Twenty minutes later, the investigator was satisfied that the damage was limited to the 03 level of the carrier in a small square centered around the admiral’s stateroom.
“Admiral do you know where you are?” The voice was kind, yet insistent. “I need for you to wake up now, Admiral. Come on, I know you can hear me.”
Tombstone felt like he was underwater. The voice was barely audible, as though someone were talking a long way away. It sounded muffled, dampened by the sea. He tried to move, and felt the same sluggish restraint he always noticed when skin diving.
“Admiral talk to me.” The voice again, closer now, and louder.
Tombstone felt a groan shudder up from his gut. He twisted, and that small movement brought pain flooding into him from all over. The groan deepened, forcing its way out from between his lips against his wishes.
“GoodI knew you were awake. Open your eyes now, please.”
Tombstone tried to obey, and felt the light slowly creeping up under his eyelids. It was lighter now, but the shapes around him were oddly fuzzy and indistinct. “Where am I?” he managed to croak. His throat felt as though it were on fire.
“You’re in Medical, Admiral. There was an explosion and a fire in your quarters. You were injurednot seriously. You’re going to be fine.”
Tombstone squinted, trying to resolve the blurs into faces. Finally, one familiar to his eyes swam into view. “Batman.”
Batman laid a restraining hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Take it easy there, Stoney. I didn’t believe it possible, but that bulkhead was harder than your head. You just lay back for a while, let the doc finish checking you out.”
Batman shot the doctor a concerned look. “He says you’re going to be fine.”
“Help me stand up.” Tombstone’s voice was weak but insistent.
The doctor shook his head. “Not a chance, Admiral. You check out all right, you stay with us for another thirty minutes, then we’ll see about letting you move around. I’m not risking it at this point, not until I get the X-rays back and I’m sure you don’t have a concussion. Tell me, how’s your eyesight? Having any problem seeing me?”
The doctor snapped a flashlight on, flicked it across Tombstone’s pupils.
“No problems. I can see you fine,” Tombstone lied. “Just let me-“
Batman increased the pressure on his friend’s shoulder. “You lie your ass back down in that bed, Stoney, or I’m going to authorize the doc to put you in restraints. You got that?”
“Dammit, Batman, I-“
“It’s my ship, Tombstone.” Batman’s voice carried with it a quiet dignity. “Quit being an asshole and let me go take care of it. The doc only called me down here because you kept trying to roll out of the bed.”
“Okay.”
The efforts of the last few minutes had exhausted him, he was alarmed to find out. Tombstone lay back on the narrow mattress and stifled another groan. At least everything was moving, or seemed to be. He’d know for sure if they’d let him stand up. But there was no point in keeping Batman from his duties with a truculent childlike reaction from a senior officer. What he’d said was trueit was Batman’s ship. At this point in time, there was absolutely nothing Tombstone could do except stay out of the way.
“That’s better. Stoney, I’m going to leave, but I’ll be back later to check on you.”
“He’ll be fine, Admiral Wayne,” the doctor assured him. “Now that we’ve got him under control.”
The explosion. Tombstone tried to summon up the exact details from his battered brain, but remembered nothing more than hitting the wall.
He’d been headed back to his cabin, that much he remembered. There’d been a sharp flash, thenwhat?
Nothing.
What on the ship could possibly explode that way?
Nothing Tombstone knew about, not in that area of the ship.
A cold, clear dread settled in his stomach. It hadn’t been the ship, he knew with compelling certainty. Not the ship at all. Someone elsesomething elsehad caused the explosion.
Sabotage.
“I demand to be briefed. Immediately.” Bradley Tiltfelt’s voice was cold, full of self-righteous rage. “It’s imperative that I be kept fully aware of what’s going on on this ship.”
“How bad is it?” Batman asked the damage-control officer. The Captain of the carrier was standing immediately behind the grimy and sweating damage-control officer.
“Bad enough, Admiral.” The engineer shook his head. “The damage below-decks is relatively minor. In relative terms, that is. A few staterooms, some personal belongingsnothing structural is damaged.”
“And the flight deck?” Batman demanded.
“You’ve lost the waist catapult. There’s no way around it, Admiral.
The flight deck is slightly warped, and I can’t be sure the shuttle run is even straight, much less that it retains sufficient structural integrity for launches. If we absolutely had to, like if we were in the middle of the warwell, you might chance it. But it would be just thata chance. It might break loose the first launch and blast shrapnel into your flight deck crew and your aircraft, or it might actually work for a while. That’s even assuming it’s straight and it doesn’t tear itself apart under the steam pressure. Or that it holds pressure at all.”
The engineer shrugged helplessly. “Without a lot more facilities than I’ve got on the ship, I just can’t tell. For now, my recommendation is no flight operations whatsoever off the waist catapult.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” Batman’s voice was cold and determined. “But at least we have the two forward catapults still working, right? No problem with them?”
The engineer nodded, the Captain of the aircraft carrier also nodding thoughtfully behind him. “As far as I can tell, there should be no problem with the forward catapults. There’s enough separation that maybe there was a little stress on the deck there, but not enough to throw it out of true. There are no signs of damage, at any rateI’d like to have the shipyard look it over next time we’re in, but I think it’s safe.”
Think it’s safe. Batman nodded. That would have to do for now.
“Admiral?” Tiltfelt’s voice was sharp, demanding. “Did you hear me? What does all of this mean?”
Batman whirled to face the civilian. “It means that we’ve lost a part of our fighting capability. Sir.”
Batman let the last word drip venom. “Not so much that we’re sitting ducks, but we can’t launch as rapidly as we’d like to be able to. Is there any part of that you don’t understand?”
“What do you mean by speaking to me in that tone of voice?” Tiltfelt’s face was flushed.
“I mean that I have a job to do and you’re getting in my way. Sir, I’ll tell you everything you need to knowwhen I can. But I’m not going to let what amounts to a courtesy back-briefing to a civilian interfere with my ability to conduct operations off this carrier. Is that absolutely clear to you?”
“Why you-“
Batman cut him off. “Because if it’s not, then it would make me happier than shit to strap your soft little civilian butt into a COD, throw it off the pointy end from one of my two remaining catapults, and send your ass back to the States. At least that way I won’t have to put up with having a convention of saboteurs aboard my ship.”
Bradley Tiltfelt stood and drew himself up to his full height. At six feet, three inches, he was an imposing figure. Even rousted from his stateroom in the middle of the night by the explosion and General Quarters alarm, he managed somehow to look as though he’d spent hours getting dressed. The clean, crisp white shirt, the old school tie so carefully knottedin spite of himself, Batman was grudgingly impressed. Almost as much as he was dismayed by the State Department representative’s inability to understand the situation in which Batman now found himself.