Barnwell, the quartermaster, appeared briefly in the door. “Visual contact at 1350 hours and captain taking over conn, both logged, sir.” He quickly vanished back into the warm inside.
Wilburforce had not taken his eyes away from the binoculars which he kept trained on the Bedford. “Jesus! She must be doing forty knots!” he gasped in admiration.
Captain Larsen grunted and pulled his head deeper into his parka. “Come to zero-four-zero degrees,” he called to the helmsman, then strode to the shelter of the starboard wing, from where he continued to watch the Bedford. A blinker light was winking from the destroyer’s bridge and he was able to read the challenge: COLDSNAP.
The light on the Tiburon Bay’s signal bridge clattered out the countersign, slowly and with some hesitation (another reservist going through halfhearted motions): H-O-A-R — F-R-R-R-O-S-T. Larsen glanced up at the signal bridge with patient suffering, then back at the Bedford just in time to see her rap out:
WILL EXECUTE HIGHSPEED BUNKERING AND TRANSFER. HEAD 070 AND MAKE 15 KNOTS.
The Tiburon Bay’s signalman hesitated and, instead of acknowledging, asked for a repeat. The Bedford expressed her irritation over this inefficiency by repeating the message even faster. Captain Larsen left the shelter and headed for the wheelhouse; before entering it, he looked up to the signal bridge and called with an even voice: “I got the message even if you didn’t. Simply acknowledge!”
Two boyish faces peered down at him, glowing with crimson embarrassment in the hoods of their parkas.
Stepping into the wheelhouse, he ordered the helmsman to change course to 070, rang up full ahead on the telegraph, then called the engine room on the telephone: “Give me exactly two-forty revolutions on both screws if that won’t shake your engines loose from their beds,” he said with a flat inflection.
Mr. Carmichael was at the other end of the line, some four hundred feet aft and a hundred feet below. “Aye, aye, two-forty revs, Captain,” he answered. “Request permission to blow my tubes.”
“Are you mad?”
“No, sir.”
“Request denied.”
Captain Larsen shook his head and hung up the instrument. He gave the seaman second-class at the helm a searching glance, trying to remember whether or not he too was an incompetent reservist. High-speed refueling at sea required a sure hand at the wheel, as the 18,000-ton tanker could severely damage the 3,400-ton destroyer if the two came together. Both the helmsman and his relief looked like children — neither of them could be much over twenty, too young to be reservists. Too young for solid experience. But the boy at the wheel had a confident look in his blue eyes, which he kept glued to the gyro-repeater, and Larsen decided to take his chances on him. “Are your kidneys and bowels cleared for a long session, son?”
The blue eyes flicked up for a second and there was laughter in them. “Sure thing, Captain.”
“Okay. When 113 pulls alongside, I don’t want to see you as much as blink in her direction. Let us fall away one degree and you’ll get fed to Finlander in small pieces.” He softened the terrible threat with a flash of a grin, then said to the relief: “You stand exactly two feet behind and one foot to the right of the wheel, ready to instantly take over in case your buddy has a seizure — understand?”
“Yes, sir,” the other man answered with a nervous smile.
Captain Larsen returned to the starboard wing of the bridge, stopping next to the executive officer, who was bawling out the signalman. Three decks below he could hear half-choked nasal noises which were those of Mr. Boomer bawling out the pumping crew. From somewhere around the port side of the bridge superstructure he heard the curdling profanity of CPO Grisling, who was bawling out men preparing the highline gear (Grisling was an old pro who would be aboard a carrier if it were not for his unfortunate drinking habits in port). A half-mile astern, the Bedford cut through the Tiburon Bay’s wake, made a blast on her siren and heeled over in a turn to bring her alongside. She still had a bone in her teeth and it was obvious that Finlander was going to make a hot approach. “I hope the bastard overshoots us,” Larsen muttered. He noticed a bulky figure coming up the companionway from the boat deck, and the gold-braided visor peeking out from beneath the hood identified Lieutenant Commander Porter.
“Request permission to come on the bridge, sir,” the surgeon said with a snappy salute.
Captain Larsen returned it in a more casual fashion. “No use trying to hide up here, Commander,” he told him. “Finlander has come to get you and I’ve got to hoist you over to him, dead or alive.”
Porter laughed politely. “I’ve come to thank you for a very nice trip, sir, and to pick up the dispatches for DDL 113.”
Larsen interrupted his executive officer’s lecture to the unhappy signalman. “Mr. Wilburforce, will you go and fetch Finlander’s secrets out of our safe, turn them over to Commander Porter and obtain a receipt from him for same. Thank you.” While waiting for the documents to be fetched from the chartroom, the captain kept a wary eye on the Bedford while engaging in gruff small talk with the surgeon. “I’m glad you enjoyed your days on this dear old oiler, Commander. I’d hoped you would take care of some of our sniffles and piles while you were aboard, but then I realize you’ve been steeling yourself for your forthcoming ordeal.” Noticing a small wiggle in the wake of his ship, he raised his voice to a shout. “Steady up, helmsman! You’re outmaneuvering that destroyer!” Lowering his voice back to Porter: “How’s your shipmate, the glamorous war correspondent, getting on? Hiding in the lazaret, maybe?”
“He’s playing it cool, sir.” The surgeon laughed with a doubtful head-shake. “I left him in his underwear, still sacked out. He spent half the night playing cards in the enlisted mess, you know.”
“Oh. He’s a champion of the common man, eh? I suppose he will expose the snobbery which exists between fo’c’sle and quarterdeck aboard the Bedford. Finlander will appreciate that.” Even as he spoke, he spotted Ben Munceford’s jarring camouflage jacket and fur cap coming down the catwalk which bridged the long main deck between the superstructures of the tanker. The captain’s normally crinkled eyes narrowed to pained slits. “Yes, Finlander is going to love that character,” he added, more to himself than to the other officer.
Wilburforce came out of the wheelhouse and handed Porter a large plastic envelope, sealed and with conspicuous lead weights attached to its corners. The surgeon signed the receipt, shook hands with both the exec and the captain, saluted them and left the bridge.
“Have the B flag hoisted, Mr. Wilburforce,” Larsen quietly ordered, noting that the Bedford was now only a hundred yards astern and still closing fast. The destroyer sheered off a few points to port and white foam erupted around her fantails as her eighty thousand horsepower kicked into reverse to break her speed.
“Jesus! He handles her like a god-damned Chris-Craft!” the executive officer exclaimed with breathless admiration.
Larsen grunted. He estimated that Finlander was not going to overshoot after all and crossed through the wheelhouse to take up his position in the shelter of the port wing.
The tanker plodded ahead, her bow rising and falling with an easy, solid motion through the long, low swells which she was now meeting head on. Mr. Boomer was still shouting at his pumping detail, which cursed with impersonal passion as it struggled with ice-crusted valves, hoses and lines. Grisling’s more seasoned profanities blistered the cold air around the highline station. As the booms swung outboard with the whips supporting the hoses, they dropped showers of icicles on the crew below. More cursing. On the shelter deck of the after superstructure, one of the cooks braved the cold in his bare whites, leaned over the rail and pointed a camera at the Bedford.
The destroyer had spilled most of her excess speed and was inching up alongside, some hundred feet off the Tiburon Bay. Her rolling and pitching were quicker and more nervous than those of the tanker, but her conning was exact and sure. From close quarters, much of the graceful effect of the Bedford’s lin
es was lost. Her hull was marred in several places where the undercoating had bled through to form ugly red sores on the gray plates; ice had scarred a lot of the superstructure, which was made of aluminum and shone a dull burnished color where the paint had worn off. She showed all the attrition of hard service in the arctic, yet still gave an impression of enormous power and efficiency. There was an eager rumble from her engine rooms and blowers, almost a living animal-like sound. A few hooded faces peered over the windscreen of the bridge, but otherwise she seemed strangely deserted. Only six men huddled together on the weather deck, grotesque shapes in their arctics and life jackets.
“Ship ready in every respect for bunkering DDL 113,” Mr. Wilbur-force informed his captain.
Larsen glanced over the bridge to make a quick check that everybody was occupying his assigned station — the exec standing by the annunciator, a talker next to him with his telephone plugged into the jack, the chief quartermaster now in charge of signals, the chief boatswain’s mate keeping his eyes peeled over the windscreen and Ensign Fisher, the MOD, standing in the wheelhouse with a jaundiced eye on the gyrocompass. All was in order, but the captain suddenly bristled as a lanky figure in a fur cap and an outlandish camouflage jacket popped up the companionway.
“Hi, Skipper! Mind if I get a few shots from up here?” Munceford cheerfully asked, brandishing his camera.
“Yes, I do, Mr. Munceford. I’d hate to have you miss your appointment with Captain Finlander, so please report immediately to Chief Grisling at the highline station. Good-by and good luck . . . Mr. Wilburforce! Hoist the red flag and let’s get going.”
Ben Munceford stood there for a moment with a pouting smile frozen on his face and an unspoken objection on his lips, but everybody had turned away from him and there was nothing he could do but retreat from the bridge.
The Bedford had drawn slightly ahead of the Tiburon Bay and was hanging there, still a hundred feet off, jockeying slightly until her speed exactly matched the tanker’s fifteen knots. The wash of the two vessels met between them and chopped into irregular patterns. The blinker on the destroyer flashed: EXECUTE.
“Acknowledge affirmative!”
The lamp on the tanker’s bridge clattered briefly — this time without hesitation.
The Bedford veered inward and dropped back slightly. Suddenly the oily sea between them turned into a churning millrace as the two hulls closed together, eighty . . . seventy . . . sixty . . . fifty . . . and finally only forty feet apart. The destroyer took a roll, and for an instant the revolving radar antenna on her mainmast threatened to hit the tanker’s bridge; then she steadied and began maintaining exact station. Messenger lines snaked across from the Tiburon Bay’s main deck. The seamen on the Bedford moved with precision to pick them up and start hauling over the fuel and highline gear.
“Log commencement of refueling operations as of now!”
Two minutes later the talker reported to Captain Larsen that telephone connections were established with the Bedford’s bridge. There were no greetings or small talk exchanged between commanders, only a brief, routine discussion between the respective executive officers. “They wish to immediately send over the officer Commander Porter is replacing, sir,” Wilburforce informed his captain.
“Must be damned eager to get rid of him. Tell them okay.”
The exec spoke a single affirmative into the mouthpiece, then listened for thirty seconds with a frown. “They want us to know, sir,” he told Larsen, “that a half-full bottle of whisky was spotted in our wake about three miles back.”
The captain did not take his eyes off the men on the Bedford’s main deck who were just completing the connection of the fuel hoses. “Apologize,” he said, “and compliment them on their very sharp lookout.”
3.
On the main deck Lieutenant Commander Porter sat down on a ventilator and waited in acute discomfort for his transfer. He had been helped into the cumbersome rubberized immersion suit which enclosed him from his head to the soles of his feet in its stiff folds, only his face protruding through the opening of the hood and pinched by the tight drawstring. A few feet away a couple of young seamen were making a hilarious game out of prying Ben Munceford into a similar outfit. The surgeon deliberately ignored the clowning and followed with his eyes four sacks of mail wobbling across the highline toward the plunging destroyer-leader.
“Christ! This thing’s cutting my balls off!” Munceford squealed with mock agony as one of the men heaved on the zipper.
The sailors brayed in ribald delight. “Better than freezing them off in case you get dunked,” one of them explained.
Chief Grisling increased his steady flow of profanity to a torrent which included instructions to the man on the outhaul of the highline to keep an even strain. Farther down the deck, Mr. Boomer’s haranguing of the pumping crew was temporarily curtailed by a fit of sneezing. The supply officer, an overage Lieutenant J.G. who looked frozen blue in spite of his enormously thick clothing, nagged at the commissary detail as they stacked stores according to the order of transfer. The pumps clattered. Winches ground their gears. The sea between the two ships hissed and beat against the steel plates of their hulls.
Although he kept his eyes on the Bedford, the noise of men and machinery penetrated through the thick rubber hood covering Lieutenant Commander Porter’s ears and he became impatient to leave the bedlam of this fleet oiler which Captain Larsen ran like a slovenly tramp steamer. Well, Larsen was nothing but a merchant skipper, really, so what could one expect? You could tell he was used to insolent union crews from the way he handled his men; in fact, he seemed to run the Tiburon Bay as unnavylike as possible. The surgeon looked forward to escaping across that trench of rushing water to the smooth discipline and secure service traditions of the Bedford, but he regretted that Ben Munceford would be joining him. There was another tramp, an immature and unstable one at that, who made light of discipline and tradition, who made sport of breaking regulations. How could the Navy Department grant such a man the privileges of a correspondent? How could any reputable broadcasting company trust such a judgment? Either he had some special talents which had not shown themselves as yet, or the man was a skilled bluffer and finagler — in any case, a very unpleasant character.
The surgeon sighed heavily and wiggled against the oppressive weight of the immersion suit. He noticed that the mail sacks had reached their destination and were being efficiently manhandled aboard the destroyer. His turn would come soon now and he wondered what awaited him over there. Even though he looked forward to service aboard one of the navy’s latest crack ships, there had been several unsettling things which presaged developments of possibly unpleasant nature for him. The cold war had intensified lately and for the first time since the Korean truce Porter sensed that it had a good chance of becoming a hot one. He knew from bitter experience that nothing upset the comfortable routine of his navy life more than real war. When the Korean one came along, for instance, he had had to give up his research in forensic medicine at Bethesda to sew up mangled marines on a hospital ship plying between Pusan and Nagasaki. If war came again, it could trap him for the duration on this destroyer — a far different matter from a two- or three-month temporary assignment.
Chief Grisling was suddenly directing his obscenities at the seamen forty feet away on the opposite end of the highline. The Bedford should, according to established procedure, send over their own outgoing mail sacks, then receive perishable stores. But now there was a delay. Grisling hung on a stanchion and leaned far out over the side, his leathery face screwed into a gargoyle expression as he tried to make out what was happening. His outrage became nearly apoplectic when he saw that they were switching the rig for personnel transfer instead of mail and stores. His talker, who was connected by telephone to both his own and the Bedford’s bridges, confirmed the change of arrangement. Grisling hurled his clipboard with the schedule of transfer across the deck, then bawled at a seaman to retrieve it for him.
Porter
knew that the man about to come across would be Lieutenant Barney Hirschfeld, another reason for his vague uneasiness about this cruise. He was replacing Hirschfeld, who had been the Bedford’s surgeon since her commissioning ten months ago. This sudden relieving of a medical officer in mid-ocean was very unusual in peacetime operations and had caused Porter some inconvenience when he was ordered to replace him on a couple of days’ notice. The whole affair had strange and mysterious overtones. If Hirschfeld had become ill, Porter would have heard about it, so it had to be something else. Something else which Estelle Hirschfeld obviously knew about — otherwise why had she actually cursed the Bedford in a painful scene in the Officers’ Club? Of course, Estelle tended to be emotional and high-strung, not at all a good steady navy wife like his own Martha. But to curse her husband’s ship in public . . . Horrible!
Watching Lieutenant Hirschfeld start his journey to the Tiburon Bay, Porter decided he certainly was not sick. He was sitting perfectly upright in the bosun’s chair, balancing himself with ease as it swung out over the millrace between the ships and twisting his head around to keep staring back at the Bedford’s bridge.
“Hell! That looks too dangerous for me!” Munceford downed and pretended to take flight. A pair of laughing seamen grabbed him. He broke away from them, suddenly remembered the camera in his hand and began shooting some pictures of the transfer.
The Bedford Incident Page 2
