Admiral Vaughn seemed competent enough, but Fitzgerald had a suspicion that it was his political connections more than his seamanship that had brought him to the Jefferson. At the very thought of politics, Fitzgerald’s stomach knotted. It was impossible to look at Vaughn and not remember the man he’d replaced.
Admiral Thomas J. Magruder had been the carrier group’s commanding officer throughout the roughest deployment Fitzgerald could remember … and his memory included three tours off the coast of Vietnam. Nothing he’d seen then or since matched what the Jefferson had experienced in this one single tour.
In eight months, CBG-14 had twice seen combat. In September Jefferson had been deployed in support of a combined Navy-Marine operation to rescue the crew of the Chimera, a Navy intelligence ship captured on the high seas by the North Koreans. Three months later, Jefferson’s battle group had been deployed to the Gulf of Thailand to support the Bangkok government during a coup attempt. Immediately after the Thailand crisis Admiral Magruder had been hurriedly summoned to Washington, and Vaughn had come aboard to replace him.
There was a hint of scandal in that summons, and the threat of a Senate inquest. The operation in Thailand had not violated the War Powers Resolution — U.S. participation had been limited to two Marine actions ashore, air support, and two alpha strikes off the Jefferson — but it had a number of Congressmen operating in full Administration-bashing mode.
Since it had come hard on the heels of Jefferson’s intervention in North Korea, some of the President’s sharpest critics were accusing him of being trigger-happy, an accusation that had trickled down to the man in charge on the scene as well. Admiral Magruder had enjoyed a distinguished and rewarding career, but if Washington needed a scapegoat he would be elected. His advice to the White House had led directly to the Presidential order to send in the Marines and the air strikes.
Admiral Vaughn had been tapped in his Pentagon office to fly to the Far East before the last of the rebels had been rounded up, arriving only a few days after the formal awards ceremony in Bangkok. He remembered Magruder’s face during the full-dress muster on Jefferson’s flight deck that muggy afternoon while the battle group was still anchored in Sattahip Bay. The man had looked drawn, worn, possibly a little subdued as his replacement stepped off the Sea Knight helo in his crisp and spotless dress whites. Only then had Fitzgerald realized how old Admiral Magruder looked, old and … beaten.
Fitzgerald had known then that Magruder was being sacrificed in the name of Washington politics.
Something was happening on Cat One. The Safety Officer was making sharp motions with his hands, and the orange glow of the Hornet’s afterburners was fading. The captain turned in his seat to watch one of the big PLAT monitors suspended from the overhead for a better view. Someone down there had scrubbed the launch.
“Four-oh-seven is down,” a voice called from the monitor speaker.
“Pressure failure to Cat One.”
“Break him down and get him the hell out of there,” the Air Boss said.
“Bridge, we have a downcheck on Cat One.”
Fitzgerald had already picked up the handset of the direct-access telephone known universally as the batphone and punched in Pri-Fly’s number. “Pri-Fly, Bridge. We see it. What happened?”
“Damfino,” the Air Boss replied. “I’ll let you know as soon as I know myself.”
Fitzgerald replaced the handset and studied the organized confusion engulfing the Hornet on Cat One. Almost certainly, the problem was human error … and directly attributable to the strain the men had been under for months. Damn, but that had been close! If the steam failure had occurred as the Hornet was being shot off the deck, the F/A-18 would not have attained airspeed and would have gone off over the bow. Unless the aviator had been both very quick and very lucky and had managed to eject safely, Jefferson would have run him down in the water.
We’d have lost another aviator, Fitzgerald thought. With so many lost already.
The Captain sensed rather than heard a change in the atmosphere around him. Several of the ship’s officers had been engaged in low conversation on the starboard wing of the bridge, but they were silent now, and the enlisted men at wheel and engine-room telegraph were standing a little straighter, a little more studiously correct.
Fitzgerald turned further and saw Captain Henry Bersticer stepping across the knee-knocker onto the bridge deck.
Bersticer was Admiral Vaughn’s chief of staff, a tall, swarthy man with a meticulously groomed black goatee that gave him a somewhat saturnine aspect. He walked over to where Fitzgerald was sitting. “Admiral’s compliments, Captain, and would you join him, please, in CVIC?”
He spelled out the letters, which stood for Carrier (CV) Intelligence Center, instead of pronouncing them “civic” in the time-honored fashion.
Bersticer was, Fitzgerald thought, new to carriers and didn’t yet have the hang of bird-farm language. He wondered if his CO had things down any better.
“Very well,” Fitzgerald said. He slid off the stool. “On my way.”
Admiral Vaughn was waiting alone in CVIC, a pale, heavyset man in his late fifties, with hair that might once have been red but was mostly silver now. Fitzgerald looked around as he walked toward the admiral.
The room, used as a TV studio for the Chief of the Boat’s morning broadcasts over one of Jefferson’s on-board TV stations, had a cluttered feel, and many of the lights and electrical cables had not been struck.
Fitzgerald winced inwardly when he saw it. Vaughn had an oft-stated love for order and the proverbial taut ship.
“Jim,” Vaughn said as Fitzgerald approached him. Bersticer shut the door, leaving them alone. The admiral reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a folded-up computer message flimsy. “This just came up from CIC. Have a look.”
Fitzgerald’s eyes held Vaughn’s as he took the flimsy and unfolded it.
It was a decoded flash priority from the skipper of the U.S.S. Biddle, now steaming some one hundred fifty miles northwest of the carrier.
Quickly, Fitzgerald read the details of the sub contact, now only minutes old. He looked up at the admiral and handed the message back.
“Farrel says it sounds like a Foxtrot,” he said. “Soviet or Indian?”
“God knows,” Vaughn said. “No matter which, I don’t want that damned thing closer than a hundred miles from this carrier, understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied slowly. “If we can’t nail down that sub’s position, though, we’ll have to alter course pretty far west to maintain separation. It’ll mean quite a detour, and a delay in reaching Turban Station.”
“I know that. Frankly, I hope we can ID that sub as a Russkie. If it’s Hindi … God, we don’t know what the Indians are going to do.”
Fitzgerald grinned. “I hardly think they’ll mistake us for the Pakistani navy, sir.” Jane’s Fighting Ships gave the strength of Pakistan’s navy as seventeen ships, not counting patrol craft. The largest was Babur, a former British destroyer of 5440 tons. He’d looked it up earlier that morning.
“Damn it, Captain, this is no joke!” Vaughn scowled, rubbing at his short and bristly mustache with a forefinger. “You saw the latest set of dispatches from Washington. The Indians don’t want us out here. This whole situation could blow up in our faces at any moment.”
“I realize that, sir.” The word from Washington that morning was that a formal protest had been delivered to the White House by the Indian Embassy in Washington, objecting to U.S. warships in their waters during time of war. Accidental attacks were a possibility, the communique had pointed out, especially in the confusion of jamming and electronic countermeasures in the region once fighting started.
“Listen, Jim,” Vaughn said. “I called You off the bridge because I wanted to talk with you about this command. I’ve been following the weekly reports. Performance is way down, you know. And morale.”