"Now hear this! Now hear this! Lieutenant Commander Magruder, report to the admiral's office on the double!"
Tombstone turned as the voice blared from the 5-MC speaker mounted high on the island above the flight deck. "Now what the hell…?"
Chief Bob Smith looked up from the maintenance reports he'd been reviewing with Tombstone. "What the shit you been up to, Commander?"
"Beats me, Smitty," Tombstone said, handing another stack of maintenance forms to the bearded senior chief. "But it sounds like I'd better find out."
He started down the line of aircraft parked along the edge of the flight deck, their tails hanging out over the water like gigantic, roosting birds.
Across the deck, green-jerseyed handlers were working around an SH-3D Sea King helicopter which had arrived on board Jefferson twenty minutes earlier.
Tombstone had seen the landing but not the passengers. He wondered if the helo's arrival had something to do with his summons to see his uncle.
At a doorway leading into the island he nearly collided with Batman, who was just coming out onto the roof. "Hey, Stoney! You hear?"
"I heard."
"You up for a lecture from your uncle or what?"
Tombstone pulled off his cranial and his floater ― the helmet and life jacket worn while working on the flight deck ― and shoved them at Batman's gut.
"Whatever it is, it'll beat the hell out of listening to any more of your stories!"
Batman laughed. "Aw, you're just jealous, Stoney!" Breakfast in the Dirty Shirt Wardroom that morning had been made entertaining by Batman's tales of his rendezvous in Bangkok the night before with a gorgeous blond stewardess named Becky. "You oughta come into town with me tonight! Becky's bringing a friend!"
"Not tonight," Tombstone said, grinning. "Too much paperwork to do."
He made his way down gray steel corridors, then trotted up a succession of zigzagging ship's ladders up through the heart of the island. Minutes later, he arrived at the admiral's outer office on the 0–9 deck level and opened the door. A yeoman first class looked up from a steel desk and nodded.
"Mr. Magruder! You're to go right in, sir."
The inner sanctum looked more like an executive's office than something on board ship, with wood-paneled bulkheads and oil paintings of sailing ships and Navy aircraft. The deck was carpeted, and the furniture would not have been out of place in a men's club. Only the round, steel-framed portholes along one bulkhead proved that they were still aboard ship.
Tombstone had always been troubled by the protocol of having a two-star admiral for an uncle. Navy custom and common sense both dictated that he play it conservatively and pretend he didn't know the guy… at least until they were alone and discussing nonmilitary subjects. It was easier this time, though. The admiral was not alone. Captain Fitzgerald stood by the bulkhead, looking out a porthole, and there were three civilians seated in chairs in front of the admiral's desk.
He realized that these must have been the passengers who had arrived earlier aboard the Sea King. Two were men, one small with owlish-looking glasses and a crumpled suit, the second taller and brawnier and wearing a loud print shirt and a handlebar mustache. The third civilian was a woman.
She was lovely, wearing a conservative gray skirt and jacket which seemed out of place with the disarray of her blond hair ― the result, Tombstone decided, of the cranial she'd worn during the helo flight to the carrier. Her eyes were a pale, ice blue.
"I'm Pamela Drake, Commander," she said in a crisp, businesslike tone as she rose. It was clear immediately that she was the one in charge of the trio. "American Cable Network. This is my cameraman, Bob Griffith. My soundman, Hugh Baughman."
He shook hands with the two in turn. Griffith was the tall, mustached man, Baughman the one with glasses.
Tombstone exchanged a brief glance with the admiral. "Welcome to our boat, Miss Drake," he said.
"Pleased to meet you, Commander." She raised one perfectly arched eyebrow at the admiral. "But I don't care to be patronized. I may be a civilian, but I know you call something this large a 'ship," not a 'boat.""
"Actually, he's quite correct, ma'am," Fitzgerald said. "Aviators always call their carrier a 'boat." God knows why. Even when you get too old to fly, like me or the admiral here."
"Mind your manners, Captain," the admiral said. As Pamela resumed her seat, he turned to Tombstone. "It seems that you're something of a celebrity, son. Miss Drake here has come out to the Jefferson to get some film clips for a news program special she's doing. When she found out you were aboard, well…"
"I don't understand."
"Ever hear of a news program called World Focus?"
"Yes, sir." World Focus was a popular nightly program Stateside, with a news-magazine format and aired by ACN. Mildly liberal, sharply critical of the current administration and its foreign policy, the show had never appealed enough to Tombstone for him to follow it much when he was in the States. "I haven't seen it since we were Stateside last, of course."
"It's a one-hour program," Pamela said. "Five nights a week, covering current news topics. The closing fifteen-minute slot each evening is a segment we call Up Close. Generally, we run with a single topic five nights in a row, examining it from every side, featuring in-depth interviews, that sort of thing."
"But what does that have to do with me?" Tombstone asked. He felt uneasy. Pamela Drake's direct manner, her no-nonsense tone of voice made him feel like she had him on camera.
She pursed her lips. "Next week we will be presenting an Up Close series on Navy carriers, whether they're necessary in today's world. We'll be linking it to the World Focus pieces we'll be airing at the same time on the trouble in Thailand… whether we should be here, what danger there might be in our getting involved in Thailand, that sort of thing."
"And you want Tombstone here for an interview," Fitzgerald said.
"That's right." She gave Tombstone a sidelong look. "'The Hero of Wonsan," the press was calling him a few weeks back. I think we should feature him in an interview which we'll work into the carrier piece. Who is he? What was it like shooting down six North Koreans? What did he feel about that?"
"Just a damn minute," Tombstone said. "I didn't do it for fun…"
"No one said you did, Commander. But now you're here in Thailand, presumably carrying out our government's foreign policy. What are you doing?
How do you see the situation?" She smiled suddenly. "I think you'd have a lot to contribute, Commander."
"Our instructions are to cooperate with you, Miss Drake." the admiral said. "You can make arrangements with the Captain here for any shooting you want to do on board the Jefferson."
"I'll do that, thank you. As long as my crew and I are here now, can we begin with a tour of your ship?" She smiled again, a dazzling display of perfectly white teeth. "I mean your boat!"
"I don't see why not," Fitzgerald said. "Tombstone? Would you care to show the lady and her people around?"
He did not care to, but one did not tell the Captain that. "Of course, sir."
"You'll have dinner with us this evening, Miss Drake?" The admiral was trying to be charming, but somehow it wasn't coming off well. He seemed ruffled by her challenging approach toward Tombstone.
"Sorry, we can't. We'll need to get back to our hotel. In fact, if we can arrange it, it would probably be easiest if we could conduct most of our interviews with the commander in Bangkok instead of out here. Possibly at our hotel?"
"As you wish. How long will you need him?"
"Oh, two or three sessions will be enough. I imagine we could fit him in for an hour or two these next few evenings."
Tombstone groaned to himself. "May I remind the admiral," he said, picking with care the words he could use in front of the press, "that I've been assigned to temporary duty ashore."
"I don't think that will be a problem, Stoney. We can find someone to take your place. 'Full cooperation," remember?"
It appeared that there would be no escape.
Twenty minutes later he was leading Pamela and her crew through the twisting bowels of Jefferson, taking them down the island deck by deck until they were in the maze of passageways beneath the flight deck. The experience of walking down one of Jefferson's long interior corridors never failed to amaze a first-time visitor. The passageways ran straight for hundreds of feet; every thirty feet or so they were interrupted by a cross frame with an oval-shaped door called a "knee-knocker" because they forced a tall person to simultaneously stoop and step high to go through. Watching someone approach down a passageway was like watching one's own reflection in an endlessly reflected series of arched mirrors.
"My God," Baughman said breathlessly as they turned a sudden corner and confronted another infinite regression of knee-knockers. "How many miles of tunnels do you have in this thing?"
Tombstone grinned. "Never counted 'em. It might give you an idea of her size, though, if you think of Jefferson as an eighty-story building lying on her side. In some ways, she's a self-contained city. We've got a population of over six thousand, with one radio station and two television stations, a barber shop, a hospital complete with OR, a dentist's office, a ship's exchange which passes for our own shopping mall, a newspaper and printing office, laundry service, a hobby shop."
"Anybody ever get lost down here?" Pamela asked. She stepped back against a gray-painted bulkhead as three dungaree-clad sailors squeezed past, going the other way.
"All the time," Tombstone replied. "Everybody carries maps the first few days they're aboard. After that, well… I know I'd get lost trying to find my way around down in snipe country, and I've been aboard six months."
"Snipe country?"
"Engineering spaces, below and aft. Don't worry. That's not where we're going."
"Do you know where we're going?" Griffith said. He was out of breath, lugging the bulky camera he balanced on his shoulder. He'd taken a number of shots of various parts of the ship at Pamela's direction, but he looked as though he'd be a lot happier taping congressmen in a shore-based studio.
"Sure thing, Mr. Griffith. This way."
They took another turn into a blind corner with a ladder zigzagging precipitously into the depths of the ship. He led them down three levels.
Pamela seemed to be bearing up well under the indignities of navigating the steep ladders in her skirt; more than once, though, Tombstone had to lead the way with a bellowed "make a hole" to clear the sightseeing sailors who had gathered near the base of the next ladder down. It seemed that Jefferson's grape vine was working at full efficiency, alerting sailors to the fact that a woman was making a tour of the vessel.
"We were on the 0–3 deck," he explained as they left the ladder and doubled back in an unexpected direction. "That's the level immediately under the 'roof," or flight deck. Now we're on the 0–1 level, coming up on the hangar deck."
"Does that mean we're as far down in the ship as we can go?"
"Hardly. It means the decks below this one are numbered differently…
one, two, three, and so on down to the keel. Counting the island, Jefferson is twenty stories tall."
They made one last turn and emerged into a vast, steel-lined cavern.
A visitor's first look at Jefferson's hangar deck never failed to raise the same emotions: surprise and awe. Thirty feet deep, two thirds the length of the carrier and covering two acres, the vast chamber looked like the inside of some immense shoreside warehouse. The glimpses of sunlight and blue sea caught through the huge, oval elevator bays were so restricted that they might as well have been views overlooking a river from a storage building back home.
The air rang and echoed with shouted orders, the roar of tractors, the clatter of tools and metal on metal.
Most of the deck space was occupied by aircraft, each with wings folded in a characteristic way depending on its type: F-14s with their variable-sweep wings angled back along their flanks, A-6 Intruders with the wings broken in the middle and folded across their spines, a lone Hawkeye with wings twisted at right angles and rotated back to avoid the dish-shaped radome on its back.
Space not occupied by aircraft was made hazardous by yellow-painted tractors, called mules, which busied about in a strange blend of geometry and ballet.
"It's enormous!" Pamela said.
"Yup," Tombstone agreed. "Follow me."
"What's that smell?" Baughman asked.
Tombstone sniffed the air. Curiously, he was aware of Pamela's perfume, a subtle hint of roses and vanilla, but nothing more. "Probably a mix of oil and JP5," he said. "That's what we use for jet fuel. After you've been aboard awhile, you don't even notice it."
"You carry a lot of jet fuel on board?" Pamela asked.
"About two million gallons."
"My God!" Griffith said. "That stuff's pretty explosive, isn't it?"
"Yeah. We have to be pretty careful with it."
Pamela gave him a searching, sideways look. "Why do you carry so much?"
Tombstone laughed. "Actually, it's not enough. We have fifty or sixty active aircraft at any given time. Each one flies twice a day, and burns two, maybe three thousand gallons each time up. At that rate, two million gallons doesn't last nearly long enough! We need to take on more fuel just about every week."
"I thought nuclear carriers didn't need replenishment."
"To run the engines, no. Jefferson's nuclear fuel supply will keep her cruising sixty thousand miles a year for fifteen years, sure, and uranium takes up only a tiny fraction of the space a load of fuel oil would. In fact, because of that, we can carry more avgas than sep1 conventional carriers do. But we still have to take on fresh supplies pretty often. Not just avgas either, but food, stores of all kinds. One operation like Wonsan pretty much wipes us out on munitions too. That's why we put in at Japan afterwards, to stock up."
As he talked, he led them across the tangled maze of the hangar deck toward one of the huge, oval cutaway openings in the side of the ship.
"This is one of the elevators?" Griffith asked.
"That's right. Port side aft. Actually, it's a section of the flight deck which moves up and down on those rails along the outside of the hull. We have four of them, and they can lift sixty-five tons at a time. We use them to transfer aircraft back and forth between the hangar deck and the roof."
As they stepped across the yellow-and-orange painted warning stripes which marked the joint between deck and elevator, Pamela stopped and looked at the opening, large enough to pass an aircraft with its wings folded. "You know, Commander, a big question being debated back on Capitol Hill these days is whether aircraft carriers are too vulnerable to be worthwhile in a modern war. And now that I've seen one, I have to wonder if your critics aren't right."
"What do you mean?" He led the group to a railing, out of the way of a mule and a team of yellow-jacketed deck handlers maneuvering an F-14 Tomcat onto the elevator. The dark waters of Sattahip Bay lapped at the ship's side twenty feet below.
"What did you say… two million gallons of aviation fuel? What happens if an enemy missile flies through this big hole in the ship's side?"
Tombstone grinned. "That debate has been going on since the Falklands War. That's when the Navy suddenly realized that a cheap missile could do big-time damage to a very expensive ship."
"And there was the Stark in the Persian Gulf," Pamela pointed out. "Can you really justify spending billions of dollars on something that can be blown out of the water by a single Exocet costing, oh, say a few hundred thousand dollars?"
"In the first place," Tombstone said slowly, "the Jefferson is not the Sheffield."
"Sheffield?"
"A British DDG, a guided-missile destroyer, sunk by air-launched Exocet missiles during the Falklands War," Tombstone explained. "Look at it this way. Jefferson has over two thousand separate watertight compartments.
Sinking her… well, you might as well try to sink a piece of styrofoam."
"That sounds ominously like the argument they used for the unsinkable Titanic," Pamela said. Her eyes twinkled. She seemed to enjoy sparring with him. "In a war, you'd have quite a time hiding a ship this big from Russian satellites. One nuclear cruise missile and… where would your styrofoam be then?"
Tombstone crossed his arms. "Look, if Russia and us start tossing nukes at each other, we're going to be losing a hell of a lot more than carriers!
Jefferson can fight a nuclear war all by herself if she has to, but her main purpose is as a deterrent… and to give the President some non-nuclear options in a crisis."
"Like Wonsan."
"That's right."
"Okay, what about conventional weapons then? You're still vulnerable.
An Exocet could slip right through this big doorway here, explode in there among all those airplanes and… whoosh!"
"In combat, these openings are closed off by sliding armor panels. We keep them open in fair weather and in port to keep the hangar deck aired out, but we can seal her up tight when we need to. So we won't have SSMs bouncing around on our hangar deck.
"Now, look over there." He pointed aft toward a railed sponson extending from the hull along the ship's port quarter. "See that grouping of six tubes, like mortars? That's Super RBOC." He pronounced it "are-bock."
"For Rapid-Bloom Offboard Chaff. Anti-ship missiles like Exocet are guided to their target by radar. When CIC ― that's the ship's combat information center ― picks up incoming missiles, those tubes fire off clouds of radar-reflecting fibers called chaff, just like the chaff dispensers on my Tomcat. The missiles home on the chaff and miss the ship.
"Now, look up there." He turned around and pointed forward, far up along the curve of the ship's hull. "Up there on that forward sponson… see something that looks like a big, white, dome-topped garbage can? That's one of our Mark IS Phalanx systems, or CIWS." He pronounced the acronym "sea-whizz."
"That's for Close-In Weapons System. It's a big Gatling gun, computer-controlled and radar-directed, which can rattle off 20-mm depleted uranium rounds at the rate of fifty per second. Each slug is two and a half times denser than steel and is moving at something like seven hundred miles per hour when it hits. The control and aiming is precise enough to target an incoming missile and blow it right out of the air. We have three Mark 5s aboard Jefferson: that one port side forward, one to starboard below the island, and one aft on the port side of the fantail."
The deck handlers had completed maneuvering the Tomcat onto the elevator.
A klaxon blasted warning, and then the elevator gave a hard jolt and began crawling upwards.
"Phalanx," Pamela said thoughtfully. "Wasn't that the defense system on the Stark that was turned off at the wrong time?"
Tombstone met her cool gaze evenly. "Yes, ma'am. It was."
"But of course, that can't happen aboard the Jefferson."
"No ma'am, it can't."
The elevator rose level with the flight deck and shuddered to a halt.
From here, it was like standing on a dry land airfield, with the control tower island rising far across a very large stretch of dark-colored runway. The aircraft parked along the edge of the four-acre flight deck, the helo still resting in front of the island, the tiny figures of deck handlers going about their duties ― all served to emphasize the overwhelming size of the Jefferson.
With no flight operations going on, the flight deck was unusually quiet.
"You still haven't convinced me, Commander," Pamela said as they stepped off the elevator and started across the flight deck. She stopped Tombstone with a hand on his shoulder and turned, facing west. Three of the other ships of Jefferson's battle group were visible scattered at widely spaced intervals across the Sattahip anchorage. Closest was the shark-gray shape of the Vicksburg, the CBG's Aegis cruiser. Astern was the DDG Kearny, and farther off still, the frigate Biddle. Winslow and Gridley, the remaining two vessels of CBG-14, were still at sea patrolling in the Gulf of Thailand. "Look," she continued. "You have a nine-billion-dollar aircraft carrier… and you still need all those ships just to protect her!"
Tombstone laughed.
"What's so funny?"
"Excuse me, ma'am, but that's a pretty common misconception."
"Those other ships don't protect the carrier?"
"Oh, to a certain extent, sure. The frigates are mostly for ASW ― that's anti-submarine work ― and they act as a screen to keep enemy subs from getting too close. But Jefferson's aircraft are her whole reason for being. Look…
think of a map of the United States. Now imagine the Jefferson sitting in Washington, D.C., okay?"
"Okay."
"Her frigate escorts would be deployed as far apart as, oh, say, Pennsylvania and parts of North Carolina. But her F-14 Tomcats would be on patrol over Maine, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Michigan."
"My God…"
"Her S-3 Vikings would be sub-hunting in Ohio. If there was need for a bombing run, her A-6 Intruders could hit Chicago."
"Good Lord! I had no idea you guys covered so much territory," Baughman said. He sounded impressed.
"Put that same battle group in the Med," Tombstone continued. "With the Jeff off Greece, our planes could cover places as far apart as northern Italy and Syria, Odessa on the Black Sea and the deserts of Libya." He paused, suddenly self-conscious, then smiled and gestured at the Vicksburg. "You see, as far as we're concerned, it's us who protects them!"
She laughed, a warm sound, and she reached out and touched his arm. "I must say, Commander, that I admire your love for your ship. Boat," she corrected herself. "It certainly shows when you talk about her!"
He smiled in reply. "If you think that's bad, wait until you get me talking about flying. That's my real love."
Suddenly she turned serious. "Yes, I imagine it would be." She looked at Tombstone for a moment, then, abruptly, turned away. "Okay, boys. You got what we need?"
"That should do it," Griffith said, patting his camera. "We've got five ― ten good minutes' worth."
"We could get you back on board in the next day or two while we're conducting flight ops," Tombstone offered. "You could get some great shots of catapult launches… or recovery operations aft. It's a lot more exciting than miles and miles of gray steel passageways!"
"We may take you up on that," Pamela said. "For now, though, I think we should set up a time to meet you in Bangkok. I'll want to get some of what you said today on tape. You can be quite persuasive when you want to be, Commander."
"I guess that's why they made me tour guide," he replied. "To keep your show from getting too one-sided!"
She smiled. "We'll see. I'll take up your schedule with your admiral.
By the way, Admiral Magruder is your uncle, isn't he?"
That again. "Yes, ma'am, he is."
She laughed. "Well, that must be convenient!"
"I don't know what you mean." He couldn't tell from Pamela's bantering tone whether she was serious or not. Back at Yokuska, after the fight at Wonsan, the press had had a field day with the fact that he was the nephew of the battle group commander. Tombstone kept his face impassive and turned away. "This way, if you please."
As he led the civilians across the flight deck, Tombstone couldn't help connecting Pamela's seemingly offhand comment with their quiet, unstated hostility to the very idea of the Jefferson. To them, the carrier represented billions of misspent dollars, and he could tell they were looking for ways to attack her.
And now it felt as though they were attacking him.