passageway, since there hadn’t been room for them in the bubble. The air here was cooler, and calm.
Senator Cavel got down to cases that evening after dinner in the flag mess. The admiral’s chief of staff, operations officer, and aide left after dessert. Vice-Admiral Lewis had flown from the ship that afternoon, telling the congressman he had to get back to Naples. Now just Admiral Parker, Jake, and the four congressmen were sitting around the table. One of the representatives lit a cigar, and Jake greedily inhaled some smoke. It made him slightly dizzy. With a wry grimace, he pushed his chair further away from the table to avoid the fumes.
The senator played with the spoon beside his coffee cup. It was real silver, and under the cup was a real white linen tablecloth. Admirals rated the good stuff.
“How come, Admiral, you people had to sink that boat?”
“It was running without lights and closing the task group in a suspicious manner. It refused to identify itself or change course. It shot at one of our planes.”
“Would you have sunk it if it hadn’t opened fire on Captain Grafton’s plane?”
Cowboy Parker scanned the faces gathered around the table. “Has everyone here got a clearance?”
“Yessir,” Senator Cavel boomed. “We all do. Top Secret. And we’ve read the classified action report. We know Captain Grafton turned on his aircraft’s lights — apparently no one in the eastern Mediterranean is very fond of lights — and pointed his plane directly at that boat. At a very low altitude. Only then did the crew of the boat open fire. Now what we are trying to find out is whether or not his actions caused the captain of that boat to feel he was under attack.” The senator looked at his colleagues. None of them spoke. He resumed, “You do think the men in that boat had the right to defend themselves in international waters, don’t you?”
“Yes, Senator, they had that right.” Parker picked his words carefully. “But only if they were under attack or had reason to believe an attack was imminent. We know that boat wasn’t under attack, and the appearance of a low-flying plane with its position lights on is not what I would call an indicator of an imminent, forthcoming attack.”
“We’ll be the judge of that, Admiral.”
“I’m sure,” Parker said. “You people can debate it for weeks. I didn’t have weeks. I’m responsible for a lot of lives and ships out here, Senator. You gentlemen have read the Rules of Engagement we operate under. You know that at some point I have to use my own judgment.”
The representative with the cigar spoke up. This was Victor Gilbert, from a dirt-poor conservative district in the Deep South. He was the same one that found Admiral Lewis a tad too slippery earlier in the day. “Admiral Parker, we don’t want you people to start a war out here.” He pronounced “here” as “hyah.” “I understand that the navy is just obeying orders from the administration. I think the orders are misconceived, not in the national interest, but I’m not the president. However, I am a congressman. My constituents don’t want a war. I can’t make it any plainer, Admiral.”
“Sir,” Parker said. “I agree wholeheartedly with your constituents. I don’t want a war, either. I’m doing everything I can to prevent one from happening. On the other hand, I have to protect these ships.”
“Captain,” the senator said, looking at Jake, “why did you turn on your lights and fly right at that boat?”
Every eye in the place was on Jake Grafton. “I was trying to spook him. If he was hostile, we wanted to know it sooner rather than later. We can’t sit here like bumps—”
Senator Cavel gestured angrily. “In my twenty years in the senate, I’ve found that a man who goes looking for a fight usually finds one.
“The men on that boat were looking for the fight,” Jake shot back. “We can’t wait until they pop a cruise missile against a ship before we decide what we’re going to do about it.”
“Admiral, you never answered my question. Would you have sunk that boat if it hadn’t opened fire on Captain Grafton?”
Parker sipped his coffee and took his time before he spoke, “If they had continued on course toward the task group, I would have had the nearest screening ship fire warning shots. Yes, I’d have been forced to the conclusion that attack was imminent if they had ignored the warning shots, and I’d have defended this task group.”
“Do your superiors know what you would have done?” Cavel pressed.
Parker set his cup firmly in its saucer. “My superiors sent me here with written guidelines, called Rules of Engagement. I follow them. If anybody threatens to kill my people or sink my ships, I’ll shoot first. That’s in the ROE.”
“But it all hinges on whether or not there is a threat. You alone determine that, and nobody elected you to anything. If you’re wrong, we may be in a war.”
Parker turned his hand over and inclined his head an inch.
“Pretty goddamn convenient if you ask me, Admiral, that your air wing commander just happened to be flying the plane that needed to zap somebody,” Senator Cavel said. “That doesn’t look so good. You can bet your pension that the pundits in the States are pointing to that as proof positive that you and the administration are up to something sleazy.”
Parker explained that the air wing commander routinely flies missions with his crews. He concluded, “I can’t worry about how this looks on the front pages back in the States on Monday morning. My problems are here and now.”
“It strikes me, Admiral,” Victor Gilbert said, “that you’ve got a damn tough job.” He puffed his cigar three or four times quickly, then took a deep drag and blew the smoke down the table, toward Jake. “You fuck this up and the navy will hang you by the balls. If they don’t, we will.”
A trace of a smile flickered on Parker’s lips. “I think we understand each other, gentlemen.”
After Jake finished answering questions at the press conference in the wardroom, the congressional delegation trooped into the lights of the television cameras. They spoke as a group, then individually. Representative Gilbert, sans cigar, was mouthing a string of one-liners for the evening news shows when Jake joined Farnsworth at the door and opened it as quietly as he could. Farnsworth had operated the tape recorder. In the lounge Farnsworth told Jake, “You did fine, sir.”
“I strategized my conformity,” Jake Grafton muttered.
Farnsworth nodded sagely. “Why couldn’t you have woven my name in there someplace? I always like to see my name in the paper.”
“I want to read that transcript before it goes anywhere.” Two can play this game, Jake thought.
“Should I put in all the ‘uhs’ and ‘ands’ and sentence fragments, or should I clean it up so that it reads like English?”
“Farnsworth …”
“An excellent choice, sir. It’ll be on your desk in two hours.”
11
It was five minutes to four in the morning when Jake Grafton walked into the Carrier Air Traffic Control Center (CATCC) space and dropped onto the vinyl-covered couch beside the air operations officer, Commander Ken Walker. As usual, he surveyed the plexiglas status boards that lined the front of the compartment and listed all the aircraft waiting on deck to be launched and all the aircraft airborne awaiting recovery while he bantered with several of the squadron skippers and executive officers who were trailing in. The launch was scheduled to go on the hour, and as soon as the launch was complete, the recovery would follow.
CATCC, pronounced “cat-see,” was the nerve center of carrier operations at night. Two monitors suspended near the overhead displayed the video from the island and flight deck cameras continuously. Enlisted “talkers” wearing sound-powered telephone headsets stood behind the status boards and updated the information with yellow grease pencils. The air ops officer sat on the vinyl couch where he could see it all and dictate orders to his assistant, who sat in front of him at a desk surrounded by a battery of intercom boxes and telephones.
The room was dark except for a minuscule light over the desk and red lights that illuminated the yellow words and numbers on the status boards. Behind the couch where the heavies sat, junior officers from each of the squadrons with planes aloft stood shoulder to shoulder. They were there to give advice and answer questions, if
