Andrew nodded and started up the stairs.
His father stood at the foot watching him go up. “Andrew, you should stop in and see your sisters. Let them comfort you before you begin your long journey tomorrow.”
TWO
“How are you feeling?” Agazzi asked.
Jacobs pushed off lightly from the safety railing of Sea Base. Alistair Agazzi, Senior Chief Sonar Technician, walked up beside him. “You know, Alistair, I hate to tell you this, but your red hair is migrating toward gray — hell, it isn’t migrating, it’s at a full gallop.”
“What’s this, you still feeling sorry for yourself? Deflecting my question?” Agazzi jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I was down in medical. They said you won’t do a damn thing they tell you since you returned from the Boxer.”
Jacobs pulled a cigar from a small waist pack threaded onto his khaki web belt. He winced from the effort.
“You’re not fully recovered from your wounds, you know,” said Agazzi.
“I’m not?” Jacobs replied sarcastically. “I mean, it’s only been a couple of months.” He bit off the end of the cigar. “Go figure.”
“You lose your clip?” Agazzi laughed.
Jacobs reached out and placed his hand on the safety line. “Yes,” he said softly. “It bugs the shit out of me having this sling around my neck all day and not being able to do what I need to do. I got my boatswain mates offering me seats when I come up. Now, where in the hell does a boatswain mate sit when he’s doing his job?”
Agazzi shrugged.
“He sits on the deck on his ass is where he sits. There ain’t any chairs in a boatswain mate’s work space.”
Agazzi chuckled. “Seems to me they may be seeing through your master chief facade and recognizing what a great and wonderful guy you are.”
“What you trying to do? Upset me? It’s been a beautiful day so far, so don’t come up here and try to ruin my lunch.” “Speaking of lunch, you going down to the goat locker?” Jacobs took a deep pull off his cigar. “After my cigar maybe. Do you know how long it is going to take my First Division of boatswain mates to clean up this mess on the deck and get it back to Navy standards?”
Agazzi grinned as Jacobs ranted about the damage the burnt aircraft had done to the Sea Base deck. Keeping a ship at sea pristine was impossible. Salt air, wind, and waves worked together to grow rust on top of the Navy gray. Agazzi stood quietly beside the injured man, noting that while Jacobs had complained about the sling around his neck, his friend seldom used it. It hung there like some giant French honneur de guerre.
How long had they served together? Agazzi asked himself against the backdrop of Jacobs’s monologue. It seemed to him they had known each other for at least twenty of his twenty-two years in the Navy.
They had steamed together and deployed together so many times in his career, he had lost count. Jacobs was always a pay grade ahead of him in the oldest rating in the United States Navy — boatswain mate.
Boatswain mates lived with the reputation of being more Navy than the Navy, tracing a tradition of keeping warships shipshape, fine-looking, and seaworthy. They fought the salt air, wind, and waves to remove the rust the elements left behind. Over the years as ratings came and went, the boatswain mate rating survived, even during the years of transformation when ambition and political favors turned the Navy inward upon itself.
Jacobs turned with one hand on the safety line, looking aft out to sea. Agazzi did likewise. His friend was still experiencing a lot of pain, but Jacobs hated sympathy almost as much as he hated a speck of rust on his deck.
“I understand the Skipper wants to hold a ceremony for your Bronze Star award,” Agazzi said, interrupting Jacobs.
Jacobs stopped and smiled at him. “Did you glaze over again while I was talking?”
“You were getting too technical for me.”
“How do you get too technical for a sonar technician, Alistair? What you mean to say is that I was getting too nautical for you.”
“As I said, I understand the Skipper intends to hold a ceremony for your Bronze Star.”
“So the XO told me.”
“I would think you’d be more enthused about it.”
Jacobs shook his head. “Alistair, there I was—alone— against the entire North Korean Army and armed only with a measly fire hose.” He waved his cigar at his friend, his eyes twinkling above the smile. “A man can get hurt doing that shit.” Jacobs pointed toward the forward portion of Sea Base. “I don’t need no stinking ceremony. What I need is that fire-blazed stain off my deck.”
Agazzi knew Jacobs would never admit anything worried him. Jacobs had been wounded fighting North Korean soldiers who had staged a surprise landing on board Sea Base in an attempt to replicate their capture of the USS Pueblo. Wielding a fire hose at the time, the master chief had used the water pressure of the hose to keep the North Koreans from assembling until bullets pierced the hose, draining the pressure.
“You know something, Alistair? You never think about your mortality until something such as this slams it against you.” Jacobs turned, looked at Agazzi, started to say something, but instead just shook his head. “Wish I was on a real warship instead of this Office of Naval Research floating experiment.” Agazzi nodded. “Guess so. You don’t have transport aircraft landing on warships.”
“And,” Jacobs said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward the forward portion of Sea Base, “you don’t have a big black starlike stain ruining the starlike quality of your deck.”
“Sea Base did pretty good in the Sea of Japan.”
“Sea Base is a disaster waiting to happen,” Jacobs harrumphed. The master chief smiled. “It’s a miracle we aren’t resting on the bottom of the dark Pacific with our story being told on the History Channel under Great Military Disasters or something like that.”
Sea Base was a man-made island of more than eighty acres of a special alloy deck held aloft by eight of the largest, but oldest, Fast Sealift Ships in the Fleet. Ships that two years ago were headed for the mothball fleet, but thanks to this ONR experiment, had gained new life.
Banks of computers and servers filled the cargo hold of the USNS Pollux. Connected to the engineering rooms and bridges of the eight ships, they worked constantly to control the coordinated positioning of the ships.
Each Fast Sealift Ship was over 946 feet long, only a few feet shorter than an aircraft carrier. At their beam, they were 105 feet across. The eight ships were arranged with two sets of three holding up the main body of Sea Base, with the remaining two forward and aft of the six. These two ships held up the leading and trailing edges of the runway that ran down the middle of Sea Base. Both ends of the runway jutted out from the main Sea Base deck by one thousand feet.
Along with running the engineering and bridge controls, the bank of computers and servers moved huge sea anchors beneath the ships, continually adjusting their depth with technological direction to further hold the ships in place. Connecting each ship to the others were mobile passageways with rubber gaskets that stretched and contracted to the minute changes of position. No one enjoyed walking the passageways. They swayed like rope bridges over deep canyons. Many preferred to climb the four stories from the main deck of the Fast Sealift Ships to the Sea Base canopy and walk across the gray metal island in the open air to the next ship.