by Brandon Webb
“A man?”
“Chief Donnelly, senior guy from the ops department. He’s been assigned to show you around for a few days, point out spaces of interest, Chief’s Mess, that kind of thing. Think of him as your personal tour guide.”
“No need,” said Finn. “Sir.”
“You sure? It’s no trouble. The Abe is a hell of a labyrinth.”
“I’ll find my way.”
The lieutenant didn’t push it, as a purebred bureaucrat would have. Good for him.
“Spent much time on a carrier, Chief?”
“Been a while. First time on a nuke.”
Schofield nodded and looked around, as if weighing how to convey the enormity of the ship. “Chief’s Mess is five levels below, on deck three, aft. Best chow on the boat. And XO says you’ve got an open invitation to the officers’ wardroom on deck two.”
“I’ll find my way.”
Schofield nodded and paused. Then said: “So, special assignment, we’re told.”
Finn looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “Sir.”
Schofield smiled with his eyes and gave a single nod. “Well, it’s an honor to have you on board, Chief,” he repeated.
“Just a passenger,” said Finn.
He closed the steel door between them and stood, alone.
Special assignment.
An antiseptic term, crafted to cover a lot of sins. Could be as simple as briefing a high-level committee. Or as complex as extracting sensitive intelligence from deep inside hostile territory. Sometimes a special assignment concluded when two men walked into a dark alley and only Finn walked out.
Finn set his backpack and kit bag down and glanced around the tiny space.
It felt like he’d been shuffled into a desk drawer.
He pulled the thin regulation wool blanket off the rack, rolled it up, and tucked it under his arm. Opened the door and looked out into the empty passageway. Stepped out and shut the door behind him.
Special assignment. The mother of all military euphemisms.
His best guess?
He was being shipped home in disgrace.
6
At 0600 the next morning a speaker outside Finn’s compartment crackled to life, emitting a long, sharp whistle followed by a monotone voice: “Reveille, reveille, all hands heave out and trice up.”
Which was lost on Finn, who’d been out most of the night anyway, walking the length of the gallery deck back and forth a dozen times, taking a different route with each circuit. It was what he always did in any new environment. Recon.
The gallery deck was trisected lengthwise by two long central corridors, port and starboard, like the twin avenues of a modern city. A similar pair ran the length of the mess deck, four levels below. From there, as on the rest of the ship, the tangle of passageways splintered off in all directions with no discernible logic, like the back alleyways of a medieval town. Given the sheer number of forks and turns, Finn guessed he could repeat his stern-to-bow-to-stern lap four or five dozen times and never walk the same path twice.
Reveille was also the breakfast bell, so he headed below to the mess deck. He’d already swapped his cammies for a plain desert-tan flight suit to better blend in—no patches, no platoon logo, just name tag and trident.
As he made his way aft he passed a line forming outside Jittery Abe’s, the ship’s coffee shop, serving a full line of caffeinated libations hot and cold. Uncle Sam, meet Captain Starbucks. The place didn’t open till 0630, but a swarm of some three dozen sailors had already flocked to the scent like sharks to blood.
“Sssst!” he heard a sailor at the end of the line, a corpsman, hiss under his breath to his neighbor. “Yo, Billy.” Nodding with his chin. “You in?” The corpsman shot a quick glance down at his hand, then back at the other guy. Finn caught a glimpse of a small handmade white paper envelope and heard Billy decline softly: “Not my thing, man.”
Stealing and dealing: a court-martial offense.
Not his problem.
Finn kept walking.
For his first morning on board Finn opted for general mess, right behind Jittery Abe’s, where the rank and file ate. He believed Lieutenant Schofield’s claim that Chief’s Mess had the best food on the ship, but Finn didn’t care about the quality of the food.
He cared about the quality of information.
On a ship, meals were ritual, food was social fabric; mess was the seat of morale. And sitting for a few minutes with his bowl of plain oatmeal, surrounded by trays bearing reconstituted egg product, greasy bacon, and mugs of corrosive coffee, listening to the scraps of conversation and watching the body language, Finn could already see: morale on the Lincoln was not good. It had been a long deployment, and from all appearances, not a happy one.
Everyone was itching to get out of the Gulf and head home.
Leaving mess behind, Finn headed above to resume his recon.
Despite its unique function as the air wing’s launch and landing strip, the flight deck was not the ship’s central reference point. The “main deck,” or deck 1, largely consisted of three gigantic bays that housed the planes, thus it was also called the “hangar deck.” Additional decks were numbered downward from there: deck 2, deck 3, deck 4, and so on, while decks above the hangar deck were technically called “levels”: 01 level; 02 level, with its aircrew quarters and squadron ready rooms; 03 level, aka “gallery deck,” and finally the flight deck and its imposing control tower, called the “island,” which itself encompassed minilevels numbering all the way up to level 10, where the radar dishes turned.
Since Finn’s first priority was to locate areas of possible solitude that were open to the exterior, today he’d stay above the waterline, which meant deck 2 (mess deck) and above. On each deck he made at least a dozen laps, noting entries, exits, and choke points; offices and compartments, their functions and personnel; side passageways and hatches and where each led.
As he walked he observed people hurrying to their various stations and duties, from engineers and intel wonks, navigators and scheduling clerks, communication hacks and store workers, to the mechanics and medics and barbers and galley cooks and all the other worker bees.
With no room to pass in the narrow passageways, every encounter between two people was an exercise in deference and therefore a reminder of rank. Enlisted deferred to officer, junior officer to senior officer, black shoe (boat navy) to brown shoe (aviation community). Yet everyone without exception, when they got close enough to see that golden trident on Finn’s chest, stepped aside.
In the grand poker of navy ranking, nothing trumped a SEAL.
A few times people stopped and asked, “Do you need directions, Chief?”
He didn’t.
Years earlier, before BUD/S, Finn had done a tour as a sonar operator and rescue swimmer on the USS Kitty Hawk, the navy’s last non-nuclear carrier. The Abraham Lincoln was a whole different ball game. Everything was newer, sharper, more modern. The dimensions felt larger here. There’d been no Starbucks on the Kitty Hawk, that was for sure.
The essentials never changed; you could walk off a World War II–era carrier and onto the flight deck of a modern vessel like the Lincoln and it would all feel familiar. Still, the devil was in the details.
And you never knew when the devil would show up.
Finn needed to know what had changed and what hadn’t, where everything was, how everything worked. So he walked and observed and cataloged.
Something was bugging him. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Not something wrong, exactly.
Something missing.
7
At 0900 the 1MC—the ship’s PA system—coughed out a single long tone from the bosun’s pipe, followed by that same bored voice: “All available hands to the flight deck for FOD walk.”
Finn was already there, watching as ship’s personnel fo
rmed a ragged line, edge to edge, across the bow.
The FOD walk—Foreign Object Debris walkdown, pronounced “fahd-walk”—was typically the first order of every day that included flight operations. All available hands were called topside to participate, officers included. If you were caught loitering below you were in for a quick ass-chewing and mandatory summons.
The FOD walk was serious business. It took tens of millions of dollars to put a fighter jet in the air; a seventy-five-cent bolt could ruin it. Any foreign object—the tiniest screw or scrap of metal wire, a misplaced shoestring or boot eyelet, a dropped pen—could be sucked into a jet engine and cause catastrophic damage to the aircraft. Not to mention the humans flying it.
To execute the walkdown, the crew would line up shoulder to shoulder in several rows, then carefully pace along the flight deck, starting at the bow. The vanguard line slowly moved aft, each person focused on the deck directly in front of them; every so often a sailor would bend down, pick up some found object, and continue on, additional rows following behind in ten-foot intervals to scour for anything the first row might have missed. When the whole phalanx reached the stern they’d about-face and perform the same operation over again, moving in reverse.
All found items were collected in FOD bags, then analyzed to trace them to their source. If you were the one who dropped that tiny screwdriver, well, you were fucked, because they could track that tool back to the specific tool kit it came from, and records would show who last took it out. You could run but you couldn’t hide. Not from a FOD walk.
Finn watched as crew members shuffled into place, lining the deck.
Not loving what he saw.
A few clusters of pasty faces here and there, under-dwellers from ship’s company. Bored pilots sauntering into the line with casual arrogance. Mostly the mob was composed of flight deck crew with their strange goggle-tan lines and colored jerseys. They all looked exhausted. And today’s flight ops hadn’t even started yet.
This was nothing like the FOD walks he remembered from the deck of the Battle Cat fifteen years earlier.
The USS Kitty Hawk had been one of the most beloved warships of the twentieth century. Also one of the most hated. Plagued with mechanical breakdowns and maintenance problems. All of which earned her a second nickname: “Shitty Kitty.” But the damn thing stayed afloat for nearly fifty years. Finn had loved it there on the Shitty Kitty, for one reason, and one reason only.
Captain Tomaszeski.
Captain Tom’s leadership sent ripples of pride and quality flowing throughout the ship. He created an esprit de corps that expressed itself on the flight deck, at mess, in the polish and gleam of every passageway. That turned even something as routine and burdensome as their daily FOD walkdown into something to look forward to.
Finn’s very first experience of a FOD walk on the Shitty Kitty had erupted with an amplified bass drum’s thump, thump, thump booming from the air boss’s PA system, joined by a deep blast of electric guitar—a single struck note, its long reverberation bending away at maximum fuzz and maximum volume. Then another long downward-bending note.
And then: Ozzy Osbourne, screeching out the opening lines of “Iron Man.”
And then another voice—“AHHHHHHH”—the air boss, known on the flight deck as the Voice of God, blasting out of the hyper-amplified flight-deck PA system—“AHRIGHT, KITTY HAHK, welcome to this mahnin’s edition of yah FAHHHD WAHHHK!”
Yes, Shitty Kitty’s VOG happened to hail out of Boston. God spoke Southie.
“AHHHHHH, little Black Sabbath comin atchahhhhh…”
Command on the Shitty Kitty definitely knew how to hold your attention. You couldn’t call it “fun,” exactly, it was a FOD walk and serious as a coronary. But there was a spring in people’s step, a sense of shared purpose, a feeling Finn identified as a spirit of camaraderie.
Finn did not experience this himself. The whole concept of camaraderie was something of a mystery to him. But he knew it when he saw it. For example, among the men in his own platoon.
He knew its absence when he saw it, too.
It was staring him in the face right now.
No music there on the deck of the Lincoln, just the sounds of the wind and shuffling feet. Like prisoners of war lining up in the frigid yard.
Now the ragged line was in motion, oozing along the flight deck. Finn noticed body language, posture, and facial tells. The deck-status LSO (landing signal officer) passing a young photographer, the two studiously avoiding each other’s eyes, unwittingly telegraphing an illicit relationship. Two guys who’d obviously been drinking the night before (although alcohol was strictly forbidden on board) and a third who’d been hitting it already this morning. He saw the guy who’d offered Billy the little white envelope in the coffee line, could see his dilated pupils.
Christ on stilts, Kennedy would say if he were seeing this.
And they were finding way too many items. Yes, the whole point of the walkdown was to find misplaced objects—but there shouldn’t have been this many objects there to start with.
This place was FOD, all right: Fucked On Delivery. The operation was a mess. Which meant there was a mess somewhere in the leadership.
Small men in high places.
As if on cue, Finn felt the faint heat of someone’s gaze fixed on him from above. He swiveled his neck to look up. A thin angular face looking down on him from sixty feet above, standing out on the little balcony they called “Vulture’s Row.” Steel-gray captain’s eyes, flanking an eagle’s claw of a nose, radiating mistrust.
Which Finn radiated right back.
Duly noted.
8
Ship’s library, waiting his turn till the next common-use PC came free.
Schofield the ATO officer was right: Finn’s cellphone was useless here. There was no wireless service out on the open ocean, and no Wi-Fi on board. No point. The place was one gigantic steel honeycomb. No way to make a Wi-Fi signal penetrate all that steel.
Until his replacement satphone came, the library’s PCs would have to do.
Though even then, email and web access would be limited. There was no such thing here as private email—it all went through DOD email that was tightly monitored—and the meager bandwidth made browsing the Internet tediously slow, social media sites all but impossible.
CNN blatted away on the big screen in the corner, nobody listening. At some point someone would switch it off and start the day’s cycle of films. No doubt Top Gun would at some point make an appearance. Or maybe Hot Shots, depending on the irony level of whoever controlled the TV.
Finn read the ship’s “Rules to Live By” posted on the bulkhead:
Any display of affection between shipmates while on board the ship is strictly prohibited. Out of the way places on the ship are off-limits for any male-female meetings. Close proximity viewing of movies on computer or DVD player, hanging out, or leaning on or against another person is forbidden. (Must maintain 1 foot distance between individuals.)
Good luck with that. Finn noted one pair “studying” in back, nearly down each other’s pants.
He finally got his PC, checked his two Gmail accounts.
No email yet from Kennedy.
Which shouldn’t have surprised him. “Give me twenty-four,” Kennedy had said when Finn told him he was leaving. Which Finn had understood to mean, “Give me twenty-four hours to talk with command, and I’ll contact you and explain exactly what the hell is going on.” That was yesterday afternoon. Technically speaking, not quite twenty-four hours yet.
So no, it shouldn’t have surprised him. But it did. Kennedy was a guy who underpromised and overdelivered.
Finn sent short emails to a few of his platoon mates. Then sat for a full minute, thinking about doing some web searches.
Decided against.
Clicked on NEW MESSAGE and entered into th
e TO box:
[email protected]
Finn had a girl. Up in Washington, near the Canadian border. Carol.
Finn and Carol lost their virginity to each other some two decades earlier when they were both fifteen. To date, she was the only girl he’d slept with. The other Team guys ribbed him about this, of course. Ragged on him for not hitting on other women the way the rest of them did. But Finn didn’t see the point. “Don’t you like sex?” they’d say. Of course he did. When he and Carol had sex Finn felt like he was diving into the deepest, clearest water. Becoming the water. When he climaxed, he became the entire ocean. So yes, he loved sex. Would it be better with someone other than Carol? He didn’t understand the question.
One of the guys asked him about it one night while they were waiting to take down an enemy compound in some backwater in Helmand Province.
He and Carol, Finn explained to the guy, had similar backgrounds. Not the same, but parallel.
In Carol’s case it was a stepfather with a predilection for staying home and raping the girls while mom was out hustling spare change. One gray day Carol’s older sister up and shot them both, then turned the little .22 on herself. Carol rode the foster home bus till she hit the age of majority, then took an actual bus west across the country to start over.
In Finn’s case it was…whatever it was.
Childhoods best left forgotten. Not identical, but similar.
“So she’s like, your soul mate?” the teammate said. Finn said “Okay” and let it go at that. He didn’t really know what bound them together. Maybe it was just that they seemed to be traveling in roughly the same direction.
“ ’Scuse me, Chief. You finished?” A sailor waiting his turn.
“Not quite,” said Finn. He typed in his message to squidink28:
I’m on the water. If you hear anything, don’t believe it. I’m good.
After clicking SEND he checked his IN box again. Still nothing.
If you hear anything, don’t believe it. Why had he written that? He didn’t know. Whatever prompted it was at the far edge of his thoughts, like a blur in his peripheral vision, something he couldn’t quite see but had learned to trust.