We’d have lost another aviator, Fitzgerald thought. With so many lost already.
The Captain sensed rather than heard a change in the atmosphere around him. Several of the ship’s officers had been engaged in low conversation on the starboard wing of the bridge, but they were silent now, and the enlisted men at wheel and engine-room telegraph were standing a little straighter, a little more studiously correct. Fitzgerald turned further and saw Captain Henry Bersticer stepping across the knee-knocker onto the bridge deck.
Bersticer was Admiral Vaughn’s chief of staff, a tall, swarthy man with a meticulously groomed black goatee that gave him a somewhat saturnine aspect. He walked over to where Fitzgerald was sitting. “Admiral’s compliments, Captain, and would you join him, please, in CV1C?”
He spelled out the letters, which stood for Carrier (CV) Intelligence Center, instead of pronouncing them “civic” in (he time-honored fashion. Bersticer was, Fitzgerald thought, new to carriers and didn’t yet have the hang of bird-farm language.
He wondered if his CO had things down any better.
“Very well,” Fitzgerald said. He slid off the stool. “On my way.”
Admiral Vaughn was waiting alone in CVIC, a pale, heavyset man in his late fifties, with hair that might once have been red but was mostly silver now. Fitzgerald looked around as he walked toward tbe admiral. The room, used as a TV
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Keith Dougtass
ARMAGEDDON MODE
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studio for the Chief of the Boat’s morning broadcasts over one of Jefferson’s on-board TV stations, had a cluttered feel, and many of the lights and electrical cables had not been struck. Fitzgerald winced inwardly when he saw it. Vaughn had an oft-stated love for order and the proverbial taut ship.
“Jim,” Vaughn said as Fitzgerald approached him. Berstieer shut the door, leaving them alone. The admiral reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a folded-up computer message flimsy. “This just came up from CIC. Have a look.”
Fitzgerald’s eyes held Vaughn’s as he took the flimsy and unfolded it.
It was a decoded flash priority from the skipper of the U.S.S. Kiddle, now steaming some one hundred fifty miles northwest of the carrier. Quickly, Fitzgerald read the details of the sub contact, now only minutes old. He looked up at the admiral and handed me message back. “Parrel says it sounds like a Foxtrot,” he said. “Soviet or Indian?”
“God knows,” Vaughn said. “No matter which, I don’t want that damned thing closer than a hundred miles from this carrier, understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied slowly. “If we can’t nail down that sub’s position, though, we’ll have to alter course pretty far west to maintain separation. It’ll mean quite a detour, and a delay in reaching Turban Station.”
“I know that. Frankly, I hope we can ID that sub as a Russkie. If it’s Hindi . . . God, we don’t know what the Indians are going to do.”
Fitzgerald grinned. ‘ ‘I hardly think they’ll mistake us for the Pakistani navy, sir.” Jane’s Fighting Ships gave the strength of Pakistan’s navy as seventeen ships, not counting patrol craft. The largest was Babur, a former British destroyer of 5440 tons. He’d looked it up earlier that morning.
“Damn it, Captain, this is no joke!” Vaughn scowled, rubbing at his short and bristly mustache with a forefinger. “You saw the latest set of dispatches from Washington. The Indians don’t want us out here. This whole situation could blow up in our faces at any moment.”
“I realize mat, sir.” The word from Washington that morning was that a formal protest had been delivered to the White House by the Indian Embassy in Washington, objecting to U.S. warships in their waters during time of war. Accidental
attacks were a possibility, the communique had pointed out, especially in the confusion of jamming and electronic counter-measures in the region once fighting started.
“Listen, Jim,” Vaughn said. “I called you off the bridge because I wanted to talk with you about this command. I’ve been following the weekly reports. Performance is way down, you know. And morale.”
Fitzgerald ran one hand through his thinning hair. “That’s hardly surprising, Admiral. They’ve been through a hell of a lot this cruise.”
“That’s no excuse, hey?”