doing up here?”
“We’re signalmen. This is our GQ station.”
“Ain’t nobody on the bridge gonna tell you to run up a signal flag tonight. You guys take a hike.”
The sailors didn’t have to be told twice. They shut the door behind them.
Garcia checked the bridge windows again. Still nobody visible. He looked around the dark signalmen’s shack. There was just enough light coming through the door to make out a dark sweater lying on the worn couch. Garcia pulled it on over his white T-shirt, then buckled the duty belt around his waist. The belt had been draped over his shoulder. It contained spare magazines for the M-16.
Too bad he didn’t have any camouflage grease, because his face would show like a beacon on the dark signal bridge. He glanced at the coffeepot. Coffee grounds wouldn’t help much. The chief’s desk. He rummaged through the drawers and came up with a tin of black shoe polish. He smeared some on his face.
A head was visible in the bridge window. The man wasn’t looking back this way. The head disappeared.
It was now or never. Garcia swallowed hard, gripped the rifle firmly, and sprinted toward the closed watertight entrancedoor to the bridge.
He huddled in the corner, out of the wind and rain, and placed his ear against the door. Nothing. Damn. He tried again. Only the pounding of his heart. He could smell smoke, heavy and acrid. It must be coming from the doors to Elevators One and Two, and being swirled up here by the wind.
The door was heavy and was held shut with six dogs. He moved in front of the door and very carefully raised his head toward the window. Slowly, ever so slowly, careful not to let the rifle barrel touch the metal of the bulkhead or door. More and more of the room came into view, until he was looking directly in the window. Two sailors were visible sitting on the deck with their backs against the forward bulkhead, their arms crossed on their knees and their heads down on their arms. Someone had obviously ordered them into this position and was guarding them. He looked left, trying to see the sentry. No way. There was a little passageway in from this door and window, about four feet in length, and he couldn’t see around that corner. And the sentry couldn’t see this door.
He could, however, see the navigator’s chair and the chart table and the usual compass repeater and ship’s clock and, between the windows, telephone headsets mounted in clips. He looked for reflections in the bridge windows. The windows here were all slanted outward at the top so the view down toward the water and the flight deck would be unimpaired. So no reflections.
He lowered his head away from the window and applied pressure to the lower right dog. It moved. Without sound, thank God. The technician who maintained these fittings apparently didn’t want to risk the captain’s ire. Garcia turned the dog until it was in the open position.
He peered in the window again, taking his time, inching his head up in case someone was there. Nobody. He opened the two dogs on the upper part of the door. This time the door made a noise as the pressure was relieved. Garcia huddled in the corner, as far out of sight of the window as he could get.
Time passed. He watched the dogs, waiting for a lever to betray the touch of a human hand by a movement, no matter how slight. Nothing.
Where in the fuck was Slagle? That was one hell of a phone call he was making to the lieutenant.
Finally he eased back to the window and ever so carefully raised his head until he could see inside with his right eye. There was a man there. A man with a submachine gun in his hands, the strap over his right shoulder and a gym bag over the other. The man was looking out the windows on the starboard side, searching. Garcia lowered his head and held his breath. If he saw the open dogs, the game was up. The gunman would be waiting for the door to open. Garcia begin breathing again and counted seconds. When a half minute had passed he decided to risk the window again.
A loud screech behind him. Garcia spun, ready for anything. God, it was the loudspeaker.
“You there in the catwalk, down on the flight deck. This is Colonel Qazi on the bridge. Leave the flight deck or I will shoot a man here on the bridge. Go below. Now! Or this man dies.”
Gunny Garcia glanced in the window. The gunman was gone. He opened the remaining three dogs and pulled the heavy door open.
“Now, Admiral,” Colonel Qazi said as he hung up the 1-MC mike. “I want you gentlemen to understand me. You and I are going upstairs to Pri-Fly. We won’t be gone long. My two helpers here will ensure no one on the bridge moves a muscle or opens his mouth. They will cheerfully shoot anyone who is so foolish. Come, Admiral.”
Cowboy Parker looked from face to face. Laird James and Jake Grafton had their eyes on him. They were standing with him on the left wing of the bridge, near the captain’s chair. The bridge watch team were all seated on the floor in a row across the bridge, facing aft, their heads down on their knees, one of the gunmen watching them while the other pointed his weapon at the three senior officers. “What are you after, Colonel?”
“No.” Qazi’s voice was flat and hard. “We’re not going to do it that way, Admiral. No conversations.” The muzzle of the pistol twitched in the direction of the door.
Admiral Parker moved and felt the blunt nose of the silencer dig into the back of his neck.
There was no one in the passageway, no one except the dead marine who lay on his side upon the deck by the bridge door. Parker paused and Qazi dug the pistol into his neck. “Step over him.” Parker did so, looking down and feeling very much responsible for the death of that young man. What had gone wrong?
As they climbed the ladder Parker said bitterly, “You’re a bastard.”
“True. And my father was an Englishman. So you’re in big trouble and your next cute little remark will be your last. Believe it. I don’t need an admiral.”
Nothing in his thirty years in the navy had prepared Earl Parker for this … this feeling of despair, frustration, and utter helplessness. He was living a terrible nightmare from which he would never awaken. His men were dying all around him and he was powerless to lift a finger. He was being robbed of everything he had worked a lifetime for, of everything that made life worth living. He was being murdered an inch at a time. Hatred and rage flooded him.
But since he was Earl Parker, none of it showed. He flexed his fists as he topped the ladder, his stride even and confident, his shoulders relaxed, then forced himself to unball his fists. His face remained a mask, an arrangement of flesh under the absolute control of its owner. Don’t let the bastard know he’s getting to you, he told himself, wishing he hadn’t made that last remark. My chance will come. God, please, let it come.
Parker undogged the door to Pri-Fly and pulled it open. Qazi stood just far enough behind him to make any attempt at going for the pistol impossible.
Inside the Pri-Fly compartment, the air boss and assistant boss, both commanders, stood silently and watched Parker and Qazi enter. The three sailors in the compartment kept their eyes on Qazi’s pistol. Without a word, Qazi examined the panel that controlled the ship’s masthead and flight-deck floodlights. Then he glanced at the air boss. “Where is that helicopter that was searching for the man in the water?”
“We sent it to Naples,” the boss said. He named the airfield. Earl Parker was looking at the column of black smoke rising from Elevator Four and being carried aft by the wind. Smaller columns of smoke were coming from Elevators One and Two, forward on the starboard side, and were waffling around the island. On the flight deck below, the planes stood wet and glistening in rows under the red floodlights. Even here, in this sealed compartment, Parker could smell the smoke.
“And the liberty boat?”
“We sent it back to the beach too.”
“You.” Qazi pointed the pistol at the senior enlisted man, a second-class petty officer. “Come here.”
The man looked at the admiral and then at the air boss.
“Do as he says,” the boss said.
The sailor moved slowly, his eyes on the gun.
“Turn off the flight-deck floodlights, wait five seconds, then turn them back on.” The sailor’s hands danced across the switches. The flight deck below seemed to disappear into the night, then reappear. “Again.” The sailor obeyed. “Now once more.”
With the lights back on, Qazi seized the admiral’s arm and backed him up. “All you people leave. Go below. If anyone comes back to this compartment, I will kill them and the hostages on the bridge.” After the sailors and officers filed out, Qazi fired his pistol into the radio transmitter that sat on a shoulder-high shelf near the door. He
