YN3 Philip Ahn was rethinking the helicopter thing. Helos looked so fucking cool in the movies and on the cop shows. Gray or camo war machines owning the sky; transporting Spec Ops teams of Navy SEALs, or Army Rangers, or Marine Force Recon units to secret insertion points for badass covert raids and firefights.
Nothing in the movies hinted at how loud the damn things were, how badly they vibrated your kidneys, or how nauseously unpleasant their crawly sideways motions could be.
Then there was the smell. Hot metal, mixed with lubricating oil, burning kerosene, and the unavoidable odors of human bodies stewing in an enclosed capsule.
The flight was entering its third hour, and the pizza Phil had scarfed down for lunch was not riding well in his stomach. He needed to pee. He almost needed to puke. But most of all, he needed to get the fuck out of this whirling, shrieking, rattling nightmare of an aircraft.
With all fantasies of Special Operations badassery now thoroughly squelched, he turned his thoughts back to wondering why he was here.
He was a Yeoman, for God’s sake. A pencil pusher. As some of the more active Coast Guard ratings liked to joke, a Xerographer’s Mate. So what was he doing in a helicopter over the open ocean? And why wouldn’t anyone tell him anything?
The helo had flown directly through Cuban airspace, straight over the island, with no delays for permission and no interference from local military or police. Someone had pulled serious diplomatic strings to make that happen. Who had that kind of political horsepower? And why were they wasting it to fly a junior Coastie paper shuffler out to a Navy ship?
With the North Korean mess going on, it was possible that the Navy needed an interpreter who could speak Korean. He fit the bill for that, more or less. His parents — now naturalized American citizens — had both grown up in Seoul before immigrating to the states in their early twenties. Phil and his two older sisters had been raised in a household where English and Korean were spoken in fairly equal measures. But he had never put serious effort into mastering the language of the country his parents had left behind.
He could usually get his ideas across in Korean and he understood the language more clearly than he spoke it. That didn’t make him fluent by any stretch of the imagination, though. As his mother liked to point out, his vocabulary and grammar were weaker than they should have been, and his pronunciation was (if anything) weaker still.
If the Navy needed someone to translate, they could easily have chosen someone better suited than he was. That couldn’t be what they wanted, anyway. The Navy had their own interpreters. There was no reason for them to requisition a Coast Guard YN3 who sort of spoke the language.
As he was racking his brain for alternatives, the monotonous thunder of the rotors changed in some indefinable way. He felt a sinking elevator sensation in the pit of his stomach.
He leaned forward in his seat and strained to look past the heads and shoulders of the pilots. The helo was dropping now, the waves coming up much faster than seemed reasonable or safe.
Then he caught sight of the ship, and it looked small. Really small. The flight deck seemed to be the size of his fingernail. And it was moving. A lot. Bobbing. Rolling.
Maybe that would be enough to abort the landing. Maybe the pilots would take one look at the tiny unstable flight deck, and turn back for the Coast Guard station at Key West. Get somebody else to handle whatever they’d brought him out here to do.
But the pilots showed no sign of turning back. They didn’t even seem to be concerned. The helicopter continued to drop toward the ship, and the pizza in Phil’s stomach announced an entirely new level of unhappiness.
He clamped his eyes shut and recognized instantly that it only magnified his queasiness. He settled for staring at his boots instead. The toe of the left one had picked up a scuff. He’d have to find some polish and buff it out, assuming that he survived the next few minutes.
Even if the circus acrobat landing didn’t kill him, he’d be aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer, in the same stretch of the Caribbean where the other destroyer had been blown up. According to internet buzz (and what little he’d seen of the news), the Navy was getting its ass kicked down here by some kind of killer North Korean rocket sub. Not the type of thing he wanted to get involved in if he had any say in the matter. Which, of course, he didn’t.
It occurred to him that he might actually be flying toward the scene of his death, either by helo crash, or getting blasted into dog food by an enemy super weapon. The thought pissed him off. He had plans for Saturday night with that little tourist hottie from The Lazy Gecko. If his weekend was going to be interrupted by violent dismemberment, he at least wanted to know what the fuck he would be dying for.
Eyes still focused on his boots, he wasn’t prepared for the jolt that shot up his spine when the landing gear hit the deck. The pitch of the helo’s engines changed dramatically and he felt a microsecond of panic. Then his brain processed the available clues and decided that the helicopter was down. He wasn’t dead yet. That was a good sign.
Two minutes later, after the obligatory head-bowed dash under spinning rotor blades, he was through a watertight door and into the destroyer’s aft starboard passageway.
A Navy lieutenant was there to meet him. They were indoors and not wearing covers, so Phil decided that saluting would not be necessary. Or would it? Maybe the Navy’s rules on that sort of thing were different from the Coast Guard’s. Could be that he was expected to pop tall and snap out a salute.
Instead, he dredged up the only thing that seemed to fit the occasion. “Request permission to come aboard, sir.”
The lieutenant grinned. “Granted. It isn’t like we have much choice, since you’re already here.” He gave Phil a rapid visual inspection, taking in the Coast Guard sailor’s wrinkled blue Operational Dress Uniform and the sickly look that probably lingered on his face. “Rough flight?”
“Seemed like it to me, sir. But maybe helos are always like that.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” the lieutenant said. “I refuse to fly in anything that has to beat the air into submission.”
It was an old joke. Phil laughed anyway. It never hurt to let officers think they were clever.
The lieutenant turned and starting walking toward the forward end of the ship.
Phil followed a few steps behind. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir, where are we going?”
“The Admin Office,” the lieutenant said over his shoulder. “You have some paperwork to take care of.”
That took Phil by surprise. The Admin Office? Had the Navy really dragged him out of Key West to shuffle papers in the middle of the ocean? They couldn’t possibly be that short of Yeomen. There had to be something more to this.
“Uh… What kind of paperwork, sir?”
“We’re upgrading your security clearance to Top Secret,” the lieutenant said. “So you’ll basically be signing away your birthday, your firstborn son, all the usual stuff.”
Phil nearly stopped in his tracks. “I think you’ve got the wrong guy, sir. I’m not eligible for TS. My parents were born in a foreign country, and I’ve never had the required background investigation.”
“It’s a special interim clearance,” the lieutenant said. “Requested by Commander Atlantic Fleet, with expedited approval by Defense Security Service. A one-time deal. Short-term access, but you’ll be permanently barred from disclosing any of the information you’re about to receive. At least until it all gets declassified, which probably won’t happen in your lifetime.”
This time, Phil did stop. “Lieutenant? You understand that I’m a third class Yeoman, right? My qualifications include typing up the Plan of the Day and changing the toner in the Xerox machine. Sometimes I manage to file things in the right drawer. Nobody in his right mind would give me Top Secret information.”