“Yes, sir.”
“Listen, Phil, I want his ass.”
“Yes, sir.”
The moment he put the phone down, the air boss turned to PRIFLY’s mini boss. “Get Lieutenant Ronson up here pronto.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ronson was the chief of the
Meantime he had a plane to get down and, glancing at the real-time PRIFLY clock, saw he had seventeen minutes.
“We going to get this barricade up in time?”
It was more an order than a question, but the mini boss complied. “They’re working on it, sir. They think they’ll make it.”
The air boss picked up his binoculars, looking down at the barricade, a series of tough, hydraulically anchored nylon ribbons forming a vertical netting that stood twenty-four feet high, strung across the flight deck and which he hoped would catch the Tomcat if, due to the necessarily high “up” angle the pilot would have to have on the nose, the Tomcat missed the three wire.
“You done one of these before, Henry?” the air boss asked his assistant.
“No, sir.”
“What time we got, Henry?”
“Sixteen minutes, sir,” replied the mini boss, wondering whether his superior had ever handled a barricade engagement himself.
“Weather report, sir,” interjected a seaman, handing him the printout. “Wind’s dying, but more fog.”
“Great,” said the air boss sardonically. “Just what we fucking need. Be lucky if he can see the meatball. We got rescue and fire all set, Henry?”
“All set, sir.”
“Anyone loses a goddamned oil rag in future and the whole shift pays. Beer ration cut to one can — or zilch.” He shifted his binoculars to look down at the port side of the barricade being laid out, its nylon ribbons flapping furiously in the cross wind. “How much time we got, Henry?”
“Fourteen minutes, sir,” said the mini boss, the other spotter trying to keep visual contact with Shirer’s blinking red light along with the radar blip. The mini boss looked teed off— couldn’t the air boss read a goddamned clock? Everyone was getting too tense.
Five decks below, TV technicians were plugging into the flight deck camera feed. With the crew of over five thousand below decks run ragged by the day-in, day-out dangerous task of keeping planes constantly airborne, the Tomcat’s final approach might as well entertain as instruct. In the dungeon, above the noise of the mules pushing and pulling planes about and scores of technicians swarming over parked planes, many of the aircraft looking as if they’d been roughly cannibalized for spare parts, some green jackets checking Tomcat avionic “slip-in, pull-out” circuit boards in the black boxes started making book on whether Shirer would make it or not. More navy pilots had been lost in accidents than had been shot down.
Up on the flight deck in the wait room, S1c. Elmer Ventral, whose job it was to race out to release the hook immediately after a plane caught the wire, was being ribbed by the rest of the work crew, who’d awarded him the “ROFOR”—royal order of the fucking oil rag.
Unbeknownst to Ventral, the CPO in charge of the shift Ventral was part of, following carrier tradition, had called down to one of the bakeries aboard to have them bake a cake for Ventral’s birthday — and to decorate it with something that looked like an oil rag.
Up in PRIFLY, the air boss was going over everything that could possibly go wrong. He called down to flight deck control. “Harris!”
“Yes, sir?”
“Phil — you have the new weight for two oh three?” The loss of weight occasioned by the Tomcat burning up as much fuel as possible before landing would have to be vectored in so the arrestor wires wouldn’t be too taut.
“We’ve got it covered, sir.”
“Good man.”
“Barricade’s up, sir,” reported the mini boss.
“Clear the deck!” ordered the air boss, his voice projected by the powerful PA system designed to cut through any noise on the carrier, including the cacophony of noise attending the launch of a full air operation, when the air boss dispatched the carrier’s planes at a rate of one every thirty seconds.
“Decks clear,” came the confirmation two minutes later.
“Very good,” acknowledged the air boss.
“Fog bank closing,” another voice informed him.
“Not good,” said the air boss, turning around. There was a nervous chuckle. The air boss then ordered the Sea King helo off the starboard beam to move from its plane guard position three miles away from the carrier to one mile. If the pilot overshot and had to ditch, there was no way the ninety-thousand ton ship, at twenty-two knots, could stop or alter course to assist, risking the integrity of the entire battle group. Besides, even if all engines were shut down, it would still take the ship over a mile to stop.
After crossing the loch, Robert and Rosemary noticed how many more cars were coming south from Mallaig than those, like themselves, heading north toward the fishing port. And after a while, when the Prices’ car hadn’t shown up behind them, Robert Brentwood grew even more suspicious of the Englishman’s story. If the Prices, or whatever their real name was, were really protecting him and Rosemary, then they’d be going on to Mallaig. For Robert, the choice was clear. Either he and Rose could go on ahead to Mallaig, looking over their shoulders all the time in the fog—”a hell of a way,” he murmured, “to spend your honeymoon”—or he could do something about it. As he made the U-turn cautiously in the swirling fog, heading back in the direction of the ferry, Rosemary asked him to pass her another Gravol. Whether it was morning sickness or from their “run-in” with the Prices, she didn’t know, but she felt “awful.”
Brentwood saw the vague shape of a car coming at him from the direction of the ferry. It wasn’t the Prices. It occurred to him they might have turned back to the ferry, recrossed the loch, and made a call perhaps — arranged a little surprise for the captain of the Sea Wolf in Mallaig — away from witnesses and the busload of kids on the ferry?
After another five minutes or so, he saw what at first seemed to be a cluster of lambs and a shepherd at the roadside, but on getting closer, he could see it was a group of teenage girls and, immediately behind them, the school bus. The girls, in buff-colored skirts and maroon blazers, stood near the bus, which had a miter with a scroll underneath painted on its side. It was pulled off on the opposite side of the road where it had been heading for Mallaig, and soon he could read “St. Mark’s” written in black letters above the more colorful school emblem. The girls were all standing in a group, subdued. A moment later he saw two figures, a man and a woman, emerging from behind the bus, but saw it wasn’t the Prices. The woman, in a gray pleated skirt and coat, was walking toward him briskly, and behind her was a man who appeared to be the bus driver, wearing an anorak. The woman, obviously in charge, nodded brusquely.
“Anything the matter?” he asked.
“There’s been an accident,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Can you help?”
“I know first aid,” said Brentwood, getting out of the car. “What—”
“It’s too late for that, I’m afraid,” she said. “First aid.” The bus driver looked shaken, turning, his arm pointing behind the bus to a car, lopsided in a ditch, almost completely hidden by bracken. Brentwood’s first thought was that it was the Prices, but he couldn’t tell from this distance.
“I think,” began the bus driver, “what Miss Sawyers means, sir, is that you could help us if you’d take a message for us to Mallaig. We can’t go over sixty kilometers an hour on the bus. Be a while ‘afore we get in.”
