Final Flight by Stephen Coonts

office and gazing about distractedly had been his
father. Except that Grafton was about ten years too
young.
    Still, he had an air of quiet selfconfidence
that Farnsworth found most agreeable. So
Farnsworth tried desperately to recall if he
had ever heard how long Columbus’ voyage had
taken.
    “Sir, I don’t remember.”
    “Me either. How about running up to the ship’s
library and looking it up? Better check on
Noah, too.” And since he was not in the habit of
giving frivolous orders, Jake added, “I need
a good excuse to ask the powers that be for a day off for the
troops. Maybe we could have a deck picnic when
we equal Columbus’ time at sea.
    Farnsworth was out the door almost before Jake
finished. The captain went into his office and
tackled the contents of his inbasket. He was deep
into the preliminary draft of an accident report,
Jelly and Boomer’s crash, when Will Cohen
knocked and entered.
    “Sit down, W.”
    “Thanks, CAG. Thought I’d give you a
report on the maintenance inspection.”
    Jake leaned back and propped his feet on the
open top drawer of the desk. “How’s that going?”
    “We’ve finished both the F-l4 outfits and
one of the FirstA-l8 squadrons.
    Still working on the others. One of the fighter
squadrons”-he named it-“has been cheating a
little. They’ve been robbing parts from down birds
to keep the others flying.”
    Jake knew about that dodge. You kept your
aircraft available to fly by shuffling components, which
increased the work load on the sailors. For every bad
component that needed replacement, the mechanics had
to remove two parts and install two more. The
practice, known as cannibalism, increased the
opportunities for a maintenance error, and it
certainly didn’t help morale.
    “Are parts all that hard to come by?” Jake asked
as he watched Cohen take out a pack of
cigarettes, Pall Mall filters, and light
one.
    “Supply says no. But that skipper and
maintenance officer are doing their damnedest to keep their
availability looking as good as possible.”
    Jake grunted and watched Cohen look around for
an ashtray. The maintenance officer settled on the
trashcan and pulled it over.
    “That’s a lot of work for the troops for a damn
small increase in availability.”
    “Yep,” Cohen agreed. “But when everyone
wants a ‘walks on water” fitness
report, you want the numbers as good as possible.”
    Jake knew all about the fitness report game,
too. But this, he realized, was more complex than the
natural desire of the skipper to look good. The
skipper was under intense pressure to keep the
maximum number of his aircraft ready to fly, and
if the supply system failed to spew forth spare
parts quickly enough, the temptation to cannibalize an
aircraft that couldn’t be readily repaired was almost
irresistible. The real challenge was making the
supply system work properly. Jake
Grafton’s primary responsibility was making the
entire system-including supply-function as it should,
and the effort absorbed the bulk of his time. There were
moments when the sheer inertia of the bureaucracy
daunted him. “I’ll have a little chat with that skipper.
    You give me a list of the parts he’s been
cannibalizing. What else have you found?”
    “Not a whole lot. Little screw ups here and there,
but the repair work seems to be getting done
properly and quickly. At times they get behind on the
documentation, which is par for the course. Overall the
quality of the work is excellent.”
    “They only have to fuck up once and somebody
dies.” He picked up the draft
accident report and perused it again as a thin blue
fog of cigarette smoke filled the small
compartment. The exact cause of the accident was unknown,
but the investigators opined that the probable cause was
an oxygen system malfunction that the crewmen had not
noticed in time. The equipment used to fill the
aircraft’s tank with liquid oxygen had checked
out perfectly. The aircraft had flown almost a
hundred hours without