Final Flight (9 page)

Sakol stared at him. Finally he said, “You would.
I believe you.”

Qazi stepped forward and slashed the front sight
of his pistol across Sakol’s cheek, then quickly
stepped back. As the blood dripped from Sakol’s
cheek onto his shirt Qazi pocketed the weapon.
“You’ll be returned to the cell with Jarvis. You’ll
ensure he performs as required.”

Just then the door opened and Ali stood there,
framed in the opening.

Qazi issued orders to Ali in Arabic as
Sakol walked toward the door.

“How do we know,” Ali asked Qazi later
in the corridor, “that the electrical outputs those
instruments produce are the proper ones?”

“That is why we have Sakol working with Jarvis,”
Qazi answered offhandedly, his mind still on
Sakol and the possibility he might speak
frankly to the wrong people. Keeping Sakol alive was
a large risk, a much larger risk than he had
previously believed. Sakol’s attitudes and
opinions should have been anticipated. There was just no
margin in the plan for errors of that magnitude.
“Sakol has assured me Jarvis is giving us the
correct voltages.”

“Can we not verify the voltages through other
sources?” Qazi stopped on the stairs and faced
Ali. The black eyes were not evasive. “That
information is classified Top Secret by the
Americans. One would need the actual technical
data manual for the weapon. That manual is one of the
most closely held American secrets.”

“So we must rely on Jarvis and Sakol.”

Qazi resumed his descent of the stairs. “That would
be a very slender reed, indeed. No, I have a source
that will supply the manual.”

“I suspected as much, Colonel. And what is
the source?”

“The traits that make you valuable to me, Ali,
are your unquestioning faith and your discretion. Keep
exercising both.”

The two men stepped into the desert heat and walked
across the courtyard to the waiting Mercedes, where Ali
slid behind the wheel.

In the car Qazi sat in the front seat with
Ali. “Why does Sakol hate you so?”

Ali laughed. “I call him a whore, selling
himself for money. I ask him to do sexual things for
me. He is not amused.” His face grew serious.

“I think when he was a prisoner in
Afghanistan, the Russians forced him to do sexual
things with other men. Or the Russians did it to him.
The Russians are such pigs.” He made a
spitting motion.

Ali was on the main road now, heading north.
To the west the afternoon sun caused the dust-filled sky
to glow red. Perhaps they would reach the capital before the
dust storm struck. Qazi turned off the
air-conditioning and rolled down his window. The heat
filled the car.

He took a deep breath. He, too, loved the
smell of the desert, the smell of purity, the smell
of nothing at all.

Along the road ahead he saw a bedouin on a
camel. The mounted figure shimmered in the heat as the
car approached. As the car went by Qazi saw that the
rider did not even deign to give them a glance.
Qazi adjusted the rearview mirror on his door
and watched the receding figure until it was lost in the
heat mirages rising from the stony emptiness.

HOW LONG was Columbus at sea on his first
voyage to the New World?” Jake Grafton asked
Yeoman First Class Farnsworth, who pushed
himself back from his typewriter and thought seriously about
the question.

Abandoned by his mother at the age of five,
Farnsworth had spent his youth shuttling between foster
homes. He had enlisted in the navy at seventeen
and earned his high school equivalency diploma
during his first tour of sea duty. The navy, with its
routine and tradition and comfortable discipline, was the
only happy home he had ever known. There were times
when Farnsworth wished the captain standing in the middle
of the office and gazing about distractedly had been his
father. Except that Grafton was about ten years too
young.

Still, he had an air of quiet selfconfidence
that Farnsworth found most agreeable. So
Farnsworth tried desperately to recall if he
had ever heard how long Columbus’ voyage had
taken.

“Sir, I don’t remember.”

“Me either. How about running up to the ship’s
library and looking it up? Better check on
Noah, too.” And since he was not in the habit of
giving frivolous orders, Jake added, “I need
a good excuse to ask the powers that be for a day off for the
troops. Maybe we could have a deck picnic when
we equal Columbus’ time at sea.

Farnsworth was out the door almost before Jake
finished. The captain went into his office and
tackled the contents of his inbasket. He was deep
into the preliminary draft of an accident report,
Jelly and Boomer’s crash, when Will Cohen
knocked and entered.

“Sit down, W.”

“Thanks, CAG. Thought I’d give you a
report on the maintenance inspection.”

Jake leaned back and propped his feet on the
open top drawer of the desk. “How’s that going?”

“We’ve finished both the F-l4 outfits and
one of the FirstA-l8 squadrons.

Still working on the others. One of the fighter
squadrons”-he named it-“has been cheating a
little. They’ve been robbing parts from down birds
to keep the others flying.”

Jake knew about that dodge. You kept your
aircraft available to fly by shuffling components, which
increased the work load on the sailors. For every bad
component that needed replacement, the mechanics had
to remove two parts and install two more. The
practice, known as cannibalism, increased the
opportunities for a maintenance error, and it
certainly didn’t help morale.

“Are parts all that hard to come by?” Jake asked
as he watched Cohen take out a pack of
cigarettes, Pall Mall filters, and light
one.

“Supply says no. But that skipper and
maintenance officer are doing their damnedest to keep their
availability looking as good as possible.”

Jake grunted and watched Cohen look around for
an ashtray. The maintenance officer settled on the
trashcan and pulled it over.

“That’s a lot of work for the troops for a damn
small increase in availability.”

“Yep,” Cohen agreed. “But when everyone
wants a ‘walks on water” fitness
report, you want the numbers as good as possible.”

Jake knew all about the fitness report game,
too. But this, he realized, was more complex than the
natural desire of the skipper to look good. The
skipper was under intense pressure to keep the
maximum number of his aircraft ready to fly, and
if the supply system failed to spew forth spare
parts quickly enough, the temptation to cannibalize an
aircraft that couldn’t be readily repaired was almost
irresistible. The real challenge was making the
supply system work properly. Jake
Grafton’s primary responsibility was making the
entire system-including supply-function as it should,
and the effort absorbed the bulk of his time. There were
moments when the sheer inertia of the bureaucracy
daunted him. “I’ll have a little chat with that skipper.

You give me a list of the parts he’s been
cannibalizing. What else have you found?”

“Not a whole lot. Little screw ups here and there,
but the repair work seems to be getting done
properly and quickly. At times they get behind on the
documentation, which is par for the course. Overall the
quality of the work is excellent.”

“They only have to fuck up once and somebody
dies.” He picked up the draft
accident report and perused it again as a thin blue
fog of cigarette smoke filled the small
compartment. The exact cause of the accident was unknown,
but the investigators opined that the probable cause was
an oxygen system malfunction that the crewmen had not
noticed in time. The equipment used to fill the
aircraft’s tank with liquid oxygen had checked
out perfectly. The aircraft had flown almost a
hundred hours without an oxygen system gripe. The
crew was current on their lowpressure chamber
training and their masks had been inspected recently.
Jelly had five hours sleep in the twenty-four
hours prior to the crash and Boomer had slept for
six. Both men had eaten within six hours of flying,
food from the wardroom that had not affected anyone
else.

Jake sighed and tossed the report onto the
desk. He eyed Cohen. “Gimme a cigarette.”

“I thought you were trying to quit.”

“I am trying, asshole. But you came in here and
fumigated the joint and now I want a fucking
cigarette. So gimme one.”

Cohen scrutinized the captain carefully. He
decided he was serious and passed one across
the desk. Jake sniffed it, then placed it in his
mouth. “Now a match.”

“You shouldn’t do this, you know.”

Jake glared.

Cohen passed over his lighter. Jake lit up
and exhaled slowly, through his nose. “Keep going
On the inspection. And tell Chief Shipman
to drop in the next time you see him. I want to hear
how he’s doing too.”

Cohen stood up.”

“Thanks, W.” Cohen closed the door behind him
on the way out.

Jake took another drag on the cigarette.
It tasted terrible and made him light-headed, yet
he wanted it. He held it up and stared at the
glowing red tip. I’m addicted to these fucking things,
he told himself slowly. He stubbed it out on the
inside of the gray metal trashcan, only to see
several red coals fall on down toward the
bottom, under the paper. He poured cold coffee
into the can and sloshed it around.

Farnsworth opened the door, paused, and sniffed.
“You’ve been smoking.”

“Eat shit and die,” Jake Grafton
snarled.

The yeoman wasn’t fazed. “Columbus was at
sea continuously for only thirty-four days before he
landed in the West Indies. His whole first voyage,
including a few weeks in the Canary Islands,
only took sixty-two days.”

“That quick, huh? How long have we been at sea?”

“One hundred five days.”

“So that’s out.”

“Noah might be a better bet. It’s a little
confusing, but it looks like he floated around for a
hundred and fifty days. And lots of ships have
made longer voyages, sir. Maybe ol’ Noah
set the record when he did it, but he wouldn’t even
be close now. I’ll bet I could find someone who
went to sea a bosun third and came home an
admiral.”

Down in the wastebasket half the cigarette
remained unburned, though it was slightly bent.
Jake pushed it off the paper wad where it rested and
watched it turn brown in the coffee at the bottom
of the can. “Another voyage from yesterday to the day after
tomorrow, he muttered and sat back in his chair.
“Forget it, Farnsworth. It was just an idea.
I’ll ask for the day off anyway.

“Can you imagine ol’ Noah mucking out
under all those animals for a hundred and fifty days?
And I think I have to shovel shit around here!”

“How about seeing if you can find me a clean
trashcan,” Jake said, nudging the offending container
with his foot.

“sure.” “Thanks, Farnsworth.”

A heavyset sailor wearing a filthy jersey that
had once been yellow stood against the bulkhead
outside the XO’S stateroom, facing the marine
sentry in dress blues. The marine, a
corporal, was at parade rest, his eyes fixed on
infinity. For him the sailor was beneath notice, not
worth the effort to make his eyes focus. On the
sailor’s jersey, just barely visible amid the
grease and gray pall of jet exhaust, were the words
“Cat 4 P.o.”

“What are you doing down here, Kowalski?”

“Uh, waiting to see the XO, CAG,” the
sailor said with an embarrassed little grin. He
held his flight deck helmet in both hands and
twisted it nervously.

Jake nodded and spoke to the marine. “Tell the
XO I need a few minutes of his time.”

The corporal snapped to attention, then picked
up the telephone receiver on the bulkhead and
waited until the executive officer in his
stateroom answered it. “He’ll be with you in a few
moments, sir,” the corporal said as he hung up
the phone and resumed his parade rest stance. Jake
leaned against the bulkhead beside Kowalski.

“Are you ready for Naples, Ski?” Captain
James had announced an hour ago on the public
address system that the ship would dock in Naples in
ten days.

“Uh, yessir.” Kowalski’s forehead and two
large circles around his eyes were spanking clean, as
white as the top of the corporal’s hat, but the
bottom half of his face, which was unprotected
by his helmet and goggles, was tanned and grimy.
The grime was as nothing compared to his hands though; the
grease had become permanently embedded in the
crevices of his skin and no amount of scrubbing would
make them clean. He reeked of jet exhaust.
He was so nervous he could not hold still, so Jake
gave him a reassuring smile.

The door opened and the XO, Commander Ray
Reynolds, motioned to Jake, who went in and
closed the door behind him. “What’s the problem with
Kowalski?”

The XO grinned, a ludicrous effort
since his four top front teeth were missing and when
he grinned, he tried to hold his upper lip down
to hide the hole. The effort caused his entire face
to contort, and as usual, Jake poliztely
averted his eyes at this demonstration of Reynolds’
vanity. Jake liked Reynolds immensely.

“Ski has a habit of getting drunk and
getting into a bar brawl every time he goes
ashore. He’s an alcoholic.” Grafton
nodded. “And he’s the best catapult captain we
have. If we could just keep him aboard ship all the
time, he’d do fine. I told him last time that his
feet weren’t going to touch dry land until the end of
his enlistment, but that isn’t fair. So I’m going
to let him ashore in Naples. If he gets
carried back to the ship one more time by the shore
patrol, he’s on his way to the drunk farm, and
maybe out of the navy.” Reynolds shrugged.

“But what did you want to see me about?”

“I want to have a deck party for the crew on
Saturday if we can get a day off. We will have
been continuously at sea over three times longer
than Christopher Columbus, and I think we ought
to play it up and let the crew know they’ve done
something big.”