The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga)

by Stan Hayes

  Time, then, to “Hit the Boat.” Now we were the objects of envy, looking down- way down, and ever-cool- on the primary training students in their improbably tiny T-34’s, as they’re advised by ground control to “hold short at the throat for outbound T-28’s,” and the USS Antietam (CVS-36) out there, slicing tracks in the Gulf and waiting for us. We kicked in to buy two jugs of Jack Black, one for our Landing Signal Officer, Major Craddock, and one for whomever would be the first of us to be carqualled. With that in mind, we cut cards for spots in the flight. Now we waited for Antietam to send the squadron a “Charlie” time (ETA overhead) for our flight.

  Runup, takeoff and rendezvous were uneventful; we then began giving serious thought to making this the most perfect formation flight of our fledgling careers, having had the concept of “looking good at the boat” drilled into us from every source of authority in the squadron. It was not at all unusual, they said, for bad formation flying to result in a “down” (failing grade) for an entire flight. The flight leader checked us in with the Antietam over UHF. I was third in the flight of four, giving me a quick opportunity to look down. Buddy, there’s no feeling like looking down at a Fleet aircraft carrier under way, and knowing that you’re going to slap wheels on that deck very, very soon; serious business for a guy with slightly over a hundred hours in this Peterbilt of the air.

  PriFly (primary flight control) put us in the Delta pattern, a circular orbit 5000 feet above the boat. As I recall, we only made a few orbits- five at the very most- before they called Flight Lead to send us down to the pattern. Letting down, we paralleled the ship’s course and flew up its starboard side. As the lead aircraft passed the bow, he executed a snappy break, turning downwind to join the landing pattern. I watched #2 do the same after the mandatory 10 count, and following my own count of 10 broke downwind, cut the throttle, dropped gear and flaps, opened the cowl flaps and pulled the lever to open the canopy. Slowing to 90 knots, I took interval on #2 and checked my position abeam the carrier. Everything looked good; I was in my now-familiar posture of hanging on the prop, the big Wright Cyclone lambasting me with 1,425 horsepower’s worth of nine-cylinder noise.

  Calling the LSO (whose callsign is still “Paddles,” and I imagine always will be) at the abeam position, I gave my side number, fuel state and name, and reduced throttle once again to set up the standard Navy semicircular approach, which dispenses with anything resembling a “base leg.” Designed who-knows-when by who-knows-whom, obviously in the interest of recovering as many aircraft as possible in the shortest time possible, it’s another bit of airmanship that distinguishes a Naval Aviator from all others. As my altitude bled away, the ship did its part by moving ahead, giving me the room I needed to pick up the meatball, establish my final rate of descent and get lined up and wings level, hoping to see the row of green lights that Paddles would flash to signal a “cut.” The meatball obliged me by appearing just a second or two after I’d reached my “90,” ninety degrees away from final lineup with the flight deck, descending steadily. This landing would be the first of two “touch-and-go’s,” so my tailhook was still in its retracted position. When I called “meatball” this time, I felt it down to my shoes. Barin Field was never like this!

  “Roger, 176,” Paddles’ voice crackled in my earphones. “Nice rate of descent, looking good. Check your lineup.” Nothing left but to drive it in, watching my airspeed like a hawk, ready to catch any sinking tendency with a decisive hit of throttle. Green lights! I chopped the throttle, switching my gaze from the mirror to the flight deck, dropping in pretty close to dead center of the arresting gear wires. I roared with delight, and my engine joined me as I pushed the throttle forward, airborne again. The next touch-and-go went just as well; on climb-out, Paddles advised me to drop my tailhook. Adding “hook down” to my abeam report, I willed myself into workmanlike mentality, suppressing the joy that welled up inside me as I came around to make my first arrested landing.

  Checklist, one more time. Shoulder harness locked, FOR SURE. Meatball. Lineup. Airspeed. Blessed green cut lights. Throttle back. OOF! I was down, 78 knots to zero, in a couple of plane-lengths; everything stopped but my eyeballs, which had ideas of their own. Training suppressed the urge to raise my face shield and push them back in, and I looked for the yellow-shirted taxi director as I pulled up my hook. Stationed precisely where our briefing said he would be, he directed me through a shallow right turn and forward to a point where he stopped me with a crossed-arms signal. Pointing to another yellow shirt, the Launch Officer, he handed me off with a brisk salute. Time’s at a terrific premium when launching and recovering aircraft, and the Launch Officer wasted none giving me the runup signal with his right hand, clenched left fist overhead ensuring that I hadn’t released the brakes. As directed in our briefing, I nodded to him when my manifold pressure gauge hit 30 inches. Returning the nod, he continued to listen to the engine for a few seconds while I struggled to hold the brakes. Then his left arm dropped, his right arm pointed down the deck, I released the brakes and was off like a shot, easing in more power, the newest Tailhooker in the Navy. And I got to do it five more times (but I didn’t get the booze)!

  Next week the other shoe drops, when we’ll find out what our destinies for advanced training will be. Like three out of four students (maybe more than that), I’ve requested the jet pipeline. Trying not to get my hopes up, as I know only about one in four gets it. So hold a good thought for me, Ranger Dogface, and I’ll let you know how that particular cookie crumbles. Hope all’s well with you, buddy...

  Later

  Jack

  At 3:15 on a muggy Tuesday afternoon, Pete nosed the Buick into a parking space about a block north of Norman’s. He sat, motor running, for about a minute and a half before the Briefer opened the front passenger door. Appropriately enough, the Briefer carried a briefcase. Acknowledging his presence with a quick nod and noncommittal smile, Pete slipped the transmission into reverse and looked for an interval in traffic that would accommodate the big car. Turning right at his first opportunity, he headed west. Coconut Grove was well behind them before the Briefer spoke. “Ever hear of Navas Bay?”

  “Can’t say as I have. What’s it close to?”

  “It’s between Baracoa and Moa on the north coast. Beautiful little bay, circular, about 400 yards across. The mouth’s nearly half that wide, so you won’t have a problem getting in or turned around. You’re ETA’s 0550, day after tomorrow. Winds are forecast to be what they typically are at that time of the morning, light and variable, so you should be able to land on a heading of 180 True just outside the bay, holding that heading as you taxi in. Look for a red light off your port bow; it’ll flash three times every 10 seconds until you acknowledge it with the same signal. You’ll have five passengers, two men, a woman and two small children. Bring them back to Tamiami; a car’ll be waiting for them.”

  Pete pulled the car off the road and into a gas station, parking well away from the building. Taking the envelope that the Briefer held out to him, Pete opened it and shook the contents out onto the seat beside him. There was a WAC chart of Cuba’s northeast coast, a sheet of plain white bond paper folded horizontally in half, and a #10 envelope containing what Pete knew would be $15,000 in well-used $100 bills. Looking at Navas Bay on the chart, he smiled. “Coast looks steep around that bay; guess that’s why there’s not much development.”

  “No approach to the water except a few footpaths,” the Briefer said, his impatience beginning to encroach on his studied professional detachment. “Anything else?”

  “Jets on the runway at Gitmo?”

  “You’ll have a CAP on this one; 10 miles north at Angels 10.”

  He slipped the car into gear and headed out of the gas station’s lot, turning left to retrace their route back into Coconut Grove. Glancing at the Briefer, he said, “So, can we look forward to having this CAP arrangement in the future?”

  Looking out the window at a flock of low-flying gulls, the Briefer said, “I’d say it�
�d depend a lot on your payload.”

  “So what’s in the briefcase?”

  “Present for you. Hope you won’t need it, but it might help you out of a tight spot somewhere along the line. It’s called a MAC-10; compact little rascal, even with a 30-round magazine. Makes no noise to speak of. You’ll need to pick up some 9mm Parabellum ammo. Two extra magazines in the case.”

  “Thanks. Take it out of the fee.”

  “Already done,” the briefer said with his first genuine smile of the day.

  “That was quite a ride for one great big yokel,” Linda said, the noncommittal note in her voice less convincing than it might have been. Unwinding with liberal applications of Bacardi Añejo, they’d jumped out of the shower and into bed, shivering in the relative cool of one of the season’s first cold fronts. Linda sandwiched one of Pete’s thighs between hers as they cuddled under the sheet.

  “No doubt,” Pete said, his voice, too, reflecting the tension of the Navas Bay mission. “They’ll want to debrief us in a whole lot more detail than they did this afternoon, but I suspect that they’ll be taking their time with- what’s his name? Jerry.”

  “I suspect you’re right, since he’s all they got for their money. He sure seemed to be upset that the others didn’t show. He acted like he wanted to swim ashore and go get ’em.”

  Rolling onto his back and pulling her along with him, Pete mused, “‘The Morgans;’ he only said it once, and then it seemed like he wanted to take it back. Must’ve been a family he was helping to get out, and somehow the deal fell through.”

  “Old Jerry seemed like he was used to giving orders, didn’t he? What the hell drives a guy like that, obviously American, to get involved in Cuba? And he’s clearly not the only one; I’d guess this Morgan family’s Gringo, too. Well, whatever else he is, Jerry’s a pretty good-looking guy- for a yokel.”

  Pete chuckled appreciatively. His cock had swelled to a full erection from the constant pressure of Linda’s thigh. “Ol’ Yokel Jerry get you hot, did he?”

  “Damn right he did.” Holding his cock-tip with the ends of her fingers and thumb, Linda milked it from the base with her other hand like an inverted cow teat, quickly producing a trickle of pre-cum. Catching the first of the clear flow on her fingertips, she spread it rapidly over rock-hard flesh, adding her saliva to the now-steady flow, maintaining a slickly liquid surface. Turning to position her labia above Pete’s head, she deftly devoured his cock, taking it into her mouth and part-way down her throat, muffling his groan with her labia. This is great, she thought, but I really miss doing Jack. Pete’s no slouch, but Jack feels like a county-fair-winning cucumber in your throat, and I’ll bet that I’m still the only one who’s ever taken the whole thing. Makes me wonder what that fancy old lady does with it...

  Rick and his fellow DSSLs quickly integrated themselves into the 7th Special Forces community by the sheer weight of their intelligence and athletic ability. Despite the technical difficulty of there being no TO&E (Table of Organization and Equipment) slot in Special Forces for Second Lieutenants, the newly-elected President’s high priority on upgrading both the quantity and quality of Special Forces units rectified this omission overnight. The DSSLs were, accordingly, distributed throughout various professional undertakings on and around Smoke Bomb Hill. Rick found himself elbow-deep in an assortment of small arms, most of which he’d never known to exist. The weapons course provided for written and practical examinations at the end of each day’s instruction.

  W.H.B. Smith’s Small Arms of the World was the course’s bible, but the deepest font of available knowledge on weapons was to be found in the cranium of a certain Staff Sergeant Curtis. A weapons handler without peer, Curtis was master of positively every weapon, foreign and domestic, in the teams’ inventory. To watch his hands virtually fly over the bones of a complex piece like the 7.62mm FN FAL was a transcendental experience to Rick, who rapidly became Curtis’s apt and motivated student. “Damn, Sarge,” he said one day after coming up over a minute short of Curtis’s time to strip and reassemble an early AK-47, “how the hell did you ever get so fast at this?”

  “Ah, hell, sir, you’d be as fast as me if you’d sat over in Bogeyland for six months doing nothing else. Bogeyland was the teams’ parlance for Laos, the landlocked little country between Thailand and Vietnam, where a series of teams was providing “assistance” to the troops of the Royal Lao army in their efforts to oppose both rebel Pathet Lao forces and the far better trained and equipped army of North Vietnam.

  “Not much going on over there, huh?”

  “Well, sir, if there had a’been, I doubt I’d be so fast slappin’ these weapons around.”

  “Hm. Well, just the same, hope I get a chance to check it out. Six months, huh?”

  “Longest, buggiest six months of my life, sir.”

  “I’m sure, Sarge, but I want to check it out just the same. I’d like to walk into The Cage right now.”

  The Cage was a compound located in the center of The Hill, with barracks buildings, and mess hall and an orderly room, circumscribed by concentric fences of 10-foot-high barbed wire. Every couple of weeks the otherwise-empty buildings would fill up with troops, with MPs patrolling between the fences 24 hours a day. Spotlights bathed the entire area at night, and for as long as the buildings were occupied, no one would be seen entering or leaving the compound. A number of days later, covered trucks would back up to one of the gates, troops would board them under cover of darkness and The Cage would be empty again, its most recent inhabitants having departed on a mission elsewhere in the world.

  Rick’s time in The Cage hadn’t yet arrived, but an opportunity to sharpen up his hand-to-hand combat skills was just around the corner. At a Saturday company formation, a rare thing in itself, the Sergeant Major announced that Company Stakes would be conducted that day. Rick had never heard the term, but gathered that, from the uproarious reception in the formation that it was a pretty good thing. That was before he heard the word “pit.” The last man in the pit, the Sergeant Major said, would get a three-day pass. Everyone who participated would get free beer, for as long as it lasted.

  From where he stood, Rick could see a number of kegs arrayed around what looked from his perspective like a slit in the ground, but which must be, he figured, the pit. The last word from the Sergeant Major was that those who didn’t feel like playing could proceed directly to the Orderly Room and “Pick up a transfer to Division.” There was no way, Rick figured, that the Sergeant Major could deliver that statement as a joke with such an incredibly straight face. If he was that good, hell, he’d be in Hollywood.

  On the heels of the Sergeant Major’s announcement, somebody standing behind Rick yelled, “Into the pit!” From Rick’s position in the formation, there was nothing optional about joining his comrades there. In what can only be fairly called a stampede, he and the rest of the company shoved/ran/stumbled/dived into a circular pit of mud about 30 feet across and 6 feet deep. Once they were in, the Sergeant Major directed their attention to Major Fredericks, the company commander. The major advised the hundred men in his command that maiming and murder are not options in this frolic, but that a three-day pass was a three-day pass.

  With that, the Sergeant Major blew one long burst on his whistle, and immediately bodies were flying through the air, which was now blue with profanity. This game, Rick realized, had no rules and a single outcome. Looking around, he instinctively chose to buddy up with someone. Over to his left, a stocky sort of about 5-10 seemed to have come up with a workable formula: knock ’em out, then throw ’em out. Where he needed help was after the one-two punch had dropped an individual, the Puncher being at the mercy of attackers while he got the punchee to the edge of the hole and pushed him up and out. “Get ’im out,” Rick advised the Puncher. “I’ll watch your back.”

  Their combination of talent, and that of others who had adopted similar tactics, thinned the hole’s population by two-thirds in less than 15 minutes. Then someone, not Rick,
had the “more is better” idea, and created a four-man team to begin separating the two-man teams and ejecting one at a time. Disdaining this tactic, which was a mistake, Rick and the Puncher held their own for a while, but one of the four-man teams had recruited a giant, who was big enough and strong enough to begin simply throwing people out of the hole, now that he had room to maneuver. Rick’s turn came soon after he saw what was going on. As he and the Puncher took on two at a time, the giant picked him up from behind, wrapping his arms around Rick and, with a spinning half-turn, sending him airborne over the edge, conveniently near a keg. He sat up to see the smiling, grimy face of Staff Sergeant Curtis, hand outstretched with the most welcome 16 ounces of brew that Rick had ever seen. “Not bad, sir, but why did you stay in there so long? I thought officers were smart.”

  To this observation, Rick had no immediate response.

  21 December 1960

  Dear “Still an O-1,”

  The President and Congress of the United States, in their combined wisdom, yesterday elevated me to the dizzying height of First Lieutenant, United States Army Reserve. Actually, it only took the signature of my CO, but sheesh! I can hardly stand to look at those nasty old brown bars that formerly sullied my shoulders. You’ll see what I mean soon enough, my boy, when your number comes up.

  I’m planning to run down and see the folks over Christmas. What’s your dance card looking like for the holidays?

  As ever

  Your Superior Officer (but who’s counting?)

  24 December 1960