Final Flight (35 page)

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 men and crept onto the bridge.
He eased the door shut behind more.

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
vantage.

He could hear the choppers even here on the
bridge. Now if the one guarding these sailors is just
looking at the choppers. He crept to the corner,
keeping low, and peered around with the stol 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 M16 up.

Before he could pull the trigger the bullets from an
Uzi tore to his side and he was off balance and
falling and the MI 6 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 still him for the door where
he had entered. A stuttering hail of lead cut down
another sailor charging toard 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. ‘nother sailor careened past and then Garcia
was through the or.

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 thanked 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 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 MI 6 filled the
bridge, Hadad, 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 MI 6 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 IMC 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 ill kill your admiral.”

He put the microphone back in its bracket.
“Watch them,” he Id 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 ody through, then wrestled
it up over the rail. It fell away toward he
deck below, leaving the rail smeared with blood. He
went back nto the bridge and dogged the watertight
door shut. He propped the interior door open so
the dogs were plainly visible. When 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 now 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 as
sitting up nursing his head. He kicked his arm out and
rolled im 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 rists, then
rolled him over and placed a piece of tape across
his outh. 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 ridge.

Use grenades if you have to. Don’t let them
take you live.”

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.
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 orn and.

The lobby of the hotel had been a mess when she
walked hrough 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 gunn a
strap checked her identification and compared her name to a
zst of hotel guests. Only then had she been
admitted. In the lobby people in formal clothes sat on
the black leather sofas without rms and smoked and
talked to men with notebooks. The middle levator
had been roped off. She saw the bullet holes in
the laster and the red stains. Another man with a
submachine gun ad 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? he whole city had that look, that look… of
an impoverished old age, sort 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 ved him too much. What would she ever do if
she lost him? She opened the door and went out on the
balcony again, trying 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 0-3
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
ovenlike bay every few minutes for a soaking from an
open hose. Thus cooled, they were given water
to drink, the oxygen canisters in 1 their OBA’S 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 0-3 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.