Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [254]
“Were those boats on the line of departure when you turned away from the beach?”
“As near as I could calculate, yes. This was all a matter of tangent bearings and radar ranges of course, but I brought them as close to the line as was humanly possible.”
“In that case, Commander, if they were already on the line, what purpose did the dye marker serve?”
Queeg hesitated. “Well, you might say a safety factor. Just another added mark. Maybe I erred in being overcautious and making sure they knew where they were but then again I’ve always believed you can’t err on the side of safety.”
“From the time you made rendezvous with the boats, Commander, until the time you dropped the marker, what was the widest gap between you and the boats?”
“Well, distances are deceptive over water, particularly with those low-lying boats.”
“Did you stay within hailing distance of them?” Blakely said with a slight acrid impatient note.
“Hailing distance? No. We communicated by semaphore. I might have swamped them if I’d stayed within hailing distance.”
Blakely pointed at the redheaded officer at the far left of the bench. “Lieutenant Murphy informs the court that he was a boat officer in similar situations in three invasions. He says the common practice was to stay within hailing distance, never more than a hundred or a hundred fifty yards apart.”
Queeg, slumped in his seat, looked out from under his eyebrows at the lieutenant. “Well, that may be. It was a windy day and the bow wave made a lot of wash. It was simpler to semaphore than to go screaming through megaphones.”
“Did you have the conn?”
Queeg paused. “As I recall now Lieutenant Maryk did, and I now recall I had to caution him for opening the gap too wide.”
“How wide?”
“I can’t say, but at one point there was definitely too much open water and I called him aside and admonished him not to run away from the boats.”
“Why did your executive officer have the conn?”
“Well, he was navigator and for split-second precision instead of repeating a lot of orders back and forth- And it’s all coming back to me now. As I recall I dropped the marker because Maryk had opened the gap so wide and I wanted to be sure the boats knew exactly where the line of departure was.”
“Didn’t you direct him to slow down when you saw the gap widening?”
“Well, but it was all happening very fast and I may have been watching the beach for a few seconds and then I saw we were running away. And so that’s why I dropped the marker, to compensate for Maryk’s running away from the boats.”
“These are your factual recollections, Commander?” Blakely’s face was grave.
“Those are the facts, sir.”
Blakely said to Greenwald, “You may resume your examination.”
The lawyer, leaning against his desk, said at once, “Commander Queeg, did you make it a practice, during invasions, to station yourself on the side of the bridge that was sheltered from the beach?”
Queeg said angrily, “That’s an insulting question, and the answer is no, I had to be on all sides of the bridge at once, constantly running from one side to the other because Maryk was navigator and Keith was my OOD at general quarters and both of them were invariably scurrying to the safe side of the bridge so I was captain and navigator and OOD all rolled in one and that’s why I had to move constantly from one side of the bridge to the other. And that’s the truth, whatever lies may have been said about me in this court.”
Greenwald, slack-mouthed, his face expressionless, kept his eyes on the court members, who stirred in their chairs. “Commander,” he said, as soon as Queeg subsided, “do you recall an incident during the Saipan invasion when the U.S.S. Stanfield was fired on by a shore battery?”
“I most certainly do.” The ex-captain glowered at Greenwald, breathing heavily. “I don’t know what lies have been sworn to in this court about that little matter, but I’ll be glad to set the record straight on that, too. This same Mr. Keith we’re talking about went hollering and screaming all over the bridge making a big grandstand play about wanting to fire on the shore battery