The Intruders (11 page)

all of it came flooding back.

Why are you here, aboard this steel ship on this wilderness of ocean,
worried about Russian flak and missiles, contemplating the ultimate
obscenity? Why aren’t you there, where you grew up, feeling the warmth
of the sun on your back and helping your father in the timeless rituals
that ensure life will go on, and on . . . as God intended? why
aren’t you there to help your mother in her old age? Answer me that,
Jake Grafton. You never hated the farm as your elder brother did-you
loved it. Loved everything about it. Your parentsyou love them. You
are of them and they are of you. Why are you here?

Why?

Life aboard ship quickly assumed its natural rhythni, which was the
rhythm dictated by two hundred years of naval tradition and regulations.
Everyone worked, meals were served, the ship’s laundry ran full blast,
and every afternoon at precisely 13:30 the PA system came to life and
announced a general quarters drill. “This is a drill, this is a drill.
General quarters, general quarters. All hands man your battle stations.
Go up and forward on the starboard side and down and aft on the port
side. General quarters.”

The aviators’ battle stations were their ready rooms.

While the damage control parties fought mock fires and coped with
flooding, nuclear, chemical and biological attack, the aviators took
NATOPS exams, listened to lectures, and generally bored one another. It
was during these drills that Jake gave his lectures on shipboard
operations. In addition to the material in the CV NATOPS, he added
every tip he could recall from his two previous combat cruises. The
lectures went well, he thought. The Marines were attentive and asked
good questions. To his amazement, he found he actually enjoyed standing
in front of the room and talking about his passion, flying.

After secure from general quarters the officers scattered to squadron
spaces throughout the ship to do paperwork, to which there was no end in
this life. The evening of the second day at sea Jake found an
opportunity to discuss his Soviet ship project with the skipper, Colonel
Haldane, who knew as much about the subject as Jake did. After they had
spent an hour going over the problem, the colonel took him to the air
wing spaces to meet the air wing ops officer, a lieutenant commander.
Here the subject was aired again.

The upshot of it was that Jake was assigned to help Wing Ops put
together realistic exercises for the ship’s air wing.

Officers could eat dinner in either of the two wardrooms aboard–the
formal wardroom on the main deck, right beside Ready Four, where
uniforms were required, or in the dirty-shirt wardroom up forward in the
0-3 level between the bow catapults where flight suits and flight deck
jerseys were acceptable. In practice the formal wardroom was the turf
of the ship’s company officers who were not aviators, invaded only
occasionally by aviation personnel on their best behavior. Here in the
evening after dinner a movie was shown, one watched with proper decorum
by congressionally certified gentlemen.

The aviators congregated in their ready rooms for their evening movies,
here to whistle, shout, offer ribald suggestions to the characters, moan
lustily at the female lead, and throw popcorn at the screen and each
other. If a flyer didn’t like the movie in his ready room, he could
always wander off to another squadron’s, where he would be welcome if he
could find a seat.

And in the late evening somewhere in the junior officers’ staterooms
there was a card game under way, usually nickeldime-quarter poker
because no one had much money. Although alcohol was officially outlawed
aboard ship, at a card game a thirsty fellow could usually find a drink.
Or several.

As long as one didn’t appear in any of the ship’s common spaces drunk or
smelling of liquor, no one seemed to care very much.

Of course, a junior officer could skip the movie and card game and
retire to his stateroom to listen to music or write letters. Since a
lot of the junior officers were very much in love, a lot of them did
this almost every night, Jake Grafton among them. of course the lonely
lovers had roommates, which sometimes presented problems.

“It’s so damned unfair,” the Real McCoy lamented. “I could get more
information about the markets if I were sitting in a mud hut in some
squalid village in the middle of India. Anywhere but here.” He turned
his woeful gaze on his roommate. “There are telephones everywhere on
this planet except here. Everywhere.”

Jake Grafton tried to look sympathetic. He did reasonably well, he
thought.

“It’s the not knowing,” the LSO continued. “I bought solid companies,
with solid prospects, nothing speculative.

But I am just completely cut off. Condemned to the outer darkness.” He
gestured futilely. “It’s maddening.”

“Maybe you should put your investments in a trust or something. Give
someone a power of attorney.”

“Who? Anyone who can do as well as I have in the market is doing it,
not fooling around with someone else’s portfolio for a fee.”

“We’ll be in Hawaii in a week. I’ll bet you’ll find that you’re doing
great.”

The Real McCoy groaned and glanced at Jake Grafton with a look that told
him he was hopeless. The LSO took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly.
He looked so forlorn that Jake decided to try to get him talking.

A question. He should ask a question. After thinking about it for a
moment, Jake said, “Hey, what’s the difference between stocks and
shares? In the newspapers they talk about stockholders and shareholders
and-”

He stopped because the Real gave him a withering look and stomped for
the door. He slammed it shut behind him.

Dear Callie, We are three days out of San Francisco on our way to Pearl
Harbor. We are making about twenty knots.

We tried to go faster but the escorts were taking a pounding in heavy
swells, so we slowed down. The swells are being kicked up by a typhoon
about fifteen hundred miles to the southwest. I got requalified on
carrier landings, day and night, the first day out of port, but we
haven’t flown since.

MY bombardier-navigator is a guy named Flap Le Beau. He’s from Brooklyn
and has been in the Marines for ten years. I’M still trying to figure
him out. He appears to be a good BN and a fine officer. He wasn’t too
sure about me the first time we flew together and gave me a lot of gas
to see if I could take it. What he didn’t know is that I’ve learned to
take gas from experts, so his little performance was just a minor
irritation. I think he’s a Pretty neat guy, so I was lucky there. I
think you’d like him too.

My roommate is a character, fellow called the Real McCoy. He is in a
tizzy worrying about what is happening in the stock market while we are
Out of touch. He’s made a lot of money in stocks and wants to make a
lot more. If I knew anything about stocks I would too, but I don’t. I
couldn’t make easy money if I owned the mint.

The skipper is a lieutenant colonel — same rank as a commander-named
Richard Haldane. Don’t know where he is from but he doesn’t have an
accent like I do. Neither does Flap, for that matter.

Jake didn’t know he had an accent until Callie told him he did. She was
a linguist, with a trained ear. Since she made that remark he was
listening more carefully to how other People talked. Just now he said a
few words to see if he could detect some flaw in his pronunciation, “My
name is Jake Grafton. I work for the government and am here to save
you.”

Nope.

She wouldn’t kid about a thing like that, would she?

Colonel Haldane has me giving lectures to the flight crews on flight
operations around the ship. It’s easy and sort Of fun. It used to be
that I didn’t like standing in front of a crowd and saying anything, but
now I don’t mind the people if I know the material I am going to talk
about I must have a little ham in me The colonel also has me doing some
research on how to attack Soviet ships, just in case we ever have to.
The research is difficult, especially when you realize that if the
necessity ever arises, a lot of American lives are going to depend on
how well you did your homework.

As I mentioned, the first day out of port I got requalifled day and
night. The day traps went okay, but the night ones were something else.
On the fourth one I had an in-flight engagement, which means I caught a
wire during a wave-off and the plane fell about four feet to the deck.
The impact almost destroyed the airplane. It appears to have survived
with only damage to the avionics, which is the electronic gear. Why a
wheel didn’t come off I’ll never know.

Everyone says the in-flight wasn’t my fault, but in a way it was. The
LSO gave me a wave-off too late, and I shouldn’t have rotated as much as
I did when I poured the power to her. It’s a technique thing. I did it
by the book and got bitten, yet if I had deviated from approved wave-off
procedure in this particular case, things would have probably worked out
better.

All you can do is hope that when the challenge comes, you will do the
right thing through instinct, training, or experience, or some
combination of these, The one thing you know is that when the crunch
comes you won’t have time to think about how you should handle it. The
hard, inescapable reality is that anyone who flies may die in an
airplane.

I suppose I have accepted this reality on some leveL Still, the
in-flight shook me up pretty good. As the airplane decelerated, still
in the air, we were thrown forward into the straps that hold us to the
seat. At moments like that every perception is crystal clear, every
thought arrives like a bell ringing. You are so totally alive that the
events of seconds seem to happen so slowly that later you can recall
every nuance, As I felt the plane decelerating, I knew what had
happened.

In-flight!

I could feel her slowing, saw the needle of the angleof-attack gauge
swing toward a stall, saw the engine RPM still winding up … and knew
that we were in for it. For an instant there we hung suspended above
the deck. Then we fell.

The jolt of falling about four feet stunned me. I knew exactly what had
happened, yet I didn’t know whether or not we were safely arrested. I
couldn’t see too well.

I didn’t know if the hook had held, or if the cross-deck pennant had
held together. Or if the airplane was in one piece-if the fuel tank had
ruptured we were only seconds away from blowing up.

It was a bad scare.

I’ve had a few of those through the years and one more isn’t headline
stuff, but stiff, with the war over and all and me thinking about
getting out, that moment was a hard, swift return to cold reality.

I have been thinking a tot about you these last few days. Our time
together in Chicago was something very special. Although the visit
didn’t wind up quite the way I planned, everything else was super.
Theron is a great guy and your folks seem like they would be very
pleasant once I got to know them a little better.

He stopped and reread that last paragraph. That bit about the parents
wasn’t strictly true, but what could he say? Your dad’s a royal jerk
but I like them like that.

Diplomacy. This letter had some diplomacy in it.

When you stop and think about it, life is strange.

Some people believe in preordination, although I don’t.

Still, you grow up knowing that somewhere out there is the person you
are going to fall in love with. So you wonder what that person will be
like, how she will look, how she will walk, talk, what she will think,
how she will smile, how she will laugh. There’s no way of knowing, of
course, until you meet her. The realization that you have finally met
her comes as a wondrous discovery, a peek into the works of LIFE.

Maybe a guy could fall instantly in love, but I doubt it. I think love
sort of creeps over you-like a warm feeling on a clear blue fall day.
This person is in your thoughts most of the time-all the time, actually.
You see her when you close your eyes, when you look off into the
distance, when you pause from what you are doing and take a deep breath,
You remember how her eyes looked when she laughed, how she threw her
head back, how her fingers felt when they touched you …

The loved one becomes a part of you, the most valuable part.

At least it is that way with me when I think of you.

As ever, Jake

VISUAL DIVE-BOMBING REALLY HADN-r CRANGED MUCH SINCE the 1930s, even
though the top speeds of the aircraft had tripled and their
ordnance-canying capacity had increased fifteenfold. The techniques
were still the same.

Jake Grafton thought about that as the flight of four A-6s threaded
their way upward through a layer of scattered cumulus clouds, The four
warplanes, spread in a loose finger four formation, passed the tops at
about 8,000 feet and continued to climb into the clear, open sky above.

Perhaps it was the touch Of the romantic that he tried with varying
degrees of success to keep hidden, but the link to the past was strong
within him. On a morning like this in June 1942, U.S. Navy dive bomber
pilots from Enterprise and Yorktown topped the clouds and searched
across the blue Pacific for the Japanese carriers then engaged in
hammeling Midway Island. They found them, four aircraft carriers
plowing the broad surface of that great ocean, pushed over and dove.
Their bombs smashed Kaga, Akagi and Soryu, set them fatally ablaze and
turned the tide of World War II.

This morning thirty-one years later this group of bombers was On its way
to bomb Hawaii, actually a small island in the Hawaiian archipelago
named Kahoolawe.

The oxygen from the mask tasted cool and rubbery. Jake eyed the cockpit
altimeter, steady at ten thousand feet, and unsnapped the left side of
his mask. He let it dangle from the fitting on the other side as he
devoted most of his attention to holding good formation. His position
today was number three, which meant that he flew on the skipper’s,
Colonel Haldane’s, right side. Number four was on Jake’s right, number
two on Haldane’s left.