He'd gotten along well with the guy so far. In the late-night bull sessions in flight officers' quarters, Tombstone had never sounded as though he had something to prove, never rambled on about improbable sexual escapades during some past liberty, never worn the mask of the fearless and invulnerable warrior. For the past several months, Snowball had felt closer to Tombstone than to anyone else on board the Jefferson.
But now…
His ears caught the faint beat of rotors across the water. He strained his eyes and caught sight of one of Jefferson's helos patrolling off to port. Aft, he could see deck personnel and officers checking the arrestor cables and gathering in front of the Fresnel lens system. A recovery operation then. Somebody was coming in.
Tombstone was carrying a load, Snowball knew. Coyote's loss had been a bad blow to the commander. He'd watched Tombstone change in those long minutes of the flight back to Jefferson after that first, terror-laced dogfight two days earlier. But blow or not, change or not, it wasn't right that Tombstone should lash out at him like that.
Pucker-factor. It was an old flyer's term, referring to the fear that every aviator felt at one time or another… in combat, in a night trap on a rain-swept deck, in the swirl of smoke and flame and noise as the ejection seat kicked you clear of the cockpit. Belonging to the pilots' fraternity, Snowball knew, depended not on the absence of fear, but on the way a man controlled it.
He thought about the confrontation in Tombstone's office. If he quit now, every man in the wing would think he was a coward. Worse, they would feel sorry for him… or agree with one another that since he never belonged in the first place, it was obvious that he simply didn't have the right stuff.
What else could he do? Go to CAG and ask for reassignment? Who else besides Tombstone would he rather fly with?
His hands closed on the Vulture Row railing, squeezing with his building anger. He would not let this beat him! He would belong!
"Now hear this, now hear this," a voice grated over the 5-MC loudspeakers over the flight deck. "Stand by flight deck for recovery operations, COD. That is, stand by flight deck for recovery operations, COD.
Snowball looked aft. It took him several minutes to locate the inbound plane, a speck low above the horizon growing slowly into a recognizable aircraft.
The C-2A Greyhound was designed as a COD aircraft, the acronym standing for Carrier On-board Delivery. Its high wings and two turboprop engines, its odd-looking boom tail with four vertical stabilizers made it a close twin of the E-2 Hawkeye, though a thicker body gave it a heavy-built, stubby appearance, and it lacked the saucer-shaped radar housing above the fuselage. With a range of over fifteen hundred miles, Greyhounds were the principal means of delivering cargo, mail, and personnel to carriers at sea. This flight, Snowball knew, was an unscheduled one. He wondered what it was carrying.
The Greyhound swelled rapidly during the final seconds of its approach, flaps at full and nose high as it roared over the roundoff and dropped to the deck for a perfect trap on the number three wire. A good landing, Snowball thought with the detached interest of a professional. Landing one of those chunky turboprops on a carrier had always seemed more unlikely to him than landing a nimble Tomcat.
Curiously, he watched as the plane backed slightly to spit out the wire, then taxied cautiously past a row of Hornets parked shoulder to shoulder abaft of the island. The Greyhound made a final turn to face away from Snowball. Optical illusion made the spinning propellers seem to reverse themselves as they slowed to a stop.
With a whine, a rear hatch opened in the Greyhound's tail, and a ramp slowly lowered itself to the deck. Before the ramp touched steel, a line of men were filing out of the aircraft. Snowball counted fifteen of them. At first he thought they were Marines, for each wore camouflage-patterned trousers and shirts and had floppy-brimmed boonie hats on their heads. The Navy seabags each man held balanced across his shoulder made him think again. They could be Marines, but…
Snowball had seen men like that before, during his tour at Coronado: SEALS.
He found himself wondering if those men had ever been in combat. It was likely; SEALs had played an important part in the oil rig raids and recon missions off Kuwait. They might even have participated in anti-terrorist ops, the successful anti-terrorist ops that never made the evening news.
Snowball felt a sudden and unexpected lift at the thought, and a new determination. He'd been in combat only two days before, been in combat and come back to tell about it. Training and experience aside, what did those SEALs have that he didn't?
Maybe belonging had more to do with his attitude than theirs. He'd show them, show them all. He wouldn't quit. Snowball Newcombe was a flight officer!
CHAPTER 12
Coyote's situation had improved, but not by much. They'd taken him from the hole the afternoon before, questioned him one more time, then marched him across the compound to a long, narrow building guarded by flint-eyed soldiers armed with AKMs. Inside he'd found the surviving crewmen of the Chimera.
He wasn't sure why the North Koreans had herded him into the low, single-storied building with the others. Classes he'd attended during his training on how to survive as a prisoner of war suggested that POWs were nearly always segregated early on, the officers separated from the enlisted men. For some reason, their captors weren't following the usual routine, and Chimera's entire complement was present in the building which the inmates had already named the Wonsan Waldorf.
Of the American spy ship's original complement of 193, 170 were still alive ― 163 sailors, 7 officers. Coyote learned that 23 men had died, killed outright during the attack or succumbing to wounds during the three days since their capture; 61 were wounded, 18 seriously. Their captivity thus far had been little short of a nightmare, officers and men crammed together into what might have once been a storeroom or warehouse of some kind, with little food, no blankets, no sanitary facilities, and no medical treatment for the injured beyond the most rudimentary attempts at first aid.
Captain Gerald K. Gilmore was one of the wounded. HM/I Herb Bailey, a hospital corpsman, had sewn up the knee-to-thigh gash in his right leg and stopped the bleeding, but the captain was desperately weak from shock and loss of blood. Infection would kill him and a dozen others in days if they weren't given proper treatment soon.
"The big-bucks question is," one chief petty officer said in a low voice, "whether we'd be better off out there… or here."
Fifteen of them were gathered in a circle around the ragged mattress on the floor which served as Gilmore's bed. They were the officers and NCOs who had appointed themselves as the group's escape committee. As soon as he'd been able to prove he was American ― an intimate knowledge of Navy slang terms like "slider" and "pogie bait" had quickly established his credentials ― Coyote had been invited to join because his pilot training had included such useful tidbits as survival and E&E, escape and evasion.
Coyote glanced away from the circle and down the dimly lit length of the building. The rest of the men were gathered in small groups, talking, sleeping, tending the wounded, or just sitting. At intervals along both of the longer walls, several sailors were positioned as lookouts. They stood on overturned honey buckets, peering out the narrow windows set into the wall high up just under the building's eaves. Their warning that someone was approaching would turn the escape committee's whispered conversation into an animated discussion about girls and improbable sexual experiences. "Getting out won't be easy," Coyote said. "There are several hundred troops here, a battalion at least. The camp is surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire."