"Daniel da Cruz - Texas Trilogy 01 - The Ayes of Texas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Da Cruz Daniel)

beachhead operations by the Marines and Army. Simultaneously, her antiaircraft batteries fought
off the Kamikazes that came screaming in out of the clouds, bearing a single suicide pilot astride
a ton of high explosive fitted with stubby wings. For the U.S.S. Texas, the Battle of Okinawa lasted
six weeks. For Gwillam Forte, it would last four. . . .
The second of May, two years to the day since he enlisted in the Navy, began like many another
for Gwil-lam Forte. At three-fifteen in the predawn darkness, "Jimmy Legs," the Navy's
master-at-arms, slapped his night stick against the underside of Forte's hammock to rouse him
for the four-to-eight watch. Forte rubbed the sleep from his eyes and dropped lightly to the deck
from the hammock, rigged seven feet above the divi-sion passageway. He unhitched the
hammock from its hooks, folded the edges in over the thin mattress, and lashed it into a neat
sausage with seven half hitches. He folded it over into a horseshoe and heaved it into the division
hammock nest.
Forte groped his way down the darkened, pitching passageway to the division galley, where a big
galvan-ized pot of coffee and a rack of thick white handleless cups awaited the watch. He poured
a cup and squatted on his heels beside the others to drink his coffee in the dim light of the single
red bulb that illuminated the compartment. Nobody spoke. The warmth radiating through the
linoleum deck from the boiler room below induced a sense of weary detachment that made
con-versation a burden. Anyway, what was there to talk about, when each day was like yesterday,
and even more like tomorrow?
After a second cup of coffee, Forte deposited his cup in the rack and shuffled down the
passageway to the head, first downhill, then uphill, then downhill again in the never-ending rhythm
of the pitching ship. There he shaved and bathed in half a bucket of water heated by immersion
under live steam.
At three-fifty, dressed in the uniform of the day, Forte entered the pilothouse on the bridge.
Sunrise was forty-five minutes away in this latitude, but the shadows of the watch-standers were
already well defined in the light of false dawn. In his high-backed, padded swivel chair, bolted to
the deck, the officer of the deck sat facing forward, his cap pulled down over his eyes. He
appeared asleep, but Forte knew better. Amidships, the helmsman kept his eyes on the
binnacle's illuminated compass card, continually applying minute adjustments to the small brass
wheel, so that the ship's swinging bow was never more than two or three degrees off course.
"You're relieved," Forte said to the duty bugler.
The other man nodded and left the pilothouse. There would be just time enough for him to go
below for coffee and a cigarette. General Quarters, sounded half an hour before dawn and dusk at
sea, would bring him running again to his battle station on the bridge. It was during the twilight of
sunrise and sunset that the ship was most vulnerable; in that gray interval, a sub-merged enemy
could make out a ship's silhouette be-fore its lookouts could detect the feathery wake of a
periscope, and most ships sent to the bottom by torpe-does were lost during those two perilous
periods of the day.
For the next quarter of an hour, Gwillam Forte stood at the rear of the pilot house, lulled by the
hypnotic pitch of the ship, as its bow rose and fell with stately majesty, like a dowager queen
acknowledging the cheers of her subjects. Like all watch-standers at sea, Forte had mastered the
art of sleeping standing up, with his eyes wide open, even when the sun was high in the sky. Such
sleep is neither sound nor refreshing, but so long as nobody spoke to him or made any abrupt
move-ment within his range of vision, he could remain in this state of suspended animation
indefinitely. Aside from the steady swish of the windshield wipers and the faint whistle of the wind
through the rigging, no sound dis-turbed his semiconsciousness until he heard the door to the
captain's cabin behind him open and a mild voice say: "Good morning, gentlemen."
"Good morning, sir," the OOD replied for all.
"I'll take the conn, Mr. Matthews."
"Aye, aye, sir," the officer of the deck replied, vacat-ing the high chair and saluting.