Terminal Run

High over the John Paul Jones’s flight deck the superstructure of the island presided. The highest full-width island deck was the bridge, with angled windows looking down on the wide expanse of the deck and the surrounding seas. Set into the windows were large Plexiglas wheels spinning at six hundred RPM, casting off the water of the almost horizontal rain to allow the officers to see outside, but even the view through the wheels was nearly opaque. The atmosphere surrounding John Paul Jones was more water than air in the driving rain. The bridge deck’s central feature was the ship control console, with the helm station with its wheel and the throttle console and communications station. Forward of it on either side were the radar stations, all of them dark. The carrier was in the center of the far-flung loose formation, the antisubmarine destroyers and frigates running far out in an ASW sector fifty to a hundred nautical miles ahead of the rest of the battle group Somewhere out there were five Aegis II missile cruisers, their holds stuffed to the gills with Equalizer Mark IV supersonic heavy cruise missiles. Also steaming with them were the multipurpose destroyers, the DD-21s, their clean decks making them look like the old Civil War ironclads, but their belowdecks choked with batteries of missiles and torpedoes. To a bystander, the John Paul Jones carrier battle group would seem invincible, the most massive assembly of naval firepower since the War of the East China Sea, with over two million tons of warships plowing the hostile seas. But to the battle fleet’s commander, Vice Admiral Egon “The Viking” Ericcson, the fleet was woefully inadequate. The Achilles’ heel of the flotilla was its vulnerability to hostile submarines.

Far over the horizon to the west, the nuclear submarine Leopard had come to periscope depth and had sent a brief situation report, a “sit-rep,” copied to Admiral Ericcson’s task force. Admiral Ericcson was awakened during the night to read the message from Leopard.

“I wasn’t asleep, goddammit,” he said in his gravelly voice to the messenger of the watch.

The admiral sat up in his rack and pulled a new Partagas cigar out of his humidor and lit it in the dimness of the stateroom, illuminated only by his desk lamp. He handed the pad computer back to the messenger of the watch and snarled at him to take the news to the ship’s captain and the battle group operations officer. Too wound up to return to sleep, Ericcson rose to his six-and-a-half-foot height and pulled on his khaki uniform. On his left breast pocket were eight rows of ribbons, topped by the gold wings of a fighter pilot. Below the ribbons Ericcson wore his surface warfare pin, and below that his fleet command gold emblem, a downward angling dagger framed by tidal waves. He ran his hand through his closely cropped full head of platinum-blond hair, the fierce frowning expression interrupted briefly for a yawn. Ericcson coughed, swearing to himself for the tenth time this trip that he would quit his constant cigar smoking. He was rarely seen at sea without one in his fist, insisting on chewing them unlit in places where smoking was prohibited. The bridge of the aircraft carrier was such a place, the advanced electronics of the phased array radar systems too delicate to be bombarded with cigar smoke. The Viking had accused the electronics of being sissies, and insisted on smoking anyway.

He took three cigars to the bridge, where he decided to spend the rest of the night, reclining in the fleet commander’s chair and smoking. He spent one in three nights in the chair, the nicotine and the weight of fleet command making him an insomniac. The deck inclined upward precipitously as the ship rode an incoming wave, then rolled sickeningly down the crest to slam into the trough, all the while rolling far to port, then back to starboard, the ship corkscrewing through the mountainous waves. Ericcson lit the first cigar, stoking it up to a mellow cloud in front of him, listening to the music of the spray on the windshield and the howl of the wind in the rigging, the low tones of conversations on the bridge and the whine of the high-speed gyros. The Viking puffed on the Partagas, his eyes half shut, feeling the roller-coaster motion of the deck, a deep contentment filling his soul, his battle fleet under his combat boots, sailing into harm’s way on a ship christened John Paul Jones, the greatest American naval officer in history.

Ericcson smoked the cigar and let his mind return for the dozenth time to Patton’s underground bunker briefing.