The Intruders (10 page)

Praise God, that was a religious experience, Amen! I feel born again,
Amen! The narrowness of our escape and my ecstasy must have made me the
eensiest bit careless in my military manners. I apologize. You
understand, don’t you, sir?”

“Ecstasy! What crap! Go sit over there in that corner with your Amens
and keep your mouth shut until your fellow jarheads get the maintenance
book up here for your pilot to read. He can read, can’t he?”

“Oh yes, sir. He’s Navy, not Marine. He’s got a good, solid,
second-grade education. His mamma told me he did just fine in school
until - - .”

Jake Grafton decided he was thirsty and needed to take a leak. He
wandered away to attend to both problems.

He was slurping water from a fountain in the passageway outside the
hatch to Flight Deck Control when he realized that Lieutenant Colonel
Haldane was standing beside him.

Haldane was wearing his uniform tonight, not his flight suit.

His I-been-there decorations under his gold aviator wings made an
impressive splotch of color on his left breast.

“What happened?” he asked Jake.

“They gave me a late wave-off, sir. I was almost at the ramp, or at it.
Somebody said something about the deck going foul. Whatever, at the
time all I knew was that the red lights were flashing and the LSO was
shouting. So I did my thing. I was just too close.”

Haldane was watching his eyes as he spoke. When he finished speaking
the colonel gave him another five seconds of intense scrutiny before he
asked, “Did you do everything right?”

Jake Grafton swallowed hard. This just wasn’t his day.

“No, sir. I didn’t. I knew we had passed the wave-off point, so I was
concentrating on the ball and lineup. When the wave-off lights came on,
I guess I was sorta stunned there for a tenth of a second. Then I
reacted automatically-nose up, boards in, full power. I should have
given her the gun and got the boards in, but I should have just held the
nose attitude. Should have rode it into a bolter.”

Haldane’s head bobbed a millimeter. “Are you up to two more?” he asked.

“I think so, sir.”

“If you don’t want to go I’ll back you up. No questions asked.”

“I’d like to go now, sir, if we can get a bird.”

“How many carrier landings do you have?”

“Before today, sir, three hundred twenty-four.”

“How many at night?”

“One hundred twenty-seven, I believe.”

Haldane nodded. “Whenever I have a close call,” he said, “the first
thing to go afterward is my instrument scan. I get ‘way behind the
plane, fixate on just one instrument. Really have to work to keep the
eyeballs moving.”

“Yessir,” Jake said, and grinned. He liked the way Haldane used himself
as an example. That was class. “I’ll keep it safe, Skipper,” Jake
added.

“Fine,” said the colonel, and went into Flight Deck Control to see the
handler.

“A thank-you letter to Jesus, huh?”

“That was the best I could do on the spur of the moment.

Don’t hold it against me.”

“Amen to that.” Jake sighed and tried to relax. They were sitting
behind the jet-blast deflector for Cat One, waiting for the A-7 ahead to
do his thing. Jake tugged at the VDI reflexively and wriggled to get
his butt set in the seat.

He was still feeling the aftereffects of adrenaline shock, but he knew
it, so he forced himself to look at everything carefully. Wings locked,
flaps and slats out, stabilator shifted, roger the weight board, ease
forward into the shuttle, throttles up and off brakes, cat grip up, wipe
out the controls, check fuel flow, RPM, EGT … Lights on and barn!
they were hurling down the catapult into the blackness.

Off the pointy end, nose up, gear up, climbing …

It went well until he got onto the ball, then he couldn’t get
stabilized. Too nervous. Every correction was too big, every
countercorrection overdone. The plane wobbled up and down on the glide
slope and went from fast to slow to fast again. He was waggling the
wings trying to get properly lined up as he went across the ramp and
that, coupled with not quite enough power, got him a settle into the
two-wire.

The last one was more of the same. At this point Jake realized he was
totally exhausted.

“Settle down,” Flap told him in the groove.

“I’m trying. Let’s just get this fun over with, okay?”

Crossing the ramp he lowered the nose and eased the power a smidgen to
ensure he wouldn’t bolter. He didn’t. One wire.

He had to pry himself from the cockpit. He was so tired he had trouble
plodding across the deck.

“Another day, another dollar,” Flap said cheerfully.

“Something like that,” Jake mumbled, but so quietly Flap didn’t hear it.
No matter.

“It was a late wave-off, and I’m sorry,” Hugh Skidmore told Jake in the
ready room. The LSOs were waiting for Jake when he came in. The
television monitor mounted high in the corner of the room was running
the PLAT tape of the in-flight engagement, over and over and over.
Colonel Haldane was there, but he stood silently without saying
anything. Jake and the LSOs watched the PLAT tape twice.

“You owe me, Skidmore.”

“Other than that little debacle, your first one-the touch and-go-was
okay, the first trap okay, the second fair, the third okay. The fifth
trap was a fair and the last one a nograde. I almost waved you off. I
don’t want to see any more of that deck spotting-” After a glance at the
skipper Skidmore ran out of words. He contented himself with adding, “I
think you were a little wrung out on the last one.”

Jake nodded. He had sinned there at the end and wasn’t too proud to
admit it. “I spotted the deck on the last one.

Sorry!” He tried to shrug but didn’t have the energy. “What about the
in-flight?”

“Gave you a fair.”

“Fair? Now wait just a minute-’ Jake knew the futility of arguing with
the umpire, but that pass had cost him too much.

“I had a good pass going until everything went to hell.”

“Not all that good. You were carrying a little too much power in the
middle and went fast. You made the correction but you overdid it.
Approaching the ramp you were slow and settling into a two-wire when I
waved you off.”

“How do you figure that?”

The Real McCoy spoke up. “Jake, if you -had been right on a centered
ball when the wave-off came, you would have missed all the wires on the
wave-off. Smacking on a big wad of power should have just carried you
across the wires into a bolter. Hugh’s right. You were a half ball low
going lower when you gunned it. That pass would have been a fair
twowire. Look at that PLAT tape again. Carefully.”

Jake surrendered. “I bow to the opinion of the experts.”

“Next time keep the ball centered, huh?”

Flap Le Beau spoke up. “There had better not be a next time. If there
is, you two asshole mechanics better swim for it before I get out of the
plane.” He was apparently oblivious of the presence of Richard Haldane.

Jake glanced at the colonel to see how he was taking all this.
Apparently without a flicker of emotion.

“No, I’m serious,” Skidmore said. “If you ever get a waveoff in close
like that, Jake, slam the throttles up and run the boards in, but don’t
rotate. Just ride her into a bolter.”

“But don’t go into the water waiting for the wheels to hit,” the Real
added.

Now Richard Haldane spoke. “May I have a word with you gentlemen?”

Skidmore and McCoy went over to where the colonel was standing. Flap
asked Jake, “How are you supposed to know that it’s an in-close wave-off
if the LSOs can’t figure it out?”

“The guy with the stick in his hand is always responsible,” Jake told
the bombardier. “He’s the dummy who signed for the plane.”

After Jake and Flap debriefed both the planes they had flown that
evening, Jake asked Flap if he wanted a drink.

“Yeah. You got any?”

“A little. In my stateroom. One drink and I’m into my rack. See you
in a bit.”

Ten minutes later Flap asked, “So Skidmore should not have waved us off,
even though the cable might have parted on number three if we had caught
it?”

“Yeah. That’s right. The in-close position is defined as the point
where a wave-off cannot be safely made. From that point on, in to
touchdown, you are committed, like the pig.

The LSO has to take you aboard no matter what. It’s a practical
application of the lesser of two evils theory.”

“Like the pig?”

“Yeah. A chicken lays eggs, she’s dedicated. A pig gives his life,
he’s committed.”

“Where you from, anyway?”

“Virginia. Rural Virginia, down in the southwest corner.

And you?”

“Brooklyn.”

“all that crap you gave me this morning about Louisiana and you’re from
Brooklyn?”

“Yep. Born in the ghetto to a woman who didn’t know who my daddy was
and raised on the streets. That’s me.”

“So how did you get into the s ‘ I

. Flap Le Beau finished off his straight whiskey and grinned. He held
up the glass. “Got any more?”

“Help yourself.” pouring, Flap said, “Did you ever hear When he finished
of a guy named Horowitz who funded scholarships for ghetto children?”

“No. Don’t think so.”

“Well, it’s sorta. the in-thing for a millionaire to do these days.
Publicly commit yourself to funding a college education for ten ghetto
kids, or fifty, a hundred if you have the bucks, Sol Horowitz was the
first. He promised to pay for the college education of a hundred
first-graders in a public school in Brooklyn if they graduated from high
school- I was one of the hundred. It’s sort of amazing, but I actually
got through high school. Then I got caught stealing some cars and the
probation officer told the judge I had this college scholarship waiting,
if I would only go. So the judge sentenced me to college. I kid you
not.”

Flap sipped, remembering. Finally he continued. “I screwed around at
the university. Drank and came real close to flunking out, or getting
du-own out. Miracle number two, I graduated. So somebody arranged for
me to meet Horowitz. I don’t know exactly what I expected. Some
wizened old Jew with money rtlclcmg out of every pocket sitting in a
mansionI don’t know. welL Solomon Horowitz was none of that. He lived
in a walk-up flat off Flatbush, a real dump. He looked me up and down
and told me I was nothing.

“‘You have learned nothing,” he said. ‘You barely passed your courses-I
hear you continued to steal cars. Oh yes, I have my sources. They tell
me. I know.” What could I say? -Horowitz asked, ‘Who do you think gave
you a chance to make something of yourselP Some oil baron? Some rich
Jew asshole whose daddy left him ten million? I will tell you who.”

“He rolled up his sleeve. He had a number tattooed on the inside of his
wrist. He had been in Dachau. And you know something else? When he
made the promise to send those kids to college, he didn’t have any
money. He made the promise because then he would have to work like hell
to earn the money.”

“Why?” Jake asked.

“‘I’liat was my question. I’ll level with you, Jake. I was twenty-two
years old and I’d never met anybody in my life who wasn’t in it for
himself. So I asked.

“Horowitz thought about it for a little bit and finally said he guessed
I was entitled to know. The Nazis castrated him.

He could never have any children. When he got out of Dachau after the
war weighing ninety-one pounds, he came to America. He wanted his life
to make a difference to somebody, he said, so he promised to send a
hundred kids to co , blacks and Puerto Ricans who would never have a
chance otherwise. He worked three jobs, seven days a week, saved his
money, invested every dime. And he did it. Actually sent thirty-two,
who were all of the hundred that finished high school and could read and
write well enough to get into a college. Thirty-two. He paid board,
room, books and tuition and sent a little allowance every month.
twenty-three of us graduated.”

Flap tossed off the last of the liquor and set the glass in the small
metal sink jutting out from the wall.

“I thought long and hard about the interview. I decided I wanted my
life to make a difference, to make Horowitz’s LIFE make a difference …
you see what I mean. But I’m not Solomon Horowitz. All I knew how to
do was drink, screw, do burglaries and fight. I wasn’t so good at
stealing cars–I got caught a lot. So I picked the fightin’est outfit
of them all and joined up.

“‘They wouldn’t send me to officer candidate school because of my
record. I enlisted anyway. I was full of Horowitz’s fire. I went to
boot camp and finished first in my class, went to mortar school and came
out first, so they made me an instructor. Got to be a pretty fair hand
with a mortar and a rifle and led PT classes in my spare time. Finally
they decided I might make a Marine after all, so they sent me to OCS.”

“How did you do there?” Jake asked, even though he thought he knew the
answer.

“Number one,” Le Beau said flatly, without inflection.

“They gave me a presentation sword.”

“Going to stay in?”

,There’r, nothing for me in Brooklyn. My mother died of a drug overdose
years ago. I’ve been in ten years now and I’m staying until they kick
me out. The Corps is my home.”

“Don’t you get tired of it sometimes?”

“Sometimes. Then I remember Horowitz and I’m not tired anymore. I’ve
got his picture. Want to see it?” The Marine dug out his wallet.

Jake looked. Flap towered over Horowitz–a younger Flap togged out in
the white dress uniform of a Marine officer. The old, old man had wispy
white hair and stooped shoulders. His head was turned and he was
looking up into the beaming face of the handsome black man. They were
smiling at each other. -Horowitz came to Parris Island for the
graduation ceremony,” Flap explained. 1-they gave me the sword and I
walked over to where he was sitting and gave it to hin!”

“He still alive?”

“oh no. He died six months after this picture was taken.

This is the only one of him I have.”

After Flap left, Jake slowly unlaced his flight boots and pulled them
off. It took the last of his energy.

If the whole cruise goes like this day has, I’m not going to make it.
Russian frigates, in-flight engagements … Jesus’ He eyed his bunk,
the top one, and worked himself up to an effort. He didn’t even Pull
off his flight suit. Sixty seconds after his head hit the pillow he was
asleep.

the SHIPS SAILED ACROSS A RESTLESS, EMPTY OCEAN. JAKE saw no ships
other than those of the task group whenever he went on deck, which he
managed to do three or four times a day. Many sailors never went
topside; they spent every minute of their day in their working spaces,
their berthing areas, or on the mess deck, and saw sunlight only when
the ship pulled into port. Jake Grafton thought he would go stir-crazy
if he couldn’t see the sea and sky and feel the wind on his face every
few hours.

He would stroll around the deck, visit with Bosun Muldowski if he ran
into him, chat with the catapult crews if they were on deck, and examine
planes. His eyes seemed naturally drawn to airplanes. His destination
on these excursions was usually the forward end of the flight deck,
where he would stand between the catapults looking at the ocean.

The wind was usually vigorous here. It played with his hair and tugged
at his clothes and cleaned the below-decks smells from his nostrils, The
first morning he saw a school of whales to starboard.

Knots of sailors gawked and pointed. The whales spouted occasionally
and once one came soaring out of the water, then crashed down in a
magnificent cloud of spray. Mostly the view was of black backs
glistening amid the swells.

When he went below this first morning at sea, reentered the world of
crowded passageways, tiny offices, and neverending paperwork, the
squadron maintenance officer cornered him. “That plane you flew last
night-well, we haven’t found any airframe damage yet. Maybe we dodged
the bullet.” If there was no damage there would be no official report
assessing blame. “The avionics took a helluva lot bigger lick than
they’re designed for, though. Radar and computer and VDI are screwed
up.”

Jake threw himself into the problem assigned to him by Colonel Haldane.
How would you attack a Soviet ship?

Since the Soviets had all kinds of ships, he soon focused on the most
capable, the guided missile cruisers that were the mainstay of their
task forces, Kyndas and Krestas. After preliminary research of
classified material in the Air Intelligence spaces, he paid a visit to
the EA-6B Prowler squadron in their small ready room on the 0-3 level,
near the numberfour arresting gear room.

This squadron had only four aircraft, but they were Cadillacs. A
stretched version of the A-6, the Prowler held a crew of four- one pilot
and three electronic warfare specialists.

The airplane’s sole mission was to foil enemy radars. The electronic
devices it used for this task were mounted in pods slung on the weapons
stations. Other than the pilot’s instruments, the panels of the cockpit
were devoted to the displays and controls necessary to detect enemy
radar transmissions and render the information they gave the enemy
useless.

Since it was a highly modified version of the A-6, the plane was
popularly referred to as a Queer Six.

The Prowler crews in Ready Eight greeted Jake with open arms. They too
were stationed on Whidbey Island when ashore, and two or three of the
officers knew Jake. When he finally got around to explaining his
errand, they were delighted to help. The capabilities of Soviet
warships were their stock in trade.

Jake had already known that Soviet ships were heavily armed, but now he
found out just how formidable they really were. Radar capabilities were
evaluated, weapons envelopes examined. Finally Jake Grafton gave his
conclusion. “A single plane doesn’t have much of a chance against on e
of these ships.” This comment drew sober nods from the two electronic
warfare experts at his elbows.

Nor, he soon concluded, did a flight of planes have much of a chance if
the weapons they had to use were free-falling bombs, technology left
over from World War II. Oh, freefalling bombs had been adequate in
Vietnam when attacking stationary targets ashore-barely adequate-but
modern warships were another matter entirely. Ships would detect the
aircraft on radar while they were still minutes away.

Radar would allow antiaircraft missiles to be fired and guided long
before the attacker reached the immediate vicinity of the ship. Ilen,
in-close, radar-directed guns would pour forth a river of high
explosives.

If our lucky attack pilot survived all that, he was ready to aim his
free-fall weapons at a maneuvering, high-speed target. Even if he aimed
his bombs perfectly, the bombs were unguided during their eight to ten
seconds of fall, so if the ship’s captain reversed the helm or tightened
a turn, or if the pilot had miscalculated the wind, the bombs would
miss.

And now our frustrated aerial warrior had to turn his fanny to the fire
and successfully avoid on the way out all the hazards he had penetrated
on the way in.

What the attack pilot desperately needed was a missile he could shoot at
the ship, Jake concluded, the farther away the better. Alas, the U. S.
Navy’s antiship missiles were still in the development stage, victims of
Vietnam penny pinching, so the attack crews would have to make do with
what they had. What they had were some short-range guided missiles like
Bullpup, which unfortunately carried only a 250pound warhead–enough to
cripple a warship but not to sink it.

If the weather was good enough, the attacking planes could use
laser-guided bombs, preferably two-thousand pounders. Although these
weapons were unpowered, the laser seeker and guidance assembly on the
nose of the weapon could steer it into the target if the attack pilot
made a reasonably accurate delivery, and if the spot of laser light that
the guidance system was seeking was indeed on the arget. The weak point
of the system was the beam of laser light, which was scattered by
visible moisture in the air. Alas, over the ocean the sky was often
cloudy.

With or without laser-guided bombs, the attackers were going to have to
penetrate the enemy ship’s radar-directed defenses. Here was where the
EA-613 came in. The electronic warfare (Ew) plane could shield the
attack force electronicay if it were in the middle of it or placed at
the proper angle to the attack axis.

What about overloading the enemy’s defenses with planes? perhaps a
coordinated attack with as many Planes as we can launch, saturating the
enemy’s defenses with targets, one prays too many targets- Some would
inevitably get through.

And our coordinated attack should come In high and low at the same time.
Say A-6s at a hundred feet and A-7s and F-4s diving in from thirty
thousand.

Jake made notes. The EA-6 crews had a lot of ideas, most of which Jake
thought excellent. When he said his good-bye two hours after he came,
he shook hands all around.

Back in his stateroom staring at his notes, Jake wondered what a war
with the Soviets would be like. An exchange of intercontinental
ballistic missiles would make for a loud, mighty short war, but Jake
didn’t think there would be much reason for the surviving warships to
try to sink One another. Without countries to go back to, the sailors
and the ships were all doomed anyway. Could there be a war without
nuclear weapons, in 1973?

Really, when one is contemplating the end of civilization the whole
problem becomes fantastic, something out of a sweaty nightmare. Could
sane men push the button, thereby destroying themselves, their nations,
most of the human race? He got bogged down at this point. The
politicians would have to figure it out.

one thing he knew for sure–if there was a war without a nuclear
Armageddon, the American admirals would go after the Soviet ships like
bulldogs after taw meat It wouldn’t be easy. He knew well that a strike
on a single ship would be a fluke, an ambush of a straggler. Like every
other navy, the Soviets would arrange their ships in groups for mutual
support. Any attack would have to be against a task force.

Staring at his notes on detection ranges, missile and flak envelopes,
Jake could envision how it would be. The ships would be rippling off
missiles–the sky would be full of Mach 3 telephone poles. If that
weren’t enough, Soviet warships were covered with antiaircraft guns.
American ships these days didn’t have many, but then the Soviet Navy had
no aircraft carriers to launch strikes against them. The flak from the
Soviet ships would be fierce, would literally be a steel curtain the
attacking planes would have to fly through.

An Alpha strike-everything the ship could launch, coming in high and low
and in the middle, shielded by EA6B Prowlers and coordinated as well as
possible by an E-2 Hawkeye orbiting safely out of range a hundred miles
away-that was the answer he would give Colonel Haldane.

Wouldn’t ever happen, of course. America and Russia weren’t about to
fight a war. Planning an attack on a Soviet task force was just another
peacetime military what-if exercise. Yet if it did happen, few of those
planes would survive.

And of those crews who successfully penetrated the cordon of missiles
and flak, only the most fiercely determined would successfully drive the
thrust home. For Jake Grafton knew that it was neither ships nor
airplanes that won battles, but men.

Were there men like that aboard this ship? By reputation Flap U Beau
was one, but were there any more?

Disgusted with the whole problem, he began to think of home. He had
visited his parents on their farm in southwestern Virginia this spring.
In May, with the leaves on the trees coming out, the grass in the
meadows growing green and tender, the cows nursing new-born calves.

His parents had been so glad to see him. Dad, well, his pride in his
son had been visible, tangible. And Mother, smiling through her tears
at her man-son come home.

He had helped his father with the cattle, once again felt the morning
chill and smelled the aroma of warm bovine bodies, manure, sweet hay …
Just the memory of it made him shiver here in his small stateroom aboard
this giant steel ship. The dew in the grass that recorded every step,
the sun slanting up over the low ridges and shining into the barn, his
father’s voice as he talked to the cattle, reassuring, steady …