by Andrew Watts
“Will do.” He got up and walked towards the hangar.
Victoria turned to the junior pilots. “You guys don’t have anything more productive to do than play games?”
The three 2Ps stared at her, each looking slightly scared of what she was about to say. “Which one of you am I flying with tomorrow?”
Caveman raised his hand sheepishly.
“You have all your emergency procedures memorized?” The 2Ps were required to know all of the helicopter emergency procedures verbatim.
Caveman nodded.
Victoria looked at each of them in the eye. “You know, if you three were studying right now, and you made a mistake on your emergency procedures, or couldn’t draw out the electrical system from memory, or couldn’t name all nineteen functions of the automatic flight control system by heart tomorrow when I ask you…I could be okay with that. But if you can’t do one of those things—and I will ask you tomorrow—if you can’t do one of those things and you’ve been playing video games while you have enlisted men performing maintenance on your aircraft—well, that would piss me off.”
After a moment of silence, all three of the junior officers quickly got up, turned off the video game, and went back to their stateroom to crack open the books.
Once in their room, with the door closed, Juan whispered, “What’s up boss’s ass tonight?”
Caveman said, “That’s just her, man. She’s intense. But I think it’s gotten worse since workups last year. After the accident.”
One Year Earlier…
Victoria Manning gripped the galley table as the ship rolled to a very unpleasant angle. Sea spray and rain pelted the tiny black porthole to her right. They’d been at sea for two weeks on the USS Farragut, an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer.
The bad weather had begun as a tropical storm down near Cuba. The warm waters of the Caribbean and a lack of wind shear had fueled the system into a massive hurricane, which was now moving northeast over Georgia, and out to sea.
While the path of the storm was predicted to miss the two carrier strike groups that were training in the Atlantic, the winds and low pressure system still made for some of the most horrendous seas that Victoria had ever encountered in her eleven years of naval service.
The phone rang in the wardroom. She picked it up, saying, “Air Boss.”
“Boss, can you come down to the hangar? We’ve got news on the bird.”
She could tell by the sound of his voice that it wasn’t good.
“Sure, I’ll be right down,” she said and hung up the phone. She began the balancing act of marching down the ship’s passageway as it rolled from side to side.
Aside from the weather, the helicopter’s maintenance had been the other disaster of their time at sea. Helicopter squadrons worked year-round to get their thirty-five-million-dollar helicopters in top condition for their underway periods.
There were thousands of complex parts in each of these aircraft. It was up to the twenty-somethings turning the wrenches and checking the electronics every day to keep each aircraft flyable. But in an isolated and harsh saltwater environment, with so many moving parts and almost no way to get spares, things often went wrong.
The USS Farragut had a single helicopter on board for this training period. They would deploy with two helicopters—one in each hangar—in a few months. The ship had been at sea for two weeks now. The weather had made it impossible to fly during at least seven of those days. And a plague of maintenance issues had kept them grounded for another five. It was embarrassing.
She arrived back in the hangar. The glum faces of her maintenance chief and maintenance officer stared back at her.
The maintenance officer, a lieutenant, said, “Boss, it ain’t looking good. We had to replace the AFCS computer.”
“So we’ll need a maintenance flight?”
“Afraid so.”
She left out a defeated sigh. Maintenance flights were not just flights. They were long diagnostic checks that took place both on deck and in the air. These events had to be completed before any other type of mission was permitted. It was as if they had just replaced a piano and now would have to spend the next few days tuning it before they were allowed to play any songs. Meanwhile, the ship’s captain and the admiral’s staff would have their arms crossed, asking for status updates every hour until they were ready.
The ship took another roll, and the three of them each grabbed hold of something sturdy, bending their knees and trying to stay upright. If she didn’t feel so sick from the never-ending motion, it would be fun. But the constant rolls of the ship got old after a few hours of heavy seas. After a few days, it became torture.
She thought about the problem. The automatic flight control system provided stability to the aircraft when flying. Without it, it would be very hard to hold a steady hover or maintain altitude with precision. Some of their missions required them to hold a steady hover only a few feet above the water. On nights like this, the fifteen-foot swells would cause the flight deck to pitch and roll violently. Because of the clouds, there was no visible horizon to hint at which way was up. Flying in this weather would be hard enough. Flying without an AFCS computer at night would be near suicidal. That’s why it was forbidden by the manuals.
Victoria said, “Okay, let’s plan to start the maintenance turns tomorrow. Hopefully the weather improves. Are you going to order a backup in case this computer doesn’t work?”
“Yes, ma’am. We should be able to pick it up from the carrier when we get in range.”
Because of the hurricane, the fleet had been scattered over an area of several hundred square miles. They were well out of range of any supply ships or carriers right now.
They looked shamed. She realized that her men took maintenance setbacks as personal failures. Victoria smiled and said, “Gentlemen, you’re doing the best you can in a lousy situation. This isn’t your fault. Tell the team that it isn’t their fault either. We’ll get the bird up. With any luck, this godforsaken weather lightens up soon—maybe we can even get her fully mission-capable tomorrow.”
The men nodded.
The 1MC speaker announced overhead, “Air Boss, your presence is requested in the captain’s cabin.” It was like getting called to the principal’s office.
She was a lieutenant commander, and an O-4 in the Navy. Destroyer captains were O-5s, holding the rank of commander in the Navy—equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in the other services.
Victoria had been promoted early to lieutenant commander and been made a department head. She had leapfrogged many of her more senior peers to get this assignment, which was considered prestigious.
While she would never admit it to anyone else, she had expected nothing less. Victoria had been on the fast track ever since she’d set foot on the hallowed grounds of the US Naval Academy, fifteen years ago.
Victoria had not always wanted to go into the military. Quite the opposite. While her father was an admiral, she had been turned off to the idea of military service. This was partly due to the natural teenage need to rebel against one’s parents, and partly because the military career track had just never seemed that interesting to her.
That is, until she had gone to a college fair in the fall of her junior year in high school and heard the word no.
Her grades and high school resume had been exemplary. But the man behind the US Naval Academy desk didn’t seem impressed. Victoria didn’t even know why she had stopped at the table. Maybe she had just wanted a USNA brochure so she could tell her parents that she had at least given it a look.
But when she asked the aged alumnus behind the booth for a brochure, he didn’t immediately hand her one. A disapproving frown on his face.
“Honey, maybe you should look at one of the other schools instead. No offense, but the Naval Academy can get pretty rough.”
That was all it took.
Victoria was an excellent athlete. Always had been. She had broken her nose playing lacrosse, but she joked with her br
others, “You should have seen the other guy.”
She worked just as hard at her studies as she did on the athletic field. That work ethic came from her father, she knew. As did her inability to accept being told no.
Ironically, her father had tried many times to convince her to look at one of the service academies or ROTC programs. Nothing her father said had ever swayed her thinking. But this sexist old dinosaur, passing judgment on her with one look…that lit a fire under her ass.
She hadn’t even applied to any other colleges. She’d aced her exams, received a nomination from her senator, and been recruited by the Navy women’s lacrosse team.
Victoria had accepted her appointment in the fall of her senior year. Early admission.
When she arrived on campus, Victoria discovered that she actually kind of liked the military lifestyle. It gave her a sense of purpose. And she liked that the military rewarded disciplined, hardworking, and capable people like herself. She excelled in all aspects of Academy life, earning top marks, starting on the lacrosse team all four years, and being selected for Navy pilot upon graduation.
Flight school was a continuation of her successes. She was a natural pilot. Victoria suspected that her talent came from the coordination and ability to judge relative motion that she’d developed playing sports. But what really set her apart from her peers was her intellectual ability. Everyone there was smart. They had to be. Still, Victoria was better than ninety-nine percent of her fellow flight students at memorizing all the books filled with numbers and procedures. She could then rattle them off under pressure, and—most importantly—she was able to make sound decisions based on her newly learned knowledge.
Once in her fleet squadron, Victoria was ranked as the number one pilot of more than thirty competitive junior officers. While many of her fellow pilots went barhopping on the weekends, she drove right back into work. She didn’t have a personal life. Nor did she want one. She had goals, and nothing else mattered.
Victoria knew that some thought she was judged favorably because she was a woman, and she deeply resented that. It was hard work and ability—anyone who said otherwise was just jealous. Her success earned her a sterling reputation among her commanding officers, and she was rewarded with the most coveted assignments. After finishing her tour as a junior officer, she’d spent several years as a flight instructor, then as an admiral’s aide.
She was promoted early to lieutenant commander and sent to a HSM-46 in Mayport, Florida, to become a department head. She was to get her own helicopter detachment—to be sent off with two helicopters and thirty men somewhere halfway around the world.
Her early promotion, and selection to department head were both her reward and her expectation. Stepping stones to someday becoming a commanding officer—and, hopefully, well beyond. They were not a surprise.
The surprise came after she began her work in the new leadership role.
Prior to becoming a department head, she had only had the opportunity to lead small teams. Now, she was the third-highest-ranking person on a ship of over three hundred. She was in charge of thirty highly trained aviators, rescue swimmers, and mechanics. And for someone who was used to being judged and rewarded based on her individual performance, it was a challenge to constantly be held accountable for the sometimes-substandard work of her men. And in the short time she had been on the destroyer—the helicopter detachment had only just joined the crew a few weeks ago—she had grown frustrated working with the captain.
The captain was a surface warfare officer. A ship driver. While he had worked with aviators before, his career had predominantly been spent aboard ships that did not have helicopter detachments. So the constraints of working with an aviation unit caused a lot of consternation between his young, newly minted O-4 air boss and him.
Every time they wanted to fly—even many of the times when they just needed to do maintenance and move or start up the helicopter—it required the captain to drive his ship a certain way. A certain direction, or a certain speed. It was limiting. And the captain had a schedule to keep. A busy schedule, written by the admiral’s planners on the carrier.
It infuriated the captain that Victoria’s helicopter had been grounded for maintenance for so long. She was having a major negative impact on his ability to meet the ship’s daily schedule of events.
The captain made sure that Victoria understood his disappointment. The captain’s boss was on the carrier, and he was putting pressure on the captain to get it fixed. The captain made sure to let her know that he was writing to Victoria’s own helicopter squadron commanding officer, who was on the carrier, letting him know of how bad it was going.
There were also personnel issues to deal with in her own air detachment that were so numerous she couldn’t keep them all straight. One of her young sailors was about to lose his security clearance over financial problems. Another had a pregnant wife at home who had just sent him divorce papers. One of her junior officers couldn’t land the helicopter without almost crashing—which might be normal for this stage in his career, but it was still scary as hell to deal with.
Pressure in the aircraft had never gotten to Victoria. But the pressure of command—and the feeling of helplessness that accompanied it—was the hardest obstacle she had yet faced.
Thank God she had her own stateroom with a satellite phone—and her mother’s calming voice. She kept the calls very short, never completely sure that there wasn’t some crewmember in the communications office listening in. Victoria’s mom was her only confidant. Her mom knew the Navy, having been a Navy wife for several decades. And she knew Victoria, and the amount of pressure she placed on herself. He mother calmed her down, restored her self-confidence, and acted as the sounding board she knew her daughter needed. Thank God for her.
Now, walking to the captain’s cabin, Victoria took a deep breath. She could get through this.
“Air Boss?” The chaplain poked his head out of the wardroom door. “May I speak with you a moment?”
“I’m sorry, Chaps. I need to run up to the captain’s cabin. Can it wait?”
He looked apprehensive. “Yes. Sure. But please come find me when you’re finished there.”
She was curious, but simply said, “Will do. Sorry.”
Victoria climbed up a ladder and kept walking down the passageway, swaying with the waves. She wondered if her father was feeling these seas on his carrier.
Admiral Arthur Louis Manning IV, the commander of the Harry S. Truman Strike Group, was about two hundred miles from her right now, she knew. This was the first, and likely the only, time they had been in the same area while acting in their official capacity in the Navy.
He was on one of the two carriers that were out here. His carrier was not supposed to be in charge of Victoria’s ship. However, due to the hurricane, with the ships being sortied into irregular groups, Admiral Manning actually had tactical control of her ship for the next week. Her mother would get a kick out of that.
Victoria knocked on the door to the captain’s cabin. “Sir, permission to enter?”
The captain opened the door and waved her in. He was on a phone.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir, I’m about to discuss it with my helicopter officer in charge. I’ll get back to you in five.” He hung up the phone, then picked up another and said, “TAO, this is the captain. How far away is the Porter? Alright, let’s make best speed there now. No, hold off on calling flight quarters.” He hung up the phone.
“What’s going on, sir?”
The captain stood up. “I understand that your aircraft is having maintenance issues. But I need a no-shit best effort here, Air Boss. The USS James E. Williams just had their helicopters go down. Since the fleet is so spread out, we’re the only ship that has a helicopter in range.”
Her face went white. “Down, sir? Should we go into the CIC? Look at the tactical picture? I can—” CIC was the Combat Information Center. Also known as Combat, it was the central command and control space on the ship.
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“Now, hold on. The admiral read our ship’s daily status report and knows that your helicopter is not flyable due to maintenance problems. He only wants you to launch if you have those issues fixed. He was very clear on that point.” The captain looked uncomfortable. “And he said he wants to speak with you directly about it as soon as you’re available.”
Victoria went over the scenario in her mind. By the book, it was an absolute no. There was no way she should allow her aircraft to fly with an AFCS computer that hadn’t passed a maintenance check flight. Especially at night, over water, and in horrendous weather.
But she knew those pilots. The helicopter detachment on the USS James E. Williams were from her own squadron. Those were her brothers in arms. They would do anything for her, and she needed to push herself, her men, and her aircraft to their absolute limit if at all possible.
She said, “Sir, I think I can do it. I’ll fly it.”
The captain nodded. “Alright. I’ll let you explain it to the admiral. We’re supposed to call him back in five minutes.”
The operations officer knocked on the door and entered. “Sir, you asked for an update?”
“Yes, what is it, OPS?”
“Sir, the suspected crash site is about ninety miles to our north. We’ve confirmed with Strike Group that we’re the only ship with an air asset that would be able to get there in time. But we would need to launch soon, sir. With the water temperature and heavy seas, the SAR planners say we need to get there quick to give them a chance of survival.”
The captain waved OPS away. “Very well.” He picked up the phone and pressed a button, connecting them by satellite to the aircraft carrier.
As the captain waited to be connected, Victoria cursed herself. Who was she kidding? The winds were out of limits. The seas were out of limits. She didn’t know if the AFCS would work. She would be risking the lives of whoever she took with her.
“Yes, sir. My air boss says that her aircraft is flyable, sir. Excuse me, Admiral?”
Victoria just realized something. She had assumed that the captain referred to the admiral on the IKE. But now that they were under the Truman Strike Group’s control…God, was that her father on the line?
