The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga)

by Stan Hayes

  “Roger, Rusty; gimme a heading to the easternmost, and advise when we’re 10 miles out. Flight to crew, here we go again; all stations rig for riggin’.” He glanced over at Jack, who, like Rusty, was filling in on Browning’s Crew Five. With his typical self-deprecating grin he confessed, “I just can’t say ‘rig for riggin’ with a straight face.” Shifting his headset so that its leather-covered double arch found a fresh place to settle onto his gray-fringed pink scalp, he patiently awaited a new heading from CICO.

  “Flight, CICO, come right to 332; my seat-of-the-pants ETA’s 1037, subject to Nav’s confirmation.”

  “Flight, Nav,” Freddie Barstow’s dissonant crackle cut into the tail end of Parker’s transmission, “sounds Kosher to me, unless we pick up the forecast northwesterly wind shift ahead of time. Driftmeter just showed me zero, so that could be happening. Will advise.”

  Low-level reconnaissance, or “ship rigging” in the jargon of Navy patrol squadrons, involves close visual inspection of shipping, flying at or below the height of a ship’s superstructure. It’s by no means a normal maneuver for a four-engine, near-100-ton aircraft with a couple of dozen souls on board. In the case at hand, normalcy had long since been thrown out the window. Stormron THREE was one of the many units temporarily attached to Atlantic Fleet Task Force 84. The squadron’s mission was identical to that of the much smaller Lockheed P2V’s it was ordered to supplement; locate and track ships suspected of carrying nuclear missiles and other war matériel into Castro’s Cuba.

  A fast-growing volume of intelligence, both from airborne reconnaissance and sources on the ground in Cuba, grew more negative by the hour. It indicated that the Soviet Union was providing massive military assistance, both in hardware and manpower, to its new Caribbean ally. This information flow was climaxed by high-altitude U-2 overflights that confirmed the installation of launching sites for intermediate range ballistic missiles and the presence in Cuba of at least 40,000 Soviet troops. After a series of unproductive diplomatic exchanges, President Kennedy addressed the nation on October 22nd. Preparing his fellow Americans for what could be dire consequences, he said that these missiles could reach targets deep inside the United States. He stated that war was a distinct possibility if the Soviets did not remove them.

  Shortly after that, the decision was made to place Cuba under “quarantine.” No ships determined to be carrying war matériel would be allowed inside a 500-mile circle, its radius anchored on Havana. Ship-rigging provided current information on ships’ identity, type, deck cargo, course and speed. It also provided an up-close reminder to the ships, and upward through their chain of command, of the United States’ intent to enforce the decision, arrived at just the day before, to continue ship-rigging operations. Other aspects of the quarantine were currently suspended, pending the outcome of negotiations at the United Nations.

  “Flight, CICO.”

  “Go.”

  “The easternmost ship’s now 10 miles out, on a relative bearing 010.”

  “Roger. I think we’ll approach him out of the East on the first pass, Rusty. We’ll come right to 060 to give us some interval; advise when we’re abeam his position.”

  “Wilco.”

  “Oh, and ask Mr. Christie to come forward to see if we can get an ID on the ship as we close on it.”

  “Roger.”

  LTJG William Christie, temporarily attached to the squadron from his regular billet at the Naval Station, hurried forward, holding 7X35 binoculars to his chest with one hand as he gripped a bulging briefcase with the other. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said with a wink in Jack’s direction. “I didn’t realize we’d be coming up on Point Alpha this quickly.”

  “We’ll be there before you know it, Billy,” Browning said with a smile. “Think you might have some hot dope on these ships we’re going to buzz?”

  “Eight to five I have, sir,” Christie said, returning the grin as he plugged his headset into the jump seat’s phone jack. “CINCLANT teletyped quite a bit of stuff over last night. Looks like we’re taking the Sovs’ deal, which has their inbound ships holding short of the quarantine line.”

  “Hm,” Browning grunted. “Well, this one we’re coming up on looks to be doing just that. CICO, Flight,” he said into the boom mike at the corner of his mouth.

  “Flight, CICO. You’re reading my mind, boss. Come left to 272.”

  “272, Roger. Got him in sight. Flight to crew; stand by for ship-rigging; fasten seatbelts. “Eddie,” he said to the flight engineer, “let’s ease on down to 200 feet. Jack, call the altitude as we pass through 500. Let’s see if we can pick this rascal’s name off the hull on the first pass.”

  Pushing the big ship’s nose gently over, Browning let its airspeed build up to 225 as they approached the ship, its low silhouette suggesting its role as a tanker, rapidly filled the windshield. It was port-side-to and motionless on the still and shiny Caribbean. Letting the altitude drop to 150 feet, Browning pulled up to clear the ship’s after superstructure at the mission-prescribed distance of 300 feet. Its name, Грозный, appeared clearly on the bow. “Allen, did you get that?”

  Photographer’s Mate Second Class Clarence Allen was seated before the aircraft’s two-foot diameter circular windows, stacked one above the other at the Aerographer’s station, portside and aft of the Combat Information Center. The windows’ bowed-out contour, designed to allow the Aerography Officer and his assistants an optimum view of the waves when penetrating hurricanes, was just as good for aerial photography. He began shooting the ship’s bow as soon as he had it in sight through the upper window, and was able to get three exposures with his Polaroid-backed 4x5 Speed Graphic camera. “Yes sir, I got it,” he replied, allowing himself a thin smile of satisfaction.

  “Well done, Shooter,” Christie responded. “Sit tight and stand by to get the other side.” Turning to the aircraft commander, he asked, “Mr. Browning, can you take us down the ship’s starboard side? A good shot of those monster silver tubes on her deck’ll make ’em sit up and take notice back at command.”

  “That’s what we’re out here for, son. Jack, how about doing the honors?”

  “I’ve got it, sir,” Jack responded, smiling. “BMEP 120, please, Chief.” Jack brought the aircraft’s nose up as he set it in a 30-degree angle of bank, which he held steady as he waited for the Soviet ship’s stern to come into view. As it did, he called for reduced power, slowing the aircraft down as its altitude dropped to 150 feet. Coming left as they approached the ship, then coming right to run parallel to its hull, he glanced quickly over at Christie, saying, “How’s that?”

  “Just right,” exclaimed the Intelligence Officer. “Look at the size of those tubes! If those aren’t SS-4’s, I’ll eat my bridge cap. You getting them, Allen?”

  “Affirmative, sir; yes indeed!”

  “Attaboy,” Christie said as he shuffled paper inside his briefcase. Looking at Ray Browning, he said, “Sir, may I have Allen bring his shots up here, so we can compare the ship’s name with my list of English translations?”

  “Sure, go ahead. Take us due south about 5 miles, Jack, and let’s orbit there while we ID the ship and get a message out.”

  “Allen, this is Mr. Christie. Come on up and let’s have a look at your work, young man.”

  Jack and his second post-shower Corona had just gotten settled on the abbreviated backyard behind his quarters when he sensed Nick’s presence. “Some days in the Cold War are rougher than others, hm?” Dressed in tennis togs, he leaned against the yard’s lone palm tree, the base’s lights spreading out behind him, stretching west to the little town of Ceiba and beyond.

  “Yup, Bobby Riggs, you could say that,” Jack replied, “or you could say that there are a whole lot of people in this world doing their absolute best to scare the piss out of each other, and doing a jam-up fucking good job of it, too. Looking at somebody else’s nuclear missile up close ain’t that soothing an experience, and we saw quite a few today, with a few of the other
guy’s subs thrown in.”

  “An altogether sobering experience, no doubt about it,” Nick mused, “and I’m sure you’ll be glad to know that today was your last ship-rigging hop.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that there was nothing scheduled for tomorrow, but how the hell do we know the Reds are really gonna fold and go away? You know politicians.”

  “The thing that I know best about politicians is that they want to stay in office, and that means staying alive. They’ll negotiate this thing to a standstill, provided some hotshot Colonel or equivalent doesn’t take it on himself to let one go just for the hell of it. Each side’s got a few of that type.”

  “Christie, this intelligence type from the Station that flew with us today, said they really have a shitload of stuff already on the island. Do you really believe that they’ll actually load all of it up and take it back to the USSR? And how the hell long will that take, anyway?”

  “It’s already underway; 60 missiles, 134 nuclear warheads and some 30,000 combat troops. Kennedy pretty much held Khrushchev’s feet to the fire, although he did agree to pull some obsolescent NATO missiles out of Turkey. Oh, and he did say that the US won’t be invading Cuba- ever.”

  “Hm. Sort of like the Monroe Doctrine in reverse. Of course, once everybody has nukes, it’s an entirely different ball game. Christie told me something else in the Cuba department that was pretty fascinating. Turns out he’s from Georgia, too; Bainbridge. Says his folks got done out of a fair-sized piece of property on the Isle of Pines. The Castroites call it the Isle of Youth now. Apparently, people from the Southern states bought up the majority of the island after the War Between the States, with the idea of escaping Reconstruction and starting farms that would supply produce to the mainland. The treaty- the Hay-Quesada Treaty- guaranteed possession of Guan-tánamo to the US in exchange for its ceding of all claims of sovereignty to the Isle of Pines.”

  “The treaty took 21 years to ratify,” Nick said. “A couple of your relatives were down there, too.”

  “You’re kidding. Who?”

  “Couple of offshoots of the Watkins clan; an in-law and, oh, maybe a great, great uncle or something like that. You could check.”

  “I will, believe me. Bill- Christie- has been down there; on the island, that is, sometime after World War II. Way after his folks had left, of course. Said it reminded him of a bunch of small Georgia towns from that time period- early 1900s, I mean- that had been picked up and dropped there by magic. His parents hired a guide who took them down to some caves with inscriptions that the guide said were thousands of years old, relics of what he called ‘the time of Atlantis.’ He called it ‘Antilia,’ but Bill said that there was no question of what he was talking about.”

  “Might be a nice place to retire, if the Cubans ever learn how to run a country,” Nick said.

  “And if nobody succeeds in blowing it up.”

  “Trust me, you’re safe on that score. Maybe I’ll take a look in my spare time; seems as though Atlantis was doing business somewhere between 9-10,000 B.C. Quite a stretch, even for me. So many civilizations, so little time. Happy birthday, by the way.”

  Jack glanced at his watch. “Thanks. I’ll be 28 in two hours. Feels funny to think that I might not have made it.”

  Pushing off the tree, Nick bent his knees and burlesqued a sweeping backhand. “You’ll make it, kid, and a whole lot more. Sleep well.” In a new maneuver, he back-flipped off the cliff behind the quarters, and was gone.

  26 EYE DON’T SEE IT

  “Hey, Bart!” Jack called to the bartender, some 50 feet away jiggling hamburgers on a hot grill. “We’re ready when you are, pal!” It was early on the Friday evening before the squadron’s Saturday all-hands party, ordered by the Captain in celebration of Jack’s crew’s survival of the monster Hurricane Flora. His off-and-on girl friend of recent months, Louella Tambeaux, whom her friends call Lulu, had driven out to the base for the party. After meeting her at the gate and authorizing a temporary pass for her car, he’d led her past his quarters in Bundy Housing to the main BOQ parking lot, all the Bundy parking spaces being reserved for occupants. Jack parked the Cunningham, planning to put Lulu’s car and her luggage in his parking spot down the hill when they returned from happy hour at the Officers’ Club. He was barely on his feet when he heard Burke Swearingen’s voice somewhere behind him.

  “Jack! Hey, Jack!” He turned to see Burke Swearingen standing at the far corner of the BOQ’s check-in desk.

  “Yo, Burke. What’s up?”

  “Is that Lulu?”

  “Sure is.”

  Swearingen, who spent every possible weekend in San Juan, had been attracted to a clutch of civilian hedonists, most of them “mainland” transplants, whose Saturdays and Sundays revolved around cocktails, tanning and shoveling large loads of bullshit on the promenade deck of the Condado Beach Hotel. Jack, who had gone there a few times at his recommendation, could never get too enthused about this bunch, pretentious, effete and faux-literary, approximately in that order. He much preferred the bar at the Hilton, through which coursed a constant stream of Pan American flight attendants. He’d stopped by the Condado, however, late one Sunday afternoon when the Hilton stream had temporarily gone dry, and found Swearingen serving himself and a striking young Latin girl, not much past twenty, at the tapas bar. Momentarily taken aback, as he’d more or less consigned Swearingen to the group’s light-in-the-loafers contingent, he produced a happy-hour grin as her escort performed the introduction.

  “ I love the way you talk,” the girl, Margarita Torres, said in a faint Latin-long-time-in-the-US accent. Where are you from?”

  “Ohh, jus’ a little old Georgia town on th’ Cae’lina border,” Jack said, milking the opportunity. “Ain’t much more’n a whistle-stop.”

  “Don’t buy that country bumpkin act,” said Swearingen. You ought to see his car.”

  “I can’t believe it! Come on,” she said, taking hold of his arm and giving it a healthy tug. You must meet our little Lulu.”

  Little Lulu, as it turned out, was five-eight in her stocking feet, just about as dark as Margarita, but with compelling midnight blue eyes. Shifting slightly toward him on her chaise, she smiled slyly up at him as Margarita led him to her. “Lulu, this is Jack. I can’t wait to see the two of you go at it,” she said. “Talking, I mean. You sound exactly alike.”

  Full lips parted under pronounced cheekbones, revealing bright, even teeth that suggested pearls in a plush-lined strongbox. Extending a large, well-shaped hand, she said, “Hey, Jack. How ’bout we shut up and make ’em beg?”

  Not to be outdone, Jack retained her hand, replying, “Or we could just leave and make ’em wait a week. Or a month.”

  She laughed out loud, harpooning him with those eyes. Patting the cushion next to her, she said, “ Let’s have a drink and see what happens.”

  A fair amount had happened since then. Lulu, more formally Louella Marie Tombeaux, had moved around quite a bit in the couple of years since graduating from high school in Gaffney, South Carolina. Frankly admitting that she desired “the high life,” she hotfooted it to New York, thinking that she could put her “commercial course” skills to work there as easily as she could in Atlanta or Miami, her second and third choices. She diligently worked her only contact, her best friend’s father, the superintendent of a local textile mill, for a recommendation to a colleague at the company’s headquarters in New York. “He’d been after me for the longest time,” she’d told Margarita, whose father was the New York colleague. “I’d get together with him now and then, down in Columbia, after he called your daddy and got him to agree to interview me.”

  Mr. Torres’s department lost their new secretary, however, the next year when Margarita graduated from Hunter College. The girls had become roommates after meeting during one of her visits to her father’s office. Soon after graduation, she decided that she could live no longer without Caribbean sun. “Since we can’t go back to Cuba, at

  least n
ot until Castro’s out of there, I’m moving to Puerto Rico. Wanna come?” She didn’t have to ask little Lulu twice. The sister act moved to San Juan, where both girls quickly found work, again with the help of Dad’s connections, Margarita in one of the airport gift shops and Lulu in the San Juan office of a US-based public relations outfit. Lulu’s Spanish, which she’d taken as an elective outside her “commercial course”, improved through daily use, and while she wasn’t exactly fluent, she did better than just get by.

  “Out here for the big party?” Swearingen asked her, having talked them into the BOQ bar for “a congratulatory drink on the house.”

  “Had to come out and make sure Mr. Wonderful’s OK, and to see you jerks tryin’ to act like adults,” Lulu said, elbowing him in the ribs. You comin’ tomorrow?”

  Wincing from the vigorous elbow, Swearingen said, “Indeed I am; after all, it’s my party, in a sense. I’m the mess treasurer, and if anything came adrift at the Casa Coqui tomorrow night, if I weren’t there to fix it it’d be my ass- er, butt. My boss’ll be there too, of course; the Commanding Officer of Naval Station, Roosevelt Roads.”

  Lulu’s luxuriant eyebrows, a rare and devastating combination with her deep blue eyes, rose, then fell. “Came adrift where?

  “That’s what they call the O Club, sweetie,” said Jack, grinning. Means...”

  “House of the Little Frog,” Lulu said. “Eleutherodactylus coqui. The little rascal’s Puerto Rico’s official mascot.” Laughing at both men’s obvious befuddlement, she said, “Can’t believe I knew that, huh, boys? The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s an account of ours.” Draining her glass, she said, “Ol’ Bart really can whip up the daiquiris, can’t he? They’re so much better than those frozen headaches everybody drinks at the Condado.” Looking at Jack, she said, “Better order us another round, sweetie, before he gets on another batch of burgers.”

  At the end of the long daiquiri trail, Lulu and Jack, the urgency of their first coupling spent, lay on their sides toying with each other. Lulu kidded him about the size of his cock, and he twitted her over the readiness of her clitoris to come readily out of its hood and stand to attention. “You’ve got the clit of a courtesan,” he said. At her smiling gratification, he added, “and a mouth to match. Eleutherodactylus coqui indeed.”