The Gulf

by David Poyer

  A sea the color of a shark’s back, yet with a blue-green heart, hurtled over the stern and exploded over the wallowing minesweeper. It rattled down on five men spaced across the deck between cable reels, tie-down points, and lashed-down paravanes. The paramedic spluttered and stopped counting. “Ah, j’ai eu plein le cul de ce foutu temps, moi,” he cried above the whistle of wind in the sweep gear.

  “Ain’t it about time to wrap this up, Senior?” grunted Burgee through a dripping mustache.

  Gordon didn’t answer. His legs ached, too, from flutter kicks, sit-ups, push-ups, and the raise-and-opens known hopefully as “hello darlings.” He rested them for a moment against the splintery coldness of the deck and checked his watch.

  “Two more sets.”

  “Christ!”

  “Merde.”

  Gordon told them passionlessly to shut up. Finally, when it was time, he rolled over and hoisted himself to his feet.

  “About fucking time,” muttered Burgee. “Jesus, I’m starting to feel my age on those Goddamned flutter-kicks.”

  Maudit, Terger, and Burgee went immediately below, the squat contractor squeegeeing salt water out of his mustache with the flat of his hand. Everett got up slowly, pulling on a soaked sweat shirt he’d wedged under a padeye. Gordon squatted on a coil of line, waiting for his thighs to stop quivering. The banker looked around for a moment, then lurched toward him as the stern dropped. Gordon made room, and they sat silently together on the little ship’s fantail, looking forward and holding on.

  The sea boiled around them. Combers the color of old aluminum hissed as they came in. Audacity was the last ship in the tow. They couldn’t see the cable from here, but Gordon knew from the wake that it was still up there, a three-inch-thick rope of braided steel that led five hundred yards in a great submerged catenary to the stern of Resolute. Ahead of that, off to starboard, when the sea lifted them the two men could see the horned shadow of U.S.S. Sumter, LST-1181, their motive power and mother for this long and painful voyage.

  The minesweepers had been under way for three weeks now. Their progress was glacial. Hunnicutt announced the miles made every day at morning quarters, just to keep the crew’s spirits up. Just to reassure them, Gordon suspected, that they were making progress, and not slipping back. It worked out to between 125 and 190 miles a day. Their best distance—250 miles between midnight and midnight—was the first week out, when all the sweeps had engines. Since then, many of the aged Waukeshas had broken down. And they’d wallowed along like a string of pack mules on rough terrain, rolling and pitching, yawing and bucking stubbornly at their bonds.

  The crews were thoroughly sick of it. With the engines secured, fresh water had to be rationed; without exhaust heat, it had to be made electrically, with heaters on the evaps. The fresh food, milk and vegetables, had been used up and they lived now out of cans and dry stores.

  Everett sat silent beside him. The combers swept toward them, hesitated above the little ship, as if saying grace, then toppled forward, shattering into leaping showers of white foam. Then Gordon heard him muttering. “‘Those images that yet, Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’”

  “Poetry?”

  “Yup.”

  “Yours? That long thing you said you’re working on?”

  “I wish,” said Everett. “Yeats. ‘Byzantium.’”

  “Nice … well, guess I’ll go see Honey.” Gordon watched the next crest, waited for it, wondering at the same time how this all looked to Lem. How differently he must see the world. A farmer, now, didn’t have much use for imagination.

  The sweep rose sickeningly, tilting her stern up, he thought, like a randy she-cat. With a bellow like an angry bull, the sea burst over them, raining green water over the sweep gear, laying a transparent gloss over the splintered teak of the deck, like the cobalt glaze Ola fired on her art pieces. As it ran out the freeing ports, he jumped up, crab-walked forward, and gained the hatch.

  The interior was hot and dark. Like bugs shaken in a jar, sailors braced themselves foursquare in the tilting passageway. The galley was unlit, shut down. There hadn’t been hot meals for two days, since they hit this low-pressure area. Gordon stopped in forward berthing, close as a sealed tomb, the bunks swaying with silent bodies tied in with bungee cords and light line. He hung his wet gear on a pipe to drip, pulled on his greens, rank with old sweat—no laundry, either—and headed for the bridge.

  He had to stop at the top of the narrow aluminum ladder. His fingers whitened on the coaming.

  The bridge was only twenty feet wide, but it was packed with a full watch: the captain, two officers, boatswain’s mate, quartermaster. The wheel and engine order telegraph were a deck below, in the pilothouse proper, and the conning officer was shouting his orders down through a voice tube. Heavy manila spanned it diagonally and horizontally, and the watch standers had entwined themselves like flies dressed by a spider. The fabric overhead rattled and boomed. A familiar stench came up from buckets lashed into the corners.

  Audacity paused. Leaning drunkenly at the extremity of her roll, she gave a deep, tortured groan, unlike anything he’d heard from a metal ship. As she passed through the vertical again, the eerie multiple whine of the wind returned. He tried to let go of the frame, but the sensation of swooping through the air was too powerful. He had to take himself firmly in hand and just let go, stagger to the nearest line, and work his way up hand over hand till he reached the captain.

  Hunnicutt, strapped into his chair, was staring straight ahead through the windows. He looked pale. He was gripping a plastic trash bag in his lap. Gordon followed his glance, and found Illusive, off to starboard, rolling so wildly he could see her bottom paint. The next moment, he was looking down her stack.

  The captain jerked his face around. “Hello, Senior,” he said through white lips. “Guess this’s a change from Vermont.”

  “Kind of, sir.”

  “How’s your gear doing?”

  “All lashed solid.”

  “And your men?”

  “They’ll make it.” Gordon tightened his grip as the deck began another buck. “How bad we in for, Captain?”

  “It’s hard to say. We had a route laid out to avoid storms, but we’re so slow, we can’t dodge when they change course.” He hesitated. “I’ve been talking to the other sweep COs. If it gets any worse, we’re going to ask Sumter to head into the seas. I don’t know how much longer we can take this beam beating.”

  * * *

  The cooks made cold sandwiches for dinner. Shortly after that, Lieutenant Kearn’s voice, over the 1MC, told all hands to stay off the weather decks, and for those not on watch to lay to their bunks. Gordon had been riding a chair back and forth across the chief’s quarters, grimly memorizing the render-safe procedure for a new Italian mine. But at that he gave up, locked the publication up, and went below.

  He was dreaming about Jezebel’s breech birthing when a hand came out of the darkness. The compartment was dark, filled with the screech of stressing timbers and the crash of waves.

  “What. Lem? What is it?”

  “Yeah. We got to get suited up. They want us to dive.”

  Dive. Gordon came fully awake at that and tried to swing his legs out. Unsuccessfully. Then he remembered, and unhooked the bunk strap.

  The deck fell away and he shot out as if spring loaded. He crashed into Everett and they both went down, scrabbling across slick wet tile on hands and knees. At last, he hit the bulkhead and got his legs braced. “What the hell do you mean?” he panted into the other chief’s ear.

  “Don’t know. Lieutenant Caliban rousted us out, told us to get suited up.”

  “Hold off till I find out what’s going on.”

  Gordon pulled on trousers and boots and went up and forward. He rapped at Hunnicutt’s door and went in.

  There were three men already there: the captain himself, Kearn, and the engineer, a bulky, bald lieutenant named Parini. The divers got along with him; Burgee ha
d found an intermittent short for him in one of the switchboards.

  “You people ready to go?” asked the sweep officer, turning his furrowed face slightly. “No? Well, goddamnit, get them—”

  “Wait a minute, Lieutenant. I understand you’re ordering my men into the water. It doesn’t work that way. They take their operational orders through me.”

  None of the officers said anything. So he added, “Now, what’s going on?”

  “We need you to go down,” said Hunnicutt.

  The deck slanted and Gordon grabbed a pipe in the overhead. No one asked him to sit, though there was a place on the bunk, next to Kearn.

  “We were running the engines about an hour ago,” said the captain. “Normal, we run ’em fifteen minutes a day, keep the sleeves and pumps lubricated. Unfortunately, this time we got a problem, a leak in the cooling system.”

  “A leak?”

  “Zeke, draw him a picture.”

  The engineer’s grease-blackened coveralls were wet from the knees down. He didn’t look at Gordon, just pushed a ship’s plan across the table. “Here, inboard of the main sea suction valve. Probably a fatigue crack. Any other time, we’d just close the valve, dry the area from inside, and braze it up. But that isn’t working. The flapper won’t hold water. It’s probably shredded; it’s rubber and pretty old.”

  “How bad is it?” said Gordon.

  “We’re taking two hundred gallons a minute. Pumps can keep up with that running both generators, but thing is, it could just rupture on us. That’s a nine-inch intake, that’d flood out the engine room in about fifteen minutes.”

  Kearn said, a sneer in his voice, “I been wondering what you people were here for, Chief. Calisthenics and cribbage is all I seen so far. Well, y’all are going to go down and put a cofferdam into place. Once we got that over the intake, we can pull the whole shebang, valve, pipe, replace the flapper and weld it up.”

  “We’re in a storm,” said Gordon.

  “Course we are,” said Parini mildly. “That’s probably what made it crack.”

  “Forget what made it crack, it’s fuckin’ cracked. Now break out your fuckin’ gear and—”

  “I don’t think we can do that.”

  They all looked at him. After a few seconds, Kearn bent forward. “What the fuck does that mean, you ‘don’t think you can do it?’”

  “I mean I’m not doing it, Lieutenant. When the sea’s this high, you lose control of your divers. It’s dangerous.”

  “More dangerous than mines?”

  “We’re trained for mines. We’re equipped for mines. Jumping over the side in a storm to do something we don’t know how to do—that’s the way you hurt people.”

  “Well, what do you need?” said Hunnicutt. “For precautions? Jesus, Chief, sometimes you have to accept a little risk in the Navy.”

  Gordon turned to him. He didn’t like the way the captain looked, white, drawn, that intimidated look in his eyes. Sometimes you have to accept risks. Where had he heard that before? This wasn’t the time to try to remember. “I understand that, sir. But the answer’s still no.”

  “You know what I think, Dick?” interrupted Kearn. “We thought we had EOD hotshots on board. What we really got’s a bunch of egotistical civilians who when the crunch comes start shiverin’ like a pup shittin’ peach pits.”

  Gordon didn’t say anything.

  “Captain, if these asshole Reserves won’t do it, I will. I used to swim pretty good. You hazardous-pay part-timers are too weak-kneed to take a chance for the ship, I’m not.”

  “Wait, wait, Sapper.” Hunnicutt looked pleadingly at Gordon. “Senior, I understand your concern. But look at it from … Look. If the engine room floods, this ship could go down. We’d have to evacuate to Sumter. We could lose a combat unit the Navy badly needs right now. That’s why I’d like—”

  “Order him to do it,” muttered Kearn in his ear as a roll swayed him forward on the bunk. “It’s simple, Honey. Apply some size-nine leadership. Then if he won’t, relieve him and put his second in charge.”

  Hunnicutt didn’t answer for a moment. He passed a hand across his scalp. Gordon saw the sweat glitter.

  “Okay, you want to push me to it,” he said. “What do you say to that, Senior Chief?”

  “What I said before, sir. We don’t dive in rough seas in open ocean. It’s too dangerous.”

  The captain said then, and for the first time his voice sounded calm: “So the bottom line is, you’re refusing a direct order.”

  “I can’t, sir. I can’t risk my men in this.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem. ‘Your men.’” Hunnicutt was looking at his hands. “You Reserves train together, work together, stay together a long time. Right? Know each other’s families? Sometimes that doesn’t comport with getting the mission done, Senior. If you might have to pay for it in lives.”

  “I don’t think that’s the issue here, sir.” But just for a moment, he wondered whether Hunnicutt could be right.

  It must have shown on his face, because just then the sweep officer sniggered. “Changed your mind?”

  Gordon said slowly, “I’ll do it. Sir. But when we get to the Gulf, I’m going to take this up with our bosses.”

  “You do that,” said Kearn, lighting a cigar. He blew the smoke into the air and squinted through it at Gordon. “Why don’t you just do that. But meanwhile, Farmer John, just lay your ass aft, and do as you’re goddamn well told.”

  * * *

  “Now EOD team, lay to the fantail.”

  Gordon shook his head angrily; they were all already there. He ducked under a burst of cold Atlantic and circled a finger in the close-it-up sign they used underwater.

  “We got to cut out an intake,” he began, and ignoring Terger’s startled mutter, explained the situation. He finished, “I don’t think it’s right but I’ve been overruled.”

  “What about Sumter’s CO, John? Isn’t he in charge of the group?”

  “He’ll back Hunnicutt. I don’t think they understand what they’re asking us to do.”

  “Yeah, but if we all refuse—”

  “There’re no strikes in the Navy. That’s enough discussion,” Gordon said sharply. “Okay, listen. I’ll be diving alone. I’ll use the nineties and standard regulator—”

  “No, you won’t,” said Everett. “You are not going down alone. You’re going down with me.”

  “Can’t do it, Lem, I need a qualified dive supe topside.”

  “Alors, you are going with me, John.”

  “No, me!”

  Gordon saw how it was. “Okay, shut up! It’ll be Leroy and me. Lem’ll supervise. Tony, you’re tender. Clint, you’re standby.”

  “Hold on!” shouted Maudit. They grabbed for handholds as a sea the color of distant mountains lifted to port. So high the wind stopped, its steady pressure left their bodies, cut off by the wave. It hung above the little ship so long Gordon could have memorized every ripple on its glass-slick, curving belly. Beyond it, almost on them, was the gray wall of a squall.

  Then it broke, slamming down like a wet white avalanche. When they could breathe again, they stared at one another. “Nobody can dive in this,” shouted Burgee. “This is crazy.”

  “You aren’t going, Clint, so just listen up. The intake’s on the port quarter, just above the turn of the bilge. Any questions? Let’s go. I want to get this done before it gets dark. And stay alert up here, too. I don’t want anybody washed overboard.”

  When he came up again, carrying his gear, the motion was less violent, the seas slightly less mountainous. He looked out and saw why. A hundred yards off, between them and the wind, rose the gray flank of the landing ship. Heaving, glistening dully with spray, Sumter was rolling almost as badly as the sweeps. To the west, her other ducklings, Resolute and Illusive, had lengthened their tows and were riding nose to the swells.

  “Heads up!”

  He hadn’t heard the shot over the wind’s howl, but now Kearn’s gang swarmed out on de
ck. The shot line, bellied by the wind, drifted gracefully down out of the sky. They grabbed it and began hauling off. The chief boatswain leaned to his ear. “Gonna make up with a line forward, one aft, keep her steady while you’re down, buds.”

  Gordon nodded wordlessly as the squall hit. Cold rain rattled on the deck. He shucked off his instantly soaked greens and stepped naked into the wet-suit bottoms. He zipped the top on and sat down on a chock. Maudit handed him in turn buoyancy compensator, knife, fins, depth gauge, and gloves.

  He turned his head to see Terger’s face disappear under a hood. He shook his head, preferring to leave his off. Everett finished making up the tank set and lifted it with a grunt. Gordon stood. He thrust his arms through the straps and pulled them taut. Bit the mouthpiece, and took a tentative breath.

  He nodded. His mouth was dusty-dry, and not only from the canned air. Supported by his dressers, he shuffled through the dancing rain toward the side.

  “Hold up, damn it,” shouted the boatswain. “We’re not fast to Sumter yet.”

  He returned to his perch, turning his mask this way and that. Terger waited too, the black rubber over his barrel chest bleeding with rain. He shouted, “Actually I’d rather be teaching electron balances.”

  Gordon grinned back, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  A capstan hummed. The after line rose dripping from a wave, then suddenly grew taut as nine hundred tons of minesweeper lunged against it. He glanced at the seething gray above the masthead, then at his watch. Dusk would be falling soon.

  “What the hell are you waiting for?” Kearn’s voice, high, pissed-off.

  “You ready for me to go?”

  “All intakes closed. Ship’s tagged out and word’s been passed we got divers over. Get moving, we can’t hold this fucking lee all day.”

  The cofferdam, a heavy pine box about the size of a peach crate, was already over, hanging on a hogging line. Gordon waddled to the side—the boatswain had taken down a section of the brass railings aft of the sweep gear—and without stopping or saying anything grabbed his regulator with one hand, his tank boot with the other, and went in feet first.