Bloodstorm

9

Jaybird, Dobler, DeWitt, and Murdock sat around a small table in the SEALs’ assembly room on the carrier staring at Don Stroh.

“You saying that Chinese freighter is a floating garage sale for nuclear warheads?” Murdock asked, the first to get his voice after Don Stroh’s quick briefing.

“We’re not sure, but we’ve had the old scow under AWACS scrutiny the past three days. There have been helicopter landings on the Chinese freighter twice. The choppers moved to land sites where there were international airports.”

“Our best guess is that the Chinese are stripping the nuke warheads out of the missiles and selling them on the open market?” DeWitt asked.

“Possibly. They are easy to move. You could have carried one for ten or fifteen miles in that APC, you told me.”

“So we take out the freighter before they distribute any more nukes around the world,” Dobler said.

“That’s been our recommendation to the President and my chief,” Stroh said. “We’re also trying to track those choppers and what they did with their cargo. We’ve got one of them tied down as to who picked it up and where it was left and the route the plane took that picked it up. We’re working on the second one.”

“Where’s the ship now?” Murdock asked.

“That’s another curious development. The ship is wandering around the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea. One chopper went to the boat and then back to Athens. Sometimes the ship is making only five knots.”

“Waiting for more customers,” Murdock said. “My bet is that the brass will decide to take out the ship next, then try to find any of the warheads that are still missing. How far are we from the freighter?”

“Too far, almost eight hundred miles,” Stroh said. “We have a cruiser in the Athens harbor now. It can be pushed out toward the freighter to give you a platform to work from in case we go after the Chinese ship next.”

Jaybird scowled. “Most cruisers carry a Seahawk chopper. It’s smaller than the Sea Knight and can haul only twelve men. We need sixteen. We’d have to use a Sea Knight and squeeze it on the cruiser. It should fit. The Sea Knight’s rotor blades are only fifty-one feet in diameter. The Seahawk’s blades are two feet longer, so the larger bird should be able to land and take off from the cruiser.”

Stroh looked at Jaybird with surprise.

“Jaybird remembers those kind of things,” DeWitt said. “Now, when can we get some word about this new mission?”

“When I hear, I’ll call you. I don’t know how the Navy will put this through channels, but it should get here eventually. In the field we’ll go with the first word we get and let channels catch up with us. Okay, troops?”

The four SEALs nodded. They had been on board the carrier only an hour, and hadn’t eaten, showered, or slept yet. They were headed in that direction when Stroh nailed them.

“I’ll get clearance for a Sea Knight on board the Cowpens, CG 63, in Athens if this one goes down the way we think it will. Now, why don’t you guys get some food and some shuteye. I might be calling you before you know it. The chief is hot on this one. Nobody in Washington wants these warheads charging around the world like loose cannons.”

It was only a little after 0830, but Murdock and DeWitt both ordered up steak dinners at the dirty-shirt mess.

Later they found Kat sitting in the wardroom, staring at her hands and sipping coffee. She nodded a grim welcome.

Murdock and DeWitt watched her a moment without speaking. She looked up and set her mouth in a firm, hard line. “I’m so damn mad that I could spit,” she said. Her eyes were furious brown holes hidden by lowered brows.

“I don’t think I’m going to do this anymore,” she went on. “I just might call the President and tell him to get another player. I’m used up.”

“Kat, I’m no shrink, but I’ve sent more than one of my men to take a few sessions with the psychos. If you don’t want that, how about a talk with the chaplain.”

She looked up at Murdock and nodded, her brows raised in surprise.

“Yes, now why didn’t I think of that? I can’t get that woman’s furious expression out of my head. She knew she was dying and she looked right through me. I shivered then, and I’m shivering right now remembering it.

“I killed her, Murdock. I shot her three times and she died right there in that field. How can I ever accept the idea that it is all right for me to kill someone when I’m wearing this uniform? Even when I’m on a mission to save hundreds of thousands of lives? It doesn’t make sense to me. How do I get in touch with the chaplain?”

Captain Ira Ralston, senior chaplain on the carrier had learned years ago that being a Navy chaplain was a lot more than holding services and listening to complaints. He found himself to be father confessor for the Catholics, and oftentimes psychiatrist in uniform for many of the Protestants and Jews. He had been listening to this young lieutenant for a half hour now, and knew more about her and her life than he wanted to.

“So, how can I justify killing another human being?” she concluded.

“You simply reacted to the situation. You responded as you had been trained to do. You also fired in an attempt to save the life of a teammate. Those are all good and worthwhile motives. I’ve talked to a lot of men in combat. They say that they are always reacting before they can think. In a split second your mind must order your body to do something, in this case to aim and fire to protect another member of the team.

“Kat, you were in a combat situation. You’ve been there before, you told me, and you’ve killed before. This is no different. The fact that the victim was a woman is a coincidence. It more than likely would have been a man with the ratio of men to women in the defense force.

“This all goes way back in man’s development to the cave man when he fought huge ferocious beasts. He did it for food and to survive.

“Today some of us have to do the same thing. We fight to survive. Now we often call it ‘him or me.’ In the heat of battle, even if it lasts only a few seconds, the basic primal urge of fight to survive surfaces. If it’s a confrontation with another person, then it all comes down to who kills who. It’s him or me who will live. We always strive our best to be sure that it’s the me who survives and not the him.”

Captain Ralston watched the young lieutenant. He knew about her civilian status and the temporary rank for convenience. She looked up at him, but didn’t say anything.

“How did you handle this when you came out of Iran?” he asked.

“Not well. I cried a lot. I took a month off work and tried to get myself settled down. I kept having a dream when I relived the whole damn thing. Then I went into denial, and that almost worked. One day I woke up and realized that I had to face it, confront the fact that I had killed four or five men in Iran. Yes, part of it was a him-or-me syndrome. I never sought any professional help. I can see now that I should have.”

He waited. She looked at him, then at the bulkhead, then back at him. “So?”

“Did you throw up after the incident?”

She smiled. It was the first smile he had seen from her. “Incident? I kill a woman and you call it an incident?”

“Yes. Those warheads that you destroyed could have killed up to a half million each. That would be four and a half million lives that you saved in the world. The loss of one woman’s life against four and a half million makes it a ridiculously small incident.”

“Oh. I never thought of it that way before.” The smile came again. “All right, let’s summarize: I didn’t throw up after the… incident. I have not gone on any crying jags since that time, now almost five hours ago. I feel fairly well adjusted, but I think that I can now grieve for the woman I killed, without ruining my life. I’m ready to move on. Also, I want to call the President and resign from this special assignment and ask him to send me home.”

Captain Ralston smiled. “Good, good. I think this little talk has been of some benefit for you. I’ll call the communications center and have them set up a call with the White House. As you know, there is little chance you’ll talk directly with the President. But he will get the message.”

Twenty minutes later, Captain Ralston left the communications center when Kat picked up the handset.

“I’d like to speak with the President, please. This is Katherine Garnet on the aircraft carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Mediterranean.”

“Yes, Miss Garnet. Congratulations on your successful mission on the nine warheads. I’m the President’s personal secretary and he knows about your good work. He left an hour ago for Europe and can be reached only in emergencies.”

Kat stared at the handset.

“Miss Garnet, are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“The President tried to call you, but we couldn’t get through to the ship. Some mix-up somewhere. He’ll try to call again tomorrow. May I offer you my congratulations on saving the world from nine more nuclear explosions and the millions of lives you saved.”

“Thanks, but the SEALs did most of it. I… I’ll wait for the President’s call. Thank you.”

When they first arrived in the assembly compartment, the SEALs had dropped their gear, had a big supper-type breakfast, and fallen into bed in their quarters. Mahanani had taken care of any scrapes and scratches. Ching had had what they decided was a sprained finger. They’d taped it tightly to the finger next to it.

Murdock showered after his meal, and dropped into bed, one of a six-pack officers compartment. De Witt was in the bunk over him.

Three hours after he got to bed, Murdock came awake with a start. Don Stroh was shaking his shoulder.

“Okay, sailor, up and at ’em. You’ve had more than enough sleep for one day. The captain wants to see you.”

Murdock came awake instantly. It was a skill he’d had to develop in the SEALs the first month he’d arrived, and he had maintained it.

“Captain? The ship’s captain or the CAG?”

“Yeah, the fly guy. He says he just received some messages from Air Force One and from the CNO. Sounds like they have made up their mind about the next move.”

Murdock decided to let DeWitt sleep. He dressed, and Stroh led him to the carrier’s Combat Information Center. It was the heart of the ship’s battle capability. All combat information came in there, and most of it showed on a large display of screens.

Captain Prescott nodded at the two and led them to a screen.

“This is a feed from our AWACS plane monitoring the Chinese ship. At the moment, she’s almost dead in the water. A small ship of some sort is approaching her, and it looks like some kind of a meeting or a mid-sea transfer. Either way, we don’t like it. Wanted to let you see this so you know that we know what the Chinese are doing all the time.”

He took two sheets of paper from a small desk area and waved them. “The gist of this signal from the President is that we have a green light to go ahead and stop, board, take control, examine, and generally satisfy ourselves that there are or there aren’t any of the former Soviet Satan missiles on board.

“The only vessel we have in the area is a missile cruiser at Athens. She’s been alerted, and has left one of her helicopters onshore. She will be ready to receive a visiting Sea Knight, if that is what we decide. She is now steaming in the general direction of the Chinese ship, the Star of Asia, a freighter in poor condition.”

“You also got the signal through Navy channels?” Murdock asked.

“Yes, from the CNO through channels. It took a little over an hour more than it did for the message to come from the President. At least we’re legal.”

“So we figure out how to take down a rusty Chinese freighter on the high seas?” Murdock asked.

“That’s the size of it, Commander. I understand your men have done this before.”

“We have. How big is this freighter?”

“About the size of our combat stores ships. Five hundred and eighty feet, about sixteen thousand tons. That’s a generality, but that’s the signals we get back.”

“So, we go from here to Athens in a COD. Pickup the Sea Knight in Athens and join the cruiser in the Aegean Sea. That’s the easy part.” Murdock paused. “Anything about timing of our attack? My men just came off an all-night mission.”

“The President mentions that in the signal. He said if you could get to the freighter sometime tonight, it would be the best scenario.”

“Tonight?” Murdock looked at his watch. It was 1206. “So we’re still nearly eight hundred miles from Athens. The Carrier Onboard Delivery planes make about three hundred and fifty miles an hour. A two-and-a-half-hour flight. Then make connections at the Athens municipal airport, or do we have some military in Greece?”

“We have some military. Athens is about seventy-five miles from the Chinese freighter. We have a COD on board here that you can use anytime.”

“It sounds possible. My men can sleep on the trip. Not more than a half hour on the Sea Knight to the freighter. Then we go out the hatch with our IBSs and go up the freighter’s rusty side and take her down. We’ll need hand and foot magnet climbers, the kind our men use when working parts of the exterior hull.”

“I’m sure we have them. When do you want the COD to be ready for takeoff?”

Murdock looked at his watch again. “We’ll plan a midnight attack. Gives us twelve hours. Let’s let the men sleep two more hours, then we’ll get them up and moving. We’ll need breakfast and box lunches. Also a resupply on ammo and explosives. Oh, do you have two IBSs? Inflatable rubber boats?”

“One of our support ships has some. We’ll get two of them on board within an hour.”

“Good. You’ll clear this with the XO and the captain? I’m getting bugged about going through channels.”

Captain Prescott grinned. “I know the feeling. Yes, I’ll inform them of the plan.”

Murdock stood. “I better get my second up and briefed. You’ll alert the kitchen crew we’ll need breakfast in three hours?”

“Right. Our cooks can come up with any kind of meal any time of the day.”

Murdock grinned, waved, and headed for his compartment. He had to get DeWitt up and moving and briefed. DeWitt knew where Senior Chief Dobler bunked. Two hours’ more sleep for the men, then they would be up.

Murdock wondered how Kat was doing. At least she wouldn’t be along on this run. He poked DeWitt on the shoulder.

“Hey sailor, get up. Time we do it again.”

DeWitt came alert slowly. He sat up, shook his head.

“We’re going after the damn freighter?”

“Roger.”

“Wonder if they have any Chinese troops on board. Ah, probably not. It’s just an old rust-bucket freighter.”