Tombstone sniffed the air. Curiously, he was aware of Pamela's perfume, a subtle hint of roses and vanilla, but nothing more. "Probably a mix of oil and JP5," he said. "That's what we use for jet fuel. After you've been aboard awhile, you don't even notice it."
"You carry a lot of jet fuel on board?" Pamela asked.
"About two million gallons."
"My God!" Griffith said. "That stuff's pretty explosive, isn't it?"
"Yeah. We have to be pretty careful with it."
Pamela gave him a searching, sideways look. "Why do you carry so much?"
Tombstone laughed. "Actually, it's not enough. We have fifty or sixty active aircraft at any given time. Each one flies twice a day, and burns two, maybe three thousand gallons each time up. At that rate, two million gallons doesn't last nearly long enough! We need to take on more fuel just about every week."
"I thought nuclear carriers didn't need replenishment."
"To run the engines, no. Jefferson's nuclear fuel supply will keep her cruising sixty thousand miles a year for fifteen years, sure, and uranium takes up only a tiny fraction of the space a load of fuel oil would. In fact, because of that, we can carry more avgas than sep1 conventional carriers do. But we still have to take on fresh supplies pretty often. Not just avgas either, but food, stores of all kinds. One operation like Wonsan pretty much wipes us out on munitions too. That's why we put in at Japan afterwards, to stock up."
As he talked, he led them across the tangled maze of the hangar deck toward one of the huge, oval cutaway openings in the side of the ship.
"This is one of the elevators?" Griffith asked.
"That's right. Port side aft. Actually, it's a section of the flight deck which moves up and down on those rails along the outside of the hull. We have four of them, and they can lift sixty-five tons at a time. We use them to transfer aircraft back and forth between the hangar deck and the roof."
As they stepped across the yellow-and-orange painted warning stripes which marked the joint between deck and elevator, Pamela stopped and looked at the opening, large enough to pass an aircraft with its wings folded. "You know, Commander, a big question being debated back on Capitol Hill these days is whether aircraft carriers are too vulnerable to be worthwhile in a modern war. And now that I've seen one, I have to wonder if your critics aren't right."
"What do you mean?" He led the group to a railing, out of the way of a mule and a team of yellow-jacketed deck handlers maneuvering an F-14 Tomcat onto the elevator. The dark waters of Sattahip Bay lapped at the ship's side twenty feet below.
"What did you say… two million gallons of aviation fuel? What happens if an enemy missile flies through this big hole in the ship's side?"
Tombstone grinned. "That debate has been going on since the Falklands War. That's when the Navy suddenly realized that a cheap missile could do big-time damage to a very expensive ship."
"And there was the Stark in the Persian Gulf," Pamela pointed out. "Can you really justify spending billions of dollars on something that can be blown out of the water by a single Exocet costing, oh, say a few hundred thousand dollars?"
"In the first place," Tombstone said slowly, "the Jefferson is not the Sheffield."
"Sheffield?"
"A British DDG, a guided-missile destroyer, sunk by air-launched Exocet missiles during the Falklands War," Tombstone explained. "Look at it this way. Jefferson has over two thousand separate watertight compartments.
Sinking her… well, you might as well try to sink a piece of styrofoam."
"That sounds ominously like the argument they used for the unsinkable Titanic," Pamela said. Her eyes twinkled. She seemed to enjoy sparring with him. "In a war, you'd have quite a time hiding a ship this big from Russian satellites. One nuclear cruise missile and… where would your styrofoam be then?"
Tombstone crossed his arms. "Look, if Russia and us start tossing nukes at each other, we're going to be losing a hell of a lot more than carriers!
Jefferson can fight a nuclear war all by herself if she has to, but her main purpose is as a deterrent… and to give the President some non-nuclear options in a crisis."
"Like Wonsan."
"That's right."
"Okay, what about conventional weapons then? You're still vulnerable.
An Exocet could slip right through this big doorway here, explode in there among all those airplanes and… whoosh!"
"In combat, these openings are closed off by sliding armor panels. We keep them open in fair weather and in port to keep the hangar deck aired out, but we can seal her up tight when we need to. So we won't have SSMs bouncing around on our hangar deck.
"Now, look over there." He pointed aft toward a railed sponson extending from the hull along the ship's port quarter. "See that grouping of six tubes, like mortars? That's Super RBOC." He pronounced it "are-bock."
"For Rapid-Bloom Offboard Chaff. Anti-ship missiles like Exocet are guided to their target by radar. When CIC ― that's the ship's combat information center ― picks up incoming missiles, those tubes fire off clouds of radar-reflecting fibers called chaff, just like the chaff dispensers on my Tomcat. The missiles home on the chaff and miss the ship.
"Now, look up there." He turned around and pointed forward, far up along the curve of the ship's hull. "Up there on that forward sponson… see something that looks like a big, white, dome-topped garbage can? That's one of our Mark IS Phalanx systems, or CIWS." He pronounced the acronym "sea-whizz."
"That's for Close-In Weapons System. It's a big Gatling gun, computer-controlled and radar-directed, which can rattle off 20-mm depleted uranium rounds at the rate of fifty per second. Each slug is two and a half times denser than steel and is moving at something like seven hundred miles per hour when it hits. The control and aiming is precise enough to target an incoming missile and blow it right out of the air. We have three Mark 5s aboard Jefferson: that one port side forward, one to starboard below the island, and one aft on the port side of the fantail."
The deck handlers had completed maneuvering the Tomcat onto the elevator.
A klaxon blasted warning, and then the elevator gave a hard jolt and began crawling upwards.
"Phalanx," Pamela said thoughtfully. "Wasn't that the defense system on the Stark that was turned off at the wrong time?"
Tombstone met her cool gaze evenly. "Yes, ma'am. It was."
"But of course, that can't happen aboard the Jefferson."
"No ma'am, it can't."
The elevator rose level with the flight deck and shuddered to a halt.
From here, it was like standing on a dry land airfield, with the control tower island rising far across a very large stretch of dark-colored runway. The aircraft parked along the edge of the four-acre flight deck, the helo still resting in front of the island, the tiny figures of deck handlers going about their duties ― all served to emphasize the overwhelming size of the Jefferson.
With no flight operations going on, the flight deck was unusually quiet.
"You still haven't convinced me, Commander," Pamela said as they stepped off the elevator and started across the flight deck. She stopped Tombstone with a hand on his shoulder and turned, facing west. Three of the other ships of Jefferson's battle group were visible scattered at widely spaced intervals across the Sattahip anchorage. Closest was the shark-gray shape of the Vicksburg, the CBG's Aegis cruiser. Astern was the DDG Kearny, and farther off still, the frigate Biddle. Winslow and Gridley, the remaining two vessels of CBG-14, were still at sea patrolling in the Gulf of Thailand. "Look," she continued. "You have a nine-billion-dollar aircraft carrier… and you still need all those ships just to protect her!"
Tombstone laughed.
"What's so funny?"
"Excuse me, ma'am, but that's a pretty common misconception."