Flight of the Intruder jg-1

by Stephen Coonts

  McPherson, his head against the scope hood, fed Grafton a running commentary. “We’re in the valley … looks good for five miles ahead, ridges on both sides … the valley will bend right … we’ll be coming right in two miles … your altitude looks good … begin a right turn … harder right … looking good … steady up….”

  And so they sped up the valley. In five minutes they crossed the divide and descended into another valley leading toward the interior plain, the desert.

  The turns were steep at first, the pilot reluctant to force the nose down, but as the valley widened and straightened he let the machine sink until the impact bar rested on the coded range bin and the radar altimeter read 1000 feet.

  “Looks real good . . . ridges moving away from our track… hold this heading … clearance looks good……”

  They turned to a heading that would take them to a lake seventy miles away. Halfway there McPherson pushed back from the scope hood and began tapping in the coordinates of their next turnpoint onto the computer keyboard between his knees.

  After the fierce concentration of the last fifteen minutes, the pilot unconsciously relaxed, took several deep breaths, and scanned the engine instruments and the fuel gauge as McPherson typed and checked his kneeboard cards. Satisfied that the computer had taken the new information, the bombardier put his head against the scope hood and Jake heard him scream.

  “Pull up!”

  Now Jake saw the display. They were dead men. The coded range bin was way above the impact bar, up near the top of the display. He slammed the throttles forward and jerked back on the stick. His eyes swung to the radar altimeter.

  The needle was sinking through 200 feet.

  We’re dead!

  The aural warning sounded. The needle passed 100 feet. He had the stick locked aft.

  So this is how it feels to die.

  The needle on the radar altimeter fell to 50 feet, hovered there for a second, then began to climb. The Pilot’s eyes came back to the vdi. Twenty degrees nose up. He kept the stick locked aft. The radar altimeter needle raced clockwise.

  He couldn’t release the back pressure on the control stick. Forty degrees nose up … fifty … sixty …

  seventy.

  At eighty degrees nose up he felt the stall buffet and then, only then, did he ease the stick to neutral.

  Two hundred knots and slowing. They were passing 9000 feet.

  He stared at the instruments. He had to do something! They were going almost straight up and running out of airspeed!

  “Come on, Jake.” Morgan’s calm voice.

  The pilot rolled the plane ninety degrees and let the nose drop toward the horizon. Slowly, slowly it came down and the airspeed crept up. When the nose reached the horizon, he rolled wings level.

  They were at 13,000 feet. He was shaking uncontrollably. What had he done? He had almost killed them!

  Morgan must have sensed how shaken he was. As they droned around on autopilot in a lazy circle with Jake shivering, the bombardier had talked to him. Jake could never remember what Morgan had said. He had just talked to let Jake hear the sound of his voice, calm and soothing; he talked until Jake was over his panic. And when they had landed, McPherson never mentioned the incident to anyone, had never reported the near disaster. He merely shook Jake’s hand in the parking lot and gave him a parting smile.

  And he had saved both their lives!

  Now he was dead. Two years and hundreds of thousands of miles later, he was dead.

  Jake began to write. After three drafts he had the semblance of an acceptable letter. It wasn’t really acceptable, but it was the best he could manage. Two more drafts in ink gave him a letter he was prepared to sign.

  Dear Sharon, By now you have been notified of Morgan’s death in action.

  He was killed on a night strike on a target in North Vietnam, doing the best he could for his country. That fact will never fill the emptiness that his passing leaves but it will make him shine even brighter in my memory.

  I flew with Morgan for over two years. We spent over six hundred hours together in the air. I knew him perhaps as well as any man can know another.

  We both loved flying and that shared love sealed our friendship.

  Since I knew him so well, I am well aware of the depth of his love for you and Bobby and realize the magnitude of the tragedy of his passing. You have my deepest and most sincere sympathy.

  Jake What would she think when she read it? Would she save it and get it out in those moments when the pain must be revisited? Ten or twenty years from now, on a cool spring day when she’s cleaning the attic, would she find this letter from her lost past? The paper would be faded and yellow then. She would remember how he looked when she received it, the final notice that dreams of her youth had died far away, in a forsaken land, in a forgotten cause. Perhaps she would show it to her son when he asked about his father.

  He stared at himself in the mirror over the sink. Where would he be in twenty years? Dead like McPherson and the nameless men who died under his bombs Or selling insurance and paying off a mortgage, but with the day-to-day affairs that fill up life yet somehow leave it empty?

  He turned off the light and lay down on his bunk. Tired as he was, sleep would not come. He reviewed that last flight from beginning to end. There must be something he could have done differently.

  But that bullet had come out of nowhere; he couldn’t have avoided it. Now Morgan was dead, and for what?

  He wanted to get the bastards for that! He remembered the RockEye attack on the guns. God, that had felt good! He had pickled the four cluster bombs at precisely the right moment. Too bad the A-6 didn’t have a gun like the A-7 Corsair had. If only he had a gun! He could just drop the nose, put the pipper in the sight a fraction below the target, pull the trigger, and walk those slugs right up onto the gomers. As he lay there in his bunk, he could feel the recoil from the hammering weapon. The sensation was so real he panicked and groped for the light.

  With the light on there was only the small room. He found Lundeen’s bottle and, sitting down in his desk chair, took a pull of the liquor.

  Camparelli’s words came back to him. “I don’t want anybody in those planes who thinks he’s John Wayne on a vengeance mission.” But it was damn hard not to want revenge. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a body for a body….

  So he’s dead and nothing can bring him back. He died bombing a bunch of trees in a shitty little place in a shitty little war that we don’t have the guts to try to win, and he would get a flag for his coffin. Jesus, you lose him like that and you want something more than a flag. You can’t help wishing that if he had to die that he’d died bombing a target that might have meant something. So you could honestly say, so Sharon could truthfully say, so his son could say with pride in the years to come: He died for…. My dad helped win the war by…. He died in the name of…. What? Nothing. Christ, what you want is for his death to mean something. You want a reason.

  Maybe you can make his death mean something. You could sneak north some dark night and bomb something worth the trip. Really kick the gomers in the nuts.

  He was up and pacing around the little room. It is possible, he told himself. Yes. No one but your bombardier knows where you go after you cross the beach. The Americans can’t follow you on radar, and the gomers have no idea where you’re supposed to go. So you can go anywhere you please and attack any damn thing.

  What crazy thoughts! You pull a stunt like that, Jake, and you’ll be court-martialed … crucified.

  Fuck that. So what? McPherson’s dead. I want a target that will make the gomers bleed. Like they made Morgan bleed. And Sharon.

  And me….

  When he lay down on his bunk again, he left the light on and concentrated on the creaks and groans of the ship as its steel beams and plates moved to meet the stresses of the swells.

  He lay a long time listening to the sounds of the ship.

  FOUR

  It waSARotten night in the tro
pics. The rain had resumed just after sunset. On the bridge of the ship the officer of the deck made a note of the time for the log.

  After a few minutes the OOD ordered the bridge windshield wipers turned on, and he searched the blackness for the lights of the destroyer that should be out ahead of the carrier. She had been visible only a moment ago. He checked the radar screen. Still just where she should be, five thousand yards ahead.”

  “Let me know if the Fannon gets out of position,” he said to the junior officer of the watch, then called down to the Combat Information Center and repeated the order to the watch officer who sat surrounded by surface-and-air-search radar consoles. Even the air on the bridge was laden with moisture. The one hundred percent humidity prevented sweat from evaporating, so damp hair, shirts, and underwear gave each man his o particular odor.

  The OOD walked over to the port wing of the bridge and looked at the rain-whipped flight deck below. The airplanes were huddled together in the blurred red light. Their up-thrust wings reminded him of arms raised in supplication. The tropical rain was good for the planes; it would wash off some of the grime and salt spray. The sound of the rain pounding on the bridge’s steel and the rhythmic swish-swish of the wipers made the watch officer feel alone in the night.

  This line period would be over in two days time. Then the ship would leave Yankee Station for the pleasures of Subic Bay, a thirty-six-hour trip across the South China Sea. On that cheerful morning, the jungle-covered mountains that encircled the U.S. Navy’s home in the South Pacific would rise from the sea and break the monotonous horizon. Five glorious and mostly carefree days and nights of maximum liberty awaited most of the men. For some, of course, there would still be long hours of hard work, but even they could look forward to evenings on the beach.

  U.S. Naval Station Subic Bay and the adjoining U.S. Naval Air Station Cubi Point, the Philippines, were not places normally advertised on travel posters, but dry land is dry land. Well, it was dry land until a tropical storm opened heaven’s gates, but then a sailor could always rationalize that mud is preferable to saltwater.

  When sailors on liberty grew tired of drinking in the bars, or playing golf in the blazing sun, or strolling through the navy exchanges, they could then amble across the bridge that spans the Perfume River, really a drainage canal, and sample the exotic delights of Olongapo City. Some 150,000 people struggled to stay alive in this crowded town of half-dirt-half-paved streets.

  Most of the people of Po City made a living, of sorts, chasing the Yankee dollars brought across the bridge by thirsty, sex-starved American servicemen momentarily free of Mother, God, and the U.S. Navy.

  A kaleidoscope of sensual delights, the city offered cheap booze and horse-piss beer and legions of little brown girls with only wisps of pubic hair who would perform almost any sex act imaginable for the right price. And to the never-ending delight of the horny Americans, the right price was always ridiculously low.

  Tonight, two days out of port, the doctors an corpsmen in the hospital spaces were buying five-buck squares in the clap pool: The nearest square to the exact number of VD cases diagnosed in the next line period would take the pot. Up in the captain’s office a yeoman was putting the finishing touches on a report of drug-overdose death from the ship’s last port visit. In the galleys the night shift, busy baking the fifteen hundred loaves of bread and the five thousand doughnuts the crew would consume the following day, were calculating the number of loaves and doughnuts between them and Subic Bay. From the keel to the signal-bridge, every man aboard was looking forward to nights ashore as the ship lay tied to the Cubi Point carrier pier.

  Beneath the flight deck in the cubicle that housed the Strike Operations office, the men charged with directing the ship’s combat sorties sat over coffee an cigarettes, considering a map of the war zone spread o the table before them. On top of the map lay the lateest weather forecast, which was consulted again and again The Gulf of Tonkin, where the ship was located, an North Vietnam were blanketed by rain clouds that also covered Hainan Island and most of northern South Vietnam. The men decided, after a few questions to the weather forecasters, on a new air plan for the twelve hours beginning at midnight, and the plan was quickly written, printed, and distributed throughout the ship The ship would sail south. Beginning at midnight, the A-6s would be launched at the preassigned targets in the North.

  Their electronic eyes could penetrate the clouds and rain and darkness.

  The Phantoms would still provide fighter cover for the task force, and the early warning planes, the E-2s, would fly above the weather and ensure that the sky and sea remained free of unfriendly ships and planes.

  At dawn everything that could fly and carry bombs would head south to work with Air Force Forward Air Controllers (FACs). “Hate to let the boys up North have a day off, but I don’t see any other way,” the strike ops boss said to his staff.

  In response to the new air plan, the ship’s navigator plotted a new course to first-launch position and handed it to the OOD. The watch officer notified the carrier’s escorting ships of the new course and necessary maneuvers and checked their positions in relation to the carrier before he ordered the course change. He watched the helmsman spin the wheel to bring the ship about, then glued his head to the radar repeater to ensure that none of the screening ships attempted a turn across the behemoth’s bow. The huge ship heeled only two or three degrees in a long, slow turn. Rainwater sluiced off the flight deck into the scuppers, then fell the sixty feet to the sea.

  Someone was shaking him. He was coming up from a long way under and someone was shaking his arm. “Rise and shine, Jake. Time to go fly.” Lundeen shook him one more time to make sure he was awake.

  From his bunk, Jake watched his tall roommate lather up his face. Every muscle in Jake’s body was relaxed. “How long did I sleep?”

  “At least fourteen hours. You were really zonked.”

  Lundeen hummed as he shaved. “We have a brief in five minutes for the first launch at midnight,” he said. “You have a tanker.”

  “Weather?”

  “Heavy sea running. Raining enough to float the Ark. Another great navy day.” Lundeen continued humming.

  Jake looked at his watch, 10:25. Reluctantly, he kicked away the sheet and sat up. He was covered with a fine layer of perspiration. He stretched and yawned.

  “Your humming is really inspirational. What’s the tune?”

  “I don’t know. I make it up as I go along.” Jake pulled on his new olive-drab flight suit, one-piece fire-resistant coveralls. As he laced up his steel-toed flight boots, he asked, “Sammy, if you could bomb any target in North Vietnam, what would you bomb?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “What’s the most important asset they have?”

  “Ho Chi Minh’s grave.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am serious. They don’t have anything worth piddle. If they did, we’d have bombed it.”

  “Bullshit. You know that isn’t true.”

  Sammy rinsed his razor and wiped his face. “It’d be in Hanoi. If they have anything valuable, it’s in Hanoi where it can be defended. And about all the navy ever bombed there were the bridges and the rail yards. Maybe a power plant or two.”

  Both men opened their desk safes, drew out their revolvers, and dropped them in a chest pocket.

  The baggy one-piece suits sagged. They locked the safe turned off the lights, and locked the stateroom door behind them. “But you can’t just go bomb something on your own, Jake, and you know it,” Sammy said as they walked toward the ready room.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t get any big ideas.”

  “Sure, Sam. You know me. Jake stopped at the main wardroom pantry adjacent to their ready room. He filled a mug with coffee and scrounged a slab of roast beef from the steward, leftover from the evening meal which he had slept through. He even cadged a bread roll, tore it in half and put it around the beef.

  Inside the ready room the bri
ef was in progress.

  Grafton settled into one of the large padded chairs beside Razor Durfee, his BN for the flight. Razor was taking notes from the briefing being broadcast over the closed-circuit television, which was mounted high in one corner. The same show was playing in all eight of the ship’s ready rooms. One of the A-6 squadron’s air intelligence officers, Abe Steiger, was giving the brief to the air wing for the first launch. Jake ate his sandwich while Razor took notes.

  “Real tough about Morgan,” Durfee whispered, his eyes on the television.

  Jake grunted and kept eating. Yeah, it was tough. And Morgan had despised Durfee. As he thought about it, he concluded he didn’t think much of the man, either. He watched the bombardier take notes. Razor’s hairline was in full retreat and, as if in compensation, he sported a luxuriant mustache that he stroked compulsively.

  Sammy Lundeen and Marty Greve would fly one s while Cowboy Parker and Miles Rockwell flew the other. Little Augie and Big Augie had the standby tanker; they would man up but launch only if Grafton’s plane had a mechanical problem. All the men in the room had settled into the high-backed padded chairs, and most had their feet propped up on the backs of the chairs in front of them. A more casual-looking crowd would be difficult to find. From hard experience they all knew that forced relaxation was the best way to control the agitation of stomach and nerves as launch time . Perceptible nervousness being contagious, enforced cool was the unwritten law.

  When Abe Steiger finished listing the targets on the television, the camera panned to clouds, the duty weatherman. Everyone’s eyes zeroed in on the charts at the end of Clouds’s pointer. “Not a good evening, gentlemen.