Free Jonah Watch by Jack; Cady Page B

the lines, found them sound, and made up the mooring himself.
    "Sometimes the tide pools up," he told Brace. "It gets to working in circles." He checked his watch. "Time to call your relief."
    Brace, withdrawn to silence, and with shame over his fear, returned to the bridge. Conally went belowdecks like a confused bear retreating to a cave—only to be wakened an hour and a half later by Glass, who was resolute and in control, and perfectly articulating a language that Conally thought was either Arabic or Armenian.
    "Speak English."
    "It's doing it again," Glass said.

Chapter 9
    Small craft warnings on a clear day are like a bright exclamation. Beneath slanting sunlight, wind pebbles the water in small runs across the harbor, and the flag is a red tongue that wags, laughs, gossips about the sun, mountains, islands, and wind. Gulls fly straighter, their circles flatten, and they rise or descend on the wind like squawking and feathered yo-yos. Distant in the harbor, dories appear bobbing between splashes, while buoys ride solid, displaying the wind as they separate the lightly running chop. Susurrous murmurs wake between the hull and the pier, and men, not exactly intimidated by the cooling wind, place their hands on sunlit steel of the leeward side where there remains a memory of excellent warmth. The breeze nudges like a sniffing, snuffling dog, nose-bumping indifferent elbows, intent on gaining affection. Men step belowdecks to rifle seabags from which are fetched questionable-looking socks, watch caps, long johns and mittens that have survived the preceding winter. On the messdeck and in the crew's compartment, foul weather gear is pulled almost apologetically into view. Needles are clumsily threaded and loose buttons tightened, with triangular snags patched and sealed with tar.
    "Fit out," Glass advised Brace.
    "Come payday. "
    "Come first liberty. I'll take you to the credit Greek. I rake off a percentage."
    "So does the Greek," Howard said. "If you want the perfect crime, open an Army-Navy store."
    "I already got the perfect crime," Glass told him. "After years of study. I'm going to design perfect crimes and sell them."
    "For a percentage."
    "For a flat fee and a percentage. "
    "It's warm in the engine room," Brace said, "and that's where I'm going."
    "You're going to the Army-Navy store."
    Brace, in single-minded determination, was, approximately, mentally unsound on the subject of the engine room. He was engrossed with a dream that had been sketchy before his days on the mast. Now, that dream was firmed into the maniac certainty that Levere, Dane and Snow would welcome what Brace's unbalanced mind called "logic." While other men walked the chilling decks, watched repair proceed on Abner and cast hesitant glances at the wayward and ugly Hester C ., Brace thought only of the engine room.
    Hester C . settled into watchful sullenness that forced quartermaster-designate Rodgers, formalistic, Catholic-inclined, skinny, exact, red-haired, and plagued with ceremony, to make the sign of the cross each time he walked the gangway. Sometimes Rodgers crossed himself before saluting the colors, sometimes after. "I try to make it half and half," he confided to Lamp, "‘cause it's hard to say which should come first."
    Lamp, believing that the pope was a kind of superannuated rabbi, opted for prayer without ceasing.
    "You got to be kidding," Rodgers said. "Protocol. You ever hear of protocol, cook?"
    "Something pulled that tramp to us," Lamp complained. "It wasn't protocol."
    "It was Abner ."
    "You are simpleminded. Simple."
    "I climbed all over that scow," Conally told them. "There's nothing different about that boat from any other boat."
    "It's plotting mischief, boys, I got a feeling."
    "Pull the plug," said Howard. "Poof."
    "And have it lay at the end of the pier for always."
    Gunner Majors, ordinarily quiet, as if stilled by his preoccupation with things that explode, claimed that Hester C . would make a wonderful target. The