by Noah Mann
“One-minute fuse,” Westin said.
Schiavo pointed to the area of cover we’d found. We all moved that way, maintaining cover across the open expanse before us. Just beyond the thick slab of steel we huddled against the hangar deck wall, waiting. For the explosion. For some attack that might materialize out of the darkness as one had before.
The latter didn’t come. The former did, in the form of a blinding flash and a sharp crack that reverberated in the space, echoing with painful force over and over, the metal structure seeming to vibrate like some tuning fork for nearly half a minute. When the noise subsided, there was only that same darkness and a veil of misty smoke blowing in the shifting air.
“Corporal Laws, have a look.”
The young man, who’d become that on our journey through the hellfire to Portland, and beyond, didn’t hesitate. As we moved back to our original position nearer the elevator to cover him, he jogged smoothly into the hazy darkness to assess how the charge had worked.
“Fletch...”
Schiavo was next to me, speaking softly as we waited for Laws’ return.
“Yeah?”
“I’m kind of at a loss here,” she said, hinting at a vulnerability which was natural, but not for her.
“We’ll find him,” I assured her.
She stared off into the interior night that stretched across the hangar deck. I’d expected a nod of acknowledgment, if not agreement. But I received none. She was truly, deeply thrown by the disappearance of her husband.
Eleven
“He’s coming,” Hart said.
Schiavo looked fast, her reaction instinctual. But it was not Martin who had returned. It was Carter Laws running toward us, the lingering smoke swirling in the wake he cut through it.
“It’s sliced clean through,” he reported.
“Sergeant, do a radio check,” Schiavo said, forcing herself to stay on task.
This choreography, too, had been pre-arranged. Westin retrieved a handheld transmitter from his gear and stepped onto the elevator, looking out to where the Blue Streak would be, holding station several hundred meters away. He turned the unit on and adjusted the squelch and volume, looking back to us with a relieved smile.
“No jamming,” he said.
“Try it out,” Schiavo said.
Westin brought the handheld unit to his face and keyed the mic.
“Blue Streak, do you copy?”
There wasn’t even a delay for dramatic effect.
“Well that is a welcome sound,” Orville Pehrsson replied over the airwaves. “We’re back in business.”
Schiavo stepped out from cover and motioned for her come expert to hand her the radio. He did and turned to face the interior of the hangar deck, covering his commander.
“Orville, this is Colonel Schiavo. Will you be able to approach the carrier again to recover personnel?”
Now there was a brief pause, though the drama was not for effect. It was rooted in an unpleasant reality.
“I don’t believe so, Angela,” Orville replied.
Schiavo kept the radio close to her cheek and thought for a moment, weighing risks and alternatives. The answer she came up with surprised us all.
“Orville, take the Blue Streak back to Bandon,” Schiavo instructed the fisherman over the radio. “Your boat getting smashed to pieces out here will serve no purpose.”
“But how will you...”
He didn’t finish the question, likely because he knew she would.
“We have other transport,” she reminded him. “Just get yourself safely home. Copy?”
“Aye,” Orville said. “I copy.”
The transmission ended and she handed the radio back to Westin, eyeing it for a moment as he slipped it into his pack.
“Any chance you can reach Bandon on that?”
Westin shook his head at his commander’s question.
“Not enough power, and too short an antenna,” he said.
“There are still some antennas on the island,” she said.
The superstructure rising from the starboard side of the flight deck appeared to have had much of its upper communication array stripped away. But not all of it.
“Could you use what’s up there?” Schiavo pressed. “Tap into one of those antennas and use it to transmit?”
“Possibly,” Westin said. “I’d still need more power.”
“This ship has power,” Schiavo said. “We know that. There could be some still flowing to the island.”
Westin nodded, accepting that.
“Then, yes, ma’am. I can make it happen.”
“What are you thinking, Angela?” I asked.
“There’s no way Orville can get any of us off,” she said. “With him gone, the only point of contact between us and Bandon is that aircraft up top. We may not have time to play carrier pigeon passing messages if I we have to contact Bandon.”
“We need a radio,” I said.
“We need a radio,” she affirmed.
“Ma’am,” Laws said.
“Corporal...”
“The plane...it only holds three passengers.”
“And there are six of us,” Schiavo said.
She ignored Martin’s absence. She had to. We all did. He would be back with us before we departed the Vinson.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Two flights,” Schiavo said. “Mr. Beekman is going to have to play taxi driver a bit more than planned.”
“We’ll leave in shifts,” Hart said.
“Once we’ve figured this out, and once we’re all here, that’s how we’ll get home.”
No one challenged her plan for the ultimate evacuation of the carrier. Except me.
“And what if not everyone we find aboard wants to kill us?”
She might have considered the possibility and dismissed it, but I didn’t think so.
“If that happens, Fletch, we’ll deal with it,” she answered, a subtle sharpness in her tone. “But right now that’s way down on the list of things I’m worried about.”
It wasn’t a rebuke that came from animus, but the others noticed her harsh reply. Even Angela recognized the biting reply she’d offered, and for an instant she quieted, berating herself internally, I suspected.
But she had to move on. We had to move on. And she was the one who had to get us moving.
“Sgt. Hart, you’ll stay with Fletch and me,” Schiavo ordered. “Sgt. Westin, you and Corporal Laws will get to the flight deck and see what you can do about getting us a working radio while you help Mr. Beekman keep that plane secure.”
Westin nodded and looked to the rope we’d used to rappel down to the hangar deck.
“Can you make it up on that?” she asked.
“Not a problem,” Westin said, and slung his M4. “Corporal...”
Laws did the same, the pair moving quickly to the rope and expertly making their way toward the flight deck.
“That leaves us,” Schiavo said once they were safely topside.
“Ma’am, what you already found,” Hart began, “it sounds...odd.”
Sounds of a galloping horse being played through speakers and an attack by men who were more caricature of soldiers than the real thing...yes, I thought, odd started to describe what we’d seen and heard already.
“And what does that mean, Sergeant?” Schiavo asked.
Hart didn’t hesitate. She’d trained him well.
“Expect the unexpected,” the medic said.
“Okay,” I said, my weapon ready as I looked to the darkness that Hart had been covering. “Let’s go find Martin.”
He was Schiavo’s husband. He was the man who’d saved Bandon. And he was my friend. As much as she wanted to be reunited with him, I knew that there was no way that I was going to leave the carrier without him by my side.
“Lead off, Fletch,” Schiavo said.
I did just that, leaving the meager cover we’d used, and walking slowly into the darkness.
Twelve
&nb
sp; I hadn’t taken twenty steps toward the bow when I came upon something.
Something that could have killed me.
“Hold up,” I said quietly, putting a hand out to signal the others to stay back.
“What is it?” Schiavo asked.
I crouched and cautiously approached what I’d spotted just a couple yards before it might have swallowed me—a square hole cut into the floor of the hangar deck. It was roughly the shape and size of the penetration which the huge power cables had passed through to the lower decks, its edges jagged, knots of once molten steel protruding from where some welding torch had pushed aggressively through the thick metal. Past its edge there was only darkness below. I’d only seen the shadowy breach because I’d been looking. What if Martin hadn’t been? What if he’d been maneuvering for an advantage when the assault began, or to cut off any reinforcements? Would he have seen the hole in time to avoid it?
I waved Schiavo and Hart forward. The medic positioned himself off to the left of us, providing cover.
“What is it?” Schiavo asked.
I pointed to the hole.
“A first attempt to pass the cables up from below?” I suggested.
Schiavo nodded. Even in the night now fully filling the hangar deck, I could see the fear build in her gaze. She was thinking exactly what I had about Martin, and what might have happened.
“Light it up, Fletch.”
I shifted my position first, slightly away from Schiavo, wanting that separation should my weapon light trigger some violent response from below. She brought her M4 up and took aim down into the hole, ready to respond.
“Now,” I said.
The beam sliced the darkness past the barrel of my AR and lit up the space below, immediately revealing that Martin was not there. But some sign of him was.
“Fletch...”
“I see it,” I told Schiavo.
The space below, some sort of compartment, had been cleared out, just the slab that had once been the missing piece of deck before us lying on the floor some fifteen feet below. And on it was scrawled something. Scratched with the point of a sharp object. A message.
MJ...
And next to those very clear initials for Martin Jay was a single arrow, pointing to an opening in the compartment, a narrow passageway partly visible beyond.
“He fell,” Schiavo said. “It could have killed him.”
Fifteen feet was substantial. But depending on how he landed, he could have been lucky enough to walk away with only bruises. That he wasn’t there, and had left some message, pointed strongly to him not being severely injured.
“Why isn’t he still there?” she wondered.
“Maybe it was either leave or be captured,” I said.
“That message would help any pursuers as much as it does us,” she said. “Maybe more. They have to know the layout of this ship.”
“The best worst option might have been all he had,” I told her.
To see any further, to learn more, we would have to venture below.
And I knew we would.
“Sgt. Hart...”
The medic shifted closer to our position and glanced at what we’d found.
“Secure a rope,” Schiavo said. “We’re going down. All of us.”
* * *
The rope Hart tied off to a structural beam made the descent far less treacherous than it must have been for Martin. I went down first and covered the doorway to the passage outside the compartment as Schiavo and Hart followed. There was no option to advance without using artificial light down here, but we didn’t have to be excessive about it.
“One light on at a time,” Schiavo ordered.
Doing so would clearly expose whichever of us was employing the light, but the others might be able to reach cover if a firefight erupted. It seemed we were facing our own best worst option.
“What is this room?” Hart asked, scanning the space we’d come into.
Whatever it was it had been stripped bare, metal attachment points on the walls ripped away, either by brute force or at the business end of a welder’s torch.
“I think this was meant for the cables,” I said. “They cleared it out to fit them through. But it didn’t work out, for some reason.”
“Meaning they make mistakes,” Hart said.
That was a fairly large mistake to make, considering the effort they’d undertaken to power some hellish transmitter affixed to the flight deck. It spoke of amateurish planning, which matched the level of professionalism they’d exhibited in their attack.
“And still they have an aircraft carrier,” I said, voicing the ultimate juxtaposition.
“Fletch, are you okay staying on point?”
“I am,” I told Schiavo.
The passageway just outside the compartment ran left and right, a bare steel wall just across from the doorway. I killed my weapon light and leaned quickly through the doorway, looking and aiming left, activating the light for just a second. The corridor stretched out before me, doors set into either side at varying intervals, piping and conduit affixed to the metal ceiling above. Nothing of note stood out, and I repeated the action with the same haste looking to the right, finding a similar layout. The first recon complete, I leaned back into the compartment.
“Both ways end in T intersections,” I reported.
The light of my downcast weapon light bounced off the floor and lit Schiavo from below, raising deep, angular shadows from her features as she considered our next move.
“We could split up,” Hart suggested as he covered the opening above us.
“No,” Schiavo said. “I’m not losing anyone else because they were alone.”
In that statement I knew that she blamed herself for Martin’s disappearance, at least in part. It was an honest, if inaccurate appraisal of responsibility common to leaders who had lost people.
But we hadn’t lost Martin. We simply hadn’t found him. Yet.
“Right is toward the bow,” Schiavo said, sizing up the maritime landscape we were facing. “There’s not much bow left.”
“There can’t be much that way,” I said.
“Left then?” Hart asked.
“Let’s move toward the stern,” Schiavo said. “If we don’t find him, we’ll check the bow on our way back.”
The implication was that we’d be leaving the way we came, through the hole above us. But there were obviously other ways to reach the hangar deck. Those who’d attacked us had emerged from some door or passage unseen in the darkness. In the maze of corridors and stairs and ladders and compartments we were certain to come across, there was no guarantee that we would be able to locate an alternate way out. Finding our way back to this point of egress was going to be a big enough challenge.
“Someone should keep track of our route,” I suggested.
“I’ll map us,” Hart said. “Up here.”
He tapped his temple.
“Years of role playing games has prepared me for just this moment,” the medic shared with a smile. “It’s just a big dungeon in my head.”
Schiavo, too, allowed a brief grin. It lasted just a few seconds.
“Let’s get moving, Fletch.”
I did as Schiavo said and stepped through the doorway, bringing my AR up and activating the light as I turned left. The corridor lit up before me and we were on our way into the depths of the carrier.
Thirteen
There was no rhyme or reason to the path we took, particularly with no further clues left by Martin. No trail of bread crumbs to follow. We moved along the passageways, turning left, right, checking compartments. And finding nothing. Not a single sign of any life.
Then we heard the sound.
It rose from a steep stairwell as we were about to pass it. A tapping. Metal on metal. Not rhythmic. No cadence or meaning to it. But still, it was there.
Schiavo activated her weapon light and aimed it down the stairs, hardly more than a wide ladder angled steeply between the decks. I maintained my watch
ahead, covering the way we’d been moving, chancing a glance down the stairwell.
As I did the sound stopped.
“A sound stopping is as telling as a sound starting,” Schiavo said.
As if to prove her right, a few seconds later, the sound rose again, the tap-taptap-tap-tapping a clear indication of...
Something.
“Fletch...”
I backed up and put my light down the stairwell, gripping my AR one handed as I took hold of the handrail and made my way down the steep steps.
* * *
“Straight ahead,” I told Schiavo when she and Hart were behind me.
“Okay,” she said.
We were two levels below the hangar deck now. Was that even the proper term? Level? No, they were decks, too. But clearing that up in my thought process wasn’t getting us any closer to locating the source of the sound.
I moved forward, the beam of my light splashing off the grey metal walls, the space eerily reminiscent of the ashen world left behind by the blight. We passed intersecting corridors and more compartments, giving each a cursory check as we progressed toward the sound, which appeared to be emanating from beyond a slightly open door at the end of the passageway a dozen yards distant.
“Low on your right,” Schiavo told me softly.
The drill was almost ingrained. I would open the door and use my light while sweeping the space at eye level. Schiavo would crouch on my right. Hart would bring up the rear, offering cover for any threats behind and to back us up should that become necessary.
I reached the door, another corridor stretching left and right from it. A quick check showed both directions clear. My focus shifted fully to what had to be done.
Tap-taptap-tap-tap...
The sound continued. Standing this close to it now, just a hinged slab of steel separating it from us, there was no doubt remaining that it was not random at all. There was purpose to it.
Just as that fact became clear, we heard the whistling. It, like the tapping, came from whatever lay beyond the barely open door, each matching the other’s tempo. A man’s whistle, it seemed, not halting, but strained.
Schiavo lowered herself into position and nodded. I pushed the door, the heavy barrier swinging slowly, creaking on dry hinges. My light swept left, revealing another stripped compartment.
