off. Just move the desk and strip this old wax off and rewax it. Clean it up before it discolors the linoleum.”
“Yessir.”
“Compartment’s unsat. Get this deck in shape.” Without another word Captain James led the inspection party through the door and along a passageway toward the outside skin of the ship. He paused before a rest room, a “head.”
“VF-11 space, sir,” the clipboard man informed him.
In the captain went The enlisted man in charge of keeping the space clean snapped to attention. Urinals lined one wall and stalls the other.
The deck was clean as a wedding dress. Jake nodded at the sailor, who appeared to be about nineteen. James looked into crannies on the bulkhead formed by the angle iron. Nothing there. This place shone like a new penny. The captain stuck his head into the nearest urinal and looked around under the porcelain lip. “Corrosion,” he announced, straightening. “Take a look, sailor.”
To his credit, the sailor didn’t hesitate. He stuck his head in just like the captain, held it two seconds, then straightened and said, “Yes, sir. I see it, sir.”
“Captain Grafton, come look at this.” The Old Man was checking all the others. “Corrosion in all of them. These men aren’t cleaning the inside of these urinals. That corrosion will eat through the porcelain if it’s not removed, and then we’ll have to replace the urinals. We’ve got a brand new ship here, three billion dollars’ worth, and unless we take care of it, it’s going to fall apart around us. I want these urinals kept clean. Get some soft brushes for these men to use, Captain. The men will do a good job if they have the proper tools,”
“Yessir.”
“Other than that, you have a good space here, sailor,” Captain James said to the man, whose chest swelled visibly. “Above average.”
“What’s your name,” Jake asked the sailor, who was wearing a T-shirt instead of his uniform shirt since he was on a cleaning detail.
“Zickefoose, sir.”
“Keep up the good work.”
Back in the passageway the captain went over the results on the clipboard of all the spaces he had looked at this morning. He had been in portions of seven zones and he had graded ten compartments unsatisfactory. “CAG,” he told Jake, “Tomorrow I would appreciate you and your staff reinspecting every failed compartment the air wing owns.” Jake would need to use most of the officers on his staff or he would be at it all day. “I want more emphasis put on cleanliness and material condition.”
The captain’s eyes fell on the watertight doorway in the bulkhead. He ran his finger along the knife-edge, the bronze edge that the heavy door sealed against. The knife-edge met a rubber grommet on the door when the door was closed and formed a seal. “This knife-edge is nicked. Is it on the list for the DCA?” The Damage Control Assistant, the officer standing behind Jake, was in charge of maintenance on all watertight fittings and fire-fighting gear. The damage control petty officer in each squadron or ship’s division reported discrepancies to the DCA, who used his own staff to make repairs.
The first-class flipped to a list on the bottom of his clipboard. “Yessir,” the petty officer announced, and read off the hatch number.
“When was it reported?”
The date was over two months ago. The captain merely looked at the DCA, turned, and walked away.
He paused at the first red fire bottle he came to and flipped the inspection tag up so he could read it. “How much does a fully charged CO2 bottle weigh?”
“Fifty-two pounds, sir,” the DCA told him.
“How much does it weigh empty?” The captain began unstrapping the red bottle from the bulkhead bracket.
“Thirty-five pounds or so, Captain.” A look of foreboding crossed the DCA’s face and he shot a glance at Grafton.
“The VF-11 airman who has been weighing this bottle has been diligent. He has correctly noted it weighs 35.1 pounds. Every inspection, every month. It’s empty.”
Laird James hefted the bottle, then passed it to Jake. “CAG, I want a report from you. I want names and dates. Explain to me how a sailor can perform his duties diligently and thoroughly, and still accomplish absolutely nothing. Explain to me how his efforts contribute to the combat readiness of this ship. This sailor’s chief, his division officer, his department head, and his commanding officer are about to get charged with dereliction of duty. I want the report in twelve hours.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Jake Grafton said. “But these people work for me. I’ll decide when and if they get disciplined.”
Laird James cocked his head slightly and his mouth got even smaller than it usually was. He stared at Jake. In the navy these two officers had spent their careers in, the air wing commander was an officer with the rank of commander, and he answered to the captain of the carrier for a variety of things both operational and administrative. The CAG used to be subordinate to the ship’s captain. But not anymore. The navy had just recently made the air wing commander a captain’s billet — Super-CAG was the acronym currently popular — and had given him almost complete control over the ship’s airplanes and weapons. Laird James and Jake Grafton were still feeling out this new relationship. Laird James made no secret of the fact he didn’t like it very much. His lips barely moved when he spoke. “I won’t tolerate incompetence on this ship, CAG. Anyone’s incompetence. It may be your air wing, but this is my ship. There had better not be any more empty fire bottles in spaces assigned to your squadrons.” His eyes flicked to the DCA. “There had better not be any more empty fire bottles on this ship.”
The captain whirled and loped away for the bridge. His marine orderly strode along behind, trying to keep up. As he watched them go, the DCA muttered to Jake, “That’s the first time I ever saw a captain in the U.S. Navy stick his head in a urinal. The—”
Jake cut him off. “He
The skipper of the VF-11 Red Rippers, Harvey Schultz, was short and built like a fireplug. He was on a permanent diet after a series of confrontations with medical officers over his borderline noncompliance with the navy’s body-fat guidelines. He argued his neck was too skinny, but the doctors said his waist was too big and their opinions were the only ones that counted. Behind his back, his junior officers called him Jack Spratt. The face above the stocky body was lined and seamed and looked like a hundred miles of bad road. The bags under his eyes even had their own bags. He was so ugly he was handsome, or so Callie had once told Jake after she met him.
“Find out why Airman Potocky doesn’t know the difference between an empty fire extinguisher and a full one,” Jake told Schultz after relating the incident. “I have to write a report for the captain. Gimme the names of chief, division officer, and department head.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Check every fire bottle that kid is responsible for. Have it done and report back to me within an hour. By the way, your man Zickefoose had the cleanest head I’ve ever seen. You tell him I said that.”
“Is this fire bottle business going to be a flap, CAG?”
“Nothing like it would have been if there had been a fire and someone had tried to put it out with that extinguisher.”
“That’s comforting.”
Jake gulped the air when he stepped out onto the flight deck. He always thought he could detect the smell of oil in the processed air inside the ship. The air inside had a distinctive odor and right now he had had enough of it.
The sky was laced with broken clouds. The sea looked almost black, except for the few spots where the sunlight touched it. The task group was steaming west around the southern edge of Sicily. The two alert fighters were sitting in the hookup areas of the waist catapults, and the crews in the cockpits waved as he went by, then resumed reading their paperback novels.
Jake saw Ray Reynolds standing by the port catwalk near the optical landing system and walked over to him. Reynolds was watching four marines in camouflage fatigues install a fifty-caliber machine gun in the catwalk. Jake
