Goddamn admiral is trying to fuel in the center of a ty-phoon, that's what's happening-"

  "Fuel! In this?"

  There was nothing in sight all around the ship but gray waves streaked with white. But they were like no waves Willie had ever seen. They were as tall as apartment houses, march-ing by majestic and rhythmical; the Caine was a little taxicab among them. It was no longer pitching and tossing like a ship plowing through waves, it was rising and falling on the jagged surface of the sea like a piece of garbage. Flying water filled the air. It was impossible to see whether it was spray or rain, but Willie knew without thinking that it was spray because he tasted salt on his lips.

  "A couple of cans are down to ten per cent," Keefer said. "They've got to fuel or they won't live through it-"

  "Christ. How are we on fuel?"

  "Forty per cent," spoke up Paynter. The little engineering officer, his back to the bridgehouse, was hanging onto the rack of a fire extinguisher.

  "Coming around fast now, Captain!" called the helmsman. "Heading 062- Heading 061-"

  "Ease your rudder to standard! Starboard ahead standard! Port ahead one third!"

  The ship rolled to starboard and back again, a terrifying sharp roll, but in a familiar rhythm. The tightness in Willie's chest eased. He now noticed the sound that was almost drown-ing out the voices in the wheelhouse. It was a deep, sorrowful whine coming from nowhere and everywhere, a noise above the crashing of the waves and the creaking of the ship and the roar of the black-smoking stacks, "Ooooooooo EEEEEEEEEEE eeeeeeeeeeeeee," a universal noise as though the sea and the air were in pain, "Ooo EEEEEEE, ooooo EEEEEE-"

  Willie staggered to the barometer. He gasped. The needle trembled at 29.28. He went back to Keefer. "Tom, the ba-rometer-when did all this break loose?"

  "It began dropping while I was on the mid. I've stayed here ever since. The captain and Steve have been on deck since one o'clock. This terrific wind just came up-I don't know, fifteen or twenty minutes ago-must be a hundred knots-"

  "Heading 010, sir!"

  "Meet her! Steady on 000! All engines ahead two thirds!"

  "Why the Christ," said Willie, "are we heading north?"

  "Fleet course into the wind to fuel-"

  "They'll never fuel-"

  "They'll go down trying-"

  "What the hell happened on those big rolls? Did we have a power failure?"

  "We got broadside to the wind and she wouldn't come around. Our engines are okay-so far-"

  The whine of the storm rose in intensity, "OOOOH--EEEE!" Captain Queeg came stumbling out of the wheelhouse. His face, gray as his life jacket, bristled with a black growth; his bloodshot eyes were almost closed by puffs around them. "Mr. Paynter! I want to know why the hell those engines didn't answer when I called for power-"

  "Sir, they were answering-"

  "God damn you, are you calling me a liar? I'm telling you I got no power on that starboard engine for a minute and a half until I started yelling over the loudspeaker-"

  "Sir, the wind-"

  ("Oooo-eeee-OOEEEE!")

  "Don't give me any back talk, sir! I want you to get below to your engine spaces and stay there and see to it that my engine orders are obeyed and fast-"

  "I have to relieve the deck, sir, in a few minutes-"

  "You do not, Mr. Paynter! You are off the watch list! Get below to those engines and stay there until I tell you to come up, if it takes seventy-two hours! And if I have another power delay you can start preparing your defense for a general court--martial!" Paynter nodded, his face placid, and went carefully down the ladder.

  With its head to the wind the Caine rode better. The fear that had enveloped the officers and crew started to thin. Jugs of fresh coffee were brought up to the bridge from the galley, and soon spirits rose to the degree that profane jokes were heard again among the sailors. The up-and-down pitching of the ship was still swift and steep enough to cause a queerness in the stomach, but the Caine had done a great deal of pitching in its time, and the motion was not scary like long rolls which hung the bridge over open water. The unusual crowd on the bridge diminished; the remaining sailors began to reminisce about the scare in relieved tones.

  This burst of optimism discounted the wind, which sang its eerie lament as loud as ever, and the flying scud, which was still thick, and the barometer, which had fallen to 29.19. The men on the old minesweeper were used to the idea, now, that they were in a typhoon. They wanted to believe that they would come through safely; and because there was no immedi-ate crisis, and because they wanted so much to believe, they believed. They did not tire of repeating remarks like "This is a lucky ship," and "You can't sink this old rusty son of a bitch."

  Willie's feelings were very much those of the crowd. With the coffee warm in his stomach he began to sense the exhilara-tion of being in a tight spot, and unafraid. He recovered enough presence of mind to apply some of his lore from the American Practical Navigator to the storm, and calculated that the cen-ter was about a hundred miles due east, approaching at twenty miles an hour. He even looked forward with some pleasure to the possibility that the calm eye of the storm might pass over the Caine; he wondered whether a ring of blue sky would be visible in the black heavens.

  "I hear you're going to relieve me instead of Paynt." Hard-ing had come up to him unobserved as he faced the wind and made calculations.

  "Sure. Shall I take over now?"

  "Like that?"

  Willie looked down at himself, naked except for sopping trousers, and grinned. "Slightly out of uniform, hey?"

  "I don't know that the situation calls for dress blues with sword," said Harding, "but you might be more comfortable with clothes on."

  "Be right back." Willie went down and slipped through the hatchway scuttle, noticing that the sailors were gone from the main deck passageways. He found Whittaker and the steward's mates in the wardroom, all in life jackets, laying a white table-cloth, straightening out the chairs, and picking tumbled maga-zines off the deck. Whittaker said to him mournfully, "Suh, I dunno how we gonna have breakfast less'n I get some tin trays offen general mess. We ain't got enough crockery left but for maybe two officers, suh"

  "Hell, Whittaker, I think you can forget about breakfast down here. Check with Mr. Maryk. I think sandwiches and coffee topside is all anybody expects."

  "Thank you, suh!" The faces of the colored boys bright-ened. Whittaker said, "You, Rasselas, belay settin' dat table. You go ask the man like Mr. Keith says-"

  It amused Willie to consider, as he struggled to dress in his galloping room, that the issue of the morning had dwindled so quickly from life-or-death to a question of the wardroom's breakfast. He was cheered by the steward's mates' solemn per-sistence in routine, and by the quiet yellow-lit sameness of his room. Down here he was Willie Keith, the old immortal, in-destructible Willie, who wrote letters to May Wynn and de-coded messages and audited laundry statements. The typhoon topside was a sort of movie adventure, exciting and mock-dangerous, and full of interest and instruction,
if only he could remember to keep his head. He thought someday he might write a short story about a typhoon, and use the touch of the steward's mates worrying about breakfast. He went back to the bridge, dry and buoyant, and relieved the deck. He stood in the pilothouse, safe from the flying spray, his elbow hooked around the captain's chair, and grinned into the teeth of the typhoon, which wailed louder than ever, "OOOO! EEEEE!"

  The barometer stood at 29.05.

  30

  The Mutiny

  A steamship, not being a slave to the wind like a sailing vessel, is superior to ordinary difficulties of storms. A warship is a special kind of steamship, built not for capaciousness and econ-omy, but for power. Even the minesweeper Caine could op-pose to the gale a force of some thirty thousand horsepower; energy enough to move a weight of half a million tons one foot in one minute. The ship itself weighed little more than a thou-sand tons. It was a gray old bantam bursting with strength for emergencies.