Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [131]
During the remaining time before the Kwajalein sortie Captain Queeg fell into a curious lassitude. He could be found at almost any hour of the day in his bunk, or at his desk in his underwear, playing with a jigsaw puzzle. He emerged only at night, when they were in port, to watch the movie on the forecastle. At sea, during rehearsal maneuvers, whole days passed when he was not seen on the bridge. He gave orders to the DOD’s through the speaking tube. The rasp of the captain’s buzzer became as common a sound on the bridge as the ping of the sound-search gear. He stopped coming to the wardroom for meals, and ate almost nothing but enormous quantities of ice cream with maple syrup, brought to his cabin on a tray.
The other officers imagined that Queeg was busy memorizing the documents of the operation, but Willie knew better. When he brought decodes to the captain’s cabin he never found Queeg studying any battle plans or books of tactics. His occupation was either sleeping, or eating ice cream, or reading a magazine, or simply lying on his back, staring with round eyes at the overhead. He acted, thought Willie, like a man trying to forget a terrible sorrow. The ensign guessed that perhaps Queeg had had a quarrel with his wife during the overhaul, or else had received bad news of some other kind in the flood of mail. It never crossed the ensign’s mind that the bad news might have been the operation order.
Willie’s attitude toward the coming battle was a mixture of excitement, faint alarm, and a very immediate pleasure at knowing the secret. There was something reassuring in the great bulk of the operation order, in the lengthy catalogue of ships that were to take part, in the very excess of dry detail which made the blurry gray sheets so hard to read. He felt, deep down, that he was pretty safe, venturing out against the Japs under the Navy’s wing.
On a bright warm January day, a horizon-spanning horde of ships swarmed out of the harbors of Hawaii, formed itself into a vast circular pattern, and set a course for Kwajalein.
The armada moved peacefully over the wastes of the sea, through quiet days and nights. There was no sign of the enemy; nothing but rolling waters, blue by day and black by night, an empty sky, and ships of war in every direction as far as the eye could see, steaming in a great majestic diagram under the stars and the sun. Radar, the ghostly measuring rod, spanning empty space accurately to within a few yards, made the preservation of the diagram a simple matter. This vast formation, so precise and rigid, yet so quick and fluid to change course or rearrange itself, a seagoing miracle surely beyond the dreams of Nelson himself, was maintained with careless ease by hundreds of officers of the deck, not one in ten of whom was a professional seaman: college boys, salesmen, schoolteachers, lawyers, clerks, writers, druggists, engineers, farmers, piano players-these were the young men who outperformed the veteran officers of the fleets of Nelson.
Willie Keith was a full-fledged officer of the deck now, and he took for granted all the mechanical aids that eased his task. He did not consider the work easy. He was enormously and continually impressed with his quick-won mastery of the sea, and with his military authority. He prowled the wheelhouse, lips compressed, chin high, forehead puckered in a squinting scowl, shoulders hunched forward, hands clenching the binoculars through which he frequently frowned at the horizon. Histrionics apart, he was a competent OOD. He quickly developed the impalpable nervous feelers, reaching from stem to stern of the ship, which are the main equipment of a conning officer. In five months on the bridge he had picked up the tricks of station keeping, the jargon of communications and reports, and the ceremonial pattern of the ship’s life. He knew when to order the boatswain’s mate to pipe sweepers, when to darken ship, when to call away