Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [191]
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, holding 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, repeating 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 topside. 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 itself, 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 rolling 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 bubbling 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 starboard 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 almost 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 typhoon, that’s what’s happening-”
“Fuel! In this?”
There was nothing in sight all around