he led the squad that guarded the bridge during GQ, but Sergeant Vehmeier had tonight’s duty section. Now he stood looking at the five marines lying amid blood and shrapnel. One of them was conscious.
“Grenades, Gunny,” the wounded man whispered. His back and side were covered in blood and blood oozed out his left sleeve.
Sergeant Vehmeier lay face down in a pool of gore. Garcia turned him over. The man’s hands were gone, only red meat and white bones remained, and his abdomen was ripped open. He had fallen on one of the grenades, probably the first one. Miraculously, he still had a pulse in his neck. Garcia used both hands to scoop Vehmeier’s intestines back into his abdominal cavity. He rolled Vehmeier over, then stripped off his shirt and used that as a bandage to protect the wound.
“Quick,” the sergeant whispered at a knot of gawking sailors. “Get these men to sick bay, right fucking now! This man first.” The sailors leaped to obey.
Garcia wiped his bloody hands on his trousers. “Get tourniquets on these men,” he directed. He stepped over the casualties and climbed the ladder, his M-16 at the ready.
The man at the top, with his foot caught in the door and sprawled on his back down the ladder, had taken a half dozen rounds in the chest. He was beyond help. When Garcia eased the door open to peer out, the body slipped, making noise. Just below the sailors were making a hell of a racket carrying the casualties away, but Garcia froze anyway.
He waited for the bullets to come. He was sweating and his heart was pounding. Nothing. He peered again through the crack in the door, then eased it open enough to slip through.
There were two men down in the passageway, here on the flight deck level. Garcia picked up the Uzis and pistols lying on the deck. One man was still alive, but he wasn’t going anywhere with that hole in his gut. A gym bag lay near him. Garcia opened it carefully. Grenades and some stuff that looked like plastique. Some fuses.
A crumpled body lay at the bottom of the ladderwell up to the next floor. It had almost a dozen wounds in it. Garcia could see the holes in the aluminum sheeting. One of his marines had fired an M-16 clip through the aluminum and nailed this guy.
The wounded man moved and groaned. Garcia swung the M-16 in his direction. It was tempting. The bastard deserved it. But no.
The sergeant looked up the ladderwell. What was waiting up there? Should he go find out? Or should he take another route? Another route would probably be healthier.
He heard a door opening to his left and leaped right, toward a corner. Even as he did, he heard bullets spanging off the steel. In a corner of his mind it registered that there were no loud reports, and he knew the weapon had a silencer.
He sprawled on the deck and scrambled furiously, trying to ensure his body and legs were behind cover. He rolled over and waited for the gunman to round the turn in the passageway. Slowly, slowly he got to his feet, keeping the rifle pointed. He wiped the sweat from his face with the front of his T-shirt and tried to visualize the corridor that he had just left. The door that opened must have been the door to Flight Deck Control. The bastards must be in there! With all those sailors. He couldn’t shoot through the door for fear of hitting a sailor. Damn!
His thigh felt like it was on fire. He looked. A bullet hole in his trouser leg. He felt his thigh. A slug had grazed him, but not too bad. The wound was bleeding some. Those motherfuckers!
He could hear the sound of men running somewhere in the ship, minute vibrations that could be heard for hundreds of feet, and the faint clank of watertight hatches being slammed shut. These were normal noises mixed in with the hum and whine of machinery that was present every minute of every day. He stood listening now for the sound of a door being eased open or shoes scraping on steel or a weapon clinking ever so faintly against a bulkhead. Of these noises, there were none.
It was coming back to him now, those feelings of combat. Always tense, always listening, always waiting … waiting to kill and waiting to die. He had not felt those feelings for twenty years. But now they were back and it seemed like only yesterday. He was sweating profusely and his mouth was dry. He was desperately thirsty.
He heard a watertight door being opened somewhere behind him but near. He pointed his rifle and waited. Now someone was coming around the corridor, in from the starboard side of the island. It was only Staff Sergeant Slagle and a lance corporal. What was his name? Leggett. Corporal Leggett.
The 1-MC hissed. “Men of
“What do we do now, Gunny?” Slagle asked.
Garcia examined the silencer on one of the pistols he had picked up from the deck. The slide had been machined to take the silencer by someone who knew his business. He pushed the button on the grip and the magazine popped out into his hand. About ten rounds remained. He reinserted the magazine in the grip and checked that the weapon had a round in the chamber and eased the hammer down. Then he stuffed the pistol in his belt. He gave the other weapons to Slagle. “Get on a phone to Captain Mills—”
“He’s on the beach.” Mills was the marine officer-in-charge.
“So call the lieutenant,” Gunny Garcia rasped. First Lieutenant Potter Dykstra was the second in command and the only other marine officer in the detachment. “Tell him the squad that was on the way to the bridge got wiped out by grenades. And there is at least one gunman in Flight Deck Control. Find out what the lieutenant wants to do. Leggett, you stay right here. If anybody carrying a weapon comes out of Flight Deck Control, kill him. These fuckers are dressed like sailors. I’m going up to the bridge and see what’s what.”
Slagle turned and trotted away.
“Listen, Leggett. These assholes got grenades. They’re liable to toss one out here to see if they can perforate you. Keep your head out of your ass.”
“You bet, Gunny.” Leggett licked his lips and started to peer around the corner.
“Don’t do that, dummy. If you’ve gotta take a peek, get down on the deck and peek around the corner down low. And don’t let him shoot you in the head.” With that, Gunny Garcia turned and went up the ladder in the back of the island, his M-16 pointed ahead of him with the butt braced against his hip.
The fires on the hangar deck were out of control almost immediately after the paint lockers exploded. Men came pouring out of the shops and repair lockers and attacked the fires with AFFF (aqueous film-forming foam) from the fire-fighting stations located around the bay, but the burning paint and chemicals from the sabotaged lockers had been sprayed everywhere, on aircraft, in open cockpits, in the drip pans under the planes, and on aircraft tires. The tires ignited almost immediately and gave off a heavy, thick black smoke. When the CON-FLAG watches failed to close the two interior fire doors, the hangar deck officer, a lieutenant, ordered the doors closed manually. And he sent a man up to the nearest CONFLAG station to light off the hangar deck sprinkler system.
The men fighting the fires were relieved in shifts to don Oxygen-Breathing Apparatus (OBAs), which were self-contained breathing systems. Although the fires were producing immense quantities of toxic gases and smoke, most of it was being vented out the open elevator doors. And the wind was funneling in the doors, feeding the fires.
A minute after he had been dispatched to the CONFLAG station, the messenger was back and informed the hangar deck officer that the CONFLAG watchstander was dead, shot, and the sprinkler control system was shot full of holes.
The hangar deck officer called Damage-Control Central. The hangar deck sprinking system was turned on from DC Central, almost four minutes after the paint lockers had exploded. The sprinklers had little visible effect on the fires, so with the concurrence of the Damage Control Assistant (the officer in actual charge of the ship’s minute-to-minute damage control efforts) in DC Central, the elevator doors on the sides of the bays were closed too. In seconds the interior of Bays Two and Three filled with black smoke and toxic gases. The smoke became so thick that the fire fighters were literally blind inside their flexible rubber masks. Men worked by feel. They hung onto hoses with a death grip, and if one tripped and fell, he dragged men down on both sides of him. A couple men panicked and hyperventilated inside the self-contained OBAs and let go of their hoses. Lost, blind, and seemingly unable to breathe, they ripped off their OBAs and passed out within seconds from the toxic fumes.
Still, the fire-fighting effort continued. In less than ten minutes the fires in Bay One, the forward bay, were
