The Intruders jg-6

by Stephen Coonts

  Aww, fuck! It just wasn’t fair!

  “The gooks damn near killed me over North Vietnam a dozen times! It’s a miracle I’m still alive. And now you feed me a shit sandwich.”

  That just popped out. Dick Donovan didn’t seem to hear. It dawned on Jake that the commander probably couldn’t be swayed with sour grapes.

  In desperation, Jake attacked in the only direction remaining. “The jarheads maintain their planes with ball peen hammers and pipe wrenches,” he roared, his voice beyond its owner’s control. “Their planes are flying deathtraps.”

  When Donovan didn’t reply to this indisputable truth, Jake lost the bubble completely. “You can’t do this to me! I—”

  “Wanna bet?”

  * * *

  There were three staff instructors seated at stools at the bar nursing beers when Jake walked into the O Club. The afternoon sun streamed through the tall windows. If you squinted against the glare you could see the long lazy reach of Puget Sound, placid in the calm evening, more like a pond than an arm of the sea. If you looked closely though, you could see the rise and fall of gentle swells.

  Jake broke the news that he was on his way to the Marine squadron going aboard Columbia. He could see by the looks on their faces that they already knew. Bad news rides a fast horse.

  Heads bobbed solemnly.

  “Well, shore duty gets old quick.”

  “Yeah. Whidbey ain’t bad, but it ain’t Po City.”

  Their well-meaning remarks gave Jake no comfort, although he tried to maintain a straight face. Not being a liberty hound, the whores and whiskey of Olongapo City in the Philippines had never been much of an attraction for him. He felt close to tears. This was what he wanted more of — the flying without combat, an eight-thousand-foot runway waiting for his return, relaxed evenings on dry land with mountains on the horizon, the cool breeze coming in off the sound, delicious weekends to loaf through.

  The injustice of Donovan’s decision was like a knife in his gut. It was his turn, yet he was leaving all the good stuff and going back to sea!

  “Lucky you aren’t married,” one of the barflies said. “A little cruise in the middle of a shore tour would drive a lot of wives straight to the divorce court.”

  That remark got them talking. They knew four men who were in the process of getting divorces. The long separations the Navy required of families were hell on marriages. While his companions gossiped Jake’s thoughts turned morosely to Callie. She was a good woman, and he loved her. He could see her face, feel her touch, hear her voice even now.

  But her father! That jerk! A flash of heat went through him, then flickered out as he surveyed the cold ashes of his life.

  “Things happen to Marines,” Tricky Nixon was saying when Jake once again began paying attention to the conversation.

  Tricky was a wiry, dark, compact man. Now his brows knitted. “Knew a Marine fighter pilot once. Flew an F-4. He diverted from the ship into Cecil Field one night. Black night. You guys know Cecil, big as half of Texas, with those parallel runways?”

  His listeners nodded. Tricky took another swig of beer. After he swallowed and cleared his throat, he continued: “For reasons known only to God, he plunked his mighty Phantom down between those parallel runways. In the grass. Hit the radar shack head-on, smacked it into a million splinters.”

  Tricky sighed, then continued: “The next day the squadron maintenance officer went into Cecil on the COD, looked the plane over pretty good, had it towed outta the dirt onto a taxi-way, then filled it with gas and flew it back to the ship. It was a little scratched up but nothing serious. Things happen to Marines.”

  They talked about that — about the odds of putting a tactical jet with a landing weight of 45,000 pounds down on grass and not ripping one or more of the gear off the plane.

  “I knew a Marine once,” Billy Doyle said when the conversation lagged, “who forgot to pull the power back when he landed. He was flying an F-4D.”

  His listeners nodded.

  “He went screeching down the runway with the tires smoking, went off the end and drove out across about a half mile of dirt. Went through the base perimeter fence and across a ditch that wiped off the landing gear. Skidded on across a road, and came to rest with the plane straddling a railroad track. He sat there awhile thinking it over, then finally shut ’er down and climbed out. He was standing there looking ’er over when a train came along and plowed into the wreck. Smashed it to bits.”

  They sipped beer while they thought about forgetting to pull the throttle to idle on touchdown, about how it would feel sitting dazed in the cockpit of a crashed airplane with the engine still running as the realization sank in that you had really screwed the pooch this time. Really screwed the pooch.

  “Things happen to Marines,” Billy Doyle added.

  “Their bad days can be spectacular,” Bob Landow agreed in his bass growl. He was a bear of a man, with biceps that rippled the material of his shirt. “Marine F-8 pilot was trans-Pacing one time, flying the pond.”

  He paused and lubricated his throat while his listeners thought about flying a single-seat fighter across the Pacific, about spending ten or twelve hours strapped to an ejection seat in the tiny cockpit.

  Landow’s growl broke the silence. “The first time he hit the tanker for gas, the fuel cells overpressurized and ruptured. Fuel squirted out of every orifice. It squirted into the engine bay and in seconds the plane caught fire.

  “At this point our Marine decides to eject. He pulls the face curtain. Nothing happens. But not yet to sweat, because he has the secondary handle between his legs. He gives that a hell of a jerk. Nothing. He just sits there in this unejectable seat in this burning aircraft with fuel running out of every pore over the vast Pacific.

  “This is turning into a major-league bad day. He yanks on the handle a couple more times like King Kong with a hard on. Nothing happens. Gawdalmighty, he’s getting excited now. He tries jettisoning the canopy. Damn thing won’t go off. It’s stuck. This is getting seriouser and seriouser.

  “The plane is burning like a blowtorch by this time and he’s getting really excited. He pounds and pounds at the canopy while the plane does smoky whifferdills. Finally the canopy departs. Our Marine is greatly relieved. He unstraps and prepares to climb out. This is an F-8, you understand, and if he makes it past that tail in one piece he will be the very first. But he’s going to give it a try. He starts to straighten up and the wind just grabs him and whoom — he’s out — free-falling toward the ocean deep and blue. Out, thank God, out!

  “He falls for a while toward the Pacific thinking about Marine maintenance, then decides it’s time to see if the parachute works. It wasn’t that kind of a day. Damn thing streams.”

  “No!” several of his listeners groaned in unison.

  “I shit you not,” Bob Landow replied. He helped himself to more beer as his Marine fell from an indifferent sky toward an indifferent sea with an unopened parachute streaming behind him.

  “What’s the rest of it?” Tricky demanded.

  Landow frowned. There is a certain pace to a good sea story, and Tricky had a bad habit of rushing it. Not willing to be hurried, Landow took another sip of beer, then made a show of wiping his lips with a napkin. When he had the glass back on the bar and his weight lifter’s arms crossed just so, he said, “He had some Marine luck there at the end. Pulled strings like a puppeteer and got a few panels of the rag to blossom. Just enough. Just enough.”

  He shook his head wearily and settled a baleful gaze on Jake Grafton. “Things happen to Marines. You be careful out there, Jake.”

  “Yeah,” Jake told them as he glanced out the window at the reflection of small puffy clouds on the limpid blue water. “I will.”

  3

  Jake Grafton was dressed in khakis and wearing his leather flight jacket when he stepped onto the catwalk around the flight deck. The sun was out, yet to the west a layer of fog obscured the higher buildings of San Francisco and all of the Gold
en Gate Bridge except the tops of the towers. The gentle breeze had that moist, foggy feeling. Jake shivered and tugged his ball cap more firmly onto his head.

  The pier below was covered with people. The pilot rested his elbows on the railing of the catwalk and stood taking it all in, listening to the cacophony of voices.

  Sailors, Marines, officers and chiefs stood surrounded by their families. Children were everywhere, some clinging to their mothers, others running through the crowd chasing one another, the smaller ones being passed from hand to hand by the adults.

  A band was tuning up on Elevator Two, which was in the down position and stuck out over the pier like a porch roof. Even as Jake watched, the conductor got the attention of his charges and whipped them into a Sousa march.

  On the pier near the stern another band was assembling. No doubt that was the Naval Air Station band, which tooted for every ship’s departure. Well and good, but Columbia had a band too and apparently the ship’s XO thought there couldn’t be too much music.

  Above Jake’s head the tails of aircraft stuck out precariously over the edge of the flight deck and cast weird shadows on the crowded pier. Occasionally he could see people lift their gaze to take in the vast bulk of the ship and the dozens of aircraft. Then the people turned their attention back to their loved one.

  Last night he had stood in line at one of the dozen phone booths on the head of the pier. The rain had subsided to occasional drips. When his turn for the booth came, he had called his folks in Virginia, then Callie. It was after midnight in Chicago when she answered.

  “Callie, this is Jake.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On the pier at Alameda. Did you get my letters?”

  “I received three.”

  He had written the letters and mailed them from Oceana, where he had been sent to do field carrier qualifications with a group of students from VA-42. He had completed his field quals, of course, but didn’t go to the ship. There hadn’t been time. He would have to qual aboard Columbia after she sailed. He needed ten day and six night traps because it had been over six months since his last carrier landing.

  “Another letter is on the way,” he told Callie, probably a superfluous comment. “You’ll get it in a day or two.”

  “So how is the ship?”

  “It’s a ship. What can I say?”

  “When do you sail?”

  “Seven-thirty in the morning.”

  “So when I wake up you’ll be at sea.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  They talked desultorily for several minutes, the operator came on the line and Jake fed in more quarters, then he got down to it. “Callie, I love you.”

  “I know you do. Oh, Jake, I’m so sorry your visit was such a disaster.”

  “I am too. I guess these things just happen sometimes. I wish…” And he ran out of steam. A phone booth on a pier with dozens of sailors awaiting their turn didn’t seem the place to say what he wished.

  “You be careful,” she said.

  “You know me, Callie. I’m always careful.”

  “Don’t take any unnecessary chances.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I want you to come back to me.”

  Now Jake stood watching the crowd and thinking about that. She wanted him to come back to her.

  He took a deep breath and sighed. Ah me, life is so strange. Just when everything looks bleakest a ray of sunshine comes through the clouds. Hope. He had hope. She wouldn’t have said something like that unless she meant it, not Callie, not to a guy going on an eight-month cruise.

  He was standing there listening to the two bands playing different tunes at the same time, watching the crowd, watching sailors and women engage in passionate kisses, when he saw the Cadillac. A pink Cadillac convertible with the top down was slowly making its way down the pier. People flowed out of its way, then closed in behind it, like water parting for a boat.

  Cars were not allowed on the pier. Yet there it was. A man in a white uniform was driving, yet all of his passengers were women, young women, and not wearing a lot of clothing either. Lots of brown thighs and bare shoulders were on display, several truly awesome bosoms.

  In complete disregard of the regulations, the car made its way to the foot of the officers’ gangway and stopped. The driver got out and stretched lazily as he surveyed the giant gray ship looming beside the pier. The women bounded out and surrounded him.

  It’s Bosun Muldowski! Who else could it be? No sailor could get a car past the guards at the head of the pier and few officers under flag rank. But a warrant officer four? Yep.

  Muldowski.

  He had been the flight deck bosun on Shiloh, Jake’s last ship. Apparently he was coming to Columbia. Now Jake remembered — Muldowski never did shore duty tours. He had been going from ship to ship for over twenty-five years.

  Look at those women in hot pants and short short skirts!

  Sailors to the right and left of Jake in the catwalk shouted and shrieked wolf whistles. Muldowski took no notice but the women waved prettily, which drew lusty cheers from the on-looking white hats.

  With the bosun’s bags out of the trunk of the car, he took his time hugging each of the women, all five of them, as the bands blared mightily and spectator sailors watched in awe.

  “The bosun must own a whorehouse,” one sailor down the catwalk told his friends loud enough for Jake to hear.

  “He sure knows how to live,” his buddy said approvingly.

  “Style. He’s got style.”

  Jake Grafton grinned. Muldowski’s spectacular arrival had just catapulted him to superstardom with the white hats, which was precisely the effect, Jake suspected, that the bosun intended. The deck apes would work like slaves for him until they dropped in their tracks.

  All too soon the ship’s whistle sounded, bullhorns blared and sailors rushed to single up the lines holding the great ship to the land. The men on the pier gave their women one last passionate hug, then dashed for the gangways. As seven bells sounded over the ship’s PA system, cranes lifted the gangways clear and deposited them on the pier.

  The last of the lines were released and the ship began to move, very slowly at first, almost imperceptibly. Slowly the gap between the pier and the men crowding the rails widened.

  Sailors tossed their Dixie cups at the pier and children scurried like rats to retrieve them. The strains of “Anchors Aweigh” filled the air.

  When the pier was several hundred feet away and aft of the beam, Jake felt a rumble reach him through the steel on which he stood. The screws were biting. The effect was noticeable. The pier slid astern slowly at first, then with increasing speed.

  Now the pilot climbed to the flight deck and threaded his way past tie-down chains toward the bow, where he joined a loose knot of men leaning into the increasing wind. Ahead was the Bay Bridge, then the Golden Gate. And the fog beyond the Golden Gate was dissipating.

  The ship had cleared the Bay Bridge and was steaming at eight or ten knots past Alcatraz when the loudspeaker sounded. “Flight Quarters, flight quarters. All hands man your flight quarters station.”

  The cruise had begun.

  * * *

  Jake was in the locker room donning his flight gear when a black Marine in a flight suit came in. He had railroad tracks pinned to the shoulders of his flight suit, so he was a captain, the Marine equivalent of Jake’s Navy rank of lieutenant. He looked Jake over, nodded to a couple Marines who were also suiting up to get some traps, then strolled over to Jake.

  “They call me Flap. I guess we’re flying together.”

  The BN had his hair cut in the Marine Corps’ version of an Afro — that is, it stuck out from his head about half an inch and was meticulously tapered on the sides and back. He was slightly above medium height, with the well-developed chest and bulging muscles that can only be acquired by thousands of hours of pumping iron. He looked to be in his late twenties, maybe thirty at the most.

  “Jake Grafton. You’re Le Beau?�
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  “Yep.”

  “How come you weren’t at the brief?”

  “Hey, man. This is CQ!” CQ meant carrier qualification. “All we’re gonna do is fly around this bird farm with the wheels down, dangling our little hook thingy. This is your bag. You can hack it, can’t ya?”

  Jake decided to change the subject. “Where you from?”

  “Parris Island. Get it? Le Beau? French name? Parris Island?”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Don’t let this fine chocolate complexion fool you, my man. It’s French chocolate.”

  “French shit,” said one of Le Beau’s fellow Marines.

  “Eat it, butt breath,” Flap shot back. “I’m black with a seasoning of Creole.”

  “Sorta like coffee with cream,” Jake Grafton remarked as he zipped up his torso harness.

  “Yeah man. That’s exactly right. There was a planter in Louisiana, Le Beau, with a slobbering craving for black poontang. After the Civil War he took personal offense when his former slaves adopted his last name. They did it ’cause most of them was his sons and daughters. But Le Beau didn’t like the thought of being recognized in history as a patriarch, didn’t want to admit his generous genetic contributions to improving a downtrodden race. Hung a couple of his nigger kids, he did. So all the blacks in the parish adopted the name. More damn black Le Beaus in that section of Louisiana than you could shake a stiff dick at. Now that redneck Cajun planter bigot was one of my many great-great-grandpappys, of whom I am so very proud.”

  “Terrific,” said Jake Grafton, who checked to see that the laces of his new G-suit were properly adjusted.

  “We heard you were coming. The Nav just didn’t think us gyrenes could handle all this high tailhook tech. So we heard they were sending an ace Navy type to indoctrinate us ignorant jarheads, instruct us, lead the way into a better, brighter day.”

  Grafton didn’t think that comment worth a reply.

  “It’ll be a real pleasure,” said Flap Le Beau warmly as he grabbed his torso harness from his locker, “flying with a master hookster. Just think of me as a student at the fount of all wisdom, an apprentice seeking to acquire insights into the nuances of the arcane art, appreciate the—”