arm out and rolled him on his back. Then he sat on him and extracted a pair of handcuffs from his gym bag. He snapped them on the admiral’s wrists, then rolled him over and placed a piece of tape across his mouth. Finally he helped the man to his feet. “Nice try, Admiral, but not nice enough.” He pushed the admiral toward the door. “Stay here,” he told Haddad. “And don’t let anyone else onto the bridge. Use grenades if you have to. Don’t let them take you alive.”
23
Callie Grafton stood on the balcony of her hotel room and shivered in the chilly wind. She ignored the spattering raindrops and peered into the darkness, across the lights of the city, out to sea. On clear nights she could see the lights of the
It was two A.M. She had been lying on the bed still fully dressed, too tense to sleep. She had last seen Jake three and a half hours ago, when he bid her good-bye and followed that sailor into the alley. He must have decided to spend the night aboard ship. The officer at fleet landing had called and said that Jake was going out on the liberty boat, and that he had asked the officer to call and tell her he might be unable to get back ashore tonight. That was so like Jake. The heavens could be falling and Jake would have someone call and say that none of the pieces had fallen on him.
He called her every time a plane crashed. Someone would fly into the ground or eject from a burning plane. Before the news was announced or anyone was notified, if he was ashore Jake would call. He would talk of this and that and nothing in particular, and he would tell her he loved her, and he would somehow find a way to make the time of the call stick in her mind. Later she would hear of the crash. And then she would know that he hadn’t been the one injured or killed. She had caught on, of course. Whenever he mentioned the time or asked her what she was watching on television or used any of his other little dodges to make the time of the call memorable, she knew.
She stood at the window and stared down into the street. The puddles reflected the light. God, Naples is such a dreary town in the rain! The dirty stone and mud brown stucco soaks up the light. The place looks as old as it is, old and tired and poor and worn and …
The lobby of the hotel had been a mess when she walked through it this evening on the way to her room. The authorities were trundling a body into an ambulance. She had had to wait on the sidewalk while a uniformed man wearing a submachine gun on a strap checked her identification and compared her name to a list of hotel guests. Only then had she been admitted. In the lobby people in formal clothes sat on the black leather sofas without arms and smoked and talked to men with notebooks. The middle elevator had been roped off. She saw the bullet holes in the plaster and the red stains. Another man with a submachine gun had directed her to take the stairs. She had trudged the three flights up the dark staircase with a naked bulb on every landing. Why were all the staircases and buildings painted earth tones? The whole city had that look, that look … of an impoverished old age, of …
Jake’s calls when someone died were his way of reaching out. He wasn’t so much reassuring her as reassuring himself. He was still alive. He still possessed the only thing on earth he valued — her.
She fingered the drapes and wiped away her tears. Perhaps she loved him too much. What would she ever do if she lost him?
She opened the door and went out on the balcony again, trying to see through the rain. He was out there somewhere, in the darkness, on that sea.
The
The magnesium flare Qazi had ignited in the communications spaces melted through the steel deck and fell into the forward hangar bay, Bay One. It struck an aircraft and broke into several pieces which caroomed onto the deck, already ankle-deep in foam. There the pieces exploded. Molten metal was showered around the bay and several fires were ignited.
But the main threat was in Bay Two, amidships. Here the fires were raging unchecked in an ink-black hell of noise and poison gases. AFFF rained from the sprinklers mounted in the hangar ceiling, but the moisture had little effect other than to lessen the heat somewhat. Sailors fighting the fires stumbled from the oven-like bay every few minutes for a soaking from an open hose. Thus cooled, they were given water to drink, the oxygen canisters in their OBAs were checked and replaced if necessary, and they were sent back into the bay.
Ray Reynolds knew the very existence of the ship was at stake. Already the temperature in the compartments above Bay Two on the O-3 level had reached one hundred fifty degrees and fires were spontaneously igniting. The problem was the smoke trapped in the hangar. The fires here were invisible. No one even knew exactly how many fires there were.
Reynolds gathered the repair-locker leaders on a sponson where exhausted fire fighters lay flaked out on the deck. “We’re going to have to open the fire doors at both ends of the bay.”
The rush of air through the hangar would exhaust the smoke and fan the flames even hotter. Yet if the hose teams formed a line in Bay One with the wind at their backs, they might be able to snuff the fires before they joined and raged into a giant, unquenchable inferno. Bay Three was already awash in AFFF, so the backline was as ready as it would ever be. The fire leaders rushed away to get their men in place.
Reynolds was betting the ship on this maneuver. If he couldn’t get the fire under control, it would only be a matter of time before he must order the ship abandoned.
The magnesium fires were out in Bay One when Reynolds got there. Reynolds was wearing an OBA. The blackened wreckage of burned-out aircraft looked surreal in the stark white light from emergency lanterns, the only lights functioning. Thank God going into Naples he had had the handler move as many planes as possible to the flight deck to clear space in Bay Two for the sailors to play basketball. Reynolds got the hose teams arrayed five abreast amid the wreckage and gave the signal to open the doors. The door in front of him between Bays One and Two opened about six feet, then jammed. It could neither be closed again nor opened any further.
No time to worry about the door. The die was cast. The hose teams crowded together and squeezed through. Already the smoke was going out the aft bay, for the men there had managed to get that door almost completely open before it too jammed. The hose teams laid the AFFF right at the base of the flames as they came to them and kept moving. The bays were littered with smashed, blackened shells of aircraft which the men had to snake around.
The overhead was afire too, and streams of foam were directed upward. A rack holding a half-dozen aircraft external fuel tanks that had been weakened by fire gave way under the pressure of the stream of foam. The tanks, each weighing two hundred pounds, came floating down amid a veritable waterfall of foam. One of them landed on Ray Reynolds and two sailors near him carrying battle lanterns. When the tank was rolled away, Reynolds was dead.
The hose teams continued aft, smothering the fires with foam. One of the men who had been hit by the tank was still alive, so he was carried below to Sick Bay. The bodies of Commander Ray Reynolds and the sailor who died with him were laid on Elevator One with the corpses of fifteen other men who had died fighting the fires.
Jake Grafton stood in the furnace heat of the starboard O-3 level passageway and peered through the murk. The floor was awash with foamy water. The fluorescent lights were off and the only illumination came from battle lanterns mounted near each knee-knocker and hatchway. The little islands of dim white light revealed a smoky haze full of sweating men wrestling charged hoses. The hoses full of the water-foam mixture under immense pressure had the weight and rigidity of steel pipe. They could only be bent with the combined efforts of several sailors swearing mightily inside their OBAs.
Jake started coughing. “Better get an OBA on,” someone shouted, his words distorted by the faceplate on his rubber mask.
Jake pulled his shirttail from his trousers and held it over his face. His eyes were beginning to smart and itch.
