"They've already attacked us," a junior staffer pointed out.
"They're afraid we're going to retaliate."
"More likely, they plan to blackmail the Blues," Morrisey suggested.
"Would they fire on their own cities?" somebody asked.
"They might," Tarrant conceded. He sighed. "In any case, this one's already been bucked up the chain.
It's way too hot for us to handle at this level." He paused, looking at the others. "But while we're waiting for Washington to make up their minds, I'm going to send off a status report, and I'm going to include a strong recommendation that they give Galveston the order to sink that PLARB. Just in case the target is New York."
The meeting broke up shortly after that, with no firm planning beyond carrying out a modified version of the original orders.
The carrier battle force would take up position at a point sixty miles north of the Norway-Russian border, called Bear Station, and wait. The planning staff would meet again when word one way or the other came through from Washington.
"By the way, Stoney," Tarrant said, as the others were already leaving the room. "After I make my report, I expect to be deluged with questions from the Pentagon about the Great Experiment. The Washington press corps is going to be all over their ass and ours."
"The women."
"That's right. Were any lost this morning?"
Tombstone nodded slowly. "Yes, sir. One. An F-14 RIO in VF-97. We pulled the pilot out of the drink a couple of hours ago. He's going to be all right, but he doesn't think she ejected."
"Ejection seat failure?"
"Maybe. Or she just wasn't found. We still have SAR helos out, looking for all our MIAs, of course, but in water this cold, even if she did make it down in one piece…"
"I understand. What was her name?"
"Lieutenant j.g. Elizabeth Harper."
"Okay. I'll pass that on. Thanks."
"Lieutenant Lowe told me that she performed extremely well. He asked me about recommending her for the Navy Cross."
"Hmm. We'll have to see about that. Okay, CAG. Thank you."
Aboard the helo, on his way back to the Jefferson, Tombstone found time to think of Harper ― and the five other naval officers off the Jefferson who'd not been recovered. He'd not known any of them well ― all had been relative newcomers to CVW-20 ― but they would be missed.
The mourning would come later, however, once they got through this.
If they got through it. Right now, it was not at all certain that they would.
CHAPTER 15
Jefferson's quarterdeck was on her starboard side forward, between the number-one and number-two elevators, a bulge extending out from the ship's hull beneath the flight deck and connecting inboard with the hangar deck.
When Jefferson was in port, this was the carrier's "front door," with a gangway extended to the dock. VIPs and officers entered the ship here, and the space was used for some ceremonial occasions such as piping flag officers or captains aboard.
Now, the day after the Battle of North Cape, Jefferson's quarterdeck was being used for a very specific ceremony, one with its roots in the age of sail, when offenders were called to give an account of themselves before the captain at the foot of the ship's mizzenmast.
Even today, long after masts had given way to screws, it was called captain's mast.
"I am getting damned sick and tired," Captain Brandt said evenly, "of the problems generated by the raging hormones aboard this ship." He looked up at the four men facing him from across the podium before him. Front and center was a young second class, a kid with thick-rimmed glasses and buck teeth that gave him the look of a skinny, frightened rabbit. "How old are you, son?"
"Twenty-one, sir," the kid replied, standing stiffly at attention and managing to look as awkward in his dress blues as a boot at the start of recruit training. He was a photographer's mate from the carrier's OP Department, a PH2 named Tom Margolis, and he looked scared.
"Old enough to know better, in other words." Brandt glanced at the men flanking Margolis. Master Chief Charles Michener, to his left, was a powerfully built tower of ugly black muscle who had been the Jefferson's Master at Arms for the past six months.
His badge of office, like a police officer's badge, gleamed in the overhead lights against his dress blues. Master Chief Mike Weston, on the kid's right, was just as big, just as powerfully built. Where Michener was the closest thing the supercarrier's city-in-miniature had to a chief of police, Weston was that indispensable go-between who ran interference between the enlisted men and the officers, the COB or Chief of the Boat.
Standing off to the right was a chief warrant officer, CWO2 Kimball Dupuy. As head of Jefferson's OP Division, or photographic services, he was Margolis's boss. Brandt had also asked Tombstone Magruder to attend, because the charges against Margolis involved people in the air wing. Tombstone was standing behind the captain, at parade rest.
"Photographer's Mate Second Class Margolis," Brandt continued, "the charges against you are serious enough that they could warrant summary court-martial. I am of a mind to deal with this as a mast offense. However, it is your right to request a summary court, if you prefer, where you can either request legal representation, or have legal representation appointed for you by the court. What is your preference?"
"Uh, no, sir," Margolis said. His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed.
"I mean, I'll go with the mast. Sir."
"Very well," Brandt said. "That's a wise decision on your part. A court-martial could award far heavier punishment than I, under the articles of the UCMJ, am allowed to give you." He paused, giving his words time to sink in. "Son, you've made a very, very bad mistake here."
Brandt turned his attention to the top of his podium. There was a slender, silver tube there, as thick as a pencil and perhaps eighteen inches long, with a complex assembly attached to one end. Next to that was a manila folder. Pulling the folder to him, he opened it up. He'd already seen the photographs earlier, but he leafed through them again now, slowly, and he could feel the kid trembling as he turned them over one by one.
The top two were contact prints, 8"x10" sheets on which strips of pictures had been pulled straight off the negatives, without enlargement, and the figures there were so tiny a magnifier would be necessary to make out the faces. Twenty-eight more photos, though, were enlargements of some of the contacts, crisp and beautifully detailed black-and-white photographs. All appeared to have been shot from the same position, inside the junior flight officers' shower head and from a high anole, probably from up close to the ceiling.
Each picture showed one or more women, all of them flight officers, all of them revealed nude or only partly dressed. One photo showed someone at the far end of the locker area ― he thought it might be Lieutenant Damiano ― bending over, her buttocks toward the camera as she picked her panties up off the deck. Another, at much closer range, revealed a dripping Lieutenant Commander Conway with one foot up on a bench as she toweled off her crotch, and another apparently taken moments later showed Conway pulling her panties up past her knees.
There was one spectacular full frontal shot of Lieutenant Flynn as she walked toward the showers and the camera, carrying a washcloth and a bar of soap and wearing nothing but her sandals.
"Okay, Chief," he told the MAA. "You want to tell me about this?"
"Yes, sir. Last night, one of my men, Boatswain's Mate First Class Motely, was making his rounds in the enlisted berthing compartments when he noticed two men, PH2 Margolis and one other, looking at something and acting in what he considered to be a suspicious manner. As he approached, the second sailor, who could not be identified, hurried away, while Margolis attempted to hide something under his blanket at the foot of his rack.