The Intruders

by Stephen Coonts

  At this altitude he and Flap were halfway to heaven. On his kneeboard Jake jotted the phrase.

  He was checking the fuel, again, when Flap said, “We’re a hundred twenty miles out. I can see the area.” The area where the ship in distress should be, he meant, if it were really there.

  Odd day for an emergency at sea. Most ships got into trouble in bad weather, when heavy seas or low temperatures stressed their systems. On a day like this…

  “I got something on the radar. A target.”

  “The ship?”

  “The INS says it’s about four or five miles from the position Black Eagle gave us. Of course, the inertial could have drifted that much.”

  “Big ship?”

  “Well, it ain’t a rowboat. Not at this distance. Can’t tell much more than that about the size. A blip is a blip.”

  “Course and speed?”

  “She’s DIW.” Dead in the water, drifting.

  He would pull the power at eighty miles, descend with the engines at eighty percent RPM initially to ensure the generators stayed on the line.

  “It’s about fifteen miles from the coast of Sumatra, which runs northwest to southeast. Islands to seaward, west and southeast. Big islands.”

  “Any other ships around?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “On a coast like that…”

  “Maybe we’ll see some fishing boats or something when we get closer.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll tell Black Eagle.” Flap keyed the radio.

  They arrived over the ship at seven thousand feet, the engines at idle. Peering down between cumulus clouds, Jake saw her clearly. She was a small freighter, with her superstructure amidships and cranes fore and aft. Rather like an old Liberty ship. No visible smoke, so she wasn’t obviously on fire. No smoke from the funnel either, which was amidships, and no wake. There was a smaller ship, or rather a large boat, alongside, right against the starboard side.

  Jake put the plane into a right circle so Flap could get pictures with the hand-held camera and picked a gap in the clouds to descend through. The engines were still at idle.

  They dropped under the clouds at 5,500 feet. “Shoot the whole roll of film,” Jake told Flap. “From every angle. We’ll circle and make one low pass down the rail so you can get a closeup shot of the ship and that boat alongside, then we’re out of here.”

  “Okay.” He focused and snapped.

  “Looks like the crew has been rescued.”

  “Swing wide at the stern so I can get a shot of her name.”

  Jake was passing three thousand feet now, swinging a wide lazy circle around the ship, which seemed to be floating on an even keel. Wonder what her problem was?

  “Can you read the name?”

  “You’re still too high. It’ll be in the photos though.”

  Fuel? Sixty-two hundred pounds, over six hundred miles to Columbia. He shivered as he surveyed the drifting freighter and the small ship alongside. That small one looked to be maybe eighty or ninety feet long, a small superstructure just forward of amidships, one stack, splotchy paint, a few people visible on deck.

  “There’s people on the freighter’s bridge.”

  “About finished?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here we go, down past them both.” Jake dumped the nose. He dropped quickly to about two hundred feet above the water and leveled, pointing his plane so that they would pass the two stationary vessels from bow to stern. Jake adjusted the throttles. If he went by too fast Flap’s photos would end up blurred. He steadied at 250 knots.

  “They aren’t waving or anything.”

  Jake Grafton saw the flashes on the bow of the small ship and knew instinctively what they were. He jammed the throttles forward to the stops, rolled forty degrees or so and pulled hard. He felt the thumps, glimpsed the fiery tracers streaming past the canopy, felt more thumps, then they were out of it.

  “Flak!” Now Flap Le Beau found his voice.

  “Fucker’s got a twenty-millimeter!”

  They were tail on to the ships, twisting and rolling and climbing. The primary hydraulic pressure needles flickered. So did the secondary needles. The BACK-UP HYD light illuminated on the annunciator panel.

  “Oh sweet fucking Jesus!”

  Jake leveled the wings, trimmed carefully for a climb.

  The plane began to roll right. The stick was sloppy. Jake used a touch of left rudder to bring it back.

  Heading almost south. He jockeyed the rudder and stick, trying to swing the plane to a westerly heading. The plane threatened to fall off on the right wing.

  It was all he could do to keep the wings level using the stick and rudder. Nose still a degree or so above the horizon, so they were still climbing, slowly, passing two-thousand feet, doing 350 knots.

  “Get on the radio,” Jake told Flap. “Talk to Black Eagle. Those guys must be pirates.”

  He retarded the throttles experimentally, instinctively wanting to get down to about 250 knots so the emergency hydraulic pump would not have to work so hard to move the control surfaces. He trimmed a little more nose up. The nose rose a tad. Good.

  “Black Eagle, Black Eagle, this is War Ace, over.”

  They were in real trouble. The emergency hydraulic pump was designed to allow just enough control to exit a combat situation, just enough to allow the crew to get to a safe place to eject.

  “Black Eagle, this is War Ace Five Oh Eight with a red hot emergency, over.”

  And the emergency pump was carrying the full load. All four of the hydraulic pressure indicator needles pointed at the floor of the airplane, indicating no pressure at all in any of their systems.

  “Black Eagle, War Ace Five Oh Eight in the blind. We cannot hear your answers. We have been shot up by pirates on this SOS contact. May have to eject shortly. We are exiting the area to the south.”

  Just fucking terrific! Shot down by a bunch of fucking pirates! On the high fucking seas in 1973! On a low, slow pass in an unarmed airplane. Of all the shitty luck!

  “Squawk seventy-seven hundred,” Jake said.

  Flap’s hand descended to the IFF box on the consol between them and turned the mode switch to emergency. Just to be sure he dialed 7700 into the windows. Mayday.

  “There’s an island twenty miles ahead,” Flap said. “Go for it. We’ll jump there.”

  The only problem was controlling the plane. It kept wanting to drop one wing or the other. Jake was using full rudder to keep it upright, first right, then left. The stick was almost useless.

  He reached out and flipped the spin assist switch on. This would give him more rudder authority, if the loss of hydraulic pressure hadn’t already made that switch. It must have. The spin assist didn’t help.

  When the left wing didn’t want to come back with full right rudder, he added power on the left engine. Shoved the power lever forward to the stop. That brought it back, but the roll continued to the right. Full left rudder, left engine back, right engine up…and catch it wings level…

  “Seventeen miles.”

  “We aren’t gonna make it.”

  “Keep trying. I don’t want to swim.”

  “Those fuckers!”

  Three thousand feet now. Now if he could just maintain that altitude when the wings rolled…

  They were covering about four and a half nautical miles per minute. How many minutes until they got there? The math was too much and he gave up. And he could see the island ahead. There it was, green and covered with foliage, right there in the middle of the windscreen.

  “Fifteen miles.”

  The roll was left. Full right rudder, left engine up. The roll stopped but the nose came down. Full back stick didn’t help. He ran the trim nose-up as he pulled the right engine to idle.

  The nose was coming up. Yes, coming, so he started the trim nose-down. The wing was slowly rising, oh so slowly, rising…

  They bottomed out at fifteen hundred but the plane began a very slow roll to the right, t
he nose still climbing.

  He reversed the engines and rudder, played with the trim.

  Slowly, agonizingly, the wings responded to the pilot’s inputs. Now the nose fell to the horizon and kept going down.

  Full nose-up trim! He held the button and glanced at the trim indicator on the bottom of the stick. Still nose-down! Come on!

  They bottomed out this time at one thousand feet and the entire cycle began again.

  “We won’t make it the next time,” Jake told Flap.

  “Let’s jump at the top, when the wings and nose are level.”

  “You first and I’ll be right behind you.”

  Nose coming down, right wing coming down, soaring up, up, to…to twenty-three hundred feet.

  “Now,” Jake shouted.

  An explosion and Flap was gone. Jake automatically centered the rudder as he pulled the alternate firing handle. Instantly a tremendous force hit him in the ass. The cockpit disappeared. The acceleration lasted for only an instant, then he began to fall.

  20

  The parachute opened with a shock. As Jake Grafton turned slowly in the shrouds the airplane caught his eye, diving toward the ocean like a wounded gull. The nose rose and it skimmed the sea, then began to climb. It soared skyward in a climbing turn, its right wing hanging low, then the wing fell and the nose went through and it dove straight into the sea. There was a large splash. When the spray cleared only a swirl of foam marked the spot.

  The pirates! Where were they?

  He got his oxygen mask off and tossed it away, then craned his head. He saw the other parachute, lower and intact with Flap swinging from it, but he couldn’t see the pirate ship or its victim.

  Oh, what a fool he’d been. To fly right over a drifting ship with another craft tied to it—and to never once think about the possibility of pirates! These waters were infamous…and the possibility never even crossed his mind. Son of a bitch!

  The sea coming toward him brought him back to the business at hand. There was enough of a swell that the height was easy to judge—and he didn’t have much time. He reached down and pulled the handle on the right side of his seat pan. It opened. The raft fell away and inflated when it reached the end of its lanyard. He felt around for the toggles to the CO2 cartridges that would inflate his life vest. He found them and pulled. The vest puffed up reassuringly.

  Good! Now to ditch this chute when I hit the water.

  Amazingly, the thoughts shot through his mind without conscious effort. This was the result of training. Every time the ship left port the squadron held a safety training day, and part of that exercise involved each flight crewman hanging from a harness in the ready room while wearing full flight gear. Blindfolded, each man had to touch and identify every piece of gear he wore, then run through the proper procedure for ejections over land and sea. Consequently Jake didn’t have to devote much thought to what he needed to do: the actions were almost automatic.

  The wind seemed to be blowing from the west. He was unsure of directions. The way he wanted to go was toward that island—yes, that was south—and the wind was drifting him east. Somehow he also knew this without having to puzzle it out.

  The raft touched the water. He felt for the Koch fittings near his collar bones that attached his parachute harness to the shroud lines and waited. Ready, here it comes, and…He went under. Closing his mouth and eyes automatically as the surge of cold seawater engulfed him, he toggled the fittings as he bobbed toward the surface. He broke water gasping for air.

  The parachute was drifting away downwind. Now, where was that line attached to the raft?

  He fumbled for it and finally realized it was wrapped around his legs or something. He began pulling toward the raft with his arms and finally grabbed the line. In seconds he had the raft in front of him.

  All he had to do was get in.

  The first time he slipped off the raft and went under on his back. Kicking and gasping, he managed to get upright and swing the raft so it was in front of him again.

  This time he tried to force the raft under him. And almost made it before it squirted out and his head went under again.

  The swells weren’t helping. Just when he had the raft figured out, a swell broke over him and he swallowed saltwater.

  Finally, after three or four tries, he got into the raft. He gingerly rolled so that he was on his back and lay there exhausted and gasping.

  A minute or two passed before he realized he was still wearing his helmet. He removed it and looked for a lanyard to tie it to. He might need it again and everything not tied to him was going to be lost overboard sooner or later. He used a piece of parachute shroud line that he had tucked into his survival vest months ago.

  Only then did he remember Flap and start sweeping the horizon for him.

  The radio! He got out his survival radio, checked it, then turned it on. “Flap, this is Jake.”

  No answer.

  Jake lay in his bobbing, corkscrewing raft looking at clouds and thinking about pirates and cursing himself. In a rather extraordinary display of sheer stupidity he had managed to get himself and Flap Le Beau shot out of the sky by a bunch of pirates. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. After the war was over! Not just any Tom, Dick or Harry can put an almost-new, squawk-free A-6E into the goddamn drink! Is that talent or what? The guys at the O Clubs were going to be shaking their heads over this one for a long long time.

  Colonel Haldane was going to shit nails when he heard the happy news.

  He looked at his watch. The damn thing was full of water. It had stopped. Perfect!

  And his ass was six inches deep in water. Occasionally more water slopped in, but since the doughnut hole in which he sat was already full, the overflow merely drained out. Useless to try to bail it.

  Luckily the water wasn’t too cold. Sort of lukewarm. The tropics. And to think real people pay real money to swim in water like this.

  He tried the radio again. This time he got an answer. “Yo, Jake. You in your raft?”

  “Yep. And you?”

  “Nope. It’s like trying to fuck a greased pig.”

  “You hurt?”

  “No. You?”

  “No.”

  “Well, nice talking to you. Now I gotta get into this sonuva-bitching raft.”

  “Pull the damn thing under you. Don’t try to climb into it. Pull it under you.”

  “Call you back after a while.”

  A cigarette. He could sure use a cigarette. He made sure the radio was firmly tied to his survival vest, then laid it in his lap. The cigarettes and lighter were in his left sleeve pocket. He got them out. The cigarettes were sodden. The lighter still worked though, after he blew repeatedly on the flint wheel and dried it off somewhat. It was one of those butane jobs. He extracted a wet cigarette, put it to his lips and lit the lighter. The cigarette refused to burn.

  He put the cigarette back into the pack and stowed the pack away. If he ever managed to get ashore he could dry these things out and smoke them.

  Wait! He had an unopened pack in his survival vest. Still wrapped in cellophane, an unopened pack would be watertight.

  He wanted a cigarette now more than anything else he could think of. He got the left chest pocket of the vest open and felt around inside, trying not to let the rest of the contents spill.

  He found it. Thirty seconds later he had a cigarette lit and was exhaling smoke. Aaah!

  Bobbing up and down, puffing away, he decided he was thirsty. He had two plastic baby bottles full of water in his survival vest. He got one out and opened it, intending to drink only a little. He drained it in two long gulps.

  He almost tossed the empty away, but thought better of it and slipped it back into the vest pocket.

  Something on top of a swell to his left caught his eye, then it was gone. He waited. Flap, sitting in his raft, visible for a second or two before the out-of-sync swells lowered Jake or Flap.

  He checked the radio. He had turned it off. He turned it on again and immediately it
squawked to life. “Jake, Flap.”

  “Hey, I saw you.”

  “I’ve seen you twice. How far apart do you think we are?”

  “A hundred yards?”

  “At least. We’ve got to do some thinking, Jake. We’re going to be out here all night. The ship won’t be close enough to launch a chopper until dawn.”

  Jake looked longingly at the island, the one he and Flap had been trying to reach when they ejected. He saw flashes of green occasionally, but it was miles away. And the wind was blowing at a ninety-degree angle to it.

  “Let’s try to paddle toward each other. If we could get together, tie our rafts together, we’d have a better chance.”

  A better chance. The words sprang to his lips without conscious thought, and now that he had said them he considered their import. A night at sea in one of these pissy little rafts was risky at best. The sea could get a lot rougher, a raft could spring a leak, the pirates might come looking, sharks…

  Sharks!

  A wave of pure terror washed over him.

  “Okay,” Flap said. “You paddle my way and I’ll paddle toward you. I don’t think we can make it before dark but we can try. I’m going to turn my radio off now to save the battery.”

  Jake inspected himself to see if he was injured, if he was bleeding. Adrenaline was like a local anesthetic; he had been far too pumped to feel small cuts and abrasions. If he were bleeding…well, sharks can smell blood in the water for miles and miles.

  He felt his face and neck. Tender place on his neck. He held out his gloved right hand and stared at it: red stain. Blood!