World in Flames

“They will, sir.”

From the general’s quick response, Mayne guessed the C in Cs had instructed him to make that very argument. “Then I suggest we transfer Doug Freeman immediately — to C in C Korea. Get Anderson out of there. Put Freeman back on his old turf for a while.”

This the general wasn’t ready for. “But — Mr. President. We want to slow down in Europe, yes. But if we take General Freeman out and there’s a Russian counterattack, then—”

“Don’t tell me we haven’t got any other generals over there, Jimmy? Defensive backs?”

“Of course not, sir. I simply mean that Freeman has a high profile. If the Russkis see him withdrawing —”

“It’ll be a demonstration of enormous confidence in all our other field commanders,” countered Mayne. “Most of them trained by you, Jimmy, I might add.”

“Maybe, sir, but still—”

“Jimmy, Freeman knows Korea. He attacked the North Korean capital at night, got in, got out, and gave us time to reinforce the Pusan-Masan perimeter. We need a man like that.”

“You mean someone a little bit crazy?”

“We have to get those Chinese back across the Yalu.”

“I don’t know if even Doug Freeman can do that, Mr. President.”

“Let’s try.”

The general nodded his assent. “Very well, sir.”

“Jimmy?”

“Sir?”

“If you aren’t happy with bringing him out of Europe, how about we play a shell game?”

General Grey frowned.

“General, we live in a country that produces more actors than any other. We breed them by the bushel. Hell, if I remember correctly, one of them occupied this office.”

There was subdued laughter from Trainor. General Grey was warming to the idea. “A double?”

“You won’t have much time,” conceded Mayne.

But Grey, pursing his lips, was considering the logistics. “It might just work. They did it with Montgomery. But how about Freeman’s getting to Korea? If that gets out, the Russians—”

“It won’t,” said Mayne, turning to Trainor. “Under wraps. No press. Shut everything down like Reagan did in Grenada and Bush in Panama. Keep the press right out of it — and only allow two or three of Doug’s top aides to go with him. Leave the rest in Europe. Hell — he’ll need to leave most of them in Europe to execute his strategy over there — until he gets back.”

“Mr. President,” General Grey told his commander in chief, “Doug Freeman’ll the without the press — without an audience.”

“Then he’ll the in a good cause,” said Mayne, reaching for the water decanter, a signal to Trainor it was time for the pain pills.

* * *

“Think positive, Frank,” Shirer told himself, as one by one he saw the green blips of Salt Lake City’s brood of aircraft disappearing from his radar screen as they landed safely on the carrier. Finally only one blip remained, approximately three miles starboard aft of the carrier: the “Sea King” helo on its plane guard station. Shirer had been making pattern for thirty minutes, and the nose wheel hadn’t budged, so that now he knew that he had only twenty-seven minutes remaining before he’d have to take her in. “Like a bird, like a bird,” he repeated to himself, recalling the words of his old instructor during his first carrier landing. “Coming in on a carrier’s way different from having a mile of runway to screw around on. Go in like the birds — feet first, get your rear rubber down, hook the wire, and the nose’ll take care of itself.” The only trouble was, this time Shirer knew the nose wouldn’t take care of itself, not with the wheel only halfway down. He tried to remember whether there had ever been a barricade engagement on Salt Lake City—a crash landing racing at 150 miles an hour into the nylon net.

In another three minutes, Commander Harris in flight deck control was watching the last of the Salt Lake City’s air umbrella, an E-C Hawkeye long-range warning aircraft, its rotodome stem retracting, the dome sitting on the plane’s fuselage like a huge white pancake, wings already folding up and back as the plane was being hauled by a mule, a flat yellow tractor, to the port elevator as fast as the crosswind would allow so that it could be moved out of harm’s way in the hangar deck below.

“Soon as that baby’s in the dungeon,” instructed Harris, “let me know.”

“Yes, sir,” replied a tired assistant one deck below in air traffic control, which was part of the combat information center. “Sir — LSO says we may have a foul deck.”

“Chri—” Harris began, checked himself, and asked, “How long’s two oh three got fuel for?”

“Twenty-four minutes, sir.”

The flight deck commander called the LSO. What he needed to know was whether the LSO had any idea of what the debris on the deck might be. And where?

“Can’t tell you, Phil,” came the LSO’s reply. “Might be nothing, but thought I saw something drop off when the last Hawkeye came in.”

“It was a clean trap, wasn’t it?” the FDC asked the LSO.

“Yeah — clean trap. But I thought I saw something after she hit. Could have been thrown up in her wash.”

“Okay. We’d better check it out.”

“Looked like it was near three cat.” He meant the white line that marked the waist catapult run.

“Thanks, Pete,” answered the worried FDC. If it was an obstacle near the waist catapult line, it could be a dislodged nut, fuel tank flap — or anything from the scores of deck vehicles used to push and pull the planes into position. A nut sucked into either one of the Tomcat’s intakes could mean a multimillion-dollar engine gone, or a seabird that had been hit and knocked to the steel-grooved deck could become an instant lubricant the moment the twenty-five-ton aircraft, its nose wheel not fully extended, landed, sending the Tomcat sliding an inch or two out of alignment — which, at over a hundred miles an hour, could wipe out the aircraft and anyone nearby. The FDC lifted the phone for the air boss six decks above him, depressed the other phone atop his right shoulder, and requested a search party for the area around the four arrestor wires. They simply didn’t have time for a full-fledged “walk-down” to make sure the deck was sterile.

Within a minute, the chief petty officer and the sixteen-man search party team were scouring the deck, and it was Seaman First Class Sic. Elmer Ventral, who’d been on the Salt Lake less than a year, who spotted the oil rag caught in the corner of one of the four-feet-diameter circular steel mountings that houses the one-and-a-half-inch-thick cable to which the number one arrestor wire was attached. Whenever the wire hooked an aircraft, the big cable took the strain.

“All right,” said the chief petty officer, whose job it would be to report to flight deck control. “Let’s get inside before we all freeze our butts off.”

Young Ventral, two days away from his twenty-first birthday, married little more than fourteen months and already a father, felt good about having found the oil rag. It couldn’t really have caused that much damage — unless it got sucked in by an air intake — but the air boss was a fanatic about a sterile deck, and Ventral knew it would stand him in good stead.

The CPO who had to tell the FDC wasn’t so lucky.

“Jesus Christ!” Harris bellowed. “What was that doing there?”

“Somebody must have dropped it, sir.”

“I know somebody dropped it, Chief. And I want his ass. You read me?”

“Yes, sir,” said the CPO, but he knew the task would be hopeless. So did the FDC. They were both feeling bad about it, both having worked with the air boss long enough to know that when any single player screwed up, the team screwed up. FDC called PRIFLY and told the air boss what had fouled his deck.

“A rag!” said the air boss, his voice rising like a tenor going for the high C as he walked, or rather stalked, behind the grease pencil status board and stared down into the bluish light that washed the flight deck. “We’ve got a man to come down and some joker’s dropped a fuckin’ rag?”