“Yes, ma’am. We should be able to pick it up from the carrier when we get in range.”
Because of the hurricane, the fleet had been scattered over an area of several hundred square miles. They were well out of range of any supply ships or carriers right now.
They looked shamed. She realized that her men took maintenance setbacks as personal failures. Victoria smiled and said, “Gentlemen, you’re doing the best you can in a lousy situation. This isn’t your fault. Tell the team that it isn’t their fault either. We’ll get the bird up. With any luck, this godforsaken weather lightens up soon — maybe we can even get her fully mission-capable tomorrow.”
The men nodded.
The 1MC speaker announced overhead, “Air Boss, your presence is requested in the captain’s cabin.” It was like getting called to the principal’s office.
She was a lieutenant commander, and an O-4 in the Navy. Destroyer captains were O-5s, holding the rank of commander in the Navy — equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in the other services.
Victoria had been promoted early to lieutenant commander and been made a department head. She had leapfrogged many of her more senior peers to get this assignment, which was considered prestigious.
While she would never admit it to anyone else, she had expected nothing less. Victoria had been on the fast track ever since she’d set foot on the hallowed grounds of the US Naval Academy, fifteen years ago.
Victoria had not always wanted to go into the military. Quite the opposite. While her father was an admiral, she had been turned off to the idea of military service. This was partly due to the natural teenage need to rebel against one’s parents, and partly because the military career track had just never seemed that interesting to her.
That is, until she had gone to a college fair in the fall of her junior year in high school and heard the word no.
Her grades and high school resume had been exemplary. But the man behind the US Naval Academy desk didn’t seem impressed. Victoria didn’t even know why she had stopped at the table. Maybe she had just wanted a USNA brochure so she could tell her parents that she had at least given it a look.
But when she asked the aged alumnus behind the booth for a brochure, he didn’t immediately hand her one. A disapproving frown on his face.
“Honey, maybe you should look at one of the other schools instead. No offense, but the Naval Academy can get pretty rough.”
That was all it took.
Victoria was an excellent athlete. Always had been. She had broken her nose playing lacrosse, but she joked with her brothers, “You should have seen the other guy.”
She worked just as hard at her studies as she did on the athletic field. That work ethic came from her father, she knew. As did her inability to accept being told no.
Ironically, her father had tried many times to convince her to look at one of the service academies or ROTC programs. Nothing her father said had ever swayed her thinking. But this sexist old dinosaur, passing judgment on her with one look… that lit a fire under her ass.
She hadn’t even applied to any other colleges. She’d aced her exams, received a nomination from her senator, and been recruited by the Navy women’s lacrosse team.
Victoria had accepted her appointment in the fall of her senior year. Early admission.
When she arrived on campus, Victoria discovered that she actually kind of liked the military lifestyle. It gave her a sense of purpose. And she liked that the military rewarded disciplined, hardworking, and capable people like herself. She excelled in all aspects of Academy life, earning top marks, starting on the lacrosse team all four years, and being selected for Navy pilot upon graduation.
Flight school was a continuation of her successes. She was a natural pilot. Victoria suspected that her talent came from the coordination and ability to judge relative motion that she’d developed playing sports. But what really set her apart from her peers was her intellectual ability. Everyone there was smart. They had to be. Still, Victoria was better than ninety-nine percent of her fellow flight students at memorizing all the books filled with numbers and procedures. She could then rattle them off under pressure, and — most importantly — she was able to make sound decisions based on her newly learned knowledge.
Once in her fleet squadron, Victoria was ranked as the number one pilot of more than thirty competitive junior officers. While many of her fellow pilots went barhopping on the weekends, she drove right back into work. She didn’t have a personal life. Nor did she want one. She had goals, and nothing else mattered.
Victoria knew that some thought she was judged favorably because she was a woman, and she deeply resented that. It was hard work and ability — anyone who said otherwise was just jealous. Her success earned her a sterling reputation among her commanding officers, and she was rewarded with the most coveted assignments. After finishing her tour as a junior officer, she’d spent several years as a flight instructor, then as an admiral’s aide.
She was promoted early to lieutenant commander and sent to a HSM-46 in Mayport, Florida, to become a department head. She was to get her own helicopter detachment — to be sent off with two helicopters and thirty men somewhere halfway around the world.
Her early promotion, and selection to department head were both her reward and her expectation. Stepping stones to someday becoming a commanding officer — and, hopefully, well beyond. They were not a surprise.
The surprise came after she began her work in the new leadership role.
Prior to becoming a department head, she had only had the opportunity to lead small teams. Now, she was the third-highest-ranking person on a ship of over three hundred. She was in charge of thirty highly trained aviators, rescue swimmers, and mechanics. And for someone who was used to being judged and rewarded based on her individual performance, it was a challenge to constantly be held accountable for the sometimes-substandard work of her men. And in the short time she had been on the destroyer — the helicopter detachment had only just joined the crew a few weeks ago — she had grown frustrated working with the captain.
The captain was a surface warfare officer. A ship driver. While he had worked with aviators before, his career had predominantly been spent aboard ships that did not have helicopter detachments. So the constraints of working with an aviation unit caused a lot of consternation between his young, newly minted O-4 air boss and him.
Every time they wanted to fly — even many of the times when they just needed to do maintenance and move or start up the helicopter — it required the captain to drive his ship a certain way. A certain direction, or a certain speed. It was limiting. And the captain had a schedule to keep. A busy schedule, written by the admiral’s planners on the carrier.
It infuriated the captain that Victoria’s helicopter had been grounded for maintenance for so long. She was having a major negative impact on his ability to meet the ship’s daily schedule of events.
The captain made sure that Victoria understood his disappointment. The captain’s boss was on the carrier, and he was putting pressure on the captain to get it fixed. The captain made sure to let her know that he was writing to Victoria’s own helicopter squadron commanding officer, who was on the carrier, letting him know of how bad it was going.
There were also personnel issues to deal with in her own air detachment that were so numerous she couldn’t keep them all straight. One of her young sailors was about to lose his security clearance over financial problems. Another had a pregnant wife at home who had just sent him divorce papers. One of her junior officers couldn’t land the helicopter without almost crashing — which might be normal for this stage in his career, but it was still scary as hell to deal with.