Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [87]
The trouble started one morning when there was a fog. Captain Queeg came on the bridge at dawn and saw nothing but a blue blur, dimly relieved by yellow blotches of lamps on the dock. The air was muggy and smelled of mildew. “The hell with this,” the captain snorted. “Secure special sea details. We’ll get under way when this mess is gone. The sun’ll dry it up.”
But the blue turned light gray, then a drizzly white, and the channel echoed with the mournful, irritated hoots of foghorns, and the clock stood at 0815. From the bridge, the cranes on the fantail could barely be seen; beyond that was blank whiteness. Captain Queeg had been pacing the bridge for an hour, muttering. “Stand by to get under way,” he snapped at last.
Sounding fog signals, with the engines at dead slow, the Caine backed out into the channel. The dock was swallowed in drifting mist. The blind ship floated in a steamy void, rocking, and around it the foghorns suddenly seemed louder. They bawled and screeched from every direction, as hard to place as crickets in a dark cellar. Queeg ran from wing to wing, straining his eyes at the dripping blank windows and at the tumbling mists astern. His jaw was slack; his lips trembled. “Get out of my way, God damn it,” he yelled at Willie on the port wing, and the ensign leaped backward.
All at once a blast shattered the air, a tremendous foghorn apparently right on top of the Caine. Willie bit his tongue in sudden fright. Queeg came racing past him, bawling, “All engines stop! Who sees it! Where is it? Doesn’t anybody see anything?” He ran past Willie again and again, circling the bridge in frenzy four times, stopping each time for an instant in the wheelhouse to yank the foghorn cord. Again the big horn blasted, and a monstrous shadowy shape, a tanker, loomed through the fog, slipped past the Caine’s stern, and disappeared.
“Whew!” said Queeg, arresting his orbit beside Willie. He went to the charthouse door. “Navigator, how about giving me a course here? What the hell is the holdup?”
Gorton looked up from his chart in surprise. The course from this point was 220 degrees straight to the target base. Captain Queeg knew it as well as he. “Aye aye, sir, I-”
“What do you mean, aye aye, sir? What’s the course?” squeaked the captain, pounding his fist against the iron bulkhead.
Gorton stared at him. “Sir, I didn’t think you wanted a course until we turned around-”
“Turned around?” exclaimed Queeg. He glared at Gorton for a moment, then rushed into the pilothouse and issued the engine and rudder orders to turn the ship around. In a moment the minesweeper began to shudder as its screws pounded in opposite directions. The circle of gleaming green numbers on the black face of the gyroscope compass ticked steadily counterclockwise and the heading increased: 95 degrees, 100, 105, 120, 150. Queeg watched the compass intently for a few moments. Then he said to the helmsman, “Call out every twenty degrees of course change,” and ran out on the wing. Maryk, with both hands gripping the bulwark, was squinting out into the mist. The water was visible now around the ship for a couple of hundred yards, and overhead the whiteness had become dazzling.
“I think she’s breaking up, sir,” said the first lieutenant.
“About time,” growled Queeg, panting a little.
“Heading 180,” called the helmsman, a gunner’s mate second class