The Intruders jg-6

by Stephen Coonts

  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…

  And he had tried hard. He had taken the time, made the effort to do it right. He had written point after point, gone through the CV NATOPS page by page, paragraph by paragraph. He had covered every facet of carrier operations that he knew about. And had forgotten one item, a scintilla of information that he had heard once, somewhere, about an improperly secured VDI that slid four inches out of the tray in which it sat when the plane went down the catapult. Probably there were messages about it, several years ago, but the Marines didn’t take cat shots then and the info apparently went in one official grunt ear and out the other. Now, when they needed to know that tidbit, he had forgotten to tell them.

  Luck is really a miserable bitch. Just when you desperately need her to behave she sticks the knife in and twists it, leering at you all the while.

  Rory Smith was dead. No bringing him back. All the teeth gnashing, hair pulling, hand wringing and confessions in the world won’t raise him from the Pacific and breathe life back into his shattered body. The cockpit of War Ace 511 was his coffin. He was in it now, down there on the sea floor. The sea will claim his body and the airplane molecule by molecule, until someday nothing remains. He will then be a part of this ocean, a part of the clouds and the trade winds and the restless blue water.

  Jake opened his safe and got out a bottle of whiskey. He poured himself a drink, raised it to Rory Smith, and swallowed it down.

  The liquor made him sleepy. He climbed into the top bunk.

  This guilt trip was not good. Yet at least it gave him the proper perspective to view the flying, the ship, the Navy, and all those dead men. Morgan McPherson, the Boxman, Frank Allen, Rory Smith, all those guys. All good dead men. All good. All dead. All dead real damn good.

  He was going to get out of the Navy, submit a letter of resignation.

  Never again. I’m not going to stand in the ready room any more helplessly watching videotapes of crashes. I’m not going to any more memorial services. I’m not packing any more guys’ personal possessions in steel footlockers and sending them off to the parents or widow with any more goddamn little notes telling them how sorry I am. I’m not going to keep lying to myself that I am a better pilot than they were and that is why they are dead and I’m not. I’ve done all that shit too much. The guys that still have the stomach for it can keep doing it until they are each and every one of them as dead as Rory Smith but I will not. I have had enough.

  10

  Jake and Flap flew a tanker hop the next afternoon, which was the last scheduled flying day before the ship entered Pearl Harbor. They were in the high orbit, flying the five-mile arc around the ship at 20,000 feet, when Flap said, “I hear you are putting in a letter of resignation.”

  Since it wasn’t a question, Jake didn’t reply. He had talked to the first-class yeoman in the air wing office this morning, and apparently the yeoman talked to the Marines.

  “That right?” Flap demanded.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, you are one amazing dude. Yesterday afternoon you dropped six five-hundred-pounders visually and got four bull’s-eyes, then did six system bore-sights and got three more. Seven bull’s-eyes out of twelve bombs. That performance puts you first in the squadron, by the way.”

  This comment stirred Jake Grafton. In the society of warriors to which he belonged it was very bad form to brag, to congratulate yourself or listen placidly while others congratulated you on your superb flying abilities. The fig leaf didn’t have to cover much, but modesty required that he wave it. “Pure luck,” Jake muttered. “The wind was real steady, which is rare, and—”

  Flap steamed on, uninterested in fig leaves. “Then you motor back to the ship and go down the slide like you’re riding a rail, snag an okay three-wire, find out a guy crashed, announce it’s all your fault because you knew something he didn’t, and submit a letter of resignation. Now is that weird or what?”

  “I didn’t announce anything was my fault.”

  “Horse shit. You announced it to yourself.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I had a little talk with the Real McCoy last night,” Flap explained. “You were moping down in your room. You sure as hell weren’t crying over Rory Smith — you hardly knew the guy. You were feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “What an extraordinary insight, Doctor Freud! I can see now why I’m so twisted — when I was a kid my parents wouldn’t let me screw my kitty cat. Send me a bill for this consultation. In the meantime shut the fuck up!”

  Silence followed Jake’s roar. The two men sat staring into the infinity of the sky as the shadow cast by the canopy bow walked across their laps. This shadow was the only relief from the intense tropic sunshine which shone down from the deep, deep blue.

  “Hard to believe that over half the earth’s atmosphere is below us,” Flap said softly. “Without supplemental oxygen, at this altitude, most fit men would pass out within thirty minutes. You know, you’ve flown so many times that flying has probably become routine with you. That’s the trap we all fall into. Sometimes we forget that we are really small blobs of protoplasm journeying haphazardly through infinity. All we have to sustain us are our little lifelines. The oxygen will keep flowing, the engines will keep burning, the plane will hold together, the ship will be waiting…Well, listen to the news. The lifelines can break. We are like the man on the tightrope above Niagara Falls: the tiniest misstep, the smallest inatt
ention, the most minuscule miscalculation, and disaster follows.”

  Flap paused for a moment, then continued: “A lot of people have it in their heads that God gave them a guarantee when they were born. At least seventy years of vigorous life, hard work will earn solid rewards, your wife will be faithful, your sons courageous, your daughters virtuous, justice will be done, love will be enough — in the event of problems, the manufacturer will set things right. Like hell! The truth is that life, like flying, is fraught with hazards. We are all up on that tightrope trying to keep our balance. Inevitably, people fall off.”

  In spite of himself Jake was listening to Flap. That was the problem with the bastard’s monologues — you couldn’t ignore them.

  “I think you’re worth saving, Grafton. You’re the best pilot I’ve met in the service. You are very very good. And you want to throw it all away. That’s pretty sad.”

  Flap paused. If he was giving Jake a chance to reply, he was disappointed. After a bit he continued:

  “I never had much respect for you Navy guys. You think the military is like a corporation — you do your job, collect your green government check, and you can leave any time you get the itch. Maybe the Navy is that way. Thank God, the Corps isn’t.”

  Stung, Jake broke his silence. “During our short acquaintance, you haven’t heard one snotty remark out of me about the Holy Corps. But if you want to start trading insults, I can probably think up a few.”

  Flap ignored Jake. “We Marines are all in this together,” he said, expanding on his thesis. “When one man slips off the rope, we’ll grab him on the way down. We’ll all hang together and we’ll do what we have to do to get the job done. The Corps is bigger than all of us, and once you are a part of it, you are a part of it forever. Semper Fidelis. If you die, when you die, the Corps goes on. It’s sorta like a church…”

  Flap fell silent, thinking. The Corps was very hard to explain to someone who wasn’t a Marine. He had tried it a few times in the past and always gave up. His explanations usually sounded trite, maybe even a little silly. “Male bonding bullshit,” one woman told him after he had delivered himself of a memorable attempt. He almost slapped her.

  For you see, the Corps was real. The feelings the Corps aroused in Flap and his fellow Marines were as real, as tangible, as the uniforms they wore and the weapons they carried. They would be loyal, they would be faithful, even unto death. Semper Fi. They belonged to something larger than themselves that gave their lives a meaning, a purpose, that was denied to lesser men, like civilians worried about earning a living. To Marines like Flap civilians concerned with getting and spending, getting and spending, were beneath contempt. They were like flies, to be ignored or brushed away.

  “I’m trying to explain,” he told Jake Grafton now, “because I think you could understand. You’re a real good aviator. You’re gifted. You owe it to yourself, to us, to hang tough, hang in there, keep doing what you know so well how to do.”

  “I’ve had enough,” Jake told him curtly. He had little patience for this sackcloth and ashes crap. He had fought in one war. He had seen its true face. If Flap wanted to wrap himself in the flag that was his business, but Jake Grafton had decided to get on with his life.

  “Rory Smith knew,” Flap told him with conviction. “He was one fine Marine. He knew the risks and did his job anyway. He was all Marine.”

  “And he’s dead.”

  “So? You and I are gonna die too, you know. Nobody ever gets out of life alive. Smith died for the Corps, but you’re gonna go be a civilian, live the soft life until you check out. Some disease or other is going to kill you someday — cancer, heart disease, maybe just plain old age. Then you’ll be as dead as Rory Smith. Now I ask you, what contribution will you have made?”

  “I already made it.”

  “Oh no! Oh no! Smith made his contribution — he gave all that he had. You’ve slipped one thin dime into the collection plate, Ace, and now you announce that dime is your fair share. Like hell!”

  “I’ve had about two quarts more than enough from you today, Le Beau,” Jake spluttered furiously. “I did two cruises to the Nam. I dropped my bombs and killed my gooks and left my friends over there in the mud to rot. For what? For not a single goddamn thing, that’s for what. You think you’re on some sort of holy mission to protect America? The idiot green knight. Get real — those pot-smoking flower-power hippies don’t want protection. You’d risk your life for them? If they were dying of thirst I wouldn’t piss in their mouths!”

  Jake Grafton was snarling now. “I’ve paid my dues in blood, Le Beau, my blood. Don’t give me any more shit about my fair share!”

  Silence reigned in the cockpit as the KA-6D tanker continued to orbit the ship 20,000 feet below, at max conserve airspeed, each engine sucking a ton of fuel per hour, under the clean white sun. Since the tanker had no radar, computer or inertial navigation system, there was nothing for Flap to do but sit. So he sat and stared at that distant, hazy horizon. With the plane on autopilot, there was also little for Jake to do except scan the instruments occasionally and alter angle-of-bank as required to stay on the five-mile arc. This required almost no effort. He too spent most of his time staring toward that distant, infinite place where the sky reached down to meet the sea.

  The crazy thing was that the horizon looked the same in every direction. In all directions. Pick a direction, any direction, and that uniform gauzy junction of sea and sky obscured everything that lay beyond. Yet intelligence tells us that direction is critical — life itself is a journey toward something, somewhere…

  Which way?

  Jake Grafton sat silently, looking, wondering.

  * * *

  Hank Davis was still in a private room in sick bay when Jake dropped by to see him. He looked pale, an impression accentuated by his black-as-coal, pencil-thin mustache.

  “Hey, Hank, when they gonna let you out of here?”

  “I’m under observation. Whenever they get tired of observing. I dunno.”

  “So how you doing?” Jake settled into the only chair and looked the bombardier over carefully.

  Davis shrugged. “Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you. He got a big bite of my butt yesterday. A big bite.”

  “Well, you made it. You pulled the handle while you still had time, so you’re alive.”

  “You ejected once, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Jake Grafton told him. “Over Laos. Got shot up over Hanoi.”

  “Ever have second thoughts?”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like maybe you were too worried about your own butt and not enough about the other guy’s?”

  “I thought the VDI came out on the shot? Went into Smith’s lap?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hank! What could you do? The damned thing weighs seventy pounds. Even with your help, Smith couldn’t have got it back into its tray. No way. If you’d crawled across to help, you’d both be dead now. It’s not like you guys had a half hour to dick with this problem.”

  Davis didn’t reply. He looked at a wall, swallowed hard.

  Jake Grafton racked his brains for a way to reach out. I should have told you guys about checking the VDI’s security. Although he felt that, he didn’t say it.

  Hank related the facts of his ejection in matter-of-fact tones. The chute had not completely opened when he hit the water. So he hit the water way too hard and had trouble getting out of his chute. The swimmer from the helicopter had been there in seconds and saved his bacon. Still, he swallowed a lot of seawater and almost drowned.

  “I dunno, Jake. Sometimes life’s pretty hard to figure. When you look at it close, the only thing that makes a difference is luck. Who lives or who dies is just luck. ‘The dead guy screwed up,’ everybody says. Of course he screwed up. Lady Luck crapped all over him. And if that’s true, then everything else is a lie — religion, professionalism, everything. We are all just minnows swimming in the sea and luck decides when it’s your turn
. Then the shark eats you and that’s the fucking end of that.”

  “If it’s all luck, then these guilt trips don’t make much sense, do they?” Jake observed.

  “Right now the accident investigators are down in the avionics shop,” Hank Davis told him. “They are looking for the simple bastard who didn’t get the VDI screwed in right. All this shit is gonna get dumped right on that poor dumb son of a bitch! ‘Rory Smith is dead and it’s your fault.’ Makes me want to puke some more.”

  * * *

  Squadron life revolves around the ready room, ashore or afloat. Since the A-6 squadrons always had the most flight crewmen, they always got the biggest ready room, in most ships Ready Five, but in Columbia, Ready Four. The ready room was never big enough. It was filled with comfortable, padded chairs that you could sink into and really relax, even sleep in, but there weren’t enough of them for all the officers.

  In some squadrons when all the officers assembled for a meeting — an AOM — chairs were assigned by strict seniority. In other outfits the rule was first come, first served. How it was done depended on the skipper, who always got a chair up front by the duty desk, the best seat in the house. Lieutenant Colonel Haldane believed that rank had its privileges — at least when not airborne — so seniority reigned here. Jake Grafton ended up with a seat four rows back. The nuggets, first lieutenants on their first cruise, stood around the back of the room or sat on metal folding chairs.

  AOMs were social and business events. Squadron business was thrashed out in these meetings, administrative matters dealing with the ship and the demands of the amorphous bureaucracies of the Navy and the Marine Corps were considered, lectures delivered on NATOPs and flying procedures, the “word” passed, all manner of things.

  At these soirees all the officers in the squadron got to know each other well. Here one got a close look at the department heads — the “heavies”—watched junior officers in action, here the commanding officer exerted his leadership and molded the flight crews into a military unit.