Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 6 - Intruders

by Intruders (lit)

  Stay in, get out, whatever, that's your choice and yours alone. You must five your own life-was "Damn, woman! I'm trying." "I know," she said gently.

  "You know me," he told her.

  "I'm beginning to." comHow are your folks?" "Fine," she said. They talked for several more minutes, then said good-bye.

  The vast bulk of the ship loomed high over the bank of telephone booths. Jake glanced up at the ship, at the tails of the planes sticking over the edge of the flight deck, then lowered his gaze, stuffed his hands into his pockets and walked away.

  The problem was that he had never been able to separate the flying from the rest of it--4he killing, bombing, dying.

  Maybe it couldn't be separated. The My Lai massacre, Lieutenant William Calley, napahn on villages, burning children, American pilots nailed to trees and skinned alive, Viet Cong soldiers tortured for information while Americans watched, North Vietnamese soldiers given airborne interrogationstalk or we'll throw you from the helicopter without a parachute: all of this was tied up with the flying in a Gordian knot that Solomon couldn't unravel.

  He thought he had cut the knot-well, Commander Camparelli and the Navy had cut it for him-last winter in Vietnam. He had picked an unauthorized target, the North Vietnamese capitol building in Hanoi, attacked and almost got it, then faced some very unhappy senior officers across a long green table.

  They knew what their duty was: obey orders from the elected government. What they couldn't fathom was how he, Lieutenant Jake Jackass from Possum Hollow, had lost sight of it.

  We're all in this together. We must keep the faith. Wasn't that what you and your friends were always telling one another when the shit got thick and the blood started flowing?

  We do what we must and die when we must for each other.

  The faith was easier to understand then, easier to keep.

  Now the war was over. Although some people want to keep fighting it, by God, it's over.

  Now the Navy was peacetime cruises, six- to eight-month voyages to nowhere, excruciating separations from loved ones, marriages going on the rocks under the strain, kids growing up with a father who's never there; it's getting scared out of your wits when Lady Luck kisses your ass good-bye; it's seeing people squashed into shark food; it's knowing-knowing all the time, every minute of every day that you may be next.

  The life can be smashed out of you so quick that you'll inhale in this world and exhale in hell.

  Lieutenant Jake Grafton, farmer's son and history major, was going to get on with his life.

  Do something safe, something sane. Something with tangible rewards. Something that allowed him to find a good woman, raise a family, be a father to his children.

  He would bequeath this flying life to dedicated half-wits like Flap Le Beau.

  Yet he would miss the flying.

  This afternoon as Jake Grafton walked along the boulevard that led into downtown Honolulu, huge, benign cumulus clouds were etched against the deep blue sky, seemingly fixed. He would like to fly right now-4o strap on an airplane and leave behind the problems of the ground.

  We are, he well knew, creatures of the earth.

  Its minerals compose our bodies and provide our nourishment. Our cells contain seawater, legacies of ancestors who lived in the oceans. Yet on the surface man evolved, here where there are other animals to kill and eat, edible plants, trees with nuts and fruits, streams and lakes teeming with life. our bodies function best at the temperature ranges, atmospheric pressures and oxygen levels that have prevailed on the earth's surface throughout most of the age of mammals.

  We need the protection from the sun's radiation that the atmosphere Provides. Our senses of smell and hearing use the atmosphere as the transmitting medium. The earth's gravity provides a reference point for our sense of balance and the resistance our muscles and circulatory systems need to ftmction property. The challenges of surviving on the dry surface provided the evolutionary stimulus to develop our brains.

  Without the earth, we would not be the creatures we are.

  And yet we want to leave it, to soar through the atmosphere, to voyage through interplanetary space, to explore other worlds. And to someday leave the solar system and journey to another star. All this while we are still trapped by our physical and psychological limitations here on the surface of the mother planet.

  Sometimes the contradictions inherent in our situation hit him hard. Last fall, while he was hunting targets in North Vietnam as he dodged the flak and SAM'S, Americans again lked on the moon. Less than seventy years after the wa Wright brothers left the surface in powered flight, man stood on the moon and looked back at the home planet glistening amid the infinite black nothingness. They looked while war, hunger, pestilence and man's inhumanity to man continued unabated, continued as it had since the dawn of human history.

  it was a curious thing, hard to comprehend, yet worth pondering on a balmy evening in the tropics with the air laden with fragrant aromas and the surf flopping rhythmically on the beach a few yards away.

  Jake Grafton walked along the beach, stared at the hotels and the people and the relentless surf and thought of all these things.

  An hour later, as he walked back toward the army base with traffic whizzing by, the tops of the lazy large clouds were shot with fire by the setting sun.

  The problem, he decided, was keeping everything in proper perspective. That was hard to do.

  Impossible, really.

  To see man and his problems, the earth and the universe, as they really are one would have to be God.

  The officers' club was full of people, music, light, laughter.

  Jake stood in the entrance for several seconds letting the sensations sink in. He tucked his hat under his belt, then strolled for the bar.

  He heard them before he got to the door.

  "How ugly was she?" three or four voices asked in a shaky unison.

  "She was ugly as a tiger's hairball." Flap's soaring baritone carried clearly. People here in the lounge waiting to combe called for dinner looked at each other, startled.

  "How ugly?" "Ugly as a mud wrestler's navel." Eyebrows soared.

  iss "How ugly?" Eight or ten voices now.

  "Ugly as a pickled pervert's promise." Women giggled and whispered to each other. Several of the gentlemen frowned and turned to stare at the door to the bar. Jake saw one of the men, in his fifties, with short, iron gray hair, wink at his companion.

  "That's not ugly!" "She was so damn ugly that the earth tried to quake and couldn't-it just shivered. So ugly that five drunken sailors pretended they didn't see her. The city painted her red and put a number on her-two dogs relieved themselves on her shoes before I got to the rescue, that's how ugly she was.

  She was so desperately ugly that my zipper welded itself shut. And that, my gentle friends, is the gospel truth." Jake Grafton grinned, squared his shoulders, and walked into the bar.

  THE AIR WAS OPAQUE, THE SUN HIDDEN BY THE MOISTURE IN the air. Two or three miles from the ship in all directions the gray sea and gray sky merged. Columbia was in the midst of an inverted bowl, three days northwest of Pearl laboring through fifteen-foot Swells. The wind was brisk from the west.

  From his vantage point in the cockpit of a KA-613 tanker spotted behind the jet blast deflector-the JBD'-FOR Cat Three, Jake Grafton could see a frigate a mile or so off the port beam. Just ahead, barely visible on the edge of the known universe, he could make out the wake and superstructure of another.

  Jake and Flap were standing the five-minute alert tanker duty, which meant that for two hours they had to sit in the cockpit of this bird strapped in, ready to fire up the engines and tad onto the catapult as soon as the F-4 Phantom that was parked there-also on five-minute alert-launched.

  There was another fighter on five-minute status sitting just short of the hook-up area on Cat Four, and an airborne early warning aircraft, an E-2 Hawkeye, parked with its tail against the island. Sitting on the waist catapult tracks was a manned helicopter, th
e angel, which would have to launch before the catapults could be fired. A power unit with its engine running was plugged into each aircraft, instantly ready to deliver air to turn the engines. All five of the alert birds had been serviced and started, checked to make sure all their systems worked, then shut down.

  The crews were strapped into the airplanes. The pilot of the Phantom on Cat Four was reading a paperback novel, Jake could see, but he couldn't make out the title.

  On the deck behind the waist catapults sat two more fighters and a tanker on alert-fifteen status, which meant that their crews were flaked out in their respective ready rooms wearing all their flight gear, ready to run for the flight deck if the alarm sounded.

  Alert duty kept flight crews busy any time that planes were not aloft. Except in waters just off the shore of the United States, it was rare for a carrier to be below alertthirty status.

  Alert-fifteen was the usual status for the high seas, with alert-five reserved for the South China Sea during the war just ended or other locations where a possible threat existed. Today a possible threat existed. Intelligence expected the Soviets to try to overfly the carrier task group as it transited to Japan with land-based naval bombers from Vladivostok or one of the fields on Sakhalin Island or the Kamchatka peninsula.

  The Russkis were going to have their work cut out for them overflying the ship in this low visibility, Jake thought, if they came at all. He sat watching the frigate on the port beam labor into the swells, ride up and then bury her bow so deep that white spray was flung aft all the way to the bridge.

  Columbia's ride was definitely more pleasant, but Jake could feel her pitching and see the leading edge of the angled deck rise and fall as she rode the restless sea.

  To Jake's right, in the bombardier-navigator's seat, Flap Le Beau was reading a book by Malcolm X. Every time he got to the bottom of a page, he lowered the paperback and glanced around, his eyes scanning several times while he turned the page.

  On one of Flap's periscope sweeps, Jake asked, "That book any good?"............ --Guy sure is interesting," Flap said, and resumed his reading.

  ,what's it about?" comy don't know Malcolm X?" "Uh-uh." comHated honkeys. Believed the races should have their own enclaves, no mixing, that kind of stuff." "Do you believe that?" Jake asked tentatively. Flap was only the second or third black naval aviator Jake had ever met, and he had never discussed race with one 6tHe had some good ideas," Flap said, glancing at Jake.

  "But no, I think the races should be integrated.

  America is for Americans--comblack, white, brown, yellow, green or purple. But what about you? You're from rural Virginia, niggerhating redneck heaven, one-party bigot Politics, pot-gutted klagel sherMore-what d'ya think?" comOil X should've had you writing his speeches-was Jake Grafton wasn't stupid enough to proclaim himself a true believer in racial equality and brotherly love, certainly not to a black man probably capable of forcing him into the bigot cesspool with just a little effort.

  "If this Marine Corps gig goes sour, I might go into politics,,, Flap allowed, then resumed reading his book.

  His father had two black employees on his farm during the years Jake was growing up. They were both huge men, with hands like pie plates and upper arms larger than Jake's thighs. They were barely able to sign their names but they could work any four white men into the dirt- In their younger days they had worked on railroad track-rePair gangs swinging sledgehammers. "Georgia niggers," his father, Sam, had called them. How they came to end up on the Grafton farm Jake never quite understood, but Isaiah and Frank allowed from time to tune that they had ab1s0lutely no intention of crossing the Virginia line south-bound.

  Then they would shake their heads and laugh at some private joke, creating the vision in the boy's mind of bloodthirsty southern sheriffs eager to avenge spectacular, unmentionable crimes.

  Ms father treated the two blacks like the whites he hired occasionally, worked alongside them, shared food and smokes and jokes. Young Jake liked the men inunensely.

  Yet, like most of the boys of his generation in southwestern rural Virginia, he accepted racial segregation as natural, as unremarkable and logical as the deference men showed women and the respect accorded the elderly. That is, he did until 1963, the year he turned eighteen. One evening while watching the network news show footage of Negro children in Birmingham being blasted with streams from high pressure fire hoses, his father had let out an oath.

  "I guess it's a damn good thing that I'm not colored," Sam Grafton declared. "If I were, I'd get me a gun and go to Birmingham and start shooting some of those sons of bitches. And I'd start with that bastard right there!" His finger shot out and Jake found himself staring at the porky visage of Bull Connor.

  "Sam!" exclaimed his mother disgustedly.

  "Martha, what the hell do they have to do to get treated decent by whites? The colored people have put up with a hell of a lot more crap than any Christian should ever have to deal with. Those sons of bitches laying the wood to them aren't Christians.

  They're Nazis. It's a miracle the colored people haven't started shooting the damned swine." "Do you have to cuss like that?" high time some white people got mad at those bigots," Sam Grafton thundered. "I wish Jack Kennedy would get his ass out of his rocking chair and kick some butt. The President of the United States, saying there's nothing he can do when those rednecks attack children! By God, if Bull Connor was black and those kids were white he'd be so' " 9mg a different tune. He's just another gutless politician scared of losing the bigot vote. Pfft!" -- That evening had been an eye-opener for Jake. He started paying attention to the civil rights protests, listening to the arguments.

  His father had always been a bit different than his neighbors, marching to a different drummer. And he was usually right. He was that time, too, his son concluded.

  Remembering that evening, he sighed, then glanced around the flight deck People were lying on the deck beside their equipment, napping.

  He was in the middle of a yawn when he heard the hiss of the flight deck loudspeaker system coming to life.

  "Launch the allert-five. Launch the alert-five. We have bogies inbound." The lounging men on the flight deck sprang into action.

  Jake Grafton twirled his fingers at the plane captain, received a twirl in response.

  He turned on the left engine-fuel master switch and pushed the start button. With a low moan the engine began to turn. When the RPM was high enough he came around the horn with the throttle, then sat watching the temperatures and RPM'S rise while he pulled his hell met on.

  By the time he got the second engine started and the canopy closed, the chopper on the Cat tracks was engaging its rotors. The ship was turning--Jake could see the list on the flight deck-coming about forty degrees left into the wind. Now the deck leveled out. The Columbia's rudder was centered. Thirty seconds later the angel lifted off. it left the deck straight ahead. When it was safely past the bow the chopper pilot laid it into a right turn. out of the Now the catapult shuttles were dragged back ected water brakes into battery while the final checkers insp the two fighters and gave their thumbs-up. Red-shirted ordnance-men pulled the safety pins from the missile racks and taxi director showed them to the pilots. The yellOw-shirted gave the pilot of the plane in front of Jake a come-ahead signal and let him inch the last two feet forward Onto Cat Three while the green-shirted catapult hook-up men crawled underneath with the bridle and two more greenies installed the hold-back bar, on the Phantom a ten comfoot-long hinged strap with the hold-back shear-bolt attaching to the airplane's belly and the other end going into a slot in the deck.

  The weight-board man flashed his board at the Pilot and got a thumbs-up, then showed it to the Cat Officer, who also rogered. The whole performance was a ballet of multicOlored shirts darting around, near and under the moving fighter, each man intent on doing his job perfectly.

  As the taxiing fighter reached the maximum extent of the hold-back bar, the JBIGGNESS came up, three panels that would deflect the e
xhaust of the launching aircraft from the plane behind.

  Now Jake saw the Phantom lower its tail-- actually the nose-gear strut was extended eighteen inches to improve the angle-of-attack.

  He saw the cat officer twirl his fingers above his head for full power and heard the thunderous response from the Phantom, saw the river of black smoke blasted upward by the JBD, felt his plane tremble from the fury of those two engineand The fighter pilot checked his controls, and the stabilator and rudder waggled obediently. Thumbs-up flashed from the squadron final checkers.