“Might be better than roast sheep,” Wharton said. “I’ll be tasting that mutton for a week.”
The next morning Flanagan went looking for Paul Blake. He found him in the hotel dining room eating his breakfast.
“Mind if I sit down?” Flanagan asked.
“No, I mean, yes, sit down, Chief.”
“What have you been doing with yourself?” Flanagan asked. “I thought you’d sign up to go out on that thing we went on yesterday. Hell of a good time. You hear about the Indian?”
“Yes, sir,” Blake said. “Everyone who didn’t go has heard about that. Must have been something to see. The reason I didn’t go …” He blushed suddenly, and Flanagan felt awkward.
“Reason I didn’t go, Chief, I met a girl. I mean, it’s not, I’m not living at her house or anything like that. She took me home to meet her parents, she lives with them. They’re real nice folks, just like my own folks. Her father is in charge of the Port Customs or something like that.”
“How’d you meet her?”
“Day before yesterday some Red Cross people came to the hotel to see if they could do anything for us, for the crew, like sew on buttons or even write letters home. Most of the fellows were out somewhere. I was the only one here. I was sitting in the lobby and I was trying to write a letter to Ginny, that was my girl back home until she decided I was too far away.” Flanagan saw the younger man’s eyes blink a little bit.
“Well, anyway, I had tried and tried to write a letter to Ginny and I couldn’t say what I wanted to say and there were some crumpled up pages on the deck around my feet and she asked me if I’d like her to write the letter. So I gave her the letter from Ginny.”
“The Dear John letter?” Flanagan asked softly. Blake nodded.
“And she wrote Ginny a real nice letter. She just seemed to know what to say. So I asked her if I could buy her lunch and she said yes and then we went to the zoo and walked around and she took me home to meet her father and her mother. Real nice people, Chief. Her father walked me back to the streetcar, they call them trams here, and invited me to go back there for supper tonight. You could go with me if you want.”
“Thanks, but no,” Flanagan said. “You go ahead, but don’t foul things up by making a run on the girl or something like that.”
Blake’s face flushed. “I wouldn’t do anything like that! She’s a nice girl. Her mother and father treated me like I was their son. They’re going to take my picture today and send it to my folks.”
Flanagan stood up. “Okay, son. Take things easy.” He walked away, glad that the boy’s disappointment over the Dear John letter had evaporated quickly. He saw Lieutenant Lee coming across the hotel lobby, motioning at him. He stopped and waited until the officer came up to him.
“You mind if I ask you to come out to the ship, Chief?” Lee said. “They’ve got some sort of a problem with some torpedoes. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I’ve got to go out there, and I’d like you to come along if you don’t mind. It shouldn’t take long.”
“I don’t mind,” Flanagan said. Lee led the way outside to a jeep, where a sailor sat behind the wheel.
The Eelfish was now moored inboard, next to the bulk of the submarine tender. Flanagan walked down the steep gangway and saw that some relief crew sailors were closing the torpedo-loading hatch to the After Torpedo Room. Up forward Steve Petreshock was supervising a relief-crew gang as a torpedo was being lowered to rest in the loading skid.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Flanagan said to Petreshock. “You’re supposed to be in the hotel and what in the hell is going on, taking fish aboard? We’re not supposed to get new fish until after we get back from the hotel.” He turned to Lee.
“We’re not going to have our usual week to ten days in port after the R and R,” Lee said. “They want us back at sea as quickly as we can get there. So they load the fish today.”
“And you?” Flanagan said to Petreshock.
“Well, we got the word yesterday morning that they were going to load fish, so me and Nelson decided to come down today and make sure they did it right,” Petreshock said. “Nelson’s in the After Room, and he’s got some kind of problem. Don’t know what it is. I been busy up here.”
Flanagan nodded and went to the Crew’s Mess hatch and went down the ladder, followed by Bob Lee. Fred Nelson was in the After Room with a crew of torpedomen from the submarine tender.
“What’s the problem, Fred?” Flanagan asked.
“These people are giving us destroyer fish, Mark Fifteens, for the tubes back here,” Nelson said. “Mark Fourteens for the reloads.”
“What difference does that make?” Lee asked.
“Mark Fifteen fish are longer than our regular Mark Fourteen torpedoes,” Flanagan said. “I’ve heard you could use Fifteens in the After Room because the tubes back here are a lot longer than those up front so’s the fish will clear the screws and the stern planes. But I never heard of any boat firing Fifteens.”
“It’s a real fuck-up!” Fred Nelson said. He stared at the tender torpedomen balefully, glaring at them from his six feet four of brawn, his eyes hot.
“Way it is with these damned fish,” Nelson said. “Way it is is that the fish are just that much too long so when the fish is lined up with the tube you can’t open the inner door because the warhead sticks out too far.
“That makes it that when you want to load a fish you got to open the inner door first and then jockey the damned fish back and forth until you get it lined up. That ain’t too bad sittin’ in port. But when we have to pull these bastards to routine them at sea it means we do the routining with the inner door open and the Old Man wants them inner doors closed when a fish is outa the tube.
“And that ain’t the only thing. They had to put a modified guide stud on these here Fifteens because the regular guide stud don’t line up with the stop bolt in the tube. Means that when you load you got to bleed down the impulse air and dry-fire the tube and hold down the firing key. Then you got to ease the fish in the tube inch by inch until you can feel the stop bolt touch the guide stud and then you ease it in a little bit more until you can feel the stop bolt drop down into the slot on the guide stud.”
Flanagan stood quietly, his mind sifting through the problem. He looked at Nelson.
“That would mean that when you want to pull the fish to routine it you have to bleed down the impulse air and dry-fire the tube and hold the firing key down while you pull out the fish. Hell, you can’t do that unless you bypass all the safety interlocks!”
“You got the picture,” Nelson said sourly. “With them safety interlocks disconnected any clown goes between the tubes and touches a firing key and we’ve got a fish fired in the tube with the outer door closed.”
“There’s another thing.” One of the relief crew torpedo-men spoke up. “When you pull a fish for routining you got to be awful sure you dry-fire the tube and hold that firing key down because if you try to pull the fish without doing that the modified guide stud will bend up and the only way you’ll get that fish out of the tube is to go topside, open the After Trim tank manhole, go down in the tank and take off the stop bolt housing, and then remove the guide stud. That ain’t anything I’d want to do out in a patrol area.”
“How come you give us these fish?” Flanagan asked.
“We’re short of torpedoes,” the relief crew man said. “We’re putting four fish, Mark Fifteens, in the after tubes of every submarine until further orders.”
“Big pain in the ass,” Nelson said.
Riding back to the hotel in the jeep Lieutenant Lee turned to Flanagan.
“What do you think, Chief?”