Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 2 - Final Flight

by Final Flight (lit)

  They probably got six IV needles stuck in him and have given him enough dope to supply Los Angeles for a week. Too bad about his hands, but with artificial hands he can do everything except pick his nose.

  He wondered if he was bleeding internally. He had seen enough bullet wounds to know that there was no way to tell just from looking. You observed the patient for signs that he was 1 losing blood, and if it wasn't visibly coming out of holes, it must be internal bleeding. And shock looked like hemorrhaging. He wondered if he was in shock.

  He felt cold, but they had put a blanket over him.

  Mild shock maybe. He took several deep breaths, trying to see if his lungs were working properly. His side felt as if he had a knife in it. Maybe he shouldn't do that. Maybe a busted rib would penetrate his lung.

  Wonder if that foray on the bridge did any good. He had knocked that one gunman down for sure and maybe the other guy. Those sailors had been shot, but there was no other way. They would have approved, he told himself. They would have wanted him to try.

  One of the corpsmen returned, the one with the glasses. "The doctor says you have two cracked ribs, but there are no bullet fragments in your chest. Just an ugly surface wound. You were very lucky." Yeah. Very lucky. That slug could have went into my gut and there is no way my gut could take another, not with all that scar tissue down there. Very lucky.

  Yeah. "How about wheeling me in with Sergeant Vehmeier." "Who?" "That marine that was brought down here a while ago with his hands blown off. He fell on a grenade." "Oh. He's dead. Sorry." The sailor walked away. It was a busy night.

  "Come back here, you fucking swabbie!" Garcia's voice was coldly furious. The sailor paused and turned, uncertainty on his face. "You said Sergeant Vehmeier is dead?" "Yeah, Sarge. He was dead when they brought him in here." "I'm 'Gunnery Sergeant" to you, pill-pusher. Now get some fucking tape and put a permanent bandage on this wound." Garcia slid his legs off the edge of the bed and hoisted his torso erect, feeling slightly dizzy and nauseous.

  "You can't-was "Do I have to get the fucking tape and do it myself?" The sailor scurried away.

  Where did they put that fucking rifle?

  As the helicopters had settled onto the angle of the flight deck Colonel Qazi marched Admiral Parker down the ladders toward the flight deck with his pistol in his back. He saw no one.

  The ladderwell was empty.

  Except at the last flight of stairs before he reached the flight deck level-Qazi's dead Palestinian lay where he had fallen, still crumpled against the door. The door gaped several inches. He made the admiral step over the corpse and push the door open.

  He heard a sound to his left and stepped behind the admiral. The barrel of a rifle pointed at him below one frightened eye. "If you pull that trigger, you'll kill the admiral. If you don't, I will.

  After I kill you." Several seconds passed, then the eye and barrel disappeared. Qazi listened as the man retreated.

  The wounded man had died. The muscles in his face were slack and his eyes stared fixedly at nothing. The other body lay undisturbed. But their weapons were missing. And their gym bags. The door to Flight Deck Control was open a crack. One of his men there opened it wider and nodded.

  On the flight deck he met Noora and Ali.

  They were surrounded by armed men and hadJarvis between them.

  More men lay in a circle around the helicopters, their weapons at thez ready. The engines of the helicopters were still and the rotors stationary.

  Qazi set off diagonally up the flight deck, heading for the catwalk forward of Elevator One.

  Behind him Ali and Noora shepherded Jarvis along. Immediately behind Jarvis was a man carrying one of the trigger devices. It weighed about forty pounds and was slung across his back on straps. Qazi kept the admiral's arm firmly in his grasp.

  Youssef, the Palestinian leader, carried two backpacks over his shoulders. Two gunmen preceded the party and two followed. Two more were out on each side. "Faster," Qazi told the men in front, and they picked up the pace.

  HE POWER WAS OFF in the forward mess deck. Emergency battle lanterns provided the only illumination. The unarmed sailors who packed the place gaped when they realized that the officer in whites with tape over his mouth and wrists handcuffed together was Admiral Parker. Ali and his troops pointed their weapons and gestured. The sailors hastily retreated through the watertight hatches into the passageways beyond with many backward glances at Admiral Parker, who watched them go impassively. Qazi's men dogged the hatches shut again behind the last Americans.

  The entrance to the forward magazine was a hatch leading downward. It was marked with a warning in red: "Unauthorized Personnel, Keep Ou.

  This Means Y." Everyone donned gas masks: Noora helped Jarvis with his, and Qazi placed one on Admiral Parker and ensured it was properly positioned on his face and functioning correctly.

  Then Ali and his men opened the dogs on the magazine hatch and lifted it to the open position.

  The first man through the magazine hatch found the compartment below empty. It was merely a security access area. A large vault door stood at the end of the compartment with a television camera immediately above it. The gunman put a pistol bullet through the camera and the red light just below the lens went out. He could hear the muffled sound of an alarm.

  He quickly set a shaped charge on the door, then stood to one side and detonated it.

  Within seconds his companion, Youssef, slipped a hose attached to a metal canister through the small hole in the door punched by the explosive and opened the valve on the canister. As the gas hissed through the hole the first man methodically set plastique charges on the vault door. When he had the fuses set, he scrambled away up the ladder. Youssef secured the valve on the canister, pulled the hose from the hole, and scurried after his companion.

  The explosion jolted the mess deck. Down the ladder the two men went again.

  The access compartment was in total darkness.

  Shattered glass from the florescent tubes in the overhead and the emergency battle lanterns lay on the deck. The security door was off its hinges and badly warped.

  Smoke eddied uncertainly. The two men pulled the door free and groped their way into the next compartment.

  One of the three marines in the compartment was still conscious, so the intruders shot him. They ignored the others. The gas would keep its victims out cold for several hours. Qazi had insisted on the use of nonlethal gas; not because of any concern for the victims, but just in case one of his key people had a defective mask. 1 Another hinged watertight door stood against the forward bulkhead of this compartment.

  It had no locks, but opening the door would be fatal if there were armed marines on the other side. The two gunmen set another shaped charge and backed away.

  It exploded with a metallic thud.

  Youssef approached the hole with his cannister.

  He never got there. A marine on the other side of the door put his rifle against 1 the hole and opened fire. The MI 6 slugs spanged against the canister and tore into Youssef's arm and ripped his throat apart.

  The demolition man huddled against the door. He pulled his backpack off and began packing the dogs with plastique, working in the darkness without his flashlight entirely by feel. Bullets sprayed periodically through the one-inch hole blown by the shaped charge as the muzzle flashes strobed the smoke-filled atmosphere. The demolition man cringed under the lashings of the thunderous reports of the M-l6, magnified to soul-numbing intensity in this enclosed steel box. Between rifle bursts he could hear an alarm ringing continuously.

  In the compartment on the other side of the door, the senior of the three young marines there was trying desperately to inform someone of their plight. The overpressure from the shaped charge that blasted a hole in the door had practically deafened them. Still, the sergeant could hear well enough to learn that the phones and intercom box on the wall were dead. He had already triggered the alarm, which also rang in Central Control, in the main engineeri
ng station, and on the bridge. One man was vomiting; he already had too much of the gas. The man at the door changed the magazine in his rifle and sent another burst through the hole. The rifle sounded to him as if it were being fired in a vacuum.

  The senior marine was Sergeant Bo Albright from Decatur, Georgia. He groped through the silent, choking darkness for the bulkhead-mounted controls which would flood the magazines. He found them and pulled the safety pin from the lever that energized the system. He pulled the lever down. A row of green lights illuminated above a series of six buttons. Hejabbed the first two buttons and held them. In three seconds the lights turned from green to red. He pushed the buttons in succession until all the lights were red.

  In the compartment two decks below his feet that ran the width of the ship, the actual magazines, water rushed in from the sea. "Get away from the door," Albright screamed into the ear of the rifleman.

  Together they pushed a desk away from the wall and crouched behind it with their rifles. They were as far away from the door as they could get. Albright stuck his fingers in his ears, scrunched his eyes shut, and opened his mouth. He waited.

  The plastique around the door detonated. The concussion jolted them with the wallop of a baseball bat.

  Albright peered through the darkness, blinking rapidly, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs. They would be coming!

  Lights through the gap where the door had been! He triggered a burst.

  Another. Something was thudding into the desk. He fired again.

  He was falling. Slowly, languidly, drifting and falling. The gas! He squeezed the trigger on the rifle and held it down as he went over the edge and tumbled into a black, alien va/s.

  "Wake up, Ski. Wake up." The sailor shook the catapult captain vigorously.

  "Goddammit Ski, wake up!" Aviation Boatswains Mate (equipment) Second-Class Eugene Kowalski groaned and opened one eye. "Okay, asshole, I'm awake. We'd better be fucking sinking or.

  "We're at G tilde Ski. A bunch of terrorists have landed on the flight deck.

  No shit." Kowalski groaned again and sat up. He was on the floor of the waist catapult control station, still in civilian clothes. No doubt someone had carried him here to sleep it off when he came back to the ship drunk. That was what usually happened. He had awakened here on the floor of the waist bubble before-several times, in fact. "Terrorists, huh?" "Fucking A. And the captain and the admiral are hostages on 1 the bridge and there's a big fire in the hangar and one in the comm spaces.

  He drew a breath. "And three choppers full of terrorists landed on the flight deck a little bit ago.

  "Cut me some fucking slack, Pak. You idiots didn't let me sleep through all of that." "What could you have done? And this is your GQ station, so when they called it away you were right here. We'd have woke you up for a launch." His voice was so sincere that Kowalski eyed the Korean. Maybe he was telling the truth.

  "So how come you woke me up now?" "You ain't gonna believe this, Ski. One of those choppers is sitting right on top of number-fourJBD. Right smack dab on top of it." Kowalski took his time about standing up. Pak grabbed him under the armpit to help and Ski shook him off. He finally got erect and remained that way by hanging onto the cat officer's little desk.

  "Jesus, Ski, you pissed your pants." "There's some aspirin in my desk. Get me three of them." His esk was in the Cat Four control room. "And some water. A glass fwater." of.

  dashed out. The cat captain lifted himself into the cat officer's raised chair and rested his elbows on he table, his chin in his hands. After a moment he felt his crotch. was wet. He tried to remember how he had gotten back to the hip. Captain Grafton was in there somewhere, but the rest was hazy.

  Maybe the X0 was right. Maybe he was an alcoholic. He slipped off the chair and rushed out the door of the bubble. Here he was on a little sponson on the 0-3 level, outside the skin fthe ship.

  He grabbed hold of the safety wire and leaned out and etched. The wind swirled some of the vomit back onto him. He puked until he had the dry heaves, and when they subsided he took off his torn sport shirt, wiped his face with it, and threw it over the side. The stench of something burning was strong.

  Too strong. It made him feel sick again. He went back into the bubble and collapsed into the cat officer's padded chair. Pak came back with two other guys. "A committee, huh?" They tood and watched Ski swallow the aspirin and drink the water. "Where's Laura?" Laura was the captain of number-three catault.

  "He didn't get back. He's on the beach." Ski sat the cup down with a bang. "Okay, let's take a look. Raise his thing." The three sailors looked at each other in the weak glow of the ittle red lights here in the bubble.

  "The terrorists got guns, Ski. hey've been shooting people right and left. They have the captain and admiral-was "This bubble's bulletproof, fireproof, and bombproof. They can't do nothing to us in here." "Yeah, but they could get into the cat control rooms and-was "We'll have to risk it. I ain't gonna get out on the catwalk and stick my head up over the edge." "Pak did. That's how he knows there's a chopper on fourJBD. And he went back and checked the fifty caliber on the stern. The marine back there is dead, shot, and the ammo belt is missing." Pak nodded nervous confirmation.

  Kowalski shook his head. "And I'll bet the grunt on the port bow gun is dead too and the belt's in the water. Yeah. Well. Pak, you're an idiot. We gotta raise the bubble. But it wouldn't hurt to disable the horn." One of the men went outside the cab and used a knife to saw through the wire to the warning Klaxon that sounded every time the control bubble went up or down.

  When he returned, he pushed a button on the bulkhead near the door. As the bubble began to slowly rise in splendid, and safe, silence he dogged down the entrance hatch.

  The control cab rose on its hydraulic arms until it protruded eighteen inches above the level of the flight deck. Everything above deck was glass, inch-thick glass that was tilted in at the top so that objects striking it would be deflected upward.

  Inside the cab, all four men stood with knees bent so only their eyes were above the lower edge of the window. They stared at the helicopters on the flight deck, stark in the island's red floodlights, rotors stationary. The sentries guarding them were also visible. The lights in the control cab were off so the men on deck could not see in, yet when the sentrally turned their way, all four dropped their heads down below the window. In a moment one of them raised up for another peek.

  "They're civilian choppers. See, that's Italian on the side of that one.

  "What'ya expect? Chinese? Look over there.

  See that guy with the submachine gun? He's one of them." "He's dressed like a sailor," Kowalski said. "Yeah. They all are. And they got the captain.

  "Sure. Yeah. I got that." Kowalski picked up the phone and held it in his hand.

  "Maybe we oughta call the office. Maybe the bosun's up there, or one of the chiefs." The office he was referring to was the V-2 division office, where the khaki in charge of the catapults had their desks. He stared aft at the third helicopter.

  From this angle it certainly looked like it was sitting on the JBD.

  "Ain't nobody there," Pak told him.

  "There's a big fire up in the comm spaces, and the office was inside the fire boundaries, so they ran everybody out. I think they got 'em all fighting fires, either in the comm spaces or down in the hangar." Kowalski grabbed the ship's blue telephone book and thumbed through it.

  He dialed a number. It rang and rang.

  Finally he used his thumb to break the circuit. "The XO ain't in his stateroom," 1 he announced.

  A third-class petty officer from the Cat Three crew spoke up. "We figured you're all we got, Ski. There's terrorists in Flight Deck Control. And they're on the bridge. And they made an announcement over the I comMC about how they're gonna shoot hostages and toss them down on the deck if anybody resists. Maybe the terrorists are in Pried-Fly or over in the air department office.

  We didn't figure we should take the chance calling them. We tried to cal
l the bow cats and the phones are dead up there. We sent a greenie looking for one of the chiefs or a cat officer, and he ain't come back. The passageways up forward are filled with smoke and they're grabbing guys to fight fires. So you're our man.

  What are we gonna do?" Kowalski hung the phone back in its wall cradle. He rubbed his face with both hands. "If I'm all we've got, we're in deep fucking shit." He took one more look around the flight deck, at the choppers and the sentries and the jets sitting with folded wings on the bow and aft of the waist JBD'S.

  Wisps of steam rose from the catapult slots: this would be leakage from the preheaters coming through the gaps in the rubber seals that were placed in the slots when the cats were not in use.