Gator scampered out of range and dodged behind the filing cabinet.
“Only if you promise to let me read it when you’re done with it.
Though what that woman could ever see in you is a mystery to us all.”
“Gator,” Bird Dog howled, darting around the file cabinet and desperately trying to get his hands on his RIO’s. “I swear to God, you’re going to be puking your guts out in the back of that Tomcat when I get my hands on you. I swear it!”
“Looks like a damned kindergarten around here,” the operations chief snapped. “Gator, damn it, give him his envelope. Let him drool over it a while so he’ll eventually get back to work. You heard the admiral we don’t have time to fuck around with this.”
Gator yielded up the pink envelope to his pilot, but only after running it under his nose and taking a long appreciative sniff of the delicate scent. “It still smells like” “Gator,” the chief of operations said warningly. “Don’t you have to be somewhere else?”
“I guess I do at that,” Gator answered mildly. He ambled to the door, and heading back down toward Strike Planning said, “Let me know when he’s sane again. Captain.”
Bird Dog held on to the letter with both hands and looked pleadingly at the chief of operations. “Could I” The chief scowled at him. “Fifteen minutes. Get the hell down to your compartment, read the letter from your honey, then get the hell back up here. And when you’re back here, mister, I want your full attention focused on what we’ve got to do.
You got that?”
“Yes, sir!” Bird Dog smiled and headed for the door.
Callie’s timing was perfect. A letter arriving just as he made a masterstroke in his career! How could she have known?
Bird Dog darted down to the compartment, dodging other sailors and leaping easily over knee-knockers. He flung open the door to his stateroom, made sure his roommate wasn’t skulking in a corner, and threw himself down on the lower bunk. He paused to take a deep, appreciative sniff of the letter before he delicately teased the envelope flap away from the body of it. The smell of perfume grew stronger. He inhaled deeply, then drew out the two folded pages of paper.
Only two sheet she frowned slightly, then dismissed the feeling.
Callie wasn’t much for long letters, he knew, though he himself could have written ten or fifteen pages to her every night if he had the time, pouring out his need for her, his plans, and his description of the life they’d have together eventually. Still The first words stopped his breath. He read the first paragraph again, trying to understand what his eyes were seeing, at a complete loss as to understand why it sounded like his fiancee was … she was. Dumping him? How could she? Gradually, his heart started to beat again, though it had taken a dive to somewhere down behind his navel.
The possibility that Callie wouldn’t follow through with their plans, would find someone else while he was on cruise, had never even occurred to him.
He let the pages flutter from his hand and land on the worn, nubby carpet on his deck. This would take some time to think through, some planning to figure out just how to convince her that she was making a terrible mistake. Time he didn’t have right now.
When Bird Dog walked back into the Operations Department only four minutes after he’d left, the rest of the staff looked startled, then maintained a cautious silence. There was no teasing, no joshing about what he’d been doing in those moments alone in his stateroom. Whether it was the short time span or the expression on his face, every single officer there seemed to know. Know, and commiserate. At least half of them had had the experience of receiving a Dear John letter while out on cruise. But the predictability of the event made it no less tragic for the officer involved.
Bird Dog seated himself at his desk, toggled his mouse to dissolve the flying-toaster screen saver into shards of color, and called up the beginning of his operational plan. Within minutes, he was immersed in the intricacies of it.
The noise level in the Operations compartment gradually returned to normal. Everyone left Bird Dog alone.
“We’re still afloat, if that’s what you mean.” Captain Heather’s voice sounded infinitely weary. “Damage control is still de-smoking and dewatering the ship, but I don’t think we’re in any imminent danger of sinking. At least I hope we’re not.”
He ran one hand over his face, rubbing wearily at the skin that seemed to sag on his cheeKbones. his leg had been hastily splinted, and he held it out in front of him as he squirmed in his command chair. If the corpsman had had his way, the captain would be down on the mess decks with the other casualties right now.
The voice over the speaker was in marked contrast to the way the captain felt. Two days ago, it could have been him.
There was a cool, calm note of command in it, the very choice of words and expressions denoting absolute confidence in the ability of the battle group to take this war to the enemy’s homeland. “And your operational capabilities?”
Captain Heather forced down a small spike of anger.
Admiral Magruder knew that there were dead sailors on his ship, men still waiting on the mess decks for medical attention. The admiral was just asking what he had to know, needed to know and had a right to know: How capable was the Arsenal ship of being a part of the battle plan?
“Most of the electronics are fine,” he answered, striving for professionalism. God, it was hard, when he’d just come back from visiting the wounded and dead on the decks below. “What was damaged we can bypass. The structural integrity of the launch tubes is another matter. I think we have some damage we won’t really know until we try to op-test them.”
“I don’t have to tell you we don’t have time for you to return to port and do that,” Magruder said slowly. The captain stared at the speaker as the admiral paused. “Give me your best guess. We’ll plan around it.”
The captain sucked in a sharp breath. “Admiral, the missile-launching capabilities of this ship are honeycombed together in the forward and aft parts of the ship even along the gangplanks, in some cases. If one cell is defective, it could pose a major fire hazard for us. Without shipyard-level testing, I can’t be sure.”
“It you’re looking for certainties, you’re in the wrong business. And I don’t think you are. There was a reason the Navy put you in command of Arsenal, and I suspect it’s because you’re superbly qualified for the position. This is why you get paid the big bucks. Captain. Or are you going to take the easy way out and declare your ship a total casualty?”
“I need to get back to you. Admiral,” the captain said, his voice frostily neutral. “Give me two hours. I’ll have a complete operational damage assessment for you then. And my decision as to whether there’s any chance at all we can still launch safely.”
“That will have to do,” the admiral said. “Make it sooner if you can.”
The circuit dissolved into a smooth hiss of static, the connection broken. The captain slammed the receiver down and jolted upright in his seat, slamming his hand into his open palm. After a few minutes, his anger became determination.
As much as he hated to admit it, the admiral was right.
The USS Arsenal was out here for one purpose to demonstrate the operational capabilities of a platform so far advanced over anything else the Navy had ever designed that it would change the shape of battles to come. And if it couldn’t survive a hit from the most primitive of naval weapons, an underwater mine, and continue fighting, then it might not be worth all the money that had been sunk into the program. It was up to him to demonstrate that now, one way or the other. He owed that to the men who’d died, to the men who’d lived, and to his country.
He could do it. He was convinced of that now. It was just a matter of making his crew believe that their ship could do it, too.
She was getting tired of being tossed into rickety jeeps and ferried about to obscure locations and even more fed up with the Cuban demands that she broadcast what they wanted when they wanted. This was not the way
