Читать книгу Damage Control - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 26

Madje had been lucky, protected by the heavy central bulkhead when the first explosion happened. Madje had dragged the admiral clear of the fire on adrenaline alone, put a fire blanket over him, and donned a breathing apparatus, then rescued the helmsman. He would never remember doing any of these things. His first conscious action had been getting the firefighting team to help him get the admiral out of the smoke.

But the thing he would never forget was the sheet of flame covering the whole deck as the fire spread, interspersed with fountains of fire as aircrews punched out of their stranded planes. He had seen it for only a moment, a second, before the forward part of the bridge started to warp and collapse. He must have been moving the admiral by then. Things were missing—time, space, fire, pain. It was as if the last hour was a movie, and all he had was the promos.

He put a hand to his head and hair came away, burned. His face felt as if he had a bad sunburn. He shook his head inside the respirator mask.

Who was next in command?

Figure the CAG as dead, burned in his cockpit, or ejecting into the water and thus unavailable. The boat’s skipper was dead. That left the flag captain, the navigator, and the engineer, all captains. The flag captain ought to be down on the O-3 level in the flag spaces, where Madje had planned to move Admiral Rafehausen. Seemed like a good place to start. He shone a flashlight down the ladder well through the smoke. Where had he got a flashlight?

“Looks clear,” he shouted through the hatch.

“Lead the way, sir. We’ll bring the admiral.”

A blast from outside the tower rocked it, moved it by several inches and distorted the bulkhead to his left. He touched it cautiously and it burned him.

“Down! Now! Quick as you can! This wall is hot! Go, go!”

They ran and fell and fought down the steel ladder, around a platform and down again, with wrenching noises above them and a roaring like a jet engine. Madje knew that the flight deck was just the other side of this hatch, and he could see from the distortion all along the wall that the other side was exposed to extreme temperature. The heat came through the respirator, burned his face again and scorched his hands.

When this wall burned through, the tower would collapse. The structural beams visible on the vertical surface were spalding, huge flakes of hot metal shooting off them in response to impacts from elsewhere. For the first time, it occurred to Madje that the carrier might not recover.