Countdown

CHAPTER 2

Navy fliers never referred to themselves as pilots. The Air Force had pilots, men who landed on fifteen-hundred-foot runways, stationary runways, men who didn't have to contend with pitching decks or equipment failure in the recovery gear. The Navy had aviators, and naval aviators wore that word as a badge of supreme accomplishment, pride, and honor.

Could a woman be an aviator? That was the question. Tombstone Magruder still wasn't entirely sure of his own feelings regarding women aboard combat ships or flying combat missions. To be honest, he had no doubts whatsoever about their technical ability. Tricia Conway and the other women who'd come aboard in Norfolk two weeks earlier were hot pilots, as good as any rookie Tomcat drivers Tombstone had seen. With seasoning, with experience in the form of a few hundred more hours flying off the Jefferson day and night, in all weathers and in all types of seas, they'd be as good as any man in CVW-20.

In time, he supposed, they'd be real aviators and accepted as such by the hitherto all-male fraternity of naval fliers.

His real problem with women serving aboard ship was on a different level entirely.

Tombstone's destination was the Dirty Shirt Mess, so called because officers could show up there for a bite to eat at almost any time without having to change from working clothes to clean uniform, as was expected in Jefferson's more formal officers' wardroom. He'd missed the regular mess call because he'd been tracking the evening's CAP in worsening weather, first from CATCC, Jefferson's air traffic control center, and then from up in Pri-Fly.

Now that Conway and her girls were safely down, he realized that he was hungry and wanted something to eat.

Conway and her girls. Every sensitivity session on women in the military that Tombstone had sat through during the past several years had emphasized that you don't call an adult, professional woman a "girl." It was demeaning, sexist, insensitive.

Yeah, right. Like it was demeaning for Tombstone to talk about his "boys." Conway herself referred to her people as her "girls," though some of the female Naval Flight Officers bristled when a man called them that. The semantic distinction seemed less important to the enlisted personnel on both sides of the line, but the whole issue had the air wing's male complement so on edge they sometimes seemed positively tongue-tied. Morale was being affected, and since Tombstone, as CAG, was responsible for the fighting trim and efficiency of CVW20, that made it his problem.

The line to pay for his meal at the Dirty Shirt wardroom was a short one.

An enlisted man sitting at the door punched his meal ticket, and Tombstone went straight in. Fluorescent lighting gleamed from metal surfaces and white tables. A handful of NFOs, all male, sat in small groups amid the clatter of silverware and the low-voiced murmur of conversation. Tombstone picked up a tray and started through the chow line. Fried chicken was on the menu this evening, left over from the regular mess hours and kept hot for people coming in off duty.

Tombstone didn't resent the women. No, if he resented anyone, it was the politicians and bureaucrats back in Washington who continued to use the entire U.S. military as a test bed for their experiments in social reform.

The first experiment with women aboard ship had taken place as far back as 1972, when Admiral Zumwalt, then Chief of Naval Operations, had issued one of his famous "Z-grams." Among other innovations, Z-gram 116 had called for 424 men and fifty-three carefully screened Navy women volunteers to report aboard the hospital ship U.S.S. Sanctuary for a four-hundred-day test at sea.

Officially, the test was an enormous success. Unofficial leaks to the press, however, as well as the Navy's own classified reports, told a different story. Despite regulations, there'd been romantic relationships between members of the crew, and several pregnancies. PDAs, Navyese for "Public Displays of Affection," had been common, and there'd been a number of fights.

"The situation was becoming serious," read a memorandum from Sanctuary's commanding officer to the CNO, "and was definitely detrimental to the good order and discipline of the ship's company."

Perhaps the most obvious proof that the experiment had been less than totally successful could be found in the fact that the Sanctuary returned to port after only forty-two days at sea. She spent most of her next several years tied to a dock, before being unobtrusively decommissioned in 1975.

In 1978, after Watergate's Judge John S. Sirica ruled in Federal District Court that banning women at sea violated their 14th Amendment rights, the Navy tried integrating the sexes aboard ship again, assigning a mixed crew to the repair ship Vulcan. Even before she left port, several pregnant personnel had to be put ashore, and the media began referring to the U.S.S. Vulcan as "the Love Boat."

Eventually, Sirica's decision was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1981, a ruling that feminists decried as tragic and the ACLU called "a devastating loss for women's rights."

But the matter had not ended there. Women continued to be stationed on some auxiliary, noncombat vessels. In the early nineties, the destroyer tender Samuel Gompers had become the next Navy ship to be known as the Love Boat when three sailors, two men and a woman, videotaped themselves having sex. One of the men was caught passing the tape around to his buddies, precipitating court-martial proceedings and yet another Navy sex scandal.

But there was another side to the larger issue of women in combat than pregnancies and PDAs. During the Gulf War of 1991, women had served with distinction, including helicopter pilots operating at the front. The death of one female pilot in a helicopter crash, and the capture and sexual mistreatment of another, had been widely reported. Several women had died in one night when a barracks of the 14th Quartermaster Corps at Dahran had been hit by an incoming Iraqi SCUD missile.

Finally, the Clinton Administration, coming to office in 1993, ruled once and for all that there should be no barriers whatsoever to women serving aboard ship or in combat aircraft. The Air Force, first to admit women cadets to their academy as far back as 1976, had swiftly integrated women pilots into front-line aviation, but implementation of the new policy in the other services had been slow. The Navy's first female combat aviators had begun feeding into shore-based fighter squadrons by the mid-nineties, but it wasn't until now that a serious attempt had been made to fully integrate women into carrier-based units.

The official story was that Jefferson's squadrons had suffered severe combat losses in the Battles of the Fjords, and qualified women had been needed to bring the carrier's squadrons back to full strength. That played well on CNN, but Tombstone knew that there were still plenty of male NFOs available for duty. The situation was being used by the politicians back home who were eager for the support of women's groups such as NOW.

As he took his tray to a vacant table and sat down, he couldn't help wondering what tune the radical feminists would be singing if the Russian situation deteriorated far enough that a draft became necessary, a draft that would put women in front-line foxholes next to men.

He thought again of his conversation with Barnes up in Pri-Fly. If war erupted again between the resurrected Soviet empire and the West, there would be no way to contain it. Conway and her "girls" would be right in the thick of what promised to be a long, bloody, gruesome war.

"Hello, CAG. You look about as chipper as a man on the way to his own execution. Surely the chow's not that bad."

Tombstone looked up. "Hey, Batman. Secure a chair."

Lieutenant Commander Edward Everett Wayne, wiry, dark-haired, and irrepressible, was VF-95's Executive Officer. He was also one of Tombstone's most experienced flight officers. The two men had known each other for better than four years now.

"So why all the unrestrained hilarity?"

"What?"

"Actually," Batman said, stabbing a fork loaded with mashed potatoes at the empty space above Tombstone's head, "it's that little black cloud above you that worries me. I'm going to have to report that thing to the Met office, you know. They take a dim view of micro-thunderstorms going off loose aboard ship. Plays hell with their jobs. Makes 'em look bad."

Tombstone chuckled, the bleak spell of his thoughts broken. "Okay, Batman. You can rest easy. Right after chow, I'll trot up to Scott's office and get my cloud registered."

Lieutenant Scott was head of Jefferson's OA division, the Meteorological Office. An "oh" was one of Met's weather observations, taken once each hour when Jefferson was underway, and every thirty minutes during flight quarters.

"That'll do it," Batman opined, nodding and chewing. "Now tell Dr. Batman what triggered that LBC in the first place."

"LBC?"

"Little black cloud, of course. Aren't keeping up with our official navy acronyms, are we?" He shook his head. "Obviously, CAG, You're slipping, suffering deeply from the Strain of command."

Tombstone sighed. "You got that right. I'm concerned about our nuggets.

Our female nuggets."

Batman grinned. "Woman trouble, Tombstone? That's not like you. What would Pamela say?"

Pamela Drake was Tombstone's fiancee, a network anchor for ACN news.

"Leave Pam out of this."

"I suppose we should. Although I imagine she's just thrilled by the news that we have girls serving aboard the Jefferson now. Her and about six thousand other Navy wives and sweethearts who have to stay behind while their men sail off into danger."

"I've had some letters from worried wives already," Tombstone admitted.

"God, this female aviator thing is nothing but one big headache, As if we didn't have headaches enough already."

"Ah, don't sweat it. Be like me. I love the women's movement!"

Tombstone eyed his friend warily, sensing a trap. "You do?"

"Yup. Especially from behind!"

Tombstone closed his eyes, groaning. "You, Wayne, are a hopeless degenerate."

Batman nodded vigorously. "A Neanderthal male chauvinist pig, that's me."

"Yeah, and you're probably the last person aboard this boat I should talk to about this. I still remember that incident in Bangkok."

"Incident?" Batman's eyes widened into blank innocence. "What incident?"

"The Thai International Hotel? Skinny-dipping with a couple of stewardesses in the hotel's pool, with God knows how many civilians watching from the lounge through a big underwater window?"

"I'm sure I have no idea what the captain is talking about," Batman said with sore-wounded dignity. "I would certainly have remembered the incident in question had I been the alleged perpetrator involved. Sir."

"Save it. You never did track that one stew down again, did you? What was her name?"

"Which one? Becky or Arlene? Besides, I still don't know what you're talking about."

"I rest my case. I can't talk to you about the problems I'm having with women on board ship. You're too busy chasing them."

Surprisingly, Batman didn't answer right away, and when he did, the bantering tone was gone. "I know I used to be a skirt-chaser, Stoney," he said. "Used to be I had just one use for women. That's not true anymore."

Tombstone regarded his friend for a moment with a level gaze. "I know.

I was out of line, Batman."

He'd heard the story from Batman himself. Several years back, during Jefferson's deployment to Thailand during an attempted military coup in that country, Batman had been shot down by rebels along the Thai-Burmese border.

Chances were he would have ended up dead… but he'd been found instead by a young Karen woman named Phya Nin, a sergeant in the Karen National Liberation Army. He almost certainly owed her his life. Ever since, Batman had continued to maintain the traditional facade of the swinging, predatory, womanizing naval aviator, but it was clear that nowadays his manner was a facade.

Perhaps he'd learned something about women while hiking through the Thai jungle.

"Hey, no biggie," Batman said. "But in case you were wondering, I'm not bedding the Amazons. Not that the idea doesn't have a certain appeal, but it's too damned hard to manage any privacy on this bird farm!"

"'Amazons?""

"The DACOWITS Amazons. What the guys are calling Conway's people.

Strictly unofficial, of course."

DACOWITS was the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services.

Founded in 1951, the organization had for years been in the vanguard of the fight to secure women the same opportunities in the military as men. Since the late 1970s, though, the committee had frequently been used as a political front for the radical feminist agenda. Some people had claimed that its more extreme members actively sought the draft for women, if only to deliberately expose more American women to a non-traditional lifestyle, forcing change for change's sake.

Tombstone had no opinion on such charges, but he hated the political shenanigans that were turning the U.S. military into some kind of social testing program. The Clinton Administration had forced the women-in-combat issue, just as they'd forced another controversial issue by lifting the military's ban on homosexuals. Damn it all, between the gargantuan budget cuts and the social engineering, it was as though the White House had been determined to torpedo Navy morale and efficiency.

"So what's eating you about 'em?" Batman prodded.

"Now that I think about it, I'm afraid the problem is more with me than with the situation. I was up in Pri-Fly tonight, watching while they brought Conway and Hanson down. Hanson trapped okay, no problem, but the weather was getting dicey by the time Conway charlied. She boltered once, and her fuel was getting tight."

"She made it?"

"Yup. Second pass."

"Happens to the best of us, man."

"Sure. The point is, I was up there with the Air Boss about to have a cow, hoping Conway wouldn't have to ditch and praying she wouldn't slam into the roundoff. Damn it, I worry about any of my men when they're in trouble, but this was different. Worse."

"The fact that Conway's a woman made it worse?"

"I guess that's what I'm saying." Tombstone took a deep breath. "I was brought up in a pretty traditional family, Batman. A Navy family. I was always taught that the womenfolk back home were part of what we were fighting for. You know, civilization. Family. Motherhood."

"Mom in the kitchen baking apple pie."

"God damn it, Batman-"

"Hey, chill out, CAG. I'm not making fun of you. But it sounds to me like you're having some trouble adjusting to the times that are a-changin'."

"You got that right." He shook his head. "Another dinosaur, blundering off to extinction."

"Another male chauvinist pig dinosaur." Batman took a bite of chicken and chewed thoughtfully for a moment. "But you're worried about more than just your response to female aviators."

"How perceptive."

"That's why they pay me the big bucks, man. What's the matter, then?

Afraid one of 'em'll go on the rag and bleed all over the seat of one of your airplanes?"

"Jesus, Wayne!"

"Sorry. Bad joke. Okay, how's this. You're afraid Conway's people can't cut it, is that it? That they can't handle the pressure?"

"Well, I used to wonder about how hard they'd push. Aggression's supposed to be a male thing, you know. Then I realized that any woman who'd fought her way to the top of the pyramid in naval aviation sure as hell didn't have anything lacking in the aggressiveness department."

"I'd say that's an understatement."

"I'm worried about the wing's morale. The men as well as the women.

Damn it, we're about to go into combat. People are going to be making split-second decisions where a half second's hesitation is the difference between living and dying. People are going to die, Batman." He closed his eyes for a moment and saw again the horror aboard the Jefferson after the last of the Battles of the Fjords.

Modern, high-tech warfare carried its own peculiar intensity. Four Soviet Kerry missiles had struck the carrier at the height of the battle, and fuel and munitions in the hangar bay had been set ablaze. The fires had nearly claimed the ship. He could still remember the scene on her flight deck, just after he'd returned to the Jeff aboard an SH-3 helicopter. The wounded had been lined up on stretchers in ranks, waiting their turn to evacuate. Kids, most of them, with hideous burns over faces and arms.

Could he watch something like that happen to a woman?

"The morale and the efficiency of this unit are my responsibility," he continued. "I think having them aboard is hurting our morale, and I think it's going to get worse the closer we get to Russian airspace. The closer we get to battle."

Batman didn't answer right away. "How do you feel about it?" Tombstone prompted him.

"Oh, my morale's just fine, thank you. And I'm not aware of anyone else in the Vipers with a problem. Well, Arrenberger, maybe."

"Slider? What's with him?"

"Bad attitude, mostly. He's one of those 'the woman's place is in the home' types. And there're a few others who may like having them aboard too much, if you know what I mean."

"The question is, what's that going to do to our combat efficiency when we go one-on-one against the Russians?"

"There's not a lot we can do that we're not already doing. You make sure your people are the best trained, the best motivated there are, like always.

Shouldn't be hard. You've got good material to work with. I think you're just shook because you reacted to a situation tonight like a man instead of like a commanding officer."

"Yeah. And I can't help what I am, can I? I'm also wondering if that's going to be a problem for other men in this wing. What about these guys you say like having the women aboard too much?"

"Hey, CAG. I named no names."

"I'm not interrogating you. But is it a problem? PDAs?

Fraternization?"

"I'm pretty sure some of the guys have something going with some of the gals, yeah. You know Navy guys."

"And aviators."

"Right. But they're doing their jobs. They're professionals, Stoney.

They wouldn't be here if they weren't."

There was no way, Tombstone knew, to stop men and women from being men and women, certainly not when they were locked up together for month after month in an unrelieved confinement that could make life in a prison seem liberal by comparison. The question was whether the issue of sex aboard ship could impair Jefferson's fighting ability. There was nothing he could do but, as Batman had suggested, rely on his people's own professionalism and good sense.

He wondered, though, about Conway. As the senior female aviator aboard, she was de facto the women's CO, though she and all of the women in turn answered to him, as commander of the wing.

Was she having the same worries about her girls as Tombstone was having with his boys? Maybe it would be a good idea to talk to her about it.