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By Paul Clancy, The Virginian-Pilot

VIRGINIA, USA,7 April 2002 -- ON THE JAMES RIVER -- Hand over hand down cold metal rungs, into the belly of the ship. Beams from flashlights dance in the dark. Voices echo in the deep cavern.

``You got to be very careful,'' says Wayne Taylor, a machinery mechanic who leads the way. ``You could fall in the hold and be killed.''

Four levels down, a thick paste of water and rust resembling wet clay lathers the ship's hold. There's a steady plink-plink-plink somewhere in the hold, an almost-cheerful sound, except that this vessel, this dying hulk on the James River, is slowly sinking.

Boots crunch on the rust and slosh in the red goo.

Above, workers lower buckets of cement into the darkened cavern. The buckets clunk on railings, causing thin streams of cement to shower down and mix with air that's already thick with dust.

Dave Howe grunts as he muscles the buckets over to Ralph Cooke near the ship's starboard bilge well.

Cooke is bathed in flashlight beams and clad in muddy yellow foul-weather gear.

``I figure we got a problem here,'' he says, ``because I'm seeing this black oil, Bunker C fuel oil, and this is not a fuel oil tank. I figure it's coming from a lower tank, coming up.''

As each bucket arrives, Cooke mixes the cement with water standing on the floor, dust rising to his face, then shapes it with a small shovel around the well opening.

A pump head attached to a thick hose is lowered. It sucks water out of the well so the cement will have a better chance to set.

``It's a losing battle,'' Howe confides. ``You can't beat Mother Nature at this game. All we can do is play along with it, but we can't beat her.'

' Fighting losing battles is what they do, the 74 machinists, riggers and electricians from the U.S. Maritime Administration. Every day, regardless of weather, they go out on the James River from piers at Fort Eustis and struggle with forces that are trying to sink many of the vessels that make up what the government calls the James River Reserve Fleet.

Folks nearby -- and the workers themselves -- call it the Ghost Fleet, about a hundred World War II Victory ships and aging merchant vessels that hauled troops and supplies to one conflict or another. They were once kept up, rust chipped away and new paint religiously applied, but now they wait to be scrapped or sunk somewhere off the coast to serve as dive reefs.

There's still a certain dignity and dash about them, in spite of the flaking paint, rusting decks and seabird excrement. In the wind, they creak and groan, hugging each other against the river and the advance of years.

They're anchored and moored together in rows on both sides of the river channel just off Fort Eustis. Several of the oldest still hold thousands of gallons of highly toxic fuel oil.

The only thing standing between the fleet and disaster seems to be the work crews.

``To me, it's a job,'' Howe says with a shrug. ``But still, the ones that care, Ralph and myself and a couple of the other fellas, the reason we do what we do, some of these vessels could have a tremendous environmental impact on this river if we just let 'em go.''

Howe demonstrates how bad the corrosion is by aiming his boot at a steel ballast container. The wall, orange with rust, gives like a cheese cracker.

One must-see sight on the ship is the ``Rice Device,'' named for welder Mike Rice, who devised a combination of marine epoxy and turnbuckle that recently stopped an almost disastrous leak. The dark line showing where the water rose in the hold is shoulder height.

``You got to keep inventing Band-Aids here,'' says Howe.

Today the machinist crew is working on the Mormac Moon, a 1965-era freighter. Along with the riggers and electricians, they gather at the MARAD piers at 7 a.m., get their orders, then board aging launches that take them to their jobs on the water.

It's raining, with cold northeast winds pushing up whitecaps on the river.

The ships, moored together bow to stern and separated by wooden fenders, are a formidable presence on the river. The launches sidle up to outer ships in each of the rows, and workers climb gangways to the decks above, then step across brows from one vessel to the next as the river below rushes by.

They clear paths across the ships, sometimes crawling to get safely from one to the other.

``It's not just a job; it's an adventure,'' says rigger Roosevelt Askew III on board the Bayamon, a severely rusted roll-on, roll-off ship showing every one of its 30-plus years.

The riggers throw a line across to its neighbor, the Shirley Lukes.

``All right, coming to you,'' shouts one of the crew. The rope is attached to a new 600-foot, inch-and-a-quarter cable to replace one that is frayed.

It takes six men on each side to haul the cable through open chocks and lash it to double bits in a figure-eight pattern. They sigh with the effort. ``When you get some age on you, it's a challenge,'' one of the men admits.

Askew, a fitness buff, takes a break and does a series of push-ups on the deck. Now, polishing off a cup of yogurt, he says, ``I try to get these guys to come to the gym with me and lose weight and work out. This job takes a lot of strength from all the pushing and pulling, and good shape for all the running back and forth between the units. In the summer you got to watch your fluids, drink a lot of water. A lot of times the guys forget that, and find themselves in trouble.''

Then there's dealing with all the nasty stuff, pigeon droppings that seem to coat everything. The workers tell of a room full of pigeon carcasses that rats seemed to have stacked up, with spider webs clinging everywhere. Like a horror movie, they say.

As the workers pass a half-open door on the deck, they duck as a startled flutter of wings sends gray bodies flying past their faces.

Another stop is the Vandenburg, a onetime Air Force missile tracker that the workers say was used in the Apollo space program. It still bristles with satellite antennas and a gigantic white dome but now is plastered with crude Russian lettering. The movie ``Virus,'' in which an electronic alien life form threatens to destroy humanity, was filmed on board.

This morning the ship has a heavy list to starboard from water that had poured in from broken vents on deck. Marlowe Tabaniag, one of the crew, leads the way down into the engine room, where he thrusts a dipstick into the fuel tank to check for water leaks. The coating on the stick would turn purple in the presence of water, he says. It doesn't.

Up near the bridge, he places a level on a rail. It shows a slight list now, about 1 1/2 degrees. It was 2 1/2 earlier, before 3,000 gallons of water was pumped out. The culprit: Corroded vents on deck invited rainwater to pour into the hold.

After eight hours on the water, the workers huddle on benches near a heater on the launch. On deck, Monroe Williams leans against the cabin, hands in his pockets.

``People think of the Ghost Fleet, they think, `You tie the ships together and just leave them there,' '' he says over the roar of the launch's engine. ``They don't realize what we do out here. Every day.''

Reach Paul Clancy at pclancy@pilotonline.com or 222-5132.