The Intruders (26 page)

Jake joined Flap Le Beau on the fantail, where they stood watching the
proceedings and comparing experiences as they wiped away the worst of
the grease with paper towels.

The ship wasn’t moving, Jake noticed. She lay dead in the water on a
placid, gently heaving sea. Around her at distances ranging from one to
three miles her escorts were similarly still. All the ships were
conducting crossing-the-line initiation ceremonies. Painted ships upon
a painted ocean, Jake thought.

With a last glance at the sea and the sky and the merry group still
cavorting on the flight deck, he headed below for the showers.

“Getting shot down was a real bad scene,” Flap Le Beau told Jake. They
were on a surface surveillance mission along the southern coast of Java,
photographing ships. To their right was the mountainous island with its
summits wreathed in clouds, to the left was the endless blue water. They
had just descended to 500 feet to snap three or four shots of a small
coaster bucking the swells westward and were back at 3,000 feet,
cruising at 300 knots. The conversation had drifted to Vietnam.

Perhaps it was inevitable, since both men had been shot down in that
war, but neither liked to talk about their experiences, so the subject
rarely came up. If it did, it was in an oblique reference. Somehow
today, in a cockpit in a tropic sky, the subject seemed safe.

“It was just another mission, another day at the office, and the gomers
got the lead right and let us have it. I hadn’t even seen flak that
morning until we collected a packet.

Goose was killed instantly-one round blew his head clean off, the left
engine was hit, the left wing caught fire. All in about the time it
takes to snap your fingers.”

“What were you doing?”

“Dive-bombing, near the Laotian border. We were the second plane in a
two-plane formation, working with a Nail FAC.” A FAC was a forward air
controller, who flew a small propeller-driven plane.

“We were on our second run. Oh, I know, we shouldn’t have been making
more than one, but the FAC hadn’t seen any slut in the air and
everything was cool during our first run. Then whap! They shot us into
dog meat going down the chute. I grabbed the stick, pickled the bombs
and pulled out, but the left engine was doing weird things and the wing
was burning like a blowtorch and Goose was smeared all over everything,
including me. Wind howling through the cockpit–all the glass on his
side was smashed out. Real bad scene. So I steered it away from the
target a little and watched the wing burn and told Goose good-bye, then
I boogied.”

“How long did you wait before you ejected?”

“Seemed like an hour or so, but our flight leader told me later it was
about a minute. All the time he was screaming for me to eject because
he could see the fire. But we were at about six thousand feet at that
point and I wanted a little distance from the gomers and I wanted the
plane slowed down so I wouldn’t get tore up going out. There was so
much noise I never heard anything on the radio.”

Jake remembered his own ejection, at night, over Laos.

Just thinking about it brought back the sweats. He didn’t say anything.

P__

“When I got on the ground,” Flap continued, “I got out my little radio
and started talking. Now I’d checked the battery in that jewel before
we took off, but I could barely hear the FAC. I found a place to settle
in where I could keep an eye on the chute. Then the rescue turned to
shit.

The gomers were squirting flak everywhere and it was late in the
afternoon and darkness was coming. What I didn’t know until way
afterward was that the guy flying the rescue chopper got a case of cold
feet and decided his engine wasn’t right or something. Anyway, he never
came. It got dark and started raining and I decided I was on my own.”

“So how’d you feel?”

“Well, I felt real bad about Goose. He was a good guy, y’know? Tough
getting it like that.”

“I mean how did you feel?”

“Like I had never left Marine recon. At least my jungle rot wasn’t
itching. That was something. I skinned out of all that survival gear
and kept only what I needed and decided to set up an ambush. What I
really wanted was a rifle. All I had was the forty-five. And my
knife.”

“Didn’t you think they might catch you?”

“No way, man. I knew they wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Not unless they shot me
or something. I was on the ground for two weeks and had people walk by
within six feet of me and they never saw me.”

“So what did you do?”

“Do? Well, I found a guy who had a rifle and took it, and his food.
Ball of rice, with a lot of sand mixed in. You sort of have to develop
a taste for it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Checked in on the emergency freq about once a day, when the gomers
weren’t close. Didn’t want to overwork the batteries in that radio. But
they never heard me. A patrol found me on the fourteenth day. It was a
good thing, because my jungle rot was starting to itch by then. You can
never really cure that shit, you know.”

“So how many gomers did you kill?”

“A dozen that I know about.”

“Know about?”

“Yeah. I kept busy building booby traps and such. With a little luck
the traps got a few more of ‘em. In a way, it sort of made up for
losing Goose. Not really, I guess. But it helped.”

“Uh-huh.”

“A fucked-up war, that’s what it was. A hell of a mess.”

“Yeah,” Jake said, and checked the fuel and the clock on the instrument
panel. “I think we’re going to have to turn around.”

“Okay,” Flap Le Beau said. “Boy, it sure is pretty out here today.”

“There’s a decision point for every career officer,” Lieutenant Colonel
Haldane said, “one day when you wake up and decide that you want to make
a contribution. And for pilots, that doesn’t mean driving an airplane
through the sky every day.”

He and Jake were sitting in the ready room. Jake had the duty and sat
at the duty desk and Haldane was in his chair just behind it. There was
only one other officer in the room, doing paperwork near the mailboxes.
Haldane’s voice was low so that only Jake could bear it.

“True, some officers merely decide to stay until retirement, and I
suppose that’s okay. We need those people too.

But the people we want are those who dedicate themselves to making the
service better, to being leaders, people who try to grow personally and
professionally every day. Those folks are few and far between but we
need them desperately.”

Jake merely nodded. Haldane had read the latest classified messages and
handed the board back to Jake just before he began this monologue.
Apparently Jake’s letter of resignation was on his mind, although he
hadn’t mentioned it.

Haldane went on, almost thinking out loud: “In every war America fought
before Vietnam, the people who led the military to victory were never
the people in charge when the shooting started. U. S. Grant and
William T. Sherman weren9t even in the army when the Civil War started.
Phil Sheridan was a captain. Eisenhower and George Patton were colonels
at the start of World War II, Halsey and Nimitz were captains. Curious,
don’t you think?”

Before Jake could reply, he continued, “In peacetime the top jobs go to
politicians, men who can stroke the civilians and oil the wheels of the
bureaucracy. During a war the system works the way it is supposed
to-men who can lead other men in combat are pulled to the top and given
command. In Vietnam this natural selection process was stymied by the
politicians. It was a political war all the way and the last thing they
wanted was to relinquish the controls to war fighters. So we lost. And
you know something funny? We could afford to lose because we didn’t
have anything important at stake in the first place.

“Someday America is going to get into a fight it has to win. I don’t
know when it will come or who the fight will be with. That war may come
next year, or twenty years from now, or fifty. Or a hundred. But it
will come. It always has in the past and evolution doesn’t seem to be
improving the human species anywhere near fast enough.

“The question is, who will be in the military when that war comes? Will
the officer corps be full of glorified clerks, efficiency experts and
computer operators putting in their time to earn a comfortable
retirement? Or will there be some military leaders in that mix, men who
can lead other men to victory, men like Grant, Patton, Halsey?”

Haldane rose from his chair and adjusted his trousers.

“Interesting question, isn’t it, Mr. Grafton?”

“Yessir.”

“The quality of the people in uniform-such a little thing.

And that may make all the difference.”

Haldane turned and walked out. The officer doing paperwork had already
left. Jake pulled out the top drawer of the desk and propped his feet
up on it.

That Haldane–a romantic. Blood, thunder, destiny … If he thought
that kind of talk cut any ice anymore he was deluding himself. Not in
this post-Vietnam era. Not with the draft dodgers who didn’t want to go
and not with the veterans who weren’t so quick.

Jake Grafton snorted. He had had his fill of this holy military crap!
His turn expired when this boat got back to the States in February. Then
somebody else could do it.

And if the United States goes down the slop chute someday because no one
wants to fight for it, so be it. No doubt the Americans alive then will
get precisely what they deserve, ounce for ounce and measure for
measure.

What was that quote about the mills of the gods? They grind slowly?

SINGAPORE LIES AT THE SOUTHERN END OF THE MMAY peninsula, a degree and a
half north of the equator. This city is the maritime crossroads of the
earth. Ships from Europe by way of Suez and the Red Sea, India,
Pakistan, Africa and the Middle East transit the Strait of Malacca and
call here before entering the South China Sea. Ships from America,
Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea and the Soviet Far East call here on their
way west. The city-state is close enough to the Sunda Strait that it
makes a natural port call for ships from the Orient bound for South
Africa or South America via the Cape of Good Hope.

Although it is one of the world’s great seaports, Singapore doesn’t have
a harbor. The open roadstead is always crammed with ships riding their
anchors, except on those rare occasions when a typhoon threatens. There
are few piers large enough for an oceangoing vessel, so the majority of
the cargo being off- or on-loaded in Singapore travels to and from the
ships in lighters. The squadrons of these busy little boats weaving
their way through the anchored ships from the four corners of the earth
and all the places in between make Singapore unique.

As befits a great seaport, the city is a racial melting pot.

The human stew is composed mostly of Malay, Chinese, That, Hindu,
Moslem, and Filipino, with some Japanese added for seasoning, but there
are whites there too. British, primarily, because Singapore was one of
those outposts of empire upon which the sun never set, but also people
from most of the countries of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and,
inevitably, America.

Visitors who have always considered their place, their nation, as the
zenith of civilization here receive a shock. Vibrant, cosmopolitan
Singapore is a major vortex, one of those rare places where the major
strains of the human experience come crashing together and swirl madly
around until something new is created.

To the delight of visiting American sailors, the British still had a
military base there, Changing, and shared it with those stout lads from
Down Under, the Australians, who naturally came supplied with Down Under
lassies. Australian women were the glory of Singapore. These tall,
lithe creatures with tanned, muscular legs and striking white teeth that
were forever being displayed in dazzling smiles somehow completed the
picture, made it whole. You ran into them at Raffles, the old hotel
downtown with ceiling fans and rattan chairs and doddery old gentlemen
in white suits sipping gin. You ran into them in the lobbies and
restaurants of the new western hotels and in the bazaars and emporiums.
You saw them strolling the boulevards and haggling with small Chinese
women in baggy trousers for sapphires and opals. You saw them
everywhere, young, tan, enjoying life, the center of attention wherever
they were. It helped that their colorful tropical frocks contrasted so
vividly with the drab trousers and white shirts that seemed to be the
Singaporean national costume. They were like songbirds surrounded by
sparrows.

“If Oantas didn’t bring them here, the United Nations should supply them
as a gesture of good will to all human kind.”

Flap Le Beau stated this conclusion positively to Jake Grafton and the
Real McCoy as they stood outside Raffles Hotel surveying the human
parade on the sidewalk.

“I think I’m in love,” the Real McCoy told his companions. “I want one
of those for my very own.”

The three of them had ridden the liberty boat two miles across the
anchorage an hour ago. They had walked for an hour, taking it all in
and had developed a terrible thirst. Just now they were contemplating
going into Raffles to see if their need could be quenched somewhat.

“After forty-five days at sea, everything female looks mighty good to
me,” Flap Le Beau said, then smiled broadly at an elderly British lady
coming out of the hotel. She nodded graciously in reply and seated
herself in a waiting taxi.

“Well, gentlemen,” Jake Grafton said, and turned to face the white
antique structure, “shall we?”

“Let’s.”

The temperature inside was at least ten degrees cooler.

The dark interior and the ceiling fans apparently had a lot to do with
that, but the very Britishness of the place undoubtedly helped. The
heat and humidity could stay outside-it wouldn’t dare intrude.