Restaurant recipes. All secrets.

Captain, he told Bixenman. Admiral Cornell explained about your brother, and Im sorry I made that remark. The captain eyed him with a glint of new respect. The incident is forgotten and your apology accepted. Am I correct in assuming youve never been on any ship before, let alone a Navy ship? Nothing bigger than a rowboat, Henning confessed. Despite my remarkable seafaring ancestry. Bixenman showed his surprise. You come from a family of sailors? Bad sailors, Henning said with a straight face. My great-great-grandfather was a lookout on the Titanic, my grandfather was in charge of torpedo warnings on the Lusitania, and my father handled radar on the Andrea Doria. It took Bixenman a few seconds to realize his leg was being pulled, and then he burst out laughing. Montague was one of the first to notice that the captain and the psychiatrist were becoming unlikely friends, but given Hennings personality, it didnt surprise him. In fact, he welcomed the relationship as one of the few light spots in the Chases businesslike atmosphere. That was another difference between this vessel and the informal, frequently sloppy Henry Morgan. The Chase breathed efficiency, from her captain down to the greenest seaman. John Hawke had told him once that few navies kept their ships as spotless as the Americans, and he could believe it after seeing the way Bixenman ran the Chase. True, the daily loudspeaker blare of Sweepers, man your brooms! was grating to the civilians, but Montague, for one, found this environment curiously reassuring. He began to feel that Cornell, Bixenman, and all the others knew what they were doing. Yet he also wondered if all this brisk competency had given him a false sense of security. There was no wasted motion in the oil-smooth lifeboat drills, the fast manning of gun stations, the crisp commands and instantaneous responses by bridge personnel. He listened to the effortless humming of the ships modern turbines and wistfully remembered the Henry Morgans tired, wheezing engines. And yet ... He could laugh wryly to himself when he admitted there was one thing about the Henry Morgan he missed: Charles LeBarons culinary skills. The nostalgia of such remembrances also carried a bittersweet taste, though. Thinking about people like LeBaron and the others on that old ship hurt, for Derek Montague never felt he could become really close to his companions on the Chase. It was not that he was the only Englishman; if anything, the American tendency toward informality eradicated that barrier. Bill Gillespie was especially warm, Henning was more than cordial, and in his own barnacled way, Admiral Cornell treated him with a respect that bordered on affection. Still, Montague couldnt help feeling like an outsider, a man trapped in an unhappy past that refused to go away. His age was a handicap, he suspected. Everyone on the Chase seemed so young, especially the sailors, and he even envied Cornell himself, who was only a year away from retirement. The admi.