The Intruders

by Stephen Coonts

  The LSO regarded intrasquadron competition with good-natured contempt. “Games for children,” he grumped, But Jake noticed now that McCoy’s name was in the top half of the rankings on both boards.

  This morning there was mail, the first in six days. A cargo plane brought it out from Hickam Field, trapped aboard, then left with full mail sacks from the ship’s post office. Two hours later the mail was distributed throughout the ship.

  Jake got three letters from Callie, one from his folks, and something from the commanding officer of Attack Squadron 128 in an official, unstamped envelope. He shuffled Tiny Dick Donovan’s missive—probably some piece of official foolscap from a yeoman third in the Admin Office—to the bottom of the pile. Callie’s letters came first.

  She was taking classes at the University of Chicago, working on her master’s degree. Her brother and her parents were fine. The weather was hot and muggy. She missed him.

  I think that it is important for you to decide what you wish to do with your life. This is a decision that every man must make for himself, and every woman. To make this decision because you hope to please another is to make it for the wrong reason. We each owe duties to our families, when we acquire them, but we also owe a duty to ourselves to make our lives count for something. To love another person is not enough.

  I have thought a great deal about this these last few weeks. Like every woman, I want to love. I feel as if I have this great gift to give—myself. I want to be a wife and mother. Oh, how I could love some man!

  And I want the man I love to love me. To have a man who would return the love I have to give is my great ambition.

  I have dated boys, known boys of all ages, and I do not want to marry one.

  I want to marry a man. I want a man who believes in what he is doing, who goes out the door every day to make a contribution—in business, in academia, in government, somewhere. I want a man who will love not just me, but life itself. I want a man who will stand up to the gales of life, who won’t bend with every squall, who will remain true to himself and those who believe in him, a man who can be counted on day after day, year after year.

  An hour later, after he had reread Callie’s letter three times and lingered over the one from his parents, he opened the official letter. In it he found a copy of his last fitness report, bearing Donovan’s signature. In the text Donovan wrote:

  Lieutenant Grafton is one of the most gifted aviators I have ever met in my years in the naval service. In every facet of flying, he is the consummate professional. As a naval officer, Lieutenant Grafton shows extraordinary promise, yet he has not made the commitment to give of himself as he must if he is to fulfill that promise.

  There was more, a lot more, most of it the usual bullshit required by custom and instruction, such as a comment upon his support of the Navy’s equal opportunity goals and programs. Jake merely skimmed this treacle, then returned to the meat: “… has not yet made the commitment to give of himself as he must if he is to fulfill that promise.”

  A pat on the back immediately followed by a kick in the pants. His first reaction was anger, which quickly turned to cold fury. He stalked from the ready room and went to his stateroom, where he opened his desk and seized pen and paper. He began a letter to Commander Donovan. He would write a bullet that would skewer the son of a bitch right through the heart.

  What kind of half-assed crack was that? Not committed to being a good naval officer? Who the hell did that jerk Donovan think he was talking about anyway?

  Even before he completed his first sentence, the anger began leaking from him. Donovan had said nothing about the Sea-Tac adventure, didn’t even mention that the promising Lieutenant Grafton had punched out a windy blowhard and thrown him ass over tea kettle through a plate glass window, then spent a weekend in jail. Perhaps his comments dealt strictly with the performance of Jake’s duties at the squadron. No, he must have meant that comment to cover the Sea-Tac debacle in addition to everything else. Worse, Donovan was right—a more committed, thinking officer would not have done it. A wiser man…well, he wouldn’t have either.

  Jake threw down the pen and rubbed his face in frustration.

  Were Callie and Dick Donovan talking about the same thing?

  “Man, you should have seen ol’ Jake last night,” Flap Le Beau told his fellow Marines. “Both the you’re-gonna-die lights pop on bright as Christmas goin’ down the cat, and this guy handled it like he was in a simulator. Cool as ice. Just sat there doin’ his thing. Me—I was shakin’ like a dog shittin’ razor blades. I ain’t been so scared since the teacher caught me with my hand up Susie Bulow’s skirt back in the sixth grade.”

  There were eight of them, four crews, and they had just finished a briefing for another flight to the Kahoolawe target. This time they were carrying real ordnance, twelve five-hundred-pound bombs on each plane. After they had reviewed how the fuses and arming wires should look on the bomb racks, the crews stood and stretched. That was when Flap took it on himself to praise his pilot to the heavens.

  Jake was embarrassed. He had been frightened last night, truly scared, and Flap’s ready room bull puckey struck a sour note. Still, Jake kept his mouth shut. This was neither the time nor place to brace Flap about his mouth.

  He got out of his chair and went over in the corner to check his mailbox. Nothing. He gazed at the posters on the wall as if interested, trying to shut out Flap, who was expanding upon his theme: Jake Grafton was one cool dude.

  One of the pilots, Rory Smith, came over and dug a sheet of official trash out of his mailbox, something he was supposed to read and initial. “Flap gets on your nerves, does he?” he asked, his voice so soft it was barely audible. He scribbled his initials in the proper place and shoved the paper into someone else’s box.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t sweat it. To hear him tell it, every guy he flies with is the best who ever stroked a throttle. He was saying that in the ready room about his last stick five minutes before he was down in the skipper’s stateroom complaining that the guy was dangerous. You just have to take him with a grain of salt.”

  Jake grinned at Rory.

  “Everybody else does,” the Marine said, then wandered off toward the desk where the maintenance logs on each aircraft were kept. Jake followed him.

  Smith helped himself to the book for 511, the plane Jake had flown into an in-flight engagement.

  “Gonna fly it today, huh?” Jake said.

  “Yeah,” Smith said. “The gunny says it’s fixed. We’ll see.”

  “It’ll probably go down on deck,” Jake pointed out. “Down” in this context meant a maintenance problem that precluded flight. “Since I bent it,” he continued, “I’ll fly it if you want to trade planes.”

  “Well, I’m one of the maintenance check pilots and they gave it to me.”

  “Sure.”

  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 i
nspected 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. That 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 angle-of-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 stern 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 top 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.”

  “I never knew that. I wonder 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 stabilizer—the 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, hard-working 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…