Tomahawk (37 page)

Somehow, crawling around out there, he'd caught and grasped a pine branch. Buried in the snow, probably, torn off the trees either by the wind or by the descent of the chute-lowered missile.

Then the sleepiness became too much to bear. Knowing he might not wake again, he still couldn't stop himself from sliding down into the dark.

It started like it always did. A normal watch. But then, with that ever new knife-twist in the gut, he realized he'd made a mistake.

He stood frozen on
Ryan's
bridge wing, staring at what had a moment before been empty night. Something seventy feet high had created itself there, running lights burning steady, bow wave sparkling against black. Behind him a cry of “Stand by for collision!” was followed by the electric clang of the alarm.

As the carrier's bow tore into them, the destroyer heeled, knocking him onto the gratings. A long, terrifying loud shriek of tearing steel succeeded the blow. The lights, penumbraed by a fine falling mist, slid by high above. A scream of rending metal and a roar of escaping steam struggled against the drone of a horn.

He scrambled up and was propelled into the pilothouse by the slant of the deck. The boatswain was shouting into the 1MC, but nothing was audible above the din. The light on the chart table flickered and went out. The captain was clinging to his chair, staring out to starboard.

Dan fetched up against the helm and clung to it, looking out. The lights were still moving by above them, like
a train on a high trestle. Then they were gone. An explosion came from aft, rattling the windows.

“Abandon ship,” the boatswain was yelling into the mike. But it was dead.

He went out to the wing again. The carrier loomed abeam, a black cliff higher than their mast top. A choking smell reeked the air. Flames were shooting up, making crackling, rapid bangs, all along the Asroc deck.

When he turned back, the skipper was looking aft. “Abandon ship, sir?” Dan shouted above the rising roar of fire.

“She never responded to the emergency bell,” the captain said. His face was bleak in the growing firelight.

“She's cut in two aft, Captain.”

“All right. Do it. Get the order around by word of mouth. Let's get as many off as we can.”

He found himself on the main deck. Men shoved past him. Naked from the waist up, a sailor threw his legs over the lines and dropped, running in the air. “Abandon ship,” Dan shouted, fighting his way past.

The flames were licking swiftly forward. Their tips fluttered in the wind like pennants. They danced on the surface of the deck, and he thought for a moment the metal itself was burning. The smoke was choking, thick with the smell of fuel. Where in the hell was all the fuel coming from?

On the fo'c'sle, a knot of sailors were dumping life jackets out of a locker. He grabbed one and began strapping it on. His hands shook so, it took several tries to get the straps through the D-rings. Could this be dream, nightmare? No, he knew these men. That screaming was real.

“Better get in the water,” he told them. “If she goes down sudden she may suck us under. Jump in and swim clear.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

He threw his legs over the lifeline and looked down.

The sea was black, highlighted by fire. More men, black cutouts against the brilliance, were leaping now. The fire-sound was enormous but bizarrely cheerful, like a bonfire at a picnic.

He kicked away and plunged feetfirst into the black sea.

The impact burst breath from him. Icy water filled his mouth. Then the life jacket brought him up with a rush. He swam as hard as he could for fifty strokes, then turned and looked back.

USS
Reynolds Ryan's
bow rose, its deck sloping back toward him. From the forward stack aft, a pyramid of white flame ran down along the sides. The fire and fuel stench was heavy, choking.

He became conscious now of the men around him. Some were moaning, but most were quiet, tossed up and down by the four-foot seas. A sailor called out, “Think she'll float, Mr. Lenson?”

“Not much longer,” Dan shouted back.

God, the sea was cold. He kicked his feet, but the numbness didn't retreat. He was still looking at the sailor, trying to recall who he was, when beyond him he noticed the lights of a ship. Good, get in here and pick us up, he thought.

When he rose again, it was almost on top of them. In the firelight, he saw it was the carrier. Fans of light reached out, probing the black sea. Then a wave broke over his head and he sputtered, clawing away salt water that burned like cold acid.

The carrier struck the old destroyer again just aft of the stack, shoving it down to a crunching scream of buckling plates and tearing ribs. The larger ship's side lit in a smear of flame, scattering in gouts of yellow that flared up again into white as it hit the water.

A sheet of burning fuel swept toward him, leaping and guttering along the crests as it ignited first blue and then glaring yellow and then incandescent white. He screamed as it seared his shoulder and arm before he finished ripping the fife jacket off.

As the sea closed over him, the beat of the carrier's screws filled his head, He
frog-kicked desperately through the icy dark and came up into a stink of kerosene and smoke that seared his lungs.

He was in a shimmering tunnel of flame. The reek of

fuel filled his brain, and all around him men were screaming. … They were dying…. And it was all
his fault.
…

His eyes came open and he stared into the darkness, remembering that helpless terror in the water. Remembering the doomed
Ryan
drifting, burning, then torn apart again by
Kennedy's
incredible, incomprehensible second pass through the wreckage. Remembering above all that petroleum reek as the carrier's broken fuel lines spewed tons of jet fuel, which was instantly ignited by broken power lines, hot burners, and a hundred other sources of ignition that offered in a ship torn in half by the massive splitting wedge of a carrier's bow.

And with a relief so great that even now, buried in the snow, he felt liberated and redeemed, he remembered that it
hadn't
been his fault.

The relief faded, replaced by fear again. He shifted uneasily. The numbness had reached his knees. The stink of fuel lingered from the dream. Strange how smells persisted in memory, especially that one. When he was filling the car up at a gas station, his gut would suddenly tighten.

And out of nowhere, he'd be back in the black sea, the Atlantic night

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. He stared into the dark.

Suddenly the flashlight was on in one mitten, and with the other he burrowed with frantic haste, digging till a white wall fell away and the spot of dimming light showed him stains and strings of a purplish gluey mass. It looked like grape jelly, oozing down into the snow from above. He cocked his head like a wondering dog, then understood.

The jelly was RJ-4. From a full fuel load, enough to power the little engine over a thousand miles. Gallons and gallons of it, leaking out of the cracked airframe and cold-thickened to the sticky consistency of napalm.

His hands were clumsy. He kept dropping the lighter. It didn't want to work. Shoot, hadn't he read a story about this? About a guy trying to light a fire and knowing that if he couldn't, he'd die? And in the end, he'd died anyway. He looked at the lighter again, then shook it and
turned it upside down. He held the flashlight to it till the colored plastic glowed.

The clear fluid inside was frozen solid.

He thrust it into his mouth, ignoring the instant pain as his tongue froze to the metal cap, and searched through his pack for something to burn the fuel in. He came up with the scrap of wing metal. He worked for a few minutes, bending and crimping it against the fuselage, then wedged the makeshift cup into the side of the snow cave. Then he pulled it out again and stuffed pine needles under it. If this worked, the metal was going to get ultra-hot. He didn't need it melting itself down into the snow and disappearing. With shaking hands, he scraped a tablespoonful of the sticky stuff out of its snow matrix with a twig clamped between his wrists and arranged it in a heap. He took the lighter out of his mouth, prayed, and tried it.

The fuel sagged under the sickled yellow flame. Then, without preliminary smoke, a blue radiance played over its surface. It grew and built until a four-inch-high white flame danced in the draft. The heat reached through the eyeholes. He pulled the mask off and let it bathe his face, his numb, cracked lips, till they unbent into a smile.

He tended the little fire all that night with the total and utter dedication of a vestal. Once the stringy, cold fuel clung to his fingers, and he lit them by mistake. But that was a simple matter of plunging his hand into the snow. Everything was simple, now that he had a fire. All he had to do was tease out another lump of congealed fuel occasionally and drop it onto his makeshift lamp. That, and stay awake.

And think.

For the first time in months, he had time to really think. So he did.

All that endless night, curled around the high-energy flicker, he thought his life over. Face-to-face with death, he reviewed his standoffish, suspicious relationship with Kerry. He could do better than that. He could love now, without so much thought for himself, concern for himself, fear for himself.

Toward morning, he was confident enough even to go
to sleep for short bursts, once he had the plate heaped with fresh fuel.

Once again that night, he had a dream—not of
Ryan
this time, but of hovering somehow above his motionless sleeping body. He looked down at the pine-screened opening, at the flame-light whipping in the relentless wind. He felt no terror anymore, no loneliness. Only a vast compassion for the being that in some mysterious way was a broken-off piece of himself. Creature half of darkness, half of light. Half of hope and half of desperate and eternal fear, feeling and creeping its way over an immense and shadowy plain. So much could be forgiven, once you understood.

He wondered how he could tell it that: that everything, in the end, was going to be all right.

The storm didn't slacken till the afternoon of the next day. That was when he crawled outside at last and built a bigger fire. He heaped pine branches onto it till a greasy, viscous smoke shouldered upward through the trees. And it wasn't long after that till he heard the thud and flutter of helicopter blades. He staggered about, scuffing desperately at the snow, and at last stared upward, arms spread wide, welcoming the hovering descent of life.

21

 

 

 

A week later, he stared down at Washington once again through the window of the plane. Seemed like he was spending half his life bouncing from one end of the country to another. He winced and removed his fingers from his nose. They kept drifting there, despite his intent to keep them away.

The chopper had taken him back to Cold Lake for a checkout in the base infirmary. Frostbite was nothing to screw around with. No permanent damage, the doc said, but he had black blisters on his fingers and his nose. He was having trouble with his feet, too. But barring the blisters and peeling, and a lengthy time of sensitivity after that, he should recover full function.

The Huey had gotten to him in time because Sullivan, exercising his own judgment, had made his way back to the Hummer as soon as they got separated. He'd waited there all night long with the engine running and the lights on, in contact with Primrose by the vehicle radio. Toward morning, he'd had to refuel from the jerrican, but basically he'd spent the night safe and warm.. The chopper had dropped him a bladder of fuel, and he'd arrived back about the time Dan was reaching Cold Lake by air.

He pulled his fingers away from his nose again. Damn, it was sensitive all right. He'd had to wear a glove liner stuffed under his mask whenever he went outside for the rest of the tests. Which had gone gratifyingly well. Riding in the seat pocket forward of his knees were the quick-look results for the completed Primal Thunder series. The
final three missiles had launched and flown smoothly. Final box score: eight launches, seven successes, one failure, although one missile had impacted out on the edge of the target area; it had been snowing heavily at Toktoyaktuk at the time. But that still gave them an 87 percent success rate, which materially boosted the average. He hoped he could do as well in the next series, the Navy antishipmissile tests.

The flap about the demonstrators had ended with a whimper rather than the bang they'd probably hoped for. They stayed in a comfortable tent all through the blizzard, eating MREs and drinking hot cocoa. Then left meekly, heloed back to Grand Centre, where, as far as he knew, the Canadians would decide whether to charge them with trespassing. As for the map, he'd faxed it back to JCM, pointing out his suspicion that it had come from the briefing package, but without any explanation as to how the protesters had gotten it. Because, although he'd puzzled over it, he actually couldn't think of any.