REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : All Hands Raced to Get Shipshape for Summit

The way Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class David Harden of Decatur, Ala., remembered it Thursday, the first he heard about a summit conference was several weeks ago, when the skipper announced over the intercom that the cruiser Belknap might soon play host to President Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

But as the skipper sheepishly acknowledged Thursday on the eve of his commander in chief’s scheduled arrival, he himself had got the word not through official channels but through the grapevine--from sailors talking by telephone with excited relatives at home who had heard it on the news.

The first official word from the Navy did not reach the skipper, Capt. John F. Sigler, until later that evening, in a coded secret message.

And ever since then, the 450 officers and enlisted men of the Belknap have been racing the clock to catch up. So have the officers and men of their Soviet counterpart, the cruiser Slava. So has a contingent of Secret Service agents and White House aides, plus all 320,000 citizens of the island of Malta.

It has not been easy, although everyone has pitched in.

“I haven’t seen the ship look this good in two years,” Machinist’s Mate 1st Class Paul Martindale of Marion, Va., said, looking back on the extra watches and extra work details that went into getting ready for the summit. “The guys have a lot to be proud of.”

Visitors on the Soviet cruiser report similar feelings among its officers and men.

There is also a sense of something like relief that the superpower leaders are meeting at a time when the clouds seem to be parting and the world appears to be getting safer.

“I’d like to see us allies like we were during World War II,” Harden said. “It would help a lot of places in the world.”

The Maltese, whose tiny homeland has experienced recurrent war for at least a thousand years and now languishes in an economic eddy, hope the summit meeting will help them somehow.

Still, it has been a lot of work all around. To begin with, there has been the problem of finding room in the cramped spaces of a warship for a lot of extra people and material: 8,000 pounds of special communications gear and other equipment, for example, plus Bush’s personal cook and a supply of pumpkin pies.

Lt. David Schwabauer of Kalamazoo, Mich., the Belknap’s chaplain, has been given the task of composing a short sermon for delivery at an ecumenical service on the fo’c’s’le Sunday morning under the eyes of the President and just about the entire crew of the ship.

Not that it won’t be the moment of a lifetime, but just exactly what should a 36-year-old Presbyterian say to a Yale aristocrat and leader of the non-Communist world just before he begins his final meeting with the most powerful atheist on Earth?

Then there has been all that painting--”painting and more painting and more painting,” in the words of one sailor.

Much of the Belknap’s steel skin has been given a fresh coat of Navy gray. So have many of its interior spaces.

They repainted the big round “Ghost Riders” emblem of the 6th Fleet’s helicopter unit that decorates a bulkhead near the quarterdeck, where Gorbachev will come on board for dinner with Bush on Saturday evening and the last presidential session on Sunday.

Also, someone had to make a plaque with the word President on it for the door of the small, blue-carpeted cabin normally occupied by Vice Adm. J.D. Williams, the fleet commander.

A red-white-and-blue “Beat Army” banner had to be painted on cardboard and hung where Bush, a former Navy pilot, can’t miss it.

The black-lettered “United States” was repainted on the stern of the admiral’s barge, which will carry Bush and his party to and from the Belknap--unless the wind kicks up above 35 knots and the waves begin to run in through the mouth of Marsaxlokk harbor at 3 or 4 feet, as they can at this time of year, in which case it’ll be helicopter time.

The Soviet sailors got their chance to wield paint brushes too. The Slava, which at 613 feet is 66 feet longer than the Belknap, has been refurbished from stem to stern. Crews were at work Thursday swabbing the decks, even though it was raining.

To touch up the Slava’s nameplate, a sailor had been lowered over the stern earlier this week. The wind was fresh, and he had a wild time of it. He clutched the line with one hand and a paint brush with the other, daubing at the Cyrillic letters as best he could while twirling above the waves--before admiring eyes on the Belknap and Maltese onlookers ashore.

Even the Maltese got paint fever. Crews were out with truckloads of whitewash on Thursday brightening up the curbs of major streets. And that wasn’t the end of it.

“Shining brass is a Navy tradition,” Capt. Sigler told a group of visitors Thursday, “and we’ve polished a lot of brass”--including the plaques along the passageways leading to the part of the ship Bush will occupy that warn: “Admiral’s Country, No Passage.”

Beyond all the polishing and painting and swabbing, there has been the matter of positioning the two ships--for security and for camera angle, a Navy officer said.

The ships are arranged in line, bows pointing to sea. The Slava is closer to the mouth of the harbor and the Belknap 400 yards directly astern.

This way, when Bush and Gorbachev meet Sunday on the fantail of the Belknap, just aft of its 5-inch gun, with eight sideboys at rigid attention and a Navy band swinging into the national anthems as the two presidents salute the flags, the television cameras should have a perfect backdrop: a strip of vivid blue water and yellow limestone cliffs topped by the massive walls of Ft. St. Lucian, with a huge red-and-white Maltese banner snapping in the wind.

Keeping the two vessels on their marks may not be easy. The Slava is using two bow anchors and a line secured to a buoy astern, but Thursday the wind was so strong that the stern kept swinging to starboard.

The Belknap has had even more trouble. On Monday, the wind rose to 45 knots and the 8,900-ton cruiser dragged its four-ton stern anchor so far out of position that it had to call for help.

Getting ready for the summit hasn’t been all work and worry, though. The officers and men of the Slava and the Belknap have visited back and forth and, in keeping with the times, that has led to trade.

The officers have generally confined themselves to exchanges of pictures of the two ships and similar gifts. But the crews have gone beyond that to belt buckles, pins, insignia and even hats.

The American sailors have dark-blue baseball caps with the name of their ship and its home port, Gaeta, Italy, embroidered in gold. The Soviet sailors wear traditional white flat hats with a long black ribbon down the back--ribbons they clench in their teeth to keep the hats from flying off in the wind. The ship’s name is printed on the front in gold letters.

So brisk was the trading that one officer worried aloud about whether a promised shipment of 3,000 more baseball caps would arrive in time for the presidential meeting.

Before the exchanges, Machinist’s Mate Harden said, “we wondered what the Soviet sailors would be like. The picture we’re given . . . we expected them to be rigid and closed in. But the ones we’ve met have seemed to be very friendly, happy people.”

Capt. Sigler, who held a lengthy meeting with his Soviet counterpart, agreed. “After 24 years in the Navy,” he said, “I’ve learned that no matter whose navy you’re in, you have common goals and aspirations. . . . We talked about our families and found we had a lot in common.”

Thursday afternoon, when a Soviet boat pulled away from the Belknap after a visit, Russian sailors who still had their own uniform caps persuaded their officers to let them come back alongside for one more round of swapping.

As the sea tossed the boat perilously close to the Belknap, a lanky Soviet sailor balanced himself deftly and signaled to the Americans to come down the accommodation ladder.

A Belknap sailor scrambled down the sharply angled ladder, holding out a small plush box. The Soviet sailor gathered it in and coolly appraised the contents--a polished steel cigarette lighter. Then, timing his move to the movement of the vessels, he passed one more hat across the gap.

“Allllll rrrrrright!” sailors on the Belknap shouted.