Red Storm Rising (1986) - Tom Clancy
(from internet transcript)
excerpt, Chapter 20 – The Dance of the Vampires
The missiles hit within a second of one another, one on the after port corner of the flight deck, the other on the number two arrestor wire.
Toland was thrown fifteen feet, and slammed against a radar console. Next he saw a wall of pink flame that washed briefly over him. Then came the noises. First the thunder of the explosion. Then the screams. The after CIC bulkhead was no longer there; instead there was a mass of flame. Men twenty feet away were ablaze, staggering and screaming before his eyes. Toland's only thought was escape. He bolted for the watertight door. It opened miraculously under his hand and he ran to starboard. The ship's fire-suppression systems were already on, showering everything with a curtain of saltwater. His skin burned from it as he emerged, hair and uniform singed, to the flight deck catwalk. A sailor directed a water hose on him, nearly knocking him over the side.
"Fire in CIC!" Toland gasped.
"What the hell ain't!" the sailor screamed.
Toland fell to his knees and looked outboard. Foch had been to their north, he remembered. Now there was a pillar of smoke. As he watched, the last Kingfish was detonated a hundred feet over Saratoga's flight deck. The carrier seemed undamaged. Three miles away, Ticonderoga's after superstructure was shredded and ablaze from a rocket that had blown up within yards of her. On the horizon a ball of flame announced the destruction of yet another-my God, Toland thought, might that be Saipan? She had two thousand Marines aboard . . .
"Get forward, you dumbass!" a firefighter yelled at him. Another man emerged to the catwalk.
"Toland, you all right?" It was Captain Svenson, his shirt torn away and his chest bleeding from a half-dozen cuts.
"Yes, sir," Bob answered.
"Get to the bridge. Tell 'em to put the wind on the starboard beam. Move!" Svenson jumped up onto the flight deck.
Toland did likewise, racing forward. The deck was awash in firefighting foam, slippery as oil. Toland ran recklessly, falling hard on the deck before he reached the carrier's island. He was in the pilothouse in under a minute.
"Captain says put the wind on the starboard beam!" Toland said.
"It is on the fucking beam!" the executive officer snapped back. The bridge deck was covered with broken glass. "How's the skipper?"
"Alive. He's aft with the fire."
"And who the hell are you?" the XO demanded.
"Toland, group intel. I was in CIC."
"Then you're one lucky bastard. That second bird hit fifty yards from you. Captain got out? Anyone else?"
"I don't know. Burning like hell."
"Looks like you caught part of it, Commander."
Bob's face felt as if he'd shaved with a piece of glass. His eyebrows crumpled to his touch. "Flashburns, I guess. I'll be okay. What do you want me to do?"
The XO pointed to Toland's water wings. "Can you conn the ship.? Okay, do it. Nothing left to run into anyway. I'm going aft to take charge of the fire. Communications are out, radar's out, but the engines are okay and the hull's in good shape. Mr. Bice has the deck. Mr. Toland has the conn," XO announced as he left.
Toland hadn't conned anything bigger than a Boston Whaler in over ten years, and now he had a damaged carrier. He took a pair of binoculars and looked around to see what ships were nearby. What he saw chilled him.
Saratoga was the only ship that looked intact, but on second glance her radar mast was askew. Foch was lower in the water than she ought to have been, and ablaze from bow to stem.
"Where's Saipan?"
"Blew up like a fucking firework," Commander Bice replied. "Holy Jesus, there were twenty-five hundred men aboard! Tico took one close aboard. Foch took three hits, looks like she's gone. Two frigates and a destroyer gone, too-just fucking gone, man! Who fucked up? You were in CIC, right? Who fucked up?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Z7Pn5NRkU
Back 2 the Archives: Top holiday toys from 1994
KREM 2 News
Photojournalist Nathan Brand opened up the KREM 2 archives to take a look at the top toys during the 1994 Christmas season.
https://criticalai.org/the-ai-hype-wall-of-shame/
From 12/17/1962 ( ) To 4/22/1985 ( ) is 8162 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 3/8/1988 ( as me, Kerry Burgess, while enlisted paygrade E-5, designated Fire Controlman Petty Officer Second Class (FC2), my official enlisted US Navy documents includes: Terrier MK 152 guided-missiles Fire Control Computers Complex Operator (operator and advanced technician, UNIVAC digital-computers Mk152 Terrier System for, primarily, SM2-ER {Extended Range} Standard Missiles ordnance) - CF-division, Missile Plot, USS Wainwright CG-28, US Navy, following my graduation Naval Missiles School, Dam Neck, Virginia ) is 8162 days
Previously, here, developed by me, Kerry Burgess, excerpt:
From 4/22/1985 ( ) To 4/24/2006 ( from The Seattle Times newspaper: Microsoft is farming in Quincy? ) is 7672 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 11/4/1986 ( as me, Kerry Burgess, my official enlisted US Navy documents includes: Date Completed - US Navy Fire Control Technician Class "A", Service School Command, Naval Training Center, Great Lakes, Illinois, - leading to permanent assignment until 1990 to CF-division, Missile Plot - guided-missiles Fire Control Computers Complex (UNIVAC digital-computers Mk152 Terrier System for, primarily, SM2-ER {Extended Range} Standard Missiles ordnance), USS Wainwright CG-28, US Navy, while enlisted paygrade E-5, designated Fire Controlman Petty Officer Second Class (FC2) ) is 7672 days
Red Storm Rising (1986) - Tom Clancy
(from internet transcript)
excerpt, Chapter 16
A door opened, and a sailor dressed in what looked like a purple planeflueler's shirt joined him on the flight deck catwalk.
"Darkened ship, sailor. I'd dump that cigarette," Toland said sharply, more annoyed to have his precious solitude destroyed.
"Sorry, sir." The butt sailed over the side. The man was silent for a few minutes, then looked at Toland. "You know about the stars, sir?"
"What do you mean?"
"This is my first cruise, sir, an' I grew up in New York. Never saw the stars like this, but I don't even know what they are-the names, I mean. You officers know all that stuff, right?"
Toland laughed quietly. "I know what you mean. Same with my first time out. Pretty, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir. What's that one?" The boy's voice sounded tired. Small wonder, Toland thought, with all the flight operations they've been through today. The youngster pointed to the brightest dot in the eastern sky, and Bob had to think for a few seconds.
"That's Jupiter. A planet, not a star. With the quartermaster's spyglass, you can pick out her moons-some of them anyway." He went on to point out some of the stars used for navigation.
"How do you use 'em, sir?" the sailor asked.
"You take a sextant and plot their height above the horizon-sounds harder than it is, just takes some practice-and you check that against a book of star positions."
"Who does that, sir?"
"The book? Standard stuff. I imagine the book we use comes from the Naval Observatory in D.C., but people have been measuring the tracks of the stars and planets for three or four thousand years, long before telescopes were invented. Anyway, if you know the exact time, and you know where a particular star is, you can plot out where you are on the globe pretty accurately, within a few hundred yards if you really know your stuff. Same thing with the sun and the moon. That knowledge has been around for hundreds of years. The tricky part was inventing a clock that kept good time. That happened about two hundred and some years ago."
"I thought they used satellites and stuff like that."
"We do now, but the stars are just as pretty."
"Yeah." The sailor sat down, his head leaning way back to watch the curtain of white points. Beneath them the ship's hull churned the water to foam with the whispering sound of a continuously breaking wave. Somehow the sound and the sky matched each other perfectly. "Well, at least I learned something about the stars. When's it gonna start, sir?"
Toland looked up at the constellation of Sagittarius. The center of the galaxy was behind it. Some astrophysicists said there was a black hole in there. The most destructive force known to physics, it made the forces under man's control appear puny by comparison. But men were a lot easier to destroy.
"Soon."
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 3:52 PM Pacific-timezone USA Tuesday 12/23/2025
