Abrams gathered he was talking about the enormous, vulnerable gash in the JFK’s starboard side.
In response, Drake merely pointed at Chief Shields, who answered for him.
“Sure, we can dog all the hatches. Already done that. Problem is all those missiles that exploded there didn’t have the courtesy to stop their blast damage right at the panels between frames, all in a nice straight matrix. There are bulkheads that are knocked down, others that are weakened and structurally shot. There are hatches that won’t shut, there are exposed crawlspaces, electrical ducts, air ducts, drainage ducts. Hell there are interstitial spaces I barely knew were there. I’m doing my best to lock all that down, and shore it up, with the zero manpower I have for the job. But it’s all half-measures, and it’s not going to hold – not against that many dead. If and when they get inside the superstructure, I’d strongly suggest taking your bets off the table.”
The big, serious Marine, Blane, spoke up. “Also, if they’ve overrun the flight deck at that point, and they’re crawling all over the island… can we even steam away? What, do we never go out on deck again? We need to stop them before that happens, to maintain control of the flight deck, for air ops, and positive control of the vessel. The whole idea of riding out the storm was never that brilliant in the first place, in the view of this Marine.”
“Okay,” Drake said, waving his hand to cut this off. “Enough about the hole. That plan is planned. Moving on. As most of you know, the high-level strategy for this engagement is to try and hold – hold out long enough for the incoming nuke guys from the UK to land and kick the reactor over. And then we all steam the hell out of here. The new little wrinkle we’ve discovered is… we’re not sure we can actually drive ourselves off the sandbar with engine power alone. Captain Martin here has developed simulations that illustrate this.”
Martin half-opened the lid of a laptop and looked to Drake.
Drake’s brow furrowed, then he fractionally shook his head. “On second thought… not right now with the sims.” He looked back around the table. “Let’s stipulate that what we’re about to tell you is grounded in oceanography, materials science, and physics. What we need to do, firstly, is lighten the ship, mainly by offloading cargo – trans-shipping it to the Murphy if we really need it, dumping it over the side if we don’t. Two, we’re going to hold on until high tide, which will help our buoyancy. But the third and most important step is: right now, we’re already rigging up both lengths of our anchor chain into a single strand and making it fast to the Murphy. And when our engine comes online, and our screws start turning, and we’re also lighter, and the tide’s up… then the destroyer is going to start hauling, and tow our asses out of here. All taken together, it should do the job.”
“Plus the engines,” Shields asked. “Right?”
Drake tried not to pause or change expression. “Right. Plus the engines.”
Abrams spoke up now for the first time. “Sir. Isn’t it worth trying to tow you off now?”
Drake nodded at Martin, who spoke in response. “No. We’ve run it a number of ways, based on the weight of the ship, the depth we’re wedged in the sandbar, friction coefficients, and the gross torque and horsepower of the Murphy. And we’re very confident you won’t have the power to do it on your own. You’ll pull your own hull out first.”
Drake pinned Abrams with his eye. “And about that. You do not risk your boat trying to save this one. We’re bringing you in closer than I wanted to, to try this. But if it starts looking like we’re not coming loose… or if the dead get too close… you’re to cast off that chain and steam to a safe distance. You’re also only going to be able to pull so hard until your hull fails. So you’re going to have to monitor that very closely. Do not mistake me: if it’s not happening, you do not risk scuttling your vessel. If the Kennedy isn’t coming loose, you have got to survive. That is your job number one. If we go down, and you’ve already retrieved the mission team, you’re to steam the hell out of here – straight for Portsmouth. Got it?”
Abrams also kept himself from visibly reacting. “Yes, sir.”
“And you’re to station a security team at your endpoint of that chain – a big one. You know how the dead like to crawl up anchorlines and bowlines and shit.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“And, whatever happens, you do not risk the structural integrity of your ship hauling on mine. You very clear on that?”
“Roger that, sir.”
* * *
The meeting broke up into a number of smaller but more intense conversations.
Abrams could just hear the Air Boss arguing with the LT from CIC, something about “at least trying to draw them off some more. It’s been working, you know it has! Look, we loop my fliers out over the sea, so they can’t follow our engine noise – and then we do some show-of-force flyovers, right on the periphery of the herd, to the south, or the north. Then drop more ordnance. It’s gotta draw some of them off, right?” Abrams couldn’t make out her answer in the general cocktail-party tumult of chatter.
Through all this, Drake was trying to make his way over to Abrams – but got intercepted by Chief Shields. “This trans-shipping of cargo weight, Commander. Where do you expect me to find the manpower for that?”
Drake looked profoundly unsympathetic. “You’ve finished your defensive construction work, right?”
Shields squirmed. “Finished is a fluid concept. And, anyway, many of those ratings are going to be needed for the fight. And we’re out of time now, anyway…”
Drake very obviously didn’t give a shit about Shields’ manpower problems. “Find the people. Find the time. This is going to happen. Now stop talking about your problems and start creating my solutions, Chief.”
But before Drake was even free of him, he got buttonholed by the CAG. “Commander, I’m still not a hundred percent comfortable with these ramparts being built on th—”
Drake cut him off. “Stow it, Cole. The time is fast coming when we’re going to be out of the business of launching aircraft – and just trying to keep our heads above water. The ramparts stay.” He looked up and raised his voice. “This meeting is concluded! You’re all dismissed. Return to your duties.”
But he pointed his finger directly at Martin, who was rising. “Not you. You stay.”
* * *
Abrams found his vision going long and out of focus as he rose to leave, partly due to already trying to picture the operation for attaching the enormous anchor chain to his ship – which, evidently, Drake had already set in motion.
The most obvious solution would be to secure it around their own “wildcat” – as they called the vertical shaft which was used to spool and unspool their own anchor chain. They’d most likely tow the chain over in a launch, then winch it up to the destroyer’s deck using a smaller, lighter chain or heavy braided rope…
He was already so far into his own head he didn’t notice the furtive looks or whispering of two enlisted men on the Flag Bridge, both near the outside hatch, one of them manning a radar station. Abrams saw the hatch had been propped open, as it sometimes was, to permit a breeze inside.
Stepping into the open air, he moved to the side and put his back up against the wall. He just wanted a few seconds to think, and to breathe, and to get his head together – before he was shoved back into the close and constant company that was life in the surface fleet. But as he stood, arms crossed on chest, and after the others from the meeting had filed out, Abrams realized he could hear the two seamen just inside, hissing to each other.
“Dude – that plane from the UK is nothing like two hours away.”
“Yeah? How long?”
“Five, if it’s a minute. Also, I heard they’re British civilian power-plant engineers. What the fuck do they know about maritime nuclear reactors?”
“I don’t know, dude. It’s just more mushroom farming, ain’t it – keep us in the dark and feed us shit…”
Abrams frowned, straightened up, and desce
nded the external ladder to the flight deck to get back in his Seahawk. He gave the pilot a single word of instruction over the ICS headset mic – “Home” – then slumped back against his seat, thinking dark thoughts all the way.
As the sleek bird crossed the short stretch of ocean, then swooped back in toward the helo landing deck at the stern of the destroyer, Abrams looked out and could see two of his sailors standing on top of the hangar that overlooked the helipad. One was leaning down into into an open case, while the other stood and hurled what looked like a large model airplane into the sky. It was one of their hand-launched RQ-11 Raven drones – which would be useful for having their own aerial surveillance and view into the battlespace. Unfortunately, the vector the dude hurled it on was nearly directly into the flight path of the Seahawk, which was now roaring in to land.
Abrams mentally shrugged. He just had to trust that everyone on his ship knew what the goddamned hell they were doing.
He only hoped the same was true of everyone on the Kennedy.
* * *
At last, Drake and Martin sat alone in the silence and peace of the nearly empty meeting room. The last person out had closed the door and Martin now had his laptop open, flipping through windows onscreen – talking while he worked, but not looking up.
“I’m going to need to set up some kind of measuring apparatus,” he said.
“To measure what?” Drake asked.
“The actual numbers of dead outside – and how they match up against the simulated numbers.”
“Can you use the observation deck?”
“No. I need a mobile aerial view.”
“Okay. I’m sending up the X-47 shortly anyway.”
“That a UAV?” Martin asked.
“It’s a lot of UAV.”
Martin nodded, satisfied. “But there’s also the question of what’s going on under the water, around the hull. In the sandbar.”
“So you need an underwater view.”
“Precisely.”
Drake nodded. “We can do underwater. We’ve got a MK18 Mod 2 Kingfish.”
“That another drone?”
“Yes. But a UUV – unmanned underwater vehicle. Looks like a big torpedo. But good maneuverability, good depth floor, great optics and sensors. Can linger for ages.”
“Brilliant,” Martin said. “That’ll do.”
Drake stood. “I’ll assign someone to run it for you. What else?”
Martin didn’t stand himself. He just looked up at Drake, his head slightly cocked. “Why didn’t you tell them the real plan? For getting us off the sandbar?”
Drake paused, his lips pursed, before answering. “Are you out of your mind? It’s fucking absurd, on the face of it.”
“It works in the simulation.”
“Yeah. And if reality matches the sim, then… then our doom will also be our salvation.”
“Indeed it will.”
“We just have to keep it from fucking killing everyone on board first…” Drake’s expression sagged a little. “But the odds against all of this coming together, in time to save us… What’s your degree of confidence? Based on your models? What are our real chances?”
Martin looked genuinely amused. “Are you having a laugh? Calculating confidence is even harder than calculating the original prediction itself. A lot harder, actually.”
“C’mon, take a shot. Give me something. You’ve sold me on this plan. And now everything’s hanging on it. Convince me I didn’t just sign all our death warrants.”
“All right.” Martin stuck his face into the laptop and started typing and clicking as he narrated. “Multiplying out all the degrees of confidence I’ve got in each of the assumptions that went into this model, some of them slightly made up, and all expressed as percentages… and then plugging all those into a basic statistical regression… I get, um, thirty-nine-point-four percent. That’s the likelihood everything will work as advertised.”
Drake paused before answering. “That’s not terrible.”
Martin leaned back in his chair. “It’s also a bit of a sham. You need to understand that estimates of the probability of one-time events are actually conceptually flawed.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it’s either going to happen or it’s not. It can’t thirty-nine percent happen, or happen thirty-nine percent of the time – because there’s only the one time, and it either happens or it doesn’t.”
Drake sighed. “And we’re either dead or we aren’t.”
“Exactly. In the end, it’s either going to be one hundred percent or zero percent. Arguably, all that thirty-nine per cent number can be is our subjective view of how likely we think it is. It’s not a statistic.”
Drake looked to Martin as if his attention was fading. Maybe he didn’t need a probability and statistics lecture right now. Maybe he was exhausted.
“But there’s one thing I can quantify, with some statistical significance.”
Drake perked up slightly. “Yeah?”
“When it’s going to happen. If it does. How soon.”
Drake checked his watch. “You said about the same time as high tide.”
“Yes. But that’s the center of a range. And with ninety-five percent certainty, that range stretches from as soon as… fifty minutes… out to just over four hours.”
Drake sighed. “So we may need to hang on longer than we thought. A lot longer.”
Martin just shrugged. “How long do you think we can actually hold?”
“When the full onslaught hits? Not five hours. Not four, either. I don’t know.”
“Let’s hope it comes in at the low end of the range, then.”
Drake put his hands on a chair back and leaned forward. “Yeah, let’s hope. Moreover, given all of that uncertainty… and given the plan we’re actually counting on for getting us refloated… You still need to ask why I didn’t tell them? Is that what you want the crew pinning their hopes on? No, they’d shit themselves if I tried to tell them that’s our real plan for getting out of here. We’re not telling them those numbers, and we’re definitely not telling them what we really have in mind. Because, right now, morale is more important than anything. It’s not even just morale – it’s… it’s bigger than that, it’s what we both just said. It’s hope. Hope has been bleeding away all around us. And now hope is more valuable than bullets, more valuable than live bodies. More valuable even than…”
But then Drake trailed off, hearing himself getting needlessly theatrical. He sighed, the weight of his upper body feeling impossibly heavy on his arms. Finally, he raised his gaze up to Martin, and looked him in the eye. When he spoke, his voice was steady and quiet – but firm.
“What you said earlier, about how you failed to get the reactor started, and failed to save the ship.” He paused a heavy beat. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Martin nodded, almost imperceptibly. Drake thought he was looking uncomfortable in that special way the English did, whenever anything got too personal, or if you tried to praise them. Or, in this case, tried to take blame off their shoulders.
“I gave you an impossible job. You took it on and did your best. Hell, you told me what was going to happen. And in the end you saved everyone on board, by heading off a core meltdown.”
Drake took his weight off his arms, stood up straight, and exhaled.
“Now we’ve got another chance. And we’re all in this together. Every setback is shared. Any success is everyone’s. And we’re just going to have to adapt and overcome… or else we’ll go down fighting. Either way, we do it together.”
With that, Drake turned, pulled open the hatch, and exited. Captain Martin slowly and quietly closed the cover of his laptop.
And, for just a few seconds, he sat alone and in silence.
The Raining Dead
Lake Rudee, Virginia Beach
The dead were pouring into the lake now, and by the thousands. The yacht, a gift from fate for Wesley and the ragtag group of sailors and survivors he led,
now floated out in the middle of Lake Rudee – slowly drifting toward the sea inlet, but still only fifty scant yards from the pier’s edge. The engine had fired up long enough to blast them away from the rampaging dead at the dockside. But, almost immediately, it had petered out again, and now only stuttered. Problems with the alternator, Burns had said, but he promised they would fix it.
In the meantime, that left most of the group watching the horde as it slowly filled up the water around them. More than once Wesley swore he saw something moving in the depths below, but as yet nothing had tried to climb on board. This surprised him every time he looked over at the docks, where the runners still poured across the bridge and leapt without hesitation or reason into the water, only to vanish beneath and not come up again.
There was a blur of movement to his left and Wesley turned, expecting something to leap at him, but instead he stepped forward and caught Derwin, just as the man staggered and started to fall. One of the survivors – a short guy with stubble on his chin and biceps that suggested a lot of gym time – also grabbed hold of the half-delirious shore patrolman, and they lowered him down to lean on the railing of the yacht. He was turning very pale, and his eyes didn’t focus on Wesley as he spoke.
“Come on mate, stay awake. Stay with us.” But Derwin was drifting, almost unconscious one moment, and then moving but dazed the next.
“Damn,” cursed Wesley, as he noticed the growing patch of blood soaking through the man’s uniform. “He’s lost too much blood.”
“We need a medical kit,” said the bodybuilder. “To try and wrap this wound up properly. Slow the bleeding.” He turned to Burns. “We still got the med kit?”
“No,” said Burns. “We lost it when we had to break and run this morning.”
Melvin and Browning joined the group huddling around the semi-conscious Derwin.
“Okay,” Wesley said. “I’ll go check the cabins. Can you lot just keep him still, or something? Maybe get him some water.”
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 14
