Final Flight (41 page)

Jake grabbed the bolt-cutter from the deck where
Archer had dropped it and used it on the handcuffs that
held Parker’s wrist to the dolly.

Jake dropped the big tool and seized the
tongue of the dolly. The brake was automatically
released when he lifted it. He began to pull the
dolly. “What are you gonna do?” Archer asked.
“Over the ,ide. The radio receiver won’t work
underwater, and maybe the water will short out this trigger
thing.”

Archer joined him on the other side of the tongue.
They began to trot. ‘not too fast,” Archer
warned, “or this thing’ll tip over.

They pulled it around the front of the island toward the
starboard rail.

“This thing may go off when it hits the water,”
Archer said.

“We’ll have to risk it. We’re out of time.”
There’s a bomb chute somewhere here on the starboard
side of the island, Jake remembered.

There! He turned the dolly around and backed it
toward the chute, which was a metal ramp with lips that
extended downward at an angle over the catwalk
and ended out in space.

The rear wheels of the dolly went in and then the
front and it started to roll. It fell away toward
the sea. Jake Grafton turned his face and
closed his eyes. If it blew, he would never even
feel it.

His heart pounded. Every thump in his chest was another
half second of life. Oh, Callie, I
love you so…

When he finally realized there would be no explosion,
he tried to walk and his legs wouldn’t work. He
fell to the deck and rolled over on his back.
Slowly, slowly he sat up. Archer was sitting on
the deck near him with his face in his hands.

Qazi crossed from the open right-side door of the
helicopter to he bucket seats that lined the other
bulkhead. He had been watching the lights of the
carrier recede into the gloom. “How far away are
we?”

Ali shouted, barely making himself eard over the
engine noise. “When we get to eight
miles Qazi handed him the radio triggering box.
Ali used the telephone by the door to speak to the
pilots, then held his watch nder the small lamp
near the phone, one of three small lights hat
kept the interior from total darkness. He stepped
to the door and leaned out into the slipstream looking aft.
Noora and Jarvis were huddled in the corner.
Noora had Jarvis’s head cradled on her breast
and was rocking softly from ide to side. Jarvis’s
face was down and Qazi could only see the op of his
head.

On Qazi’s right, three of the gunmen sat with their
weapons between their knees and their heads back against the
bulkhead, their eyes closed and their faces slack.
They looked totally exausted. These three had
managed to scramble aboard as the flight-deck crash
truck charged them, then turned in the door and
emptied their weapons at the truck. They were the
only survivors of the thirty-six men Qazi had
taken to the ship. Yet he had two bombs. The
skins of the weapons were white and reflected the glow
of the little light over the telephone near the door.

Ali was still leaning out into the slipstream. He
pulled himself inside, checked his watch, and grinned
at Qazi. He braced himself against the
bulkhead and manipulated the controls on the box.

Nothing happened. He tried again with a frown on his
face. He leaned out the door with the box in his hand and
pointed it aft at the carrier.

Ali hurled the control box at Qazi, who
didn’t flinch as it bounced off the bulkhead and
fell to the floor. “Traitor,” Ali screamed as
he grabbed for his pistol.

Qazi shot him. Once, twice, three times
with the silenced HiPower. He could feel the recoil,
but the high ambient noise level covered the
pistol’s muffled pops.

Ali sagged backward through the door. The
slipstream caught him and his hand flailed, then he was
gone.

The gunmen didn’t move. Noora continued
to rock back and forth with her eyes closed, her arms
around Jarvis.

Colonel Qazi slowly put the pistol back
into his trouser waistband. He zipped up the
leatherjacket he was wearing. It was chilly here. He
stuffed his hands into the jacket pockets and stared at the
white weapons.

LAIRD JAMES was in a coma when Jake
checked on him in sick bay. An IV
bottle of whole blood hung on a hook beside the
bed, and two corpsmen were preparing him for the operating
room. The blue oxygen mask over his nose and
mouth made the rest of his face look white as
chalk.

“Is he going to make it?” Jake asked the
corpsmen, who didn’t look up.

“He’s lost a lot of blood. Bullet through his
liver. His heart stopped once and we gave it a
kick-start.”

Jake turned and went back through the ward, looking
at the burn, gunshot, and smoke victims. There
were more patients than beds and some of the men lay on
blankets on the deck. Most were conscious, a few
were sleeping, and here and there several were delirious.

One man was handcuffed to his bed. A marine wearing
a duty belt with a pistol sat on a molded
plastic chair near the bed, facing the prisoner.

The man in the bed looked at Jake, then looked
away. Jake picked up the clipboard from a hook
on the bottom of the bed and read it. Name unknown, no
ID. “Can’t or won’t speak English.”

“He’s one of the terrorists, sir,” the marine
said. “He fell overboard from the liberty boat
earlier this evening.”

Jake nodded, replaced the clipboard on the
bed, then moved on. Chaplain Berkowitz was moving
through the ward, taking his time, pausing for a short
conversation at every bed.

The second-deck passageways outside sick
bay were still crowded with men sitting and standing, but the crowd
was thinning as the chiefs and division officers got people
sorted into working parties and led them off. The I
comMC blared continually with muster information for the various
divisions and squadrons.

Jake climbed a ladder to the hangar deck.
Foam still covered the wreckage of aircraft and
lay several inches deep on the deck. The
bulkheads and overhead were charred black. The glow of
emergency lights was almost lost in the dark cavern.

In Flight Deck Control the handler was roaring
orders over the radio system he used to talk
to his key people on the flight deck. Will Cohen, the
air wing maintenance officer, turned to Jake when he
saw him enter the space.

Every airplane on the flight deck had shrapnel
or bullet damage. “All of them?” Jake
asked, stunned. “Even the ones clear up on the
bow?”

Cohen showed him a list he was compiling.
They went over it, plane by plane. Jake wanted
every fighter and tanker available airborne as soon
as possible. He had Harvey Schultz briefing a
dozen F-14 crews and a dozen First A- I 8
Hornet pilots. But he had to get them some
airplanes It quickly became apparent that the
E-2’s parked next to the 1 island would not be
flying tonight. One of them had absorbed so much
shrapnel from the disintegrating rotors of the upended 1
helicopter that Cohen thought it would never fly again.
The others would require rework at an intermediate
maintenance facility back in the States. Three
of the tactical jets had caught fire, and the fires
had damaged two other machines before they were
extinguished. All the planes had bullet holes
in them, and maintenance crews were checking right now
to determine the extent of the damage. “We can’t
take them to the hangar, and the wind makes opening the
radomes and engine-bay doors hazardous,” Cohen
said.

“We’re going to damage some planes just
inspecting them unless you slow the ship down or run
with the wind over the stern.”

Jake had the ship heading due south ‘at
twenty-five knots, straight at the
island of Sicily. Gettysburg was a mile
away on the starboard beam.

Her captain had requested this slower speed to enable
his ship to ride easier.

The bullet hole in the plexiglas status
board caught Jake’s eye. Someone had drawn a
yellow circle around it. It looked obscene.
“One hour,” Jake told the maintenance officer.
“We launch in one hour. Get me some planes.”

On the bridge Jake ordered the ship slowed
to fifteen knots. The reduced wind would also help
the crash crews who were trying to clean up the nuclear
contamination from the wreckage of the chopper immediately in
front of number-four JBD. When the helicopter
had turned upside down, the ensuing fuel fire had
ruptured one of the weapons, causing the conventional
explosive inside to cook off and scatter nuclear
material.

Most of it had been carried over the port side
of the ship, but the wreckage and flight deck were still
hot. The crash crew was using high-pressure
hoses to wash the radioactive contamination into the
sea, where it would soon disperse to harmless concentrations.

Now Jake stood beside the captain’s chair and
tried to absorb the avalanche of information
flowing at him from all over the ship. The information
came faster than Jake could assimilate it. The
navigator came over to help.

Several long messages were handed to him to approve
before they were sent by flashing light to Gettysburg for
electronic transmission. The first one he looked
at was a Top Secret flash message giving the
bare bones of the incident. The second one was ten
pages long and covered the incident in detail.
Jake took exactly one minute to read them both
as he listened to someone give him an estimate of how
soon various radio circuits could be repaired.
Jake handed the short message to the signalman for
transmission and used a borrowed pencil to draft a
final paragraph for the longer one: Intentions: Will
launch all available fighters ASAP to pursue,
find, and destroy helicopter that escaped.

Gettysburg radar tracked it toward
Sicily. Contact now lost. Believe
helicopter will land and refuel vicinity of
Palermo. Urgently request assistance.”

He stared at the paragraph and chewed on the
pencil. The landing near Palermo was only likely
because of the chopper’s fuel state. There was no way it
could fly the width of the Mediterranean without
refueling.

Perhaps Qazi intended to transfer the bombs in
Sicily to another aircraft, a faster one.
“All available fighters” was a joke: right
now he didn’t have any. And what assistance could
anyone give?

Never hurts to ask, he told himself and handed the
message to the waiting signalman. Then he
pursued the sailor, took the message back, and
added one more sentence. “While in hot pursuit,
intend to enter foreign airspace without clearance.”

The squawk box again. “Bridge, Handler.”

“Bridge, aye.”

“We have three aircraft on deck with strike
damage, CAG. I need room.

Request permission to jettison these three
aircraft.”

“Push ‘em over the side?”

“Have someone take the classified boxes out of them
and do it.”

For some reason the squawk boxes and telephones
fell momentarily silent.

The navigator and several of the officers from the
flag staff were having a discussion behind him, the
O0Do and the quartermaster were hard at it,
and the junior officer-of-the-deck was briefing the
lookouts, yet for the first time since Qazi escaped,
no one was talking to Jake. He eyed the captain’s
chair. He was so tired, exhausted physically and
emotionally, and it was tempting. Why not? He heaved
himself into it.

Cowboy Parker dead, Ray Reynolds, over
a dozen marines and nearly fifty sailors.
Major damage to the ship, enough to put her into a yard
for a year or so. And forty-some planes lost. That
list would grow as the machines were inspected. Any
way you cut it, a major debacle. And to top it
off, Qazi got away with two nuclear weapons.
But this was not the time to dissect the disaster; worry now about
winning the next battle. Win the next one and you will
win the war. But can we win? So far Qazi has had
all the cards; he has prepared and planned and
plays a trump at every turn. What has he
prepared in the event he is followed?

What are his options?

“CAG.” Someone was standing beside him.

It was his deputy air wing commander, Harry March.
Will Cohen stood beside him with a paper cup full of
coffee, which he offered to Jake along with a
cigarette. Jake gratefully accepted
it and got down from James’s chair. Out of the corner
of s eye, he saw Harvey Schultz come onto
the bridge in his flight ear, with his helmet bag in
his hand. He was the senior fighter uadron skipper
and would lead the planes after Qazi. As Cohen lit
the cigarette for him, Jake listened to March. “We
ave three turkeys that can fly, CAG,” March
said. “Turkey” was the slang name for the F-14
Tomcat. “One KA-6 tanker and two
Hornets. We’re putting our most experienced people
in them and launching in thirty minutes.” March
spread out a chart of the editerranean. “When they get
airborne, they’ll be talking to the Gettysburg.
All our radars and radios are out and will be for some
ours.

Out the window Jake could see airplanes being
towed around he flight deck by low, yellow
tractors. The respot for launch was lmost
complete.

March was still speaking: “Gettysburg has told
us via flashing light that the chopper is headed for
Sicily. There is U.s. frigate that cleared the
Strait of Messina twelve hours ago and is now
off the eastern coast of Sicily. Gettysburg
is trying to notify the Italian
authorities, but that’s all going to take time.
probably too much. They’ll be gone by the time
Rome tells the local constabulary to drive out to the
airport and make an arrest, if possible.”

“Can anybody get close enough to shoot down the
chopper with missiles?”

“Nope. Not enough time. After we launch, I
recommend we take the carrier as far south as we can
get her to shorten the flight home for the planes.
Fuel is going to be tight. They’ll take our one
tanker with them, but everyone is going to be watching their
gauges pretty close. At least we have
Sigonella for a possible fuel divert if necessary.
‘Sigonella was a U.s. Naval Air Station
on the eastern end of the island of Sicily.