'You'll have dinner with us this evening, Miss Drake?' The admiral was trying to be charming, but somehow it wasn't coming off well. He seemed ruffled by her challenging approach toward Tombstone.
'Sorry, we can't. We'll need to get back to our hotel. In fact, if we can arrange it, it would probably be easiest if we could conduct most of our interviews with the commander in Bangkok instead of out here. Possibly at our hotel?'
'As you wish. How long will you need him?'
'Oh, two or three sessions will be enough. I imagine we could fit him in for an hour or two these next few evenings.'
Tombstone groaned to himself. 'May I remind the admiral,' he said, picking with care the words he could use in front of the press, 'that I've been assigned to temporary duty ashore.'
'I don't think that will be a problem, Stoney. We can find someone to take your place. 'Full cooperation,' remember?'
It appeared that there would be no escape.
Twenty minutes later he was leading Pamela and her crew through the twisting bowels of Jefferson, taking them down the island deck by deck until they were in the maze of passageways beneath the flight deck. The experience of walking down one of Jefferson's long interior corridors never failed to amaze a first-time visitor. The passageways ran straight for hundreds of feet; every thirty feet or so they were interrupted by a cross frame with an oval-shaped door called a 'knee-knocker' because they forced a tall person to simultaneously stoop and step high to go through. Watching someone approach down a passageway was like watching one's own reflection in an endlessly reflected series of arched mirrors.
'My God,' Baughman said breathlessly as they turned a sudden corner and confronted another infinite regression of knee-knockers. 'How many miles of tunnels do you have in this thing?'
Tombstone grinned. 'Never counted 'em. It might give you an idea of her size, though, if you think of Jefferson as an eighty-story building lying on her side. In some ways, she's a self-contained city. We've got a population of over six thousand, with one radio station and two television stations, a barber shop, a hospital complete with OR, a dentist's office, a ship's exchange which passes for our own shopping mall, a newspaper and printing office, laundry service, a hobby shop.'
'Anybody ever get lost down here?' Pamela asked. She stepped back against a gray-painted bulkhead as three dungaree-clad sailors squeezed past, going the other way.
'All the time,' Tombstone replied. 'Everybody carries maps the first few days they're aboard. After that, well… I know I'd get lost trying to find my way around down in snipe country, and I've been aboard six months.'
'Snipe country?'
'Engineering spaces, below and aft. Don't worry. That's not where we're going.'
'Do you know where we're going?' Griffith said. He was out of breath, lugging the bulky camera he balanced on his shoulder. He'd taken a number of shots of various parts of the ship at Pamela's direction, but he looked as though he'd be a lot happier taping congressmen in a shore-based studio.
'Sure thing, Mr. Griffith. This way.'
They took another turn into a blind corner with a ladder zigzagging precipitously into the depths of the ship. He led them down three levels.
Pamela seemed to be bearing up well under the indignities of navigating the steep ladders in her skirt; more than once, though, Tombstone had to lead the way with a bellowed 'make a hole' to clear the sightseeing sailors who had gathered near the base of the next ladder down. It seemed that Jefferson's grape vine was working at full efficiency, alerting sailors to the fact that a woman was making a tour of the vessel.
'We were on the 0–3 deck,' he explained as they left the ladder and doubled back in an unexpected direction. 'That's the level immediately under the 'roof,' or flight deck. Now we're on the 0–1 level, coming up on the hangar deck.'
'Does that mean we're as far down in the ship as we can go?'
'Hardly. It means the decks below this one are numbered differently…
one, two, three, and so on down to the keel. Counting the island, Jefferson is twenty stories tall.'
They made one last turn and emerged into a vast, steel-lined cavern.
A visitor's first look at Jefferson's hangar deck never failed to raise the same emotions: surprise and awe. Thirty feet deep, two thirds the length of the carrier and covering two acres, the vast chamber looked like the inside of some immense shoreside warehouse. The glimpses of sunlight and blue sea caught through the huge, oval elevator bays were so restricted that they might as well have been views overlooking a river from a storage building back home.
The air rang and echoed with shouted orders, the roar of tractors, the clatter of tools and metal on metal.
Most of the deck space was occupied by aircraft, each with wings folded in a characteristic way depending on its type: F-14s with their variable-sweep wings angled back along their flanks, A-6 Intruders with the wings broken in the middle and folded across their spines, a lone Hawkeye with wings twisted at right angles and rotated back to avoid the dish-shaped radome on its back.
Space not occupied by aircraft was made hazardous by yellow-painted tractors, called mules, which busied about in a strange blend of geometry and ballet.
'It's enormous!' Pamela said.
'Yup,' Tombstone agreed. 'Follow me.'
'What's that smell?' Baughman asked.
Tombstone sniffed the air. Curiously, he was aware of Pamela's perfume, a subtle hint of roses and vanilla, but nothing more. 'Probably a mix of oil and JP5,' he said. 'That's what we use for jet fuel. After you've been aboard awhile, you don't even notice it.'
'You carry a lot of jet fuel on board?' Pamela asked.
'About two million gallons.'
'My God!' Griffith said. 'That stuff's pretty explosive, isn't it?'
'Yeah. We have to be pretty careful with it.'
Pamela gave him a searching, sideways look. 'Why do you carry so much?'
Tombstone laughed. 'Actually, it's not enough. We have fifty or sixty active aircraft at any given time. Each one flies twice a day, and burns two, maybe three thousand gallons each time up. At that rate, two million gallons doesn't last nearly long enough! We need to take on more fuel just about every week.'
'I thought nuclear carriers didn't need replenishment.'
'To run the engines, no. Jefferson's nuclear fuel supply will keep her cruising sixty thousand miles a year for fifteen years, sure, and uranium takes up only a tiny fraction of the space a load of fuel oil would. In fact, because of that, we can carry more avgas than sep1 conventional carriers do. But we still have to take on fresh supplies pretty often. Not just avgas either, but food, stores of all kinds. One operation like Wonsan pretty much wipes us out on munitions too. That's why we put in at Japan afterwards, to stock up.'
As he talked, he led them across the tangled maze of the hangar deck toward one of the huge, oval cutaway openings in the side of the ship.
'This is one of the elevators?' Griffith asked.
'That's right. Port side aft. Actually, it's a section of the flight deck which moves up and down on those rails along the outside of the hull. We have four of them, and they can lift sixty-five tons at a time. We use them to transfer aircraft back and forth between the hangar deck and the roof.'
As they stepped across the yellow-and-orange painted warning stripes which marked the joint between deck and elevator, Pamela stopped and looked at the opening, large enough to pass an aircraft with its wings folded. 'You know, Commander, a big question being debated back on Capitol Hill these days is whether aircraft carriers are too vulnerable to be worthwhile in a modern war. And now that I've seen one, I have to wonder if your critics aren't right.'
'What do you mean?' He led the group to a railing, out of the way of a mule and a team of yellow-jacketed deck handlers maneuvering an F-14 Tomcat onto the elevator. The dark waters of Sattahip Bay lapped at the ship's side twenty feet below.
'What did you say… two million gallons of aviation fuel? What happens if an enemy missile flies through this big hole in the ship's side?'
