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She asked, but there were no officers with carrier experience anywhere else in the strike group, so she off-loaded tasks onto her lower rankers, better to have some experience than risk a no-experience know-it-all coming aboard who outranked her.
It was over an hour before the Ouija Board Handler called out to no one in particular, “We’re missing 892. Where the hell is 892?”
Well, Penny decided, that answered one thing at least. She pointed upward at the ruin of the Island superstructure. How the hell Gabe Brown had landed in PriFly after killing everyone in the Captain’s and Admiral’s Bridges was still a mystery.
The explosion of 892 and the fire had killed everyone from PriFly at the top, down through the command decks, through radar and flight control, and into the pilot’s ready room at deck level. Four times she’d called for a plane, only to be told that its pilot couldn’t be found. She made a point of personally adding each name to the Presumed Dead list as those and other callouts couldn’t find the person. The second double-column sheet was almost full. A hundred and sixty souls and the count was still climbing. That didn’t include the injured that were strewn about sick bay and the ship’s operating theaters.
Fourteen hours since the incident, they were holding on by their fingernails with no rest in sight. The accident had occurred at shift change, so that lost both command teams. Only she and a few others had been on a special training schedule so that they weren’t in the Island when this happened, which meant she was in hell with no relief in sight.
And now what?
As Acting Captain, she’d spoken several times to the Admiral at CINCPACFLT, the four-star Commander in Chief of the entire Pacific Fleet. He’d agreed she’d made the right decision to take over the ship herself.
Then, to really piss her off, she’d received a call from Admiral Stanislaw of the Joint Chiefs that she was to show all due courtesy to a civilian investigation team and would she please send a Greyhound to pick them up. Fishing out the plane from the Hangar Deck had grossly disrupted the shipboard traffic and had forced the Handler to fully reset his Ouija Board—again. He’d had to do that every two to three hours, but that didn’t make it any easier.
Stanislaw was so far removed from reality that he didn’t understand what she needed was a ship’s captain, not a useless flock of goddamned tourists. She’d never been more than a watch stander.
But CINCPACFLT had said she was in charge until further notice. The carrier’s B-crew was on shore leave after six months at sea and it would take days to pull them back together and deliver a qualified command team to theBig Stick.
When it was determined that they were still flight and navigation operational, she’d been ordered to remain on station. Pushing so many patrol aircraft aloft had been her decision, which doubled down the load on every team from air traffic control to deck operations, but it couldn’t be helped.
The Air Boss slid the C-2 Greyhound in between two flights of returning F/A-18 Super Hornet jets. Then he shuffled it to park on Elevator 4 at the portside-rear of the deck and left it there. It would take another feat of magic to restow it anywhere else. They wouldn’t need that elevator for another fifteen minutes, which made it a problem for some other time.
Five people deplaned. Four civilians and—Thank God above!—an unexpected Navy Commander come to take charge. The Admiral wouldn’t have sent her if she didn’t have carrier experience.
Penny dispatched a white-vested safety observer to escort them across the active flightline. The four civilians could be blown overboard for all she cared, but she needed that commander.
