The Santee disappeared over the horizon with signal flags flying that said, “Good luck,” and broad grins on the faces of her skipper, Supply Officer, and Chief Engineer.
Chapter Fourteen
On to Israel
As the Santee went on her way, Fatso and his boys gathered in the messroom to discuss future operations.
“So. Where do we go from here, Cap’n?” asked Scuttlebutt.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” said Fatso. “And there’s a lot of angles we got to think about. All the good liberty ports have got an American consul, who might get nosy about why he wasn’t notified that we were coming. Most of the places that don’t have a consul are too small to be worth going to.”
“Of course, we don’t have to go right into the harbor,” suggested Webfoot. “We could beach ourselves on the coast nearby somewheres. We got our own transportation.”
“Yeah,” said Fatso. “But that could get us in a hell of a jam. They might say we was smuggling dope or something. That would really make a federal case out of it. Trying to sneak in is no good. Wherever we go we gotta just barge right in as if we had a perfect right to and try to bluff it through.”
“Athens is a good liberty port. We could go back there,” suggested Jughaid.
“No-o-o-o,” said Fatso, judicially. “Our credit rating may not be very good in Athens. The guy from that night club might come aboard with a big fat bill for that dinner we didn’t ... er ... quite finish there.”
“How about Istanbul?” asked the Judge.
“It’s a hell of a good liberty port - and I’d like to go there,” said Fatso. “But there’s lots of Russian Navy ships go through there now on their way in and out of the Black Sea. I think we better keep away from the Roosians for a while.”
“Cap’n,” said Ginsberg, “I think Tel Aviv is the place to go. There’s so much big stuff going on there now they won’t have time to get nosy about us. And after the Liberty goof, they won’t want to make trouble for us anyways.”
“I think you got something there, Abie,” said Fatso. “That’s where the action is, right now - and I never been there.”
“Cap’n,” said Ginsberg eagerly, “You just take it from me. They’ll fall all over themselves to be nice to us.”
“You’re prob’ly right,” said Fatso. “The game would depend on the first bounce the ball takes when we come in. Two weeks ago we wouldn’t of had a chance of getting away with it. But now, catching them unawares while everybody is sobering up from a big binge and their Navy is out in left field on account of the Liberty, I think we can.”
“Cap’n,” said the Professor. “On a thing like this, you might as well go for broke. We want our arrival to look real official. Why not come barging up to the entrance and fire a national salute? You can’t make your arrival any more official than that. And it will put them on the spot. They won’t be expecting anything like that from a little bucket like this, and failure to answer a national salute could stir up an international incident. They’ll have to make up their minds fast what to do. Their Navy is in the crap house right now, and it’s one hundred to one they’ll answer the salute. When they do, they’ll be committed on a high level right from the start.”
Fatso’s eyes lighted up and a broad grin spread across his face. This sort of broad strategic thinking and high-level hanky-panky was right up his alley. His long years of naval experience had taught him that the best way to get away with murder was to do it right out in the open, as if the Admiral himself had ordered you to hit the old lady with the ax. The usual reaction was - “he wouldn’t dare do a thing like that unless he had a right to.”
“Hmmmm,” observed Fatso. “I’ll go for that ... Now, how are we gonna fire that salute?”
“No strain,” said Webfoot. “Our two 20 mm guns make a perfect saluting battery - all we gotta do is take the bullets out of our ammo.”
“Okay,” said Fatso. “We gotta fly the Israeli colors at the mast head while we’re saluting. How about that?”
“That’s easy,” said Ginsberg. “I’ll draw a sketch of their flag and Webfoot can sew it up for us.”
“The only other thing is sounding off with their national anthem,” observed the Professor. “And we got a platter that has it. We put that on our loudspeaker, run up their colors, and we can fire just as good a national salute as a battleship.”
“Okay,” said Fatso, “Let’s get the chart and lay out a course for Tel Aviv ... Boy oh boy! I’d sure like to see the face of the Captain of the Port while we’re blasting away, and he’s got half a minute to figure out what he’s going to do!”
Since the Professor was an MIT graduate, Fatso had appointed him navigator of the LCU 1124. The Professor soon had the chart of the eastern Med laid out on the table and was bent over it with his parallel rulers and dividers. While all hands watched with interest, he laid out various zigzags on the chart from his previous noon position to where they ought to be now.
“You know,” he observed, “Our Polaris subs have got mechanized brains to do this for them. All the navigator has gotta do to find out where he is, is to read the latitude and longitude dials.”
“They’ve got the same thing on the big surface ships,” said Jughaid. “The Dead Reckoning Tracer. It’s connected to the compass and the propeller shafts, and it moves a little bug around on the chart. The navigator don’t have to do no figuring at all.”
“The hell he don’t,” said the Professor. “That DRT only tells him where he oughta be, if everything is just the way he thinks it is. But usually it ain’t. The helmsman always weaves back and forth a few degrees each side of the right course - all you guys know that. Barnacles on the bottom slow you down so the speed ain’t what the engineer claims it is. And the wind and currents throw you off course. So the navigator has gotta keep checking his DRT against the stars, by loran, or by satellites. But the Polaris subs have got inertial navigators that can tell you whenever you change course or speed the least little bit, so no matter whether it’s from bum steering, currents, or what have you, even if you stop your engines and drift, it knows which way you’re drifting and how fast.
“How about explaining to us poor ignorant sailors how it does that, Professor,” asked the Judge.
“It’s got things that they call inertial accelerometers that can feel and measure every change of direction or speed. When you’re in an elevator, you can’t see it move, but you can feel it whenever it starts up or down. Or when you’re riding in a car, you can feel it when it turns. This is on account of inertia. If you want to know what that is, read Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia. He got hit on the head by an apple one day and sat down and wrote this book that explains all about inertia. Anyway, Polaris subs have got inertial accelerometers that keep track of exactly where they are all the time. They’ve gotta know, or else their Polaris missiles wouldn’t be any good. There’s no use in having a missile that can hit a gnat’s ass one thousand miles away unless you know exactly where you’re shooting it from. A Polaris sub can zigzag around submerged for it week and know where it is to within about a city block.”
“I’ll be gahdam,” observed most of his listeners.
“How about this satellite navigation?” asked the Judge.
“Yeah - that’s very accurate, too,” said the Professor. “We’ve got these satellites flying around the world now, like the ones that send TV programs all over the world. We’ve got others that fly around going beep-beep-beep. They go round the world in about an hour and a half, following the same track in space, and the world rotates under them, so there’s one or two of them overhead a couple of times a day, no matter where you are. The satellites are pretty near as regular in their orbits as the sun and the moon, so we always know exactly where they are. You tune their beeps into a black box, it measures what they call the Doppler effect, feeds that into a computer, and the computer tells you where you are.”
“Uh huh,” commented the listeners with grave nods.
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br /> “Every now and then a Polaris boat will come up and get a satellite fix to check their inertial navigators. They usually come out only a few hundred yards apart, so then the skipper flips a nickel to see which one he believes.”
By this time the Professor had finished working out his dead reckoning for the past day. He took his dividers, made a pinprick in the chart and drew a very small ring around it. Then he took his parallel rulers, drew a line from the pinprick to Tel Aviv, slid the ruler over to the compass, rose, and announced “Course to Tel Aviv 089, Cap’n.”
“Okay, Professor,” said Fatso. Then turning to the voice tube on the bulkhead, he yelled up to the charthouse, “Steer zero seven nine.”
An injured look came across the Professor’s face. “What’s the matter, Cap’n?” he asked. “Don’t you trust my navigation?”
“Don’t get your tits in a flutter, pilot,” said Fatso. “Didn’t you tell me one time that the first thing they teach you about computers at MIT is that the answers you get out are no better than the dope you put in?”
“Yeah. That’s what they call the GIGO factor.”
“GIGO? What’s that?” asked Webfoot.
“Garbage in - garbage out,” said the Professor.
“Okay,” said Fatso. “That’s what I’m allowing for. Zero eight nine is the exact course from that pinhole you got in the chart to the lighthouse at Tel Aviv. But we been zigzagging around out here out of sight of land for over a week. We could be twenty to thirty miles away from your pinhole.”
“Sure. But it’s the best guess we can make,” said the Professor.
“I know. But suppose we steer 089 for a couple of days and when we make our landfall, we find we didn’t hit it right on the nose. Which way do we turn - north or south?”
“Yeah. I see what you mean,” agreed the Professor.
“This way, I’m heading for a spot that we feel for sure is north of Tel Aviv. So when we pick up the coast we just run south along it until we get to Tel Aviv.”
“You’re exactly right, Cap’n,” said the Professor. “And come to think of it, that’s how they used to navigate in Columbus’s time. Even with all the fancy black boxes we’ve got today, it’s still a pretty good one.”
That evening in the messroom the Professor was removing the projectiles from the “saluting ammunition.” They were solid slugs with tracers, so this wasn’t a dangerous job. As he removed each slug from the brass shell, he stuffed a little wad of cotton in the open end of the cartridge case. “We’ll hafta try a couple of these out tomorrow,” he observed, “and see how they sound. We may have to fiddle around with the amount of wadding we put in before they’ll make the right kind of a boom.”
“You know,” observed the Judge, “When I was a kid, I used to think a twenty-one-gun salute meant twenty-one guns fired all at once in a volley.”
“Some books say it used to be that way in the early days,” said the Professor. “News didn’t travel as fast then us it does now. So when a strange sail showed up off the entrance forts, they never knew at first whether it was friendly or hostile. So just as the ship came within range of the fort she was supposed to fire her whole broadside battery - with no shots in it - to prove she was coming in with her guns unloaded and couldn’t do any harm.”
“Yeah,” said the Judge. “And I read somewheres that every now and then a dopey Gunner’s Mate would forget to unload all the guns, and they’d send a few cannon balls houncing down the main street of the town. The next thing you’d know, a Gunner’s Mate would be swinging from the yardarm just like we had Charley Noble the other day.”
“Could be,” said the Professor. “Gunner’s Mates were prob’ly just as dumb in the old days as they are now. Anyway, that’s how this national salute business got started - to prove your guns weren’t loaded. Reloading them old muzzleloaders was a big job. You had to drag the gun back in on deck, out of the port, and it took quite a while. So when you left your guns out after the salute, they knew you were friendly, or at least, harmless. Later on, they changed it into a sort of a formal ceremony of firing twenty-one guns, one after the other like we do now, ... and speaking of formal ceremonies, we better be ready to receive official callers.”
“On a little spit kit like this?” asked Fatso. “I don’t think we’d have any official callers.”
“When even a little spit kit comes sailing in firing a national salute, the Captain of the Port will have to put on his frock coat, swabs, fore-and-aft hat, and sword and come out here and pay you an official call. The Israelis won’t want to take no chances on creating another international incident.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” conceded Fatso. “And we gotta be sure we receive him the way the Book says to ...” Turning to Satchmo, he said, “Get me the Regulation Book out of the bottom drawer of my desk.”
As Satch went off to get the book, Fatso remarked, “I’ve had to look in that book more this past week than I did in the last ten years.”
“You’re representing the United States, now ... that’s one of the penalties you pay for reaching high command,” said the Professor, philosophically.
The book is a volume of a little less than a thousand pages, which tells you as briefly as possible how to run a Navy. Almost anything that can happen on a ship has already happened, and it’s covered somewhere in the book. Its commandments are based on the experience of our own Navy going back to the time of John Paul Jones, and of the British Navy before that. It contains the distilled wisdom of many years battling with wind, wave, and foreign enemies, corrected up to date as steam replaced sail, flattops took over from battleships, and Polaris missiles took the place of smooth-bore muzzleloading guns. Some old salts will tell you tolerantly that the book is useful only to feeble-minded sailors who wouldn’t know what to do if it wasn’t all written down in a book for them. But nine times out of ten, when these old-timers have to look up something in the book, they find it prescribes the most sensible way of doing it - or at least, a way that will work even for old-timers who aren’t always as smart as they think they are. It covers just about everything a ship may ever have to do - except how to surrender.
Soon Satchmo was back with the Book and Fatso thumbed through it till he came to the Table of Side Honors. This table lists all the VIPs who are ever apt to come aboard ship, from a reigning monarch down to an Ensign. The monarch, of course, gets the works: All hands man the rail, full-dress uniform; eight sideboys; full guard and band; twenty-one-gun salute; and the national anthem, followed by martial music while he ‘inspects’ the honor guard. If by some strange happenstance an Ensign ever calls officially, he is entitled to two sideboys.
“Captain of the Port isn’t listed in the table,” said the Professor, as they ran down the list.
“His honors depend on his naval rank,” said Fatso. “He’ll be either a Commander or Captain.”
“Okay - all he gets, then, is four sideboys.”
“What are sideboys?” asked Jughaid.
The others all looked at him scornfully, and the Professor said, “It’s easy to see you’ve never been in anything but the hooligan Navy. Sideboys are sailors that stand at the head of the gangway and salute while the Boatswain’s Mate is piping some big shot aboard. It’s a custom that goes back to the days of sail. They didn’t have gangways there - just rope ladders over the side. When a big shot came, alongside in a boat, they’d lower a Bosun’s chair and hoist him aboard. The sideboys used to man the falls and hoist away. According to the old stories, the big shots used to eat pretty well, and the higher their rank, the bigger and fatter they were, so it took more boys to hoist an Admiral than it did a Lieutenant. They used to teach all about that in boot camp.”
“They still do,” observed the Professor. “And there’s another version of it in some of the old books that they don’t tell the boys in boot camp. That is that the sideboys were to help the VIP in and out of the Bosun’s chair. The VIPs were always half full of rum in the old days. The higher thei
r rank, the drunker they were apt to be. So the number of boys it took to help them increased with their rank.”
“Now there’s one other item we gotta think about on this official call business,” said the Professor. “This guy will come aboard in a frock coat, fore-and-aft hat, swabs, and a sword. You oughta be in dress uniform, too.”
“All I can do is put on my best suit of tailor-made blues,” said Fatso.
“You got about six rows of ribbon you can put on. Have you got the medals that go with them?”
“Yeah - I guess I’ve still got ‘em in my ditty box somewheres.”
“Okay. Break ‘em out and pin ‘em on. That oughta to make an impression on him. We gotta get you a sword, too.”
“I can make up a real good sword,” said Scuttlebutt. “It prob’ly wouldn’t be much good in a fight. But it will look real official.”
“Okay,” said the Professor. “We can receive the Captain of the Port with all due ceremony, just the way the book says.”
“You know,” said Fatso, “all this stuff about the Captain of the Port reminds me of the time we went into Marseilles on the Memphis back in ‘48.”
“Marseilles?” said Scuttlebutt. “That’s one of the worst stink holes in the Med. Nothing there but pickpockets, pimps, and whores. Everybody in that town is one or the other.”
“Yeah. That’s right,” agreed Fatso. “So when we anchored there, the skipper was in a hurry to get everything squared away so he could beat it up to Paris. There was some things to be arranged with the Captain of the Port, so the skipper told the young officer of the deck to keep an eye open for him and as soon as he showed up to send him right down to the cabin.
“Well, soon after that a swanky looking launch comes alongside with a Frenchman in the after cockpit, wearing one of those three-cornered hats like Napoleon did and a coat with a lot of gold braid, like a hotel doorman or an Admiral. The OOD figured this must be the Captain of the Port, so he sent him down to the cabin. Actually, this guy was the head pimp from the leading whorehouse in town.”
Cap'n Fatso Page 13
