The Intruders (16 page)

“Sure. 9 f Meanwhile Flap had progressed to his favorite subject,
women. Jake looked up from the maintenance book on his plane when Flap
roared, “Oh, my God, she was ugly!” -How ugly?” three or four of his
listeners wailed in unison.

“She was so ugly that paint peeled off the walls when she walked into a
room.”

“How ugly?”

“So ugly that strong men fainted, children screamed, and horses ran
away.”

“How ugly?” This refrain had become a chorus. Even Rory Smith joined in
from the back of the room.

“Women tore their hair, the sky got black, and the earth trembled.”

“That’s not ugly-”

“I’m telling you guys, she was so dingdong ugly that mirrors cracked,
dogs went berserk, fire mains ruptured and one man who had smiled at her
at night dropped stone cold dead when he saw her in the daylight. That,
my friends, is the gospel truth.”

It was a typical afternoon in the tropics–scattered puffy clouds
drifting on the balmy trade winds, sun shining through the gaps. Hawaii
was going to be wonderful. Two more days, then Pearl Harbor! Oh boy.

Jake inspected the Mark 82 five-hundred-pounders carefully. He hadn’t
seen deadly green sausages like this since the night he was shot down,
seven months ago. Talk about a bad trip!

Well, the war was over, this was a peacetime cruise …

He could probably spend another twenty years in the Navy and would never
again have to drop one of these things for real. World War III? Get
serious.

Up into the cockpit, into the comfortable seat, the familiar instruments
arranged around him just so. The truth was he knew this cockpit better
than he knew anything else on earth. Just the thought of never getting
back into one bothered him. How do you turn your back on six years of
your life?

Flap settled into the seat beside him as the plane captain climbed the
ladder on jake’s side and reached in to help with the Koch fittings.

He had lived all this before-it was like living a memory.

And somehow that was good.

Rory Smith preflighted his aircraft, 511, very carefully indeed. ‘nat
four- or five-foot fall couldn’t have done this thing any good. The
main concern was the landing gear. If anything cracked … Well, the
airframes guys hadn’t found a single crack. They had scraped the paint
from the parts, fluoroscoped them and pronounced them perfect. What can
a pilot do? Just fly it.

The radar, computer and inertial were seriously messed up. All the
component boxes of those systems had been replaced, as had the radar
dish and drive unit in the nose.

The vertical display indicator-the VDI-and the radio were also new.

When Smith and his BN-Hank Davis-were strapped in, they turned on each
piece of gear and checked it carefully.

The inertial was slow getting an alignment, but it did align.

Make a note for the debrief.

They were the last A-6 to taxi toward a Cat, number two on the bow. The
others were airborne and in a few minutes, Smith would join them at nine
thousand feet. That altitude should be well above the tops of this
cumulus, he thought, taking three seconds to scan the sky.

Roger the weight board, check the wing locks, flaps and slats down,
stabilizer shifted, into the shuttle, off the brakes and power up. Check
the controls.

“You ready?”

“Yep,” Hank Davis told him cheerfully.

Rory Smith saluted and placed his head back into the headrest. He
watched the bow cat officer give his fencer’s lunge into the wind as his
arm came down to the deck. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the
catapult deck edge operator lower both hands as he reached for the fire
button.

In the space of a second the launching valves dropped open, 450 pounds
of steam hit the back of the pistons, and the hold-back bolt broke. The
G’s slammed Smith back into his seat as War Ace Five One One leaped
forward. And the VDI came sliding out of the center of the instrument
panel.

Rory Smith reached for the black box with both hands, but too late. The
front of it tilted down and came to rest in his lap. Jammed the stick
back. All this in the first second and a half of the shot.

Desperately Smith heaved at the box against the G. He had to free the
stick!

And then they were off the bow, the nose coming up.

And up and up as he struggled to lift the fucking box!

With his right hand he reached under and tried to shove the stick
forward. Like pushing against a building.

He felt the stall, felt the right wing go down. He was trying to lift
the box with his left hand and push the stick forward with his right
when Hank Davis ejected. The horizon was tilting and the nose was
slewing right.

Oh, damn!

On the bridge of Columbia the captain saw the whole thing. The nose of
the Intruder off of Cat Two rose and rose to almost thirty degrees nose
up, then her right wing dropped precipitously. Passing thirty or forty
degrees angleof-bank he saw a man in an ejection seat come blasting out.

The wing kept dropping past the vertical and the nose came right and the
A-6 dove into the ocean. A mighty splash marked the spot.

Galvanized, the captain roared, “Right full rudder, stop all engines.”

The officer of the deck immediately repeated the order and the helmsman
echoed it.

The captain’s eyes were on the ejection seat. The drogue streamed as
the seat arched toward the sea. The seat was past the apogee when the
captain saw a flash of white as the parachute began to deploy. It
blossomed, but before the man on the end of the shrouds could complete a
swing he hit the water. Splat.

This 95,000-ton ship was making twenty-five knots. The A-6 went in a
little to the right of her course, and the survivor splashed a little
right of that. All he could hope to do was swing the stem away. The
stem with its thrashing screws.

There, the bow was starting to respond to the helm.

The rescue helicopter, the angel, was already coming into a hover over
the survivor. His head was just visible bobbing in the water as the
carrier swept by, still making at least twenty knots.

Missed him.

“War Ace Five Oh Five, Departure.”

“Go ahead, Departure.”

“Five Oh Five, your last playmate will not be joining you.

Switch to Strike and proceed with your mission, over.”

“Roger that.” Major Sam Cooley gave the radio frequency change signal by
hand to Jake on his left wing and the Real McCoy on his right. He
waited until the formation came around to the on-course heading, then
leveled his wings and added power for the climb. They were on to p of
the cumulus layer. Above them was sunny, deep blue open sky.

So Rory Smith didn’t get that plane airborne, Jake thought. He should
have accepted that offer to switch planes. It’s a good day to fly.

“Rory Smith’s dead.”

They heard the news in the ready room, after they landed.

“He never got out. When Hank Davis punched Rory was sitting there
wrestling the VDI. Hank’s okay. He said the VDI came out on the cat
shot. Came clean out of the panel right into Rory’s lap. Jammed the
stick aft. They stalled and went in.”

“Aww Flap said.

When Jake found his voice he muttered, “He must not have checked to see
that it was screwed in there.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah,” he told Flap. “You gotta tug on the thing to make sure the
screws that hold it are properly screwed in.

Doesn’t matter except on a catapult shot. If the VDI isn’t secured
right on a cat shot, it can come back into your lap.

The damn thing weighs seventy pounds.”

“I never knew that.”

“I thought everybody knew that.”

r knew that. I wonder

“I neve if Smith did.”

Jake Grafton merely stared in horror at the BN- He was the one tasked to
cover everything these Marines needed to know about shipboard
operations. He had forgotten to mention checking the VDI before the
shot. Flap didn’t know.

Maybe Rory didn’t either. And now Rory Smith was dead!

He sagged into a nearby chair. He had forgotten to tell them about the
VDI on the cat! What else had he forgotten to tell them? What else?

The television camera on the ship’s island superstructure had caught the
whole accident on videotape. The tape was playing now on the ready room
television. Jake stared at the screen, mesmerized.

The shot looked normal, but the horizontal stabilizerthe stabilator-was
really nose up. Too much? Hard to tell.

There he went, off the bow, nose up rapidly, way too high, the stall and
departure from controlled flight, a spin developing as the plane went
in. One ejection. The whole thing happened very quickly. The A-6 was
in the water twelve seconds after the catapult fired.

Just twelve seconds.

The show continued. The angel hovered, a swimmer leaped from about four
feet into the water … lots of spray from the rotor wash …

Jake rose and walked out. In sick bay he asked the first corpsman he
saw, “Captain Hank Davis?”

“Second door on the left, sir.”

The skipper came out of Hank’s room before Jake got to the door. He
told Jake, “He doesn’t need any visitors just now. He swallowed a lot
of seawater and he’s pretty shook.”

“I need to ask him a question, sir.”

“What is it?”

Jake explained about the VDI, how the screws might not engage when the
box was installed, how the pilot must check it. “I need to know,
Colonel, if Rory tugged on the VDI to check it before he got to the
cat.”

The colonel said nothing. He listened to Jake, watched his eyes, and
said nothing.

“I’ll ask him,” Haldane said finally, then opened the door and passed
through.

Minutes passed. Almost five. When Haldane reappeared, he closed the
door firmly behind him and faced the pilot, who was leaning against the
bulkhead on the other side of the passageway.

“He doesn’t remember.”

“Did he know about the possibility of the VDI coming out?”

“No. He didn’t.”

Jake turned and walked away without another word.

He was sitting in his stateroom at his desk when the Real McCoy came in.
The only light was the ten-watt fluorescent tube above Jake’s desk.
McCoy seated himself on his bunk.

“Take a hike, will ya, Real? I need some time alone.”

McCoy thought about it for a few seconds. “Sure,” he said, and left.

Summer in Virginia was his favorite time of year. Everything was
growing, the deer were lazy and fat, the squirrels chattered in the
trees. The sun there would be hot on your back, the sweat would dampen
your shirt. You would feel good as you used your muscles, accomplished
tangible work that stood as hard evidence of the effort that had been
put into it. The folks up and down the road were solid, hardworking
people, people to stand with in good times and bad.

And he had given that up for this …

Sitting in his stateroom Jake Grafton could hear the creaks and groans
of the ship, the noises made by the steel plates as she rode through the
seaway. And man-made noises, lots Of them, tapping and hammering,
chipping, pinging, clicking, grinding … slamming as doors and hatches
were opened and closed.

Responsibility-they give you a tiny little job and you fuck it up and
someone dies. In twelve seconds. Twelve lousy seconds …

And he had tried hard. He had taken the time, made the effort to do it
right. He had written point after point, gone through the CV NATOPS
page by page, paragraph by paragraph. He had covered every facet of
carrier operations that he knew about. And had forgotten one item, a
scintilla of information that he had heard once, somewhere, about an
improperly secured VDI that slid four inches out of the tray in which it
sat when the plane went down the catapult. Probably there were messages
about it, several years ago, but the Marines didn’t take cat shots then
and the info apparently went in one official grunt ear and out the
other. Now, when they needed to know that tidbit, he had forgotten to
tell them.

Luck is really a miserable bitch. Just when you desperately need her to
behave she sticks the knife in and twists it, leering at you all the
while.

Rory Smith was dead. No bringing him back. All the teeth gnashing,
hair pulling, hand wringing and confessions in the world won’t raise him
from the Pacific and breathe life back into his shattered body. The
cockpit of War Ace 511 was his coffin. He was in it now, down there on
the sea floor.

The sea will claim his body and the airplane molecule by molecule, until
someday nothing remains. He will then be a part of this ocean, a part
of the clouds and the trade winds and the restless blue water.

Jake opened his safe and got out a bottle of whiskey. He poured himself
a drink, raised it to Rory Smith, and swallowed it down.

The liquor made him sleepy. He climbed into the top bunk.

This guilt trip was not good. Yet at least it gave him the proper
perspective to view the flying, the ship, the Navy, and all those dead
men. Morgan McPherson, the Boxman, Frank Allen, Rory Smith, all those
guys. All good dead men.

All good. All dead. All dead real damn good.

He was going to get out of the Navy, submit a letter of resignation.

Never again I’m not going to stand in the ready room any more helplessly
watching videotapes of crashes. I’m not going to any more memorial
services. I’m not packing any more guys’ personal possessions in steel
foodockers and sending them off to the parents or widow with any more
goddamn little notes telling them how sorry I am. I’m not going to keep
lying to myself that I am a better pilot than they were and that is why
they are dead and I’m not. I’ve done all that shit too much. The guys
that still have the stomach for it can keep doing it until they are each
and every one of them as dead as Rory Smith but I will not I have had
enough.

JAKE AND Flap FLEW A TANKER HOP THE NEXT AFTERNOON, which was the last
scheduled flying day before the ship entered Pearl Harbor. They were in
the high orbit, flying the five-mile arc around the ship at 20,000 feet,
when Flap said, “I hear you are putting in a letter of resignation.”

Since it wasn’t a question, Jake didn’t reply. He had talked to the
first-class yeoman in the air wing office this morning, and apparently
the yeoman talked to the Marines.

“That right?” Flap demanded.

“Yeah.”

“You know, you are one amazing dude. Yesterday afternoon you dropped
six five-hundred-pounders visually and got four bull’s-eyes, then did
six system bore-sights and got three more. Seven bull’s-eyes out of
twelve bombs. That performance puts you first in the squadron, by the
way.”

This comment stirred Jake Grafton. In the society of warriors to which
he belonged it was very bad form to brag, to congratulate yourself or
listen placidly while others congratulated you on your superb flying
abilities. The fig leaf didn’t have to cover much, but modesty required
that he wave it.

“Pure luck,” Jake muttered. “The wind was real steady, which is rare,
and-” Flap steamed on, uninterested in fig leaves. “Then you motor back
to the ship and go down the slide like you’re riding a rail, snag an
okay three-wire, find out a guy crashed, announce it’s all your fault
because you knew something he didn’t, and submit a letter of
resignation. Now is that weird or what?”

“I didn’t announce anything was my fault.”

“Horse shit. You announced it to yourself.”

“I didn’t-”

“I had a little talk with the Real McCoy last night,” Flap explained.
“You were moping down in your room. You sure as hell weren’t crying
over Rory Smith-you hardly knew the guy. You were feeling sorry for
yourself.”

“What an extraordinary insight, Doctor Freud! I can see now why I’m so
twisted-when I was a kid my parents wouldn’t let me screw my kitty cat.
Send me a bill for this consultation. In the meantime shut the fuck
up!”

Silence followed Jake’s roar. The two men sat staring into the infinity
of the sky as the shadow cast by the canopy bow walked across their
laps. This shadow was the only relief from the intense tropic sunshine
which shone down from the deep, deep blue.

“Hard to believe that over half the earth’s atmosphere is below us,”
Flap said softly. “Without supplemental oxygen, at this altitude, most
fit men would pass out within thirty minutes. You know, you’ve flown so
many times that flying has probably become routine with you. That’s the
trap we all fall into. Sometimes we forget that we are really small
blobs of protoplasm journeying haphazardly through infinity.

All we have to sustain us are our little lifelines. The oxygen will
keep flowing, the engines will keep burning, the plane will hold
together, the ship will be waiting … Well, listen to the news. The
lifelines can break. We are like the man on the tightrope above Niagara
Falls: the tiniest misstep, the smallest inattention, the most minuscule
miscalculation, and disaster follows.”

Flap paused for a moment, then continued: “A lot of people have it in
their heads that God gave them a guarantee when they were born. At
least seventy years of vigorous life, hard work will earn solid rewards,
your wife will be faithful, your sons courageous, your daughters
virtuous, justice will be done, love will be enough-in the event of
problems, the manufacturer will set things right. Like hell! The truth
is that life, like flying, is fraught with hazards. We are all up on
that tightrope trying to keep our balance. Inevitably, people fall
off.”

In spite of himself Jake was listening to Flap. That was the problem
with the bastard’s monologues-you couldn’t ignore them.

“I think you’re worth saving, Grafton. You’re the best pilot I’ve met
in the service. You are very very good. And you want to throw it all
away. That’s pretty sad.”

Flap paused. If he was giving Jake a chance to reply, he was
disappointed. After a bit he continued:

“I never had much respect for you Navy guys. You think the military is
like a corporation-you do your job, collect your green government check,
and you can leave any time you get the itch. Maybe the Navy is that
way. Thank God, the Corps isn’t”

Stung, Jake broke his silence. “During our short acquaintance, you
haven’t heard one snotty remark out of me about the Holy Corps. But if
you want to start trading insults, I can probably think up a few.”

Flap ignored Jake. “We Marines are all in this together,” he said,
expanding on his thesis. “When one man slips off the rope, we’ll grab
him on the way down. We’ll all hang together and we’ll do what we have
to do to get the job done. The Corps is bigger than all of us, and once
you are a part of it, you are a part of it forever. Semper Fidelis. If
you die, when you die, the Corps goes on. It’s sorta like a church …”

Flap fell silent, thinking. The Corps was very hard to explain to
someone who wasn’t a Marine. He had tried it a few times in the past
and always gave up. Ms explanations usually sounded trite, maybe even a
little silly. “Male bonding bullshit,” one woman told him after he had
delivered himself of a memorable attempt. He almost slapped her.

For you see, the Corps was real The feelings the Corps aroused in Flap
and his fellow Marines were as real, as tangi able, as the uniforms they
wore and the weapons they carried.

They would be loyal, they would be faithful, even unto death. Semper
Fi. They belonged to something larger than themselves that gave their
fives a meaning, a purpose, that was denied to lesser men, like
civilians worried about earning a living. To Marines like Flap
civilians concerned with getting and spending, getting and spending,
were beneath contempt. They were like flies, to be ignored or brushed
away.

“I’m trying to explain,” he told Jake Grafton now, “because I think you
could understand. You’re a real good aviator. You’re gifted. You owe
it to yourself, to us, to hang tough, hang in there, keep doing what you
know so well how to do.”

“I’ve had enough,” Jake told him curtly. He had little patience for
this sackcloth and ashes crap. He had fought in one war. He had seen
its true face. If Flap wanted to wrap himself in the flag that was his
business, but Jake Grafton had decided to get on with his life.

“Rory Smith knew,” Flap told him with conviction. “He was one fun
Marine. He knew the risks and did his job anyway. He was all Marine.”

“And he’s dead.”

“So? You and I are gonna die too, you know. Nobody ever gets out of
life alive. Smith died for the Corps, but you’re gonna go be a
civilian, live the soft life until you check out. Some disease or other
is going to kill you someday–cancer, heart disease, maybe just plain
old age. Then you’ll be as dead as Rory Smith. Now I ask you, what
contribution will you have made?”

“I already made it.”

“Oh not Oh no! Smith made his contribution-he gave all that he had.
You’ve slipped one thin dime into the collection plate, Ace, and now you
announce that dime is your fair share. Like hell!”

“I’ve had about two quarts more than enough from you today, Le Beau,”
Jake spluttered furiously. “I did two cruises to the Nam. I dropped my
bombs and killed my gooks, and left my friends over there in the mud to
rot. For what? For not a single goddamn thing, that’s for what. You
think you’re on some sort of holy mission to protect America? The idiot
green knight. Get real-those potsmoking flower-power hippies don’t want
protection. You’d risk your life for them? If they were dying of
thirst I wouldn’t piss in their mouths!”

Jake Grafton was snarling now. “I’ve paid my dues in blood, Le Beau, my
blood. Don’t give me any more shit about my fair share!”

Silence reigned in the cockpit as the KA-613 tanker continued to orbit
the ship 20,000 feet below, at max conserve airspeed, each engine
sucking a ton of fuel per hour, under the clean white sun. Since the
tanker had no radar, computer or inertial navigation system, there was
nothing for Flap to do but sit. So he sat and stared at that distant,
hazy horizon.

With the plane on autopilot, there was also little for Jake to do except
scan the instruments occasionally and alter angle-of-bank as required to
stay on the five-mile arc. This required almost no effort. He too
spent most of his time staring toward that distant, infinite place where
the sky reached down to meet the sea.

The crazy thing was that the horizon looked the same in every direction.
In all directions. Pick a direction, any direction, and that uniform
gauzy junction of sea and sky obscured everything that lay beyond. Yet
intelligence tells us that direction is critical-life itself is a
journey toward something, somewhere …

Which way?

Jake Grafton sat silently, looking, wondering.

Hank Davis was still in a private room in sick bay when Jake dropped by
to see him. He looked pale, an impression accentuated by his
black-as-coal, pencil-thin mustache.

“Hey, Hank, when they gonna let you out of here?”

“I’m under observation. Whenever they get tired of observing. I
dunno.”

“So how you doing?” Jake settled into the only chair and looked the
bombardier over carefully.

Davis shrugged. “Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats
you. He got a big bite of my butt yesterday.

A big bite.”

“Well, you made it. You pulled the handle while you still had time, so
you’re alive.”

“You ejected once, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Jake Grafton told him. “Over Laos. Got shot up over Hanoi.”

“Ever have second thoughts?”

“Like what?”

“Well, like maybe you were too worried about your own butt and not
enough about the other guy’s?”

“I thought the VDI came out on the shot? Went into Smith’s lap?”