The Intruders (28 page)

At least half an hour passed before Jake went back into the pavilion.
Three half-potted Aussies were huddled around the piano watching Flap
dance with the three stews who were still there. Le Beau had them in a
line and was teaching them new steps to the wailing of a Japanese music
machine.

Everyone else had left, including the Real McCoy. Tomorrow was a
working day for most of them.

Jake decided one more beer for the road wouldn’t hurt, so he picked a
bottle out of the icy water of the tub and joined the piano crowd.

“Hey, mate.”

“How you guys doing tonight?”

“Great.”

“Sure nice of you fellows to invite us to your wing ding.

Makes a good break after forty-five days at sea.”

“Don’t know how you blokes manage.”Prayer,” Jake told them, and they
laughed.

The biggest of them was a brawny man three or four inches taller than
Jake and at least forty pounds heavier.

Most of his bulk was in his chest, shoulders and arm& He hadn’t said
anything yet, but now he gestured to Flap. “Wish your bleedin’ nigger
mate would pick his bird and let us at the other two.”

Jake Grafton carefully set his beer on the piano. This was getting to
be a habit. The last time they had sent him to the Marines.

Wonder where they’U send me this time?

He stepped in front of the big Aussie, who still had one giant mitt
wrapped around a bottle of beer.

“What did you say?”

“I said, I wish your bleedin’ nigger mate would…..

As Jake drew back his right fist for a roundhouse punch he jabbed the
Aussie in the nose with his left. This set the man momentarily off
balance, so when the right arrived on his chin with all Jake’s weight
behind it, it connected solidly with a meaty thunk that rocked Jake
clear to the shoulder.

The Aussie went backward onto the floor like he was poleaxed. And he
stayed there.

“Nice punch, mate, but you– said the one to the left, but his words
stopped when Jake’s fist arrived. The man took it solidly on the side
of the head and sent a right at Jake that connected and shook him badly.

Stars swam before Grafton’s eyes. He waded in swinging furiously. Some
of his punches missed, some hit. That was the lesson he had teamed as a
boy on the grade school playground-keep swinging and going forward. Most
boys don’t really like to fight, so when you keep swinging they will
fall back, and ultimately quit. Of course, these soldiers weren’t boys
and worse, they like to fight.

Ms attack worked for several seconds, then the third Aussie, who was now
behind him, grabbed him and spun him Before Jake could get set he took a
shot on the bone that put him down.

Dazed, he struggled to rise. When he got to his feet it was too late.
All three of the Aussies were asleep on the floor and Flap Le Beau was
standing there calmly scrutinizing him.

“What was that all about?”

Jake swayed and caught himself by grabbing the piano.

“They insulted Elvis.”

Flap sighed. “I guess we’ve worn out our welcome.” He took Jake’s arm
and got him started for the door. “Ladies,” he said, addressing the
three stews gaping at them, “it’s been a real treat. The pleasure of
your company was sweeter than you will ever know.”

He beamed benignly at them and steered Jake out into the night.

The base was quiet. No taid at the main gate. They waved at the sentry
and kept walking. Jake’s right hand throbbed and so did his head. The
hand was the important thing, though. He rubbed it as he walked.

“What really happened back there?” Flap asked.

“The big stud called you a nigger.”

“You hit him for that?”

“Yeah. The asshole deserved it.”

Flap Le Beau threw back his head and laughed. “Damn, Jake, you are
really something else.”

“He was peeved because you were monopolizing the women.”

Flap thought this was hilarious. He roared with laughter.

“Want to tell me what’s so damn funny?”

“You are. You nitwit! All of them are bigots. Even the women. I
wasn’t getting anywhere with them. Not a one of those women would have
gone to bed with me, not even if I was the richest nigger in America and
had a cock eighteen inches long. They’ll go back to Australia and tell
all about their big adventure, talking to and dancing with an American
nigger. ‘Oh, Matilda, you won’t believe this, but I even let him touch
me.”‘ Jake didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

After a bit Flap asked, “Think you broke your hand?”

“Dunno. Don’t think so. Maybe stoved it. Man, I got that big guy with
a perfect shot. Had everything behind it and drove it right through his
chin.”

“He never moved after you hit him. Bet it’s the first time anybody ever
knocked him out.”

“Thanks for coming to the rescue, Kemo Sabe.”

“Any time, Tonto. Any time. But you could have broken your hand
hitting that guy that hard.”

“Had to. He outweighed me by forty pounds. If I had just given him a
you-piss-me-off social punch he would have killed me.”

“You’re a violent man, Jake.”

“I had a lot of trouble with potty training.”

The next morning he realized the dimensions of the quandary he faced.
Nell Douglas was a fine woman, passionate, level-headed, intelligent,
thoughtful … And Callie McKenzie was one fine woman, also passionate
and level-headed, intelligent, educated, well spoken … He was in love
with one and could easily fall in love with the other. But the woman he
loved hadn’t written in two months and had made it clear that he wasn’t
measuring up.

The woman he could love wasn’t being quite so picky. No doubt when he
knew her better she would get more pickywomen were like that. But she
wasn’t being picky nowl And if you couldn’t take the heat there was
always celibacy to fall back on.

Alas, celibacy didn’t seem very attractive to Jake Grafton.

Not when you are in your twenties, in perfect health, when the sight,
smell and touch of a woman makes the blood pound in your temples and
your knees turn to jelly.

He sat in his chair in his stateroom savoring the memories of last
night. Of how her lips had felt against his, how her hot, wet tongue
had speared between his teeth and stroked his tongue, how her breasts
had heaved against his chest, how her thighs had pressed against his
while her hands stroked his back. Gawd Almighty!

He liked the way she talked, too. That flat Australian twang was sexy
as hell. Just made shivers run up your spine when you recalled how the
words sounded as she said them.

“. . . I might drag you off to my lonely little bed for a night of
sport.” Well, lady, I wish …

I don’t know what I wish! Damnation.

He was writhing on the horns of this dilemma when the door opened and
the Real McCoy staggered through. He flopped into his bunk and groaned.
“Wake me up next week.

I am spent. Wrung out like a sponge. That woman turned me every way
but loose. There are hot women and there are hot women. That one was
thermonuclear.”

“Tough night, huh?”

“She was after me every hour! I didn’t sleep a wink. Every hour! I’m
so sore I can hardly walk.”

“Lucky you escaped her evil clutches.”

“Never in my born days, Jake, did I even contemplate that there might be
women like that walking the surface of the earth. Australia is merely
the greatest nation on the planet, that’s all. That they breed women
like that down there is the best-kept secret of our time.”

Jake nodded thoughtfully and flexed his right fist. It was sore and a
little swollen.

“I’m getting out of the Nav, arranging to have my subscription to the
Wall Street Journal sent to me Down Under, and I am going south. May
the cold, blue light of Polaris never again meet my weary gaze. It’s
the Southern Cross for me, Laddie Buck. I’m going to Australia to see
if I can fuck myself to death before I’m forty.”

With that pronouncement the Real McCoy turned on his side and curled his
pillow under his head. Jake looked at his watch. The first gentle
snore came seventy-seven seconds later.

Were the women bigots? Well, Flap should know. If he said those three
stews were prejudiced, they probably were.

But what about Neff?

And what about you, Jake? Are you?

Aaugh! To waste a morning in port fretting about crap like this.

He pulled a tablet around and started a letter to his parents.

The liberty boat for the enlisted men was an LCI-landing craft
infantry-a flat-bottomed rectangular-shaped boat with a bow door that
flopped down to let troops run through the surf onto the beach. Jake
often rode it from the beach to the ship. This evening, however, he was
dressed in a sports coat and a tie and didn’t want to get soaked with
salt spray, so he headed for the officers’ brow near Elevator Two. The
captain’s gig and admiral’s barge had been lowered into the water from
their cradles in the rear of the hangar bay. In ten minutes he was
descending the ladder onto the float, then he stepped into the gig.

Jake knew the boat officer, a jaygee from a fighter squadron, so he
asked if he could stand beside the coxswain on the little midships
bridge. Permission was granted with a grin and a nod. The rest of the
officers went below into either the fore or aft cabin.

With the stupendous bulk of the carrier looming like a cliff above them,
the sailors threw the lines aboard and the coxswain put the boat in
motion. It stood out from the ship and swung in a wide circle until it
was on course for fleet landing The water was cahn this evening, with
merely a long, low swell stirring the oily surface. The red of the
western sky stained the water between the ships, gave it the look of
diluted blood.

The roadstead was full of ships: freighters, coasters, tankers, all
riding on their anchors. Lighters circled around a few of the ships,
but only a few. Most of them sat motionless like massive steel statues
in a huge park lake.

But there were people visible on most of the ships. As the gig threaded
its way through the anchorage Jake could see them sitting under awnings
on the fantails, sometimes cooking on barbecue grills, talking and
smoking on afterdecks crowded with ship’s gear. Most of the sailors
were men, but on one Russian ship he saw three women, hefty specimens in
dresses that reached below their knees.

“Pretty evening,” the jaygee said to Jake, who agreed.

Yes, another gorgeous evening, the close of another good day to be
alive. It was easy to forget the point of it all sometimes, easy to
lose sight of the fact that the name of the game was to stay alive, to
savor life, to live it day to day at the pace that God intended.

One of Jake Grafton’s talents was to imagine himself fiving other fives.
He hadn’t been doing much of that lately, but riding the gig through the
anchorage, looking at the ships, he could visualize sitting on one of
those fantails, smoking and chatting and watching the sun sink closer
and closer to the sea’s rim. To go to sea and work the ship and spend
quiet evenings in port in the company of friend&-it could be very good.
I could live that way, he reflected.

Maybe in my next incarnation.

The Intercontinental was a huge, modern hotel built on a slight hill.
The lobby was a cavern seven or eight stories high. Marble floors
accented with giant potted plants, a raised bar with easy chairs in the
middle, all the accents a plush burgundy, polyester fabric glued to the
walls—-yuck!

Jake settled into one of the bar’s overstuffed polyester chairs and
tilted his head back. You could almost get dizzy looking up at the
balconies, which were stacked closer and closer together until they met
at the ceiling. Tropical plants hung from planters along each balcony,
so the view upward was green. Dark green, because the fighting up there
was very poor”Grotesque, isn’t it?”

He dropped his gaze from the green canopy above to the young woman
walking toward him. He stood and grinned.

“Yep.”

“The interior designer was obviously demented.” Neu Douglas settled into
the chair opposite. A waiter appeared and hovered.

“Something to drink?” Jake asked her politely.

,’A glass of white wine, please.”

“Scotch on the rocks.”

The waiter broke hover and disappeared behind a large potted leafy green
thing T HE IN TRUD ER S

“So how was your flight in?”

“Bumpy. Storms over the South China Sea. How’s your hand?”

“You heard about that, huh?”

“The other girls were all atwitter. Your black friend really impressed
them.”

“Flap can move pretty fast when he wants to. He’s handy to have
around.”

“If the necessity arises to knock people senseless. Is he lurking
nearby now, just in case?”

Vaguely uneasy, Jake flashed a polite smile. “No, I think he came
ashore earlier today hoping to cheat some opal merchants. And my hand’s
fine.” He wiggled his fingers at her, pretending she cared.

Their drinks came and they sat sipping them in silence, both man and
woman trying to sense the mood of the other.

After a bit Nell said, “He’s some kind of trained killer, isn’t he?”

That comment was like glass shattering. Amazingly, Jake Grafton felt a
tremendous sense of relief. It had been a nice fantasy, but this woman
was not Callie.

“I guess everyone in combat arms is,” he said slowly, “if you want to
look at it that way. I deal in high explosives myself. I fly attack
planes, not airliners.”

He took the plastic stir stick from his drink and chewed at it. Why do
they put these damn things in a drink that is nothing but whiskey and
ice? He took it out of his mouth and broke it between his fingers as he
examined her face.

“I started the fight,” he continued, now in a hurry to end it. “One of
the soldiers referred to Captain Le Beau as a nigger. He happens to be
my BN and a personal friend. He is also a fine human being. The fact
that his skin is black is about as important as the fact that my eyes
are gray. That word is an insult in America and here. The man who said
it knew that.”

“The only black people in Australia are aborigines.”

“I guess you have to be an American to understand.”

“Perhaps.”

The waiter reappeared with his credit card and the in 247 voice. Jake
added a tip, signed it and pocketed the card and his copy.

Her face was too placid. Blank. Time to get this over with.

“Would you like to go to dinner?”

Nell Douglas looked this way and that, apparently searching for
something to say.

Finally she sat her wineglass on the table and leaned forward slightly.
She looked him in the eye. “It was wonderful the other night, and I am
sure you are a fine person, but let’s leave it at that.”

He nodded and finished his drink.

“We grew up on opposite sides of the world.” She stood and held out her
hand. “Thanks for the drink.”

“Sure.”

Jake stood and shook. She threaded her way through the potted jungle
and made for the elevators.

“Did you get laid?” the Real McCoy asked late that night in their
stateroom aboard ship.

“She said we grew up on opposite sides of the world.”

“You idiot. You’re supposed to fuck ‘em, not discuss philosophy.”

“Well, it probably turned out for the best,” Jake said, thinking of
Callie. He desperately wished she would write.

She could write anything-if she would just put something in an envelope
and stick a stamp on it.

He decided to write her.

He got a legal pad, climbed into the top bunk and adjusted the light
just so. Then he began. He went through their relationship episode by
episode, almost thought by thought, pouring out his heart. After eight
pages he ground to a halt.

Every word was true, but he wasn’t going to send it. He wasn’t going to
take the chance that he cared more than she did.

You aren’t going to get very far with the fairer sex if you aren’t
willing to take some risks.

I’m tired of taking risks. Someone else can take a few.

Faint heart never wonIf she cared, she’d write. End of story.

THE IN TRUD ERS

The night before the ship weighed anchor Lieutenant Colonel Haldane
asked Jake to come to his stateroom. According to the duty officer.
Jake went.

Flap was already there sitting in the only chair. Jake sat on the
colonel’s bed and Flap passed Will a sheet of paper.

It was a letter from the commander at Changing. Fight in the pavilion.
Jake scanned it quickly and passed it back to Flap, who handed it to
Haldane, who tossed it on his desk.

“The skipper of the ship got this. He wants me to investigate, take
action, and draft a reply for his signature. What can you tell me?”

Jake told the colonel about the incident, withholding nothing.

“Any comments, Captain Le Beau?”

“No, sir. I think Mr. Grafton covered it.”

Haldane made a face. “Okay. That’s all. We’re having a
back-in-the-saddle NATOPS do in the ready room at zero seven-thirty. See
you there.”

Both the junior officers left. Jake closed the door behind him.

Twenty frames down the passageway he asked Flap, “Was that it? We
aren’t in hack or candidates for keelhauhng?”

“Naw. Haldane will apologize profusely to our allies, tell them that
he’s ripped us a new one, and that’s that. It was just a friendly
little social fight. What more could there be?”

Jake shrugged. “My hand’s still sore.”

“Next time kick ‘em. in the balls.”

AT DAWN ONE MORNING THE TASK GROUP WEIGHED ANCHOR and entered the Strait
of Malacca. With Sumatra on the left and the Malay peninsula on the
right, the ships steamed at 20 knots for the Indian Ocean, or the 10 as
the sailors called it, pronouncing each letter.

In the narrows the strait was a broad watery highway with land on each
horizon. The channel was dotted with fishing boats and heavily
traversed by tankers and freighters. As many as a half dozen of the
large ocean-going ships were visible at any one time.

As usual in narrow waterways, the carrier’s flight deck and island
superstructure were crowded with sightseeing sailors’ Typically, Jake
Grafton was among them, standing on the bow facing forward. With all of
the great ship behind him the sensation was unique, almost as if one
were a seabird soaring along at sixty feet above the water into the
teeth of a 20-knot wind.

This morning Jake watched the steady stream of civilian ships and
marveled. He had flown enough surface surveillance missions over the
open ocean to appreciate how empty the oceans of the earth truly were.
Often he and Flap flew a two-hour flight and saw not a single ship, just
endless vistas of empty sea and sky. Yet here the ships plowed the
brown water like trucks thundering along an interstate highway.

A hundred years ago these waters hosted sailing ships. As he stood on
the bow watching the ships and boats this morning he thought about those
sailing ships, for Jake Grafton had a streak of romance in him about a
foot wide. Clipper ships bound for China for a load of tea left England
and the eastern ports of the United States and sailed south to round the
Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa.

The sailors would have gotten close enough to land for a glimpse of
Africa only in good weather. Then they crossed the vast Indian Ocean
and entered this strait, where they saw land for the first time since
leaving England or America.

Months at sea working the ship, making sail, reefing in storms, watching
the officers shoot the sun at noon and the stars at night when the
weather allowed, then to hit this strait after circumnavigating half the
globe-it was a great thing, a thing to be proud of, a thing to remember
for the Test of their lives. Exotic China still lay ahead, but here the
sailors probably saw junks for the first time, those flatbottomed the
commerce of the Orient. Here two worlds touched.

Jake looked at the freighters and tankers with new interest. Perhaps he
should look into getting a mate’s license, consider the merchant marine
after the Navy. It was a thing to think on.

Standing on the bow with the moist wind in his hair and the smell of the
land filling his nostrils as the task group transited this narrow
passage between two great oceans, he was struck by how large the earth
really was, ho’w diverse the human life, how many truths there must be.
The U.S. Navy was a tiny part of it, surely, but only a tiny part. He
had been confined long enough. He needed to reach out and embrace the
whole.

The Indian Ocean lay ahead, beyond that watery horizon.

The flying there would be blue water ops, without the safety net of a
divert field ashore. The ship would be hundreds of miles from land, so
when the planes burned enough fuel to get down to landing weight there
would be no dry spot on earth they could reach with the fuel remaining
in their tanks.

They had to get aboard. Airborne tankers could provide fuel for another
handful of attempts, but their presence would not change the
scenario-every pilot would have to successfully trap or eject into the
ocean.

Carrier aviation never gets easier. The challenge is to develop and
maintain skills that are just good enough. In this war without bullets
the stakes were human lives. Each pilot would have only his skill and
knowledge to keep him alive in the struggle against the weather, chance,
the vagaries of fate. Some would lose. Jake Grafton knew that as well
as he knew his name. He might be one of them.

Thinking about that possibility as he stood here on the bow, he took a
deep breath of the moist sea air and savored it.

A man never knows.

Well, he would do his best. That was all he could do. God had the
dice, He would make the casts.

Jake was standing the squadron duty officer watch in the ready room one
night when first Lieutenant Doug Harrison came in from a flight. He
gave Jake his flight time figure and handed him the batteries from his
emergency radiothe batteries were recharged in a unit above the duty
officer’s desk-then dropped into the skipper’s empty chair as Jake
annotated the flight schedule. Only then did Grafton turn and take a
good look at the first-cruise pilot. His face was pasty and covered
with a sheen of perspiration.

“Tough flight, huh?”

Harrison dropped his eyes and massaged his forehead with a hand. “No
… Got a cigarette?”

“Sure.” Jake passed him one, then held out a light.

After Harrison had taken three or four puffs, he took the cigarette from
his mouth and said softly, “After we landed, I almost taxied over the
edge.”

“It’s dark out there.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it. No light at all, the deck greasy,
rain on top of the grease … it was like trying to taxi on snot.”

“What happened?”

“Taxi director took me up to the bow on Cat One, then turned me. Wanted
me to taxi aft on Cat Two. It was that turn on the bow. Sticking out
over the fucking black ocean.

I was sure I was going right off the bow, Jake. I about shit myself. I
kid you not. Pure, unadulterated terror, two-hundred proof. I have
never had a feeling like that in an airplane before.

“Uh-huh.”

“I was turning tight, I could feel the nose wheel sliding, the
yellow-shirt was giving me the come-ahead signal with the wands, and the
edge was right there! And there isn’t even a protective lip. You know
how the bow just turns down, same as the stem?”

“So what did you do?”

“Locked the left wheel and goosed the right engine. The plane moved
about a foot. I could feel the left wheel sliding.

To make things perfect I could also feel the deck going up and down, up
and down. Every time it started down the vomit came up my throat. Then
the yellow-shirt crossed his wands and had the blue-shirts chock it
right where it sat.