Suddenly, the screen door burst open. Lieutenant Commander Bill Frank strode into the room, a look of concern on his face.
Frank was Lab Rat’s second in command of the intelligence detachment from the USS Jefferson. With the carrier in dry dock for repairs, she had little use for the highly specialized talents of her intelligence spooks. Admiral Everette “Batman” Wayne, never one to waste precious Navy manpower, had promptly formed the CVIC department into an independent detachment and sent them packing. The Navy had opined that with the Middle East situation still in flux — and when exactly wasn’t it? Lab Rat had wondered — that Lab Rat and his sailors would be most effective working in direct support of USACOM, the type commander with cognizance over the Atlantic theater of operations. Lab Rat and sixty-two others were currently making a nuisance of themselves at the Joint Intelligence Center, or JIC, at Naval Station Norfolk.
Frank plopped himself down in the chair opposite Lab Rat without speaking. The native of Alabama was never one to interrupt a man when he was eating, but Lab Rat could already see that bad news was coming. If he waited long enough, Frank would tell him, feeding him short phrases in a brief summary delivered in that slow drawl of his.
Lab Rat sighed and put down his spoon. “What now? Can’t I even enjoy my chowder in peace?”
“Back to the office, sir,” Frank said, no trace of apology in his voice. Whatever he’d been doing when his duty officer beeper had gone off, Frank evidently thought it was a good deal more interesting than immersing himself in a bowl of chowder. Given Frank’s disheveled appearance and the slight smudge of black on his collar — eye makeup, perhaps? — Lab Rat thought that he could make an educated guess as to what Frank thought was more important than a bowl of chowder.
“But what for?” Lab Rat asked, knowing even as he spoke the words that anything that warranted a recall was far too classified to be discussed here. Frank just shook his head.
Lab Rat stared down at the bowl of creamy chowder, almost ready to cry. He waved Gloria over, and said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask for this to go.” It would be cold, or least chilly by the time he got to eat it. Although he could eat in his car — no, not safe, not unless he left his here and rode back to base with Frank.
The sheer unfairness of it all came crashing in on him. “And,” he said, with sudden ferocity, determined to wring some sort of concession out of life, “I want another quart. To go. In an insulated container. With extra crackers. LOTS of extra crackers.”
Gloria stepped back slightly, then smiled and nodded. “You sure are from California, aren’t you, sir?”
Admiral Everette “Batman” Wayne and retired Admiral Matthew “Tombstone” Magruder stood on the pier and surveyed the battered hull of the USS Jefferson. She was in dry dock, her keel resting on individually crafted cradles, the water drained out of the dock so her entire hull was exposed. In dry dock, the carrier looked more like an office building than ever before. She was massive, overshadowing every other structure around, an imposing figure. It seemed impossible that she was upright, supported only by the cradles, ripped from the sea to stand naked and exposed to the world.
“The old girl has seen better days,” Tombstone said quietly.
“Yes. But it’s not as bad as it looks, they say. Another week, and she’ll be back together.”
To an aviator, an aircraft carrier was a shape-shifting creature of magic. At night, to an approaching pilot hoping desperately for the first glimpse of her lights through foul weather, Jefferson seemed impossibly small, a mere postage stamp in a vast ocean. In every approach Tombstone had ever made, there had been one fragile moment when it seemed inconceivable that the massive aircraft strapped on his ass could somehow land on that deck that looked so short.
But that moment passed in an instant, and within seconds, Jefferson looked like a granite cliff, massive and inhospitable. Her stern would rise up from the ocean almost one hundred feet, depending on how the waves caught her and how heavily laden she was. She stretched several football fields in length. Below the water line, there were another eight decks, in addition to the twelve above the water line, and that wasn’t even taking into account the height of her antennas and radar masts. Her deck was massive, stretching out for miles and miles, and finding the elusive three-wire seemed the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Once you were onboard again, Jefferson shrank by a factor of ten. Aircraft from eight squadrons crowded her deck and hangar space, and with thousands of sailors and officers running over her exposed surface, repairing, preparing for launch flight, and directing the aircraft around on the hot nonskid of her flight deck it seemed impossible to taxi to your appointed spot without sucking at least a dozen of them down your jet intakes.
And it didn’t end there. Even when you weren’t flying, Jefferson seemed impossibly larger on the inside than on the outside. Few people on the ship had been to every compartment — in fact, most sailors had never even visited each of her decks. The decks below the waterline that held her machinery, nuclear reactor, and everything that kept her steaming through the ocean in excess of thirty-five knots, was well out of the way for most except engineers. Above that, the decks were crowded with enlisted berthing and the enlisted dining facility, as well as some officers’ quarters. Then the 03 level, the one immediately below the flight deck. That housed the guts of the combat capabilities. Forward, the ship’s combat direction center, staffed by ship’s personnel, coordinated the actions of the battle group. Six decks above, the ASW commander, or Des Ron, took control of the undersea warfare battle, coordinating flights of S-3B and other antisubmarine warfare aircraft and assets, including helos and surface-ship towed arrays and sonars.
Back on the 03 level, aft of the ship’s CDC, were the flag spaces. They were curtained off from the rest of the passageway by blue plastic curtains pulled back to each side. They were sometimes tied back to provide passageway, but other times met in the middle. The tile on the deck there, too, was blue. Blue meant flag spaces — ship’s personnel were to steer clear and use the long passageway on the other side of the ship rather than trespass on that ground.
The blue tile area was short compared to the rest of ship, housing all the administrative and combat functions of the admiral’s staff. Both Tombstone and Batman had filled that billet, Tombstone first being pressed suddenly into power from his billet at CAG. Batman had just spent two years as the admiral in command of the battle group, and was still technically embarked on the battered ship.
The blue tile passageway was where elephants danced, and the rest of the ship ventured in there at their own peril. The short stretch of office space housed not only the admiral, but the Carrier Air Wing Commander as well. Technically, his billet should have been abbreviated as CAW, but the historic acronym for the earlier title of Carrier Air Group commander stuck even after changes in command structure rendered it obsolete. The senior, post-command Navy captains that filled the new billet were convinced to a man that CAW sounded exceptionally — well — stupid, although they’d generally phrased that thought in more traditionally colorful language.
The CAG owned all the aircraft onboard the carrier, and he was the immediate superior of each one of the individual squadron commanding officers. He, in turn, reported to the admiral onboard, the Carrier Battle Group Commander, and it was CAG’s responsibility to task missions and sorties to support the CVBG’s plans.