his rifle against the hole and opened fire. The M-16 slugs spanged against the canister and tore into Youssef’s arm and ripped his throat apart.
The demolition man huddled against the door. He pulled his backpack off and began packing the dogs with plastique, working in the darkness without his flashlight entirely by feel. Bullets sprayed periodically through the one-inch hole blown by the shaped charge as the muzzle flashes strobed the smokefilled atmosphere. The demolition man cringed under the lashings of the thunderous reports of the M-16, magnified to soulnumbing intensity in this enclosed steel box. Between rifle bursts he could hear an alarm ringing continuously.
In the compartment on the other side of the door, the senior of the three young marines there was trying desperately to inform someone of their plight. The overpressure from the shaped charge that blasted a hole in the door had practically deafened them. Still, the sergeant could hear well enough to learn that the phones and intercom box on the wall were dead. He had already triggered the alarm, which also rang in Central Control, in the main engineering station, and on the bridge. One man was vomiting; he already had too much of the gas. The man at the door changed the magazine in his rifle and sent another burst through the hole. The rifle sounded to him as if it were being fired in a vacuum.
The senior marine was Sergeant Bo Albright from Decatur, Georgia. He groped through the silent, choking darkness for the bulkhead-mounted controls which would flood the magazines. He found them and pulled the safety pin from the lever that energized the system. He pulled the lever down. A row of green lights illuminated above a series of six buttons. He jabbed the first two buttons and held them. In three seconds the lights turned from green to red. He pushed the buttons in succession until all the lights were red.
In the compartment two decks below his feet that ran the width of the ship, the actual magazines, water rushed in from the sea.
“Get away from the door,” Albright screamed into the ear of the rifleman. Together they pushed a desk away from the wall and crouched behind it with their rifles. They were as far away from the door as they could get. Albright stuck his fingers in his ears, scrunched his eyes shut, and opened his mouth. He waited.
The plastique around the door detonated. The concussion jolted them with the wallop of a baseball bat.
Albright peered through the darkness, blinking rapidly, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs. They would be coming!
Lights through the gap where the door had been! He triggered a burst. Another. Something was thudding into the desk. He fired again.
He was falling. Slowly, languidly, drifting and falling. The gas! He squeezed the trigger on the rifle and held it down as he went over the edge and tumbled into a black, alien vastness.
“Wake up, Ski. Wake up.” The sailor shook the catapult captain vigorously. “Goddammit Ski, wake up!”
Aviation Boatswains Mate (Equipment) Second-Class Eugene Kowalski groaned and opened one eye. “Okay, asshole, I’m awake. We’d better be fucking sinking or …”
“We’re at GQ, Ski. A bunch of terrorists have landed on the flight deck. No shit.”
Kowalski groaned again and sat up. He was on the floor of the waist catapult control station, still in civilian clothes. No doubt someone had carried him here to sleep it off when he came back to the ship drunk. That was what usually happened. He had awakened here on the floor of the waist bubble before — several times, in fact. “Terrorists, huh?”
“Fucking A. And the captain and the admiral are hostages on the bridge and there’s a big fire in the hangar and one in the comm spaces.” He drew a breath. “And three choppers full of terrorists landed on the flight deck a little bit ago.”
“Cut me some fucking slack, Pak. You idiots didn’t let me sleep through all of that.”
“What could you have done? And this is your GQ station, so when they called it away you were right here. We’d have woke you up for a launch.” His voice was so sincere that Kowalski eyed the Korean. Maybe he was telling the truth.
“So how come you woke me up now?”
“You ain’t gonna believe this, Ski. One of those choppers is sitting right on top of number-four JBD. Right smack dab on top of it.”
Kowalski took his time about standing up. Pak grabbed him under the armpit to help and Ski shook him off. He finally got erect and remained that way by hanging onto the cat officer’s little desk.
“Jesus, Ski, you pissed your pants.”
“There’s some aspirin in my desk. Get me three of them.” His desk was in the Cat Four control room. “And some water. A glass of water.”
“We ain’t got …”
“Put it in a coffee cup.” Pak dashed out. The cat captain lifted himself into the cat officer’s raised chair and rested his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands. After a moment he felt his crotch. It was wet. He tried to remember how he had gotten back to the ship. Captain Grafton was in there somewhere, but the rest was hazy. Maybe the XO was right. Maybe he was an alcoholic.
He slipped off the chair and rushed out the door of the bubble. Here he was on a little sponson on the O-3 level, outside the skin of the ship. He grabbed hold of the safety wire and leaned out and retched. The wind swirled some of the vomit back onto him. He puked until he had the dry heaves, and when they subsided he took off his torn sport shirt, wiped his face with it, and threw it over the side. The stench of something burning was strong. Too strong. It made him feel sick again. He went back into the bubble and collapsed into the cat officer’s padded chair.
Pak came back with two other guys. “A committee, huh?” They stood and watched Ski swallow the aspirin and drink the water. “Where’s Laura?” Laura was the captain of number-three catapult.
“He didn’t get back. He’s on the beach.”
Ski sat the cup down with a bang. “Okay, let’s take a look. Raise this thing.”
The three sailors looked at each other in the weak glow of the little red lights here in the bubble. “The terrorists got guns, Ski. They’ve been shooting people right and left. They have the captain and admiral—”
“This bubble’s bulletproof, fireproof, and bombproof. They can’t do nothing to us in here.”
“Yeah, but they could get into the cat control rooms and—”
“We’ll have to risk it. I ain’t gonna get out on the catwalk and stick my head up over the edge.”
“Pak did. That’s how he knows there’s a chopper on four JBD. And he went back and checked the fifty caliber on the stern. The marine back there is dead, shot, and the ammo belt is missing.” Pak nodded nervous confirmation.
Kowalski shook his head. “And I’ll bet the grunt on the port bow gun is dead too and the belt’s in the water. Yeah. Well. Pak, you’re an idiot. We gotta raise the bubble. But it wouldn’t hurt to disable the horn.”
One of the men went outside the cab and used a knife to saw through the wire to the warning Klaxon that sounded every time the control bubble went up or down. When he returned, he pushed a button on the bulkhead near the door. As the bubble began to slowly rise in splendid, and safe, silence he dogged down the entrance hatch.
The control cab rose on its hydraulic arms until it protruded eighteen inches above the level of the flight deck. Everything above deck was glass, inch-thick glass that was tilted in at the top so that objects striking it would be deflected upward. Inside the cab, all four men stood with knees bent so only their eyes were above the lower edge of the window. They stared at the helicopters on the flight deck, stark in the island’s red floodlights, rotors stationary. The sentries guarding them were also visible. The lights in the control cab were off so the men on deck could not see in, yet when the sentry turned their way, all four dropped their heads down below the window. In a moment one of them raised up for another peek.
“They’re civilian choppers. See, that’s Italian on the side of that one.”
“What’ya expect? Chinese? Look over there. See that guy with the submachine gun? He’s one of them.”
“He’s dressed like a sailor,” Kowalski said.
“Yeah. They all are. And they got the captain …”
“Sure. Yeah. I got that.” Kowalski picked up the phone and held it in his hand. “Maybe we oughta call the office. Maybe the bosun’s up there, or one of the chiefs.” The office he was referring to was the V-2 division office, where the khaki in charge of the catapults had their desks. He stared aft at the third helicopter. From this angle it certainly looked like it was sitting on the JBD.
