Final Flight (37 page)

Yeah. Very lucky. That slug could have went into my
gut and there is no way my gut could take another,
not with all that scar tissue down there. Very lucky.
Yeah. “How about wheeling me in with Sergeant
Vehmeier.”

“Who?”

“That marine that was brought down here a while ago with
his hands blown off. He fell on a grenade.”

“Oh. He’s dead. Sorry.” The sailor
walked away. It was a busy night.

“Come back here, you fucking swabbie!”
Garcia’s voice was coldly furious. The
sailor paused and turned, uncertainty on his
face. “You said Sergeant Vehmeier is dead?”

“Yeah, Sarge. He was dead when they brought him
in here.”

“I’m ‘Gunnery Sergeant” to you,
pill-pusher. Now get some fucking tape
and put a permanent bandage on this wound.” Garcia
slid his legs off the edge of the bed and hoisted his
torso erect, feeling slightly dizzy and
nauseous.

“You can’t-“

“Do I have to get the fucking tape and do it myself?”
The sailor scurried away.

Where did they put that fucking rifle?

As the helicopters had settled onto the angle
of the flight deck Colonel Qazi marched
Admiral Parker down the ladders toward the flight
deck with his pistol in his back. He saw no one.
The ladderwell was empty.

Except at the last flight of stairs before he
reached the flight deck level-Qazi’s dead
Palestinian lay where he had fallen, still crumpled
against the door. The door gaped several inches. He
made the admiral step over the corpse and push the
door open.

He heard a sound to his left and stepped behind the
admiral. The barrel of a rifle pointed at him
below one frightened eye. “If you pull that trigger,
you’ll kill the admiral. If you don’t, I will.
After I kill you.”

Several seconds passed, then the eye
and barrel disappeared. Qazi listened as the man
retreated.

The wounded man had died. The muscles in his
face were slack and his eyes stared fixedly at
nothing. The other body lay undisturbed. But their
weapons were missing. And their gym bags. The door
to Flight Deck Control was open a crack. One
of his men there opened it wider and nodded.

On the flight deck he met Noora and Ali.
They were surrounded by armed men and had Jarvis between them.~~~
More men lay in a circle around the helicopters,
their weapons at the ready. The engines of the
helicopters were still and the rotors stationary.

Qazi set off diagonally up the flight deck,
heading for the catwalk forward of Elevator One.
Behind him Ali and Noora shepherded Jarvis
along. Immediately behind Jarvis was a man carrying one
of the trigger devices. It weighed about forty pounds and
was slung across his back on straps. Qazi kept
the admiral’s arm firmly in his grasp.
Youssef, the Palestinian leader, carried two
backpacks over his shoulders. Two gunmen
preceded the party and two followed. Two more were out on
each side. “Faster,” Qazi told the men in
front, and they picked up the pace.

THE POWER WAS OFF in the forward mess
deck. Emergency battle lanterns provided the
only illumination. The unarmed sailors who packed
the place gaped when they realized that the officer in
whites with tape over his mouth and wrists handcuffed
together was Admiral Parker. Ali and his troops
pointed their weapons and gestured. The sailors
hastily retreated through the watertight hatches into the
passageways beyond with many backward glances at
Admiral Parker, who watched them go
impassively. Qazi’s men dogged the hatches
shut again behind the last Americans.

The entrance to the forward magazine was a hatch leading
downward. It was marked with a warning in red:
“Unauthorized Personnel, Keep Out.

This Means You.” Everyone donned gas masks:
Noora helped Jarvis with his, and Qazi placed
one on Admiral Parker and ensured it was properly
positioned on his face and functioning correctly.
Then Ali and his men opened the dogs on the magazine
hatch and lifted it to the open position.

The first man through the magazine hatch found the
compartment below empty. It was merely a security
access area. A large vault door stood at the
end of the compartment with a television camera
immediately above it. The gunman put a pistol
bullet through the camera and the red light just below the lens
went out. He could hear the muffled sound of an alarm.
He quickly set a shaped charge on the door, then
stood to one side and detonated it.

Within seconds his companion, Youssef, slipped
a hose attached to a metal canister through the small
hole in the door punched by the explosive and opened
the valve on the canister. As the gas hissed through the
hole the first man methodically set plastique
charges on the vault door. When he had the fuses
set, he scrambled away up the ladder. Youssef
secured the valve on the canister, pulled the hose
from the hole, and scurried after his companion.

The explosion jolted the mess deck. Down the
ladder the two men went again.

The access compartment was in total darkness.
Shattered glass from the florescent tubes in the
overhead and the emergency battle lanterns lay on
the deck. The security door was off its hinges and
badly warped.

Smoke eddied uncertainly. The two men pulled
the door free and groped their way into the next
compartment.

One of the three marines in the compartment was still
conscious, so the intruders shot him. They ignored the
others. The gas would keep its victims out cold for
several hours. Qazi had insisted on the use of
nonlethal gas; not because of any concern for the
victims, but just in case one of his key people had a
defective mask. Another hinged watertight
door stood against the forward bulkhead of this compartment.
It had no locks, but opening the door would be fatal
if there were armed marines on the other side. The two
gunmen set another shaped charge and backed away.
It exploded with a metallic thud.

Youssef approached the hole with his cannister.
He never got there. A marine on the other side of the
door put his rifle against 1 the hole and opened
fire. The MI 6 slugs spanged against the
canister and tore into Youssef’s arm and ripped his
throat apart.

The demolition man huddled against the door. He
pulled his backpack off and began packing the dogs
with plastique, working in the darkness without his flashlight
entirely by feel. Bullets sprayed periodically
through the one-inch hole blown by the shaped charge as the
muzzle flashes strobed the smoke-filled
atmosphere. The demolition man cringed under the
lashings of the thunderous reports of the
M-l6, magnified to soul-numbing intensity in this
enclosed steel box. Between rifle bursts he could
hear an alarm ringing continuously.

In the compartment on the other side of the door, the
senior of the three young marines there was trying
desperately to inform someone of their plight. The
overpressure from the shaped charge that blasted a hole
in the door had practically deafened them. Still, the
sergeant could hear well enough to learn that the phones and
intercom box on the wall were dead. He had already
triggered the alarm, which also rang in Central
Control, in the main engineering station, and on the
bridge. One man was vomiting; he already had too
much of the gas. The man at the door changed the
magazine in his rifle and sent another burst through the
hole. The rifle sounded to him as if it were being fired
in a vacuum.

The senior marine was Sergeant Bo Albright from
Decatur, Georgia. He groped through the
silent, choking darkness for the bulkhead-mounted controls
which would flood the magazines. He found them and
pulled the safety pin from the lever that energized the
system. He pulled the lever down. A row of green
lights illuminated above a series of six
buttons. He jabbed the first two buttons
and held them. In three seconds the lights turned
from green to red. He pushed the buttons in succession
until all the lights were red.

In the compartment two decks below his feet that ran the
width of the ship, the actual magazines, water
rushed in from the sea. “Get away from the door,”
Albright screamed into the ear of the rifleman.

Together they pushed a desk away from the wall and
crouched behind it with their rifles. They were as far away
from the door as they could get. Albright stuck his fingers
in his ears, scrunched his eyes shut, and opened his
mouth. He waited.

The plastique around the door detonated. The
concussion jolted them with the wallop of a baseball
bat.

Albright peered through the darkness, blinking rapidly,
shaking his head to clear the cobwebs. They would be coming!

Lights through the gap where the door had been! He
triggered a burst.

Another. Something was thudding into the desk. He
fired again.

He was falling. Slowly, languidly, drifting
and falling. The gas! He squeezed the trigger on
the rifle and held it down as he went over the edge
and tumbled into a black, alien va/s.

“Wake up, Ski. Wake up.” The sailor
shook the catapult captain vigorously.
“Goddammit Ski, wake up!”

Aviation Boatswains Mate (equipment)
Second-Class Eugene Kowalski groaned and
opened one eye. “Okay, asshole, I’m
awake. We’d better be fucking sinking or.

“We’re at GQ Ski. A bunch of
terrorists have landed on the flight deck.

“No shit.”

Kowalski groaned again and sat up. He was on
the floor of the waist catapult control station, still in
civilian clothes. No doubt someone had carried
him here to sleep it off when he came back to the ship
drunk. That was what usually happened. He had
awakened here on the floor of the waist bubble
before-several times, in fact. “Terrorists, huh?”

“Fucking A. And the captain and the admiral are
hostages on the bridge and there’s a big fire
in the hangar and one in the comm spaces.

He drew a breath. “And three choppers full
of terrorists landed on the flight deck a little bit
ago.

“Cut me some fucking slack, Pak. You
idiots didn’t let me sleep through all
of that.”

“What could you have done? And this is your GQ station,
so when they called it away you were right here. We’d have
woke you up for a launch.” His voice was so sincere
that Kowalski eyed the Korean. Maybe he was
telling the truth.

“So how come you woke me up now?”

“You ain’t gonna believe this, Ski. One of
those choppers is sitting right on top of
number-fourJBD. Right smack dab on top of
it.”

Kowalski took his time about standing up. Pak
grabbed him under the armpit to help and Ski shook him
off. He finally got erect and remained that way
by hanging onto the cat officer’s little desk.

“Jesus, Ski, you pissed your pants.”

“There’s some aspirin in my desk. Get me
three of them.” His desk was in the Cat Four control
room. “And some water. A glass of water.”

The cat captain lifted himself into the
cat officer’s raised chair and rested his elbows on
he table, his chin in his hands. After a moment he felt
his crotch. It was wet. He tried to remember how he
had gotten back to the hip. Captain
Grafton was in there somewhere, but the rest was hazy.
Maybe the X0 was right. Maybe he was an
alcoholic. He slipped off the chair and rushed out
the door of the bubble. Here he was on a little sponson
on the 0-3 level, outside the skin fthe ship.
He grabbed hold of the safety wire and leaned out and
retched. The wind swirled some of the vomit back
onto him. He puked until he had the dry
heaves, and when they subsided he took off his torn
sport shirt, wiped his face with it, and threw it
over the side. The stench of something burning was strong.
Too strong. It made him feel sick again. He
went back into the bubble and collapsed into the cat
officer’s padded chair. Pak came back with two
other guys. “A committee, huh?” They tood and
watched Ski swallow the aspirin and drink the
water. “Where’s Laura?” Laura was the captain
of number-three catault.

“He didn’t get back. He’s on the beach.”
Ski sat the cup down with a bang. “Okay,
let’s take a look. Raise this thing.”

The three sailors looked at each other in the
weak glow of the ittle red lights here in the bubble.
“The terrorists got guns, Ski. they’ve been
shooting people right and left. They have the captain
and admiral-“

“This bubble’s bulletproof, fireproof, and
bombproof. They can’t do nothing to us in here.”

“Yeah, but they could get into the cat control rooms
and-“

“We’ll have to risk it. I ain’t gonna get out
on the catwalk and stick my head up over the
edge.”

“Pak did. That’s how he knows there’s a chopper
on fourJBD. And he went back and checked the
fifty caliber on the stern. The marine back there
is dead, shot, and the ammo belt is missing.”
Pak nodded nervous confirmation.

Kowalski shook his head. “And I’ll bet the
grunt on the port bow gun is dead too and the
belt’s in the water. Yeah. Well. Pak, you’re
an idiot. We gotta raise the bubble. But it
wouldn’t hurt to disable the horn.”

One of the men went outside the cab and used a
knife to saw through the wire to the warning Klaxon that
sounded every time the control bubble went up or down.
When he returned, he pushed a button on the
bulkhead near the door. As the bubble began
to slowly rise in splendid, and safe, silence he
dogged down the entrance hatch.

The control cab rose on its hydraulic arms
until it protruded eighteen inches above the level
of the flight deck. Everything above deck was glass,
inch-thick glass that was tilted in at the top so that
objects striking it would be deflected upward.
Inside the cab, all four men stood with knees
bent so only their eyes were above the lower edge of the
window. They stared at the helicopters on the flight
deck, stark in the island’s red floodlights,
rotors stationary. The sentries guarding them were also
visible. The lights in the control cab were off so the
men on deck could not see in, yet when the sentry
turned their way, all four dropped their heads down
below the window. In a moment one of them raised up for
another peek.

“They’re civilian choppers. See, that’s
Italian on the side of that one.

“What’ya expect? Chinese? Look over there.
See that guy with the submachine gun? He’s one of
them.”

“He’s dressed like a sailor,” Kowalski
said. “Yeah. They all are. And they got the
captain.

“Sure. Yeah. I got that.” Kowalski
picked up the phone and held it in his hand.
“Maybe we oughta call the office. Maybe the
bosun’s up there, or one of the chiefs.” The office
he was referring to was the V-2 division office,
where the khaki in charge of the catapults had their
desks. He stared aft at the third helicopter.

From this angle it certainly looked like it was sitting
on the JBD.

“Ain’t nobody there,” Pak told him.
“There’s a big fire up in the comm spaces, and the
office was inside the fire boundaries, so they ran
everybody out. I think they got ‘em all fighting
fires, either in the comm spaces or down in the
hangar.”

Kowalski grabbed the ship’s blue telephone
book and thumbed through it.

He dialed a number. It rang and rang.
Finally he used his thumb to break the circuit. “The
XO ain’t in his stateroom,” he announced.

A third-class petty officer from the Cat
Three crew spoke up. “We figured you’re
all we got, Ski. There’s terrorists in
Flight Deck Control. And they’re on the
bridge. And they made an announcement over the I
comMC about how they’re gonna shoot hostages and
toss them down on the deck if anybody
resists. Maybe the terrorists are in
Pried-Fly or over in the air department office.
We didn’t figure we should take the chance calling
them. We tried to call the bow cats and the phones are
dead up there. We sent a greenie looking for one
of the chiefs or a cat officer, and he ain’t come
back. The passageways up forward are filled with
smoke and they’re grabbing guys to fight fires. So
you’re our man.

What are we gonna do?”

Kowalski hung the phone back in its wall
cradle. He rubbed his face with both hands. “If
I’m all we’ve got, we’re in deep fucking
shit.”

He took one more look around the flight deck,
at the choppers and the sentries and the jets sitting with
folded wings on the bow and aft of the waist JBD’S.
Wisps of steam rose from the catapult slots: this
would be leakage from the preheaters coming through the gaps in
the rubber seals that were placed in the slots when the
cats were not in use.

After a moment he asked for a cigarette and someone
gave him one. He sat down on the floor and
smoked it slowly. “What are these terrorists after?”

The men beside him shrugged. “But they came
on the helicopters, right?”

“Some of them did, anyway,” one of his listeners
answered. “And they probably expect to leave the
same way.” Nods of assent from everyone.

“So you guys go get the JBD hydraulic
system fired up.”

“We thought you’d say that, Ski,” Airman
Gardner said with a quick grin as he left with the others.

When Sergeant Albright set off the main alarm in
the magazine, a red light began to flash on the main
engineering panel and an audible tone sounded in the
compartment.

“Well, gentlemen,” Jake Grafton said
bitterly as he and the chief engineer watched the lights
indicating the positions of the magazine flooding
valves turn from green to red. “Now we know why
Colonel Qazi is here.”

He had already been informed that Qazi and the admiral
were on the forward mess deck. He and the marine
lieutenant had been discussing the possibility of
surrounding the mess area and trying to trap Qazi.
It was too late for that. The magazines! Even as
they spoke, the lights turned green again. Then the
lights went out.

“Goddammit,” Trixorn swore
softly. “They’ve closed the valves and chopped the
power.”

“Can you flood from Central Control?” Jake
asked. The central control station two decks below
where they sat actually distributed power and controlled
the position of emergency valves. Trixorn
tried the squawk box.

Jake tried to digest it. Qazi and his men were
forcing their way into the magazines. To set a charge
to detonate the bombs stored there and sink the ship in
one glorious, suicidal fireball? If so, why
were the helicopters still on the flight deck? No,
they were planning to leave the same way most of them
arrived. And they were going to take something with them. That
something could only be nuclear weapons.

“No way, CAG,” Trixorn said.
“We’ve lost power to those valves.”

“Halon. Let’s use the Halon system.”
The magazines could be filled with Halon gas, a
system designed to choke off a fire. It would also
suffocate anyone in the compartment not wearing an
0BA.

Trixorn paused. “Halon will kill our
guys too.” Jake rubbed his eyes. “Do it.”

Trixorn spoke into the intercom box.
In seconds the answer came back. The Halon
system was also disabled. Jake slumped into a chair.

How will Qazi get out of the magazine through the
marines? Hostages won’t help Qazi then, and
he 1 knows it. Even as he thought of the problem
Jake Grafton knew the answer.

“Where’s that marine officer? I need to talk
to him.” Perhaps he could secure electrical power
to the weapons elevator. No good. Qazi will arm
one of the nuclear weapons and threaten to detonate it
unless he is allowed to leave. And if he is
thwarted by marines or inoperative elevators or
anything else, he may just carry out the threat.
Jake had no doubt that it was technically possible
to bypass the safety devices built into the
weapon. The weapons were designed to prevent an
accidental etonation; of course, a technician who
knew what he was doing would intentionally trigger one,
given enough time and the right tools. And Qazi probably
had enough of both. The Bay of Naples! Jake
rubbed his forehead. It felt like the skin here was dead,
as if the blood supply no longer functioned. The
xplosion would vaporize the ship and everyone aboard
her. And he ship was three miles off the coast, in
a bay surrounded on three sides
by hills and islands which would focus and enhance he
concussion, radiation, and thermal pulses from the
explosion.

and the light and thermal pulses would be reflected
off the louds. How many people are in Naples,
anyway? In Pozzuoli, ortici, on the
slopes of Vesuvius?

The marine lieutenant was standing beside him, looking
at him, waiting.

Will Qazi be bluffing? Can I afford to take the
risk of calling im?

What if he just lights one of those babies off
while he’s down in the magazine? For a few
milliseconds a raw piece of the sun about the
size of a an’s fist would exist here on the surface
of the earth.

The plutoium’s mass would be converted to pure
energy. The sky and sea would rip apart. Every human
within twenty miles not cremated on the first
millionth of a second would see the face of an
angry, wrathful God.

“Trixorn, let’s get underway. We’ll
steer the ship from after steering. Get the navigator
to lay a course out to sea. Put some lookouts with
sound-powered phones up on the bow and let’s
slip the cable. Now!”

“Aye aye, sir.” Trixorn stepped away,
issuing orders as if he got the ship underway from
engineering every other Thursday. Perhaps he was relieved
to have orders he found familiar. Jake watched the
officers and sailors. They, too, seemed
relieved that something was being done.

The marine shifted nervously beside Jake’s chair.
Jake stood. He felt a little light-headed.
“Got a cigarette?” he asked the lieutenant.

“I don’t smoke, sir.”

Jake nodded vacantly. The alarm from the forward
magazine was still sounding. were the Americans there still
alive? What about Parker? At least the fire in the
comm space was extinguished and the ones in the hangar were
under control and would soon be out. That was a plus.

Perhaps the only one.

What kind of man was this Colonel Qazi?
Jake had spent a quarter hour on the bridge
watching him. He was not the wiredup fanatic one
expected after viewing too many terrorist incidents
on television. No. He was competent,
calculating, intelligent, and, Jake suspected,
absolutely ruthless. Not suicidal. Not on a
mission for the glory of Allah. But a man
who would do whatever he felt he had to do to get the
job done.

“What are we going to do, sir, about the
intruders?” Dykstra 1 had a stern, squarejaw
and a wide mouth that just now was set in a pencil-thin
line. His nostrils flared slightly every time he
inhaled.

“Whatever that asshole wants us to do,
Lieutenant. I’m sure he’ll be telling us just
what that is before very long.”

The seawater looked black in the glow of the
battle lanterns in the forward magazine.
Colonel Qazi waded through the cold, foot-deep
water casting his flashlight beam this way and that. Row
after row of olive drab sausages met his eye.
White missiles hung in racks against the
bulkheads. Enough ordnance for a nice little war, he
thought as he scanned the compartment. There, a door.

He lifted the single lever that controlled all six
of the dogs, then sprung back as the door flew
open from the weight of the water behind it. A little
waterfall flowed through the doorway until the water
in this compartment was equal in depth to the water where
Qazi and his companions stood. Qazi stepped through
into this compartment. Yes.

The weapons were white, about the size of a
five-hundred-pound bomb.

Each of them was strapped into its own cradle which
held it firmly several feet above the deck.
Chains and pulleys hung from rails on the
overhead.