As he felt the arresting gear slow the plan he slapped the throttles to idle, flipped the external light master switch off, and raised the flap handle. The A-6 jerked to a halt and rolled backwards.
The pilot pushed the button to raise the hook, then applied the brakes.
The Intruder stopped with another jolt, this time remaining at rest.
Jake could see people running toward the plane from the island. He chopped the right engine and opened the canopy. A corpsman in a white shirt scrambled up the ladder on the BN’s side of the plane and reached McPherson. He raised the bombardier’s head, looked at his neck, then motioned to the overhead floodlights switch on the canopy bow, the steel longitudinal frame that split the top of the canopy plexiglass. Turning it on, the pilot squinted and blinked as naked white light bathed the cockpit.
Rich red blood was everywhere. Blood covered McPherson and coated the panels on his side of the plane. Grafton’s right hand was covered with it, as was the stick grip and everything else he had touched. The cockpit was a slaughter house.
More men were draped over and on the cockpit. They flipped up the ejection seat safety latches to prevent the seat from firing accidentally, then released the fastenings that held the bombardier to the seat. They lifted his body out of the cockpit and passed him to the waiting hands below.
Fighting for self-control, Jake folded the wings an switched off the electronic gear. He became aware of Sammy standing on the ladder beside him.
Lundeen reached into the cockpit and pulled the parking brake handle, then shut down the left engine. Grafton unlatched his oxygen mask and removed his helmet. His eyes were riveted on the stretcher bearing Morgan McPherson to the island superstructure until it disappeared behind a swinging metal door.
Silence descended on the cockpit. The wind down the flight deck dried the sweat coating Jake’s hair and face. He began to chill. He looked again at the blood, on his hand, on the stick, blood everywhere under the harsh white light. The clock in the instrument panel was one of the few things not smeared with blood. The pilot looked up into the face of his friend.
“Sammy-” He felt the burning vomit coming up his throat and caught it in his helmet.
TWO
Early the next afternoon Jake Grafton walked through the hangar bay, picking his way around the planes and past the sailor-mechanics tending the R A-5 Vigilante reconnaissance planes, F-4 Phantom fighters, A-7 Corsair and A-6 Intruder attack planes, a couple of helicopters-all were carefully arranged so that every square foot of space was used.
Here in the hangar were performed the routine maintenance and emergency repairs that could not be done in the wind and rain of the flight deck. Here also were those plan needing spare parts that would be delivered by ship resupply plane. The hangar bay, an impressive acre and a half of aircraft, usually held a fascination for Jake, but not today.
When he reached the back of the bay, he walked through a set of open fireproof double doors into the Engine Repair Facility. A Young men wearing the enlisteds’ usual at-sea attire-bell-bottom jeans and faded denim shirts stained with oil, grease, and hydraulic fluid-attended to a half-dozen jet engines resting on waist-high dollies. Rags dangled from hip pockets, and wrenches and screwdrivers protruded at odd angles. Back in the States, these men must have been dressed much the same way on those long summer evenings when they tinkered with their Chevys and Fords.
Jake approached the shop chief, a trim middle-aged man. “Chief, do you have an old busted wrench or some scrap metal I could have?”
The chief petty officer took in the officer in khakis. About six feet and 175 pounds, Jake Grafton wore pilot’s wings above his left breast pocket and the blue nametag of the A-6 squadron above his right.
Clear gray eyes looked out past a nose that was at least one size too large for the face, and his brown hair had begun to recede from his forehead. Under one arm the officer was carrying a wadded-up flight suit.
“Sure, Mister Grafton.” The chief rummaged through a metal box beside a desk stacked with forms and publications. He selected two pieces of odd-shaped rusted steel, together weighing five or six pounds, and handed them to the pilot.
“Thanks, Chief.”
Jake continued on aft past the shop and stepped through an open hatch onto the fantail of the ship, a giant porch-like structure about fifteen feet above the water with the flight deck aSARoof. Ordinarily the engine mechanics used this space to bolt their jet engines to massive stands and test them before reinstalling them in the aircraft, and often the marine detachment aboard used the fantail for small-arms practice, firing at cans or rags tossed into the wake. Today, though, the place was deserted.
Jake unrolled the flight suit, placed the metal in one of the deep chest pockets, then zipped it closed. Dried blood, now a rusty brown, covered the right sleeve and splotched the one-piece suit. He threw the suit over the rail into the wake, a river of foam reaching toward the horizon. The green cloth floated briefly, then settled beneath the roiling surface on its long trip to the sea’s floor. The cloth would last a few years before it disintegrated but the steel would take maybe as many as a thousand years before it surrendered completely to the ageless sea. But the sea would win. That he knew. Even after the cloth had disappeared several hundred yards astern, he remained mesmerized by the water agitated in the wake of the ship’s four massive screws. The water came up white with a tinge of green ceaselessly renewing itself. Except for the steel and the bloody cloth sinking slowly into the depths, not a trace of man’s passage would remain after the wake disapated miles behind the ship.
Maybe I’ll end up there, he thought, trapped in a shot-up cockpit or drowned after ejecting from a plane at night. He visualized sharks. Attracted by the smell of blood or the thrashings of a man trying to stay afloat the gray shapes would come out of the dark and rip a man to pieces. He imagined how it might be when the sharks tore at his flesh.
He grimaced and turned away.
Commander Camparelli’s stateroom was two decks below the hangar deck, off a quiet passageway. Jake made sure his shirttail was properly tucked in before he knocked and stepped inside.
Camparelli sat in a chair at the desk. Lieutenant Commander Cowboy Parker, the squadron’s operations officer, sat on the bunk and the executive officer, Commander Harvey Wilson, had the sofa. The top of the small refrigerator, conveniently close to the desk, made a handy place for Camparelli’s file stacks.
The only other furniture was a knee-high table in front of the sofa and a dresser-locker recessed into one bulkhead As the commanding officer of the A-6 squadron aboard the Shilo, Frank Camparelli was responsible for sixteen aircraft, forty officers, and three hundred sixty enlisted men. Twenty years had gone into learning this assignment, and he regarded it as the high point of his career. He was just getting used to all these men calling him “Skipper.” Behind his back they called him the “Old Man.” The same name was given to every other commanding officer in the navy, but on occasions, such as this evening, Camparelli felt that he in particular richly deserved it. Short and muscular, he had a habit of running his fingertips lightly over the stubble of his crewcut whenever his mind was fully engaged in solving a problem. Tonight the fingertips were in constant motion.
One of Camparelli’s burdens was that he had several bosses. His immediate superior on operational matters was the commander of the air wing. The air wing was composed of the eight squadrons aboard the ship. This officer, a senior commander, was known as the CAG, an acronym from the days when a ship’s squadrons were constituted as an air group. On administrative matters, Camparelli answered to a rear admiral back in the States who supervised all the A-6 squadrons assigned to the navy’s Pacific Fleet. And because the squadron was embarked in a navy ship, the commanding officer of the ship, Captain Boma, had a rather large say both operationally and administratively.
Camparelli had to be an adroit politician to stay afloat in this Byzantine world, complicated by strong personalities and overlapping op
erational and administrative concerns. The effort challenged his ingenuity and patience, but he felt he usually measured up. Most of the time, in fact, he thrived on it.
“Sit down, Jake.” Camparelli waved at the bunk. Grafton sat down beside Cowboy. “We’d like to hear about the flight, again, and ask you a few questions. Cowboy is getting the operational loss report and the XO is heading the accident investigation. We’ve read your combat report.” The skipper nodded at the papers on his desk.
Jake repeated the essence of his combat report. Others occasionally tossed in a question, but mostly they listened.
Cowboy Parker took notes on a yellow legal pad. As the squadron operations officer, he was responsible for ensuring that the aircraft were operated in accordance with regulations, the “book.” He supervised the preparation of the flight schedule and saw to it that every crewman was properly trained. He was teacher, coach, and, when necessary, slave driver. Because he was regularly required to make judgement calls, he was guaranteed a place on the hot seat at the first hint of trouble.
In spite of his authority, Parker was popular with the junior officers; they respected his professional abilities and delighted in his willingness to occasionally participate in a sophomoric prank.
Tonight, as usual, his angular face revealed nothing of his thoughts.
Harvey Wilson, the executive officer, or XO took few notes even though he was the nominal head of the accident investigation team. He had a bulging midrif and little black currant eyes that almost disappeared in his fleshy face, Grafton realized that Wilson would expect the junior people on the accident investigation team to do all the research and write the report, which he would then sign after ordering three or four drafts. He would become the next commanding officer of the squadron after Camparelli left a year from now. Jake expected to leave the squadron before Wilson got his chance to be a leader of men in combat. He had even called his detailer, the officer in Washington who wrote orders, for reassurance.
Frank Camparelli, on the other hand, was as good as they come. He listened to Jake’s account of the mission observing the pilot with clear blue eyes that seemed to notice everything. Finally Camparelli leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on the wastebasket “The whole thing sounds like an unavoidable tragedy to me. We’ll get the best results with our airplanes if we use them the way they were designed to be used, that is, low-level night attack. We get the most accurate hits at low altitude. The errors of angle in the radar, computer, and inertial result in larger miss distances the farther away from the target we release the weapons, as you gentlemen are well aware. And if we are up high, alone, five to ten thousand feet, the SAMs are going to make our life rough. Above ten thousand feet we don’t have enough bombs when you figure the probability of an accurate hit.
No,” he concluded, “we have to come in low at night. And occasionally a random bullet is going to do some damage, cost us a plane.” He glanced at Grafton.
“Or a life.”
“If they get too good at shooting at low fliers we may have to mix it up, send some guys in high and some in low to keep them guessing,” the XO offered.
The skipper ignored the comment. Jake wondered how having some planes up high would lessen the threat if the gomers learned to bag the guys down low.
It seemed to him that any low flier would have difficulty regardless of how many were at altitude. But he was only a lieutenant, The skipper spoke to him.
“You said in your combat report that the SAM they fired at you leveled off, then ceased guiding and went ballistic when you descended to 200 feet?”
“Yes, sir, that’s right.”
“Two hundred feet is too damn low,” the XO grumbled. “You hiccup at that height and you’ve bought the farm.”
“Maybe,” the skipper said and turned back to reading the combat report.
Jake fought the urge to tell Wilson he wasn’t given to hiccups over North Vietnam. He looked at Cowboy, who wore his usual blank expression. If you didn’t know better, you’d suspect Cowboy’s IQ was no greater than his age. Jake faced the skipper but examined the XO out of the corner of his eye. Wilson’s reluctance to fly at night was the subject of whispers and sneers among the junior officers- Behind his back he was known as “the Rabbit.” McPherson buys the farm, Grafton thought, and assholes like Wilson just keep on ticking. Damn it, Morg why did it have to be you?
“The thing I’m worried about is this,” the skipper said. “Are the North VietNamese getting enough technical improvements from the Soviets to break us out of the ground clutter on their radar? Or putting heat seekers on those SAMs? If they do either, those missiles are going to start coming down on us and we’ll be in real trouble.”
“Out of altitude and out of luck, I could do without that,” looking up from his pad.
The skipper sucked at his pencil, then directed his attention to Cowboy.
“Parker, you tell the ordinance shop to start loading a couple of those infrared flares in the chaff tubes. Maybe the fourth and twelfth tubes That should give us an IR flare for each of the first two missiles, so if they do put heat seekers on those things we’ll already have them foxed.” Cowboy made a note “And keep Jake off the flight schedule tonight.” Cowboy shot a look at Grafton.
“Okay, fellows. That’s all. I want to talk to Jake for a moment.” The XO and Cowboy left. Camparelli waited until the footsteps had faded in the passageway before he spoke. “I think you know how I feel. Losing Morgan is damned tough.”
“Yessir, it is.”
“I want you to write a letter to Morgan’s wife. I’ll mail it in a few days with one from me. That’ll give her a little time to get over the first shock.”
“Sure.”
“Anything you want to tell me about that hop that you don’t want in the official reports?”
Jake was surprised, and it showed. “No, sir.”
“if there is something, you had better let me know. I have to know what the hell is going on in these airplanes. I have sixteen planes and eighteen crews to worry about and I don’t like to lose people or machines.”
Jake swallowed. “Skipper, that hop was as straightforward as they come. No fuck-ups. The gomers just got lucky.”
Camparelli lit a cigarette. His cropped hair showed flecks of gray, and crow’s-feet radiated from the corners of his eyes. Like most aviators he had a deeply tanned face, but his arms, routinely encased in a fire-proof flight suit, were white. In the center of his forehead was a prominent scar, a souvenir from his younger days when he had belly-landed an A-1 Skyraider and smashed his head on the gunsight. “No fuck-ups? The doctor tells me you pressed so hard on McPherson’s neck you damaged the tissue. And at the same time you were motoring around over the treetops with your left hand trying to stay in the air. Bet that little trip resembled a roller-coaster ride.” He blew smoke in Grafton’s face. “The only way you could have stopped the bleeding would have been to stuff a finger in the bullet hole and seal off that artery. Then McPherson would have died from brain damage due to oxygen starvation.”
Camparelli leaned forward in his chair, put his elbows on his knees, and looked into Grafton’s eyes. “I know you didn’t know how badly he was hit, but you could have smacked in while you were playing doctor. Then you and McPherson would both have one of those little farms with the stones and flowers. Of course, you wouldn’t be there. You two would be splattered across a half mile or so of rice paddies. Your intentions were good, but I’m here to tell you that no matter what the circumstance, sound judgment is the only damn thing on God’s green earth that’s going to keep you alive long enough to die in bed. And even that may not be enough.”
Camparelli drummed on the table with his fingers His voice dropped. “There is no such thing as luck. You think you’re lucky and that’ll carry you through you’re living on borrowed time.” He was talking to himself. “The luckiest men I ever met are all dead now. They thought they were surrounded with a golden halo Of good fortune, a magic shield th
at couldn’t be pierced.” He looked at Grafton. “And they are dead!” He pronounced the last sentence slowly, to emphasize each word.
“I know, sir, you’re right, but what bothers me” Jake’s respect for Camparelli warred with his anger over McPherson’s death, “is why in hell we keep getting men killed and planes chewed up over garbage targets? A ’suspected truck park,” for God’s sake? “A good man’s life in exchange for some beat-up trucks? If they were there, which is not very damned likely. There’s got to be some better targets in gomer country. Why can’t we bomb something that makes a difference?”
The Old Man leaned back in his chair. “There is nothing anyone aboard this ship can do about the targets. In this war the politicians and generals do the targeting, based on political considerations.” He pronounced “political” like a preacher using a cuss word He waved his hand, dismissing the subject of targets and the men responsible for them. “I don’t want you in the air unless you’re one hundred percent. I can’t spare any more bombardiers and I damn sure don’t want to lose an airplane. All you have to worry about is your ass and your bombardier’s, but I have eighteen aircrews I’m responsible for. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
He spoke more briskly. “And I don’t want anybody in these airplanes who thinks he’s John Wayne on a vengeance mission,” Jake Grafton said nothing.
“Okay, get some sleep. Take tonight off and write that letter. It’ll be tough but it’ll help get this behind you. “Yes, sir.” He stood hesitantly and watched the skipper pull a can of Coke from his refrigerator.
“Thanks, Skipper.”
“If you kill yourself, son, I’ll piss on your grave.
“I understand.”
The commander nodded absently and ripped the pull-top off the can.
“Get some sleep, Jake.”
As he walked toward his own stateroom, Jake decided that Frank Camparelli was all right. He could tell a man to go to hell and make him happy to be on his way.
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