At the Midway (8 page)

Almost imperceptibly, his neck twisted.

The men understood he was shaking his head.

Captain Oates did not know his underwear was hanging out.

He'd been in his cabin looking over the chief engineer's log when the bugles sounded.  Up to now, he had instigated all of the alerts on the
Florida
himself.  In fact, he had one in mind for later that evening at seven bells--a half hour before midnight.

But this was totally unexpected.  The captain's hand jerked, striking a bolt-shaped blot across the page he was laboring over.  He was broadsided by a terrible fear:

Collision
.

As he raced to the bridge, the ship lurched under him.

Collision
.

The Atlantic Fleet had never quite perfected its system of night maneuvering.  Most of the training off the cost of Virginia had involved flashy displays of firepower and daylight maneuvers.  Admiral Evans doted over parallels, crisscrosses, tight turns and obliques, but these were all performed while the sun shown high.  The spectators on the yachts and the beaches would not have appreciated the complicated yet banal moves and counter-moves that transported a fleet from one place to another in darkness.

This explained why they were running with their navigational lights on, in spite of a near paranoiac fear of torpedoes.  Because, more than torpedoes, they feared themselves.

With all the long-range and rapid-fire guns on board, the ships of the Fleet could, theoretically, never see the whites of the enemy's eyes until they fished him out of the water.  Yet the Navy's ship designers had not been able to shake their fondness for the ancient Roman galleys that had once plied the Mediterranean.  Their most deadly feature had been the prominent rams built low on the bow, but they had been built long before the invention of gunpowder and twelve-inch guns.

Ramming as a form of sea warfare was as archaic as necromancy, yet protruding twelve feet out front of each armor belt was a prominent, deadly ram.  Since 1865, the sole victims of these devices had been friendly ships, accidentally rammed on dark, foggy nights.

Nights just like this one.

Collision
!

By the time he reached the bridge, Oates was breathless and sweating.  It had been a fair distance to run, from officer's country to the bridge.  And his two packs a day plus the bulge at his belt--not to mention his age--made it no easier.

From the starboard bridge the senior watch officer was shouting at the quartermaster over his shoulder.  On the port wing the junior watch officer looked thoroughly constipated, his face twisting into every conceivable expression.

"Helmsman!"

The
Florida
jumped to port.  It took Oates several seconds to identify the ship a hundred yards ahead of them as the
Missouri.
  Thank God, Captain Merriam still had his running lights on.  If they had been under attack, the
Missouri
would be blacked out.

Then the
Missouri
veered sharply to port.  The
Ohio
hove into view.  Her lights, too, were on.  She was closing fast on the
Missouri
.  One brush and the ram would slice the
Missouri's
hull like a knife through cheese.

"Captain Oates!"

The exec was calling from the cubicle where the wireless was hooked up.  Inside sat a young electrician, buried in a maze of rheostats, wires, coils and coherers.  Leaning forward, he looked like a boy holding black clams to each ear as he pressed the headset with both hands.  He mimed his frustration at what he was hearing over the set--or rather, what he was not hearing.  Captain Oates nodded.  The fact was the instrument which was supposed to launch a revolution in ship-to-ship communications and tactics was notoriously ineffective.  Its most frustrating quirk was that a wireless operator a hundred yards off might not receive a transmission, while hundreds of miles away it would come through clear as a bell.

"Helmsman!"

"We had to avoid the
Minnesota
," the quartermaster said, explaining the sudden lurches.

"What?"  Oates looked to port.  Sure enough, the
Minnesota
was not more than fifty yards distant.  It was drawing away.  Oates decided he would wait until later to ask how close they'd come to colliding.  Right now, he did not want to know.

The Third Division's formation had gone to hell.  From the faint traces of taffrail light ahead to starboard, it appeared the Second Division was no better off.

What in God's name was going on?

"It was the Flying Dutchman under command of the Wandering Jew."

Singleton! Oates winced.  Who had brought
him
up here?  No doubt some petty officer gasping to have his name in print had sneaked him onto the bridge.  The exec knew better.  But there was no diplomatic way to banish the doctor from the pilothouse once inside.  He was, after all, credentialed by the Secretary of the Navy.

"What are you talking about?" Oates half-shouted when he caught Singleton grinning at him.

And....

That
hat
!  He's wearing that
hat
!  On
my
bridge
!

"Just a schooner, Captain," Lieutenant Grissom interposed.  "It cut right through the Second Division.  They broke formation to avoid hitting her.  I guess one of them came close to the
Missouri
and she went hard to port."

"The
New
Jersey
put a spotlight on it.  It was as plain to see as your shiny nose."  Singleton spoke like a scout at a campfire.  "There was no one on her deck, no one in the sheets. She floated by like Death itself."

This earned the doctor some incredulous looks from the officers around him.  But they did not have time to dwell on his bizarre comment.

"Here she comes again!"

Oates grabbed a pair of binoculars and looked to starboard.  A smallish sailing vessel was closing on them.

"It must be the
Yankton
, broken loose."

The
Yankton
was a small pleasure yacht reserved for use by diplomats and foreign dignitaries while in port.  One of the auxiliary ships had her in tow.  If the towline had broken....

"No…." said Dr. Singleton with a succinctness that quieted them.

She rode high in the water, as if carrying no ballast.  Her bow barely stirred the surface.  As she closed, the observers on the bridge looked hard for a sign of life abovedecks.  From their perch high over the ocean, they could see directly into her cockpit.

There was no one at the helm.

"Sir," the exec murmured, "if a foreign power wanted to embarrass the expedition...."

No more needed to be said.  The Fleet had gone to great lengths to avoid antagonizing other nations.  Roosevelt wanted America to appear powerful, not obnoxious.  As an example: thousands of burlap bags had been stowed on the ships so that ashes from the holds could be cleanly removed, rather than being dumped into the water as was the usual practice.

If the president was so adverse to dirtying foreign harbors, imagine his horror if they ran down a foreign ship--no matter how inexplicable its actions.

The
Minnesota
had retreated to port.  A thick bank of fog made judging her distance virtually impossible.  The baleful low of her foghorn kept fading in and out--difficult even to tell what direction it was coming from.  Oates wanted to slow down, but that was what Second Division had done, causing chaos in the Third.  If he reduced speed, Fourth Division might run smack into his rear.

The schooner kept coming.  The officers watched with widening eyes.  The beams darting down from the
Florida's
spotlights exploded in a murky haze.  They were not much improvement over total darkness.

"Those lights make us a fine, fat target if she has torpedo tubes amidships."

"Doctor, I doubt the Flying Dutchman carried torpedo tubes."  Turning to his right, Oates commanded, "Hard to port!"

"Hard to port, sir!"

He had waited until the last possible moment for the maneuver.  He was hoping the
Minnesota
was still swerving away, increasing the distance between them.  Could the bridges of the
Ohio
and the
Missouri
see the bow lights of the two ships behind them?  Everything was so faint.

Not the mystery ship, though.  It was now close enough to count her travelers, the metal rings on her spars.  Something that might have been a slicker lay on the deck next to a bin.  Its fore-and-aft rig was handy to leeward--a quaint reminder to the men on the
Florida
that one did not need steam to drive against the wind.

"Rudder amidships."

"Rudder amidships, sir!"

Dr. Singleton's brief foray into levity was forgotten.  He took a prominent role in the chorus of awed silence.  How could she go into the wind so effortlessly?  How did she maintain her trim?

The
Florida's
ram threw up a rich, snowy bone in the artificial light.  The bows of the two ships came with a few dozen yards of closing a "V," then started to draw apart.

From Gun Number 3, starboard amidships, Midshipman Davis peered through the gun shutter.  With only eleven feet of freeboard, the crew of the six-inch gun was blinded by spray whenever the
Florida
made flank speed or veered to port.  The narrowness of the gunport limited their line of vision.  Their befogged telescope sight was next to useless.

The twelve-inch batteries could, via phone or voice tube, communicate with both the bridge and Central Station.  But the only contact the Number 3 six-incher had was through the electrical indicator bolted to the wall of the casemate.  It displayed four pieces of information: range, command (CEASE FIRE, COMMENCE...), target (CONNING TOWER, BOWS...), and projectile (LYDDITE, SHRAPNEL...)--but nothing at all about the nature of the target.  Until the searchlight beams from overhead flashed on the water in front of them, the gun crew was ignorant of what they were up against.

"Jesus!  A pipsqueak schooner!" Davis fumed.  "I could sink it with a spit wad."

Davis not only had a clear view, he had a clear shot.  She could not be more than forty yards away--and
that
was worrisome.  The
Florida
had sixteen six-inch guns mounted in broadside, twelve on the main deck and four on the upper deck.  In addition, there was a battery of twenty-two three-inch rapid-fire guns, twelve three-pounder rapid-fire guns, four one-pounders, eight machine guns, and six Colt automatic guns spread fore and aft between the six-inchers, in sponsons over the gun deck, on the superstructure and bridges, and in the fighting tops.  All of them were arranged to blow a torpedo boat to hell as quickly as possible.  If that schooner was being steered by an enemy, and if it carried torpedo launchers, the
Florida
was practically a dead duck already.

The ammo hoist rattled behind them, but before they could get the shell to the gun they heard the breech of the gun directly above them slam shut.  The gun crew on the upper tier had once again beaten Davis' team to the loading.  With competition between gun crews so fierce, this was a matter of some importance even with a potential enemy on top of them.

The gun-layers murmured as they worked the dual hand wheels, the worm gears putting in motion a combination of gears to the lower left of the six-incher, which in turn operated the cam, which in turn aimed the gun.  Captain Oates was marking a parallel course to the schooner, as though he had in mind a Nelsonian broadside.  Yet the command box stubbornly remained at STAND BY.

"She's got no name on her," one of the gun-strikers said in a perplexed tone.

Davis leaned forward.  Sure enough--no quarterboard.  Neither did she fly an identifying flag or pennant.  She could be registered on the moon, for all they knew.

The desire to let loose with a round was nearly overwhelming.  Davis' finger touched the trigger.  It felt remarkably like the trigger of a sporting rifle.

Now... if someone would only give the command….

His finger nestled tightly in the deadly curl.  A half-inch plunge would ignite the gun.  He pressed his free hand against the wall to steady himself as Oates maintained the turn.  Without quite realizing it, Davis had already depressed the trigger a quarter of an inch.

For a few minutes the
Florida
and the mystery ship ran parallel to each other.  Grabbing his megaphone, Captain Oates stood outside and shouted:

"Ahoy!  You on the schooner!  Are you in distress?"

No response.

"Ahoy!  Schooner!  Identify yourself!  Do you need help?"

Grissom and the senior watch officer chased after the captain as he dashed from the bridge.  A tactful way had to be found to tell Oates his pants were unbuttoned, his underwear hanging out.  But the captain's attention was glued to the schooner.  The exec could not catch his eye.