Final Flight

25

The officer-of-the-deck of the Aegis-class cruiser, USS Gettysburg, anchored three miles north of the United States, was momentarily confused. The carrier’s lights were moving in relation to him. The lookout on the port wing of the bridge had called it to his attention. The lights of the carrier had only been visible for the last fifteen minutes, since the rain had slackened. He quickly scanned the wind-direction indicator to see if the wind had changed; that would cause the ships to swing on their anchors. No. Perhaps his ship was moving, dragging its anchor — unlikely, since the wind velocity had also eased. But … He swung the alidade to the lighthouse at the entrance to Naples Harbor, just visible through the rain, and noted the bearing. He checked another point a little further up the coast. The bearings were the same numbers as in the pass-down log, the same numbers the radar operator in Combat had been verifying all evening. His ship was still stationary. But the carrier wasn’t.

“Bridge, Combat.” It was the squawk box, on this class of ships known as the Internal Voice Communication System which combined a telephone, a speaker system at selected locations, and all of the internal networks in the ship.

“Bridge, aye.”

“The United States is underway. We have them headed course Two Five Zero at four knots on radar.” The watch officer in Combat had established a track on the SPS-55 radar, which was operating.

The carrier was heading directly into the prevailing wind, in the same direction she had been pointing as she rode at her anchor. “Keep tracking her and call her up. Find out if we’ve missed something. Have someone check the messages.” Lieutenant (jg) Epley already suspected the worst. Somehow, some way, a message notifying the cruiser of a planned ship movement had gone astray. If so, he thought glumly, there would be absolute hell to pay. Somebody had dropped the ball rather spectacularly.

“Aye aye, sir.”

The OOD looked again through the water-streaked bridge window at the carrier’s moving lights as he twirled the handle on the “growler,” an old-fashioned intercom box. He could just hear the growler sounding in the captain’s cabin directly beneath the bridge.

“Captain.” The Old Man sounded half asleep. No doubt he was.

“Sir, this is the OOD. The United States seems to be underway. There’s no mention—”

“What?” The captain was fully awake now.

“Yessir. She’s moving. Combat verifies on radar.”

“Have you called her on the bridge-to-bridge?”

“Not yet, sir. Combat—”

“I’ll be right there.” The connection broke.

Epley pointed his binoculars at the carrier. He could see the masthead lights and the floodlights around the top of the island, though his view was slightly out of focus with all this moisture in the air.

“Bridge, Combat. Her speed is up to seven knots. No answer to our calls on Fleet Tactical or Navy Red.” Fleet Tactical was a clear voice UHF circuit. Navy Red, or Fleet Secure, was an encrypted voice circuit.

“Keep trying.”

“Watch to see if she turns,” the OOD told the port lookout and his quartermaster, who had already noted the time and event in the log.

The captain arrived on the bridge in less than a minute. He carried his shoes in his hand and tossed them on his chair. He wasted only ten seconds verifying that the United States was indeed underway, then grabbed the Navy Red radiotelephone. No answer. He called Combat and found they had had no luck either. He stuck his head out of the port bridge-wing doorway and yelled to the signalman to try and raise the carrier with his flashing light, then spent a tense, unhappy minute on the phone with the cruiser’s operations officer, who was as mystified as he was. The navigator was equally perplexed.

“Set the special sea and anchor detail, Mr. Epley. We’re going to see how fast we can get underway. We can’t let the flagship just steam off over the goddamned horizon without us. Then call the communications officer and tell him I want to see him here on the bridge in precisely sixty seconds.” He sat down in his chair and put on his shoes, fuming, “The goddamn flagship gets underway in the middle of the fucking night and no one aboard my ship knows jack about it. I’m going to get out of the goddamn navy and buy a pig farm.”

The call, when it came, was from Admiral Parker. The chief engineer summoned Jake to the telephone. He had been huddled with the navigator over a chart, plotting a course that would take the ship as far away from land as quickly as possible. The navigator had had to obtain the chart from his stateroom, since he couldn’t get up into the island to his office.

“Captain Grafton.”

“Jake, this is the admiral. I’m here with Colonel Qazi and he asked me to call you.”

“Yessir.” Jake listened intently. “Where are you, sir?”

“Uh, I think we’d better skip that. Are you the senior officer in charge?”

“Yessir. I think so.” Jake could hear someone whispering, but he couldn’t make out the words.

In a moment the admiral spoke again. “Qazi has armed a nuclear weapon. He …” Jake heard a muffled phrase, then a new voice came on the line.

“Captain Grafton, I am Colonel Qazi. You have heard Admiral Parker tell you I have armed a nuclear weapon. Do you doubt it?”

“No.”

“Unless you and your men cooperate and do precisely as I tell you, I will detonate this device. I will destroy this ship and every living soul aboard her.”

He paused and Jake pressed the telephone against his ear.

“Did you hear me, Captain?” His voice was calm, assured, confident.

“I heard you.”

“This is what you will do. You will restore power to the weapons elevators servicing the forward magazine. You will call off your marines. You will ensure your crew does not interfere with me or my men as we leave the ship. You will not interfere with the helicopters on the flight deck. If you interfere with me in any way, Captain, if you try to thwart me, I will detonate this device.”

“Let me talk to the admiral.”

“I think not, Captain. This is your decision, not his. You hold his life, your life, and the life of every man on this ship in your hands.”

“Including yours.”

“Including mine. I am in your hands. You have the power to decide if this weapon will be detonated. If it is, you will be responsible.”

Jake tried to laugh. It sounded more like a croak.

“This is deadly serious, Captain.”

“Looks to me like we have a Mexican standoff here, Colonel. You fail if you die here too.”

“No, sir. If this bomb explodes I will have shown the world the Americans cannot be trusted. No one will ever know why this bomb exploded, but the evidence will be irrefutable that it did. Your fleets will be disarmed by the American people. Your ships will be banned from the oceans of the world. I will have dealt a mortal blow to American power. I will have accomplished what the Germans and the Japanese could not in World War II. I will have destroyed the United States Navy. And I will have accomplished it very, very cheaply, at the cost of only my life and a few of my men. Think about it, Captain. You have ten seconds.”

Jake was acutely aware of the sound of his own breathing. He rotated the phone so the transmitter was up over his head and Qazi could not hear it. The bastard sounded so goddamn confident, so sure he had all the cards. And he did. The U.S. Navy was finished if a nuclear weapon detonated aboard a ship; Congress would sink it to the cheers of outraged, frightened voters. And the Soviets would inherit the earth.

“Your answer?”

“How do I know you won’t leave the ship and then blow it up?”

“You don’t, Captain. What is your decision?”

“You’ll get what you want.”

“I thought you would arrive at that rational conclusion. I await an announcement over your public-address system.” The connection broke and Jake was left with a buzzing in his ear. Jake slammed the instrument into its cradle.

Get a grip on yourself, man! Don’t let these sailors see you out of control. He took three or four deep breaths and tried to arrange his face.

“Triblehorn, how long until we can get power restored to the weapons elevators up from the forward magazine?”

“Oh, maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Do it.” Jake turned to the marine officer, Lieutenant Dykstra. “Get your people off the flight deck. Nobody, and I mean nobody, pulls a trigger unless I give my personal approval. If they do, I’ll court-martial them and you.”

A sneer of contempt crossed Dykstra’s face. “I hope to God you know what the fuck you’re doing. Sir.” Dykstra turned and stalked away.

The navigator was still bending over the chart. Jake glanced over his shoulder. The navigator was on the phone, probably to the sailor in the after steering compartment. The emergency helm was there, below the waterline in the after part of the ship, near the giant hydraulic rams that controlled the rudder. The navigator covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked at Jake, who asked, “Where are we?”

The navigator pointed. About ten miles southeast of the anchorage.

“What’s our speed?”

“Seventeen knots.”

“Let’s put on all the turns we can. Work her up to flank speed.”

“There may be ships out there. The radar’s not in service and we only have two lookouts. Visibility is poor. I’m DR-ing our track.” DR meant “dead reckoning,” drawing a line based on speed and time.

“Flank speed.” Jake wanted the United States as far from land as possible in case Qazi pushed the panic button. He would just have to pray that Lady Luck kept this blind, stampeding elephant from colliding with another ship. The two lookouts wouldn’t help much with this limited visibility; by the time they saw and reported a ship on a collision course, it would be too late to avoid the collision. And Lady Luck seemed to be off duty just now.

Jake picked up the 1-MC microphone from its bracket on the engineering watch officer’s desk. The watch officer flipped the switches. This had better be good. Qazi would hear it. He cleared his throat, pushed the button and began to speak.

His announcement was heard all over the ship, except in those spaces where the public-address system was not working because of fire damage to the wires or loudspeakers. As it happened, two of the silent areas were the portside catwalk on the flight deck and the midships area of the O-3 level, where the waist catapult control rooms were located.

On the portside catwalk forward of the angle, up near the bow, Gunnery Sergeant Garcia stepped over the body of Lance Corporal Van Housen and laid familiar hands on the Browning.50-caliber machine gun. He snapped the ammo box open and carefully fed in the belt of cartridges he had so painfully carried up from the ship’s armory draped around his shoulders. Then he opened the breech and slipped the belt in. He closed the breech and cycled the bolt. It jammed.

He tried again. No. The cartridge felt like it was hitting an obstruction. Don’t tell me! No! He used his fingers to try and seat a cartridge.

They’ve spiked it. They had pushed a metal plug, probably tapered, into the chamber and his attempts to chamber a cartridge had forced the plug deeper into the barrel, jamming it. And Garcia, you ass, you didn’t look first! You should have known!

He looked aft along the length of the catwalk at the helicopters sitting silently on the angle and tried to decide if he had the time to go get a rod to force down the barrel to push out the plug. So near and yet so far! There they sat, and here he was with a weapon that could destroy all three machines right where they were, or better yet, as they lifted off the deck, so they would fall into the sea without damaging anything else. And it wouldn’t take ammo.

Van Housen lay face down. Another dead marine.

At least he had had the sense to pick up another weapon in the armory. It was slung over his shoulder, a Model 700 Remington in.308 caliber with a sniperscope. The marines called it the M-40. He hefted it in his hands and stared at the helicopters. No. The best place for this was up in the island. On Vulture’s Row. From there he could command the entire angled deck. He turned away from the machine gun and the dead marine and went below.

Captain Grafton’s announcement should have been heard in the waist catapult control bubble because the loudspeaker there was functioning perfectly. Or would have been functioning perfectly had the volume been turned up even slightly. As it was, the volume knob had been cranked to its lowest setting by some kind soul earlier in the evening when Kowalski was brought here to sleep it off. Now the loudspeaker didn’t even hiss.

Kowalski sat on the floor of the darkened bubble with a headset of a sound-powered telephone over his ears and listened to one of the cat crewmen working on the JBD hydraulic pump in the Cat Four control spaces under the hookup area. The power was off to the pump and the crewmen were trying to tie in a line to another circuit at the main catapult junction box. A man there wearing a headset gave Kowalski an account of their progress when goaded properly.

“How much longer?”

“Goddamn, Ski, we’re working as fast as we fucking can. Give us a break, will ya?”

“I just as’d a civil question, peckerhead. Gimme a guesstimate.”

“Ski wants an estimate…. The Russian says five minutes.”

“I’m lookin’ at my watch. You tell the Russian he had better hump it.”

“Where is the ship going, Ski? We can feel the vibrations here. They must have this mother really cranking.”

“You people just worry about your end of the navy.”

Ten minutes, Ski thought, maybe fifteen. The Russian always thought he was about finished. Ski checked the clock on the bulkhead behind him. His watch was broken. Probably happened last night at that bar.

He swallowed two more aspirin and inched his way upright. He eased his head level with the deck and surveyed the situation. One of the sentries was walking slowly around the choppers. The wind was whipping his shirt and trousers. The guys below were right; this tub was really bucketing along.

One of the places Captain Grafton’s 1-MC announcement was heard was in the fire crew’s shack in the after part of the island superstructure, on the flight deck level. The firemen had a watertight door that gave them immediate access to their large fire truck parked just outside on the flight deck. If there had been planes aloft or planes on the deck with engines turning, the bosun would have had his men in asbestos suits and sitting in the truck with the engine running. Now as the bosun listened to the announcement he knocked his pipe out into the ashtray on his desk and slowly refilled it.

He was bone tired and filthy. So were his men, who sat or lay on the floor all over the compartment. They had been down in the hangar bays fighting the fires. That place was a gutted shell now. The bosun and his men had helped the damage-control teams there stack the bodies like cordwood on the elevator when the fires were out. They had helped lay out Ray Reynolds. And they had laid out the waist cat officer and two of the catapult chiefs. They had died when an airplane with a little fuel left in its tank had exploded. The bosun wiped the grime off his face with his shirttail.

“Don’t interfere with the intruders,” the CAG had said. So the fucking terrorists had the U.S. Navy by the gonads and there was nothing anybody could do. Ha! No doubt that announcement had been made to please the terrorists, because they had heard it too. This Grafton, another over-the-hill, worn-out jet-jock who’s pulled too many Gs. A far cry from Laird James. Now there was a real sailor, an asshole to work for and a perfectionist hairsplitter, but the bosun had spent twenty-seven years working for driven men who demanded perfection and were satisfied with nothing less. He was used to them. This Grafton! He’ll probably get court-martialed after tonight, the bosun told himself bitterly.

When he had his pipe drawing well, he leaned back in his chair and put his feet on his desk and regarded the no-smoking sign posted on the wall. Yep, Grafton was just like Ray Reynolds. Stick the fucking sign on the fucking bulkhead, Bosun, and don’t get caught smoking by the sheriffs boys or by the XO on one of his little jaunts around the boat. Don’t get caught breaking any of the chickenshit little rules. Just fight the fires and stack the bodies, Bosun.

Before those terrorists got to the bridge, Captain James made an announcement. Do your duty, he said. That fit the bosun’s pistol. He had made warrant officer four, the senior warrant rank, by doing the right thing regardless of what the book said. They couldn’t hurt him with a fitness report now. No, sir. It would take a court-martial to rip the gold and blue off his sleeves. And the navy doesn’t court-martial guys who do the right thing. It just shits all over assholes like Captain Grafton who earn their rank pushing paper, then fold up when the chips are down.

“Is there fuel in the truck?” he asked his first-class.

“Of course.”

“When did you start it last?”

“This morning. No, yesterday, daily maintenance inspection. Started on the first crank.”

The bosun puffed on his pipe and stared at the television monitor over the door. The helicopters just sat there. Occasionally one of the sentries moved a little.

The monitor swayed slightly in its mount. Grafton really has this tub cranked up, the bosun thought. Wonder if he knows what the hell he’s doing?

“Where in the fuck are those crazy assholes going at thirty-three knots?” The skipper of the cruiser Gettysburg roared this question at his navigator, operations officer, and communications officer collectively. All three stood beside him on the bridge and together they regarded the little arrangement of lights several miles ahead in the murk that was the United States. “Thirty-three knots, limited visibility, right through the Italian coastal shipping lanes, right through all these little fucking fishing boats and yachts full of rich queers — those crazy assholes must be out of their fucking minds!”

He turned and faced the communications officer. “Why in hell can’t you talk to her?”

“They’re not answering on any circuit, Captain. We don’t think they’re transmitting on any frequency. None of their radars are radiating. They’re observing EMCON.” EMCON meant “emissions control.”

The captain picked up the Navy Red telephone and pushed the transmit button futilely. He wiped his forehead and slowly put the instrument back into its cradle.

“They’re certainly in a hurry to go somewhere,” the ops officer observed calmly. He had always found it best to stay calm when the skipper blew off steam.

“Okay,” the captain said, his voice back to normal. “Get on the horn to Sixth Fleet. Tell him what’s going on. See if he knows something we don’t. Find out what he wants us to do. And get off a flash OPREP to Washington.” An OPREP was an “operational report,” used to advise naval headquarters of emergencies.

“We’re doing all the turns we can, sir,” the OOD piped up. “We’re not going to catch them if they keep this speed up.”

“Thank you, Mr. Epley,” the Old Man said sourly. He gestured at the communications officer. “Okay. Call Sixth Fleet and send the OPREP. Ops, you get down to Combat and sort out the surface picture. The United States isn’t talking to us, she’s not talking to anybody. She may run down one of these civilians. Try to call anyone in her way on the civilian emergency nets and tell them to get the hell out of the way. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll pick up survivors.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Willie,” he said to the navigator. “I want to know where we are every damn minute and where we’re heading. I don’t want to follow those fools smack onto a reef or island at thirty-three knots. Let me see a chart with a projection of this course. They may be running for a launch position.” That was the hypothesis that made the most sense, really. The carrier was silently racing to get into position to launch a strike. But against whom?

It’s like a nightmare, the captain told himself as he looked at the backs of his departing officers. One day they had a war and nobody told you. Is this the big one? Naw, they would have told us, for Chrissake! Maybe Laird James and Earl Parker have gone off their nut. Maybe there’s been a mutiny.

Infuriated and thoroughly confused, the captain sat in his chair and tried to get his blood pressure under control as his ship labored into the swells. White water spewed back from the bow, then the bow rose clear of the sea and crashed majestically into the next swell in another thunderous cloud of spray. He pushed his squawk-box button for the chief engineer and warned him to be ready to cut power to the shafts instantly if the screws came out of the water.

He had gotten his ship underway in record time, getting the anchor up in seventeen minutes from the time the capstan had began to turn. Due to the sonar dome under the bow, he couldn’t move the ship until the anchor cleared the water. The United States had been seven miles ahead, but he had managed to close the distance because she had stayed at seventeen knots for almost twenty minutes. Then she accelerated to thirty-three. Now, with the larger swells here in the open sea, he was hard-pressed just to match her speed. Sooner or later he would close on her; if she turned port or starboard he would turn inside her and close, providing he didn’t have to back off some turns to keep the screws in the water and could stay with her.

Something was seriously wrong aboard United States. He tried to imagine a combination of circumstances in peacetime that would justify a capital ship weighing anchor unannounced in the dead of night and steaming off alone, without her escorts, at high speed through crowded shipping lanes with radar and radios silent. When, or if, he caught up with her, it wouldn’t hurt to be ready for anything. “Lieutenant Epley, sound general quarters.”

Meanwhile, aboard United States, Jake Grafton was huddled in engineering with the ship’s department heads and every squadron skipper who was aboard, plus about half the executive officers. His operations officer and the flag ops boss were also present. Jake had told Qazi when he called the second time that restoring power to the elevators would require half an hour, and Qazi had given him half that time. Still, twenty minutes had passed and the new circuit had not been energized. All that remained was the throwing of a switch by the load dispatcher in Central Control. Jake had not yet told him to throw the switch.

“Goddammit, Captain,” the weapons boss shouted, “We can’t just let that terrorist take some bombs and fly off this ship. We can’t.” This statement was merely a rehash of arguments voiced for the last ten minutes by desperate, angry men crowded around Jake.

“Now you listen,” Jake said calmly, “All of you. This is going to be the last word. I’ve listened to all your arguments. We’ve hashed and rehashed this for ten minutes. In my opinion, we’ve got no other choice. This man has us by the balls. None of you has suggested a viable alternative course of action.”

“Goddammit—”

“No! Don’t you cuss at me! I’m the man responsible and I’ve made the fucking decision. End of discussion!”

“I still don’t see why we can’t zap his choppers with missiles when they are about five miles out, after the bomb is disarmed.” Everyone assumed that Qazi would leave an armed weapon on deck that he could explode by radio control if he were pursued.

“Bullshit. We’ve got no radar.” Jake pushed his way to the engineering watch officer’s desk and picked up the 1-MC microphone. “Central Control, this is Grafton. Energize the emergency circuit to the forward weps elevators.” He threw the mike on the desk.

“Now when these people get gone, I want every E-2 and F-14 on the flight deck that can fly fueled and armed for an immediate takeoff. You skippers, get your crews suited up and briefed. Weapons, get ready to bring missiles up from the magazines. And get some senior people to inspect those magazines as soon as the terrorists get out of them. Qazi may leave something ticking down there. Air Department, get your people ready to go. We’re going to shoot down Mr. Qazi and his friends when they’re the hell and gone away from this ship.” They stood and stared. “Do it now.”

“Jesus, CAG,” the weapons boss said. “You should have told us that ten minutes ago. We thought you were just going to let them get away.”

Jake shooed them out. He bummed a cigarette and sat down with shaking hands to smoke it. These guys weren’t using their heads. Qazi had had all the answers up to this point; he probably had an answer to the possibility of aircraft pursuers. The likeliest answer was just to detonate the bomb aboard ship when he was five or six miles away at fifty feet over the ocean, tail-on to the blast. Still, in war nothing ever goes the way you’ve planned it, so the name of the game is keeping options open. The ship’s officers just don’t realize how few options we have. He had decided earlier, when the discussion started, not to stress the fact that there was a 90 percent chance no one on this ship would live another hour. So now they have a straw to grab for, something to do to keep them and the men busy while the last minutes tick by.

“CAG,” Triblehorn said after the others had filed out. “Maybe you should let the crew know what this terrorist is up to? Make an announcement on the 1-MC.”

“So everyone can have a final moment to polish their soul before they get cremated alive? Nope. We don’t need any panic. They’ll have to go meet their maker with the tarnish still on. Death’s a come-as-you-are deal, anyway.”

What a great naval leader you are, Jake Grafton. Here you are, twenty-three years in the navy, presiding over a naval debacle that will make Pearl Harbor look like a minor traffic accident. And if by some miracle you survive, the admirals and congressmen will cram your nuts into a vise and take turns on the handle.

“How come you don’t have any ashtrays down here?” he asked the engineering watch officer.

“The XO made us take them out. Smoking’s bad for you.”

“No kidding. Look where it’s got me,” Jake said. “Call the master-at-arms shack and have them bring me a big bolt-cutter. One of those things they use to cut padlocks off. Tell them to hurry.”

“You sent for me, CAG?” The speaker was a senior chief petty officer wearing glasses. His name tag read “Archer, EOD.” EOD meant Explosive Ordnance Disposal.

“Yeah. Pull up a chair and drop anchor.” The senior chief did as requested. He was of modest stature, with intelligent eyes and even, regular features. His uniform hung on him as if it were tailor-made. He had fine, delicate hands. He looked as if he were really a banker or an accountant, except for the bare legs of a tattooed woman on his upper arm which peeped out from under his short-sleeved khaki shirt.

“Senior Chief, I need some answers about nuclear weapons. We’ve got a little problem.”