Final Flight

12

Jake Grafton hurried to keep up with Captain James as he loped along over the knee-knockers and down the ladders. Behind Jake trailed the ship’s Damage Control Assistant — a lieutenant commander — and a first-class petty officer with a clipboard. The captain’s marine orderly followed them all.

The official weekly inspection of the ship for cleanliness and physical condition was accomplished by junior officers — lieutenants and below — who each received a group of twenty to thirty compartments, a “zone,” which they toured and graded and commented upon. But Captain James liked to inspect random compartments from several zones, then compare his observations with the written comments of the junior officers assigned those zones. When the official inspectors missed serious discrepancies caught by the captain, or gave a satisfactory or above-average grade to a compartment the captain judged unsatisfactory, lively, one-sided discussions ensued on the bridge near the captain’s chair, with the offending young officer standing at nervous attention and saying “Yessir” or “Nosir” at the end of every one of the captain’s sentences. Consequently, aboard United States the junior officers hunted through the compartments for discrepancies like starving rats searching for crumbs, and the harried sailors worked like slaves to keep the ship clean, with all her myriad of systems in good working order.

The air wing commander didn’t usually participate in these weekly exercises in high-stress, power leadership. Today, however, Captain James had requested his presence and was leading him through compartments assigned to the air wing. Jake felt like a parent being shown damage his children had caused.

The captain stopped outside a closed door and rattled off the compartment number from the plate near the door as he seized and held the doorknob.

“VF-143 airframe shop, sir,” chirped the petty officer with the clipboard.

The captain twisted the knob and shot through the door as it opened. Someone inside called a hasty “attention on deck.”

James ignored the sailors rising clumsily to their feet. “Deck’s dirty. Lightbulb out.” He stopped beside a desk and examined the top. He brushed the paper aside. There were gouges in the soft material that formed the writing surface. “See that?” He looked at the nearest sailor, a third-class petty officer. “See that? That’s an expensive desk and it’s damaged. You people will want another one pretty soon and you won’t get it. I won’t approve it. You’ve got to learn to take care of this equipment. Move the desk.”

Two sailors picked it up and moved it away from the bulkhead. The linoleum was discolored. The captain bent down and scraped at it with a fingernail. “Look here, son.” The third-class bent down obediently. “This stuff comes off. Just move the desk and strip this old wax off and rewax it. Clean it up before it discolors the linoleum.”

“Yessir.”

“Compartment’s unsat. Get this deck in shape.” Without another word Captain James led the inspection party through the door and along a passageway toward the outside skin of the ship. He paused before a rest room, a “head.”

“VF-11 space, sir,” the clipboard man informed him.

In the captain went The enlisted man in charge of keeping the space clean snapped to attention. Urinals lined one wall and stalls the other.

The deck was clean as a wedding dress. Jake nodded at the sailor, who appeared to be about nineteen. James looked into crannies on the bulkhead formed by the angle iron. Nothing there. This place shone like a new penny. The captain stuck his head into the nearest urinal and looked around under the porcelain lip. “Corrosion,” he announced, straightening. “Take a look, sailor.”

To his credit, the sailor didn’t hesitate. He stuck his head in just like the captain, held it two seconds, then straightened and said, “Yes, sir. I see it, sir.”

“Captain Grafton, come look at this.” The Old Man was checking all the others. “Corrosion in all of them. These men aren’t cleaning the inside of these urinals. That corrosion will eat through the porcelain if it’s not removed, and then we’ll have to replace the urinals. We’ve got a brand new ship here, three billion dollars’ worth, and unless we take care of it, it’s going to fall apart around us. I want these urinals kept clean. Get some soft brushes for these men to use, Captain. The men will do a good job if they have the proper tools,”

“Yessir.”

“Other than that, you have a good space here, sailor,” Captain James said to the man, whose chest swelled visibly. “Above average.”

“What’s your name,” Jake asked the sailor, who was wearing a T-shirt instead of his uniform shirt since he was on a cleaning detail.

“Zickefoose, sir.”

“Keep up the good work.”

Back in the passageway the captain went over the results on the clipboard of all the spaces he had looked at this morning. He had been in portions of seven zones and he had graded ten compartments unsatisfactory. “CAG,” he told Jake, “Tomorrow I would appreciate you and your staff reinspecting every failed compartment the air wing owns.” Jake would need to use most of the officers on his staff or he would be at it all day. “I want more emphasis put on cleanliness and material condition.”

The captain’s eyes fell on the watertight doorway in the bulkhead. He ran his finger along the knife-edge, the bronze edge that the heavy door sealed against. The knife-edge met a rubber grommet on the door when the door was closed and formed a seal. “This knife-edge is nicked. Is it on the list for the DCA?” The Damage Control Assistant, the officer standing behind Jake, was in charge of maintenance on all watertight fittings and fire-fighting gear. The damage control petty officer in each squadron or ship’s division reported discrepancies to the DCA, who used his own staff to make repairs.

The first-class flipped to a list on the bottom of his clipboard. “Yessir,” the petty officer announced, and read off the hatch number.

“When was it reported?”

The date was over two months ago. The captain merely looked at the DCA, turned, and walked away.

He paused at the first red fire bottle he came to and flipped the inspection tag up so he could read it. “How much does a fully charged CO₂ bottle weigh?”

“Fifty-two pounds, sir,” the DCA told him.

“How much does it weigh empty?” The captain began unstrapping the red bottle from the bulkhead bracket.

“Thirty-five pounds or so, Captain.” A look of foreboding crossed the DCA’s face and he shot a glance at Grafton.

“The VF-11 airman who has been weighing this bottle has been diligent. He has correctly noted it weighs 35.1 pounds. Every inspection, every month. It’s empty.”

Laird James hefted the bottle, then passed it to Jake. “CAG, I want a report from you. I want names and dates. Explain to me how a sailor can perform his duties diligently and thoroughly, and still accomplish absolutely nothing. Explain to me how his efforts contribute to the combat readiness of this ship. This sailor’s chief, his division officer, his department head, and his commanding officer are about to get charged with dereliction of duty. I want the report in twelve hours.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Jake Grafton said. “But these people work for me. I’ll decide when and if they get disciplined.”

Laird James cocked his head slightly and his mouth got even smaller than it usually was. He stared at Jake. In the navy these two officers had spent their careers in, the air wing commander was an officer with the rank of commander, and he answered to the captain of the carrier for a variety of things both operational and administrative. The CAG used to be subordinate to the ship’s captain. But not anymore. The navy had just recently made the air wing commander a captain’s billet — Super-CAG was the acronym currently popular — and had given him almost complete control over the ship’s airplanes and weapons. Laird James and Jake Grafton were still feeling out this new relationship. Laird James made no secret of the fact he didn’t like it very much. His lips barely moved when he spoke. “I won’t tolerate incompetence on this ship, CAG. Anyone’s incompetence. It may be your air wing, but this is my ship. There had better not be any more empty fire bottles in spaces assigned to your squadrons.” His eyes flicked to the DCA. “There had better not be any more empty fire bottles on this ship.”

The captain whirled and loped away for the bridge. His marine orderly strode along behind, trying to keep up. As he watched them go, the DCA muttered to Jake, “That’s the first time I ever saw a captain in the U.S. Navy stick his head in a urinal. The—”

Jake cut him off. “He is a captain, and for some damn good reasons, one of which is he pays attention to detail. Another is he doesn’t ask the men to do things he wouldn’t do.”

The skipper of the VF-11 Red Rippers, Harvey Schultz, was short and built like a fireplug. He was on a permanent diet after a series of confrontations with medical officers over his borderline noncompliance with the navy’s body-fat guidelines. He argued his neck was too skinny, but the doctors said his waist was too big and their opinions were the only ones that counted. Behind his back, his junior officers called him Jack Spratt. The face above the stocky body was lined and seamed and looked like a hundred miles of bad road. The bags under his eyes even had their own bags. He was so ugly he was handsome, or so Callie had once told Jake after she met him.

“Find out why Airman Potocky doesn’t know the difference between an empty fire extinguisher and a full one,” Jake told Schultz after relating the incident. “I have to write a report for the captain. Gimme the names of chief, division officer, and department head.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Check every fire bottle that kid is responsible for. Have it done and report back to me within an hour. By the way, your man Zickefoose had the cleanest head I’ve ever seen. You tell him I said that.”

“Is this fire bottle business going to be a flap, CAG?”

“Nothing like it would have been if there had been a fire and someone had tried to put it out with that extinguisher.”

“That’s comforting.”

Jake gulped the air when he stepped out onto the flight deck. He always thought he could detect the smell of oil in the processed air inside the ship. The air inside had a distinctive odor and right now he had had enough of it.

The sky was laced with broken clouds. The sea looked almost black, except for the few spots where the sunlight touched it. The task group was steaming west around the southern edge of Sicily. The two alert fighters were sitting in the hookup areas of the waist catapults, and the crews in the cockpits waved as he went by, then resumed reading their paperback novels.

Jake saw Ray Reynolds standing by the port catwalk near the optical landing system and walked over to him. Reynolds was watching four marines in camouflage fatigues install a fifty-caliber machine gun in the catwalk. Jake knew that two of the guns would be mounted on each side of the ship during her upcoming port call.

“Afternoon, XO.”

Reynolds nodded at him, then resumed his supervision of the marines. In a few minutes the sergeant announced the gun was ready and sent a private to the bridge for permission to test-fire it.

“Sergeant, let’s see you swivel the gun through its complete field of fire,” Reynolds said.

The sergeant did as requested. “Now depress it fully.”

“The stern quadrant is completely naked,” Reynolds muttered to Jake. “And if they get within a hundred feet of the ship, these guns can’t be depressed enough.” He spoke again to the sergeant: “Okay. What’s the drill on test-firing?”

“Every man who will stand watch on these guns will fire fifty rounds today, sir. We’ll throw some cans from the galley off the bow and shoot at them as they float by.”

“Try not to put any holes in those cans over there,” Reynolds said, and gestured toward the destroyer a mile away on the beam.

“We won’t, sir.”

Reynolds nodded and turned away. As he and Grafton walked aft on the deck, he said, “I’m going to arm the flight deck security watch this time in port, CAG. Going to give them all shotguns. Wish we had more M-16s.” Reynolds threaded his way between two parked Intruders and stopped at the after end of the flight deck. He looked down into the wake, sixty feet below. “I’m putting two marines up here with M-16s. The liberty boats will be coming in to the fantail….” He gestured downward with his thumb. The fantail was the porch-like structure on the stern of the ship, immediately under the flight deck. “And we’ll have a couple of armed marines there to augment the master-at-arms force. What else can you think of?”

“Looks to me like you have it covered. Are you expecting trouble?” Which was a polite way of asking if the XO had seen an intelligence summary that Jake was not privy to or had missed.

“Nope. Just worrying, as usual.” He grinned, holding his upper lip down. “Don’t you do that?”

“All the time,” Jake said truthfully. The two men parted, and Jake walked slowly up the deck, examining the airplanes parked in rows.

He paused beside an F/A-18 Hornet and stared at it. Somehow it didn’t look quite right. It took him half a minute before he realized the plane had only eight tie-down chains holding it to the deck instead of the requisite ten. He continued up the deck, checking each plane for open access doors and properly installed chains and chocks. His eyes roved freely while he thought about Bull Majeska and empty fire bottles and dead bombardiers. When he left the flight deck, he went through Flight Deck Control and told the handler about the Hornet that needed more chains.

Late that night Jake finished the report on the fire bottle affair and went to the bridge to see Laird James. The captain sat in his raised chair on the port wing of the bridge and read the report. Jake stood beside the chair and watched the officer-of-the-deck, the OOD, discuss the intricacies of a formation turn with the junior officer-of-the-deck. Apparently Captain James was listening to that conversation, too, for Jake saw him glance across at the OOD twice as he perused the report. In the center of the bridge stood the helmsman at the ship’s wheel, watching the compass. The navigation table was on the star-board wing of the bridge, and beyond it two lookouts were visible, their binoculars up and sweeping the horizon. The remainder of the bridge watch team were busy with their duties.

“So the chief thought Potocky knew to report empty fire bottles when he weighed them, but he says he didn’t, and the chief never checked up on him.”

“The chief checked some of the bottles, but he didn’t check this one, the empty one. And this was the only empty one.”

“And the division officer never inspected the bottles to see if Potocky and the chief were doing their jobs.”

“That’s right.”

The captain threw the report on top of a stack of paper which rested on the ledge in front of him. “CAG, I think the chief and division officer are derelict in their duties. I want them taken to mast.”

“I think we should leave that decision to Commander Schultz. He’s the commanding officer of VF-11 and that’s his decision.”

“These people hazarded this ship, Captain Grafton.” He pronounced “Captain” as if the rank had been a gift from a mischievous god. “Their negligence put their shipmates lives in jeopardy.” James turned in his chair until he was looking directly at Jake. “I want every officer and man on this ship to know that such conduct will not be tolerated. I want it punished.”

“Skipper, I’m not disputing the seriousness of this. But in my judgment Commander Schultz should have the discretion to handle this matter as he chooses. I’m not going to order him to do anything. Of course, if you want to hold mast …”

Both officers knew that Captain James could merely order the ship’s master-at-arms to sign the report chit, and the accused would, in a week or two, stand at attention in his dress uniform to hear the charges read and Captain James prescribe the punishment. Mast, a nonjudicial proceeding, was really a means for the commanding officer to enforce discipline, and the only guarantee of fairness was what the commanding officer thought was fair. Both officers were acutely aware of the fact that an officer’s or chief’s naval career would be irreparably destroyed if either were awarded punishment at mast. They were also acutely aware that under the Super-CAG concept, James had been passing to Grafton all the report chits on air wing sailors generated by ship’s personnel for him to hold mast on.

“What does Schultz intend to do about this?”

“I haven’t yet discussed that with him.”

“Get him up here.”

Jake used the nearby telephone to call the Red Ripper’s ready room. While they were waiting for Schultz, Captain James said, “I saw you sight-seeing on the flight deck this afternoon, CAG. In the future you might devote your time more profitably to inspecting the material condition of air wing spaces.”

“I’m responsible for those airplanes down there, Captain.”

“And two of those airplanes have been lost this cruise. This ship is not an airplane, Grafton, that we can afford to crash, then write an accident report on.” Laird James picked up a document from a stack on the ledge in front of him and went over it carefully. Jake stood in silence and watched the yellow-shirted aircraft handlers on the flight deck move aircraft.

When Schultz arrived, out of breath because he had apparently run up the ten stories of ladders rather than wait for the elevator, James rested his paperwork on his lap and got straight to the point. “What do you intend to do with Senior Chief Cosgrove and Lieutenant (jg) Slawson for failing to properly supervise Airman Potocky?”

Schultz glanced at Jake. “Captain, Cosgrove has been in the navy twenty-six years. He’s one of my two or three best chiefs. Slawson is a Naval Academy grad on his first cruise. He’s a damn good young fighter pilot. The navy has made a hell of an investment in both of them and we’re getting a hell of a lot in return. I intend to counsel them both, and the rest of my supervisors, and ensure they all know how to be supervisors.”

“You inform them,” the captain said, his voice so soft that Jake found himself leaning forward a trifle to hear, “that there will be zero tolerance for slovenliness, laziness, negligence, incompetence, or gross stupidity that puts this ship at risk. Zero tolerance. None whatsoever. That includes you gentlemen as well, Super-CAG or no. This is my ship.”

Jake Grafton and Harvey Schultz saluted and left the bridge.