terribly wrong. Unlike many of their fellow sailors, however, they did not try to pretend that whatever had happened ashore was none of their business and simply continue their cruise or jam the airwaves with rumors. Duty ran deep in each of them, and that had been one of the first things that had attracted her to Jack.
As a result, Adele immediately turned over ship-handling responsibilities to Jack, and gone down below to pull out a chart. What exactly he intended to do, she had no clue, but Jack seemed to think it was important.
“Okay, honey, you know where we are?” Jack’s voice floated down. “Take a few bearings, and get us in as close as you can.”
Adele peered out a side window and took a hasty bearing with a handheld compass. That lighthouse there — and on the other side, the jagged stack of rocks. She slid a ruler across a piece of paper, lined up the bearings, and drew in a small circle where they intersected. Just for accuracy’s sake, she checked against the GPS. It was dead on.
“Got it, on both GPS and visual bearings,” she reported. She hadn’t questioned his request that she take visual bearings, as both of them knew that the global positioning satellite system would be one of the first casualties of any real —
Any real
“Keep track of where we are. I’m going to call off anything of interest, and give you a range and bearing from our position, okay?”
“Okay. But even assuming you turn up something of interest, how are you going to report it to anyone? No traffic is going to get out on any circuit we’ve got,” Adele pointed out.
“Cell phone,” her husband answered. “If I can figure out who to call. Then there’s one other option as well.”
Adele took a few steps back and popped her head up out of the hatch to look up at him. “What do you mean, another option.?”
“This.” He extended the small, black radio about the size of the cell phone. “It is a PRC seven, an emergency aviation radio. Saltwater activated so that if it gets wet it broadcasts a constant beeping. It’s also got a direct transmission limited range.” He pointed at a toggle switch on the side. “If I switch to military frequencies, assuming there’s someone with a receiver in range, I should be able to talk.”
“Where did you come up with this?” she asked.
“I borrowed it from my office,” he said calmly. “Just in case.”
And if any one phrase characterized Jack Simpson, it was that one. Just in case.
Petty Officer Jacobs felt the foam of the headset wearing down the skin on his ears. It had been over four hours without a break. A couple of times, he felt his attention start to wander, just as it had during refresher training, but after a few moments, he remembered exactly how things were.
“I recommend we make a slow, deep approach on the harbor, then come to periscope depth and see if we can figure out what happened,” the navigator said crisply.
The skipper was a good man, probably one of the best officers Jacobs had ever met. But for all that, he was an officer — maybe a little too strict sometimes, maybe a little too prone to worry about things that didn’t make a difference.
Still, since the situation seemed to be going to shit, Jacobs was glad to be serving under him.
“It sounds risky, coming shallow in the harbor,” he heard the captain say. “There’s no way sonar can keep everything sorted out to make sure we don’t surface directly under a small craft.”
“We’ll come up slowly,” a navigator said. “Our bow wave will push them away from us.”
“Probably. I don’t imagine they’ll like it any better than I do,” the skipper said.
If it were only a small boat running an engine, they would hear the vessel in plenty of time to slow their upward motion and avoid crashing into its keel. No, the problem wasn’t motorized boats, although their speed could put them in danger’s way. The problem was sailboats. There was simply no way to accurately detect them by passive means and nobody wanted to put an active sonar tone in the water. Counter detection considerations aside, they’d be lucky if they didn’t fry a swimmer.
“We’ll come to periscope depth now,” the skipper said, making the decision that Jacobs had hoped for. “We’ll assess what the situation is, then decide whether we’re going to proceed in the harbor. If we do, it will be at periscope depth.”
From a sonarman’s point of view, that was the preferred alternative, but the thought of having anything just above them when they didn’t know what was going on ashore made him excruciatingly nervous.
EIGHT
Batman paced furiously along the side of the island, stomping down hard on the flight deck as though to punish it instead of the pilots. There was no way he could damage the nonskid, but oh, Hot Rock and Lobo were in for it. They’d be lucky if they ever saw the inside of a cockpit again, much less flew combat missions from
He could hear the calls now, with the team of two inbound on
Being an officer meant more than flying a hot aircraft and shooting down MiGs. It meant following orders, fitting your aircraft’s mission into the overall battle picture, making sure that your wingman and the rest of the junior officers were also onboard with the program. And no matter how hot a pilot Lobo was, no matter that she’d earned the respect of every pilot in the Navy, she’d just screwed up big time, just as much as Hot Rock had. Oh, sure, he’d taken the chase on, but it was
He considered that for a moment, tempted. One part of his mind would have given anything to avoid the action he was about to take against the two, and trotting out Lobo’s career would be justification for just about any breaks he wanted to cut her. During a mission in her nugget year, Lobo had been shot down. She’d spent a couple of months in a POW camp, abused, raped and generally tortured beyond anyone’s understanding. That she’d withstood it, then had the sheer guts to recover and get back in a flight status — well, he wasn’t so sure he would have made as good a showing, had he been in her shoes.
But no, he couldn’t. Not if he wanted to do his duty. This was why they’d made him an admiral, given him command of a battle group, to make the calls like this one.
Batman sighed, frustrated. Tombstone — or at least the Tombstone he was talking to inside his own head — was right. Lobo and Hot Rock had done what every man and woman on board the carrier had wanted to do, tried to take out a MiG that had attacked an innocent, unarmed civilian aircraft. Yes, it had been too damned close to Hawaii, and yes, it could have gone brutally wrong if they’d sent the MiG spiraling into the hotels and tourist facilities crowded onto the shoreline.
