From the few meetings he’d had with the two men, he suspected not.
They were made of stronger stuff than their counterparts that he’d met, both fleet-seasoned aviators with a clear, sharp understanding of how a battle group worked, what it could and couldn’t do.
“I’ll be in Combat,” Captain Heather said abruptly. He strode off the bridge, hoping that the dim light in Combat would mask his growing uneasiness.
“A very effective report. Miss Drake,” Santana said. His uniform was streaked and spattered with mud and dirt, and there was a haggard look to his face that hadn’t been there an hour ago. “I hope they believed you.”
Pamela flung out one hand and gestured toward the area of devastation to her left. “Why the hell wouldn’t they? I sent them pictures, after all.” Her voice was cold and bitter.
This was the man who’d exposed her to grave danger, who had made her a pawn albeit a willing one in this entire political struggle. In all the conflicts she’d covered, she’d never been used like this against her own country. Not intentionally, at least. Her mind wandered back over the other conflicts, to theaters around the world where she’d watched nations struggle for domination over soil. There’d been allegations, sure. The military never liked the press intruding, and was continually speculating that their very presence and reports influenced the course of the battle. The criticism had become markedly more raucous after Desert Storm and Desert Shield and Grenada.
Especially Grenada, where a team of reporters had illuminated an incoming SEAL mission just as she had done earlier on the beach.
But the country had the right to know, didn’t it? And how would it get information if the media didn’t report it? Rely on the military officials?
She snorted. Not likely. The military’s main concern was funding and power. Not so different from their civilian counterparts, but with even more at stake, what with the security of the nation entrusted to them.
All of them? An image of Tombstone Magruder flashed through her mind.
She’d seen him agonize through tactical and operational decisions too often, felt the pain that tormented him over a mission gone wrong, and watched him suffering over the loss of life in his battle group.
Somehow, when she put a face to it all, her distrust of the military’s intentions seemed a little less solid.
“Now what?” she asked, suddenly tired of theoretical ethical speculations. She needed to focus her attention on what was next on leaving this blasted country, she hoped.
“With the missile launchers destroyed, that’s the end of it.”
A look of satisfaction backlit the weariness in the Cuban colonel’s face. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”
She pointed again at the devastation. “I think the United States solved the issue once and for all.” She was surprised to feel a sense of satisfaction at the statement. God, what had happened? Was she turning into a raving patriot just like Tombstone? No, her responsibility was to more than just one nation it was to the world, to report accurately and precisely just what was occurring around the globe.
“It would be, if that’s where the missiles were.” He shook his head slightly, all at once looking more relaxed. “But they weren’t.”
“What do you mean? I saw ” He interrupted her. “You saw a stack of shipping crates and some construction equipment wired together to look like something else. In other words, you saw what we wanted you to see. And what you wanted to see, if you will admit it. Isn’t that so?”
Her mind reeled, trying to take it all in. The dangerous journey across the sea, the mistreatment in confinement, capped off by the very real missile attack she’d just witnessed for what? As she looked up at him, his meaning became clear, sank into her mind with a dreadful clarity.
“I was part of the deception,” she whispered. “You used me.
He sighed. “No more than you used us. Miss Drake. No more than you used us.”
The ship finally finished the last section of its quartered search pattern. The special crew was starting to get tired, having started the evolution more than seven hours ago, frantically hunting for survivors of the collision between Jefferson and the small boat, their enthusiasm and hopes dimming over the ensuing hours. The crowds of off-duty sailors who had lined the weather decks, adding their eyes to the designated search teams’, had started to drift away four hours into the search as the cruiser methodically quartered the ocean farther and farther away from the original collision. By now, they all knew, there was virtually no chance of finding any survivors.
“That’s it. Captain. We’re on the last leg of the pattern.”
The officer glanced down at the hastily scribbled sequence of course and speed used to bring the cruiser within visual range of any people in the water. “I wish we could have found one. At least one.”
“Many times you don’t.” Captain Heather paused, deciding whether to launch into a discussion of some of the other rescue operations he’d been involved in, to place the whole event in perspective for his crew.
No, he decided, better not to. They would learn in their own time and way the inevitability of death, how often the water that made up 90 percent of the earth’s surface won in the battle between flesh and sea.
“Get us headed back toward the carrier. We’ll take up our former station on her starboard quarter.”
As the call went out to relieve the special team and set the normal underway watch. Captain Heather walked over to his brown leatherette chair on the starboard side of the bridge. Now that the sailors were being relieved wearied men and women with feet aching from almost eight hours of standing along the lifeline he felt he could at last sit down.
It was one of the peculiarities his crew worshipped about him his unwillingness to have them do anything he was not capable of doing himself.
He put one foot on the footrest and eased himself up into the chair, letting the hard-cushioned back support the small muscles in his back that were knotted and tense. He took a deep breath, watching the OOD guide the ship through the maneuvers to bring her back around toward the carrier, noting with one part of his mind that the young lieutenant was showing ever-increasing proficiency in his ship handling. Six months ago, there had been a certain tentativeness in his voice, a slowness in making critical decisions. During workups in the latest deployment, that had vanished, and what Captain Heather saw now was a more competent man, one surely and certainly on the track to commanding his own vessel someday.
Was he already seeing that? Did the young OOD look over at his captain now and wonder how it would feel to sit in his chair, feel the fear and eagerness that every captain felt in the pipeline? Heather hid a smile, remembering his own fantasies as a junior lieutenant officer of the deck, wondering how in the hell the Old Man managed to look like he knew what he was doing at every second, knew what was going on in parts of the ship he hadn’t visited in hours.
Those were other tricks of the trade that his OOD would pick up along the way, the captain showing him the ropes as he took more and more responsibility for the operation of the ship.
“All special teams secured and normal underway watch set,” the OOD reported. “Captain, I’ve extended the chow hours below to allow the outgoing crew to get a hot meal before they turn in. Most of them will be back on watch at midnight.”