‘Wow,’ I said during a brief lull in Couch’s litany. ‘This is the most A-I-E I’ve ever been in.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Acronym Intensive Environment,’ I said, feeling both smart and stupid at having risked a first joke in a new place.
‘That’s a good one,’ said Couch in a tone suggesting that there are only bad ones.
Light was pouring in through huge spaces on either side of the hangar: the port and starboard elevators that took planes up to the flight deck. The sea was racing past, a film of light and sky projected from within this vast and silhouetted auditorium. I would like to have watched more of this nautical epic but we were not here to admire the view. Couch’s recitation of specs and engine parts, however, was occasionally punctuated by mention of something I could humanly relate to: the beach. It came up several times, this beach, but he wasn’t taking a detour into how he liked to spend his vacation—he was talking about ‘the long logistical pipeline back to the beach’. Ah, he was still on the job; the beach was the mainland where spares were kept and more complex repairs could be made. I started calculating ways in which I might incorporate this bit of metonymy into dinner-party chat back at London beach. I couldn’t think of a single way, but I liked the logic of his usage, the way it performed two tasks simultaneously. It made the deployment seem like a pleasure cruise (if you love your job this much it is sort of a paid vacation) and it also did the opposite: made everything that happened on the mainland seem like buckets-and-spade stuff, a holiday, compared with the serious shit that went on here.
We came to the other end of the hangar, near the very back of the boat, the fantail as they call it in the trade. This was where the jets’ engines were tested. At night, a full test would take about eight hours, and it was a source not of amazement but of incomprehension to Couch that anyone would contemplate missing a single minute of this epic performance without concluding that their lives had been thoroughly wasted.
4
The beach came up again, at Carrier Control Approach, which we visited after dark.
‘Back at the beach, the field is always there,’ said one of the guys, looking up quickly from his screen. It sounded like the beginning of one of those coded radio announcements from the BBC to the French Resistance ahead of D-Day. Either that or a line from a draft of a Wallace Stevens poem. There followed a long interval of silence before whatever was happening on-screen allowed him to resume and complete. ‘Yeah, their field is always there. Whereas our airport moves.’
There were sixteen people in the CCA, all zipped up in cosy military jackets, monitoring what looked like a billion dollars’ worth of computer screens and radar maps. It was icy as a Vegas hotel and dark as a nightclub. There was even some UV light, emphasizing the white, ghostly, snowy stuff that hung from the ceiling in readiness for Halloween. The temperature had to be kept low because of the equipment but it also meant that there was no chance of anyone dozing off and taking a nap. Just trying to keep warm meant the brain was in a state of constant high alert. The darkness brought out the greens, purples, yellows and reds of the screens. There was an air of relaxed and chilly attention. Someone was drinking coffee from a clear mug with a slice of orange in it—a strange drink. A supervisor stood in the middle of the room, looking over people’s shoulders, checking to see how they were doing their jobs. He was a trainee supervisor and someone was watching over him too. Thus the naval hierarchy towers over the boat like the island over the flight deck. I started to wish I’d worn a thick pullover and wondered what coffee with a slice of orange tasted like. But mainly I was glad I had no one looking over my shoulder, checking on how I was doing my job.
We’d got here half an hour before the birds would start landing. As the time for recovery drew near the atmosphere changed, from attentive to highly focused. With the screens full of data I was reminded, as I had been on the flight deck, of the financial markets, this time with some kind of crisis beginning to make itself felt: a plunge in the FTSE 100, a devastating surge in the NASDAQ. I’d never been in an environment where a slow intensification of concentration was so marked. One of the screens went down. Came back again. I’d heard of the stress of air traffic control, had seen United 93 in which the controllers manoeuvre aircraft from the path of the hijacked planes. This was more stressful in a way—‘our airport moves’—but the number of planes was minimal compared with however many thousands it was that came barrelling in over London every day, hoping to squeeze into a landing spot at Gatwick and Heathrow without circling for hours in a rush-hour holding pattern. The controllers had a distinct way of speaking to the pilots. Firm enough that the idea of not complying did not even occur; relaxed enough that no one would feel they were being bossed around (thereby engendering the reflex urge to do the opposite).
Plasma screens displayed numbers, data and radar info; others transmitted the action on deck as planes came thumping down in the dark, one after another. The picture quality was roughly that of CCTV footage in a Stockwell off-licence. Everything went like clockwork—a phrase which, in this context, sounds several centuries out of date. The birds were all back.
And would stay back till morning. That’s right: flight ops finished at about 2140! Newell had known this all along. The talk about planes coming and going like Lionel Richie, all night long, had been just a joke. Everyone was home and would stay home. We were going to have a quiet night in. There would actually be a long interval of what passed, in these parts, for silence.
Lights Out—at ten p.m.—was preceded by an announcement broadcast over the whole ship: a little parable followed by a prayer. It was a nice way of rounding off the day and binding the ship together, those sharing a dorm with two hundred others, officers in a room for six, and the privileged few who had rooms to themselves, who lay in their bunks in the tired knowledge that if they woke in the night needing to pee the basin was only a yard away.
There may have been no jets landing but my stateroom was regularly engulfed by new sources of industrial clamour that earplugs were powerless to keep at bay. I was jolted awake throughout the night but always managed to get back to sleep, partly because the default silence was anything but. It wasn’t even white noise, more like dark grey shading into black as air, water, heat, coolant and—for all I knew—ammunition or loaves of bread went whistling, howling, surging, clanking, pouring and thumping through the gates and alleys of the carrier’s life-support system.
5
Breakfast in the Ward Room was a fried reek of congealed eggs, bacon and other horrors avoided—if not ignored—in favour of cereals, tinned fruit and yoghurt. After that we went right to the source, to the kitchens where it had all been prepared. Showing us round was Warrant Officer Charles Jakes from New York City. He was African American, and had spent twenty-five of his forty-four years in the Navy. In a way that I was becoming accustomed to Charles ran—as opposed to walked or strolled—through a description of his mission and his routines. He was in charge of 112 cooks and 180 food attendants, serving seven places to eat on ship. Increasing quantities of the stuff served in these venues were pre-prepared rather than cooked from scratch (which saved money and time, cut down on staff and accounted, in part, for why meals on the boat were less than appetizing).
The idea, Charles explained, was to go forty-five days without running out of anything. And twenty days without running out of fruit and veg. He took us into a freezer—the size of a Manhattan apartment—and talked us through its contents. Eight thousand pounds of chicken, five thousand pounds of steak, four thousand pounds of hamburger. Waiters in American restaurants always employ the first person singular when announcing and describing the day’s specials. ‘I have a lamb casserole with a radish reduction,’ they will say, as though this interesting-sounding confection has been summoned into existence by his or her descriptive efforts alone. In Charles’s case this grammatical habit took on gargantuan proportions.
‘I aim to eat my way through everything on the boat,’ he said. ‘So, going back to the US, I got a million dollars or less left for the last forty-five days.’ It made Paul Newman’s boast in Cool Hand Luke—‘I can eat fifty