Front Burner by Kirk S. Lippold

leaned over the side of the ship and could see the top curve of what had to be a huge hole. Black and brown scorch marks sprayed out from the blast hole itself. Small pieces of black residue speckled the side of the ship. And the metal surrounding the hole was bent inwards in huge jagged shards from the force of the explosion.
    Clearly, something had detonated alongside us. The ship’s general workshop, the adjoining sixty-foot-wide main engine room 1, the galley
one deck above where the crew had just been taking their lunch, and the chief petty officers’ mess, were all in the part of the ship where I was standing. In the engine room were the two gas turbine engines that powered the starboard propeller shaft, as well as the two reverse-osmosis water processing units that made fresh water out of 24,000 gallons per day of seawater. The explosion had been so powerful that I knew almost everything in these and immediately adjoining spaces must have been destroyed or severely damaged, crippling the ship and killing or severely wounding anyone who had been in these areas.
    But what could have done this? With my mind racing to explain the devastation in front of me, I could see four orange rafts in the water along the length of the port side. Questions burst into my mind, “Could these have been the vehicle for a bomb?” “How did someone manage to get these rafts alongside the ship with no one seeing them?” They were evenly spaced, from directly below where I was looking into the blast hole to the area back by the flight deck at the stern of the ship. The first raft, in the area of the blast hole, was mostly sunk and in tatters. The next two were deflated, lying flat on the surface of the water. The fourth raft, however, was fully inflated and gently rubbing and bobbing against the ship back by the flight deck and fantail area. Based on the limited evidence I had before me, it seemed as though the raft nearest me must have been the one that detonated and blew the hole in the side of the ship. The force of the explosion must have damaged the detonators on the two deflated rafts and caused them not to go off. In my mind, the fourth raft alongside the flight deck area now posed the greatest danger to the ship. It had to be full of explosives ready to detonate and cripple the twin rudders and propellers for steering and driving the ship, and if that happened we could not get underway and out of port. At the same time, I could see the crew streaming out onto the flight deck area, peering over the edge of the port side. They could all be killed if the raft exploded. I had to do something, fast.
    Meanwhile, Chief Larson had issued Cole ’s rapid response security team every weapon available: 9 mm pistols, M-14 rifles, twelve-gauge shotguns, M-79 grenade launchers, and ammunition. “Get everybody who
isn’t part of the security team back inside the skin of the ship,” I barked out to him. He immediately passed the order to those on the flight deck, hollering, “We don’t know what we’ve got out here.”
    The security teams began rounding up the crew and shoving them back inside. One of the wounded being attended to by other crew members was Fireman Raymond Mooney, his face covered with blood. He was lying in the aft passageway near the exit onto the flight deck when he saw Chris Peterschmidt, the XO. Calling out and grabbing him by his coveralls, he pulled him close: “Sir! I saw what happened! I saw what happened!”
    Mooney told Chris that he had been stationed near the forward refueling station, on the harbor side of the ship opposite from the refueling hose connection from the pier. His assignment had been to watch for a fuel spill into the harbor. He had seen the two garbage barges slowly make their approach to the ship, he said, but since they were expected—these were the first two, and there was to be a third—he saw no reason to be concerned. Once the crew had