by Brandon Webb
Twenty-five sailors whooped and clapped.
Finn had tuned it all out.
Still staring at the blank screen.
The email was in code.
“Stan” was a Teams guy he knew from way back. Big Spider-Man fan. (Hence the pseudonym.) Got out a few years ago and now worked in the private sector, big defense firm. Stan had his ear to the floor. All kinds of floors. Quite a few walls and ceilings, too. Evidently Stan knew that Finn was in transit somewhere out on the Pacific, bound for Hawaii. What else did he know?
Smitty sends his regards
Smitty, i.e. Smith, i.e. someone anonymous. Someone not simply unknown but intentionally unknown. “Stan” was relaying a message from one of Finn’s platoon mates. Who couldn’t communicate directly himself.
Which meant something highly fucked was going on.
This was about the mess in Mukalla. Had to be.
Finn’s platoon had been tracking reports of a cell operating in the area, terrorizing locals, assassinating civic leaders. Stealing what wealth there was to steal. Very bad actors. Also fiendishly elusive. Impossible to find. Then they tortured and killed an American journalist. That was a bridge too far.
Someone came up with the critical intel: the cell was holed up in a small compound, northern outskirts of the city. It was a simple mission, a classic SEAL op. Three squads, in and out, kill or capture. Finn’s squad led the breach, Kennedy’s came in from the rear, and the third squad hung back to cover their flanks and roll up any escapees. Door charge. Flash bangs. Zip ties and hoods, out and ready and—
And nothing.
No one there.
Empty compound.
Bad intel.
And while Finn and his team stood there holding nothing but the wind, five klicks to the east the bad guys were slaughtering a whole settlement of farm families. Three dozen civilians. Toddlers to great-grandparents.
Finn and the others didn’t even hear about it until the next morning. Later that same day they were shipped back to Bahrain. And the day after that Finn was on a chopper out to the Lincoln, bound for home.
Officially, the platoon wasn’t being blamed. But Finn could add 2+2 as well as anyone. Someone had to go explain their epic fail to the top brass. As platoon chief, Finn was elected.
At least that’s what he’d assumed.
But not according to “Smitty.”
According to “Smitty,” 2+2 didn’t equal 4.
Finn looked up. Supercop was over, CNN back on the screen. The place had just about emptied out.
He stood, left the library to go circuit the decks, thinking about Stan’s email. The last six words. Which were the whole point of the message.
have a Molokai Mike on him!
Finn didn’t drink. Not a drop. Not caffeine, not alcohol. Everyone who knew him knew that. “Stan L.” knew that. “Smitty” knew that.
have a Molokai Mike
Molokai
Molokai. Known for its pineapples, sea cliffs (the highest in the world), and stunning tropical ecology. Also its lepers. Among the many gifts brought to the island by nineteenth-century European traders were smallpox, cholera, and leprosy. Soon the native Hawaiian lepers were exiled to the northern side of the island and declared legally dead.
Kalaupapa: most famous leper colony in history.
“Smitty” was saying: Finn was now inhabiting a leper colony.
He was saying: Finn was a leper colony. Cut off. Legally dead.
A leper colony of one.
Finn had thought he was going home to defend his platoon.
But they weren’t blaming his platoon.
They were blaming him.
33
A few more days south of the Arabian Peninsula the oppressive shroud of wet air finally dispersed, gracing the inhabitants of the Lincoln with a dry breeze that made the flight deck crew just about weep with relief.
The drier air was a welcome change for the pilots, too, but the open ocean also brought more heat differentials, which meant more weather. As dusk approached, the sea state grew steadily rougher, and by midnight, with flight ops moving into the final launch cycle for the night, the ship was heaving and surging in twenty-five-foot swells.
Lieutenant Kristine “Biker” Shiflin’s F/A-18 was the last jet to launch, which meant that ninety minutes later it was also the last to join that cycle’s marshal stack, the tight-knit pattern planes formed in 1,000-foot layers as they queued for recovery. By the time it was Kris’s turn to go, the sea swells were pitching at thirty feet and more.
“Alrighty, then,” she murmured. “Bring it on.” Cruising at 660 mph, adjusting for tailwind, headwind, and crosswinds while listening to the voice in her headset, she stared into the nothing and waited for the word to go.
There was no moon out tonight. Pitch-black skies, pitch-black water. Her “night in the barrel,” as the pilots called it: a nighttime landing in the worst possible conditions.
“One zero five, marshal. Your push time is one-five,” said the voice in her ear. Now there was a hell of a phrase. Push time. Like you were about to give birth.
It felt like no time at all had elapsed when the voice spoke again.
“One zero five, dirty up.”
“One zero five,” she replied.
She extended her landing gear and wing flaps (“dirtied up”), activated the whirring servo motor that lowered her tailhook. Shook her head and gave a low laugh. It still amazed her that this was how they did it: that their high-tech solution to the challenge of putting 25 tons’ worth of incredibly sophisticated twenty-first-century machinery down on a moving ship’s surface in the middle of the rocking ocean was to catch on to a little wire with a little hook.
Basically, the same technology she used to hang cheap art on her studio apartment wall back home in Tennessee.
Down below, in the Golden Kestrels’ ready room, a dozen guys from Kris’s squadron were sitting around munching popcorn, watching her approach on the CCTV, taking bets on which wire she’d snag or whether she’d miss altogether and have to do a bolter.
She missed.
The ready room filled with groans and cheers, depending on which bets each had placed, followed by more popcorn, more bets, eyes glued back to the screen.
Up in the empty blackness 1,200 feet over their heads, Kris came around to port, describing a gigantic U-turn in the sky, then circled the boat and began her reapproach.
The boat heaved, bobbing up and down in forty-foot swells now, the enormous brass propellers visible for a few seconds at a time, the monster baring its teeth.
No low laugh this time. Kris was all focus.
In the old WWII days carriers had plain decks, straight as a Roman highway. When your landing didn’t go well you just plowed straight on and crashed into whatever planes were parked up ahead. Until the Brits came up with the idea of knocking the landing strip off at an angle, giving planes in trouble a clear path to escape for a second try. It was the Brits, too, who came up with the term.
Bolter.
Bolter: n. bohl’ter, from bolt, as in the flight of a crossbow arrow; a bolt of lightning, the bolt of a startled hare or runaway horse; an escaped criminal bolting from prison…
The instant Kristine hit the deck she shoved her throttle forward to “full military”—maximum power without afterburner—in case she needed to bolt a second time. Her jet’s tailhook erupting in a brilliant rooster tail of sparks as it screamed across the deck’s surface, making its grab for that 3 wire.
“Bolter! Bolter! Bolter!” said the LSO’s voice in Kris’s ear.
Shit!
A startled hare, a runaway horse—
She pulled back on the stick as she shot off the edge of the deck, practically skimming the black water below before pulling up into another climb.
Big U-turn in the sky and the Hornet came around once more, entering approach for its third try.
In the squad room the popcorn was ignored, bets forgotten, as the space went quiet. Biker was in trouble.
A land-based runway, commercial or military, could run from 6,000 to 12,000 feet long. The Lincoln’s flight deck was one twentieth of that. The length of a few football fields. A dot in the ocean.
A pitching, yawing, rolling invisible dot.
Biker closed her eyes.
She’d won her first Harley off a guy on a bet when she was fifteen, playing a game of high-stakes five-finger fillet where the contestants had to stab a jackknife down rapidly into the spaces between their fingers splayed out on a tabletop. Kris never missed, not once. Neither did the other guy. So they upped the stakes and put on blindfolds. Kris stabbed and stabbed, back and forth across her spread hand like a sewing-machine shank—hit the table every time. The other guy made seven nervous stabs before taking a knife tip square in the middle finger. Just about cut off the damn phalanx. Kris rode off that night on the guy’s Harley. In the squadron, it was the stuff of legend. It was why they called her “Biker.”
Right now felt a lot like that hot summer night outside Nashville. Stabbing her jet down at the deck, blindfolded. It was the 50,000-pound, $70 million incarnation of that casual figure of speech: a stab in the dark.
A nighttime carrier landing was essentially a controlled crash. There were no other human beings on the planet insane enough to attempt it but American pilots. Astronauts who’d piloted their rockets through G-force multiples and landed the damn space shuttle claimed that none of that equaled the stress and difficulty of a night in the barrel.
Another approach…fuck!
This time she caught the ship in between swells and the deck held fairly still—but she gave in to a twinge of panic and twitched back on the stick a fraction of an inch just before hitting the third wire, and bounced off the carrier’s surface yet again.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” she muttered, eyes darting from her instrument panel to the dark around her and back. Pushing the panic out of her chest and down into her gut. Forcing herself to keep breathing.
In the air again.
And getting low on fuel.
This was a blue ocean hop, no chance of pulling a “trick or treat,” as the pilots called it, and heading off to an alternate landing strip. The nearest beach was hundreds of miles away. And she didn’t have the fuel to risk pulling yet another bolter.
Which meant her options were now down to just two.
Grab the wire this time around.
Or eject.
There was no doorway 3.
Option number two would mean flushing $70 million of taxpayers’ money down the toilet, which to be honest was not her top concern right now, but also dropping herself down into that very same Arabian Ocean toilet, which she cared about very much indeed.
Thoughts of Micaela’s last moments flooded her mind and she shoved them out again.
She was not going into the water.
She was not going into the water.
She was not going into the water.
As she came around Kris tried not to imagine treading water alone out there in the ink-black ocean, frantically praying her flotation vest would hold long enough for the SAR team to get there, feeling the salt water tickling at her neck—
She came in at a hard angle, hammering the deck like a battering ram, pushed the throttle to full military even though she had no more bolters left—and felt the sudden jerk as her Hornet’s tailhook snagged the last wire. She heard the cable’s lunatic shriek as it snaked out into its elongated V, pulling on the massive machinery below in its attempt to stop the nearly supersonic momentum and keep her from shooting off the ship and plunging into the deep.
And then she was still.
Silence.
For a moment she thought it was a trick of perception, a glitch in her wiring. That she must have gone up into the night sky yet again and was now in the process of a slow, terminal dive. After a moment she took a violent in-breath, then slowly exhaled. Then two more quavering breaths. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
She had grabbed the fourth wire. Her last chance.
She was alive.
In the Kestrels’ ready room, a lusty cheer broke out.
“See you boys at midrats,” said one pilot as he headed for the ready room door. “Gotta go change mah shorts.”
Kris felt her pulse hammering as she taxied her Hornet into place, the goggled and green-jerseyed handlers waving her on. She forced a few long breaths, slowing her heartbeat, and grinned out the cockpit window as a few deck crew added gestures not seen on any other flight deck in US naval history: both fists held out in front, twisting forward and back. Revving on motorcycle handlebars.
Biker has landed.
She waited till the plane came to a complete halt, reduced power to idle, let out a breath, then cheerfully flipped her crew the bird. She stood, stepped out onto the wing, hopped down, and made for the catwalk, thanking them all one by one with fist bumps and hugs, her yellow- and green-jerseyed, goggle-faced comrades.
On her way below for her debrief, Kristine stopped. She needed to take a moment for herself there on the catwalk, alone.
She stood gripping the rail, struggling to get the shakes under control. Looked down at the terrifying expanse of ocean. Gripped the rail harder, willing the tremors in her muscles to slow and still. Feeling the nausea as the rivers of adrenaline drained away.
She closed her eyes, squeezing them tight.
She could still see that black water below.
34
Finn had watched the whole thing on CCTV in the wardroom. He stuck around for a while after the tense landing was over, listening to officers’ chatter, then came out and up to walk the gallery deck—just in time to see Biker emerge from her ready room, post debrief. He stood aside and nodded, catching a nod and nervous smile from her as she passed.
In the eight days he’d been on board, Biker had lost weight, maybe six or seven pounds. She looked gaunt. And right now she was a nervous wreck. He didn’t blame her.
About twenty feet up the passageway he stopped. Sensed that hormonal ozone again. Gathering human thunderheads.
“That was some hot-stuff show up there, Lieutenant.” A voice from down the passageway behind him.
Finn turned back just in time to see a tense exchange unfolding between Biker and Movie Star, the CO helo pilot.
“ ’Scuse me?” said Biker, her voice cracking.
“You know you’re supposed to fly those things, right? Not play hopscotch with them.”
Finn could see from her posture that Biker was caught off guard, grasping for a comeback. Not on her usual game, not at all.
“For a while there,” the guy went on, “I thought we were going to have to power up the Knighthawk and go sort through some Hornet wreckage.”
It was the kind of trash talk jet pilots took from one another all the time, but this guy wasn’t a jet pilot and his barbs weren’t banter. They were naked aggression.
And they’d found their target. The encounter lasted no more than ten seconds, but Biker was badly rattled when she walked on. Finn caught a glimpse of the smug rage playing over Movie Star’s features.
Finn turned back and saw West Texas, the tall helo pilot, striding toward him. The two locked eyes for an instant and Finn saw her fury as she passed, going after her friend.
“ ’Scuse me, sir,” she spat as she brushed by Movie Star—but it sounded a lot more like Fuck you, sir.
Movie Star raised both hands, palms forward, all innocence. Hey, just kidding around.
Finn continued on.
He’d seen this dynamic before. A pilot like Biker was there for a reason; she was o
n a trajectory. The no-future helo pilot wasn’t like that. Finn could read the whole story. Movie Star had planned to be a jet pilot, a top-gun guy, swinging dick of the blue skies, flying his machine like a tricked-out hog. It must piss him off mightily that a girl got the call sign “Biker.” But he hadn’t ranked high enough in flight school to get his pick of platform, so he ended up a helo pilot by default. No cool call sign, no yahoo pyrotechnics in the clouds, not for Movie Star. He was still angry about it. And taking it out on Biker.
As he walked Finn noted the usual parade of characters peopling the passageways. Grease-covered mechanics. Riggers and junior officers. A goggled flight deck handler. More pilots breaking up from debrief and heading below to midrats or off to their racks for the night. A few E-1s with their cleaning supplies, heading above or below to wash away evidence of the dying day. The city’s night population, going about their business. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
Finn stopped.
He stepped back into a shallow alcove so he wouldn’t block traffic, what there was of it, and stood still for a moment.
Something didn’t fit.
In sniper school their training began not with how to shoot but how to see. They were taught how to use their peripheral vision, which was anatomically more sensitive to movement and color than the central portion of the retina. They were taught to take in massive amounts of visual information by scanning a scene from right to left, in the opposite direction they’d been taught to use all their lives, because it interrupted the normal leaps of assumption and trained the brain to absorb the raw information and take it at face value.
And they were taught the art of target detection, which hinged on the ability to quickly take in a large field of vision and spot individual elements that were out of place. A straight line or hard geometric shape within a natural landscape. A stray moving branch, an unnatural stillness in the breeze-blown grass. A person doing something they wouldn’t normally be doing.