Terminal Run

Catardi turned and walked the gangway to the ship. The IMC PA system clicked, the voice broadcasting over the circuit, “Piranha, arriving!” to announce Catardi’s return to the vessel. He climbed the ladder to the bridge cockpit and from there to the flying bridge on the top surface of the sail.

“Mr. Pacino,” Catardi said, “get underway.”

Midshipman Patch Pacino’s stomach rolled in nausea when he was ordered to take the ship to sea. He swallowed hard, squinted at Commander Catardi with his best war face and said, “Get underway, Junior Officer of the Deck, aye, sir.”

Pacino put the megaphone to his mouth and called, “Take off the brow!” The diesel engine of the pier crane rumbled as the gangway was hoisted away from the deck and placed on the pier concrete. He made the next order on the VHP radio to the tugs, his uncertain voice echoing out over the other radios on the bridge. “Tugs one and two, shove off and stand by at two hundred yards.” The tugs’ engines roared as they throttled into reverse and faded backward into the river. Pacino lifted the bridge box mike to his lips. “Navigator, we are shoving off the tugs.”

The navigator, Lieutenant Commander Wcs Crossfield, was obviously not pleased. He’d spent an hour with Pacino going over tug commands, the current and chart of the Thames River. Pacino had liked him considerably more than Alameda. The thirty-year-old department head was a six-foot-four African American, a varsity basketball player at Navy who had forsaken an NBA career to drive submarines. He had a calm authority, and the crew seemed to respect him, but there was something hidden, an indefinable sadness adding to the officer’s seriousness. His scratchy voice called over the 1ME circuit, “Bridge, Navigator, aye. Navigator recommends keeping tugs.”

“Navigator. Bridge, aye.”

“Shift your pumps, Mr. Pacino, like we discussed,” Alameda said to him. He nodded, raising the microphone to his lips.

“Maneuvering, Bridge, shift reactor re circ pumps to fast speed.”

“Shift main coolant pumps to fast speed. Bridge, Maneuvering, aye.” The speaker box squawked the engineering officer of the watch’s reply. “Bridge, Maneuvering, main coolant pumps are running in fast speed.”

“Maneuvering, Bridge, aye.” Pacino turned to look at the tugs backing away from the ship and into the wide channel of the river. He looked at the river’s current and felt the wind, then hoisted the megaphone to his lips. “On deck, take in line one!”

He turned and took a step to the aft part of the cockpit to yell down to the aft line handlers “On deck aft, take in three, four, five, and six!”

The line handlers scurried to their tasks, the pier line handlers from ComSubDevRon 12 tossing over the lines that were looped around the massive bollards to the deck gang, which coiled them quickly on the deck and stuffed them into line lockers, shutting the hatches of the lockers and rotating the cleats into the hull, the ship beginning to look like it had never been tied to a pier. Watching it made Pacino’s heart thump harder in his chest. He tried to ignore the feeling as he craned his neck over the bridge coaming to look back aft at the rudder pointing into the river. As the lines came off the stern, the current drifted the stern off the pier, just slightly, an angle of brown water forming between the hull and the pier as the ship rotated on the single line made fast to the only remaining cleat.

“Ease line two!” Pacino shouted into the bullhorn. He watched while the crew paid out the line, then shouted for them to stop. “Check line two!” The order to hold the line tight. The current was pushing the stern further off the pier, which was mixed news. Good because he could back out straight without fears of hurting the fiberglass sonar dome, but bad because his stern was drifting downstream in the current, setting him up to point the bow north, the wrong way.

“Helm, Bridge, left full rudder,” he barked into the 1MC microphone.

“Bridge, Helm,” the speaker blared, “left full rudder, aye, my rudder is left full.”

Pacino looked aft while leaning far out over the cockpit coaming, making sure the rudder rotated to the correct position, to the right as he looked aft. The angle between the ship and the pier had opened up to twenty degrees. He took a deep breath, the next ten seconds seeming to take an hour, the hand holding the microphone shaking.

“Helm, Bridge, all back full!” he shouted into the 1ME microphone. “Hold line two!” he yelled into the bullhorn to the deck crew forward.

“All back full. Bridge, Helm, aye, advancing throttle to back full, indicating revolutions for back full.”