The officer returned the salute, touched the deck, and Jefferson's catapult hurled Willis and Sunshine into the sky.

  1635 hours

  Flight deck

  U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson

  Seaman Apprentice David James White had been aboard the Jefferson for less than six weeks. His entire Navy career thus far had Spanned less than four months, for he'd reported aboard straight out of boot camp at NTC Great Lakes, with only a ten-days leave in between to say good-bye to his mom and to his girlfriend Judy back in his home town of Ridgely, Ohio.

  He wasn't sure yet whether he liked the Navy. At eighteen, the largest social group he'd ever been a part of was his high school, and he still felt utterly lost among the miles of gray-painted passageways, the noisy horde of strange faces filling a vessel that had been described to him as being as large as an eighty-story building lying on its side. There were six thousand people aboard the Jefferson; that was twice the population of Ridgely, far more than he could possibly expect to meet and get to know personally if he stayed aboard for a full two years of sea duty. He wasn't aware of them so much as a vast crowd as he was aware of them as strange faces. The only time he saw lots of men all at once was during a flight deck FOD walk-down, but it seemed as though he would never get to really know anyone.

  Upon reporting aboard, White had been assigned to the deck division.

  After three weeks of "P school" orientation, where he'd learned the basics of flight deck theory and been given a course in first aid, he'd been given a slot with the blue shirts, the chock and chain men who secured parked aircraft to keep them from rolling. He'd started making friends… and his initiation into the Ancient and Sacred Order of the Blue Noses a few days ago had opened up a whole new world to him. Only now was he beginning to see himself, not as a stranger in this bizarre and alien world, but as part of something larger than himself.

  It had been a good feeling.

  Then had come the battle on Friday, and moments of stark terror. And after that had come the word that some kid named Pellet had hung himself. Oh, God, how could things like that happen? What had he gotten himself into? In hours, it seemed, the good feelings of belonging and being accepted had evaporated. Most of the guys White knew had withdrawn into themselves somewhat after hearing about Pellet's death. The only antidote the officers seemed to know was work… work and more work. White had forgotten when he'd slept last. He was exhausted, and the exhaustion dragged at both brain and body like leaden weights.

  He'd been helping a crew unchock the A-6 Intruders parked forward of the island. Someone handed him the two massive chocks that had immobilized one Intruder's wheels, and someone else had pointed across the deck at the place where they were supposed to be stowed.

  Though P school had provided a kind of basic orientation to the flight deck, White's actual training so far had been strictly on the job, with various petty officers telling him what to do even when he had little understanding of what he was doing or why. Carrying the chocks, he trotted across the flight deck, toward the waist catapults across from the island and aft.

  The entire flight deck was one great storm of raw noise and swirling movement. Men in colored jerseys surged back and forth in some impossible, incomprehensible ballet of motion. The noise, the noise was overwhelming, even through the ear protectors built into White's helmet. An Intruder thundered off the bow, and the jet blast whipped at his jacket. He was afraid. He'd heard time and time again that it was possible for a careless man to step into a jet blast and be hurled off the side and into the sea. In combat, the carrier couldn't stop to rescue one man overboard, and the water was so cold he wouldn't survive more than moments anyway.

  I could get killed out here. Death was very much on his mind today. Why had Pellet killed himself?

  Dam. Where was he supposed to go now? Someone in a yellow jersey turned and stared at him, then shouted something, his mouth working but the words unheard in the thunder surrounding him. Now he was waving at him, telling him to move that way.

  The color codes of the jerseys were still hazy. What did yellow mean?

  White wasn't sure. Which way now… over there? An odd-looking aircraft was on one of the waist catapults. White searched his memory. Yeah, it was a Prowler, what someone had called a stretched version of the A-6. The plane was being hooked to the cat shuttle, its engines already screaming against the upright barrier of a JBD. More men were gathered around over there. He started toward them.

  Now where? These people were all busy. Was he supposed to… He spotted someone in a blue jersey standing close to the Prowler's side and started toward him, chocks still in hand.

  Someone yelled. White turned, but kept walking backward. Were they yelling at him? Several men, one in white, the others in yellow, were coming toward him at a dead run. At first, he didn't connect them with himself. He thought he was in the way and took several more steps backward…

  1638 hours

  Air Ops

  U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson

  Air Ops, right next door to Jefferson's CATCC on the 0–3 deck, was a large compartment made claustrophobic by the clatter of display screens, status boards, computer consoles, radar scopes, and television monitors that seemed to fill every available space. Tombstone had the CAG seat, an office executive's chair positioned on the deck to give him a clear view of most of the consoles around him.

  "Just stand easy, Nightmare," he told Marinaro, who was standing beside him. The man's dark features had taken on a demonic cast in the eerie glow of radar screens and CRTS. "We'll get you guys up later, if we can."

  "I really want to go with them, Stoney."

  "I know." Damn it, Tombstone thought. So do I!

  Which was why he was holding back on letting Nightmare and Tomboy take the CAG bird up.

  "Damn it, Nightmare," Tombstone snapped. "I've got other problems on my hands right now! If you want to make yourself useful, grab a seat over there and lend a hand with squadron communications. But get the hell out of my hair!"

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  Shit. He'd not wanted to come down on the guy that hard. Maybe the strain was starting to show. He rose from the chair, intending to call Nightmare back…

  "God, look there!" another CIC officer shouted. Tombstone froze, staring up at the PLAT monitor suspended from the bulkhead.

  "What's the son-of-a-bitch think he's-"

  "Oh, Christ!"

  Tombstone stared in horror at the bloody spectacle on the TV screen. For a stunned moment there was dead silence in Ops. Then the voices started up again, urgent, worried, but continuing to maintain the flow of communications traffic to the aircraft already aloft.

  Operations went on, even when they were punctuated by tragedy. From the look of things on the PLAT screen, a sailor had just backed into the intake of a Prowler readying on Cat Three.

  The man was dead, of course. There could be no doubt whatsoever about that. Worse ― from the point of view of flight operations ― though, it appeared that the accident had just killed the Prowler as well. Its starboard engine had shut down. but there was smoke coming from the exhaust and from the intake. From the look of things, a turbine blade had exploded, and that meant bits of shrapnel had just ripped through the aircraft and probably scattered themselves across the deck. Damn!

  CHAPTER 22

  Monday, 16 March

  1705 hours (Zulu +2)

  Air Ops

  U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson

  Chalk this one up to tired men, Tombstone thought.

  The flight deck of a supercarrier had often been described as the most lethal working environment in the world, a place where mistakes or carelessness routinely killed people. Thirty minutes after a chain and chock man had stumbled into a Prowler's intake, the fire was out and the aircraft safely evacuated, but hurtling fragments from the Prowler's turbine fan might have damaged some of the Cat Three equipment. Worse, those scattered fragments continued to pose a risk both for Cat Three and for Cat Four next to it. Bits of metal or other debris the size of a bottle cap might still be lying on the deck, hazards that could get sucked into the intakes of other aircraft, damaging them in turn. FOD, or foreign object damage, was the bane of all carrier operations.

  In peacetime, the alpha strike would have been cancelled and further catapult launches halted until an FOD walk-down could be carried out, with hundreds of sailors walking in line abreast down the entire length of the flight deck, picking up each bit of debris they found. But this was not peacetime, and a delay now would cripple the operation. Half of Jefferson's aircraft were already headed into Russia at this very moment.

  Tombstone reached out and picked up a telephone, punching in the number for the Air Boss. "This is CAG in Ops," he said when Barnes came on the line.

  "What's your assessment, Boss?"

  "Shit, Stoney. Cat Three's down until we can get that Prowler cleared away," the Air Boss replied.

  "Okay. How long? What's the downtime gonna be?"

  "They're working on it. Maybe an hour before we can walk-down the area."

  "And Four?"

  "Piece of cake. They're starting a walk-down on Four now. Call it thirty minutes."

  Tombstone juggled the numbers in his head. White Storm's flight operations, as laid out in that mountain of paper transmitted from the Pentagon the day before, had allowed for the possibility of two cats going down for that long… but only just. They would have no additional time to spare.

  "Okay, Boss," Tombstone said. "Put the Prowler over the side. Yeah, munitions and all. Do your walk-downs, but make 'em damned fast. I need those catapults at four-oh ASAP."

  "We'll do our best, CAG."

  "What are you talking to me for, then? Get on it." He hung up the receiver. On the PLAT monitor covering the waist catapults, deck crewmen were already scurrying across the deck, together with one of the ubiquitous tractors or "mules" used to tow aircraft.

  The accident had crippled the EA-6B, but not destroyed it. Still, time was more precious now than equipment. The Prowler, and the millions of dollars' worth of sophisticated electronics aboard, would be tipped over the side rather than allow it to further delay the mission. Too long a delay in the launch schedule, and Jefferson's aircraft would be returning after dark.

  Night landings were always far more hazardous than recoveries made during the day, and while bombing strikes were planned throughout the night, the plan called for a reduction in the number of missions in order to keep the hazards associated with night ops to a minimum. Rather than face the drastically heightened risks of a night mission, he would have to scrub the alpha strike until tomorrow, and that meant the Marine assault would be going in with a lot more enemy hardpoints and radar sites operational than would be the case otherwise.

  Pilot fatigue was Tombstone's principal worry now. Tired men made mistakes, as had just been demonstrated on Cat Three. And every military officer tasked with planning long-range bombing strikes always had to keep in mind what had happened during Operation El Dorado Canyon.

  El Dorado Canyon was the code name of the American bombing raid against Libya in 1986, launched in retaliation for Libyan terrorist activities. Part of the assault had been assigned to Air Force F-111 Aardvarks attached to the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing based at Lakenheath, England.

  It was a large and complex mission, involving both Air Force planes out of England and Navy aircraft launched from carriers in the Gulf of Sidra, attacking five separate targets, three in and around Tripoli and two at Benghazi. In all, eighteen F-111s had been assigned to the objectives at Tripoli, and of those, nine had been slated to hit the two-hundred-acre compound of Libya's leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi.

  But the planning for the El Dorado Canyon had been intense, a strain on pilots and crews that robbed them of sleep for the forty-eight hours preceding the mission. Then, Spain and France had both refused overfly privileges for aircraft participating in the raid, forcing the entire contingent out of England to go the long way around, down Europe's Atlantic coast and past the Strait of Gibraltar, a flight of three thousand miles that took six and a half hours.

  That flight had been an epic nightmare, requiring multiple midair refuelings and continuous, nerve-wracking close-formation flying, a tactic designed to make several planes appear as one on enemy radar. One of the pilots became disoriented during refueling and, "flying on automatic," followed the tanker halfway back to England. By the time he realized his mistake, it was too late to rejoin his flight. Four more scrubbed the attack because of breakdowns with the aircraft's electronic systems, especially with the F-111's radar, which proved to have a disturbing tendency to break down during long flights. A sixth Aardvark went down at sea just off the Libyan coast, the only American plane lost in the operation. The cause of the crash was unknown, but pilot error was a definite possibility. A seventh F-111 aircrew probably misidentified a checkpoint on the Libyan coast, though equipment malfunction was also a possibility; whatever the cause, the bombs missed Qaddafi's compound and landed near the French Embassy. Civilians died, including French nationals, in what was ironically and with bitter black humor referred to later as retaliation for the French refusal of overflight privileges. Of the nine original aircraft tasked with the mission, only two actually hit the target. Damage to the compound had been relatively light.

  Adding injury to the insult, one of the casualties, unfortunately, had been Qaddafi's adopted daughter.

  The bombing of the Libyan dictator's compound had not been a direct attempt to kill Qaddafi ― it was known that he only intermittently stayed there ― but it had been intended to deliver a strongly worded warning against continuing his terrorism campaign against the West. In that, probably, the raid had succeeded, but the poor performance of the Aardvarks in that part of the mission had been a shock. During the planning, it had been estimated that at least four or five of the nine F-111s would be able to complete their bombing runs; two aircraft had simply not been enough to ensure the raid's success.

  In fairness, it was important to remember that the other elements of Operation El Dorado Canyon had carried out their parts of the mission flawlessly, causing heavy damage to the other targets.

  Tombstone signaled for an enlisted man standing nearby to bring him a cup of coffee. On the PLAT monitor, the Prowler's curiously flattened stabilizer tipped suddenly into the air as its nose went over the side. It hung there a moment, suspended, then vanished below the edge of the flight deck. The deck crew were already lined up along Catapult Three, walking their way slowly aft as they searched for bits of debris. Other men were using fire hoses to wash down an area of the deck astride the rear of the cat, sweeping away mingled gasoline, oil, and blood.

  He wondered if the accident had badly shaken the men of the deck crew.

  Coming on top of a sailor's suicide, an incident like that could further erode morale, might even cause further carelessness and more accidents.

  On another PLAT monitor, this one showing activity forward at Cats One and Two, an EA-6B Prowler howled off the port catapult, while hookup men locked the cat shuttle to the undercarriage of an F/A-18 Hornet to starboard.

  Steam boiled across the deck, obscuring the crowds of color-coded men hurrying about their elaborate choreography of readying, inspecting, and launching aircraft. The checkers, men in white jerseys and with black-and-white checked helmets, were especially evident as they combed each aircraft for downgrudges, open access panels, and loose weapons. In the background, over a communications channel, Tombstone could hear the Air Boss bellowing radio orders from his crows'-nest perch up in Pri-Fly. From the sound of it, there'd been a fault in the "mouse" worn by one of the plane directors, the distinctive earphone headset also affectionately called a Mickey Mouse, and the director hadn't noticed yet that he was off the air. That was another bit of human error. Every man who had one was supposed to frequently check his personal radio. It took several moments to get another deck officer with a mouse on to go over and physically grab the man and alert him to the equipment failure.

  How many more were going to die before this thing was done, either from enemy action or from damned, stupid carelessness born of grinding, bone-weary exhaustion?

  Maybe I've just seen too damned much of this, he thought. Pamela had been after him to give it up for a long time, though recently they'd managed to arrive at a kind of uneasy truce between his dedication to his career and their love for each other. Damn, maybe she'd been right all along.

  Right now he felt tired ― not physically, though that was certainly a part of it, but exhausted in spirit, in his mind. He was tired to the very core of his being, but unlike those teenagers still hard at work full-out on the deck with no sleep, he was ready to pack it in. He thought of the faces of the men and women of Viper Squadron earlier, when he'd told them that they'd be flying shotgun for the Intruders this afternoon. Slider and some of the others had looked like they were ready to mutiny there for a moment… but by the time he'd gotten past the initial resistance and started filling them in on their mission, the newer hands had actually looked eager, rousing from their exhaustive torpor, positively glowing when they heard they'd be spearheading an attack wave into Russian territory.

  Well, he could remember feeling the same way himself once, when he'd been assigned a challenging or exacting mission. But that was a hell of a long time ago.

  Had he made a mistake, ordering the Air Boss to expedite the cleanup on the waist cats? That tired hookup man had merely killed himself and delayed the launch schedule; if Jefferson's CAG screwed up, a lot of people would die.

  He didn't like the heavy, clammy feeling that thought carried with it.

  The Hornet was ready. The deck director gave the aviator a thumb's-up, and the man in the aircraft saluted. The director whirled, dropped to one knee, touched the deck, pointed ahead…

  … and the Hornet screamed off the catapult on a line of steam, dipping slightly as it cleared the bow, then rising steadily into the blue afternoon sky, its landing gear folding neatly away.