The valley became serpentine. The altimeter revealed they were climbing rapidly. Not much farther now. "Master arm," he said over the radio. Cole flipped the switch with his left hand, then fingered the other armament switches to satisfy himself that they were in the correct positions.
Jake saw the end of the valley ahead, a gentle up slope t a ridge not quite touching the clouds. The green forest seemed planes as they shot up the slope.
ouh the bombsight glass, Grafton saw the ridge and the flashing guns that lined the treeless summit. Streaks of white-hot artillery shells veined the air.
They cant miss. They can't. We're too close. Jake sensed the white bolts racing straight for the cockpit, then, at the last possible instant, veer away and flash to the right or left or over.
They can't miss. They can't. We're too close.
He looked down as he crossed the naked summit. Impressed on his brain for as long as he had yet to live was the confused image of flashing guns, men in black loading and firing the weapons, and rising dust clouds.
He glanced across at Corey Ford and the Boxman and saw that their plane was almost abreast about a hundred feet away. A streak of fire ripped aft from its belly. Then the machine exploded.
The fireball was yellow with a white core. It slowed as it expanded and disappeared behind.
Jake and Little Augie swept down into the valley.
"They got Ford," Little said over the radio.
"There's the runway," Cole told him. The narrow valley was filled with the rising streaks from automatic weapons. The dust devils created by the hammering guns lined the sides of the runway like sentries from a netherworld. Knowing that Little would take the right, Jake aimed his plane down the trees on the left side of the runway. He held the plane level and let the ground fall away.
Whump!
The Intruder took a sledgehammer blow. The pilot's eves flicked to the instrument panel right RPM un winding, right exhaust gas temperature climbing. He chopped the throttle on the dying engine to cutoff and began a hard turn to the left to climb the ridge.
Panic and revulsion welled up in him and he thought, (lot to get the hell out of here before they get the other engine!
Then from the middle of the tree line halfway down the runway a glint of light on silver caught his eye. A MiG!
What the hell! We're dead anyway!
Jake flung the plane towards the MiG. As the target reached the bottom of the sight glass, he brought his thumb down on the bomb-release pickle. He felt the small, slow thumps as the Rockeyes kicked off the racks, a pair each third of a second.
A stream of white streaks licked across the top of the canopy and smashed into the Intruder's tail. The needle on the airspeed indicator flipped to zero.
On the west end of the airfield only two lone artillery pieces blasted into the sky.
With the last of the bombs gone, he pulled the plane left and up. He would climb the ridge. One last look over his shoulder at the airfield. A fireball was rising from the trees. "Got one," he whispered.
The clouds enveloped them. "We should have come in from the west," he told Cole.
Back over the ocean Jake reported on covered Strike frequency the loss of his wingman to the ship. He told them that if they sent another strike it should come in from the west and get up into the clouds off target. Then he called Little to arrange a rendezvous.
The other A-6 appeared as a white seed floating in a sunbleached sky. The seed sprouted wings and a tail. Soon Jake could distinguish the men in the cockpit. Little Augie brought his plane in alongside until Jake could see each rivet, each streak of oil, each smudge of dirt.
"You have four or five nice holes in the tail, Jake." Augie slid under and lingered there, then surfaced on the right side. "No holes around the right intake. Can't see anything. Maybe something went down the intake?" Something sure as hell had, something launched from a gun barrel. "You have two small holes in the right flap, Jake. And some bad dings in the armor plate over the right engine. Other than that...."
Jake and Cole examined the other A-6 inch by inch and found only a small hole in the left horizontal stabilizer.
When Jake had the lead again, he dropped his hook, then raised it. He tested the gear and flaps. The plane tended to slew right or left as he added or subtracted power, but this was normal for single-engine flight and easily corrected with rudder. "You look pretty good to me," Little informed him. Jake raised the gear and dropped the nose to get enough airspeed to raise the flaps. The extent of the damage was reported to the ship, and in a few moments the Strike controller ordered Jake to land aboard rather than divert to Da Nang.
The damaged Intruder was the last jet aboard the ship. Jake flew a straight-in approach without speed brakes. He knew that the most co on error of single-engine approaches was a pilot's reluctance to reduce power on the good engine for fear of entering a descent that the one enjjne could not break, so he concentrated on reducing power when necessary and an doubling his power additions. He caught the three wire, and Cole said, "Not bad for a single-engine approach."
The wings folded slowly because only one hydraulic pump supplied the pressure. He was directed to the number-two elevator and was immediately lowered to the hangar deck. After taxiing off the elevator into the cavernous bay and waiting for the blue-shirted men of the tie-down crew to install chocks and chains, he opened the canopy and chopped the engine.
A crowd of somber men waited at the foot of the boarding ladder. Grafton took refuge in the familiar tasks-lifting the safety latches on the ejection seat handles, securing the proper switches, and unfastening the lapbelt and parachute riser fittings. When he could put the moment off no longer, he climbed from the cockpit and lowered himself down the ladder.
Cowboy met him. "I'm sorry, shipmate."
Jake Grafton began to weep. He had not cried since his grandmother had died when he was sixteen. Cowboy and Sammy Lundeen led him to a stairwell off the hangar deck where he sat on the ladder.
Cowboy closed the hatch leading to the hangar bay and lit a cigarette that he passed to Jake. "Have his hands been like that very long?" Jake heard Cowboy ask Sammy.
The raw smoke after two hours on oxygen scoured his lungs. The cigarette burned out when the fire reached the filter. Carefully he put the butt in his left sleeve pocket. "I'm all right now," Jake said. He stood up and looked his roommate in the eye. "I made the wrong choice. I should've come in from the west."
"You couldn't have known that." Sammy put his hand on Jake's shoulder. "Hang in there, Jake. Hang in."
Jake nodded. He would try. But it was becoming more and more difficult, and he was getting so damned tired.
TWENTY
He woke up and looked at his watch: eight o'clock, but A.M. or P.m.? He heard Sammy snoring in the bunk overhead, so he decided that it must be eight at night or Sammy would be on duty. He lay there awhile, trying to brush aside the shrouds hanging over his memory. He recalled a large red capsule held out to him in the white palm of Mad Jack. He had downed the sedative without waiting for water. Why had he been so willing? The sounds of the ship echoed in his ears, and the sight of the plane exploding in a fireball replayed in his mind. Corey Ford and the Boxman, that was why.
The sedative had left him with a headache. He inched one leg out of bed and lowered his foot to the floor. The other leg followed. He rested. Finally, slowly, he raised his body until he was sitting. He lurched over to the sink and wet a facecloth. Collapsing back on the bunk, he put the cold cloth on his forehead. Ite had done this so many times before-for hangovers.
Lying there in the darkness, he tried to draw the maximum benefit from the cool cloth over his eyes even while scenes from the previous morning's flight kept flashing into his returning consciousness. After fifteen minutes he was fully awake. He threw the washcloth toward the sink. He changed his underwear any dressed in a khaki uniform, grabbed his flight jacke and shut the door behind him.
He found Devil 502, the plane he had flown thi previo
us day, in a corner of the hangar where machine were stored that were badly damaged or awaiting spar parts. Devil 502 had become a hangar queen. Well, thi goddamn computer had never worked properly, any way. Still, the old girl had held together and has brought back Cole and him.
He climbed up a work stand placed against the rea of the fuselage and stepped across to the horizonta stabilizer. The holes in the tail were about three quarters of an inch in diameter and went clear through Five of them. Peering through one jagged hole, he sav that the internal structure had been damaged, ons metal stringer being completely severed.
Lieutenant Commander Joe Wagner, the squadron maintenance officer, stood near the nose of the plan and Jake climbed down to join him. "Really a mess huh?" Wagner called.
Jake nodded.
"You're a lucky man, Grafton, a lucky man. I jus came up here to look at this wreck again and marvel a your luck and see if some'll rub off on me."
Jake snorted. "You wouldn't want my luck."
"Don't be so sure. See those holes? My guess i fourteen point five millimeter. One, maybe two, o those shells had explosive heads. But they didn't ex plode. That's where you were extremely fortunate because if they had you might have lost half the vertica fin. I don't know if this thing will fly with half a tail Those shells penetrated the only spot on this plane tha has so little resistance that the contact fuses in the shell, weren't crushed. Come here, I'll show you something else." He led Jake over to the right intake and stooc back so Jake could see.
Most of the axial fairing inside the intake was gone, and the compressor blades were badly twisted and bent. "I suspect that shell was a thirty-sevenmillimeter, a big momma. It hit dead center on that fairing and smashed it, and the pieces of the fairing were sucked into the compressor. Luckily you shut this engine down right quick, or the compressor blades would've been flung off through the fuselage, cutting this aluminum skin like a knife through butter. On the inside, the blades probably would have cut into the main fuel cell, and fuel would have shot back onto that hot engine, and this plane would have blown up about one-thousandth of a second later. Even if the blades didn't cut into the fuel cell, if you'd kept the engine turning at power, it would have torn itself off its mounts since the first two bearings were destroyed by the shell."
Jake Grafton nodded. "A thousandth of a second. That is just about how long Ford and Box had. They were there, then they were gone in a fireball."
Joe Wagner looked away. "Maybe an explosive shell in the main fuel cell. Maybe a shell hit one of the bombs and detonated it. We'll never know."
They talked awhile, then Jake left Joe and climbed to the flight deck. He picked his way aft until he reached the island, then he descended to the catwalk. An ammunition ship lay alongside the enormous Shiloh Jake could see down onto the bridge of the supply ship, which rose and fell with the swells much more than the carrier. Deadly weapons flowed from the smaller vessel to the larger. Wires spanned the space between the two ships, and the bombs swung across, occasionally dipping into the swells. Jake watched the operation-the forklifts darting here and there, the men struggling with the heavy crates of unfused bombs-and felt it had no connection with his deliveries of the same bombs.
He turned up the collar of his flight jacket and walked away.
The flight schedule told him he had two watches in Pri-Fly after the sun came up. It was now only midnight. Restless, unable to sleep, he made his way down to the dirty-shirt wardroom where he ate a hamburger as the space reverberated under the pile-driver strokes of the bow catapults launching the first flights of the new day. When the catapult shuttles smashed to a stop in the water brakes, making a stupendous crash, the room shook and the crockery rattled. Jake lingered over his coffee and smoked a cigarette as he thought about the men riding the catapults into the night sky. When the launch was over he doused his butt in the coffee cup and left for the ready room to check his mail, hoping for a letter from Callie. Tonight, though, his mailbox contained only official paperwork. Taking a seat, he began to plow through it.
After a few moments he sensed that New Guy was surreptitiously watching him from his chair at the duty officer's desk. Except for the two of them, the room was empty. Jake kept his eyes locked on the paperwork. What was New thinking? Was he angry at Grafton, or perhaps at Ford and Box for having the ill grace to get killed? Or was he angry at himself, comparing himself with the pilots who passed through the ready room? New Guy had once been one of them, had once sat in the padded chairs and had listened to the briefs. Like them, he had opened his locker and reached in for his survival vest, G-suit, and torso harness, and smelled the stale sweat and remembered the past terrors even as he prepared to go aloft again. Was he ashamed of himself for quitting? If so, he vnnddnt blame himself long. He'd blame others: the skipper, the system, the other pilots, or his wife.
The phone on the duty officer's desk rang, and New Guy seized it as if it were a rope thrown to a drowning man. When he hung up he kept his hand on the telephone and said, "Jake, the Skipper wants to see you in his stateroom."
Moving slowly, Jake returned his papers to the mailbox. He glanced back at New Guy on his way out and saw that he was slumped over the flight schedule, rereading yet again the names of those men among whom he had once counted himself.
Jake's knock was answered with a grunt. He entered and found the Old Man at his desk and Cowboy Parker on the bunk, looking grim. Commander Camparelli looked Jake over from head to toe, then waved in the direction of the couch.
Camparelli lit a cigarette and ran his fingertips through his crewcut. Jake waited while he scanned a document. The skipper edged around in his chair and eyed Grafton. "A dead bombardier, a plane blown out of the sky, and now this." He shook the paper in his hand and scrutinized Grafton as if he were a scientific curiosity. "Do you know what this is?"
"No, sir."
"This is a secret message from me to Seventh Fleet, with copies to everyone in the chain of command. Your name's smeared all over it. Care to guess what tidbits about you this little missive contains?"
Jake shook his head.
"Yesterday I was up in Mission Planning looking at the order-of-battle SAM charts and for the life of me I couldn't find all those SAM sites that fired at you when you were going after the Bac Giang power plant. So I looked up the daily intelligence reports and asked a couple questions here and there. Then I sat down and had a friendly chat with your pal Steiger. What do you think he might have said?"
"I don't know, sir." Jake's breathing quickened.
"Too bad. I would bet a thousand dollars you could've guessed." His face was contorted and the veins in his neck stood out. "Mister Steiger had a confession to make. This happened after he tried to explain why all those missiles you dodged around Bac Giang were not in the intelligence report or on the maps, even though I'd given him a direct order to include them. Seems he knew the sites weren't exactly where you said they were in your after-action report." His voice rose to a parade-ground bellow. "In short, he said you and Cole weren't around Bac Giang when those SAMs were trying to asshole you. He allowed as how you were down over Hanoi on a little private party."
Jake dropped his eyes.
"So it's true, huh? Do you have any idea just what the hell you've done? Before I get through with you, you're going to wish to God it had been you instead of McPherson that stopped that fucking bullet. Stand at attention, Mister Grafton." The "mister" curled off his lips contemptuously.
Jake snapped to attention, eyes fastened on the bulkhead. Camparelli moved to within inches of tin. "I've been in the navy for twenty years and worked my ass off to get this command. Now, behind my back, you've abused the trust, my trust, and the trust of every officer in this squadron. My God, don't you understand that the military runs on trust? No one except your bombardier can ride in that plane with you. If you can't, or won't, follow orders, you're not worth a tinkcx's damn. Even that chicken half-wit New is worth ten of you. I can trust him to be a yellow coward. But I can trust Itim
. Do you understand me?" He shouted the last question.
Jake's gaze rested on the Old Man's accusing eyes. "You took an oath, Grafton, when you got your wmaknion. `I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and obey the orders of the officers appointed over no' That's the same oath every officer in the navy has sworn for damn-near two hundred years. And you violated that oath. You disobeyed." The skipper sat down. "Keep your eyes on that bulkhead, mister."
When Camparelli spoke again, his voice was more controlled but still bitter. "People are spitting on soldiers and sailors in airports and bus stations all over America. ROTC cadets refuse to wear their uniforms because they're cursed at and ridiculed. Can you believe that? Americans spitting on the men who have sworn to defend them, on the men who've sworn to obey the orders of the elected, civilian government." He pounded his fist on his desk. "For two hundred years the military has obeyed the civilians who were the elected government. Those civilians were not always wise, not always right, sometimes not even very smart. In fact, many presidents of this country have been hack politicians with no qualification for the job other than the fact that they fooled a majority of the people. But even the worst hacks are obeyed. Do you know why? Can you guess?"
Flight of the Intruder Page 28