The Intruders (29 page)

When I climbed down from the cockpit I couldn’t believe it-the nose
wheel was like six inches from the edge! It was so dark up there that I
had to use my flashlight to make sure. There was no way the nose wheel
was going around that corner. Even if it had, the right main wouldn’t
have made the Turn-4t would have dropped off the edge.”

Harrison took a greedy drag on his cigarette, then continued: “My BN
couldn’t even get out of the cockpit. The plane captain didn’t have
room to drop his ladder. He had to stay in the cockpit until they towed
the plane to a decent parking place.”

“Why’d you keep taxiing when you knew you were that close to the edge?”

Harrison closed his eyes for a second, then shook his head. “I dunno.”

“I know,” Jake Grafton told him positively. “You jarheads are
spring-loaded to the yessir position. Doug, if it doesn’t feel right,
don’t do it. You have only one ass to lose.”

Harrison nodded and sucked on the cigarette. The color was slowly
coming back to his face. After a bit he said, “Did you ever watch those
RA-5 pilots taxi at night? The nose wheel is way aft of the cockpit.
They are sitting out over the ocean when they taxi that Vigilante to the
deck edge and turn it. I couldn’t do that. Not in a million years.
Just watching them gives me the shivers.”

“Don’t obey a yellow-shirt if it doesn’t look right,” Jake said,
emphasizing the point. “It isn’t the fall that kills you, Doug, or the
stop at the bottom-it’s the sudden realization that, indeed, you are
this fucking stupid.”

When Doug wandered off Jake went back to the notes of his talks on
carrier operations. He was expanding and refining them so he could have
them typed. He thought he would send them back to the senior ISO at the
West Coast A-6 training squadron, VA-128 at Whidbey Island. Maybe there
was something in there that the LSOs could use for their lectures.

Boy, if he wasn’t getting out, it would sure be nice to go back to
VA-128 when this cruise was over. Rent a little place on a beach or a
bluff overlooking the sound, fly, teach some classes, kick back and let
life flow along. If he wasn’t getting out … If Tiny Dick Donovan was
willing to take hun back. Forgive and forget.

But he was getting out! No more long lonely months at sea, no more night
cat shots, no more floating around the IO quietly rotting, no more of
this Allen Bartow came up to the desk. “When you get off here tonight,
we’re having a little game down in my room.

We need some squid money in the pot.”

“I’ve still got a lot of jarhead quarters from the last game.

I’ll bring those.”

“The last of the high rollers He wasn’t going to miss it, he assured
himself, for the hundredth time. Not a bit.

One of the most difficult tasks in military aviation is a night
rendezvous. On a dark night under an overcast the plane you are joining
is merely a tiny blob of lights, flashing weakly in the empty black
universe. Without a horizon or other visual reference, the only way the
trick can be done is to keep your instrument scan going inside your
cockpit while you sneak peeks at the target aircraft. The temptation is
to look too long at the target, to get too engrossed in the angles and
closure rate, and if that happens, you are in big trouble.

On this particular night Jake Grafton thought he had it wired. He was
rendezvousing on the off-going tanker at low station, 5,000 feet over
the ship on the five-mile arc. There it was, its lights winking weakly.

“Ten o’clock,” Flap said.

“Roger, I got it.”

“He’ll be doing two-fifty-,, Jake glanced at his airspeed. Three
hundred knots indicated. He would have to work that off as he closed.
But not quite yet.

The tanker would be in a left-hand turn. Jake cranked his plane around
until he had his nose in front of it and was looking at it through the
right quarter panel, across the top of the radar scope-hood. He eased
in a little left rudder and right flaperon to help keep his plane in a
position where he could see the tanker.

With the target plane on the right side the A-6 was difficult to
rendezvous because the cockpit was too wide-the BN sat on the pilot’s
right. This meant that the right glareshield and canopy rail were too
high and, as the planes closed, would block the pilot’s vision of the
target aircraft if he allowed himself to get just a little behind the
bearing line or get a tad high. Jake knew all this. He had
accomplished several hundred night rendezvous and knew the problems
involved and the proper techniques to use without even thinking about
it. Tonight he was busy applying that knowledge.

Yet something was wrong. Jake checked his instruments.

All okay. Why was the tanker moving to the right? Instinctively he
rolled more wings level, rechecked his attitude gyro, the altimeter, the
airspeed … All okay. And still the sucker is moving right!

“Texaco, say your heading.”

“Zero Two Zero.”

Hell! Now Jake understood. He was still on the outside of the tanker’s
turning radius, not on the inside as he had assumed. He leveled his
wings and flew straight ahead to cross behind the tanker, feeling
slightly ridiculous. He had assumed that he was on the inside …

Now, indeed, he was on the inside of the tanker’s turn.

He turned to put the nose in the proper position and started inbound.
Checking the gauges, watching the bearing, slowing gently … 280 knots
would be perfect, would give him 30 knots of closure …

And the tanker was … Jesus! Coming in awful fast-way too fast! Power
back, boards out, and …

“Look at your attitude.” Flap.

Jake looked. He was at ninety-degrees angle-of-bank, passing 4,500
feet, descending.

He leveled the wings and got the nose up. The tanker shot off to the
left.

“I’m really screwed up tonight,” he told the BN.

“Turn hard and get inside of him, then close.”

Jake did. He felt embarrassed, like a neophyte on his first night
formation hop. Yet only when he got to within two hundred yards and
could make out the tanker’s position lights clearly was he sure of the
tanker’s direction of flight.

Only then was he comfortable.

He wasn’t concentrating hard enough. Attempting to rendezvous on a
single, flashing light, in a dark universe devoid of any other feature
… it was difficult at best and impossible if you weren’t completely
focused.

Flap extended the drogue as Jake crossed behind the tanker and surfaced
on his right side. “You got the lead,” said the tanker pilot, Chance
Malzahn. Jake clicked his mike twice in reply as Chance slid aft. He
dropped slightly and disappeared from sight behind. Jake concentrated
on flying his own plane, staying in this steady, twenty-degree
angleof-bank turn, keeping on the five-mile arc, holding altitude
perfectly.

In seconds the green ready light on the refueling panel went out and the
counter began to click off the pounds delivered. The refueling package
worked.

“Five Twenty-Three is sweet,” Flap told the ship.

The green ready light appeared again. Malzahn had backed out of the
drogue. Now he came up on Jake’s left side.

“You got the lead,” Jake told him as Malzahn’s drogue streamed aft.

The drogue looked like a three-foot-wide badminton birdie. It dangled
on the end of a fifty-foot-long hose aft and slightly below the wash of
the tanker. To get fuel, Jake would have to insert his fuel probe,
which was permanently mounted on the nose in front of his windscreen,
into the drogue and push it in about five feet. When the take-up reel
on the tanker had turned the proper amount, electrical switches would
mate and begin pumping fuel down the hose into the receiver aircraft.

The trick was getting the probe into the drogue, the basket. If the
basket was new, with all the feathers in good shape, it was usually
almost stationary and fairly easy to plug. If it was slightly damaged,
however, it tended to weave back and forth in the windstream and present
a moving target. Turbulence that bounced the tanker and receiver
aircraft added to the level of difficulty. And, of course, there was
the “pucker factor”—extensive experience has proven that the tension
of a pilot’s sphincter is directly proportional to the level of his
anxiety, i.e., higher makes tighter, etc.

Tonight, needing only to hit the tanker to “sponge” the excess fuel,
Jake’s anxiety level was normal, or even slightly below. He was fat,
had plenty of fuel. And the air was fairly smooth. The only fly in the
ointment was the condition of that Marine Corps drogue. Tonight it
weaved in a small, erratic figure-eight pattern.

Jake stabilized his plane about ten feet behind the drogue and watched
it bob and weave for a moment. Flap Le Beau kept his flashlight pointed
at it.

“Little Marine bastard is bent.”

“Yeah.” Flap was full of sympathy.

Flopping drogues had cracked bullet-proof windscreens, shattered
Plexiglas and fodded engines. Tonight Jake Grafton eyed this one
warily, waited for his moment, then smartly added power and drove his
probe in. Drove it at that spot where the drogue would be when he got
there.

He hoped.

Miraculously he timed it right. The probe captured the drogue and
locked in. He kept pushing until the green light above the hose chute
in the tanker came on. Now he was riding about fifteen feet below the
tanker’s tail and ten feet aft. As long as he stayed right here, held
that picture, he would get fuel.

“You get twelve hundred pounds,” Chance Malzahn told him.

Two clicks in acknowledgment.

“Nice,” Flap said, referring to the plug, the flashlight never wavering.

When the last of the gas was aboard Jake backed out. He came up on
Malzahn’s left side and took the lead as Malzahn reeled in his hose.
After a word with Tanker Control, Malzahn cut his power and turned away,
headed down on a vector for an approach.

Jake and Flap were now Texaco. Soon two F4s came to take a ton of fuel
each, then they turned away and disappeared in the vast darkness.

Jake took the tanker on up to high station, 20,000 feet, and settled it
on autopilot at 220 knots. Around and around the ship, orbiting. Flap
got out a paperback book and adjusted his kneeboard light. Jake
loosened one side of his oxygen mask and let it dangle.

“Do you ever see the faces of the men you killed?” Jake asked. They had
been orbiting the ship at high station for almost half an hour.

“What do you mean?”

Jake Grafton took his time before he answered. “I got shot down last
December. We ended up in Laos. Had to shoot three guys before they got
us out. They were trying to kill us-me and my BN-and one of them shot
me. That’s how I ended up with this scar on my temple.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Had to do it, of course, or they would have killed us.

Still, I see them sometimes in dreams. Wake up feeling rotten.”

Flap Le Beau didn’t say anything.

“Dropping bombs, now, I did that for a couple cruises.

Bound to have killed a lot of people. Oh, most of the time we bombed
suspected truck parks and crap like that-probably killed some ants and
lizards and turned a lot of trees into toothpicks. That’s what we
called them, toothpick missions-but occasionally we went after better
targets. Stuff where there would be people. Not just trees in the
jungle and mud roads crossing a creek.”

“Yeah.”

“Toward the end there we were really pounding the north, hitting all the
shit that Johnson and McNamara didn’t have the brains or balls to hit
six years before.”

“It was fucked up, all right.”

“One mission, close air support of some ARVN, they told me I killed
forty-seven of ‘em. Forty-seven. That bothered me for a while, but I
don’t see them at night. Forty-seven men with one load of bombs… it’s
like reading about it in a newspaper or history book… doesn’t seem
real now. I stiff see those three NVA though.”

“I still see faces too.”

Below them an unbroken cloud deck stretched away in all directions. The
sliver of moon was fuzzy and there weren’t many stars–they were trying
to shine through a gauzy layer of high cirrus.

“Wonder if it’ll ever stop? if they’ll just fade out or something.”

“I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t seem right somehow, to lose fifty-eight thousand Americans, to
kill all those Vietnamese, all for nothing.”

Flap didn’t reply.

“I don’t like seeing those faces and waking up in a cold sweat. I had
to do it. But damn …”

He wanted to forget the past, forget all of it. The present was okay,
the flying and the ship and the men he shared it with. Yet the future
was waiting out there, somewhere, hidden in the mists and haze. He was
reaching out for something, something that lay ahead along that road
into the unknown. Just what it would be he didn’t know. He was ready
to make the journey though.

Under the overcast it was raining. At five thousand feet visibility was
down to two or three miles and the oncoming tanker had trouble finding
them, even with vectors from tanker control. It was that kind of night,
with nothing going right. Once he was there Jake slipped in behind,
eyed the basket, and went for it. He got it with only a little rudder
kick in close and pushed it in.

Nothing. The green light over the hose hole did not illuminate.

“Are we getting any?” Flap asked the other crew.

“No. Back out and let us recycle.”

Jake retarded the power levers a smidgen and let his plane drift aft.
The basket came off the probe. He moved out to the right and Flap told
the other crew to recycle. They pulled the hose all the way in, then
ran it out again.

This time Jake missed the basket on the first try. He stabilized and
slipped in on his second attempt.