“Any time, Tonto. Any time. But you could have broken your hand hitting that guy that hard.”
“Had to. He outweighed me by forty pounds. If I had just given him a you-piss-me-off social punch he would have killed me.”
“You’re a violent man, Jake.”
“I had a lot of trouble with potty training.”
* * *
The next morning he realized the dimensions of the quandary he faced. Nell Douglas was a fine woman, passionate, levelheaded, intelligent, thoughtful…And Callie McKenzie was one fine woman, also passionate and level-headed, intelligent, educated, well spoken…He was in love with one and could easily fall in love with the other. But the woman he loved hadn’t written in two months and had made it clear that he wasn’t measuring up.
The woman he could love wasn’t being quite so picky. No doubt when he knew her better she would get more picky— women were like that. But she wasn’t being picky now! And if you couldn’t take the heat there was always celibacy to fall back on.
Alas, celibacy didn’t seem very attractive to Jake Grafton. Not when you are in your twenties, in perfect health, when the sight, smell and touch of a woman makes the blood pound in your temples and your knees turn to jelly.
He sat in his chair in his stateroom savoring the memories of last night. Of how her lips had felt against his, how her hot, wet tongue had speared between his teeth and stroked his tongue, how her breasts had heaved against his chest, how her thighs had pressed against his while her hands stroked his back. Gawd Almighty!
He liked the way she talked, too. That flat Australian twang was sexy as hell. Just made shivers run up your spine when you recalled how the words sounded as she said them. “… I might drag you off to my lonely little bed for a night of sport.” Well, lady, I wish…
I don’t know what I wish! Damnation.
He was writhing on the horns of this dilemma when the door opened and the Real McCoy staggered through. He flopped into his bunk and groaned. “Wake me up next week. I am spent. Wrung out like a sponge. That woman turned me every way but loose. There are hot women and there are hot women. That one was thermonuclear.”
“Tough night, huh?”
“She was after me every hour! I didn’t sleep a wink. Every hour! I’m so sore I can hardly walk.”
“Lucky you escaped her evil clutches.”
“Never in my born days, Jake, did I even contemplate that there might be women like that walking the surface of the earth. Australia is merely the greatest nation on the planet, that’s all. That they breed women like that down there is the best-kept secret of our time.”
Jake nodded thoughtfully and flexed his right fist. It was sore and a little swollen.
“I’m getting out of the Nav, arranging to have my subscription to the Wall Street Journal sent to me Down Under, and I am going south. May the cold, blue light of Polaris never again meet my weary gaze. It’s the Southern Cross for me, Laddie Buck. I’m going to Australia to see if I can fuck myself to death before I’m forty.”
With that pronouncement the Real McCoy turned on his side and curled his pillow under his head. Jake looked at his watch. The first gentle snore came seventy-seven seconds later.
Were the women bigots? Well, Flap should know. If he said those three stews were prejudiced, they probably were. But what about Nell?
And what about you, Jake? Are you?
Aaugh! To waste a morning in port fretting about crap like this.
He pulled a tablet around and started a letter to his parents.
* * *
The liberty boat for the enlisted men was an LCI — landing craft infantry — a flat-bottomed rectangular-shaped boat with a bow door that flopped down to let troops run through the surf onto the beach. Jake often rode it from the beach to the ship. This evening, however, he was dressed in a sports coat and a tie and didn’t want to get soaked with salt spray, so he headed for the officers’ brow near Elevator Two. The captain’s gig and admiral’s barge had been lowered into the water from their cradles in the rear of the hangar bay. In ten minutes he was descending the ladder onto the float, then he stepped into the gig-Jake knew the boat officer, a jaygee from a fighter squadron, so he asked if he could stand beside the coxswain on the little
midships bridge. Permission was granted with a grin and a nod.
The rest of the officers went below into either the fore or aft cabin.
With the stupendous bulk of the carrier looming like a cliff above them, the sailors threw the lines aboard and the coxswain put the boat in motion. It stood out from the ship and swung in a wide circle until it was on course for fleet landing.
The water was calm this evening, with merely a long, low swell stirring the oily surface. The red of the western sky stained the water between the ships, gave it the look of diluted blood.
The roadstead was full of ships: freighters, coasters, tankers, all riding on their anchors. Lighters circled around a few of the ships, but only a few. Most of them sat motionless like massive steel statues in a huge park lake.
But there were people visible on most of the ships. As the gig threaded its way through the anchorage Jake could see them sitting under awnings on the fantails, sometimes cooking on barbecue grills, talking and smoking on afterdecks crowded with ship’s gear. Most of the sailors were men, but on one Russian ship he saw three women, hefty specimens in dresses that reached below their knees.
“Pretty evening,” the jaygee said to Jake, who agreed.
Yes, another gorgeous evening, the close of another good day to be alive. It was easy to forget the point of it all sometimes, easy to lose sight of the fact that the name of the game was to stay alive, to savor life, to live it day to day at the pace that God intended.
One of Jake Grafton’s talents was to imagine himself living other lives. He hadn’t been doing much of that lately, but riding the gig through the anchorage, looking at the ships, he could visualize sitting on one of those fantails, smoking and chatting and watching the sun sink closer and closer to the sea’s rim. To go to sea and work the ship and spend quiet evenings in port in the company of friends — it could be very good. I could live that way, he reflected.
Maybe in my next incarnation.
The Intercontinental was a huge, modern hotel built on a slight hill. The lobby was a cavern seven or eight stories high. Marble floors accented with giant potted plants, a raised bar with easy chairs in the middle, all the accents a plush burgundy, polyester fabric glued to the walls — yuck!
Jake settled into one of the bar’s overstuffed polyester chairs and tilted his head back. You could almost get dizzy looking up at the balconies, which were stacked closer and closer together until they met at the ceiling. Tropical plants hung from planters along each balcony, so the view upward was green. Dark green, because the lighting up there was very poor.
“Grotesque, isn’t it?”
He dropped his gaze from the green canopy above to the young woman walking toward him. He stood and grinned. “Yep.”
“The interior designer was obviously demented.” Nell Douglas settled into the chair opposite. A waiter appeared and hovered.
“Something to drink?” Jake asked her politely.
“A glass of white wine, please.”
“Scotch on the rocks.”
The waiter broke hover and disappeared behind a large potted leafy green thing.
“So how was your flight in?”
“Bumpy. Storms over the South China Sea. How’s your hand?”
“You heard about that, huh?”
“The other girls were all atwitter. Your black friend really impressed them.”
“Flap can move pretty fast when he wants to. He’s handy to have around.”
“If the necessity arises to knock people senseless. Is he lurking nearby now, just in case?”
Vaguely uneasy, Jake flashed a polite smile. “No, I think he came ashore earlier today hoping to cheat some opal merchants. And my hand’s fine.” He wiggled his fin
gers at her, pretending she cared.
Their drinks came and they sat sipping them in silence, both man and woman trying to sense the mood of the other.
After a bit Nell said, “He’s some kind of trained killer, isn’t he?”
That comment was like glass shattering. Amazingly, Jake Grafton felt a tremendous sense of relief. It had been a nice fantasy, but this woman was not Callie.
“I guess everyone in combat arms is,” he said slowly, “if you want to look at it that way. I deal in high explosives myself. I fly attack planes, not airliners.”
He took the plastic stir stick from his drink and chewed at it. Why do they put these damn things in a drink that is nothing but whiskey and ice? He took it out of his mouth and broke it between his fingers as he examined her face.
“I started the fight,” he continued, now in a hurry to end it. “One of the soldiers referred to Captain Le Beau as a nigger. He happens to be my BN and a personal friend. He is also a fine human being. The fact that his skin is black is about as important as the fact that my eyes are gray. That word is an insult in America and here. The man who said it knew that.”
“The only black people in Australia are aborigines.”
“I guess you have to be an American to understand.”
“Perhaps.”
The waiter reappeared with his credit card and the invoice. Jake added a tip, signed it and pocketed the card and his copy.
Her face was too placid. Blank. Time to get this over with. “Would you like to go to dinner?”
Nell Douglas looked this way and that, apparently searching for something to say.
Finally she sat her wineglass on the table and leaned forward slightly. She looked him in the eye. “It was wonderful the other night, and I am sure you are a fine person, but let’s leave it at that.”
He nodded and finished his drink.
“We grew up on opposite sides of the world.” She stood and held out her hand. “Thanks for the drink.”
“Sure.”
Jake stood and shook. She threaded her way through the potted jungle and made for the elevators.
* * *
“Did you get laid?” the Real McCoy asked late that night in their stateroom aboard ship.
“She said we grew up on opposite sides of the world.”
“You idiot. You’re supposed to fuck ’em, not discuss philosophy.”
“Well, it probably turned out for the best,” Jake said, thinking of Callie. He desperately wished she would write. She could write anything — if she would just put something in an envelope and stick a stamp on it.
He decided to write her.
He got a legal pad, climbed into the top bunk and adjusted the light just so. Then he began. He went through their relationship episode by episode, almost thought by thought, pouring out his heart. After eight pages he ground to a halt.
Every word was true, but he wasn’t going to send it. He wasn’t going to take the chance that he cared more than she did.
You aren’t going to get very far with the fairer sex if you aren’t willing to take some risks.
I’m tired of taking risks. Someone else can take a few.
Faint heart never won—
If she cared, she’d write. End of story.
* * *
The night before the ship weighed anchor Lieutenant Colonel Haldane asked Jake to come to his stateroom. According to the duty officer. Jake went.
Flap was already there sitting in the only chair. Jake sat on the colonel’s bed and Flap passed him a sheet of paper. It was a letter from the commander at Changi. Fight in the pavilion. Jake scanned it quickly and passed it back to Flap, who handed it to Haldane, who tossed it on his desk.
“The skipper of the ship got this. He wants me to investigate, take action, and draft a reply for his signature. What can you tell me?”
Jake told the colonel about the incident, withholding nothing.
“Any comments, Captain Le Beau?”
“No, sir. I think Mr. Grafton covered it.”
Haldane made a face. “Okay. That’s all. We’re having a back-in-the-saddle NATOPS do in the ready room at zero seven-thirty. See you there.”
Both the junior officers left. Jake closed the door behind him.
Twenty frames down the passageway he asked Flap, “Was that it? We aren’t in hack or candidates for keelhauling?”
“Naw. Haldane will apologize profusely to our allies, tell them that he’s ripped us a new one, and that’s that. It was just a friendly little social fight. What more could there be?”
Jake shrugged. “My hand’s still sore.”
“Next time kick ’em in the balls.”
17
At dawn one morning the task group weighed anchor and entered the Strait of Malacca. With Sumatra on the left and the Malay peninsula on the right, the ships steamed at 20 knots for the Indian Ocean, or the IO as the sailors called it, pronouncing each letter.
In the narrows the strait was a broad watery highway with land on each horizon. The channel was dotted with fishing boats and heavily traversed by tankers and freighters. As many as a half dozen of the large ocean-going ships were visible at any one time.
As usual in narrow waterways, the carrier’s flight deck and island superstructure were crowded with sightseeing sailors. Typically, Jake Grafton was among them, standing on the bow facing forward. With all of the great ship behind him the sensation was unique, almost as if one were a seabird soaring along at sixty feet above the water into the teeth of a 20-knot wind.
This morning Jake watched the steady stream of civilian ships and marveled. He had flown enough surface surveillance missions over the open ocean to “appreciate how empty the oceans of the earth truly were. Often he and Flap flew a two-hour flight and saw not a single ship, just endless vistas of empty sea and sky. Yet here the ships plowed the brown water like trucks thundering along an interstate highway.
A hundred years ago these waters hosted sailing ships. As he stood on the bow watching the ships and boats this morning he thought about those sailing ships, for Jake Grafton had a streak of romance in him about a foot wide. Clipper ships bound for China for a load of tea left England and the eastern ports of the United States and sailed south to round the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa. The sailors would have gotten close enough to land for a glimpse of Africa only in good weather. Then they crossed the vast Indian Ocean and entered this strait, where they saw land for the first time since leaving England or America. Months at sea working the ship, making sail, reefing in storms, watching the officers shoot the sun at noon and the stars at night when the weather allowed, then to hit this strait after circumnavigating half the globe — it was a great thing, a thing to be proud of, a thing to remember for the rest of their lives. Exotic China still lay ahead, but here the sailors probably saw junks for the first time, those flat-bottomed Chinese sailing ships that carried the commerce of the Orient. Here two worlds touched.
Jake looked at the freighters and tankers with new interest. Perhaps he should look into getting a mate’s license, consider the merchant marine after the Navy. It was a thing to think on.
Standing on the bow with the moist wind in his hair and the smell of the land filling his nostrils as the task group transited this narrow passage between two great oceans, he was struck by how large the earth really was, how diverse the human life, how many truths there must be. The U.S. Navy was a tiny part of it, surely, but only a tiny part. He had been confined long enough. He needed to reach out and embrace the whole.
The Indian Ocean lay ahead, beyond that watery horizon. The flying there would be blue water ops, without the safety net of a divert field ashore. The ship would be hundreds of miles from land, so when the planes burned enough fuel to get down to landing weight there would be no dry spot on earth they could reach with the fuel remaining in their tanks. They had to get aboard. Airborne tankers could provide fuel for another handful of attempts, but their presence would not change the sce
nario — every pilot would have to successfully trap or eject into the ocean.
Carrier aviation never gets easier. The challenge is to develop and maintain skills that are just good enough. In this war without bullets the stakes were human lives. Each pilot would have only his skill and knowledge to keep him alive in the struggle against the weather, chance, the vagaries of fate. Some would lose. Jake Grafton knew that as well as he knew his name. He might be one of them.
Thinking about that possibility as he stood here on the bow, he took a deep breath of the moist sea air and savored it.
A man never knows.
Well, he would do his best. That was all he could do. God had the dice, He would make the casts.
* * *
Jake was standing the squadron duty officer watch in the ready room one night when first Lieutenant Doug Harrison came in from a flight. He gave Jake his flight time figure and handed him the batteries from his emergency radio — the batteries were recharged in a unit above the duty officer’s desk — then dropped into the skipper’s empty chair as Jake annotated the flight schedule. Only then did Grafton turn and take a good look at the first-cruise pilot. His face was pasty and covered with a sheen of perspiration.
“Tough flight, huh?”
Harrison dropped his eyes and massaged his forehead with a hand. “No…Got a cigarette?”
“Sure.” Jake passed him one, then held out a light.
After Harrison had taken three or four puffs, he took the cigarette from his mouth and said softly, “After we landed, I almost taxied over the edge.”
“It’s dark out there.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. No light at all, the deck greasy, rain on top of the grease…it was like drying to taxi on snot.”
“What happened?”
“Taxi director took me up to the bow on Cat One, then turned me. Wanted me to taxi aft on Cat Two. It was that turn on the bow. Sticking out over the fucking black ocean. I was sure I was going right off the bow, Jake. I about shit myself. I kid you not. Pure, unadulterated terror, two-hundred proof. I have never had a feeling like that in an airplane before.”
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