The Intruders (34 page)

THE RADOME ON THE NOSE OF THE AIRCRAFIF HAD A HOLE IN it. Jake and Flap
examined it with their flashlights. It was about the size of a quarter
and had black edges where the Plexiglas or whatever it was had melted.
They had shut down on Elevator Two so the plane could be dropped below
to the hangar deck.

Now they stood looking at the hole in the radome as the sea wind dried
the sweat from their faces and hair and the overcast began to tighten
toward the east.

Dawn was coming. Another day at sea.

The hole was there and that was that.

“Grafton, you’re jinxed,” Flap Le Beau said.

“What do you mean?” Jake asked, suddenly defensive.

“Man, things happen to you.”

“I was doing fine until I started flying with you,” Jake shot back, then
instantly regretted it.

Flap didn’t reply. Both men turned off their flashlights and headed for
the island.

Lieutenant Colonel Haldane had rendezvoused with Pee Wee Reese and Jake
had transferred over to his wing. An approach with a similar aircraft
was easier to fly. Fortunately the weather had cleared somewhat around
the ship, so when the two A-6s came out of the overcast with their gear,
flaps and hooks down they were still a thousand feet above the water.
There wasn’t much rain. The ship’s lights were clear and bright.

Jake boltered his first pass and made a climbing left turn off the
angle. He and Flap had been unable to get the radio working again, so
he flew a close downwind leg and turned into the groove as if he were
flying a day pass. He snagged a one-wire.

The debrief took two hours. After telling the duty officer to take him
off the schedule for the rest of the day, Jake went to breakfast, then
back to his bunk. The Real McCoy woke him in time for dinner.

Jake and Flap didn’t fly again for four days. The skipper must have
told the schedules officer to give them some time off, but Jake didn’t
ask. He did paperwork, visited the maintenance office to hear about the
electrical woes of 502, did more paperwork, ate, slept, and watched
three movies.

The maintenance troops found another lightning hole in the tail of 502.
Jake went to the hangar deck for a look.

“Apparently the bolt went in the front and went clear through the plane,
then out the tail,” the sergeant said. “Or maybe it went in the tail
and out the front.”

“Uh-huh.” The hole in the tail was also about quarter size, up high
above the rudder.

“Was the noise loud?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Thought it must be like sitting beside a howitzer when it went off.”

“Just a metallic noise,” Jake said, trying to remember.

Funny, but he didn’t remember a real loud noise.

“You guys were sure lucky.”

“Like hell,” Jake told him. He was thoroughly sick of these
philosophical discussions. “Pee Wee Reese was on my wing and the
lightning didn’t hit him. It hit me. He didn’t get a volt. He had the
luck.”

“You were lucky you didn’t blow up,” the sergeant insisted. “I’ve heard
of planes hit by lightning that just blew up. You were lucky.”

“Planes full of avgas, maybe, but not jet fuel.”

The sergeant wasn’t taking no for an answer. “Jets too,”

he said.

Thanksgiving came and went, then another page was ripped off the ready
room calendar and it was December.

Jake had that feeling again that his life was out of control.

“You just got to go with the flow,” the Real McCoy said when Jake tried
to talk to him about it.

“It’s a reaction to the lightning strike,” Flap said when Jake mentioned
it to him. Jake didn’t bother telling him he had had it off and on for
years.

Yet gradually the feeling faded and he felt better. Once again he
laughed in the ready room and tried to remember jokes. But he refused
to think about the future. I’m going to take life one day at a time, he
decided. If a guy does that there will never be a future to worry
about. Just the present.

That makes sense, doesn’t it?

“What does it feel like to die?” Flap Le Beau asked.

He and Jake were motoring along at 350 knots at five thousand feet just
under a layer of cumulus puffballs. Beneath them the empty blue sea
spread away to the horizon in every direction. This afternoon they were
flying another surface surveillance mission, this time a wedge-shaped
pattern to the east of the task group. They were still on the outbound
leg. They had not seen a single ship, visually or on radar. The ocean
was empty.

All those ships crossing the Indian Ocean, hundreds of them at any one
time, yet the ocean was so big …

“Did you ever think about it?” Flap prompted.

“I passed out once,” Jake replied. “Fainted. When I was about
fourteen. Nurse was taking blood, jabbing me over and over again trying
to get the needle into a vein. One second I was there, then I was
waking up on the floor after some nightmare, which I forgot fifteen
seconds after I woke up. Dying is like that, I suspect. Not the
nightmare part.

Just like someone turned out the light.”

“Maybe,” Flap said.

“Like going to sleep,” Jake offered.

“Ummm-”

“What got you thinking about that, anyway?”

“You know …”

The conversation dribbled out there. Flap idly checked the radar, as
usual saw nothing, then rearranged his fanny in his seat. Grafton
yawned and rubbed his face.

The radio squawked to life. The words were partially garbled: the
aircraft was a long way from the ship—Over two hundred miles-and low.

“This is War Ace Five Oh Eight,” Flap said into his mask.

“Say again.”

“Five Oh Eight, this is Black Eagle. We’ll relay. The ship wants you
to investigate an SOS signal. Stand by for the coordinates.”

Flap glanced at Jake, shrugged, then got a ballpoint pen from the
left-shoulder pocket of his flight suit and inspected the point He
scribbled on the corner of his top kneeboard card to make sure the pen
worked, then said, “War Ace is ready to copy-”

When he had read back the coordinates to the controller in the E-2
Hawkeye to ensure he had copied them correctly, Flap tapped them into
the computer and cycled it. “Uhoh,” he muttered to Jake. “It’s over
four hundred miles from here.”

“Better talk to the controller.”

Flap clicked his oxygen mask into place. “Black Eagle, Five Oh Eight.
That ship looks to be four hundred twenty-nine miles from our present
position, which is”-he pushed another button on the computer—-’two
hundred forty-two miles from the ship. We don’t have the gas and we
can’t make the recovery.”

Grafton was punching the buttons, checking the wing fuel.

They launched with a total of 18,000 pounds, and now had 11,200.

“Roger, War Ace. They know that. We’re talking to them on another
frequency. They want you to go look anyway.

They only got about fifteen seconds of an SOS broadcast, which had the
lat-long position as a part of it. The ship thinks you can get there,
give it a quick look-over, then rendezvous with a tanker on the inbound
leg on this frequency.”

Already Jake had swung the plane fifteen degrees to the right to follow
the computer’s steering command to the ship in distress. Now he added
power and began to climb.

“Set up a no-rad rendezvous, just in case,” Jake told Flap.

He wanted to know where to find the tanker even if the radio failed. The
only way to fix positions in this world of sea and sky was
electronically, in bearings and distances away from ships that were
radiating electronic signals that the plane’s nav aids could receive.
Unfortunately the A-6’s radar could not detect other airplanes. And the
tanker had no radar at all. Of course, Flap could find the carrier on
radar if he were within 150 miles of it and the radar worked, and they
could use the distance and bearing to locate themselves in relation to
the tanker. If the radar kept working.

There were a lot of ifs.

The ifs made your stomach feel hollow.

Seventeen days had passed since their night adventure in the
thunderstorm and here they were again, letting it all hang out.

Jake Grafton swore softly under his breath. It just isn’t fair! And
the ship in distress might not even be there. A fifteen-second SOS with
the position. Sounded like an electronic program, one that could have
easily broadcast the wrong position information. The ship could be
hundreds of miles from the position they were winging their way to, and
they would never find it.

The emergency broadcast might have been an error-a radioman on some
civilian freighter might have inadvertently flipped the wrong switch.
There might not be any emergency at all.

No doubt the bigwigs on the carrier had considered all that. Then, safe
and comfortable, they had sent Jake and Flap to take a look. And to
take the risks.

Finding the tanker would be critical. Jake eyed the fuel gauge without
optimism. He would go high, to forty thousand feet, stay there until he
could make an idle descent to the ship in distress, make a quick pass
while Flap snapped photographs, then climb back to forty thousand headed
toward the carrier. The tanker would be at 150 miles, on the Zero Nine
Five radial, at forty grand. If it were not sweet, or this plane
couldn’t take fuel, they wouldn’t be able to make it to the ship. They
would have to eject.

At least it was daytime. Good weather. No night sweats.

No need to do that needle-ball shit by flashlight. That was something.

Now Jake turned in his seat to look behind him at the sun. He looked at
his watch. There should be at least a half hour of daylight left when
they reached the SOS ship, but the sun would be down by the time they
got to the tanker.

Still, there would probably be some light left in the sky.

Perhaps it would be better if the sky were completely dark, then they
could spot the tanker’s flashing anticollision light from a long
distance away. But it would not be dark. A high twilight, that was the
card the gods of fate had dealt.

One of these fine Navy days we’re gonna use up all our luck. Then we
two fools are gonna be sucking the big one.

That’s what everyone is trying to tell us.

“We won’t descend unless you have a target on the radar,” Jake told
Flap.

“Uh-huh.”

That was a good decision. No use squandering all that fuel descending
to sea level unless there was a ship down there to look at. And if
there was a ship, it would show on radar.

What if the ship had gone under and the crew was in lifeboats? Lifeboats
wouldn’t show on radar, not from a long distance.

“How far can you see a lifeboat on that thing?” he asked Flap, who had
his head pressed against the scope hood.

“I dunno. Never looked for one.”

“Guess.”

“You were right the first time. We don’t go down unless we see
something.”

He leveled at forty thousand feet and retarded the throttles. Twenty-two
hundred pounds per hour of fuel to each engine would give him .72 Mach.
Only they had used four thousand pounds climbing up here. Seven
thousand eight hundred pounds of fuel remaining. It’s going to be
tight. He retarded the throttles still farther, until he had only
eighteen hundred pounds of fuel flowing to each engine. The airspeed
indicator finally settled around 220 knots, which would work out to
about 460 knots true.

Flap unfolded a chart and studied it. Finally he said, “That position
is in the channel between the islands off the southern coast of
Sumatra.”

“At least it isn’t on top of a mountain.”

“True.”

“Wonder if the brain trust aboard the boat plotted the position before
they sent us on this goose chase.”

“I dunno. Those Navy guys . - You never can tell.”

After much effort, Flap got the chart folded the way he wanted it. He
wedged it between the panel and the Plexiglas so he could easily refer
to it, then settled his head against the scope hood. After a bit he
muttered, “I see some islands.”

Land. Jake hadn’t seen land in over a month, not since the ship eidted
the Malay Strait. Columbia was scheduled to spend three more weeks in
the Indian Ocean, then head for Australia.

Rumors had been circulating for weeks. Yesterday they were confirmed.
Australia, the Land Down Under, the Last Frontier, New California, where
everyone spoke Englishsort of–and everyone was your mate and they drank
strong, cold beer and they liked Yanks … oooh boy! The crew was
buzzing. This was what they joined the Navy for.

Those few old salts who claimed they had been to Australia before were
surrounded by rapt audiences ready for just about any tale.

“The women,” the young sailors invariably demanded.

“Tell us about the women. Are they really fantastic? Can we really get
dates?”

Tall, leggy, gorgeous, and they like American men, actually prefer them
over the home-grown variety. And their morals, while not exactly loose,
are very very modern. One story making the rounds had it that during a
carrier’s visit to Sydney several years ago the captain had to set up a
telephone desk ashore to handle all the calls from Australian women
wanting a date with an American sailor! Any sailor!

Send me a Sailor These extraordinary females gave the term
“international relations” a whole new dimension.

That was the scuttlebutt, solemnly confirmed and embellished by Those
Who Had Been There, once upon a time Before the Earth Cooled. The kids
listening were on their first cruise, their first extended stay away
from home and Mom and the girl next door. They fervently prayed that
the scuttlebutt prove true.

The Marines in the A-6 outfit were as excited as the swab jockeys. They
knew that, given a choice, every sane female on the planet would of
course prefer a Marine to a Dixie cup. Australia would be liberty
heaven. As someone said in the dirty-shirt wardroom last night,
Columbia had a rendezvous with destiny.

All this flitted through Jake Grafton’s mind as he flew eastward at
forty thousand feet. He too wanted to be off the ship, to escape from
the eat-sleep-fly cycle, to get a respite from the same old faces and
the same old jokes. And Australia, big, exotic, peopled by a hardy race
of warriors-Australia would be fun. He hummed a few bars of “Waltzing
Matilda,” then glanced guiltily at Flap. He hadn’t heard.

Jake’s mind returned to the business at hand. Hitting the tanker on the
way back to the ship was the dicey part …

Why did fate keep dealing him these crummy cards?

The fiercely bright sun shown down from a deep, rich, dark blue sky. At
this altitude the horizon made a perfect line, oh so far away. It
seemed as if you could see forever.

The sea far below was visible in little irregular patches through the
low layer of scattered cumulus, which seemed to float upon the water
like white cotton balls … hundreds of miles of cotton balls. To the
northeast were the mountains of Sumatra, quite plain now. Clouds hung
around the rocky spine of the huge island, but here and there a deep
green jungle-covered ridge could be glimpsed, far away and fuzzy.

The late afternoon sun was causing those clouds to cast dark shadows.
Soon it would shoot their tops with fire.

“There’s something screwy about this,” Flap said.

“What do you mean?”

“Ships don’t sink in fifteen seconds. Not unless they explode. How
likely is that?”

“Probably a mistake. Radio operator hit the wrong switch or something.
I’ll bet he thought no one heard the SOS.”

“Wonder if the ship tried to call him back.”

“Probably.”

“Well, I say it’s screwy.”

“You’d better hope we find that tanker on the way home.

Worry about that if you want to worry about something.

Extended immersion in saltwater is bad for your complexion.”

“Think it might lighten me up?”

“Never can tell.”

“Life as a white man … I never even considered the possibility. Don’t
think it would work, though. You white guys have to go without ass for
horribly long periods. I need it a lot more regular.”

“Might cure your jungle rot too.”

“You’re always looking for the silver lining, Grafton.

That’s a personality defect. You oughta work on that.”

The minutes ticked by. The mountains seemed closer, but maybe he was
just kidding himself. Perspective varies with altitude and speed. He
had noticed this phenomenon years ago and never ceased to marvel at it.
At just a few thousand feet you see every ravine, every hillock, every
twist in the creeks. At the middle altitudes on a clear day you see
half of a state. And from up here, well, from up here, at these speeds,
you leap mountain ranges and vast deserts in minutes, see whole weather
systems . . . in orbit the Earth would be a huge ball that occupied
most of the sky. You would circle it in ninety minutes. Continents and
oceans would cease to be extraordinarily large things and appear merely
as features on the Earth. The concept of geographical location would
cease to apply.

At this altitude he and Flap were halfway to heaven. On his kneeboard
Jake jotted the phrase.

He was checking the fuel, again, when Flap said, “We’re a hundred twenty
miles out. I can see the area.” The area where the ship in distress
should be, he meant, if it were really there.

Odd day for an emergency at sea. Most ships got into trouble in bad
weather, when heavy seas or low temperatures stressed their systems. On
a day like this …

“I got something on the radar. A target.”

… Me ship?”

“The INS says it’s about four or five miles from the position Black
Eagle gave us. Of course, the inertial could have drifted that much.”

“Big ship?”

“Well, it ain’t a rowboat. Not at this distance. Can’t tell much more
than that about the size. A blip is a blip.”

“Course and speed?”

“She’s DIW.” Dead in the water, drifting.

He would pull the power at eighty miles, descend with the engines at
eighty percent RPM initially to ensure the generators stayed on the
line.

“It’s about fifteen miles from the coast of Sumatra, which runs
northwest to southeast. Islands to seaward, west and southeast. Big
islands.”

“Any other ships around?”

“No. Nothing.”

“On a coast like that

“Maybe we’ll see some fishing boats or something when we get closer.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll tell Black Eagle.” Flap keyed the radio.

They arrived over the ship at seven thousand feet, the engines at idle.
Peering down between cumulus clouds, Jake saw her clearly. She was a
small freighter, with her superstructure amidships and cranes fore and
aft. Rather like an old Liberty ship. No visible smoke, so she wasn’t
obviously on fire. No smoke from the funnel either, which was
amidships, and no wake. There was a smaller ship, or rather a large
boat, alongside, right against the starboard side.

Jake put the plane into a right circle so Flap could get pictures with
the hand-held camera and picked a gap in the clouds to descend through.
The engines were still at idle.

They dropped under the clouds at 5,500 feet. “Shoot the whole roll of
film,” Jake told Flap. “From every angle. We’ll circle and make one
low pass down the rail so you can get a closeup shot of the ship and
that boat alongside, then we’re out of here.”

:’Okay.” He focused and snapped.

“Looks like the crew has been rescued.”

“Swing wide at the stem so I can get a shot of her name.”

Jake was passing three thousand feet now, swinging a wide lazy circle
around the ship, which seemed to be floating on an even keel. Wonder
what her problem was?

:’Can you read the name?”

“You’re still too high. It’ll be in the photos though.”

Fuel? Sixty-two hundred pounds, over six hundred miles to Columbia. He
shivered as he surveyed the drifting freighter and the small ship
alongside. That small one looked to be maybe eighty or ninety feet
long, a small superstructure just forward of amidships, one stack,
splotchy paint, a few people visible on deck.

“There’s people on the freighter’s bridge.”

“About finished?”

:’Yeah.”

“Here we go, down past them both.” Jake dumped the nose. He dropped
quickly to about two hundred feet above the water and leveled, pointing
his plane so that they would pass the two stationary vessels from bow to
stem. Jake adjusted the throttles. If he went by too fast Flap’s
photos would end up blurred. He steadied at 250 knots.

“They aren’t waving or anything.”

Jake Grafton saw the flashes on the bow of the small ship and knew
instinctively what they were. He jammed the throttles forward to the
stops, rolled forty degrees or so and pulled hard. He felt the thumps,
glimpsed the fiery tracers streaming past the canopy, felt more thumps,
then they were out of it.

“Flak!” Now Flap Le Beau found his voice.

“Fucker’s got a twenty-millimeter!”

They were tail on to the ships, twisting and rolling and climbing. The
primary hydraulic pressure needles flickered.

So did the secondary needles. The BACK-UP HYD light illuminated on the
annunciator panel.

“Oh sweet fucking Jesus!”

Jake leveled the wings, trimmed carefully for a climb.

The plane began to roll right. The stick was sloppy. Jake used a touch
of left rudder to bring it back.

Heading almost south. He jockeyed the rudder and stick, trying to swing
the plane to a westerly heading. The plane threatened to fall off on
the right wing.

It was all he could do to keep the wings level using the stick and
rudder. Nose still a degree or so above the horizon, so they were still
climbing, slowly, passing two-thousand feet, doing 350 knots.

“Get on the radio,” Jake told Flap. “Talk to Black Eagle.

Those guys must be pirates.”

He retarded the throttles experimentally, instinctively wanting to get
down to about 250 knots so the emergency hydraulic pump would not have
to work so hard to move the control surfaces. He trimmed a little more
nose up. The nose rose a tad. Good.

“Black Eagle, Black Eagle, this is War Ace, over.”

They were in real trouble. The emergency hydraulic pump was designed to
allow just enough control to exit a combat situation, just enough to
allow the crew to get to a safe place to eject.

“Black Eagle, this is War Ace Five Oh Eight with a red hot emergency,
over.”

And the emergency pump was carrying the full load. all four of the
hydraulic pressure indicator needles pointed at the floor of the
airplane, indicating no pressure at all in any of their systems.

“Black Eagle, War Ace Five Oh Eight in the blind. We cannot hear your
answers. We have been shot up by pirates on this SOS contact. May have
to eject shortly. We are exiting the area to the south.”

Just fucking terrific! Shot down by a bunch of fucking pirates! On the
high fucking seas in 1973! On a low, slow pass in an unarmed airplane.
Of all the shitty luck! “Squawk seventy-seven hundred,” Jake said.

Flap’s hand descended to the IFF box on the console between them and
turned the mode switch to emergency. Just to be sure he dialed 7700
into the windows. Mayday.

“There’s an island twenty miles ahead,” Flap said. “Go for it. We’ll
jump there.”

The only problem was controlling the plane. It kept wanting to drop one
wing or the other. Jake was using full rudder to keep it upright, first
right, then left. The stick was almost useless.

He reached out and flipped the spin assist switch on. This would give
him more rudder authority, if the loss of hydraulic pressure hadn’t
already made that switch. It must have.

The spin assist didn’t help.

When the left wing didn’t want to come back with full right rudder, he
added power on the left engine. Shoved the power lever forward to the
stop. That brought it back, but the roll continued to the right. Full
left rudder, left engine back, right engine up … and catch it wings
level …

“Seventeen miles.”

“We aren’t gonna make it.”

“Keep trying. I don’t want to swim.”

“Those fuckers!”

Three thousand feet now. Now if he could just maintain that altitude
when the wings rolled …

They were covering about four and a half nautical miles per minute. How
many minutes until they got there? The math was too much and he gave
up. And he could see the island ahead. There it was, green and covered
with foliage, right there in the middle of the windscreen.