a catastrophe.
White fire seared her retina as a small missile streaked across black water, destroying her night vision and leaving a trail of light as an afterimage.
“Damage Control, report!” Brisco shouted.
The trail of fire dropped below them as it speared through the half-open hangar bay door.
The sailors manning the port-side hangar doors were moving faster than those on the starboard. Already more than half of the exposed area was closed off as the massive doors slid along their tracks. The starboard hangar bay doors had barely started to move.
Williams watched, both horrified and terrified at the same time. This wasn’t a drill — this was an actual attack. The seconds seem to tick by too slowly as he stared at the white fire racing across the water.
“Get down!” someone shouted, and Williams was smashed to the deck as a petty officer tackled him. They rolled over until they were behind an enclosed part of the hull, out of the open doorway.
“What the hell are you—?” Williams began, his protest cut off as the impact forced the air out of his lungs.
A lightning bolt coursed through the hangar bay, accompanied by a high-pitched screaming sound. The Stinger warhead entered the starboard hatch, flashed across the hangar bay, and slammed into the partially closed port hatch, containing the fire inside. It exploded with a deafening fireball, flames and hot gases engulfing half of the hangar bay, then subsiding into a hard, hot fire engulfing the port side.
“Fire, fire, fire!” the 1MC howled. “Fire in the hangar bay.”
“Grab the nozzle!” a petty officer said, shoving Williams toward a hose reel mounted on the bulkhead. “I’m activating the AFFF hose reel. You know how to use it, right?” The aqueous film-forming foam was the preferred method of extinguishing a Class B, or fuel, fire.
“Right.” Williams grabbed the nozzle head. Another sailor fell in behind him to help manage the hose, and then two more behind him. Everyone moved with an economy of movement born of hours of practical damage- control training.
Everyone except Williams. He stumbled over the hose as he took the nozzleman position, fingers fumbling over the moveable U-shaped handle called the bail. He hadn’t spent much time on damage control since a three-day firefighting class in San Diego before deploying but the basics were coming back to him. The AFFF would cover the burning surface and deprive it of oxygen. And in here, with so many fuel lines crisscrossing, lubricants and oils and drums, and the presence of so many aircraft for a possible Class Delta fire, it was the first choice.
The fire was centered against one bulkhead, and had consumed both a toolbox and a stack of supplies left there. It was spreading quickly, reaching out toward a helicopter tied down nearby. If it got the helicopter and started a Class Delta fire, then there would be no chance of extinguishing it. The helicopter would have to be shoved over the side of the ship and into the water.
“Where is it?” Brisco shouted, his voice carrying over the babble of damage-control reports now flooding the circuits. “Damn it, I need that contact!”
“We just don’t have it, sir,” Surface answered, frustration evident in his voice. “Small contact, choppy seas — recommend searchlights, visual targeting, and fifty-cal guns, sir.”
“The fifty-cals are already being manned,” Brisco said. He turned to Smith and said, “Get on that floodlight. Find them. You and I seem to be the only one with eyes in our heads.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” she said, already running aft along the catwalk toward the floodlight. She’d only experimented with it once or twice, but she could probably manage it.
She flipped the power switch on, shielding her eyes while she pointed her binoculars in the general direction of where she’d last seen the contact. She flipped the shutters on the floodlight open and aimed them in that general direction. Above her, she could hear the shouts of sailors scrambling to man the fifty-caliber guns.
“There he is!” she shouted, forgetting to depress the button on her sound-powered phone, but her voice carried easily up to the gun crew.
“Roger, we see him,” the gun crew chief shouted down at her. Briscoe came running out of the bridge to stand beside her.
“Weapons free,” he ordered. “Take it out, Chief.”
The hard chatter of the fifty-caliber machine gun drowned out the babble from the bridge. Empty casings rained down on them, bouncing off the steel deck and over the side. Smith concentrated on keeping the searchlights centered on a small craft, nailing it to the water with a spear of light.
The first two seconds of rounds fell short, and then the tracers danced across the small target as the gun crew adjusted their aim. She could see now that it was little more than a rowboat with an outboard motor stuck on it. There were two men standing up in it, their features indistinguishable, but one was yanking frantically on the cord attached to the outboard motor as though it had stalled.
Small waterspouts peppered the water as the fifty-cal rounds stitched a line down the wooden hull, splintering boards into shrapnel. The outboard engine kicked to life, the noise lost in the chatter of the gunfire, but the results evident in the boiling water behind the stern. The boat started to turn away from the carrier, quickly picking up speed. It was listing severely to the starboard side, indicating that at least some of the rounds had found their mark.
“Get them!” Brisco shouted.
The gun crew adjusted their aim, walking the tracer rounds up the wake to the boat. Almost immediately, the results were evident. A few rounds found the outboard motor and then the fuel can. There was a soft
She turned to look at Brisco, but he was already gone. The immediate threat eliminated, his priority now was fighting the fire.
Through her feet, Smith could feel the vibrations radiating up from the hull, the odd noises and vibrations induced by water rushing through the fire mains to supply the hose reels and hangar bay. She could see the doors sliding back now as the damage-control crew sought to ventilate the area. A few flames slipped out, licking up the side of the ship. They were one hundred feet below the bridge, but the heat was still palpable.
“Starboard, are you on station?” Surface asked. “Look, there may be more of them. Anything you see, I want to hear about it immediately.”
“Roger, Starboard is in position.” She hesitated for a moment, aware that she should avoid cluttering the circuit with unnecessary chatter, but not able to avoid asking, “The fire. How bad is it?”
“We don’t know. I’ll tell you soon as I hear something. In the meantime, keep your eyes on the water.”
Smith was cursed with an unusually vivid imagination and it kicked in now, trying to distract her from her watchstanding. She could see how the flames below looked, the liquid way that they raced up bulkheads and ceilings, enveloping fire mains and fuel lines, reaching out with tendrils of heat to seek skin and flesh, growing, engulfing the entire ship. She was so far from the water, so far, the equivalent of an eight-story building from it. If the fire grew out of control, how in the world would she ever get off the bridge? The way down to the lifeboat stations would be blocked, too, and she held no illusions about her ability to survive jumping from the bridge wing into the sea. Even if she avoided hitting the part of the flight deck that jutted out, the fall alone could very well be fatal. She saw her crumpled bleeding body floating facedown in the sea, tendrils of blood streaking the water, and a knife fin cutting through the water toward her.
