Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [263]
The meal was eaten rapidly in a clinking quiet, broken by an infrequent low remark. When Keefer cut the cake there was a brief dismal scattering of handclaps. The party broke up immediately after the coffee. There were five unopened bottles of champagne still standing on the littered table.
Willie curiously scanned the lobby when he came out of the private dining room, but the pilot was gone.
PART SEVEN
THE LAST CAPTAIN OF THE CAINE
CHAPTER 38
The Kamikaze
Of all the people Willie encountered during the war Captain Queeg loomed largest in his memory, forever after. But there was another man who had an even greater influence on his life and character; a man whose face he never saw and whose name he never knew. The day after he encountered this man-it was late in June 1945-Willie Keith wrote an eight-page letter to May Wynn, begging her to marry him.
He was a Kamikaze pilot who destroyed himself in order to set the rusty old Caine ablaze at Okinawa.
Keefer was captain, and Willie was exec. The able trouble shooter, Captain White, had spent five months restoring order on the anarchical minesweeper and had passed on to his interrupted career in big ships. The four-pipers were falling into the hands of young reserves. Willie had become a senior-grade lieutenant on June 1; some of the old minesweepers even had jg’s as execs.
The Bureau of Personnel had evidently decided that scattering the Caine’s officers and crew was the best way to dissolve the bitterness of the Queeg days. Fully three quarters of the sailors were replacements. Farrington was the only other officer left from the mutiny time. Maryk had been detached from the ship a week after his acquittal, and sent to command an LCI, a humiliation which spelled the end of his naval hopes. Nobody knew what had become of Queeg.
Willie was running the ship. Keefer had retired into an isolation like Queeg’s-except that he worked on his novel instead of solving jigsaw puzzles. Luckily for Willie, Captain White had taken a liking to him and had put him through intensive training, two months as engineering officer, two months as first lieutenant; he had been gunnery officer when the dispatch came elevating him to the executive post. In all that time Keefer had been executive officer, a sullen, seldom-seen figure around the ship. He had never completely wiped from his face the yellow stain Barney Greenwald had thrown on it, The new officers and sailors all knew the story. The mutiny and court-martial were endless topics for gossip when Keefer and Willie weren’t present. The general feeling on the Caine was that the novelist was untrustworthy and extremely queer. Willie was better liked, but for his part in the mutiny he was also regarded askance.
In the rare times when Keefer took the conn he was nervous, impatient, and harsh, and much given to pounding stanchions and yelling for instant execution of his orders. He wasn’t a good ship handler; he had gouged the sides of oilers and tenders a dozen times. It was freely said that that was why he allowed Mr. Keith to do most of the conning.
Keefer had the conn, however, when the Kamikaze hit.
“There she comes!”
Urban’s yell on the starboard wing was almost gay. But there was no mistaking the fright in Keefer’s voice, the next second: “Commence firing! All guns commence firing!” At the same instant, not in response to the captain’s order but spontaneously, came the popping of the 20-millimeters all over the ship.
Willie was in the charthouse, marking bearings along the course line. The Caine was rounding the southern end of Okinawa en route to Nakagusuku Wan to pick up mail for the mine fleet. There had been no air-raid warning. It was ten o’clock in a gray cloudy morning. The sea was calm and lonely.
He dropped his pencil and parallel rulers and went scampering through the wheelhouse to the starboard wing. Pink curved dotted lines of tracer bullets pointed to the Kamikaze, about a thousand feet up, well forward of the bow, brown against the clouds. It was slanting straight for the Caine, wobbling