Countdown

CHAPTER 21

"God damn it, Ski! What the hell do you mean, 'downgrudged'?"

Lieutenant Commander Frank Marinaro was livid, and for one moment, Joyce Flynn thought the man was going to slam his flight helmet to the deck in anger and frustration.

Tomboy Flynn, Nightmare Marinaro, and their plane captain, Chief Michael Cynowski, were standing at the port-side edge of the flight deck forward of the island. Several of VF-95's Tomcats were parked there, folded wings almost touching, their maintenance crews readying them for launch.

"Sorry, Commander," Cynowski said. He had to shout to make himself heard above the scream of jet engines, the air-hammer racket of the buffers. He wore a plane captain's brown jersey, and a bulky Mickey helmet. "Your AWG-Nine's burned out. Looks like a coolant switch fault, most likely. We'll have to swap it out, and that's gonna take time."

"How much time?"

"What?"

"I said how much fucking time!"

"Sir, I just don't have the manpower right now!" Cynowski held up the clipboard in his hand. "My boys've been goin' round the clock here for longer'n I like to think. Hell, we've got their scheds juggled between-"

"Damn it, Ski, I don't want to hear your sob story! How long before Two-oh-four is back on the line?"

Cynowski's face hardened. "Not until we secure from flight quarters.

Sir. Two days… and that's if the brass stays off our backs!"

Nightmare was the coolest, steadiest aviator Tomboy knew, but at the moment he looked like he was going to lose that cool completely. She could understand his anger. Right now, there were no spare Tomcats aboard save for the CAG bird, and it would take time to bring Two-double-nuts to the ready.

It looked like Nightmare and Tomboy were going to be staying put while the squadron launched without them.

Nightmare looked like he was about to say something else, but at that moment an A-6 Intruder taxied past the line of Tomcats, rolling slowly toward the number one catapult. The roar of its engines was deafening, and the wash from its exhaust battered at Tomboy's face, slapping at her flight suit and forcing her to turn away. Nightmare quickly pulled his helmet on and waited until the A-6 reached the cat shuttle and the noise abated somewhat.

Suddenly, he seemed to relax. "Okay, Chief. Forget it. C'mon, Tomboy."

"Where we going, Nightmare?"

"Ops. Maybe we can use Stoney's bird."

Together, they turned and strode aft toward the island.

Lieutenant Commander Bruce "Willis" Payne was uncomfortably aware of the woman seated next to him. In an A-6 Intruder, the pilot sits on the left, with the bombardier/navigator in the narrow seat to his right and slightly below and behind his position. According to All the World's Aircraft, the heart of the A-6 was the AN/ASQ-133 IBM computer which controlled the aircraft's Norden AN/APQ-154 multimode radar, but any Intruder driver with more than an hour of flight time logged would insist that the real heart was his B/N, squeezed in eyeball-to-eyeball with the radar scope projecting aft from the console. But damn!…

Payne's B/N so far this cruise had been Lieutenant Thelma Kandinsky, "Sunshine" to her shipmates. She was pretty and pert and Payne loved imagining what she'd be like in bed, but he still couldn't accept her as expert enough to find her way through that maze of indicators and electronics in her face, no matter what Tombstone Magruder might think. The tail-chewing he'd received a couple of days before still burned… and rankled.

"Damn it, Payne," Tombstone had bellowed into his face. "These women are our shipmates and they're here to stay! They can do the job as well as any man, maybe better, you read me, mister? They've already had to work ten times harder than any man aboard just to get where they are now, and if I hear you're giving any one of 'em a bad time I am personally going to have you keel-hauled… and on an aircraft carrier that's one hell of a damned serious threat!"

Fuck. Women had their uses, but they didn't belong aboard ship or flying combat aircraft. Oh, sure, he'd heard all the technical shit about how they could take more Gs than men, how their endurance was higher, how they could handle multiple tasks better than men could. Willis didn't believe that bullshit for a minute. The fact of it was the Washington REMFs were out to screw the little people, again, all in the name of progress.

Payne gave the array of flight instruments in front of him a final check.

What the hell was Washington playing at anyway? It seemed fitting, somehow, that the venerable A-6 was on the way out, just as all this new crap was coming on-line.

He loved the A-6. America's premier strike aircraft was coming up on forty years of service. Butt-ugly, blunt end up front, eel-skinny tail aft, with the permanently fixed refueling probe stuck on the nose like a rearing snake. The Navy had hoped to replace the Intruder with the ultra-stealthy A-12 Avenger in the 1990s, but the Secretary of Defense had scrapped the project when budget overruns had reached scandal proportions. Later, during the Clinton Administration, proponents of a streamlined military had actually suggested that, since the Air Force had bombers, there was no need for bomb-carrying aircraft in the Navy.

And there was real shit-for-brains thinking. Strike aircraft ― the Intruder and the half-bomber, half-fighter Hornet ― were the sole reason for even having aircraft carriers in the first place. Jefferson's Intruders were her big guns; her Tomcats were nothing more than armed protection for the carrier group and for her strike planes. Do away with Navy bombers and there was no reason for carriers.

So far, the Navy had managed to hold off the reconstructionists, at least to that extent. Until someone came up with a replacement for the A-12, though, Intruders and Hornets would be carrying the Navy's strike-mission load. Like the A-7 Corsair before it, though, already phased out save for reserve squadrons ashore, the A-6 had about reached the end of its operational life. Pretty soon, there'd be only the F/A-18s left to carry the war to the enemy's home ground, and Payne remained convinced that Hornets were neither fish nor fowl, half-breeds that did neither job well. How could they? Even with their twenty-first-century cockpits, one man was just kept too damned busy flying the aircraft to handle all the radar-intercept and bombing work as well with any kind of efficiency.

Man, the Navy should've stuck with upgraded Intruders.

And all-male combat crews.

And screw the damned politicians.

He'd heard scuttlebutt that Sunshine had been trying to get another partner, and that suited Willis just fine. He had to admit that, so far at least, Sunshine seemed to know her shit. But now they were about to launch into combat, and her life and his would be riding on how well she performed her duties as B/N. Hell, they wouldn't even be able to find the target if she couldn't untangle that gee-whiz video-game imagery on her screen into solid coordinates and vectors.

Besides, she was a goody-two-shoes bitch. When he tried to be friendly, she acted like he was coming on to her. Once, he'd stepped aside to let her enter a compartment first and she'd given him a look to freeze a snowman's balls. And then there was the smoking incident. Willis had once been a heavy smoker. He'd been cutting back a lot lately, but he always carried an extra pack still in the cellophane tucked away in the shoulder pocket of his flight suit. The first time he'd offered Sunshine a smoke, though, just trying to be friendly, she'd looked up at him like he'd just crawled out from under a rock.

"Filthy habit," she'd said. "Get those things out of my face."

The pace accelerated as they completed their final pre-flights. He glanced over at her as she completed the last of her BIT checks, the built-in test batteries that verified the A-6's radar and computer systems were operational.

Screw her. If she wouldn't even try to be friendly…

"System's hot," she said. "Ready to roll."

"Roger." A green light was showing from the island as a safety officer gave a last thumbs-up. Willis was all professional now as he looked out the cockpit to where the deck officer was standing ready, and gave a crisp salute.

The officer returned the salute, touched the deck, and Jefferson's catapult hurled Willis and Sunshine into the sky.

Seaman Apprentice David James White had been aboard the Jefferson for less than six weeks. His entire Navy career thus far had Spanned less than four months, for he'd reported aboard straight out of boot camp at NTC Great Lakes, with only a ten-days leave in between to say good-bye to his mom and to his girlfriend Judy back in his home town of Ridgely, Ohio.

He wasn't sure yet whether he liked the Navy. At eighteen, the largest social group he'd ever been a part of was his high school, and he still felt utterly lost among the miles of gray-painted passageways, the noisy horde of strange faces filling a vessel that had been described to him as being as large as an eighty-story building lying on its side. There were six thousand people aboard the Jefferson; that was twice the population of Ridgely, far more than he could possibly expect to meet and get to know personally if he stayed aboard for a full two years of sea duty. He wasn't aware of them so much as a vast crowd as he was aware of them as strange faces. The only time he saw lots of men all at once was during a flight deck FOD walk-down, but it seemed as though he would never get to really know anyone.

Upon reporting aboard, White had been assigned to the deck division.

After three weeks of "P school" orientation, where he'd learned the basics of flight deck theory and been given a course in first aid, he'd been given a slot with the blue shirts, the chock and chain men who secured parked aircraft to keep them from rolling. He'd started making friends… and his initiation into the Ancient and Sacred Order of the Blue Noses a few days ago had opened up a whole new world to him. Only now was he beginning to see himself, not as a stranger in this bizarre and alien world, but as part of something larger than himself.

It had been a good feeling.

Then had come the battle on Friday, and moments of stark terror. And after that had come the word that some kid named Pellet had hung himself. Oh, God, how could things like that happen? What had he gotten himself into? In hours, it seemed, the good feelings of belonging and being accepted had evaporated. Most of the guys White knew had withdrawn into themselves somewhat after hearing about Pellet's death. The only antidote the officers seemed to know was work… work and more work. White had forgotten when he'd slept last. He was exhausted, and the exhaustion dragged at both brain and body like leaden weights.

He'd been helping a crew unchock the A-6 Intruders parked forward of the island. Someone handed him the two massive chocks that had immobilized one Intruder's wheels, and someone else had pointed across the deck at the place where they were supposed to be stowed.

Though P school had provided a kind of basic orientation to the flight deck, White's actual training so far had been strictly on the job, with various petty officers telling him what to do even when he had little understanding of what he was doing or why. Carrying the chocks, he trotted across the flight deck, toward the waist catapults across from the island and aft.

The entire flight deck was one great storm of raw noise and swirling movement. Men in colored jerseys surged back and forth in some impossible, incomprehensible ballet of motion. The noise, the noise was overwhelming, even through the ear protectors built into White's helmet. An Intruder thundered off the bow, and the jet blast whipped at his jacket. He was afraid. He'd heard time and time again that it was possible for a careless man to step into a jet blast and be hurled off the side and into the sea. In combat, the carrier couldn't stop to rescue one man overboard, and the water was so cold he wouldn't survive more than moments anyway.

I could get killed out here. Death was very much on his mind today. Why had Pellet killed himself?

Dam. Where was he supposed to go now? Someone in a yellow jersey turned and stared at him, then shouted something, his mouth working but the words unheard in the thunder surrounding him. Now he was waving at him, telling him to move that way.

The color codes of the jerseys were still hazy. What did yellow mean?

White wasn't sure. Which way now… over there? An odd-looking aircraft was on one of the waist catapults. White searched his memory. Yeah, it was a Prowler, what someone had called a stretched version of the A-6. The plane was being hooked to the cat shuttle, its engines already screaming against the upright barrier of a JBD. More men were gathered around over there. He started toward them.

Now where? These people were all busy. Was he supposed to… He spotted someone in a blue jersey standing close to the Prowler's side and started toward him, chocks still in hand.

Someone yelled. White turned, but kept walking backward. Were they yelling at him? Several men, one in white, the others in yellow, were coming toward him at a dead run. At first, he didn't connect them with himself. He thought he was in the way and took several more steps backward…

Air Ops, right next door to Jefferson's CATCC on the 0–3 deck, was a large compartment made claustrophobic by the clatter of display screens, status boards, computer consoles, radar scopes, and television monitors that seemed to fill every available space. Tombstone had the CAG seat, an office executive's chair positioned on the deck to give him a clear view of most of the consoles around him.

"Just stand easy, Nightmare," he told Marinaro, who was standing beside him. The man's dark features had taken on a demonic cast in the eerie glow of radar screens and CRTS. "We'll get you guys up later, if we can."

"I really want to go with them, Stoney."

"I know." Damn it, Tombstone thought. So do I!

Which was why he was holding back on letting Nightmare and Tomboy take the CAG bird up.

"Damn it, Nightmare," Tombstone snapped. "I've got other problems on my hands right now! If you want to make yourself useful, grab a seat over there and lend a hand with squadron communications. But get the hell out of my hair!"

"Aye, aye, sir."

Shit. He'd not wanted to come down on the guy that hard. Maybe the strain was starting to show. He rose from the chair, intending to call Nightmare back…

"God, look there!" another CIC officer shouted. Tombstone froze, staring up at the PLAT monitor suspended from the bulkhead.

"What's the son-of-a-bitch think he's-"

"Oh, Christ!"

Tombstone stared in horror at the bloody spectacle on the TV screen. For a stunned moment there was dead silence in Ops. Then the voices started up again, urgent, worried, but continuing to maintain the flow of communications traffic to the aircraft already aloft.

Operations went on, even when they were punctuated by tragedy. From the look of things on the PLAT screen, a sailor had just backed into the intake of a Prowler readying on Cat Three.

The man was dead, of course. There could be no doubt whatsoever about that. Worse ― from the point of view of flight operations ― though, it appeared that the accident had just killed the Prowler as well. Its starboard engine had shut down. but there was smoke coming from the exhaust and from the intake. From the look of things, a turbine blade had exploded, and that meant bits of shrapnel had just ripped through the aircraft and probably scattered themselves across the deck. Damn!