He was bone tired and filthy. So were his men, who sat or lay on the floor all over the compartment. They had been down in the hangar bays fighting the fires. That place was a gutted shell now. The bosun and his men had helped the damage-control teams there stack the bodies like cordwood on the elevator when the fires were out. They had helped lay out Ray Reynolds. And they had laid out the waist cat officer and two of the catapult chiefs. They had died when an airplane with a little fuel left in its tank had exploded. The bosun wiped the grime off his face with his shirttail.
“Don’t interfere with the intruders,” the CAG had said. So the fucking terrorists had the U.S. Navy by the gonads and there was nothing anybody could do. Ha! No doubt that announcement had been made to please the terrorists, because they had heard it too. This Grafton, another over-the-hill, worn-out jet-jock who’s pulled too many Gs. A far cry from Laird James. Now there was a real sailor, an asshole to work for and a perfectionist hairsplitter, but the bosun had spent twenty-seven years working for driven men who demanded perfection and were satisfied with nothing less. He was used to them. This Grafton! He’ll probably get court-martialed after tonight, the bosun told himself bitterly.
When he had his pipe drawing well, he leaned back in his chair and put his feet on his desk and regarded the no-smoking sign posted on the wall. Yep, Grafton was just like Ray Reynolds. Stick the fucking sign on the fucking bulkhead, Bosun, and don’t get caught smoking by the sheriffs boys or by the XO on one of his little jaunts around the boat. Don’t get caught breaking any of the chickenshit little rules. Just fight the fires and stack the bodies, Bosun.
Before those terrorists got to the bridge, Captain James made an announcement. Do your duty, he said. That fit the bosun’s pistol. He had made warrant officer four, the senior warrant rank, by doing the right thing regardless of what the book said. They couldn’t hurt him with a fitness report now. No, sir. It would take a court-martial to rip the gold and blue off his sleeves. And the navy doesn’t court-martial guys who do the right thing. It just shits all over assholes like Captain Grafton who earn their rank pushing paper, then fold up when the chips are down.
“Is there fuel in the truck?” he asked his first-class.
“Of course.”
“When did you start it last?”
“This morning. No, yesterday, daily maintenance inspection. Started on the first crank.”
The bosun puffed on his pipe and stared at the television monitor over the door. The helicopters just sat there. Occasionally one of the sentries moved a little.
The monitor swayed slightly in its mount. Grafton really has this tub cranked up, the bosun thought. Wonder if he knows what the hell he’s doing?
“Where in the fuck are those crazy assholes going at thirty-three knots?” The skipper of the cruiser Gettysburg roared this question at his navigator, operations officer, and communications officer collectively. All three stood beside him on the bridge and together they regarded the little arrangement of lights several miles ahead in the murk that was the United States. “Thirty-three knots, limited visibility, right through the Italian coastal shipping lanes, right through all these little fucking fishing boats and yachts full of rich queers — those crazy assholes must be out of their fucking minds!”
He turned and faced the communications officer. “Why in hell can’t you talk to her?”
“They’re not answering on any circuit, Captain. We don’t think they’re transmitting on any frequency. None of their radars are radiating. They’re observing EMCON.” EMCON meant “emissions control.”
The captain picked up the Navy Red telephone and pushed the transmit button futilely. He wiped his forehead and slowly put the instrument back into its cradle.
“They’re certainly in a hurry to go somewhere,” the ops officer observed calmly. He had always found it best to stay calm when the skipper blew off steam.
“Okay,” the captain said, his voice back to normal. “Get on the horn to Sixth Fleet. Tell him what’s going on. See if he knows something we don’t. Find out what he wants us to do. And get off a flash OPREP to Washington.” An OPREP was an “operational report,” used to advise naval headquarters of emergencies.
“We’re doing all the turns we can, sir,” the OOD piped up. “We’re not going to catch them if they keep this speed up.”
“Thank you, Mr. Epley,” the Old Man said sourly. He gestured at the communications officer. “Okay. Call Sixth Fleet and send the OPREP. Ops, you get down to Combat and sort out the surface picture. The United States isn’t talking to us, she’s not talking to anybody. She may run down one of these civilians. Try to call anyone in her way on the civilian emergency nets and tell them to get the hell out of the way. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll pick up survivors.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Willie,” he said to the navigator. “I want to know where we are every damn minute and where we’re heading. I don’t want to follow those fools smack onto a reef or island at thirty-three knots. Let me see a chart with a projection of this course. They may be running for a launch position.” That was the hypothesis that made the most sense, really. The carrier was silently racing to get into position to launch a strike. But against whom?
It’s like a nightmare, the captain told himself as he looked at the backs of his departing officers. One day they had a war and nobody told you. Is this the big one? Naw, they would have told us, for Chrissake! Maybe Laird James and Earl Parker have gone off their nut. Maybe there’s been a mutiny.
Infuriated and thoroughly confused, the captain sat in his chair and tried to get his blood pressure under control as his ship labored into the swells. White water spewed back from the bow, then the bow rose clear of the sea and crashed majestically into the next swell in another thunderous cloud of spray. He pushed his squawk-box button for the chief engineer and warned him to be ready to cut power to the shafts instantly if the screws came out of the water.
He had gotten his ship underway in record time, getting the anchor up in seventeen minutes from the time the capstan had began to turn. Due to the sonar dome under the bow, he couldn’t move the ship until the anchor cleared the water. The United States had been seven miles ahead, but he had managed to close the distance because she had stayed at seventeen knots for almost twenty minutes. Then she accelerated to thirty-three. Now, with the larger swells here in the open sea, he was hard-pressed just to match her speed. Sooner or later he would close on her; if she turned port or starboard he would turn inside her and close, providing he didn’t have to back off some turns to keep the screws in the water and could stay with her.
Something was seriously wrong aboard United States. He tried to imagine a combination of circumstances in peacetime that would justify a capital ship weighing anchor unannounced in the dead of night and steaming off alone, without her escorts, at high speed through crowded shipping lanes with radar and radios silent. When, or if, he caught up with her, it wouldn’t hurt to be ready for anything. “Lieutenant Epley, sound general quarters.”
Meanwhile, aboard United States, Jake Grafton was huddled in engineering with the ship’s department heads and every squadron skipper who was aboard, plus about half the executive officers. His operations officer and the flag ops boss were also present. Jake had told Qazi when he called the second time that restoring power to the elevators would require half an hour, and Qazi had given him half that time. Still, twenty minutes had passed and the new circuit had not been energized. All that remained was the throwing of a switch by the load dispatcher in Central Control. Jake had not yet told him to throw the switch.