“I want a list of their names. I’ll check the personnel file on each of them. Do they know how to use small arms?”
“Yes, sir. All of them are checked out with weapons. It’s mandatory for my guys, but the others do it because they’re good ‘ole boys, and shooting comes natural.”
“But I’m still a little confused about one thing Commander. What about the SEALs?”
Bradley sat up straight. In his mind, he climbed to the high road.
“When Robert E. Lee joined the Confederacy, he knew that it would mean taking up arms against people he knew well. He didn’t like the idea, but he knew it was his sacred patriotic duty. The SEALs will become collateral damage in our mission. Once ashore, they will have to be killed.”
“We’ll meet again soon, Chief.”
“Aye aye, Sir.”
Chapter 45
Jeff DeLouker and Nancy Forsyth were in the ship’s maintenance and repair shop discussing the design of the California’s upcoming “costume changes.” They were going over Forsyth’s drawings for the large shed structures that would serve as bogus gun turrets. Both the fore and aft sheds would be eight feet high, and would grow by another eight feet by hoisting four additional walls that would lay collapsed on the roof of the sheds until needed.
“We’re going to need another member on our committee, Nance.”
“Who and why?”
“Father Rick, the chaplain, is the who. Weather is the why. We are going to need a lot of prayer, Nance. If we hit a big storm with all this crap we’re adding to the decks we’re fucked.”
DeLouker and Forsyth went to Nick Wartella’s office. Wartella invited them in. “How’s our costume change operation going?”
“That’s what we wanted to see you about Commander. My sidekick here designs stuff that can take a beating, and my team knows how to batten down for heavy weather, but if we hit a major storm we could have a big problem.”
“Hurricane season is coming,” added Forsyth. “Jeff is right. If we hit a bad storm our costume may get washed out to sea. We can take some heavy weather, no problem. But we don’t have the ability to outrun a hurricane if we don’t know it’s coming.”
“We all know that our weather forecasting took a hit when we lost our satellites,” DeLouker said. “Nancy and I just wanted to give you a heads up, in case you didn’t have anything else to worry about.”
“You’re both right. Thanks for thinking this through. I’ll talk to the captain.”
After Wartella told her about the concerns of his design team, Ashley called a meeting with Ivan Campbell, the navigator, and Lt. Kathy Cooney, the ship’s meteorologist, who is part of the navigation division.
Campbell and Cooney entered the Captain’s office. “I just got a very savvy heads up from our engineering department,” Ashley said. “They’re concerned that a big storm could compromise Operation Gray Ships by blowing all of their work out to sea. Weather is something we haven’t been thinking a lot about lately, but it’s time to think about it now.”
“I’ll turn it over to Lt. Stormy here, Captain.” The Captain smiled at his nickname for Cooney.
“I wish I could give you good news, but I can’t,” said Cooney. “After I graduated from OCS I went to Navy meteorology school because I found it interesting. But without the right tools, it isn’t interesting, it’s scary. My job as the ship’s meteorologist had been one of tracking, monitoring, and reporting. I would constantly check the satellite weather reports and the weather faxes. I would also watch CNN and the Weather Channel on our TV hookup, I’m embarrassed to admit. That’s why the job of a modern ship’s meteorologist is part-time. I have other responsibilities in the navigation department. The only thing I have to monitor now is the condition of the sky and the ship’s two barometers. We do have radar, but the range isn’t good enough to keep us out of big trouble.”
“How good are you at reading the sky, Lieutenant?” asked Ashley.
“As good as anybody, Captain, which also means as bad as anybody. We’ve all heard, ‘Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, red sky in morning, sailor take warning.’ But for serious weather forecasting, that’s pure nonsense. A fast moving front, and fronts can move very fast, will blow away any silly saying. Yes, the clouds can tell us a lot, but the situation can change very fast, as many a captain who went down with a ship in a storm found out.”
“As you see it Kathy, what’s the major problem we have to worry about?” Campbell asked.
“Here’s what keeps me up at night. Today is May 3. In less than a month from now, on June 1, the Atlantic Hurricane Season begins, or at least it did in 2013. Both of you have been in the Navy a lot longer than I have, so you know the drill when it comes to hurricanes. You head the other way and outrun them. That’s the only way to deal with a hurricane. Even in the early part of the twentieth-century, after ship-to-ship wireless telegraphs came into use, mariners were in a better spot than we find ourselves in. Ships could send warnings to other ships. We don’t even have that capability. Even the hindsight of history isn’t much good. I know we have plenty of historical data on CD-ROMs in our library, but there have been ferocious storms at sea that never made the newspapers. The only way people knew of them was when a lot of ships never returned to port.”
“I assume that you think the weather stations ashore will not be of much help,” Ashley said.
“That’s right captain. They’re primitive at best, lacking the same technology that we’re missing. For example, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, 39 years from now, was (will be?) the worst hurricane in American history, with over 6,000 lives lost. The technology of weather stations at the time wasn’t close to satellite imagery. Simply stated, the people in Galveston didn’t know it was coming. That same problem can apply to the California.”
“What steps do you recommend, Kathy?” Campbell asked.
“Sir, I’m making copies of photos of every known cloud formation, and I will be posting them around the ship. We have a lot of old salts on this ship, and maybe one of them may see something that I’ve missed. But even if they do, reading the sky is no substitute for accurate forecasting. It’s the only thing we have. Radar is good, but it will only show us that we’re about to get hit. It won’t allow us enough time to outrun a storm.”
“Ivan,” said Ashley, “I want you to come up with a list of safe harbors up and down the coast. It may give us a shot at ducking for cover if we realize some big weather is on us. We have to deal with the hand we’ve been dealt. Losing our fancy new Gray Ship costuming may be the least of our problems.”
Chapter 46
The Boston Globe
“Sighting of Amazing Gray Vessel off Coast of Maine –
Four Fishermen Report a Very Large and Fast Ship”
By Lucas McPherson, May 4, 1861
A ship the likes of which has never been seen has been reported by a fishing vessel off the coast of Deer Isle, Maine. According to the Angus Monahan, captain of the Ariana B., a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, he saw a very large Gray Ship approximately a quarter-mile from his boat. “I have never seen anything like it before. It’s the biggest ship of any kind that I’ve seen before, and I’ve been fishing these waters for over 20 years.” He looked at the ship through his spyglass and was able to see structures on her deck that he couldn’t identify, other than two objects that appeared to be large cannons. Three other crewmembers of the Ariana B. were interviewed and they confirmed captain Monahan’s statement. Although they weren’t close enough to determine the exact lettering on her stern, two of the men insisted that it read “USS California.” Large numbers on each side of her bow read “36.”