Left for Dead

by Sean Parnell

  “I can’t make up for what’s gone,” he said. “You know what happened, and why.”

  “I don’t need you to fix anything.”

  “I’m gonna try.”

  Eric looked back at his father. Maybe Hank was planning on coming home, but he wasn’t going to ask. If he said so, then he’d tell him about Rockford’s promise, but not before.

  “We can’t cure the past,” Eric said, though he was also thinking about himself and the things he’d done.

  “Nope. Not if I live to be a hundred.”

  “Maybe you will.”

  Hank smiled. “We’re not in the longevity business, son.”

  Eric nodded at that, then looked away again.

  “I’m going to be a father,” he said.

  Hank took a deep breath and sat back.

  “I’m glad. You’ll do better than I.”

  Some moments went by as the past swirled between them, then Eric said, “We should call her,” and he took out his Program cell.

  “Can you get cell service here with that thing?” Hank asked.

  “I don’t need cell service.” He almost said Dad, but didn’t. “It’s a satcom.”

  “Call her.”

  It was thirteen hours earlier in the States. They woke Susan up. They moved closer together on the bench, bent their heads low, and put her on speaker. Hank slung an arm on the bench behind Eric’s back, but thought better of touching his shoulder.

  For just those few minutes, they were a family again, without her knowing where they were and not caring, happy only that they were all together. They laughed at a few things. She cried. No promises were made, except that they’d call her again when they could. But Susan knew what that meant with her kind of men, and she held them to nothing, told them she loved them, and both of them did the same, and then she hung up.

  After that, they retreated from each other again, willing their swollen hearts to shrink. Hank spoke first again.

  “Ever hear from your half sister?” he asked.

  “Once in a while.”

  “I hear she’s got a daughter,” Hank said, thinking of the grandchild who, if things went well, he might at last meet.

  “Yeah, Kristin. She’s a lieutenant JG in the navy.”

  Hank looked at him and pulled the empty pipe from his mouth.

  “Where?”

  “A carrier, I think—”

  Their eyes locked. Then they both jumped up from the bench and ran to the jeep.

  Chapter 36

  USS ROOSEVELT, The Philippine Sea

  It was the most dangerous four and a half acres on earth.

  In the course of an eighteen-hour grueling shift on the flight deck, letting your mind wander for just one second could be the very last thought you had. Turn to the right, you could get cut in half by the huge propeller of an E-2C Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft. Turn to the left, and the afterburner of one of forty-four F-18 Super Hornet strike fighters could burn you to a crisp. Lose focus and stick your head up too high while the carrier was pitching and rolling, and the rotors of an MH-60 Seahawk helo could remove it in a bloody froth.

  Those mortal threats didn’t include the four “spaghetti” arresting wires, the thick steel cables that landing airplanes grabbed with their tailhooks, but could snap without warning and amputate your foot. Or the leading edges of fighter wings that could crush your rib cage if you forgot to duck. Or the various FODs—foreign object damage—like some loose bolt getting sucked into a jet engine intake, igniting the tanks full of JP-5 fuel, setting off an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile, and blowing you all to Valhalla.

  Working the flight deck was a choreographed dance of delivering death, while trying like hell to avoid it.

  The deck was serviced by two hundred young men and women wearing color-coded jerseys and vests. Blue moved the aircraft, purple delivered fuel, red loaded bombs and missiles, green worked catapults and wires, brown handled aircraft maintenance and preflight inspections, and white ensured safe operations.

  Yellow controlled all the chaos and launched the planes, and were considered the elite of the deck crews, having the most direct contact with the pilots and the triggerman that fired the catapults. Responding to yellow’s signals—twirling fingers, cranking arms, low lunges, and dips—the pilots cranked up the engines, stood on their brakes, and watched their referees like sprinters cocked in their blocks, until they saw that straight-armed, go-for-it gesture and exploded off the end of the deck.

  Those yellow-clad launchers had a big black shooter stamped on their backs.

  Lieutenant Junior Grade Kristin Fellows was a shooter, and she loved it.

  Kristin had come aboard the Roosevelt after a midshipmen stint with the Sixth Fleet in the Med. The “Big Stick,” as the sailors called the ship—from Teddy Roosevelt’s famous phrase “Walk softly and carry a big stick”—was a floating city of five thousand souls, with amenities you’d find in any American town. There were gyms, movie theaters, classrooms, dining facilities, and hundreds of jobs, from engine maintainers to cooks, counselors, and radar geeks. But the flight deck was where all the action happened.

  She was now OIC of the “Rough Riders,” the very first all-female launch crew in the history of the U.S. Navy. She was a tall, slim, reddish brunette, easy on the eyes and hard on her girls. She was their shooter, and they were her ammunition.

  The sun was sinking in the Philippine Sea and this was the last plane of her shift. The F-18/F in the breech had Lt. Commander Roy “Pike” Portnoy stenciled below the cockpit. Portnoy knew Kristin, she knew him, he worried about her safety and she worried about his. He’d shortly be launching on a mission to interdict potential CCP aggressors somewhere out there, and she’d be heading below to a shower, a quick meal in the mess, and her bunk. Maybe she’d read some Tolkien, but she usually fell asleep with the book on her chest.

  Her head was pounding as it always did by the end of the day, her nostrils burning with jet fuel fumes, and she couldn’t hear a damn thing. Everyone wore padded ear protectors and helmets with radio headsets, but with the din of the catapults spitting steam like dragons, the whines of the turbines, the thwops of helo rotors, and the screeches of landing gear slamming the deck, nobody used them except to take orders from the Air Boss high up on the bridge, where he managed the drama from a tower that looked like a Dairy Queen.

  From his cockpit, Pike shot Kristin a grin, snapped on his oxygen mask, and gave her a snappy salute. In his backseat, his weapons and sensor officer, Margaret “Binky” Smith, showed Kristin three hand signals—Alpha, Mike, Foxtrot—for “Adios, motherfucker.” Kristin smiled, flipped Binky the bird, and got down to business. She heard the same tune in her head she always heard when she launched a bird, “Two Steps from Hell—Protectors of the Earth.”

  She looked for a thumbs-up from under the jet where one of her greens had locked the tow bar to the catapult. She looked at the blast plate to make sure it was up, cleared everyone else as all the browns and greens scattered, then looked at Pike and whipped two gloved fingers in the air. His twin engines screamed, the nose dipped low, Kristin nodded at the firing officer in his deck hole, then she lunged like a fencer toward the prow, shot her arm straight out with a “bang bang” gesture, and the jet exploded from the blocks, went hurtling down the deck, dipped once toward the sea, and careened off into the sunset.

  The deck was empty. Kristin took a long foul breath and sagged.

  A first lieutenant appeared from somewhere, slapped her on her shoulder, showed her ten fingers three times, plus five more and yelled “Badass!” She’d launched thirty-five aircraft without a hitch. She grinned, saluted, and headed toward the superstructure.

  She felt like she’d boxed ten rounds with a gorilla. She pulled off her helmet, shook out her hair, and headed down the stairwell past the “Ouija board,” where officers moved toy airplanes around on a carrier model. She was craving something cold, so she walked into the “711” and straight to the dog machine—it sq
ueezed out ice cream like poop—and made herself a cone. She was going to head straight for a shower, then remembered she’d promised to call her mom.

  “Filthy Fellows! You look like you just pit crewed for Daytona 500.”

  She turned to find an officer colleague standing there with a Starbucks cup. They called him “Ramp” because he had an affinity for falling asleep on the cargo ramps of big airplanes.

  “Ramp, shut up or I’ll kiss you with my JP-5 tongue.”

  “Eww. Say, you wanna join my bunk later for some Texas Hold’em?”

  “Maybe after I shower, get some chow, and call Mommy.”

  “You prolly didn’t hear ’cause you were sunbathing out there,” Ramp said, “but we just went full secure. No emails, no satcom calls either.”

  “Damn. You got a card on you?”

  Ramp fished a telephone calling card from his pocket and handed it over.

  “Don’t use it all up,” he said. “Girlfriend gets jealous if I don’t report.”

  “I’ll call her and tell her it’s cool, but that you stink in the sack.”

  Ramp laughed and walked off. “Thanks!” Kristin called to his back, and she headed for another steel stairwell and down another level to a long slim corridor. On the port side was a rack of cubbyholes for stowing gear while you used what looked like old silver pay phones. They were actually digital and the lines ran through a secure communications bundle topside, but their keypads were totally retro and they had swipe slots for phone cards.

  Kristin tossed her helmet in a cubbyhole, picked up a handset, swiped her card, and dialed. She leaned back on the opposite bulkhead, stretched the coiled black wire, and waited. After a few seconds it rang on the other end, and her mother, Marla Fellows, picked up the phone.

  Marla was the biological daughter of a man Kristin had never met called Hank Steele. Kristin did, however, know Hank Steele’s other progeny from his second marriage—her mother’s half brother, Eric. She had no idea what Eric did for a living, and she rarely saw him, yet he was cool, cute, kind of spooky, and she liked him. But at the moment she wasn’t thinking about any of that.

  “Hello?” Marla said.

  “Hi, Mom. How’s it going?”

  “Why are you calling me at midnight? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing at all. I was free so I called.”

  “You scared me.”

  Kristin rolled her eyes. “Sorry, Mom, just the time difference, that’s all.”

  “Where are you?”

  “St. Croix.”

  “You’re lying, honey.”

  “You know I can’t tell you, Mom. How’s Dad?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “No, I meant how?”

  “He’s fine, he’s fine.” Marla paused for a moment as she tried not to be a paranoid military mommy, but she was chewing her lip in Virginia. “I worry about you being on that big ship, Kristie.”

  “I love you too, Mom.” Kristin looked at her watch and chewed what was left of her cone. She was dying to pee, shower, and eat.

  “No, I mean it,” her mom said. “It scares me.”

  “Oh, Mom, seriously,” Kristin said. “Listen, this boat is enormous, it’s packed with five thousand people, it’s got guns and airplanes and marines on board, and we’re out in the middle of the freaking ocean.”

  “So? That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Yes, Mom!” Kristin rolled her eyes again. “You can stop worrying. Believe me, it’s the safest place on earth.”

  Chapter 37

  Senkaku Islands, East China Sea

  The helicopters arrived at dawn, and for the Japanese fisherman of the small tuna vessel called Fijimoru, it was an unusual thing, and a bit worrisome. The Japanese men were not allowed to be on shore. No one was allowed to be there.

  The Senkaku were a group of eight tiny islands in the middle of nowhere, set in crystal blue and green shallows exactly halfway between mainland China and the island of Okinawa, and 120 nautical miles northeast of Taiwan. They were uninhabited clumps of green bushy hills, caves and caverns, rocky beaches and sharp coral that could slice your feet raw. The only living creatures were black-footed albatross and terns, lizards, mosquitoes, and feral cats, with the surrounding seas full of marlin, tuna, and sharks. They were useless islands and no one really wanted them, although China, Taiwan, and Japan all claimed them as theirs.

  The captain of Fijimoru, Taki Osawa, was a crusty old salt who had piloted his vessel for seven rough hours from the Japanese isle of Ishigaki. Once a month, he and his crew of eleven hardy men would make the trip at night to avoid the Japanese Coast Guard, then come ashore at the largest island, Uotsuri, and make camp for a few days between hooking and hauling fresh tuna. They set up their tents, made fires, cooked meals of fresh fish and rice, drank saki, smoked awful cigarettes, and sang. It was a joyful working vacation away from their mewling children and impatient wives.

  “Trouble,” Taki said to his first mate, Shingo, as he watched the three black Harbin Z-20s approaching just above the morning sea. Most of his men were donning their high boots and yellow slickers outside the tents, preparing to wade out to their anchored forty-foot diesel.

  “Fucking Chinese.” Shingo frowned as he tossed his cigarette into the foam at their feet. “I saw the red stars when they banked.”

  “Tell the men to hurry,” Taki grunted. “If we’re aboard the damn boat they can’t do a thing.”

  He looked back at the three-hundred-meter-high crest that ran for two miles along the kidney-shaped island like the spine of some prehistoric beast. There was nowhere for the helicopters to land but the wide half circle of sloping stone beach where he stood. On the other side of the island the mountain sloped right down to the water, with nothing there but a slim strip of sand.

  The first mate yelled “Isogeh!” and the men abandoned the tents and hustled with armfuls of whatever they could grab toward the waves and their boat. They were handsome, muscular, sunburned young men. A few had marlin hooks on pikes, a couple had machetes, and one had an old bolt-action Type 38 Arisaka rifle for shooting sharks—not very effective protection. Yet they were no more concerned than a pack of truant schoolboys. Naval patrols, whether Chinese, Taiwanese, or Japanese, usually just blew air horns and waved them off.

  But today there would be no such diplomacy.

  The first of the three helicopters swung in from the sea to Taki’s right as he watched. It was large and black, pounding the air with its wide main rotor, and he saw that the side doors were open, and there were legs and black boots hanging down. The belly of the beast tipped up just ten meters in front of him and two off the deck, and the roaring windstorm plucked both of his tents from their stakes and sent them tumbling down the beach, along with his favorite straw fisherman’s hat.

  A man jumped to the ground. He wasn’t large but dressed in all black and springy like a cat. He had a large pistol strapped to one thigh and also wore one of those black skull hoods that showed only his eyes and lips. He walked toward Taki as seven more men disgorged from the thundering machine and also dropped to the beach, although those held wicked-looking guns with strange black cans on their fronts. Taki wondered why Chinese commandos would be all the way out here in Senkaku, unless they were conducting some sort of exercise. The shark-like helicopter rose away and swung back out to sea.

  The first man strode up to Taki and smiled. Taki was holding one of his marlin pikes, a six-foot pole with a large barbed spear on the end. He gripped the pole near the top, bowed his head once, and smiled back. This might turn out to be a friendly encounter after all.

  Zaifeng drew his QSZ-92 pistol, shot Taki point-blank in the face and blew off the back of his skull. As Taki toppled backward, his fingers sprang open and Zaifeng reached out with his free left hand and caught the pike. He looked at it as he twirled it once, thinking this might make even a better weapon than his bo, and reminded himself to take it along in the helicopter, though they wouldn’t be leaving for som
e time.

  Meanwhile, Taki’s men—almost all of them were still in the shallow waves and wading to Fijimoru, and had stopped momentarily to gawk at the helicopters and the Chinese commandos—jolted at the horrible sight of their captain being shot in the face, spun around, and started splashing like madmen toward their boat.

  They weren’t nearly fast enough.

  Lieutenant Po barked at his six men, and they all waded into the water and opened fire. They were in no rush and there was no need to waste ammunition—these Japanese had nowhere to go. They sloshed through the water, the bolts of their QBZ-95 bullpup rifles clacked in double taps, blue smoke spewed from their coughing silencers, and the 5.8 × 42 mm bullets tore through the skulls and slickers of the wailing fishermen.

  Taki’s first mate, Shingo, chose to stand and fight. He tore the old bolt-action Arisaka rifle from the hands of his dying motorman and spun in the waves as he tried to work the rusty bolt. Just as he jerked up the rifle, Po was right there, gripping the barrel with his left glove and flipping it out of the way as it fired and just missed his ear. He shoved the mouth of his silencer into Shingo’s chest, thumbed the weapon to full auto, and blew Shingo’s sternum out through his spine. Shingo’s corpse splashed in the water.

  Another fisherman, whose father had taught him the art of the blade, also chose to die like a warrior. He screamed, yanked his machete from his belt, and charged his assaulters, whipping it over his head like a scythe. Two of Po’s men watched him come at them, one of them smiled and quipped something cruel, and they both opened up and removed his legs.

  The youngest and most spry of the fishermen, a seventeen-year-old boy from Hiroshima named Kenji, had thrown off his slicker and dived under the waves. He’d swum almost all the way to the boat in one breath, came up gasping and sputtering, and grabbed the rungs of the aluminum stern ladder and started scrambling up. But Po saw him out there, dropped his bullpup to hang from his neck, drew his pistol, and shot him offhand at fifty meters in the back of the head.