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23
“I don’t havetime for this shit!” Lieutenant Commander Penny Brightman glared at the returning C-2 cargo plane.
TheTheodore Rooseveltwas still held together with no more than duct tape and spit. She hadn’t woken for the accident itself—that she’d only been asleep an hour after a double twelve-hour training shift was the only excuse she had—but the alarms had taken care of that. First the seven short and one long of the General Alarm, followed by the continuous ring of the fire alarm, followed by a too-abrupt silence.
It wasn’t in her training to question whether or not it was an aborted drill. She dressed quickly and attempted to climb the ladders into the base of the Island.
But she couldn’t. It hadn’t been a drill.
Stairwells were blocked with fallen steel. Sealed hatches, hot to the touch, warned of fire on the opposite side.
Upon finally reaching the deck, she’d taken the requisite fifteen-second-maximum allowable time to stare at the destruction in dumb shock.
The towering Island superstructure was a blazing ruin. Bodies and wreckage were scattered about the base. Her boots crunched on the debris scattered down the flight line though she’d finally emerged onto the deck well away from the disaster itself. Fire had blackened the paint around every hatch and air vent for the first three stories.
Fire crews were battling their way into the deck-level hatches.
The aft half of the three upper stories had no glass in the windows and flames still boiled out into the air. The forward half was no more than the outlines of a structure. A massive blast had blown out walls, PriFly had collapsed down onto the Command Bridge, and both of those onto the Flag Bridge below.
The giant mast that rose ten stories above the Island, covered with radar and communications antenna, was tilted outboard at a crazy angle, but still clung to the carrier.
At sixteen seconds, Penny’s training kicked into gear.
Find who was in command and step in wherever needed.
It had taken under three minutes to determine thatshewas the senior ship’s officer remaining on the boat—in any department, not only Command. Flying officers didn’t count because they knew shit about ships. Penny knew that, because just like every carrier commander, she’d been a pilot first. The learning curve required to operate a carrier was ungodly.
She tracked down Paddles, the Landing Signals Officer, whose position at the port-side rear of the carrier had saved his life. When he began to describe what had happened, she’d shut him down.
Accident, not attack. All I need to know for now.
More fire teams in their red vests were joining the battle of what had once been the Island.
The foredeck had remained untouched, though debris was scattered down its length from some explosion. A glance upward at the destruction wrought on the Island saved her having to guess thewhereand she didn’t have time for thewhy.
Spotting the jets circling overhead, she’d taken a gamble and launched a tanker without first doing an FOD—Foreign Object Debris—walk. She’d sent it from the farthest-to-port Number Four catapult, hoping for the best. It had worked.
The moment the tanker was safely aloft to refuel the circling aircraft, she’d sent a line of fifty crew armed with buckets and brooms to clear all four of her launch catapults down to the last stray screw and piece of broken glass. One missed piece sucked into a jet engine could down the plane before it had a chance to fly.
Penny had the off-watch launch crew, who were now theonlylaunch crew, prioritize replacing all four landing wires and then perform their own FOD of the after deck.
Thirty-eight minutes after they were supposed to land, the rest of LC Gabe Brown’s flight were on the deck.
The radar still spun at a skewed angle on the wounded mast. However, all of the access to its data had been within the destroyed superstructure, as was everything else she needed. Time to go Old School.
Her engine controls quickly became shouting to a nearby helmsman over the roar the noise of departing and landing jets. He, in turn, called the engine room using one of the unpowered speaking tubes that threaded throughout the ship. Neither of them could recall the last time they’d seen the tube system in any use other than ceremonial, but they depended on it now.
A Special Ops team, which she hadn’t known was aboard, stepped forward to volunteer their services. It included a combat air controller from the Air Force’s 24th STS. As both air marshals had apparently been in the Island, he took over the outer airspace with a pair of handheld radios. A radioman was soon giving him verbals from the USSAntietam’sradar,a Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser that was part of the carrier strike group. She paired the controller with the surviving off-shift Mini Air Boss. Together they had sweated bullets throughout the long day, but no one new had died in air operations.
That wasn’t a victory, it was a triumph.
The next big problem was parking. The electronic Ouija Board had died along with its operators. Fitting eighty jets and ten helos aboard an aircraft carrier required an entire department of professionals, constantly redistributing aircraft. If two jets came up out of the hangar in the wrong order, that was the way they had to launch. If the C-2 Greyhound cargo plane was parked on the Hangar Deck in front of an F/A-18 Super Hornet, the fighter jet wouldn’t be flying anytime soon.
Two long folding tables were set up at the base of the Island, then weighted in place with an AGM-114 Hellfire missile each. With outlines of the two decks spraypainted on the table surfaces, they set up a physical board. A 20 mm round, hijacked from the Phalanx auto-gun and rubber-banded across a popsicle stick, became an F-35, with the bird’s number on the stick. Twin-engine F/A-18s were two rounds on a stick, and helicopters were crisscrossed popsicle sticks. Jokes about shit-on-a-stick had eased some of the tension.
Blue-vested runners were dispatched to make notes on where everything was parked at the moment. Each role on deck had a different color vest, and she wanted to give a medal to every damn one for not panicking.
It was only then that the search-and-rescue helo was missed. She released a frigate from the strike group to chase back along theBig Stick’spath, with no luck. Though they did pick up the bodies of several of the deck crew that had been blown overboard and left in the carrier’s wake.
