Ian Slater - Payback

Another piece of grit struck Cuso.

“Have a nice swim?” Sal asked Aussie, who was emerging from the Sea Stallion’s downblast. His sodden uniform was so plastered against his body by wind and water that it reminded Cuso of the wrap he’d seen on the Special Forces “palletized” equipment, by now safely stowed below in the hangar deck where the wrap gave the crude rotorless helicopter shape a distinctly ungainly mummified appearance.

“I said, ” repeated Sal as he walked behind Aussie, “did you have a nice swim?”

“Piss off!” Aussie replied, following John Cuso, who was leading the sodden Aussie below to one of the few shower-equipped two-man staterooms, Cuso explaining, by way of ameliorating Aussie’s embarrassment, that the pilots were probably all aft, shooting the bull in their informal “Dirty Shirt” wardroom. But Aussie wasn’t in the mood to hear what anyone else was doing — all he wanted was a hot shower, his desire for instant warmth increased by a bone-chilling blast of wind that Salvini also felt as they passed from the gray-tiled section of the carrier’s gallery deck into “blue-tile country.” Here, the cold air Salvini and Aussie had just experienced came from the computer-cooling fans in the five highly classified command and ultrasecret blue-tiled communications rooms, including the ship’s Signal Exploitation Space, or SES.

“Take all the time you need,” John Cuso told the still-dripping Aussie, who saw fresh, knife-edge-pressed Navy-issue khakis; a neatly folded, almost blindingly white crew-neck T-shirt next to the trousers, along with a pair of thick, woolen khaki socks and black boots that were so highly polished, Aussie could see Sal’s maddeningly smug face on the boot’s toe piece, together with a face he didn’t recognize.

“Master Chief Schmidt here,” Cuso told them, “will take you two gentlemen forward to the SpecOp briefing room. You two can spend the night in this stateroom. The other seven members of your team have been similarly billeted on this deck.”

“Don’t want to put any of you guys out,” said Sal as Aussie, his teeth literally chattering, peeled off his soaked underwear.

“You’re not putting anyone out,” John Cuso assured Salvini. “No one uses this stateroom.”

“Room to spare, eh?” said Sal.

Cuso gave him an enigmatic smile. “You’ll have to toss for which one of you gets the upper rack.”

Salvini looked at the two-tiered bunk then at Aussie, telling Cuso, “This guy farts wherever you put him!”

Cuso nodded good-naturedly. “Well, the boat’s doc tells us there’s a study says those who pass wind frequently live longer.”

“Geez,” said Sal. “Aussie’s set to outdo Methuselah!”

“Piss off!” came a voice behind the shower curtain, followed by a hissing stream of hot water, its fog billowing out from the stall.

Cuso grinned. “See you gentlemen at lunch.”

After Cuso left, Salvini glanced about the sparsely furnished stateroom. There was barely enough room to contain two curtained bunks and two short-backed Naugahyde chairs, the remainder of this tiny space crammed with a basin, mirror, two storage-space drawers, a Houdini-like shower stall, and two small flip-down writing desks.

Per custom, Freeman, as commanding officer of the nine “visitors,” dutifully climbed up the six laddered stairwells to the McCain ’s bridge to pay his respects to the ship’s captain. Unfortunately, Captain Crowley quickly developed a self-induced tension headache, his neck muscles becoming as taut as a dead-lift cable the moment he realized it was General Douglas “George Patton” Freeman who was the CO of what Crowley would describe in his unofficial log as “this covey of misfits parading as Special Forces Rambos.”

Crowley knew he was being unfair, that in fact Rambo types were speedily weeded out from potential SpecFor recruits as soon as possible. Rambos were muscle-bound egos on the loose. Or, as he had heard them described by Freeman himself during a CNN interview with Marte Price, “Protein-Powdered-Diet-Dick Wannabes. Wannabes who can’t work as a team.”

Despite Freeman’s disdain for Rambo types, Crowley, no less a man of habit than Freeman or any of his eight-man team, clung to his prejudiced view of what he referred to biliously as “Freeman et al.,” by which he meant Special Forces in general. For Crowley and his generation, SpecFor were still cowboys, and as such provided a convenient repository for prejudices in toto, such as Crowley’s privately nursed resentment at having female aviators on his boat. It was a prejudice that, if he ever gave voice to, he knew would end his career overnight. What particularly irked him as captain of the carrier and admiral of the battle group was that if he and other flag officers had been forced by Congress to accept “women fighter pilots”—an oxymoron, in his traditionalist view — why in hell hadn’t they legislated women into Special Forces? Oh no, he thought, Congress wouldn’t allow a woman to be part of a CHISU—“chute in and shoot up”—against the enemy, but by all means bring women onto his boat and let them fly an $80 million aircraft. It was double dealing, forcing him to accept skirts as fighter pilots and yet allowing Freeman types to pick and choose whom they wanted or, more to the point, to exclude those they didn’t want. He was so churned up by Freeman’s appearance on the bridge that for several minutes after the general had departed, Crowley remained on a slow burn, ready to morph into Growly Crowley, the sobriquet he’d been assigned by officers and crew who had run afoul of him during the battle group’s constant patrols in the dangerous waters between Japan and North Korea. “Dammit,” he fumed to Cuso, complaining how the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, in faraway Washington, had e-mailed him a memo whose very wording further raised his ire in its slavish political correctness. The memo informed him that should his female “combat” helo pilot, Lieutenant Kaymara, call sign “MK”—Mary Kaye — experience difficulties associated with menstrual cycles, that he, and his XO, should effect “appropriate nonpsychologically invasive measures to assure this aviatrix is not required to fly combat missions at that time.”

“Avia trix !” Crowley rasped, immediately circular-filing the hard copy of the CNO’s memo into the bridge’s wicker trash basket. “Aviatrix,” he grumbled anew as he hauled his diminutive figure up into the admiral’s high chair. “She’s a pilot, not an aviatrix. Those women already know enough tricks.”

Down below, as Freeman, Choir, Gomez, Lee, Eddie Mervyn, and Bone Brady approached Sal and Aussie’s stateroom, it appeared to be on fire, the steam pouring from it so dense, it looked like smoke. They glimpsed a ghostly figure emerging. It was Salvini holding his finger to his lips for them to be quiet. Freeman, sensing Sal was up to no good, stayed outside the stateroom as four of the team, Choir, Mervyn, Brady, and Chief Petty Officer Tavos, utilizing their Special Forces and SEAL silent-approach technique, crammed into the small stateroom, the steam quickly swallowing them up. Freeman waited. After this nonsense they’d have to go over the plan for the Kosong mission once more as their transport down in the hangar deck was being unwrapped, readied to go.

The general heard the shower click off, saw the curtain brusquely open, and heard a high-pitched chorus of “Oooh — it’s a shark!” upon which Sal, Choir, Mervyn, and Brady, hands held effeminately high, exited on tiptoe. “Oooh — a shark! It’s a shark!”

“You bastards!” shouted Aussie. “I’m gonna get you!”

“Shark’s gonna get us!” came Sal’s voice, high-pitched in mock panic. “Oh, she’s so angry, girls. We’d better go!”