“For the foreseeable future, I’m your reporting senior,” Tombstone continued as though Batman hadn’t spoken. “Here are your rudder orders. First, you will reexamine your priorities. You have left standing orders that you will be rousted out of your rack over matters that do not necessarily warrant your personal attention. Admiral, we don’t know what the hell is going on out here. I understand your concern, and I applaud your diligence in trying to make every effort to ensure that another tragedy such as that which struck La Salle does not occur again.”
For the first time, Tombstone’s voice softened slightly. “But there are limits to what you can do. One of the worst parts of this job is that you have to pace yourselfwhen the balloon goes up, you’ve got to be well rested, alert, or at least able to manage a reasonable facsimile thereof. You can’t be there for every call. There’s no way.”
“That’s what your predecessor thought too,” Batman snapped back. “And as a result, he got his ship shot out from under him. That’s not happening on my watch, Admiral. No way.” He turned and started to walk away.
“And that’s the trick,” Tombstone said. “Deciding which ones are criticaland which ones can be handled without your intervention. Take this situation tonight, for example,” he continued, nodding toward the TFCC hatch. “You just did exactly what you’re paid to dogave your people the information they needed about your intentions and wishes, clarified the tactical choices for them, and then left them to do their jobs. Batmanyou don’t need coffee, not right now.” Tombstone pointed toward the admiral’s stateroom. “You need sleep.”
A long moment of silence stretched out between the two, broken when Batman finally shook his head. “You don’t miss a trick, do you?”
Tombstone almost smiled. “Some. But not the same one twice in a row. I learned something while I was out here. You will too.”
Batman shot him a suspicious look. “Is that an order to hit the rack, Admiral?”
“Merely a suggestion.”
Batman straightened. “Then may I assume that the admiral will be following his own advice? Because I’ll be damned if I can recall a time when I was called to TFCC when you weren’t right on my ass.”
Tombstone shrugged. “Point well taken.”
He turned to leave the room. “If you need me, I’ll be in my cabin. Other than that, you’re on your own.”
As the two admirals headed off at right angles to each other, each to his own stateroom, Tombstone paused at the hatch leading out of the conference room just as Batman reached his own entrance.
“Stoney?”
“Yeah?”
“We were never that young. And even if we were, we were a helluva lot hotter. Weren’t we?”
Finally, Tombstone did smile. “We thought we were. And right now, that’s all that matters.”
“Night, Stoney.”
“Night, Batman.”
It was sixty-four steps back to his stateroom. Sixty-four steps and eight knee-knockers, each one threatening to gash open a giant bruise on his shinbone as he lifted his tired legs to clear the ten-inch obstacles.
He turned left, then right along the starboard passageway, heading back toward the visiting flag spaces.
Two frames from his own compartment, Tombstone paused. He heard voices, one muttering angrily. At this hour of the morning, it caught his attention in a way that it wouldn’t have during the day.
He paused outside the hatch, read the squadron insignia, and felt a wave of nostalgia wash over him. VF-95his old squadron. How many times had he been up at this hour, going over some mistake he’d made in the air, swearing at himself for some trivial error. Feeling a little guilty, he tried to decipher the voices inside. There was only one, he realizeda man, talking to himself. A pilot, based on the phrases he caught. Mounted on the door frame was a small nameplate. It was Skeeter Harmon’s room.
Tombstone stepped closer to the door, then paused. Should he?
No, he decided. He tried to remember what it was like to be a junior officer, tried to imagine the horror and chagrin he would have felt had an admiral knocked on his door atit was almost three o’clock in the morning.
Every pilot has his or her own particular nightmares. For some it’s a soft cat, for others it’s the fear of ejecting. Each one finds his own ways to deal with it, and there is little that an admiral can do to speed the process along.
Tombstone dropped his hand down by his side and turned back toward his compartment.
Inside the radio housing, delicate circuits clicked over microseconds, recording the passage of time far more accurately than was needed for the bomb’s purposes. Twenty seconds before the scheduled detonation time, two activating relays kicked over to their ready position. Poised just a millimeter over the metallic hard points that would complete the electrical circuit, they surged invisibly with the current poised over their tips.
As the timing circuit clicked over to 0300, both contacts closed the last millimeter of distance.
Tombstone took another step over another knee-knocker. The digital watch on his wrist chimed gently on the hour.
His world exploded.
Tombstone slammed hard into the bulkhead on his right. His shoulder hit first, followed a split second later by his head. His foot, still poised over the knee-knocker, caught the metal ledge on his heel, spinning him back into the angle formed by the knee-knocker hatch and the bulkhead.
His chin slammed into the steel and he felt something crumple in his mouth.
He slid down to the deck, barely conscious. In the passageway, rolling down fore and aft on a wave of sound and smoke and flames. Tombstone felt the heat, searing and instant. Then it subsided slightly as damaged nerve endings shut down. Instinctively, he buried his head in his hands, shielding his face and eyes. It was a natural movement for a pilotthe eyes, his most critical personal asset aside from testosterone.
As his consciousness faded out, he noted how oddly quiet it was.
He slid to the deck, his cheek still scraping down the gray-painted metal bulkhead, and collapsed into an ungainly sprawl on the deck.
The explosion threw Shaughnessy down the passageway, slamming her into a fire hose coiled and mounted on the bulkhead. The impact stunned her for a few moments. She lay on the deck, heard the gonging sound of General Quarters begin, and feet pounding down the passageway, without entirely understanding what was happening.
“Shaughnessy!” A young man crouched next to her, shook her gently by the shoulder. “Are you all right?”
Full consciousness returned slowly. Shaughnessy stirred, and groaned as the numbness in her back seeped away. “I think so.”
Every second, her mind cleared more and more. “Help me get up.”
The other sailor shot an anxious glance down the corridor, then held out his hand. “Come on. General Quartersare you sure you’re okay?” he asked, a frown on his face. “You don’t look so hot.”
Shaughnessy shook her head, took a deep breath, and shoved his helping hand away. “I’m all right. Let’s get up to the flight deck.”
The other sailor, Airman Mike Moyers, led the way. They darted down the passageway, keeping with the flow of sailors scrambling for General Quarters stations, then went up one ladder to the flight deck. Both were assigned to Repair 8 as their General Quarters station, the damage-control team that was responsible for the flight deck.
As they stepped over the knee-knocker and onto the tarmac, Mike grabbed Shaughnessy by the shoulder again. He pointed aft to a cluster of people. “There it isthank God, no fire.”