Dan Black was out of his depth. A few seconds after they had jumped out of the Seahawk, he’d received word that his mission was redundant. Spruance had authorized the Multinational Force to carry out search and rescue. The helicopter had lifted off almost immediately, taking Colonel Jones and leaving the two Enterprise men stranded on the Clinton. Kolhammer apologized to the pair, shouting over the sound of the rotor blades. He said it was critical they get SAR away as fast as possible.

A Negro woman appeared, wearing camouflaged pants, a heavy blue, long-sleeved T-shirt, and a bulky yellow crash helmet. She hustled them all off the flight deck, which was swarming with emergency and damage control teams. Fires burned everywhere amid the wreckage of smashed aircraft and equipment.

Black noticed that there seemed to be two island structures on the deck, separated by hundreds of yards. They hurried into the first one, and the change of atmosphere struck him immediately. The smell of burning chemicals was completely masked.

“Overpressure,” said Curtis. “Wow.”

The corridors, which were much wider, well lit, and better ventilated than the narrow passages of their own ship, were nonetheless crowded with personnel charging from one crisis to another. Corpsmen carrying stretchers busted past every few minutes. Firefighters in silver space suits straight out of Flash Gordon came and went. Sirens sounded, the PA blared. Ensign Curtis snapped his head left and right, trying to take it all in at once. Black was more controlled, but the mayhem conspired to knock his feet out from under him, nonetheless.

Kolhammer put a hand on his arm and tugged gently.

“You might as well come with me, Commander. I’m heading back to the bridge.”

Black shrugged, and fell into step with the admiral. They passed rooms that seemed to be full of nothing but movie screens, and a mess hall that looked more like a swish restaurant and smelled of things he vaguely recalled from port visits in the Far East and the Mediterranean. It was impossible to ignore the cosmopolitan nature of the carrier’s crew. Men and women of all races seemed to work in close proximity without any apparent difficulty. He saw white men take orders from what looked to be a Mexican woman, and watched as the men obeyed without question.