Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [276]
The ship still had two boilers in the undamaged fireroom with which it could make twenty knots or so. Early in July the operations officer, Captain Ramsbeck, came aboard and they went out to sea for a run, stirring up the barnacles for the first time in weeks. Ramsbeck explained to Keefer and Willie that MinePac was reluctant to send the old ship back home for overhaul while there was any life in it. Once out of the forward area it would probably not return in time to be of any help in the massive sweeping duty which lay ahead. The Caine steamed smoothly on the trial run, and Keefer said he was willing and anxious to take part in the next operation. Willie pointed out that some four-pipers which had been converted to seaplane tenders ran perfectly well on two boilers. Ramsbeck seemed favorably impressed, as much by the attitudes of the captain and exec as by the Caine’s performance. Next day he sent them the operation order for a sweep in the China Sea, with the Caine penciled in.
One morning a couple of days before the sortie for the sweep, Willie was in his room writing the war diary for June, and taking long pauses to wonder why he hadn’t yet heard from May. The gangway messenger knocked at the open doorway and said, “Pardon me, sir. The Moulton is coming alongside.” Willie ran up to the main deck. The bow of the other DMS was swinging in beside the forecastle, and he could see his old friend Keggs on the bridge, sunburned and salty-looking, leaning over the bulwark and shouting orders. Willie jumped across the gap as soon as the lines were secured and met Keggs coming down the bridge ladder.
“Captain Keggs, I presume?”
“Damn right!” Keggs threw a long arm around his neck. “Am I addressing Captain Keith?”
“Exec Keith. Congratulations, Ed.”
When they were settled in the captain’s cabin of the Moulton, drinking coffee, Keggs said, “Well, it figures, Willie. I’ve been at sea six months longer than you. You’ll have the Caine by December.” The horse face had acquired authority and poise; it was almost a stallion’s face now. Keggs looked younger, Willie thought, then he had at midshipmen school three years ago, desperately poring over ordnance textbooks in the dawn. They spoke mournfully about Roland Keefer for a while. Then Keggs said, looking at Willie sidewise, “I see you’re not talking about the Caine mutiny-”
“You know about it?”
“Willie, it was all over the DMS outfit. All we heard was scuttlebutt, though-nobody ever got the straight dope-is it still restricted or something?”
“Of course not.” Willie told him the story. The captain of the Moulton kept shaking his head incredulously, and a couple of times he whistled.
“Maryk’s the luckiest guy in the Navy, Willie. I don’t know how he ever got off-”
“Well, as I say, this lawyer was sensational-”
“He must have been- Want me to tell you something? One night down in Noumea I got drunk with the exec-under the Iron Duke, this was-and he quoted Article 184 to me by heart. And he said he was just waiting for the Duke to do one really impossible thing, and he’d nail him. But he never mentioned it to me again. You should have seen the way Sammis made him crawl, too-”
“They never do that one thing, Ed. That’s the catch.”
Seventeen days before the end of the war, the minesweeper Caine finally swept a mine.
They were out in the China Sea, in a double line of minesweepers that stretched five miles across the water. The sun was low in the east, dazzling white. Sweeping had begun at sunrise, and the ragged line of ships was advancing cautiously over the shallow green sea into the mine field. The mine popped up suddenly in the Caine’s wake and wallowed low in the water,