Payback

The Super Stallion, which had assumed its normal position off McCain’s aft quarter after having lowered the team’s big load onto the flight deck’s number 1 elevator, now turned sharply in a U-turn, hard astarboard, its rescue swimmer already at the helicopter’s door.

The helo’s downdrafts momentarily flattened the carrier’s wake into a foam-edged blue pool, Aussie’s normally brown hair now a black slick, his face strained as he attempted to look up through a maelstrom of wind and water at the descending orange blur that was the rescue harness. He hadn’t seen anyone drop from the helo, so that when the swimmer grabbed his arm, the Australian-born Lewis instantly thought “Shark!” and struck out with such violence that he stunned the swimmer, who in turn slapped Lewis across the face, yelling, “Calm down! I’m here to—”

“Oh, shit. Sorry, mate, geez—”

“Calm down!”

“Yeah, yeah, right. Okay.”

“He hit him!” said John Cuso, watching through his binoculars.

“Who hit who?” growled Crowley, watching the last of the nine-man team, CPO Tavos, touch down without incident.

“That Special Forces guy in the drink,” said Cuso. “He just clobbered our swimmer.”

“Panic?” said Crowley. “Doesn’t seem like Special Forces — more like a ninny.”

The deck crew gave the chopper’s rescue team, and presumably Aussie, a celebratory round of applause, the subdued sound of their gloves further muffled by the Sea Stallion’s roar, its downwash throwing up tiny pieces of grit from the flight deck as high up as Vultures’ Row, a piece stinging Crowley on the cheek.

“Dammit,” grumped the admiral. As captain of the McCain he was almost as detail-obsessed about his job as was Douglas Freeman, who as yet Crowley did not know was the leader of this Special Forces drop-in. Crowley immediately ordered his XO to implement more than the normal number of pre- flight “FOD”—foreign debris — walkdowns, in which a long line of deck personnel, shoulder to shoulder, would move slowly down the fourteen-degree-angled flight deck, peering down at the black deck with the concentration of a hobo looking for cigarette butts and coins. Debris as small as a dime could play havoc with a jet’s finely tuned engines and so delay an entire launch for a squadron or the 24-7 four-fighter CAP — combat air patrol. And a CAP must always be aloft, its pilots acting not only as over-the-horizon lookouts, but, should it become necessary, as the battle group’s airborne “bouncers,” as McCain’s master chief had called them.

Another piece of grit struck Cuso.

“Have a nice swim?” Sal asked Aussie, who was emerging from the Sea Stallion’s downblast. His sodden uniform was so plastered against his body by wind and water that it reminded Cuso of the wrap he’d seen on the Special Forces “palletized” equipment, by now safely stowed below in the hangar deck where the wrap gave the crude rotorless helicopter shape a distinctly ungainly mummified appearance.

“I said,” repeated Sal as he walked behind Aussie, “did you have a nice swim?”

“Piss off!” Aussie replied, following John Cuso, who was leading the sodden Aussie below to one of the few shower-equipped two-man staterooms, Cuso explaining, by way of ameliorating Aussie’s embarrassment, that the pilots were probably all aft, shooting the bull in their informal “Dirty Shirt” wardroom. But Aussie wasn’t in the mood to hear what anyone else was doing — all he wanted was a hot shower, his desire for instant warmth increased by a bone-chilling blast of wind that Salvini also felt as they passed from the gray-tiled section of the carrier’s gallery deck into “blue-tile country.” Here, the cold air Salvini and Aussie had just experienced came from the computer- cooling fans in the five highly classified command and ultrasecret blue-tiled communications rooms, including the ship’s Signal Exploitation Space, or SES.

“Take all the time you need,” John Cuso told the still-dripping Aussie, who saw fresh, knife-edge-pressed Navy-issue khakis; a neatly folded, almost blindingly white crew-neck T-shirt next to the trousers, along with a pair of thick, woolen khaki socks and black boots that were so highly polished, Aussie could see Sal’s maddeningly smug face on the boot’s toe piece, together with a face he didn’t recognize.

“Master Chief Schmidt here,” Cuso told them, “will take you two gentlemen forward to the SpecOp briefing room. You two can spend the night in this stateroom. The other seven members of your team have been similarly billeted on this deck.”

“Don’t want to put any of you guys out,” said Sal as Aussie, his teeth literally chattering, peeled off his soaked underwear.

“You’re not putting anyone out,” John Cuso assured Salvini. “No one uses this stateroom.”

“Room to spare, eh?” said Sal.

Cuso gave him an enigmatic smile. “You’ll have to toss for which one of you gets the upper rack.”

Salvini looked at the two-tiered bunk then at Aussie, telling Cuso, “This guy farts wherever you put him!”

Cuso nodded good-naturedly. “Well, the boat’s doc tells us there’s a study says those who pass wind frequently live longer.”

“Geez,” said Sal. “Aussie’s set to outdo Methuselah!”

“Piss off!” came a voice behind the shower curtain, followed by a hissing stream of hot water, its fog billowing out from the stall.

Cuso grinned. “See you gentlemen at lunch.”

After Cuso left, Salvini glanced about the sparsely furnished stateroom. There was barely enough room to contain two curtained bunks and two short-backed Naugahyde chairs, the remainder of this tiny space crammed with a basin, mirror, two storage-space drawers, a Houdini-like shower stall, and two small flip-down writing desks.

Per custom, Freeman, as commanding officer of the nine “visitors,” dutifully climbed up the six laddered stairwells to the McCain’s bridge to pay his respects to the ship’s captain. Unfortunately, Captain Crowley quickly developed a self-induced tension headache, his neck muscles becoming as taut as a dead- lift cable the moment he realized it was General Douglas “George Patton” Freeman who was the CO of what Crowley would describe in his unofficial log as “this covey of misfits parading as Special Forces Rambos.”

Crowley knew he was being unfair, that in fact Rambo types were speedily weeded out from potential SpecFor recruits as soon as possible. Rambos were muscle-bound egos on the loose. Or, as he had heard them described by Freeman himself during a CNN interview with Marte Price, “Protein-Powdered-Diet-Dick Wannabes. Wannabes who can’t work as a team.”

Despite Freeman’s disdain for Rambo types, Crowley, no less a man of habit than Freeman or any of his eight-man team, clung to his prejudiced view of what he referred to biliously as “Freeman et al.,” by which he meant Special Forces in general. For Crowley and his generation, SpecFor were still cowboys, and as such provided a convenient repository for prejudices in toto, such as Crowley’s privately nursed resentment at having female aviators on his boat. It was a prejudice that, if he ever gave voice to, he knew would end his career overnight. What particularly irked him as captain of the carrier and admiral of the battle group was that if he and other flag officers had been forced by Congress to accept “women fighter pilots”—an oxymoron, in his traditionalist view — why in hell hadn’t they legislated women into Special Forces? Oh no, he thought, Congress wouldn’t allow a woman to be part of a CHISU—“chute in and shoot up”—against the enemy, but by all means bring women onto his boat and let them fly an $80 million aircraft. It was double dealing, forcing him to accept skirts as fighter pilots and yet allowing Freeman types to pick and choose whom they wanted or, more to the point, to exclude those they didn’t want. He was so churned up by Freeman’s appearance on the bridge that for several minutes after the general had departed, Crowley remained on a slow burn, ready to morph into Growly Crowley, the sobriquet he’d been assigned by officers and crew who had run afoul of him during the battle group’s constant patrols in the dangerous waters between Japan and North Korea. “Dammit,” he fumed to Cuso, complaining how the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, in faraway Washington, had e-mailed him a memo whose very wording further raised his ire in its slavish political correctness. The memo informed him that should his female “combat” helo pilot, Lieutenant Kaymara, call sign “MK”—Mary Kaye — experience difficulties associated with menstrual cycles, that he, and his XO, should effect “appropriate nonpsychologically invasive measures to assure this aviatrix is not required to fly combat missions at that time.”

“Aviatrix!” Crowley rasped, immediately circular-filing the hard copy of the CNO’s memo into the bridge’s wicker trash basket. “Aviatrix,” he grumbled anew as he hauled his diminutive figure up into