Jefferson is twenty stories tall.”
They made one last turn and emerged into a vast, steel-lined cavern.
A visitor’s first look at Jefferson’s hangar deck never failed to raise
the same emotions: surprise and awe. Thirty feet deep, two thirds the
length of the carrier and covering two acres, the vast chamber looked
like the inside of some immense shoreside warehouse. The glimpses of
sunlight and blue sea caught through the huge, oval elevator bays were
so restricted that they might as well have been views overlooking a
river from a storage building back home.
The air rang and echoed with shouted orders, the roar of tractors, the
clatter of tools and metal on metal.
Most of the deck space was occupied by aircraft, each with wings folded
in a characteristic way depending on its type: F-14s with their
variable-sweep wings angled back along their flanks, A-6 Intruders with
the wings broken in the middle and folded across their spines, a lone
Hawkeye with wings twisted at right angles and rotated back to avoid the
dish-shaped radome on its back.
Space not occupied by aircraft was made hazardous by yellow-painted
tractors, called mules, which busied about in a strange blend of
geometry and ballet.
“It’s enormous!” Pamela said.
“Yup,” Tombstone agreed. “Follow me.”
“What’s that smell?” Baughman asked.
Tombstone sniffed the air. Curiously, he was aware of Pamela’s perfume,
a subtle hint of roses and vanilla, but nothing more. “Probably a mix
of oil and JP5,” he said. “That’s what we use for jet fuel. After
you’ve been aboard awhile, you don’t even notice it.”
“You carry a lot of jet fuel on board?” Pamela asked.
“About two million gallons.”
“My God!” Griffith said. “That stuff’s pretty explosive, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. We have to be pretty careful with it.”
Pamela gave him a searching, sideways look. “Why do you carry so much?”
Tombstone laughed. “Actually, it’s not enough. We have fifty or sixty
active aircraft at any given time. Each one flies twice a day, and
burns two, maybe three thousand gallons each time up. At that rate, two
million gallons doesn’t last nearly long enough! We need to take on
more fuel just about every week.”
“I thought nuclear carriers didn’t need replenishment.”
“To run the engines, no. Jefferson’s nuclear fuel supply will keep her
cruising sixty thousand miles a year for fifteen years, sure, and
uranium takes up only a tiny fraction of the space a load of fuel oil
would. In fact, because of that, we can carry more avgas than
sep1 conventional carriers do. But we still have to take on fresh supplies
pretty often. Not just avgas either, but food, stores of all kinds. One
operation like Wonsan pretty much wipes us out on munitions too. That’s
why we put in at Japan afterwards, to stock up.”
As he talked, he led them across the tangled maze of the hangar deck
toward one of the huge, oval cutaway openings in the side of the ship.
“This is one of the elevators?” Griffith asked.
“That’s right. Port side aft. Actually, it’s a section of the flight
deck which moves up and down on those rails along the outside of the
hull. We have four of them, and they can lift sixty-five tons at a
time. We use them to transfer aircraft back and forth between the
hangar deck and the roof.”
As they stepped across the yellow-and-orange painted warning stripes
which marked the joint between deck and elevator, Pamela stopped and
looked at the opening, large enough to pass an aircraft with its wings
folded. “You know, Commander, a big question being debated back on
Capitol Hill these days is whether aircraft carriers are too vulnerable
to be worthwhile in a modern war. And now that I’ve seen one, I have to
wonder if your critics aren’t right.”
“What do you mean?” He led the group to a railing, out of the way of a
mule and a team of yellow-jacketed deck handlers maneuvering an F-14
Tomcat onto the elevator. The dark waters of Sattahip Bay lapped at the
ship’s side twenty feet below.
“What did you say … two million gallons of aviation fuel? What
happens if an enemy missile flies through this big hole in the ship’s