"I don't understand."
"Ever hear of a news program called World Focus?"
"Yes, sir." World Focus was a popular nightly program Stateside, with a news-magazine format and aired by ACN. Mildly liberal, sharply critical of the current administration and its foreign policy, the show had never appealed enough to Tombstone for him to follow it much when he was in the States. "I haven't seen it since we were Stateside last, of course."
"It's a one-hour program," Pamela said. "Five nights a week, covering current news topics. The closing fifteen-minute slot each evening is a segment we call Up Close. Generally, we run with a single topic five nights in a row, examining it from every side, featuring in-depth interviews, that sort of thing."
"But what does that have to do with me?" Tombstone asked. He felt uneasy. Pamela Drake's direct manner, her no-nonsense tone of voice made him feel like she had him on camera.
She pursed her lips. "Next week we will be presenting an Up Close series on Navy carriers, whether they're necessary in today's world. We'll be linking it to the World Focus pieces we'll be airing at the same time on the trouble in Thailand… whether we should be here, what danger there might be in our getting involved in Thailand, that sort of thing."
"And you want Tombstone here for an interview," Fitzgerald said.
"That's right." She gave Tombstone a sidelong look. "'The Hero of Wonsan," the press was calling him a few weeks back. I think we should feature him in an interview which we'll work into the carrier piece. Who is he? What was it like shooting down six North Koreans? What did he feel about that?"
"Just a damn minute," Tombstone said. "I didn't do it for fun…"
"No one said you did, Commander. But now you're here in Thailand, presumably carrying out our government's foreign policy. What are you doing?
How do you see the situation?" She smiled suddenly. "I think you'd have a lot to contribute, Commander."
"Our instructions are to cooperate with you, Miss Drake." the admiral said. "You can make arrangements with the Captain here for any shooting you want to do on board the Jefferson."
"I'll do that, thank you. As long as my crew and I are here now, can we begin with a tour of your ship?" She smiled again, a dazzling display of perfectly white teeth. "I mean your boat!"
"I don't see why not," Fitzgerald said. "Tombstone? Would you care to show the lady and her people around?"
He did not care to, but one did not tell the Captain that. "Of course, sir."
"You'll have dinner with us this evening, Miss Drake?" The admiral was trying to be charming, but somehow it wasn't coming off well. He seemed ruffled by her challenging approach toward Tombstone.
"Sorry, we can't. We'll need to get back to our hotel. In fact, if we can arrange it, it would probably be easiest if we could conduct most of our interviews with the commander in Bangkok instead of out here. Possibly at our hotel?"
"As you wish. How long will you need him?"
"Oh, two or three sessions will be enough. I imagine we could fit him in for an hour or two these next few evenings."
Tombstone groaned to himself. "May I remind the admiral," he said, picking with care the words he could use in front of the press, "that I've been assigned to temporary duty ashore."
"I don't think that will be a problem, Stoney. We can find someone to take your place. 'Full cooperation," remember?"
It appeared that there would be no escape.
Twenty minutes later he was leading Pamela and her crew through the twisting bowels of Jefferson, taking them down the island deck by deck until they were in the maze of passageways beneath the flight deck. The experience of walking down one of Jefferson's long interior corridors never failed to amaze a first-time visitor. The passageways ran straight for hundreds of feet; every thirty feet or so they were interrupted by a cross frame with an oval-shaped door called a "knee-knocker" because they forced a tall person to simultaneously stoop and step high to go through. Watching someone approach down a passageway was like watching one's own reflection in an endlessly reflected series of arched mirrors.
"My God," Baughman said breathlessly as they turned a sudden corner and confronted another infinite regression of knee-knockers. "How many miles of tunnels do you have in this thing?"
Tombstone grinned. "Never counted 'em. It might give you an idea of her size, though, if you think of Jefferson as an eighty-story building lying on her side. In some ways, she's a self-contained city. We've got a population of over six thousand, with one radio station and two television stations, a barber shop, a hospital complete with OR, a dentist's office, a ship's exchange which passes for our own shopping mall, a newspaper and printing office, laundry service, a hobby shop."
"Anybody ever get lost down here?" Pamela asked. She stepped back against a gray-painted bulkhead as three dungaree-clad sailors squeezed past, going the other way.
"All the time," Tombstone replied. "Everybody carries maps the first few days they're aboard. After that, well… I know I'd get lost trying to find my way around down in snipe country, and I've been aboard six months."
"Snipe country?"
"Engineering spaces, below and aft. Don't worry. That's not where we're going."
"Do you know where we're going?" Griffith said. He was out of breath, lugging the bulky camera he balanced on his shoulder. He'd taken a number of shots of various parts of the ship at Pamela's direction, but he looked as though he'd be a lot happier taping congressmen in a shore-based studio.
"Sure thing, Mr. Griffith. This way."
They took another turn into a blind corner with a ladder zigzagging precipitously into the depths of the ship. He led them down three levels.
Pamela seemed to be bearing up well under the indignities of navigating the steep ladders in her skirt; more than once, though, Tombstone had to lead the way with a bellowed "make a hole" to clear the sightseeing sailors who had gathered near the base of the next ladder down. It seemed that Jefferson's grape vine was working at full efficiency, alerting sailors to the fact that a woman was making a tour of the vessel.
"We were on the 0–3 deck," he explained as they left the ladder and doubled back in an unexpected direction. "That's the level immediately under the 'roof," or flight deck. Now we're on the 0–1 level, coming up on the hangar deck."
"Does that mean we're as far down in the ship as we can go?"
"Hardly. It means the decks below this one are numbered differently…
one, two, three, and so on down to the keel. Counting the island, Jefferson is twenty stories tall."
They made one last turn and emerged into a vast, steel-lined cavern.
A visitor's first look at Jefferson's hangar deck never failed to raise the same emotions: surprise and awe. Thirty feet deep, two thirds the length of the carrier and covering two acres, the vast chamber looked like the inside of some immense shoreside warehouse. The glimpses of sunlight and blue sea caught through the huge, oval elevator bays were so restricted that they might as well have been views overlooking a river from a storage building back home.
The air rang and echoed with shouted orders, the roar of tractors, the clatter of tools and metal on metal.
Most of the deck space was occupied by aircraft, each with wings folded in a characteristic way depending on its type: F-14s with their variable-sweep wings angled back along their flanks, A-6 Intruders with the wings broken in the middle and folded across their spines, a lone Hawkeye with wings twisted at right angles and rotated back to avoid the dish-shaped radome on its back.
Space not occupied by aircraft was made hazardous by yellow-painted tractors, called mules, which busied about in a strange blend of geometry and ballet.
"It's enormous!" Pamela said.
"Yup," Tombstone agreed. "Follow me."
"What's that smell?" Baughman asked.