Final Flight by Stephen Coonts Page B

as he hung up
the phone and resumed his parade rest stance. Jake
leaned against the bulkhead beside Kowalski.
    “Are you ready for Naples, Ski?” Captain
James had announced an hour ago on the public
address system that the ship would dock in Naples in
ten days.
    “Uh, yessir.” Kowalski’s forehead and two
large circles around his eyes were spanking clean, as
white as the top of the corporal’s hat, but the
bottom half of his face, which was unprotected
by his helmet and goggles, was tanned and grimy.
The grime was as nothing compared to his hands though; the
grease had become permanently embedded in the
crevices of his skin and no amount of scrubbing would
make them clean. He reeked of jet exhaust.
He was so nervous he could not hold still, so Jake
gave him a reassuring smile.
    The door opened and the XO, Commander Ray
Reynolds, motioned to Jake, who went in and
closed the door behind him. “What’s the problem with
Kowalski?”
    The XO grinned, a ludicrous effort
since his four top front teeth were missing and when
he grinned, he tried to hold his upper lip down
to hide the hole. The effort caused his entire face
to contort, and as usual, Jake poliztely
averted his eyes at this demonstration of Reynolds’
vanity. Jake liked Reynolds immensely.
    “Ski has a habit of getting drunk and
getting into a bar brawl every time he goes
ashore. He’s an alcoholic.” Grafton
nodded. “And he’s the best catapult captain we
have. If we could just keep him aboard ship all the
time, he’d do fine. I told him last time that his
feet weren’t going to touch dry land until the end of
his enlistment, but that isn’t fair. So I’m going
to let him ashore in Naples. If he gets
carried back to the ship one more time by the shore
patrol, he’s on his way to the drunk farm, and
maybe out of the navy.” Reynolds shrugged.
    “But what did you want to see me about?”
    “I want to have a deck party for the crew on
Saturday if we can get a day off. We will have
been continuously at sea over three times longer
than Christopher Columbus, and I think we ought
to play it up and let the crew know they’ve done
something big.”
    “I’m all for it. I think I can get Captain
James to approve it. You talk to the admiral.
It’ll depend on whether we can pull off the coast
long enough to go to alert status that day. Admiral
Parker’ll have to ask the big poo-bahs.” He was
referring to the people in Washington.
    “Three times longer than Columbus, huh?”
    Jake nodded and Reynolds crossed his arms on
the desk in front of him.
    He waited expectantly. He was waiting for
Jake to light a cigarette. Reynolds was the
driving force behind a rigid antismoking campaign
that was rolling over tobacco users with the relentless power
of a mountain avalanche; indeed, Reynolds was
waving the banner of purity with the awesome zeal that he
brought to every task. So whenever Jake visited the
XO’S office, he lit a cigarette and deposited the ash in a
neat pile on the front edge of the desk. Reynolds’
fulminations were quite gratifying.
    Jake patted his pockets dramatically.
Sighing, he said at last, “Oh gee, I almost
forgot. I quit.”
    “A sinner saved! Hallelujah!” Reynolds
clasped his hands together and looked up.
“Thank you, Lord, for saving this poor ignorant
fool sitting here before me from the evils of tobacco and
impure women and bad whiskey and marked cards and….
    Jake couldn’t help himself. He laughed. Most
of the berthing compartments and working spaces aboard ship were now nonsmoking. The ship’s smoke shop, where
cigarettes and pipe tobacco had been sold, was
now a free-weight gym. The only place aboard
a man could still buy cigarettes was in the ship’s
store under the forward mess deck. And the wise and the
weary knew its days were also numbered.
    “I had to quit. They stopped carrying my brand.”
Reynolds feigned surprise, his hand on his chest
and his mouth in a little 0. He leaned across the desk and
lowered his