cannibalizing. What else have you found?”
“Not a whole lot. Little screw ups here and there, but the repair work seems to be getting done properly and quickly. At times they get behind on the documentation, which is par for the course. Overall the quality of the work is excellent.”
“They only have to fuck up once and somebody dies.” He picked up the draft accident report and perused it again as a thin blue fog of cigarette smoke filled the small compartment. The exact cause of the accident was unknown, but the investigators opined that the probable cause was an oxygen system malfunction that the crewmen had not noticed in time. The equipment used to fill the aircraft’s tank with liquid oxygen had checked out perfectly. The aircraft had flown almost a hundred hours without an oxygen system gripe. The crew was current on their low-pressure chamber training and their masks had been inspected recently. Jelly had five hours sleep in the twenty-four hours prior to the crash and Boomer had slept for six. Both men had eaten within six hours of flying, food from the wardroom that had not affected anyone else.
Jake sighed and tossed the report onto the desk. He eyed Cohen. “Gimme a cigarette.”
“I thought you were trying to quit.”
“I am trying, asshole. But you came in here and fumigated the joint and now I want a fucking cigarette. So gimme one.”
Cohen scrutinized the captain carefully. He decided he was serious and passed one across the desk. Jake sniffed it, then placed it in his mouth. “Now a match.”
“You shouldn’t do this, you know.”
Jake glared.
Cohen passed over his lighter. Jake lit up and exhaled slowly, through his nose. “Keep going on the inspection. And tell Chief Shipman to drop in the next time you see him. I want to hear how he’s doing too.”
Cohen stood up. “Yessir.”
“Thanks, Will.” Cohen closed the door behind him on the way out.
Jake took another drag on the cigarette. It tasted terrible and made him light-headed, yet he wanted it. He held it up and stared at the glowing red tip. I’m addicted to these fucking things, he told himself slowly. He stubbed it out on the inside of the gray metal trashcan, only to see several red coals fall on down toward the bottom, under the paper. He poured cold coffee into the can and sloshed it around.
Farnsworth opened the door, paused, and sniffed. “You’ve been smoking.”
“Eat shit and die,” Jake Grafton snarled.
The yeoman wasn’t fazed. “Columbus was at sea continuously for only thirty-four days before he landed in the West Indies. His whole first voyage, including a few weeks in the Canary Islands, only took sixty-two days.”
“That quick, huh? How long have we been at sea?”
“One hundred five days.”
“So that’s out.”
“Noah might be a better bet. It’s a little confusing, but it looks like he floated around for a hundred and fifty days. And lots of ships have made longer voyages, sir. Maybe ol’ Noah set the record when he did it, but he wouldn’t even be close now. I’ll bet I could find someone who went to sea a bosun third and came home an admiral.”
Down in the wastebasket half the cigarette remained un-burned, though it was slightly bent. Jake pushed it off the paper wad where it rested and watched it turn brown in the coffee at the bottom of the can. “Another voyage from yesterday to the day after tomorrow,” he muttered and sat back in his chair. “Forget it, Farnsworth. It was just an idea. I’ll ask for the day off anyway.”
“Can you imagine ol’ Noah mucking out under all those animals for a hundred and fifty days? And I think I have to shovel shit around here!”
“How about seeing if you can find me a clean trashcan,” Jake said, nudging the offending container with his foot.
“Sure.”
“Thanks, Farnsworth.”
A heavyset sailor wearing a filthy jersey that had once been yellow stood against the bulkhead outside the XO’s stateroom, facing the marine sentry in dress blues. The marine, a corporal, was at parade rest, his eyes fixed on infinity. For him the sailor was beneath notice, not worth the effort to make his eyes focus. On the sailor’s jersey, just barely visible amid the grease and gray pall of jet exhaust, were the words “Cat 4 P.O.”
“What are you doing down here, Kowalski?”
“Uh, waiting to see the XO, CAG,” the sailor said with an embarrassed little grin. He held his flight deck helmet in both hands and twisted it nervously.
Jake nodded and spoke to the marine. “Tell the XO I need a few minutes of his time.”
The corporal snapped to attention, then picked up the telephone receiver on the bulkhead and waited until the executive officer in his stateroom answered it. “He’ll be with you in a few moments, sir,” the corporal said as he hung up the phone and resumed his parade rest stance. Jake leaned against the bulkhead beside Kowalski.
“Are you ready for Naples, Ski?” Captain James had announced an hour ago on the public address system that the ship would dock in Naples in ten days.
“Uh, yessir.” Kowalski’s forehead and two large circles around his eyes were spanking clean, as white as the top of the corporal’s hat, but the bottom half of his face, which was unprotected by his helmet and goggles, was tanned and grimy. The grime was as nothing compared to his hands though; the grease had become permanently embedded in the crevices of his skin and no amount of scrubbing would make them clean. He reeked of jet exhaust. He was so nervous he could not hold still, so Jake gave him a reassuring smile.
The door opened and the XO, Commander Ray Reynolds, motioned to Jake, who went in and closed the door behind him. “What’s the problem with Kowalski?”
The XO grinned, a ludicrous effort since his four top front teeth were missing and when he grinned, he tried to hold his upper lip down to hide the hole. The effort caused his entire face to contort, and as usual, Jake politely averted his eyes at this demonstration of Reynolds’ vanity. Jake liked Reynolds immensely.
“Ski has a habit of getting drunk and getting into a bar brawl every time he goes ashore. He’s an alcoholic.” Grafton nodded. “And he’s the best catapult captain we have. If we could just keep him aboard ship all the time, he’d do fine. I told him last time that his feet weren’t going to touch dry land until the end of his enlistment, but that isn’t fair. So I’m going to let him ashore in Naples. If he gets carried back to the ship one more time by the shore patrol, he’s on his way to the drunk farm, and maybe out of the navy.” Reynolds shrugged. “But what did you want to see me about?”
“I want to have a deck party for the crew on Saturday if we can get a day off. We will have been continuously at sea over three times longer than Christopher Columbus, and I think we ought to play it up and let the crew know they’ve done something big.”
“I’m all for it. I think I can get Captain James to approve it. You talk to the admiral. It’ll depend on whether we can pull off the coast long enough to go to alert status that day. Admiral Parker’ll have to ask the big poo-bahs.” He was referring to the people in Washington. “Three times longer than Columbus, huh?”
Jake nodded and Reynolds crossed his arms on the desk in front of him. He waited expectantly. He was waiting for Jake to light a cigarette. Reynolds was the driving force behind a rigid antismoking campaign that was rolling over tobacco users with the relentless power of a mountain avalanche; indeed, Reynolds was waving the banner of purity with the awesome zeal that he brought to every task. So whenever Jake visited the XO’s office, he lit a cigarette and deposited the ash in a neat pile on the front edge of the desk. Reynolds’ fulminations were quite gratifying.
Jake patted his pockets dramatically. Sighing, he said at last, “Oh gee, I almost forgot. I quit.”
“A sinner saved! Hallelujah!” Reynolds clasped his hands together and looked up. “Thank you, Lord, for saving this poor ignorant fool sitting here before me from the evils of tobacco and impure women and bad whiskey and marked cards and …”
Jake couldn’t help himself. He laughed. Most of the berthing compartments and working spaces aboard ship were now nonsmoking. The ship’s smoke shop, where cigarettes and pipe tobacco had been sold, was now a free- weight gym. The only place aboard a man could still buy cigarettes was in the ship’s store under the forward mess
