2215 hours (Zulu -1)
0-2 deck
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Lieutenant Commander Tricia Conway knew it was going to take her quite a
while to familiarize herself with more than a tiny fraction of the
Jefferson’s miles of corridors, compartments, and companionways. She’d
gone through numerous briefings on carrier layouts and shipboard life,
of course, but after two weeks aboard she still carried the small map
they’d given her the first day she’d reported aboard. By now she had
the main routes memorized, the ones she needed to use every day between
flight deck and hangar deck, say, as well as important spaces like
VF-95’s ready room, the officers’ wardroom, and the collection of ship’s
exchange, stores, and services that was popularly called Jefferson’s
“main mall.”
Jefferson’s female personnel couldn’t approach that area, of course,
without risking comments about “mall dolls,” but then it was difficult
to find any aspect of life on a carrier that couldn’t be twisted to
humorous, salty, or racy double meaning by the men who served aboard
her.
Aboard an aircraft carrier, the vast and cavernous, steel-walled space
called the hangar deck marks a kind of dividing line in shipboard
numbering conventions. The hangar deck is on the 0-1 level; decks above
this level are numbered in ascending order, 0-2, 0-3, all the way to the
0-9 deck, high up within the carrier’s island. Below the hangar deck,
levels are numbered in descending order, first deck, second deck, third
deck, and so on, plunging deeper into the bowels of the ship far beneath
the waterline.
Jefferson’s complement of male aviators was quartered on the 0-3 deck,
which extended uninterrupted from bow to stern and lay directly
underneath the carrier’s “roof,” or flight deck. During launch
operations, the steel-on-steel clatter of chains and cat shuttles just
overhead, the tooth-rattling whump of steam catapults hurling thirty-ton
aircraft off the carrier’s bow, made sleeping or even simple
conversation a chancy proposition at best.
Jefferson’s women, both enlisted personnel and officers, had been given
a block of compartments one level down on the 0-2 deck just beneath the
officers’ wardroom. It was considerably quieter there than up on the
0-3, though during launch ops it could still get noisy enough to
interrupt conversation or wake you from a sound sleep. There were other
disadvantages, however, and one was the fact that the 0-2 level was
divided fore and aft by the hangar deck, which was a full two decks high
and took up something like two-thirds of the carrier’s entire 1,092-foot
length. In a classic case of you-can’t-get-there-from-here, it was
necessary to cut past the men’s quarters up on 0-3 to reach the women’s
quarters from points farther aft.
At times, that could be like running the gauntlet.
She was coming from the VF-95 ready room, making her way down one of
Jefferson’s endless passageways on her way to her own quarters and bed.
She was passing the male flight officers’ area on the 0-3 level, taking
each raised frame opening or “knee-knocker” with a practiced
stoop-and-step, when a man’s too-familiar voice called to her from
behind.
“Hey, Brewski! Little trouble getting down tonight?”
She turned in the passageway. Lieutenant Commander Greg “Slider”
Arrenberger caught up to her, a toothy grin showing beneath his thick
black mustache.
“Nah, no big deal, Slider,” she said. “Boltered once. It’s a shitty
night out.”
“Cold too. Cold as a witch’s starboard tit.” He winked broadly,
clucking twice. “Anything the ol’ Slider can do to warm you up?”
She was too tired to banter with the man, or to think of something
clever enough to verbally slap him down. In her present state of mind,
Arrenberger was just one more petty annoyance. Crossing her arms, she
leaned back against the bulkhead. “Fuck you, Slider,” she said.
“Hey, great idea! Anytime you say, baby. Make a hole!” He squeezed
past her in the passageway, taking up just a bit more space than he had
to to get by, contriving to lightly brush against the tips of her
breasts with his body as he passed.
Slider was a real pig, the source of the worst of the sexual harassment
Conway had endured since she’d come aboard. Most of Conway’s fellow