Clear and Present Danger

Wegener was not an officer, and since the commandant of the Coast Guard was in that room to discuss the service's budget, it was an observation to which a four-star admiral had decided to pay heed. By the end of the week Red Wegener was commissioned as lieutenant - the senator had also observed that he was a little too old to be an ensign. Three years later he was recommended for the next available command.

There was only one problem with that, the commandant considered. He did have an available command - Panache - but it might seem a mixed blessing. The cutter was nearly completed. She was to have been the lead ship for a new class, but funding had been cut, the yard had gone bankrupt, and the commissioning skipper had been relieved for bungling his job. That left the Coast Guard with an unfinished ship whose engines didn't work, in an out-of-business shipyard. But Wegener was supposed to be a miracle worker, the commandant decided at his desk. To make it a fair chance, he made sure that Wegener got some good chiefs to back up the inexperienced wardroom.

His arrival at the shipyard gate had been delayed by the picket line of disgruntled workers, and by the time he'd gotten through that, he was sure things couldn't get worse. Then he'd seen what was supposed to have been a ship. It was a steel artifact, pointed at one end and blunt at the other, half painted, draped with cables, piled with crates, and generally looking like a surgical patient who'd died on the table and been left there to rot. If that hadn't been bad enough, Panache couldn't even be towed from her berth - the last thing a worker had done was to burn out the motor on a crane, which blocked the way.

The previous captain had already left in disgrace. The commissioning crew, assembled on the helicopter deck to receive him, looked like children forced to attend the funeral of a disliked uncle, and when Wegener tried to address them, the microphone didn't work. Somehow that broke the evil spell. He waved them toward himself with a smile and a chuckle.

'People,' he'd said, 'I'm Red Wegener. In six months this will be the best ship in the United States Coast Guard. In six months you will be the best crew in the United States Coast Guard. I'm not the one who's going to make that happen. You will - and I'll help a little. For right now, I'm cutting everybody as much liberty as we can stand while I get a handle on what we have to do. Have yourselves a great time. When you get back, we all go to work. Dismissed.'

There was a collective 'oh' from the assembled multitude, which had expected shouts and screams. The newly arrived chiefs regarded one another with raised eyebrows, and the young officers who'd been contemplating the abortion of their service careers retired to the wardroom in a state of bemused shock. Before meeting with them, Wegener took his three leading chiefs aside.

'Engines first,' Wegener said.

'I can give you fifty-percent power all day long, but when you try to use the turbochargers, everything goes to hell in fifteen minutes,' Chief Owens announced. 'An' I don't know why.' Mark Owens had been working with marine diesels for sixteen years.

'Can you get us to Curtis Bay?'

'As long as you don't mind taking an extra day, Cap'n.'

Wegener dropped the first bomb. 'Good - 'cause we're leaving in two weeks, and we'll finish the fitting-out up there.'

'It'll be a month till the new motor's ready for that crane, sir,' Chief Boatswain's Mate Bob Riley observed.

'Can the crane turn?'

'Motor's burned out, Cap'n.'

'When the time comes, we'll snake a line from the bow to the back end of the crane. We have seventy-five feet of water in front of us. We set the clutch on the crane and pull forward real gentle-like, and turn the crane ourselves, then back out,' the captain announced. Eyes narrowed.

'Might break it,' Riley observed after a moment.

'That's not my crane, but, by God, this is my ship.'

Riley let out a laugh. 'Goddamn, it's good to see you again, Red - excuse me, Captain Wegener!'

'Mission Number One is to get her to Baltimore for fitting-out. Let's figure out what we have to do, and take it one job at a time. I'll see you oh-seven-hundred tomorrow. Still make your own coffee, Portagee?'

'Bet your ass, sir,' Chief Quartermaster Oreza replied. 'I'll bring a pot.'

And Wegener had been right. Twelve days later, Panache had indeed been ready for sea, though not much else, with crates and fittings lashed down all over the ship. Moving the crane out of the way was accomplished before dawn, lest anyone notice, and when the picket line showed up that day, it had taken a few minutes to notice that the ship was gone. Impossible, they'd all thought. She hadn't even been fully painted yet.

The painting was accomplished in the Florida Strait, as was something even more important. Wegener had been on the bridge, napping in his leather chair during the forenoon watch when the growler phone rang, and Chief Owens invited him to the engine room. Wegener arrived to find the only worktable covered with plans, and an engineman-apprentice hovering over them, with his engineering officer standing behind him.

'You ain't gonna believe it,' Owens announced. 'Tell him, sonny.'

'Seaman Obrecki, sir. The engine isn't installed right,' the youngster said.

'What makes you think that?' Wegener asked.

The big marine diesels were of a new sort, perversely designed to be very easy to operate and maintain. To aid in this, small how-to manuals were provided for each engine-room crewman, and in each manual was a plastic- coated diagram that was far easier to use than the builder's plans. A blow-up of the manual schematic, also plastic-coated, had been provided by the drafting company, and was the laminated top of the worktable.

'Sir, this engine is a lot like the one on my dad's tractor, bigger, but-'

'I'll take your word for it, Obrecki.'

'The turbocharger ain't installed right. It matches with these plans here, but the oil pump pushes the oil through the turbo-charger backwards. The plans are wrong, sir. Some draftsman screwed up. See here, sir? The oil line's supposed to come in here, but the draftsman put it on the wrong side of this fitting, and nobody caught it, and-'

Wegener just laughed. He looked at Chief Owens: 'How long to fix?'

'Obrecki says he can have it up and running this time tomorrow, Cap'n.'

'Sir.' It was Lieutenant Michelson, the engineering officer. 'This is all my fault. I should have-' The lieutenant was waiting for the sky to fall.

'The lesson from this, Mr. Michelson, is that you can't even trust the manual. Have you learned that lesson, Mister?'

'Yes, sir!'

'Fair enough. Obrecki, you're a seaman-first, right?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Wrong. You're a machinist-mate third.'

'Sir, I have to pass a written exam...'

'You think Obrecki's passed that exam, Mr. Michelson?'

'You bet, sir.'

'Well done, people. This time tomorrow I want to do twenty-three knots.'

And it had all been downhill from there. The engines are the mechanical heart of any ship, and there is no seaman in the world who prefers a slow ship to a fast one. When Panache had made twenty-five knots and held that speed for three hours, the painters painted better, the cooks took a little more time with the meals, and the technicians tightened their bolts just a little more. Their ship was no longer a cripple, and pride broke out in the crew like a rainbow after a summer shower - all the more so because one of their own had figured it out. One day early, Panache came into the Curtis Bay Coast Guard Yard with a bone in her teeth. Wegener had the conn and pushed his own skill to the limit to make a fast 'one-bell' approach to the dock.

'The Old Man,' one line handler noted on the fo'c'sle, 'really knows how to drive this fuckin' boat!'

The next day a poster appeared on the ship's bulletin board: PANACHE: DASHING ELEGANCE OF MANNER OR STYLE. Seven weeks later, the cutter was brought into commission and she sailed south to Mobile, Alabama, to go to work. Already she had a reputation that exactly matched her name.

It was foggy this morning, and that suited the captain, even though the mission didn't. The King of SAR was now a cop. The mission of the Coast Guard had changed more than halfway through his career, but it wasn't