by Gordon Kent
Sneesen went down to his rack, feeling the sadness, the frustration turn to anger. He’d never been this angry. This was horrible. He went down to his rack and wrote about it in his secret diary, and then he went to the canteen and got two Cokes and poured them out in the head, and then, feeling the anger in him like ice, his whole inner self turned to ice, to hatred, he went to the shop and to the back, where they kept the epoxy pumps. There were two, a big and a little; they gave five-to-one shots, epoxy and hardener. He pumped them into the cans and mixed the sticky fluids with a screwdriver he poked down through the drinking holes. Not perfect, but it would be good enough.
He put the cans on a steam pipe to harden and went back to his rack and wrote the rest of it in his diary, then put the diary right on top of his folded uniforms in his locker. Ice—a block of ice. Hard as ice. No reason to hide any more. He got out his white flight-deck jersey. The hell with them—yes, that was it, that was precisely it—to Hell with them!
And went and got the two cans, which were hot now, the epoxy inside hard, and they were heavy in his hands, like some kind of weapons. He walked the p’ways and the ladders with one in each hand, squeezing himself against the bulkheads, really pushing himself into the wall when the black guys went by. Not wanting to touch or be touched. He had a mission. He didn’t want them touching him, contaminating it.
He crossed the hangar deck and went up to the catwalk. He had hearing protection so he’d look like everybody else. He’d brought his tool kit. Everybody saw him up there all the time, anyway.
The deck was a madhouse, but one that made sense to him now. He knew what it was all about. He didn’t care about it any more.
He knew right where to look for Rafehausen’s S-3, tucked down between elevators one and two, way outboard. Sneesen walked right to it. He looked at the radome—just looked at it; why would they think he was doing anything just because he was looking? Weird—because they said he was weird. Sneesen looked around and then went to the port engine intake and looked in, and, when he knew nobody was looking, reached way back and pushed one of the epoxy-filled Coke cans as far back as he could. He put some tools in after it. Then he strolled over to the starboard engine and did the same thing.
Then he walked to the number two elevator and walked off the edge. Nobody saw him go; one moment he was there, the next he was gone—down, down the height of a five-story building, to hit the water, sudden cold, shock, landing partly on his buttocks and back and feeling the air slammed from his lungs, then sinking and hearing the great noise of the ship going on, tumbling in its wake, sinking, drowning. Gone.
The Gulf of Sidra.
USNS Philadelphia was on station at 32.17 N, 17.04 E. Long swells were running, lifting the ship and then pointing it bow-down and running away under her; a strong wind blew out of the northeast, carrying away spray from the fringe of the surface chop. Everybody was seasick, but Rose and LaFond were on deck in foul-weather gear. LaFond unashamedly threw up when he had to and made no apology; Rose, perhaps feeling some constraint because of command, found shelter. It started to rain, hard drops that hit like blown sand, and she made her way aft to the bridge and the comm office. Despite the seasickness, she felt strong enough for anything. She hadn’t known Alan had been missing, only that she hadn’t heard from him; now, she had a special message from Admiral Pilchard that he was on the Rangoon and well.
Valdez was in his bunk. The marines were in their bunks. The IVI delegation—three company reps and two scientists—were in their bunks. There was little to do for sixteen hours except wait.
The captain was in his quarters just aft of the bridge. Told that Rose was on the bridge, he came forward, a short, paunchy man in his forties. “Doing okay?” he said with the seaman’s grin at the seasick.
“I’ve spent a lot of time at sea, Captain.”
“Well, the Philly rides a little rougher than a CV.”
“Yeah, but it isn’t a chopper carrier, either. They stand on end. I’ll be okay.”
“I know you will. Well, our situation’s good, except the weather. If this lasts, we’re not gonna have fighter cover out of Aviano; they’re socked in up there.”
“I checked.”
“Well, you know our situation. We’re going to depend on what we can get out of Sigonella, but they tell me the F-18s can’t do too much for us.”
“Short legs, yeah. We’ll be okay.” She glanced at the surface radar display. “How’s that Libyan Coast Guard cutter doing?” The Libyan gunboat had been shadowing them for hours, staying just over the visual horizon, but close enough so that its mast-mounted radar kept them in sight. But that worked both ways: the Philadelphia’s higher mast kept easy track of the Libyan, and the Libyans’ choice of distance revealed the gunboat’s mast height and probable size—a good deal smaller than a frigate.
“Still there.” The captain tapped the greenish blip. “Holding station.”
“Good.”
“Game plan says we’re supposed to have a destroyer within visual. Where is it?”
“Russians are playing some game up north; there’s an Akula hanging around. Normally, they’d be running lines on it from the air, but the carrier’s too far away. Shore-based P-3s are doing their thing. I guess Admiral Pilchard thinks he needs the destroyers up there more than we do down here.”
They both looked up as a gust of wind blasted the nearest window with rain. The ship was climbing the swell, and it seemed to be heading up like an aircraft flying into the weather. Rose had to take half a step backward to steady herself, and she grabbed for the big command chair.
“Can you launch in this?” the captain shouted over the wind.
“No!” She pulled herself up the slope of the deck. “Van Nguyen, the civilian launch guy, says thirty-knot wind max plus some cockamamie scale he’s got for wave action.” She tried to grin. “We didn’t rehearse for bad weather during Fleetex.”
Without affectation, the captain said, “Oh, this isn’t bad weather.” Then he realized what she meant. “Bad for the launch, you mean, yeah. Well—we wait and see.” He braced himself against the chair. “Between you and me, I’ll be glad when that thing blasts off my deck and is gone. Nothing personal—I’ll just be glad when we’re rid of it.” He looked at her. “You know the Chinese and the Italians both made some sort of speech against it today in the UN.”
“Yeah?”
“They claimed it was a weapon of destabilization. It’s all over the Italian radio.”
Rose thought about Peretz, decided there was nothing she could do, and headed for the ladder. Just do your job. She went back down to the deck and joined LaFond and then made a tour of the sleeping spaces, trying to cheer people up. Things were really tight on the Philadelphia, which had not been configured to carry so many passengers. At that moment, nobody cared.
“Let me die, man,” Valdez moaned.
“Aw, come on, Valdez! You’re a sailor!”
“Take me back to Silicon Valley.”
The updated weather predicted that the storm would slowly shift northward, meaning that the Philadelphia might get clear enough to launch next day. L-minus-8, the formal beginning of the countdown, would come at 0400. At best, it would be tight, with the civilian experts saying they had to stay on the cautious side of the judgment line and Rose and the captain saying they wanted to launch. Either way, air cover was going to be a problem, because, as the wind lessened, the ceiling might come right down to the water, and Aviano and Sigonella would be solidly socked in. As she rolled into her rack for a nap fully clothed (admitting the truth to herself; she was nauseated) Rose thought, If it grounds us, it’ll ground the Libyans, so it’s zero-sum-game time. She didn’t let herself worry about the fact that the Libyans took off from south of her, where the weather would be improving first.
She woke and checked her watch. 1720—still early. She could feel the ship under her, tipped bow-down as the swell moved her. Wave action was the same, she decided, but what was the wind? She climbed
a ladder and came up on the deck, but before she even got there she knew the sound of the wind was different. The high keening was gone, and with it the unpredictable blasts that smashed rain against the sides. On deck, she met fog and a reduced wind that was like a slap with sopping rags.
But it was better—it was better. It was going to be okay!
She wanted to tell somebody—Alan, most of all, but Valdez would do. It was going to be okay, and tomorrow at noon they would launch, and Philadelphia would turn north and head for Naples, and she would have done her job and done it well.
She hugged herself against the damp cold of the wind. Then she felt the ship shudder and lurch, lifting stern-up and listing to port. A dull crunch and boom seemed to come from everywhere around her as she was thrown aside, trying to keep her balance, then falling to the steel deck and sliding ten feet over the wet surface. She was aware of water boiling by the rail, and her first thought was of some vagrant wave, and then she realized that the ship had been hit by an explosion, and she was sliding and tumbling and wondering if it was the missile or the ship’s propulsion system or was it the Akula or—?
Blood was pouring from her nose, but she was alert. She clawed her way up the ladder and thrust her head through the steel door to the bridge. Somebody was shouting “Helm’s not answering!” when she burst in.
“Get Cobb on the Fort Klock! Tell him I think we’ve been torpedoed!”
At sea—aboard the Jackson.
The Air Boss looked down over his kingdom and sipped at his twentieth cup of bad coffee since sitting down in the tower. He had launched two-thirds of the air wing in only two cycles; the leaders would be near Gibraltar, by now; the last planes in the chainsaw were below him, an S-3 and two F-14s. These three aircraft were the purpose of the entire launch, the actual payload that would travel up the thousands of miles of waiting tankers and defenders and do the job of the air wing. Two fighters and one big, dangerous grape.
If he hadn’t had a major hard-ass image to maintain, he would have cracked a smile. This air wing had pulled itself together and now it was possible, just possible, that it might be something special. An air wing that could launch a four-thousand-mile chainsaw.
Behind him, there was movement, and two of his enlisted men had a brief conversation.
“What’s up?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the deck.
“VS-49 has a sailor missing. They want us to check if he’s on the deck.”
The Air Boss watched the deck for a moment. “Okay, get it done. Don’t make a fuss; we haven’t got time to run a Man Overboard right now.” He heard Petty Officer Dearing talk into the comm link to the deck chiefs. Some kid probably overslept; they were all bushed.
The Air Boss saw the signal he had been waiting for and raised his hand.
“Deck is clear. Commence the launch.” Immediately, there was a little buzz behind him as the team began to inform the deck and the air wing. The S-3 was already on the cat. Rafehausen’s plane; that didn’t always mean much, but the Air Boss suspected that Rafehausen was the best pilot in the air wing, and when the chips are down, you send the best. He saw the plane quiver like a cat ready to pounce as the shuttle locked home, and then his trained eye saw a tiny flutter of metal near the left engine and he slapped at the button to hold the cat, but the catapult had already fired and the plane began to gather speed down the deck. Something in the engine intake, he knew. That engine was shredding itself even as—
The engine burst apart in a flash of brilliant white and silver, but the implacable catapult continued to fling the broken plane down the deck. The second engine went with a scream that was audible even on the bridge. A piece of turbofan blade, released from the cowling at full rotation, cut through a nearby F-18 and ripped upward and struck the Air Boss’s armored window like a hammer. The tough glass starred but didn’t hide the now wingless S-3 as it was tossed forward by the catapult. The plane rotated sharply to the left, free of the deck with no engines, no lift. One seat fired straight out over the water at a height of sixty feet; the chute opened and it hit the water at once, the rocket-propelled seat skipping over the waves. Then, directly ahead of the ship, the plane hit the water upside down. It floated for almost two seconds, breaking up from the impact but still, somehow, game. Then it was gone.
The deck was chaos and a helicopter was launching, but the Air Boss knew it was too late for the crew of the plane. As he stood up, he and every member of the crew could hear the cruel rattle as the wreckage of the plane began to drag down the length of the ship’s hull.
The con on the bridge was trying to turn away from the wreckage. It didn’t matter. But there were lives at stake somewhere in the Mediterranean, and the air wing had stretched to the limit to get a package in the air, and the Air Boss swallowed his panic and his sorrow and did his duty.
“Tell VS-49 to get another plane on deck.”
37
December 9
Off the African coast.
Alan got his way: they put him into an ancient CH-46 and he headed for the Jackson. By the time he lifted off, he had seen both Djalik and O’Neill again—both sedated, both alive, Djalik critical but “stabilized.”
He was tired but up—too up, although he didn’t know it yet. He still had that sense of urgency that had driven him on the flight, as if he had to get there, get there, get there! Even though there kept receding from him. Was there some new there, still over the horizon? Or was there the Jackson, duty, that life? Or was it Rose, some fear for her?
The helo winnowed down on the Jackson’s flight deck and he clambered out, humping his helmet bag with the stuff that had got him into and out of Zaire, and the ship looked strange to him, and at first he thought it was only its newness, and then it hit him: there were almost no aircraft. F-14s sat on the number one and two cats, but the deck behind them was dark and almost empty, and he wondered what was going on—ASW threat? An operation he didn’t know about?
He ran to the catwalk, and half a dozen officers were there to pound his back and wring his hand, but each did it and got out of the way, too fast, something wrong, passing him along; Captain Parsills last, until he passed him on, too, murmuring, “Great job, super job—the admiral wants to see you personally—”
And there was Rafe. And Rafe wasn’t smiling.
Rafe put out his hand. Alan took it, and Rafe—most un-Rafe-like—put his left hand on Alan’s shoulder. “Can you fly?” he said.
Alan thought it was a joke, a reference to his landing on the Rangoon, and he started to grin and then saw that Rafe wasn’t joking; he was beyond seriousness. Parsills and the others were behind Alan; he could feel them there, hanging back. What the hell?
“We’re running a chainsaw; I’m the last aircraft. I need a TACCO.”
“Jesus, Rafe—?” You never say you are too tired to fly. He wanted to hold up his cotton-gloved hands and yell “I’m burned out—what do I look like?” But the look on Rafe’s face stopped him.
“Somebody hit the Philadelphia. Rose is okay, but they need air cover. That’s what the chainsaw is for. Can you fly?”
He felt stupidly slow. Rose—Philadelphia—it was almost launch day, must be, so the Philadelphia must be in the Gulf of Sidra. Somebody hit the Philadelphia. “Hit with what?”
“We don’t know yet. Air cover’s gone; Cobb’s BG is focused on a Russian sub. She needs us, man.”
He looked around. Parsills and the others were looking at him, waiting. They all knew, of course. He saw the one, lone S-3 on the deck. The last plane in a chainsaw. Rose.
Rafe still had his hand. Now, he dropped it and looked away. “We wouldn’t be going, but—” He was having trouble speaking. “Last S-3 was supposed to be mine. Skipper Paneen took my plane and—Engines blew going off the cat about ten minutes ago.”
Alan had never seen it happen, but he had heard about it. The aircraft launched, disappeared below the flight deck, and never came up. Into the water off the bow, the carrier plowing over it—
>
“Jesus, Rafe, did they—”
“Skipper, Dickson, Chief Rinehart.” He swallowed. “Christy—” He swallowed again. “Christy may make it. She ejected, broke both—She may not walk, if she—You going or aren’t you?”
“Of course. Jesus, Rafe, I’m—”
But Rafehausen had already turned away and was going through the hatch. He wasn’t going to weep; he wasn’t that kind, but he was on the edge of a crash, an abyss, and he wanted to face it his own way.
Alan turned to Parsills. “Nixon was the only one who got out alive?”
Parsills nodded. He gripped Alan’s arm. “This is a tough time, Al—all the way up to the flag. BG’s split, your wife’s ship is in trouble, then this. You’re the only bright spot. Come on, the admiral wants to see you.”
Alan’s “up” turned into a down, the down of waiting. He had lost a dozen pounds, and his flight gear all had to be rebuckled, and a parachute rigger was trying to take some webbing out of his harness and re-sew it so it would fit. That sort of trivia, and the time it took to get little things done, were fraying his temper. He still had that drive to get there, and re-fitting was preventing it. He wanted to be in the air right now. He had to get to Rose. The chainsaw was in the air. And he was holding up the plane waiting for his fucking flight gear to fit!
Rafe seemed calm enough now. He’d already gone up and pre-flighted the plane twice. He was too quiet, was Alan’s thought, maybe because a lot had happened in the weeks he had been away and maybe because Christy Nixon was down in the ship’s hospital with a broken back and smashed knees.
Alan finished his can of Coke and looked at the rigger, who seemed to be staring off into space.
“Goddamit, are you working on that thing or not?” Alan snapped. The rigger glanced at him, looked hurt. “I’m not going to a fucking fashion show.”
