Dead in the Water by Stuart Woods

Author:Stuart Woods [Woods, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-01-31T06:00:00+00:00

* * *

Everything is going quadruple speed on the flight deck compared with whatever I have experienced up ’til now. The engine roar is already so full-throated and beastly I feel like surrendering to our own planes. Guys are running every which way across the deck, and this is where all the million hours of training and drilling pays off because if every man doesn’t do his job precisely and do it without smashing into the other guys, then everything comes crashing down.

I see Pappas at the controls of his Wildcat, in the lead group about to take off and he has got his game face on like never before. I wave in his direction as I sprint toward the second group, my assignment, the Dauntless dive-bombers. The screech is almighty as the first Wildcat burns up the runway and takes off. The second fighter in the CAP group slings into the air with Pappas at the controls — followed, in nothing flat, by the rest — and my unit is up.

Everybody is shouting something as all of us airedales put our muscle behind lining each Dauntless in position at the flight line. Everybody’s shouting something at somebody else while I for one am barely listening. We know this procedure by now like we know our own lungs, and we have to tell each other what to do as much as we have to tell the lungs, “in-out-in-out.” I count on each of these guys to do his part just as surely as I count on my own organs.

One, then two Dauntlesses are in the air, and we line up ours. It all runs like superb machinery, just like always, and as I stand back I look up to see Valentine giving me a thumbs-up from the bomber just the instant before it’s slung into the air. It all happens so quickly that the time-lapse between my seeing his thumb and getting mine in the air means I have given it to the next Dauntless in line, and barely manage that before it, too, is airborne.

“Enemy aircraft at twenty minutes!” the Tannoy belts out.

My crew is hustled out of the way as the Devastator torpedo-bomber group takes over the deck and somehow manages to speed things up even more. I find myself dumbstruck by this last bunch launching so fast, each bomber practically bumping right up into the tail of the one just out above the ocean in front of him.

“No time to be impressed!” the flight deck commander bellows at me. He points emphatically, like a third base coach waving me home, toward the battery of big guns just forward of amidships. “Ammo train, sailor! Now! Move, move, move!”

I am flight deck crew and would be satisfied to be nothing else, but the reality of carrier function is that you do whatever is needed at the very instant that need arises. We all know we can be drafted into the fire crew in an emergency, or plumber’s assistant or, more often than not, somewhere in the chain of ammunition supply, like now.

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