Final Flight

the island to his office.

“Captain Grafton.”

“Jake, this is the admiral. I’m here with Colonel Qazi and he asked me to call you.”

“Yessir.” Jake listened intently. “Where are you, sir?”

“Uh, I think we’d better skip that. Are you the senior officer in charge?”

“Yessir. I think so.” Jake could hear someone whispering, but he couldn’t make out the words.

In a moment the admiral spoke again. “Qazi has armed a nuclear weapon. He …” Jake heard a muffled phrase, then a new voice came on the line.

“Captain Grafton, I am Colonel Qazi. You have heard Admiral Parker tell you I have armed a nuclear weapon. Do you doubt it?”

“No.”

“Unless you and your men cooperate and do precisely as I tell you, I will detonate this device. I will destroy this ship and every living soul aboard her.”

He paused and Jake pressed the telephone against his ear.

“Did you hear me, Captain?” His voice was calm, assured, confident.

“I heard you.”

“This is what you will do. You will restore power to the weapons elevators servicing the forward magazine. You will call off your marines. You will ensure your crew does not interfere with me or my men as we leave the ship. You will not interfere with the helicopters on the flight deck. If you interfere with me in any way, Captain, if you try to thwart me, I will detonate this device.”

“Let me talk to the admiral.”

“I think not, Captain. This is your decision, not his. You hold his life, your life, and the life of every man on this ship in your hands.”

“Including yours.”

“Including mine. I am in your hands. You have the power to decide if this weapon will be detonated. If it is, you will be responsible.”

Jake tried to laugh. It sounded more like a croak.

“This is deadly serious, Captain.”

“Looks to me like we have a Mexican standoff here, Colonel. You fail if you die here too.”

“No, sir. If this bomb explodes I will have shown the world the Americans cannot be trusted. No one will ever know why this bomb exploded, but the evidence will be irrefutable that it did. Your fleets will be disarmed by the American people. Your ships will be banned from the oceans of the world. I will have dealt a mortal blow to American power. I will have accomplished what the Germans and the Japanese could not in World War II. I will have destroyed the United States Navy. And I will have accomplished it very, very cheaply, at the cost of only my life and a few of my men. Think about it, Captain. You have ten seconds.”

Jake was acutely aware of the sound of his own breathing. He rotated the phone so the transmitter was up over his head and Qazi could not hear it. The bastard sounded so goddamn confident, so sure he had all the cards. And he did. The U.S. Navy was finished if a nuclear weapon detonated aboard a ship; Congress would sink it to the cheers of outraged, frightened voters. And the Soviets would inherit the earth.

“Your answer?”

“How do I know you won’t leave the ship and then blow it up?”

“You don’t, Captain. What is your decision?”

“You’ll get what you want.”

“I thought you would arrive at that rational conclusion. I await an announcement over your public-address system.” The connection broke and Jake was left with a buzzing in his ear. Jake slammed the instrument into its cradle.

Get a grip on yourself, man! Don’t let these sailors see you out of control. He took three or four deep breaths and tried to arrange his face.

“Triblehorn, how long until we can get power restored to the weapons elevators up from the forward magazine?”

“Oh, maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Do it.” Jake turned to the marine officer, Lieutenant Dykstra. “Get your people off the flight deck. Nobody, and I mean nobody, pulls a trigger unless I give my personal approval. If they do, I’ll court-martial them and you.”

A sneer of contempt crossed Dykstra’s face. “I hope to God you know what the fuck you’re doing. Sir.” Dykstra turned and stalked away.

The navigator was still bending over the chart. Jake glanced over his shoulder. The navigator was on the phone, probably to the sailor in the after steering compartment. The emergency helm was there, below the waterline in the after part of the ship, near the giant hydraulic rams that controlled the rudder. The navigator covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked at Jake, who asked, “Where are we?”

The navigator pointed. About ten miles southeast of the anchorage.

“What’s our speed?”

“Seventeen knots.”

“Let’s put on all the turns we can. Work her up to flank speed.”

“There may be ships out there. The radar’s not in service and we only have two lookouts. Visibility is poor. I’m DR-ing our track.” DR meant “dead reckoning,” drawing a line based on speed and time.

“Flank speed.” Jake wanted the United States as far from land as possible in case Qazi pushed the panic button. He would just have to pray that Lady Luck kept this blind, stampeding elephant from colliding with another ship. The two lookouts wouldn’t help much with this limited visibility; by the time they saw and reported a ship on a collision course, it would be too late to avoid the collision. And Lady Luck seemed to be off duty just now.

Jake picked up the 1-MC microphone from its bracket on the engineering watch officer’s desk. The watch officer flipped the switches. This had better be good. Qazi would hear it. He cleared his throat, pushed the button and began to speak.

* * *

His announcement was heard all over the ship, except in those spaces where the public-address system was not working because of fire damage to the wires or loudspeakers. As it happened, two of the silent areas were the portside catwalk on the flight deck and the midships area of the O-3 level, where the waist catapult control rooms were located.

On the portside catwalk forward of the angle, up near the bow, Gunnery Sergeant Garcia stepped over the body of Lance Corporal Van Housen and laid familiar hands on the Browning.50-caliber machine gun. He snapped the ammo box open and carefully fed in the belt of cartridges he had so painfully carried up from the ship’s armory draped around his shoulders. Then he opened the breech and slipped the belt in. He closed the breech and cycled the bolt. It jammed.

He tried again. No. The cartridge felt like it was hitting an obstruction. Don’t tell me! No! He used his fingers to try and seat a cartridge.

They’ve spiked it. They had pushed a metal plug, probably tapered, into the chamber and his attempts to chamber a cartridge had forced the plug deeper into the barrel, jamming it. And Garcia, you ass, you didn’t look first! You should have known!

He looked aft along the length of the catwalk at the helicopters sitting silently on the angle and tried to decide if he had the time to go get a rod to force down the barrel to push out the plug. So near and yet so far! There they sat, and here he was with a weapon that could destroy all three machines right where they were, or better yet, as they lifted off the deck, so they would fall into the sea without damaging anything else. And it wouldn’t take ammo.

Van Housen lay face down. Another dead marine.

At least he had had the sense to pick up another weapon in the armory. It was slung over his shoulder, a Model 700 Remington in.308 caliber with a sniperscope. The marines called it the M-40. He hefted it in his hands and stared at the helicopters. No. The best place for this was up in the island. On Vulture’s Row. From there he could command the entire angled deck. He turned away from the machine gun and the dead marine and went