39
“I haven’t slept in days,”Commander Susan Piazza stood beside Mike on the Hangar Deck of the USSTheodore Roosevelt.They’d arrived from Alaska at sunset and she’d been in the dark ever since. Midnight had drifted by three hours ago. Other than the scattered lights of the circling carrier groups, there was nothing to see beyond the floodlights directed at the wreckage. Miranda, Andi, and Holly were reassembling the crashed F-35C one scrap at a time.
“It certainly feels that way,” Mike seemed utterly complacent, glad to stand and watch the other three at work. They’d been at it for hours. She didn’t understand most of what they were doing, but neither could she tear her eyes away and go beg a few hours in a bunk.
“No,” Susan massaged the back of her neck. “I mean that literally. I started thisdayin Washington, DC. Early morning flight to JBLM in Washington State with Admiral Stanislaw. From there I was rerouted to track down you lot, and now I’m in the South China Sea. My watch says that it’s 1500 hours back in DC. But I’m too tired to figure out which day that is.”
“Well, it’s three a.m. local now, so you haven’t been awake all that long.” Mike showed her his watch as if she hadn’t just looked at hers.
“And how do you figure that, Mr. Munroe?”
“Easy, the International Date Line. We crossed it going west. It’s still yesterday.”
Susan would have laughed if she could find the energy. She couldn’t. “Mike, when you cross east to west, it goes the other way. I’ve been awake twenty-four hours longer than I was minutes ago.”
“Oh, yep. That’s harsh then. No wonder I’m so tired.” His smile said that he knew that and was merely teasing her. Or testing her. Or maybe he was simply being Mike, enjoying his head games.
“Why aren’t you helping them?”
Miranda had taken over a corner of the Hangar Deck from the very reluctant deck chief.
In some ways, it was even louder here than on the Flight Deck. Up there, only the landings and departures were particularly loud. In between, there was a lot of noise—the retraction of arresting wires and release of steam catapults, the lowering and raising of jet blast deflectors, or the heavy whine of starting jet engines. It was a mechanical orchestra in constant motion, but heavy earmuffs over earplugs blocked most of it.
Down here on the Hangar Deck,everythingwas loud. The bang of forty thousand pounds of returning aircraft slamming down on the deck that was their ceiling. The roar of seventy thousand pounds of jet, heavy with fuel, headed aloft on full afterburners. Those were only somewhat muffled by the decking.
But every single sound here was trapped, and echoed about the steel cave like a gong struck with a sledgehammer. The pealing bells of Easter morning service in the church next door to her family home back in Massachusetts had nothing on this place. They were both sounding hoarse from raising their voices over the din.
The hangar was a steel box two football fields long, including the endzones, thirty meters wide, and two-and-a-half stories tall. With fifty planes and helicopters crammed into it, the vast space was so crowded that it was less navigable and louder than when she’d attended the Woodstock Festival as a young child. The three days of the concert were her first memories.
She’d transitioned from being an insipient flower child hanging out with hippies to serving thirty years in her country’s military. She, for one, had always appreciated the irony of that progression, but the service had fit her down to her socks. No two days were ever the same and the different placeswerefascinating. Perhaps she understood some of Mike’s complacency. Or perhaps contentment.
Though Miranda’s team were children by comparison. Not a one of them had been alive when she’d been dancing in the mud to Richie Havens and singing along with Arlo Guthrie and Joplin in her own way. She still remembered much that hadn’t been in movie.
But when had she become old enough to think of people in their thirties as youngsters? Retirement loomed ahead, but far enough off that she could still ignore it by focusing on what was happening around her. Time really needed to slow down rather than accelerate, at least once in a while.
The Hangar Deck added its own cacophony to the clamor from above.
The four massive elevators, which could each shift a pair of jets to and from the Flight Deck, didn’t exactly move in the same gentle silence as a glassed-in mall elevator carrying six eager shoppers.
Aircraft repairs, of which there were still many to do since the incident, seemed to be mainly comprised of smashing sheets of metal together like banging pots and pans, sharply punctuated by the high whine of power tools.
Squat tow tractors imposed deep diesel roars as they shifted jets, planes, and helos in the tight space. The wind of the carrier’s forward motion blew through the giant gaps made by the elevators and funneled out the open fantail, dragging the sultry tropical air, lightly tossed with the stench of jet fuel and hydraulic fluid, over them.
It was even noisy visually. Jets with folded up wings were packed tightly beside the origami project that was a folded-up MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor. Every square inch that wasn’t taken up by aircraft was filled with supplies and spare parts. Forklifts and mobile cranes shuffled back and forth with a terrible intentness of purpose. Nothing stayed still for long here.
And every sound on the Hangar Deck was trapped, repeated, and amplified by the underside of the Flight Deck and the steel walls until it gathered in their corner by the Number Three elevator. Only Sadie, asleep at her feet, gave no indication of anything amiss.
Miranda had built an island of floodlights. Thousands of pieces of aircraft had been spread out—the found remains of F-35C Lightning II Number 892. Each had been excised with the care of an archeologist, or would have been if Miranda had her way. Susan had worked with her to allow the carrier’s crew to deliver all of the pieces. Some, like the engine, were hauled below by heavy cranes. Others had arrived in large buckets and been dumped on the deck plating with a loud clatter and bang of a hundred parts.
Miranda arranged the pieces almost as fast as they arrived. Holly and Andi appeared to be mere extensions of her consciousness, placing each scrap properly with only the least indication from Miranda.
Surprisingly few were allocated to theUnknownsection. A large number were allocated to theShipPartssection as the gatherers were either erring on the side of caution in what they collected, or they simply wanted all of the wreckage off their deck and were dumping it on Miranda.
Despite the bewildering array of metal and carbon fiber, Gabriel Brown’s F-35C was taking shape once again.
Susan turned to Mike standing beside her, “Did she really memorize all of those manuals on the way here?”
He shrugged a maybe and kept watching. Itwasmesmerizing.