“Captain Boggs,” said Rich, “did your information say we had volunteered to do this?”
“Sure did. What’s more, I got a dispatch last night from ComSubPac authorizing me to turn the Eel and tug both over to you. The tug skipper already knows he’s to take orders from you.”
“What about charts, lights down below, people to handle lines, a below decks watch, interior communications, emergency gear…?”
“It’s all there. We’ve done this lots of times, remember. We have responsibility for safe passage, not you, even though you’ll be in nominal charge. The tugmaster’s spent his whole life on this bay. It’s his job to get your old boat over there and dodge the mud flats en route. He has the charts in his pilothouse, but we put a set aboard the Eel for you also. There’s binoculars, a big thermos of coffee, plenty of box lunches, portable hand lanterns if you want to go below. Matter of fact, you can make the whole trip down below if you want; all you really have to do is receive the Brazilian Navy when they meet the boat at Hunter’s Point. We checked out the sound-powered telephone system, so you do have interior communications. You won’t have any power, that’s all. No rudder, no anchor, and of course your propellers are just where you left them, on deck secured with welded straps. Eel is only a barge so far as this little trip is concerned. Your job is to show the Brazilians that we’re not passing off another crock to them.”
It still seemed unreal that the well-organized U.S. Navy bureaucracy could have been toying with them to this extent, but Richardson allowed himself to be convinced. Maybe Admiral Brighting had had something to do with this, too, along with everything else that had happened to him lately! “Okay,” he heard himself saying, “it will be our last trip in the old Eel, and we may as well enjoy it.”
“It’s a lovely time of year to be on the bay, Rich.” The puzzlement on Boggs’ honest face had cleared, and its broad features now held a cherubic smile. “You’ll find it full of sailboats. San Francisco will be a sight, too. I wish I could go along with you, but I’ll phone Hunter’s Point that you’re on your way. I’ll have to tell them that you’re not in uniform, anyway. They’re expecting you in all your official glory.”
The tug skipper, a heavyset warrant boatswain with a red face appropriate to the years he must have spent at his profession, extracted the quiescent Eel from her berth as soon as the two submarines moored outboard had been pulled clear by the assisting tug. With professional aplomb he put his bluff, heavily fendered craft on Eel’s port quarter, made fast, and with no ceremony whatever swung the submarine’s bow downstream and increased speed on his engine.
“It’s amazing how simple they make it seem,” said Buck Williams, as the three officers stood on Eel’s bridge, watching the maneuver. “I wonder why they call this ‘towing,’ though. ‘Pushing’ is more like it.”
“They do call it ‘pushing’ some places,” said Keith, “like the Mississippi River. You ought to see those Mississippi towboats. They can shove a couple of dozen big square-ended barges upstream, against the current, and maneuver them besides. Sometimes they handle more cargo in their barges than a big freighter could. A lot of the Mississippi is too shallow for a seagoing ship, and the big towboats are the answer.”
“Why don’t they just put a towline over their stern and pull the barges? Wouldn’t that be easier?”
“They do in the open ocean,” said Keith, “or anyplace where it’s rough. But in smooth inland waters this gives the tug better control. Did you ever steer a ship while towing something big, like a barge, astern? This way he can handle us as though his tug and whatever he’s pushing is simply one big ship.”
“That’s right, Buck,” said Richardson, joining the discussion. “Why don’t you visit over there before the trip’s over? Even though he’s pushing from alongside, you’ll see he doesn’t need any rudder to keep us going straight ahead. The way he’s made fast, his helmsman steers for us both.”
“Then that’s why he was so particular with his bow and stern lines, slacking them and heaving them in?”
“Sure. He’s got his bow toed in toward us just a little, just enough to balance the turning effect of pushing from the port quarter instead of from dead aft. That’s the whole secret.”
Keith grinned at Rich as Buck raised his binoculars and inspected the tug and its lines with renewed interest. “You should have been a schoolteacher,” he said. “You never could resist teaching a little whenever you got the chance.” Richardson grinned back. “You’re another,” he said, raising his binoculars.
A new thought struck Keith, and a slightly more serious expression settled on his normally open countenance. “You know, I guess all three of us agree that old man Brighting must have been the source of our ‘volunteering’ for this little chore. And I’ve got to admit I probably would have volunteered if I’d known about it. But isn’t the whole thing rather peculiar? I mean, keeping us in the dark the way he did?”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” said Buck. “This is sort of a surprise bonus. All the way out here, until around an hour ago when we found out, I’ve been cussing him for not letting us go right home after that sweatshop time in Idaho. Now I’m glad we’re here, but mad because he made such a secret of it.”
“The way I see it,” said Rich, “he well knows we were once together on this boat. So when BuPers wanted to know if one of us could come out here, he volunteered all three of us. Not telling us what he was up to is simply his way of doing things. He’s trying to do something for us. It’s like that time he sent us to look over the NEPA project. It’s a day off, a holiday trip, sort of.”
“Then he must be trying to make up for his bitchiness to you more than anyone,” said Buck, “and he must think you come pretty cheap. He knows doggone well it was you who kept the reactor running that day, and that it was you who saved that woman’s life in Arco, whoever she is. Both of these things make him look pretty good, you know. So, he holds up your exam long enough so that you had to stay up all night to do it, and on top of this, even though it was a tougher exam than ours and you got almost a perfect mark on it, he made Dusty hand you a lower-grade nuke certificate than we got. Don’t tell me what a grand old guy he is!”
“Maybe there was a little hazing going on,” said Rich, “but it didn’t hurt us. Don’t forget, he’s the source of our nuclear submarines, and we ought to overlook about anything because of that.”
“How about that telephone call after we finally got you to turn in?” said Keith. “Dusty tried to talk him out of it, but he said you had no business sleeping in the daytime when there’s work to be done. He knew our work was finished, and that you’d been up all night because of him besides! And then after he made Dusty get you to the phone, all he wanted was to say he’d decided to build the cafeteria after all! That had to be deliberate. He knew exactly what he was doing!”
“The main thing is, now all three of us have our nuclear ratings. I’m lucky he even let me join you two. He wasn’t going to at first, you know.” The look on Richardson’s face signaled his two juniors to leave the topic. Experience had taught them that his thought processes could not always be predicted. Something, perhaps their arguments, perhaps his own greater awareness of the political structure within the U.S. Navy, perhaps something totally unrelated to anything they had been doing, caused him to want to close it off. They would have been astounded could they have known they had evoked the memory of Joan. Might she have caused Brighting to reverse his initial rejection of Rich? Could she, just yesterday, have had something to do with his relenting on the business of the examination? Could it have been she who had suggested this last visit to their old wartime submarine? After all, she too, had had her connection with the Eel!