'He's already standing by in OR,' Coffee answered. His voice went from happy to somber and serious. 'Two of them are pretty bad.'
'I understand.' Then Phillie said something that endeared her to Coffee completely. 'Follow ME, girls!'
***
McCaverty's engine sputtered out just as Number Three made a safe landing. It had taken precious minutes to get one of the small earth movers they'd once used in Brazil out on deck to push the wreckage of One and Five safely out of the way. Those minutes had been a few too many.
'I can't land,' McCaverty informed the bridge. 'I . . . ' He checked his position relative to the ship, made some assumptions about his glide path, then continued, 'I can splash in about two hundred meters to port. Please have the Bastard pick me up.'
'Roger. Bastard standing by.'
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Every carrier landing is graded . . .
-U.S. Navy SOP
D-Day, MV
southwest of Soqotra
Drumming his fingers impatiently on plywood, McCaverty sat cross-legged over the chart house. Around him, a puddle formed from the water released by his dripping clothes. The puddle was actually more of a wet spot, as the curvature of the plywood allowed and encouraged excess to run off to the sides. His face, normally cheerful, was grim.
'I'm going to kill that stupid son of a bitch,' he muttered for roughly the hundredth time since being picked up.
Powerless, and with full flaps down as he'd neared the water, McCaverty had slowed to just under forty miles an hour. A well timed pull of his stick had lifted the plane's nose up, so that he touched down with the tail. That sudden increase of resistance in the tail had slowed the plane rapidly, though less rapidly than a nose dive would have. Instead, the tail-touch had caused the tail to nearly rip off and the fuselage to slam down almost vertically. At that, the plane had so nearly stopped that only McCaverty's safety harness had kept him from being thrown into his instrument panel.
While the harness might have saved him from any number of cuts and contusions, or worse, it had had the unfortunate effect of holding him fast inside the plane as the latter had rapidly filled with water-most of it surging through the new gaps by the tail-and gone under. If he'd panicked for an instant, he'd probably never have gotten out. As it was, the plane had been ten or fifteen feet underwater-he really couldn't be sure-before he'd managed to extricate himself and swim to the surface, there to be met by a smiling Chinese with a small life ring from which a line ran to the idling patrol boat.
They'd picked him up, gotten him-wet and shaking, with residual fear, not with cold-aboard, and then eased in toward the ship. He held in his hand, the one where the fingers weren't drumming, a good sized glass of lukewarm whiskey placed there by the patrol boat's captain, Chin.
Bastard inched up to the net that had been hung over the side. Looking up at the gantry's whine, he saw a fairly large platform composed of welded I-beams being lowered onto two projections from the hull. The platform, he knew, would be covered with PSP to provide a landing spot for one of the compliment's five-two of them now in Yemen-helicopters. A similar structure was to be erected on the starboard side, assuming that hadn't been done yet.
Probably hasn't been done yet; I don't see where they've had time.
Chin turned the wheel over to one of his crew and stepped up to where McCaverty sat. 'You've a choice, pilot,' the Chinese said. 'You can wait for us to rig the patrol boat and get hoisted aboard that way, or you can scramble up the rope net.'
'I have someone I need to kill,' McCaverty answered. 'And justice won't wait.' He tossed off the remnants of his drink and walked unsteadily to the net.
The hand that helped him over the gunwale belonged to the commander of the aviation company, Mike Cruz.
Cruz waited until McCaverty had his feet on deck before saying, 'We now have either one extra pilot or two of them. We don't need you to fly. On the other hand, we've got five men hurt, two of them badly. So, junior birdman, your flying days for us are over; you're a doctor again. No, it isn't because you did anything wrong. Ya done good . . . under the circumstances. Now get your ass to surgery and give Doc Joseph and the Chinese woman a hand.'
As McCaverty started to leave he turned his head over his shoulder. 'How much damage did it do to the flight deck?' he asked.
'Essentually none,' Cruz answered. 'Amazing stuff, PSP.'
McCaverty, scrubbed and suited now, glanced over the two filled operating tables. There was an unconscious patient on each. On one, an itty-bitty woman, the Chinese doctor, was patiently moving intestines from around what looked to be a large wooden splinter from a propeller. The splinter jutted almost straight up from the body, a nurse holding it in position. As the Chinese doctor moved the guts, she piled them on a table next to the patient. One of the surgical team-based on size McCaverty guessed it was another Chinese-sprayed a solution over the growing pile of gut.
It reeked.
'You McCaverty?' asked the surgeon at the other table. Blood sprayed through one of his hands while the other, holding a hemostat, sought out the vessel from which the blood spurted.
'That's me,' he answered.
'I'm Joseph, Scott Joseph. This guy's a mess. I'll be lucky to save his legs. Really lucky. But that may not matter because his skull's caved in. I cut a goodly chuck of it away to relieve the pressure. But he's got bone fragments stuck in his brain that are way beyond my skill set to remove. I understand you're neuro.'
'Yeah.' Automatically, McCaverty looked at his hands. Steady as a rock, which they weren't when they picked me up. Must be the whiskey Chin fed me. Ordinarily, really crappy idea to operate after drinking anything. In this case . . . might be the only possible idea.
'Well don't just stand there with your teeth in your mouth. Get to work.'
