Free Sentinels of Fire by P. T. Deutermann Page A

seal everything from small steam leaks to water seals on boats or leaking bridge windows. When exposed to air it hardened into a plasterlike compound.
    â€œI’ll locate the fuzing props and cover each one up with a handful of monkey shit, which should mean they can’t ever move again.”
    â€œThen what?” the captain asked.
    â€œWe’ll wing it from there, Captain,” Marty said. “See if we can find out what kind of bomb it is and get some advice from the bomb-disposal guys on one of the flattops on how to safe it out.”
    The ship began to turn again. “We still going to see about Waltham ?” I asked.
    The captain shook his head. He looked over at the gyro repeater next to his chair. “Talker, tell secondary conn to steer back east. Tell ’em to execute a broad weave, base speed fifteen knots.” He turned to me. “No, we have to deal with this problem first, I think. No point in going alongside Waltham and then blowing up.”
    The talker pretended he hadn’t heard that comment about blowing up. He bobbed his head and relayed the message to the officer of the deck, who was standing out in the breeze at the secondary conning station behind the after stack, along with the helmsman and lee helmsman. The ship began another turn.
    â€œOkay, Marty, go on up,” the captain said. “Take Dougherty with you. Talk to me on the bitch-box when you figure it out. XO, go below and see if you can set up some kind of CIC on the messdecks, and remind me later that we need to design a secondary CIC, just like we have a secondary conning station.”
    I went down to the crew’s messing space, where the CIC team had assembled. They’d found plug-in points for their sound-powered phone circuits and were relying on Radio Central to cover the air-control and raid-reporting radio links. We were, however, blind without access to our radar screens and, of course, useless to the main formation as a sentinel. When I sat down at one of the tables, Lanny King handed me a message form.
    â€œThis is the answer to the UNODIR,” he said. “Short, but not so sweet.”
    The message, which had come from our own squadron commander, Commodore Van Arnhem, based down in the fleet anchorage, was indeed short. Remain on station. Your mission is radar picket. Waltham is our problem.
    â€œWell, screw ’em if they can’t take a joke,” I said quietly. “By the time anybody gets to Waltham she’ll be sleeping with Davy Jones. Maybe if we told them our radars are down they’d let us go over there. Any word from topside on the bomb?”
    â€œNegative. How are we gonna get rid of that thing? Ten guys go pick it up and throw it over the side?”
    â€œYou volunteering to lead that working party?”
    â€œUm, no, sir, I am not.”
    â€œWe’ll have to figure out a way that doesn’t involve a bunch of people hugging it,” I said. “We’ll wait for word from Bosun Dougherty. I’ll be right back.”
    I went back up the bridge and handed the message form to the captain, who grunted when he read it. “Blast to follow, no doubt,” he muttered. The tone of the message was clear enough. I also knew that the admiral down off Okinawa would sit down when he had a moment and direct our squadron commander to write a personal-for message directly to the captain regarding his UNODIR. Such hate mail was called a blast. The opposite was called an atta-boy. The rule in the Navy was that one blast undid the working value of ten thousand atta-boys at fitness report time. Oh, well.
    The gun boss dropped down the ladder from the signal bridge, his hands covered in grayish goo. “The fuzing props were intact but jammed,” he announced. “Now they’re really jammed. Bomb case is completely intact. It’s definitely a 250 kg general-purpose bomb. Not smoking, not ticking, or humming, but a nasty piece of work,