into? In hours, it seemed, the good feelings of belonging and being accepted had evaporated. Most of the guys White knew had withdrawn into themselves somewhat after hearing about Pellet's death. The only antidote the officers seemed to know was work… work and more work. White had forgotten when he'd slept last. He was exhausted, and the exhaustion dragged at both brain and body like leaden weights.
He'd been helping a crew unchock the A-6 Intruders parked forward of the island. Someone handed him the two massive chocks that had immobilized one Intruder's wheels, and someone else had pointed across the deck at the place where they were supposed to be stowed.
Though P school had provided a kind of basic orientation to the flight deck, White's actual training so far had been strictly on the job, with various petty officers telling him what to do even when he had little understanding of what he was doing or why. Carrying the chocks, he trotted across the flight deck, toward the waist catapults across from the island and aft.
The entire flight deck was one great storm of raw noise and swirling movement. Men in colored jerseys surged back and forth in some impossible, incomprehensible ballet of motion. The noise, the noise was overwhelming, even through the ear protectors built into White's helmet. An Intruder thundered off the bow, and the jet blast whipped at his jacket. He was afraid. He'd heard time and time again that it was possible for a careless man to step into a jet blast and be hurled off the side and into the sea. In combat, the carrier couldn't stop to rescue one man overboard, and the water was so cold he wouldn't survive more than moments anyway.
I could get killed out here. Death was very much on his mind today. Why had Pellet killed himself?
Dam. Where was he supposed to go now? Someone in a yellow jersey turned and stared at him, then shouted something, his mouth working but the words unheard in the thunder surrounding him. Now he was waving at him, telling him to move that way.
The color codes of the jerseys were still hazy. What did yellow mean?
White wasn't sure. Which way now… over there? An odd-looking aircraft was on one of the waist catapults. White searched his memory. Yeah, it was a Prowler, what someone had called a stretched version of the A-6. The plane was being hooked to the cat shuttle, its engines already screaming against the upright barrier of a JBD. More men were gathered around over there. He started toward them.
Now where? These people were all busy. Was he supposed to… He spotted someone in a blue jersey standing close to the Prowler's side and started toward him, chocks still in hand.
Someone yelled. White turned, but kept walking backward. Were they yelling at him? Several men, one in white, the others in yellow, were coming toward him at a dead run. At first, he didn't connect them with himself. He thought he was in the way and took several more steps backward…
Air Ops, right next door to Jefferson's CATCC on the 0–3 deck, was a large compartment made claustrophobic by the clatter of display screens, status boards, computer consoles, radar scopes, and television monitors that seemed to fill every available space. Tombstone had the CAG seat, an office executive's chair positioned on the deck to give him a clear view of most of the consoles around him.
'Just stand easy, Nightmare,' he told Marinaro, who was standing beside him. The man's dark features had taken on a demonic cast in the eerie glow of radar screens and CRTS. 'We'll get you guys up later, if we can.'
'I really want to go with them, Stoney.'
'I know.' Damn it, Tombstone thought. So do I!
Which was why he was holding back on letting Nightmare and Tomboy take the CAG bird up.
'Damn it, Nightmare,' Tombstone snapped. 'I've got other problems on my hands right now! If you want to make yourself useful, grab a seat over there and lend a hand with squadron communications. But get the hell out of my hair!'
'Aye, aye, sir.'
Shit. He'd not wanted to come down on the guy that hard. Maybe the strain was starting to show. He rose from the chair, intending to call Nightmare back…
'God, look there!' another CIC officer shouted. Tombstone froze, staring up at the PLAT monitor suspended from the bulkhead.
'What's the son-of-a-bitch think he's-'
'Oh, Christ!'
Tombstone stared in horror at the bloody spectacle on the TV screen. For a stunned moment there was dead silence in Ops. Then the voices started up again, urgent, worried, but continuing to maintain the flow of communications traffic to the aircraft already aloft.
Operations went on, even when they were punctuated by tragedy. From the look of things on the PLAT screen, a sailor had just backed into the intake of a Prowler readying on Cat Three.
The man was dead, of course. There could be no doubt whatsoever about that. Worse ? from the point of view of flight operations ? though, it appeared that the accident had just killed the Prowler as well. Its starboard engine had shut down. but there was smoke coming from the exhaust and from the intake. From the look of things, a turbine blade had exploded, and that meant bits of shrapnel had just ripped through the aircraft and probably scattered themselves across the deck. Damn!
CHAPTER 22
Chalk this one up to tired men, Tombstone thought.
The flight deck of a supercarrier had often been described as the most lethal working environment in the world, a place where mistakes or carelessness routinely killed people. Thirty minutes after a chain and chock man had stumbled into a Prowler's intake, the fire was out and the aircraft safely evacuated, but hurtling fragments from the Prowler's turbine fan might have damaged some of the Cat Three equipment. Worse, those scattered fragments continued to pose a risk both for Cat Three and for Cat Four next to it. Bits of metal or other debris the size of a bottle cap might still be lying on the deck, hazards that could get sucked into the intakes of other aircraft, damaging them in turn. FOD, or foreign object damage, was the bane of all carrier operations.
In peacetime, the alpha strike would have been cancelled and further catapult launches halted until an FOD walk-down could be carried out, with hundreds of sailors walking in line abreast down the entire length of the flight deck, picking up each bit of debris they found. But this was not peacetime, and a delay now would cripple the operation. Half of Jefferson's aircraft were already headed into Russia at this very moment.
Tombstone reached out and picked up a telephone, punching in the number for the Air Boss. 'This is CAG in Ops,' he said when Barnes came on the line.
'What's your assessment, Boss?'
'Shit, Stoney. Cat Three's down until we can get that Prowler cleared away,' the Air Boss replied.
'Okay. How long? What's the downtime gonna be?'
'They're working on it. Maybe an hour before we can walk-down the area.'
'And Four?'
'Piece of cake. They're starting a walk-down on Four now. Call it thirty minutes.'
Tombstone juggled the numbers in his head. White Storm's flight operations, as laid out in that mountain of paper transmitted from the Pentagon the day before, had allowed for the possibility of two cats going down for that long… but only just. They would have no additional time to spare.
'Okay, Boss,' Tombstone said. 'Put the Prowler over the side. Yeah, munitions and all. Do your walk-downs, but make 'em damned fast. I need those catapults at four-oh ASAP.'
'We'll do our best, CAG.'
'What are you talking to me for, then? Get on it.' He hung up the receiver. On the PLAT monitor covering the
