* * *
Gunny Garcia crouched on the signal bridge and stared at the navy-gray aluminum door that covered the entrance to the bridge, now that he had the watertight door open. His first thought was, That’s why the gunman didn’t notice the two open dogs. The watertight door was hidden by this aluminum door. A mild piece of luck, in a business where you need every ounce of luck you can get.
His second thought came when he put his hand on the doorknob and started to turn it. There were, he knew, a lot of American sailors on that bridge. The whole watch team, since the ship was at general quarters. And not a one of them armed. How many gunmen there were he didn’t know. So he was going to go charging into a firefight where he was outnumbered and some innocent Americans were going to be shot, some of them fatally. Casualties would be unavoidable.
Gunny Garcia took his hand off the doorknob and crouched, thinking about it. The fumes from the hangar fire were in his nostrils and the low moan of the wind in the masthead wires was in his ears. What to do? Where in the name of God was that asshole Slagle? What would the lieutenant want him to do? What would the captain, if he were aboard, tell him to do? If he was going to do anything at all, he was going to have to get to it pretty quickly, before that bunch with the Uzis decided to look out this window again.
When he had been in combat before he had been only twenty, just another rifleman in Vietnam. The sergeants and the officers made the decisions and he laid his ass on the line carrying them out. It was still his ass, but now it was his decision too. That’s what you get, Tony, he told himself, for working your butt off for all these chevrons and rockers. Now you gotta earn ’em.
Yet instinctively he waited. You stayed alive in combat by listening to your instincts. The people who didn’t have the right instincts died. Combat was natural selection with a vengeance.
What light there was disappeared. Then it came back on. Garcia looked around. And once more. Someone was flashing the big floods on the island.
A signal? To whom?
A minute went by, then another. He risked another glance in the window. Still just the two sailors sitting on the deck.
Damnation! What was going on?
What was that noise? That buzzing? A helicopter! Gradually the noise grew louder. More than one, Garcia decided. He knew where they were without looking. They were coming in with the wind on their nose, across the stern of the ship.
He took the pistol from his trousers and thumbed the hammer back. One more glance in the window, then he pushed the door open and crept onto the bridge. He eased the door shut behind him.
The sailors didn’t look up. Good for them. So far so good.
He would try the silenced pistol first. If he could drop a man without the others hearing the shot, he might get a second or two advantage.
He could hear the choppers even here on the bridge. Now if the guy guarding these sailors is just looking at the choppers … He crept to the corner, keeping low, and peered around with the pistol ready.
The gunman was ten feet away walking toward him and looking straight at him! He snapped off a shot. And another. The man was hit! Garcia stuffed the pistol in his pants and stepped out with the M-16 up.
Before he could pull the trigger the bullets from an Uzi tore into his side and he was off balance and falling and the M-16 was hammering and he was desperately pushing himself backward, toward cover.
He was on the floor and he didn’t have the rifle. A sailor ran past him for the door where he had entered.
A stuttering hail of lead cut down another sailor charging toward him. The game was up. Surprise was lost; to stay was to die. He scrambled on all fours crab-like for the door, now open. Another sailor careened past and then Garcia was through the door.
He would never make it. The gunmen would come to the door and cut him down. The watertight door was impervious to bullets. He pushed it shut and used the dogs to pull himself to his feet. He cranked the dogs shut with all his strength. There! The bridge windows were thick. Bulletproof. It would take them about fifteen seconds to get this thing open.
He turned and hobbled toward the signalmen’s shack as fast as he could go, his side on fire and his back ready to receive the bullets from the Uzis. But the bullets never came.
* * *
When the ear-popping roar of the M-16 filled the bridge, Haddad, the gunman on the port wing of the bridge who had been dividing his attention between the captain and the approaching helicopters, dropped to his knees and spun for cover. The jacketed slugs from Garcia’s weapon ricocheted off the steel and smashed into the portside bridge windows, crazing them with a thousand tiny cracks.
Admiral Parker grabbed Qazi’s gun hand. “Run, Jake!”
Grafton was the closest to the door. He launched himself through it.
From behind the helm installation, Haddad fired a burst toward Garcia and another over the body of his downed comrade at a sailor trying to make the door on the starboard wing. The sailor crumpled like a rag doll.
Parker twisted Qazi’s wrist with maniacal fury. Qazi drew back his left hand and chopped at the admiral — once, twice — but he was off balance and couldn’t get his weight behind the blows. He went to his knees to keep his bones from snapping. The veins in Parker’s forehead stood out like red cords. The pistol fell. Qazi flailed desperately at Parker’s testicles.
The admiral was a man possessed. They struggled in silence. Qazi went to the floor to deny Parker leverage. His desperation gave way to panic; he had come so far, risked so much, and now this one man was defeating him!
Then suddenly it was over. Haddad struck the admiral on the back of the head with the butt of his pistol and he fell like a tree.
Qazi retrieved his weapon and slowly got to his feet. His right wrist was already yellow and purple. As he massaged it and opened and closed his hand experimentally he glanced at Captain James, still behind the captain’s chair, leaning against the wall and looking at him. For the first time in a very long time a smile creased Laird James’s leathery face. Then he slid down the wall and rolled face down. A blood stain was spreading across the back of his shirt. One of the ricocheting M-16 slugs, probably.
The helicopters settled into the glow of the island floodlights. Qazi checked his man who lay in a twisted heap in the middle of the bridge. It was Jamail, the man who liked to kill.
The other gunman, Haddad, stood facing the Americans still seated against the wall. Three of them wore khaki. He was swearing at them in Arabic, his Uzi ready.
“No,” Qazi told him and walked to where he could see down through the impact-crazed windows onto the angle of the flight deck. The helicopters were just touching down.
There was much to be done. He picked up the microphone for the 1-MC and pushed the button. “American sailors! This is Colonel Qazi. Three of my helicopters have just landed on the flight deck. If you interfere, more men will die. Someone just tried to gain entry to the bridge. As a lesson to you, the body of one of your sailors will be thrown to the flight deck. If there is any more resistance, any more shooting, if another of my men dies, I will kill your admiral.”
He put the microphone back in its bracket. “Watch them,” he told Haddad. He walked over to the dead American and dragged his body to the door to the signal bridge. He looked through the window, then eased the door open. Keeping low, he dragged the body through, then wrestled it up over the rail. It fell away toward the deck below, leaving the rail smeared with blood. He went back onto the bridge and dogged the watertight door shut. He propped the interior door open so the dogs were plainly visible. Then he walked the width of the bridge to where the captain and admiral lay on the deck.
James still had a pulse; he was no doubt hemorrhaging internally. He would probably die soon. But the Americans didn’t know that.
On the flight deck, sentries had exited the helicopters and spread out to guard them. He could see Noora helping Jarvis out.
Qazi picked up his gym bag and turned to Admiral Parker, who was si
tting up nursing his head. He kicked his arm out and rolled him on his back. Then he sat on him and extracted a pair of handcuffs from his gym bag. He snapped them on the admiral’s wrists, then rolled him over and placed a piece of tape across his mouth. Finally he helped the man to his feet. “Nice try, Admiral, but not nice enough.” He pushed the admiral toward the door. “Stay here,” he told Haddad. “And don’t let anyone else onto the bridge. Use grenades if you have to. Don’t let them take you alive.”
23
Callie Grafton stood on the balcony of her hotel room and shivered in the chilly wind. She ignored the spattering raindrops and peered into the darkness, across the lights of the city, out to sea. On clear nights she could see the lights of the United States, but not tonight. Too much rain, she thought. Too much cloud. She went back inside and closed the sliding glass door. A piece of the drapery got trapped in the door. She freed it and closed the door again.
It was two A.M. She had been lying on the bed still fully dressed, too tense to sleep. She had last seen Jake three and a half hours ago, when he bid her good-bye and followed that sailor into the alley. He must have decided to spend the night aboard ship. The officer at fleet landing had called and said that Jake was going out on the liberty boat, and that he had asked the officer to call and tell her he might be unable to get back ashore tonight. That was so like Jake. The heavens could be falling and Jake would have someone call and say that none of the pieces had fallen on him.
He called her every time a plane crashed. Someone would fly into the ground or eject from a burning plane. Before the news was announced or anyone was notified, if he was ashore Jake would call. He would talk of this and that and nothing in particular, and he would tell her he loved her, and he would somehow find a way to make the time of the call stick in her mind. Later she would hear of the crash. And then she would know that he hadn’t been the one injured or killed. She had caught on, of course. Whenever he mentioned the time or asked her what she was watching on television or used any of his other little dodges to make the time of the call memorable, she knew.
She stood at the window and stared down into the street. The puddles reflected the light. God, Naples is such a dreary town in the rain! The dirty stone and mud brown stucco soaks up the light. The place looks as old as it is, old and tired and poor and worn and …
The lobby of the hotel had been a mess when she walked through it this evening on the way to her room. The authorities were trundling a body into an ambulance. She had had to wait on the sidewalk while a uniformed man wearing a submachine gun on a strap checked her identification and compared her name to a list of hotel guests. Only then had she been admitted. In the lobby people in formal clothes sat on the black leather sofas without arms and smoked and talked to men with notebooks. The middle elevator had been roped off. She saw the bullet holes in the plaster and the red stains. Another man with a submachine gun had directed her to take the stairs. She had trudged the three flights up the dark staircase with a naked bulb on every landing. Why were all the staircases and buildings painted earth tones? The whole city had that look, that look … of an impoverished old age, of …
Jake’s calls when someone died were his way of reaching out. He wasn’t so much reassuring her as reassuring himself. He was still alive. He still possessed the only thing on earth he valued — her.
She fingered the drapes and wiped away her tears. Perhaps she loved him too much. What would she ever do if she lost him?
She opened the door and went out on the balcony again, trying to see through the rain. He was out there somewhere, in the darkness, on that sea.
* * *
The United States still rode on her anchor with her bow pointed into the wind. Smoke from the fires raging within her seeped out of hatches on the O-3 level forward of the island and from the open elevator doors. Below decks her crew fought desperately to save her.
The magnesium flare Qazi had ignited in the communications spaces melted through the steel deck and fell into the forward hangar bay, Bay One. It struck an aircraft and broke into several pieces which caroomed onto the deck, already ankle-deep in foam. There the pieces exploded. Molten metal was showered around the bay and several fires were ignited.
But the main threat was in Bay Two, amidships. Here the fires were raging unchecked in an ink-black hell of noise and poison gases. AFFF rained from the sprinklers mounted in the hangar ceiling, but the moisture had little effect other than to lessen the heat somewhat. Sailors fighting the fires stumbled from the oven-like bay every few minutes for a soaking from an open hose. Thus cooled, they were given water to drink, the oxygen canisters in their OBAs were checked and replaced if necessary, and they were sent back into the bay.
Ray Reynolds knew the very existence of the ship was at stake. Already the temperature in the compartments above Bay Two on the O-3 level had reached one hundred fifty degrees and fires were spontaneously igniting. The problem was the smoke trapped in the hangar. The fires here were invisible. No one even knew exactly how many fires there were.
Reynolds gathered the repair-locker leaders on a sponson where exhausted fire fighters lay flaked out on the deck. “We’re going to have to open the fire doors at both ends of the bay.”
The rush of air through the hangar would exhaust the smoke and fan the flames even hotter. Yet if the hose teams formed a line in Bay One with the wind at their backs, they might be able to snuff the fires before they joined and raged into a giant, unquenchable inferno. Bay Three was already awash in AFFF, so the backline was as ready as it would ever be. The fire leaders rushed away to get their men in place.
Reynolds was betting the ship on this maneuver. If he couldn’t get the fire under control, it would only be a matter of time before he must order the ship abandoned.
The magnesium fires were out in Bay One when Reynolds got there. Reynolds was wearing an OBA. The blackened wreckage of burned-out aircraft looked surreal in the stark white light from emergency lanterns, the only lights functioning. Thank God going into Naples he had had the handler move as many planes as possible to the flight deck to clear space in Bay Two for the sailors to play basketball. Reynolds got the hose teams arrayed five abreast amid the wreckage and gave the signal to open the doors. The door in front of him between Bays One and Two opened about six feet, then jammed. It could neither be closed again nor opened any further.
No time to worry about the door. The die was cast. The hose teams crowded together and squeezed through. Already the smoke was going out the aft bay, for the men there had managed to get that door almost completely open before it too jammed. The hose teams laid the AFFF right at the base of the flames as they came to them and kept moving. The bays were littered with smashed, blackened shells of aircraft which the men had to snake around.
The overhead was afire too, and streams of foam were directed upward. A rack holding a half-dozen aircraft external fuel tanks that had been weakened by fire gave way under the pressure of the stream of foam. The tanks, each weighing two hundred pounds, came floating down amid a veritable waterfall of foam. One of them landed on Ray Reynolds and two sailors near him carrying battle lanterns. When the tank was rolled away, Reynolds was dead.
The hose teams continued aft, smothering the fires with foam. One of the men who had been hit by the tank was still alive, so he was carried below to Sick Bay. The bodies of Commander Ray Reynolds and the sailor who died with him were laid on Elevator One with the corpses of fifteen other men who had died fighting the fires.
* * *
Jake Grafton stood in the furnace heat of the starboard O-3 level passageway and peered through the murk. The floor was awash with foamy water. The fluorescent lights were off and the only illumination came from battle lanterns mounted near each knee-knocker and hatchway. The little islands of dim white light revealed a smoky haze full of sweating men wrestling charged hoses. The hoses full of the water-foam mixture under immense pressure had the weight and rigidity of steel pipe. They could only be bent with the co
mbined efforts of several sailors swearing mightily inside their OBAs.
Jake started coughing. “Better get an OBA on,” someone shouted, his words distorted by the faceplate on his rubber mask.
Jake pulled his shirttail from his trousers and held it over his face. His eyes were beginning to smart and itch. He stumbled aft, ducking under and stepping over hoses and inching by the busy men until he found a corridor leading outboard. He followed it. He came to a ladder. The watertight hatch was down and dogged into place. In the center of the large hatch was a smaller, round hatch, just big enough to admit one man. This fitting was open and a hose went through it. Jake squirmed through.
The turnarounds were full of men sitting and breathing through rags held before their faces. These men had been evacuated from the compartments above Bays One and Two. There was nowhere else for them to go. If 20 percent of the crew were still on the beach, over forty-four hundred men were aboard.
The central engineering control compartment was still manned and the DCA was at his desk, consulting charts. The engineering department head, Commander Ron Triblehorn, was looking over the reactor control panels when Jake came in, but he strode toward him as soon as he saw him. “How did you get off the bridge?”
“Somebody got onto the bridge and started shooting.”
“The admiral and the captain?”
“Still up there.”
“Ray Reynolds is dead. He was killed a few minutes ago up in the hangar bay. Something fell on him and broke his neck. You’re the senior line officer not on the bridge.” The senior officer not a hostage, he meant.
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