Final Flight (23 page)

“Well, I’m no chaplain. “Jake sat
silently watching the moonset, then finally levered
himself from his chair and went inside.

Callie sat and watched the moon’s glow fade
as it slipped lower and lower into the sea. When she
heard him dialing the phone, she stepped in through the
open door.

“This is Captain Grafton. Who am I
talking to?” She knew he must be on the phone to the
beach duty officer at fleet landing.

“Okay, Mr. Mayer. I want you to get on
the radio to the ship, talk to the OOD. Ready
to copy? Have the senior chaplain aboard tonight go see
Commander Majeska immediately. Tell the chaplain it
is an urgent request from me. That’s it. Got
it?” He listened a moment, muttered his thanks, then
hung up. “John Majeska?” she
asked.

He nodded miserably and gathered her into his
arms.

Judith Farrell was sitting in a corner of the
hotel bar facing the door when Toad Tarkington
walked in, saw her, and came her way. There were
two couples seated at tables in the windowless,
paneled room, and several men stood at the bar
chatting with the bartender. An opera murmured from the
radio sitting on the ledge behind the bar.

“May I sit down?” Toad dropped into a
chair before she could answer.

“Listen, I owe you an apology. Several
apologies, in fact. Tonight I was just trying to move
you out so Captain Grafton and his wife could have some
time alone together. Honest, I didn’t mean to upset
you.

I’ve got two sisters who have fought like hell for
decent jobs, so I know how hard it is for women
to find them.”

“Did you come here just to say that to me?” He nodded.
“And to buy you a drink. Please, will you accept my
apology?”

“Ah reckon,” she drawled thickly.

He leaned back and laughed. “Thanks.
Maybe we should start over. I’m Toad
Tarkington.” He stuck out his hand.

She took it, and he found her hand was dry, warm
and firm. “I’m Judith Farrell, Mr.
Tarkington.”

“Call me Toad. Everyone does.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Robert.”

“Why did you really come back to the hotel this
evening, Robert?”

“To apologize. You’re a nice lady and I
felt pretty miserable.”

“Oh. I was sitting here thinking you might have had a
romantic motive.”

Tarkington flushed. “Well, I confess that the
possibility of a little romance might have been lurking
somewhere way back there amid the cobwebs in the
attic. After all, if you were some ugly old
matron with three chins, I would have been nicer to you in
the first place and my conscience wouldn’t have squirmed and
writhed and tortured me so.”

She laughed, a deep, throaty laugh, and her
eyes twinkled. “You impress me as a man who
knows a lot of girls, but not many women.”

“I know one or two,” Toad said,
well aware that he was on the defensive, yet unable
to keep silent.

“You see them as girls. Soft, cuddly little
things.”

It was true. He stared uncomfortably across the
table. In the past, one or two of his female
acquaintances had thrown down this gauntlet and he
had walked away, unwilling to discuss his feelings.
The urge to leave was there now, but there was something else,
too. This Judith Farrell .

The bartender came to the table and they ordered.
Small talk, Toad thought, small talk. Chat
with her, man. But for the life of him he couldn’t think
of anything to say. She broke the silence. “How
long have you been in the navy?”

He opened his mouth and his life story came pouring
out. In a few minutes he realized he was making a
fool of himself. He didn’t care.

He gestured and tried to say witty things and
kept his eyes on her as she smiled
appropriately and watched his face.

The drinks came and he paid. By now she was talking
and he found her comments deliciously humorous.

Judith Farrell was certainly no girl. She
was a mature, adult woman, happy with
life. Perhaps contented was the word. He found her
enchanting.

Then, in the middle of a story about her family,
she gathered her purse in her left hand and pushed her
chair back a millimeter. She finished the tale
with a flourish and as he laughed, stood up.

“Do you have to go?”

She nodded. “I’m glad we had a chance to get
to know each other.”

“Could we see each other again?” Toad stood.
“Listen, I .. She reached out and her fingertips
grazed his arm. “Good-bye, Robert.” Her high
heels clicked on the polished floor as she
walked away.

Toad watched her go, then sank back into his
chair. She had scarcely touched her drink. His
glass was empty. He waved at the barkeeper, and
failed to notice the man in his early forties wearing
a gray pinstripe suit who set his empty glass
on the bar and strolled out, less than a minute behind
Judith.

What had he said that struck her wrong?
Dejected, he sat contemplating the chair where she
had been.

THE SEPTEMBER HAZE obscured the
sky, except for a pale, gauzy blue patch
directly overhead. Here and there the tops of fluffy
little clouds could be discerned embedded in the
insubstantial whiteness. The haze completely
obscured the peaks of the two islands that formed the gate
to the Bay of Naples, Capri and Ischia.
Looking toward the coast, one could make out the major
features of the Naples estuary, but the coastline
north and south merged into this gray-white late-summer
mixture of moisture, smoke, and North
African dust.

Toad Tarkington strolled along the flight
deck of the United States and cataloged the day as
a partial obscuration, visibility five miles in
haze. Then his attention wandered to a more important
subject-a woman.

“Women!” he grumped to himself. Just when your life
is flowing along like smooth old wine, a woman
shows up.

Women are like cars, he told himself as he meandered
along with his hands in his pockets, automatically
weaving around the parked aircraft and their webs of
tie-down chains, looking only at the gray steel
deck in front of his shoes. There are the old
sedans, he decided, dowdy and faded, the
Chevys and Fords of the world that putter along and get you
there for as long as you want to go, not too fast and not in
style, but dependable. Then there are the racy
Italianjobs that can rip up to warp three in a
heartbeat, wring out your skinny little ass, and leave you
broken and bleeding beside the road. And finally, there are
the quality machines, the Mercedes of the world, the ones
that go fast or slow in elegant style, that last
forever, and you are exultantly happy with all of your
days.

Judith Farrell was a Mercedes, he decided.
His Ms. Farrell was not some cheap crackerjack
hot rod for a flashy Saturday night date, but a
quality piece of design, engineering, and
workmanship. She had character, brains, wit, beauty,
and grace. He thought about the way she moved, how her
hips swayed slightly but not too much-above her
long, shapely legs, how her hair accented the
perfect lines of her face, how her breasts rose
and fell inside her blouse as she breathed. How her
lips moved as she spoke. How she smiled. Just
thinking about her was enough to make a man sweat.

And you dumped all over her, fool! Not just
once, not just the first time you met her. Oh no. You
did it twice. Providence gave you a
second chance and you blew that too. You idiot!

He descended into the catwalk that surrounded the
flight deck and leaned on the rail just above the forward
starboard Phalanx mount. Immediately below him a barge
lay tied to the side of the ship, but Toad took no
notice. He stood with his elbows on the rail and his
chin propped on one hand, gazing blankly at the
hazy junction of sea and sky, cataloging once
again all the charms he now knew Judith Farrell
possessed, charms that apparently lay forever beyond his
fevered reach.

The barge was a paint scow. It had been towed
into position shortly after dawn by a tug. In its
hold were dozens of fifty-five gallon drums of
paint, and ropes and scaffolds and long-handled
rollers and a gang of a half-dozen or so workmen
wearing coveralls that displayed the spills and drips
incidental to their trade. The scow itself wore the
scars of countless accidents involving paint of every
color of the rainbow, though gray seemed
predominant.

On scaffolds suspended against the side of the
warship-scaffolds not visible from the catwalk where
Toad moped, since the sides of the ship slanted
steeply inward from the catwalk to the
waterline-pairs of men wielded long-handled
rollers and brushes. After months of exposure
to salt air and seawater, the hull of the United
States resembled that of a Panamanian tramp
steamer with a bankrupt owner.

The workmen quickly applied the new gray paint
over the orange-red streaks of rust and what fading
gray paint remained. However, on the scaffold
near the hangar bay opening for Elevator Two-the
second aircraft elevator aft on the starboard
side and the one just forward of the ship’s island-one of the
painters worked slower than his comrades.

He spent most of his time watching the unloading of a
barge moored near Elevator Three, aft of him
several hundred feet. That elevator was in a down
position.

The sailors used a crane on the flight deck
level to transfer cargo from the barge to the
elevator. Wooden crates on pallets were
gently deposited on the elevator where sailors
derigged the wire bridles.

Forklifts moved the crates from the elevator
platform into the hangar bay. There sailors in blue
denims and white hardhats noted on clipboards the
stenciled numbers on the crates and
directed other forklift operators in their shuttle
of the crates to prearranged positions. They worked
quickly and efficiently with only occasional shouts from a
khaki-clad figure, a chief petty officer.

The painter on the scaffold worked slowly with his
roller and observed the scene from the corner of his eye.
The sailors should be done in an hour or so, he
concluded. Already men were attacking the crates in the
hangar, breaking them open and distributing packages
to a seemingly never-ending line of men who carried the
cargo below. They hurried like ants to receive their
loads, Colonel Qazi thought. He noticed that
the laden porters took orders from another chief with a
clipboard before they departed, and they walked away in
every direction to hatches around the walls of the
two-acre hangar bay. The colonel correctly
surmised that the contents of the crates were being carried
to many different compartments throughout the ship.

After a while Cazi’s companion, Yasim,
finished the section they were working on, so Qazi shouted
in Italian until he attracted the attention of the
sailor on the catwalk above and outboard of them.
With much swaying the scaffold was moved until it
hung immediately beside the Elevator-Two entrance to the
hangar bay. From there Qazi could better
observe the layout and activity of the hangar bay.

Even though it was daytime, the bay was brightly lit from
an array of lights on the overhead.

“So many men,” Yasim commented softly.

“Yes. All trained technicians. Look at
the men working on the aircraft. See all the black
boxes.” The access panels were open on many
machines, exposing the myriad of electronic
components that filled every cubic inch of the fuselages
that did not contain engines or fuel tanks.

“We do not have this many technicians in our whole
country,” Yasim said, the envy in his voice
discernible.

The colonel motioned Yasim back to work and
dipped his own roller in a paint tray. They had
better stay busy or they would surely attract
someone’s attention.

“When?” Yasim queried.

“Tomorrow night, Saturday night,” the colonel
muttered as a fine spray of paint from his roller
misted across his face. “It must be then. The crate
comes aboard tomorrow morning and it won’t sit there forever.

These people are too efficient.”

“How do we know they won’t open it?”

“We don’t.” The colonel paused and
looked again at the men with the clipboards. They
appeared to be comparing the crate numbers against
preprinted lists. Computer-generated lists, the
colonel surmised. “The numbers on our crate
don’t match anything on their lists. So they will
leave it to last.”

“But what if they open it?” Yasim persisted.
“Then they will think there has been a mistake.” The
real problem, the colonel knew, was where they would
put the crate, opened or unopened. He had toyed
with the idea of placing a beeper in the crate, but with so
many electronic sensors on the ship, he had
rejected that option as too risky.

Selecting an unmonitored frequency would be
pure guesswork, if there were any unmonitored
frequencies, which he doubted. He would just have
to visually search for the crate when the time came,
betting everything that he could find it.

He had bet his life before, many times, but this was
different.

What was at stake this time was the Arab people’s chance
at nationhood.

If this operation succeeded, the emotional and
political pull toward one nation for the Arabs would be
great enough to overcome the centrifugal
tribal, economic, and political forces which had
always kept them apart.

Although the forces of nationalism had fired humanity
for two centuries, the Arabs still had only a
patchwork quilt of states with every major type of
government-dictatorship, monarchy, anarchy, even
token democracy-all of which left the vast bulk of
Arabs poor and ignorant, saddled by a religion
that focused on a dead past and culturally unable
to embrace science and technology, which alone gave
promise of adequately feeding, clothing, and housing
them.

So they were left in the wasteland with their dictators
and demagogues, their passions and their poverty.
Left in a desert of failed dreams which they were
taught to accept because paradise awaited them. In the
next life, not this one.