Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  He missed Ellie, missed her under him, going hard into her, riding her breath, but that was all there waiting for him when he returned. A man lets go of that when he's on the verge of something else, something bigger. A woman, skin, the bed—these were limited sensations, all edges known. Nothing on earth compared to flying combat, for its proximity to death and heaven enlarged him. It was a great and terrifying secret that no one who hadn't experienced it could understand—in all of America, only several thousand men. And of those, only a few hundred were operational now, he one of them.

  He couldn't tell Ellie. Not really. He kept her letters in a neat stack in his drawer. When he didn't care to write, he talked into a tape recorder, just rambled along. Kiss Julia and Ben for me. Go ahead and sign the mortgage, sweetie. What was a mortgage compared to a Soviet-built MiG-21 fighter? He'd made captain early, he could do five hundred sit-ups without stopping, he'd counted cards at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, he could still screw three times in one night, he owned eight hundred shares of IBM and had danced the tango with Ellie at their wedding reception. He'd rolled a Jaguar doing ninety while stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in California and walked off his concussion, he'd dropped an F-86 on a runway in Wiesbaden, West Germany. He was tested and proven and scared. He was in his prime and he knew it. Ninety-seven missions, three confirmed MiG kills, dozens of trucks, trains, and artillery pieces. How many dead Vietcong, how many dead North Vietnamese regulars? He knew the number, more or less. It was just a number. He told no one, and no one asked.

  Of course, he was angry, too. You always were when they were fucking with the technical parameters of your survival. Ellie didn't understand, and if he explained it to her on paper, he'd be flying freighters to Guam. The bureaucracy appalled him, desktop generals promoted in the somnolent 1950s sitting in the puzzle palaces making war policy. The forms and reports, the smudging of statistics. The war protesters putting pressure on him, directly, though they didn't know it. He formulated air strikes and suggested them to his superiors, many of whom had the Pentagon in one ear the whole day. But Washington used the Air Force against North Vietnam only like a cattle prod—trying to get a reaction without causing excessive damage, without doing what it had the power to do: crush North Vietnamese industry and supply lines. At times, the squads weren't even allowed to attack. A North Vietnamese cargo plane carrying war matériel was off-limits. North Vietnamese airfields were off-limits. He'd lost three men to MiG fighters parked on fields he regularly flew over. And all flying targets had to be sight-checked, as if the MiGs did not have air-to-air missiles, as if the American planes, the most advanced fighting machines ever built, did not have radar. It was fucking political. Some guys dropped ordnance anyway, claimed a rack malfunction. The Pentagon didn't appreciate the variables—the weather, the changing SAM sites, the uncertainty of MiG resistance. And the MiGs had a distinct initial advantage over the American planes. Smaller and not laden with ordnance, they turned much tighter circles than American jets, and could achieve the dominant six o'clock position—the position in which you would get banged up the ass by a Chinese missile. Hanoi had the most ornate local airspace defense system on the globe: hundreds of computer-linked SAM sites that could throw up a canopy of protection. On the city's outskirts 100-millimeter gun emplacements waved ten-thousand-foot whips of steel. The thought of it made him twist at night, made him feel he was digesting his own innards. He could get shot down. He could go from flesh to flame.

  But you weren't supposed to dwell on it—might make you tentative, weak. Yet how could he not? He'd flown over Hao Lo Prison in Hanoi, the Hanoi Hilton. The compound was laid out in a diamond, and much was known about what went on inside. Built by the French, Hao Lo served as North Vietnam's main prison and as headquarters for the country's penitentiary system. It occupied nearly a city block. The massive sixteen-foot walls were topped by thousands of shards of broken champagne bottles. Three strands of barbed wire, the top one electrified. No American flier had ever successfully escaped the Hanoi Hilton. Nonetheless, word about the inside had filtered out through CIA operatives working in Hanoi, via the ingeniously coded letters of airmen to their wives that the North Vietnamese sporadically allowed, and from the few "reeducated" prisoners Hanoi had released. He preferred to think about the American pilot who had appeared on Japanese television, which the U.S. monitored. The pilot, clean-shaven, dressed in fresh pajamas, had been forced to say he and other POWs were being well fed, supplied with cigarettes, and attended to by doctors. This the pilot did with odd pauses: When the intelligence people first looked at the films, they wondered if he had been drugged. In fact, the pilot hadn't been—he was just concentrating. The advisers realized he was flashing a message in Morse code with his eyelids: torture. Some CIA men had shown the film during a briefing on Hao Lo. In the prison, the Americans lived in one of four areas: Camp Unity, Las Vegas, Heartbreak, or New Guy Village. The rooms had names: the Meathook Room, the Knobby Room (the walls were studded with knobs of acoustical plaster to absorb screams), Rawhide, the Quiz Room, Calcutta. The North Vietnamese were effective torturers, having been so effectively tortured by the French.

  It was also known that American POWs communicated with two codes: the standard POW mute code, which utilized hand signals, and the "AFLQV" auditory code, first developed by American POWs in Korea, much faster to learn than Morse, and worth practicing for an hour each week, which he did—in case he might need it. Each letter headed a line of five letters in a twenty-five-letter square:

  A B C D E

  F G H I J

  L M N O P

  Q R S T U

  V W X Y Z

  The letter K was dropped and replaced with the letter C. The first signal identified the row: Two quick taps, for example, meant the F row. The second signal identified the column. A tap, tap, tap . . . tap, tap meant M. The pause was longer between letters. A 3, 2—1, 1—3, 3 sequence spelled MAN. By this time shortcuts and adaptations for visual use had evolved, including scratching, coughing, spitting—anything to keep the North Vietnamese guessing. Anything to pretend to hope.

  He tried not to think about it. But being a POW was a chilling prospect. The North Vietnamese had signed the 1949 Geneva Convention treaty but refused to apply its prisoner-of-war edicts to captured American pilots on the basis that the pilots were war "criminals" rather than prisoners. The treaty had expressly prohibited measures of reprisal against prisoners, instead seeking to ensure their physical and psychological well-being. But in the post-Hitler fervor the treaty had limited the rights of war criminals, who were defined as persons who had committed War Crimes (". . . wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military action . . ."); or Crimes against Humanity (". . . murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts against any civilian population . . ."). The North Vietnamese had seized upon this definition as part of their overall worldwide propaganda campaign. By parading American airmen as heinous mass murderers, they not only stimulated political pressure in the international community but justified incarceration, interrogation, indoctrination, starvation, and torture.

  Thus his superstitions. He was known to the flight mechanics as a detail freak, checking the F-4's electrical and hydraulic systems before flying. The pilots under his command in the squadron preferred flying with him. He'd lost only five men. Yet the best of pilots were shot down, and not necessarily when probability dictated they might be. On his last visit home, eight months earlier, he had impulsively tucked one of Ben's wooden Lincoln Logs into his jacket. Now it went with him on every flight. And before each mission, during the briefing of weather conditions, refueling patterns, primary approach, decoy flight patterns, probable SAM locations, and priority targets, he fingered this little notched cylinder of wood, rubbing it with his thumb. Cloud formations, time-fuel checkpoints. Visualize the mission, anticipate contingency. The men depended on him. If they had doubts, they could ask and sometimes he would change the plan jus
t so they would feel they had a stake in it. You had to do that, keep getting behind their eyes into their heads. You looked for less interest in the plane's condition, decreased appetite, increased drinking, more wife-talk. If they got lax, if they started fucking the Thai housegirls, men got killed. He had to watch for that, he had to watch for everything.

  THE FRAG ORDER that morning specified a well-known target, its weirdness part of the natural voodoo of the war. The Paul Doumer Bridge, a gargantuan structure named after the French statesman, crossed the Red River south of Hanoi, a vital link in the North Vietnamese supply line. Its steel-and-concrete foundations had resisted thousands of tons of bombs; mission after mission of fighter bombers had attacked the bridge yet barely scorched its roadbed. The Air Force, in its infinite bureaucratic frustration, had tried to B-52 it, even dropped floatable explosives upriver and detonated them when they drifted beneath the bridge spans. None of the schemes was successful. The bridge was damaged but never destroyed. And now, reported the frag order, the bridge was covered with bamboo scaffolding, and a repair barge was tied to a pylon. Air recon had spotted the barge; his job was to sink it.

  He rose at 0500, ate, briefed the flight, his jocks scribbling numbers on their knee-board cards, then walked to the pilots' locker room. There, as always, he removed his wedding band, watch, and wallet, items of no use to him in flight and potentially useful to North Vietnamese captors. He stepped into his flight suit, then into a G suit, an inflatable girdle that covered his stomach and legs. This hooked to a line in the cockpit that was fed with engine compression bleed-off air. When the F-4 accelerated past 2.5 G's, sections of the suit swelled, increasing pressure on his legs and belly, keeping blood from pooling in the bottom of his body, a dangerous effect that caused blackout. Over the G suit he put on a torso harness, which he would snap into the plane's seat—it kept him from being buffeted around the cockpit when the plane was inverted. Then he pulled on the twenty-pound survival vest, jammed with maps, code books, water bottles, emergency transmitter, two hundred and fifty feet of rappelling line, flares, knives, ammunition, a saw, foodstuffs, a compass, fishing gear, a pound of rice, gold coins, first-aid pack, matches, shark repellent, whistle, signal mirror, sewing kit, water purification tablets, and morphine. Last, he strapped a .38 pistol to his calf.

  He walked out toward the flight line at a slight cant from the weight of the survival vest, carrying his helmet. His gear clinked and rattled. Blinking in the low sunlight to the east, coffee on his tongue. The smell of JP-4 jet fuel. He had showered earlier, but only now did his consciousness wake and assume the form of a fifty-eight-thousand-pound fighter jet. Only now did he slip on the deep-green aviator sunglasses that reflected a curvilinear airfield where men wheeled bombs toward a row of jets, the backdrop lush forest, blue sky.

  His plane was being serviced by the maintenance crew. He walked around the needle nose, the short wings, the slab of the tail. Slowly, looking. It was cool to the touch. He knew the plane's surfaces better than he remembered the faces of his children, the dents and patches and hydraulic fluid leaks, the zinc chromate smears where the plane had taken damage. The F-4 Phantom, so perfect on the drawing board, was in war a dinged, banged-up, pocked, underserviced, paint-peeling, galvanic-corroded workhorse that nonetheless performed remarkably. He climbed the ladder and lowered himself into the cockpit, trying to avoid flipping any panel switches. He wriggled into the seatback, parachute pack, and headrest. The cockpit smelled of burnt wiring. The air inside was over one hundred degrees, a slow roast. He attached the four quick-release fittings to the torso harness and buckled the leg-restraint straps across his shins; in an ejection, the straps protected his legs from striking the front canopy—and thereby being amputated. He plugged in the G suit and pulled on his helmet and then fitted the oxygen mask to his face. The start cart next to the plane whined, and he flipped the electrical power switch to external. The cockpit came alive. Gauge needles shivered, amber warning lights blinked on, the radio crackled awake. He checked the frequencies and killed a fly trapped in the forward section of the canopy. The heat gathered beneath his helmet. A world away, Ellie was washing up the dishes after dinner, the children letting the screen door slam as they ran outside with their ice-cream cones. Always he kept track of their parallel days. Ellie tying Ben's sneaker, Ellie on the telephone listening to her mother's complaints, Ellie in her sunglasses at the supermarket, Ellie reading to Julia, Ellie finding a gray hair, pulling at it angrily. Ellie dutiful, Ellie strong. Was this what they were? She living at the air base, he a technician in a tin can? A soldier-actor in a drama staged by politicians? All that was unanswerable. He preferred to think of his wife as he had seen her on his last leave—a glass of wine on the arm of her reading chair, an oversized volume of Renaissance paintings in her lap, the heavy bodies in torment and longing and ecstasy. Her hair fallen down. He imagined that she looked at the paintings and drank off the wine and then later struggled in the sheets, her fingers pressed against herself. He hoped she did that. He hoped to God she only did that—and would not be bitter at his absence. If she was bitter, perhaps later he could bear it with some kind of grace, since he was the cause of it. But maybe I am fooling myself, he thought, maybe she is happy without me, or mostly happy. You thought you knew but you never did. The children tired her each day, and she was alone with them. Alone now, presumably. Yet Ellie never showed doubt that he would return. Did she worry secretly, or was her faith in his survival absolute?

  By now his electronic warfare officer had climbed in the rear seat. They could not see each other but communicated by live mike. He fired up the left engine, moving the throttle forward and watching the rpm and exhaust gas temperature gauges rise. When the left engine reached idle, he started the right one and switched to internal electrical power. The ground crew pulled away the support vehicles beneath the plane. He reached up and chunked the canopy shut. Signaling back and forth with the ground crew, he tested the speed brakes, flaps, and ailerons. The crewman gave him the thumbs-up. The sun had climbed over the tree line on the horizon, burning off moisture, leveling a hard slant of heat across the streaked expanse of the airfield. His wingman was ready now, too.

  "Two up."

  "Three ready."

  He taxied briskly along the runway. At the head of the runway a serviceman ducked under the fuselage and activated the bomb racks and missiles.

  "Blue one ready for takeoff," he told the tower.

  "Blue one cleared."

  He signaled his wingman and pressed the throttle, running the engine up from idle to one hundred percent power—10,200 rpm. The airspeed indicator needle jumped to fifty knots, and then he moved the throttles outward and forward to the afterburner stop. Maximum power, jet fuel exploding in the exhaust nozzle. Give me everything, he prayed, let's fuck the sky. The plane jolted forward, the runway flashed past. The wheels thudded over the line of cement—football field lengths shooting beneath him—and then the nose gear quieted, lifted, and the plane arced skyward. He pulled the flaps up and again the plane lurched forward, the airspeed needle climbing past three hundred knots. The pneumatic system whistled as the plane groaned and banged and shuddered its way up to speed, the two immense engines feeding a roaring, cylindrical inferno that pressed the seat against his back. Beneath him, above him, around him, air rushed over the fuselage. Ground fell away. One thousand feet, two thousand, three thousand feet. In the sky.

  The four planes joined in a combat spread and vectored north, cruising at forty thousand feet, wingtips ten feet apart. He was so near his wingman he could see the rivets and scratches on the canopy frame, the stenciled emergency markings beneath it. The flight passed into an encompassing cloud rack—four airborne sharks in pale depthlessness. The radio gargled layers and layers of garbage sound: other Air Force radio conversations, the mocking and occasionally confusing interruption of Hanoi women broadcasters (false coordinates, insults, sexual taunts—all in a sneering, provocative voice), and the screeching static of No
rth Vietnamese ground technicians trying to jam the frequencies. The noises tore through one another, became louder and softer, choppy, windy, punctuated by blasts of music and faraway unintelligible voices.

  The clouds cleared, and seven miles below stretched a landscape of flooded rice paddies, shattered mirrors of the sky, fed by a river that wound lazily like the ever-switching tail of a cat. Above them stretched a ceiling of cirrostratus.

  "Blue lead," came the ground air controller, "this is Red Crown. Bandits at two-four-oh degrees, thirty-two miles."

  "Roger," he said into the helmet mike. "Blue flight, make a ten-degree turn south, let them chase us."

  "Blue lead, Blue two. SAMs at forty degrees, five miles."

  "Right." The North Vietnamese were throwing up resistance to drive them south, make them waste fuel.

  "Blue lead, this is Red Crown. Three SAMs up ahead."

  "Bandits must be in contact with the ground."

  "You have an altitude on SAM, two?"

  "Eighteen thousand."

  Setting up a SAM envelope, chasing them into it. The SAM detonation settings would be varied to explode over a wide range.

  "Blue lead, MiGs seven o'clock, eight miles."

  "Roger."

  "I've got three up ahead, Blue lead."

  "Blue lead, make a hard turn north. You have SAM coming at you five thousand feet and closing." He pulled on the stick and the jet veered to the north. He saw a flight of MiGs above and behind him. The SAMs were exploding harmlessly a mile back.

  "Bandits high." The flight came out of its turn. He had to decide whether to press on toward the bridge, still fifty miles away, or engage the MiGs, which hovered behind them like black mosquitoes with red wing stripes. They were close to air-to-air range.

  "Blue lead, I've got four SAM launches."

  He could see the SAMs, white telephone poles rising in a long curve directly in front of him.