“Maybe.” He wondered whether to tell Coyote that he was planning on resigning. It wasn’t the sort of thing you just blurted out. There was an unspoken attitude among Navy aviators. The guys who turned in their wings or resigned were failures, fallen gods no longer possessing the edge, the all-important right stuff.
Tombstone valued Coyote’s friendship and didn’t want to risk it.
Another thought occurred to him. “Listen, Coyote. I haven’t had a chance to ask. How’s Julie?”
“Fine, fine. She told me to send her love.”
Tombstone and Coyote both had dated a good-looking insurance claims rep named Julie Wilson years before, when they’d first been stationed at Coronado. The rivalry had been friendly. In the end, Tombstone had been best man at their wedding.
“So tell me,” Tombstone said uncertainly. “What does Julie think of your coming back out here? I mean, you came pretty close to buying the farm last time around. How’d she take it?”
Coyote studied his coffee mug for a moment. “Hell, I’d be lying if I said she wasn’t worried. But she knows that Navy aviation is what I do.
She knows I miss her like nobody’s business when I’m gone, but that flying is the next best thing to sex there is.” He hesitated. “You want to tell me what’s behind that, Stoney?”
“Oh, nothing important.” He knew the lie was transparent. “Just trying to figure where my own career is going, that’s all. I met a girl.”
“Yeah?”
“TV news-type person. Met her in Bangkok during all the excitement there. I … I’m in love with her.”
“But there’re the old questions about whether love and salt water mix, hey?”
“Something like that.” Tombstone grinned suddenly. “You know the old saying. “If the Navy wanted you to have a wife, they’d have issued you one with your seabag.’” He looked at his watch. “Shit. I gotta go.”
“Hey, wait.”
But Tombstone didn’t want to talk about it, not now. He stood, picking up the tray with his unfinished supper. “Catch you later, Coyote.”
“Yeah. Later.”
Why was he telling Coyote his problems? He shook his head as he returned the tray to the galley window and shoved it through. The Coyote had it made, excited about his career, about flying … and a smart and pretty woman waiting for him back in the World.
He sure as hell wouldn’t understand. Tombstone knew he was going to have to face his problems with Pamela alone.
CHAPTER 12
“Now hear this,” the 1-MC speaker on the bulkhead intoned. “Now hear this. Commence fuel transfer operations. The smoking lamp is out throughout the ship.”
Captain Fitzgerald scarcely heard the announcement. His attention was fixed on the activity to starboard. Jefferson rode the heavy seas at reduced speed, her massive bows rising and plunging with each wave.
Sliding along in her shadow one hundred feet to starboard, dwarfed by the supercarrier’s bulk, the U.S.S. Amarillo paced her larger consort, matching her plunge for plunge.
Jefferson’s three starboard flight deck elevators had been lowered to the hangar deck level, giving men of the deck division places to stand as fuel hoses from the AOE were snaked across along span wires stretched from Amarillo’s topping lifts to pelican hooks secured to Jefferson’s side. Red flags, warning of the fire hazard, snapped in the breeze on both ships as deckhands secured the hoses. Suspended from the span wires by sliding pulleys called trolleys, the hoses were draped in a series of deep loops between the vessels, allowing plenty of give and slack as the ships went their separate up-and-down ways.
The carrier’s two Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactors could keep Jefferson steaming for thirteen years without refueling, but she still carried over two million gallons of JP-5 in her aviation fuel compartments.
During typical peacetime operations, fifty or sixty planes were flown off a carrier twice daily, each mission consuming two to three thousand gallons of fuel, and at-sea replenishment was scheduled about every two weeks. During the Vietnam War when fuel expenditures were much higher, reprovisioning at sea had taken place as often as once every three or four days.
Jefferson’s last UNREP — Underway Replenishment — had been carried out ten days earlier, in the waters north of Diego Garcia. Captain Fitzgerald looked down on the Amarillo from his vantage point on the supercarrier’s bridge and wondered how soon he could expect the next resupply. UNREP ships were limited, and they had a long way to steam to reach CBG-14 in the isolated vastness of the Arabian Sea.
The Amarillo’s 194,000 barrels of fuel translated as over seven and a half million gallons, most of it JP-5 destined for Jefferson’s air wing.
Normally, that was enough for six weeks of air operations — ASW patrols and CAPS, as well as daily proficiency flights as the aviators logged in their hours aloft.
The AOR Peoria, a second UNREP vessel, carried petroleum for the rest of the battle group, 160,000 barrels of it, enough for over a month of cruising for the CBG’s non-nuclear vessels.
But if the tense political situation turned into outright war, fuel use would go up dramatically as the carrier’s aircraft tripled or quadrupled consumption, and the non-nuclear vessels were forced to travel farther and faster each day. A worst-case scenario could see the Peoria and the Amarillo both emptied by the battle group’s maneuvers within the next week.
And if either reprovisioning ship was sunk or badly damaged during that time, CBG-14 could be crippled within a matter of days.
He turned and walked the width of the bridge back to his leather swivel chair, stenciled “CO” and set near the port wing where it overlooked the flight deck. To the west, the sun was setting in a glorious burst of golds and reds that spilled across the horizon. Despite the still-heavy seas, the dirty weather appeared to be breaking up. The meteorologists down in the OA division had scrutinized their satellite photos and promised clear weather for the next forty-eight hours.
There’d been no further threats from the Indians since the previous evening’s attack. That didn’t mean the danger was over, but the immediacy of the crisis seemed to have eased somewhat. An hour earlier, CINCPAC had reported over Jefferson’s satellite com-link that the diplomatic exchanges were continuing in Washington. Perhaps they were going to find a negotiated way out of this confrontation.
In any case, it was out of his hands. He was on station and on full alert. There was nothing else to be done until someone else pushed the button.
To the west, Fitzgerald could make out the familiar, boxy mass of the Vicksburg’s superstructure. Somewhere beyond the Aegis cruiser, well over the horizon, the Commonwealth task force was steaming on a northerly course parallel with CBG-14. Fitzgerald still wasn’t certain what he thought of the orders to join the two squadrons into a single, international task force. Even if he trusted the Russians — which he did not, as yet — there would still have been an endless list of details to be worked out before the two forces could act together. And Kontr-Admiral Dmitriev, Vaughn’s opposite number aboard the Kreml, had so far shown little enthusiasm for integrating the two fleets. SOVINDRON was steaming north in a tight-packed bundle, seemingly oblivious to the American ships out around them across a hundred miles of ocean. Nor did the Russians seem willing to make the exchanges of codes, call signs, and radio frequencies necessary for allowing U.S. and Russian ships and planes to work together.
The IFF codes alone were already causing considerable confusion in the fleet. Each aircraft in Jefferson’s air wing possessed a transponder that transmitted a coded signal when it was touched by radar beams from an American ship or plane. The system, called IFF for “Identification Friend or Foe,” caused American radar displays to show the flight number of each U.S. plane in the air. The Russians had the same system, but with different codes responding to different radar wavelengths. So far, Russian planes flying above the Kreml were tagged as unknowns when they were painted by U.S. radar … just the same as the Indian aircraft during the attack the night before. If the joint squadron was attacked now, before IFF codes and protocol could be exchanged, the battle would very quickly become an unmanageable free-for-all.