Part I - Aboard the USS Nimitz
CHAPTER ONE – Day 1
Kate Conrad leaned out the pharmacy’s dispensing window and handed the man a tube of medicated cream. She was about to tell him to apply it twice daily to the affected area, when the alarm bell rang.
At twenty, Kate was tall with short-clipped sandy hair and blue eyes. Second thoughts about leaving the University of California at San Diego to join the Navy still haunted her, but as a member of the ship’s Flying Squad, she never thought twice when that alarm bell rang.
“Follow the directions on the label,” she said hurriedly while locking the pharmacy. She ran from the medical department, calling back over her shoulder, “And don’t scratch no matter how itchy it gets!”
In the main deck passageway, Kate waited and listened to the bell’s incessant clangor.
It rang from waterproof speakers throughout the ship—a bone-rattling metallic din, threatening to perforate eardrums.
Thousands of sailors looked away from computer screens, set aside power tools and paused conversations. Throughout the multilevel maze, eyes turned toward speakers mounted on bulkheads. Those asleep in narrow bunks under white sheets and scratchy wool blankets startled awake—eyes suddenly open in air-conditioned darkness.
A squeal of feedback squashed the clanging bell, and a computer-generated female voice announced, “AWAY THE FLYING SQUAD. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. FLAMMABLE SPILL ON THE AFT HANGAR DECK, FRAME TWO FOUR FIVE. AWAY THE FLYING SQUAD, AWAY.” The bell resumed its urgent call to action, reverberating against every bulkhead.
Kate Conrad ran aft inside the main deck passageway, shouting at sailors walking ahead of her, “Gangway! Coming through!” After weeks of endless boredom, Kate relished the adrenaline shot as she ran to the accident scene.
The eight-foot-wide corridor was the Nimitz’s main drag compared to so many other narrow passageways, but sailors crammed in, walking two and three abreast. Fluorescent lights glared off the polished green Formica. Bundles of cable, ventilation ducts and myriad pipes carrying water, jet fuel and sewage crammed into the low overhead. Bulkheads marked with weld scars and rows of rivet heads. Fire hoses stowed in compact racks. Watertight doors, battle lanterns and fire extinguishers flew past in Kate’s peripheral vision.
They were the shipboard equivalents of ambulances screaming along crowded boulevards. In passageways throughout the ship, sailors squeezed behind pipes and doors, flattened themselves against bulkheads, like cars pulling to the curb, as Flying Squad members ran past, their black boots booming on the steel, their cries of “Gangway!” and “Make a hole!” punctuating the boredom of shipboard routine.
Frequent drills tested her ability to locate damage control lockers and emergency medical stations hidden away inside the Nimitz’s 1,000-foot-long and 17-deck-high hive of compartments and passageways. She’d studied 3-D schematics of the ship and proved she could find any location blindfolded during blackout and smoke drills.
Jet fuel mist swirled down around a ladder angling at 45-degrees through an open hatch in the deck above. The smell seared her nose; Kate pulled a gas mask tight against her face and exhaled hard to clear it.
Fire Marshall O’Malley emerged from the jet fuel fog. A human tree trunk with the bark peeled off, he shouted orders at sailors distributing extinguishers, mops and buckets in a disciplined frenzy. O’Malley’s fierce eyes stared out through his face shield. “You and you,” he roared, pointing a thick finger at two boatswain mates. “Grab oxygen bottles and a stretcher. Follow EMT Conrad!” O’Malley stared at Kate and shouted, “There’s one serious injury and several overcome by fumes on the fantail. Move it.”
