Flight of the Intruder

TWELVE

They were having a riot at the Cubi Point Officers’ Club. At least that’s what it looked like to Jake and Sammy when they opened the door.

A wave of noise immediately broke over them. The rock ‘n’ roll band made up only part of the assault. Much of the din came from men’s voices raised in singing and shouting as the aircrews indulged in one last glorious hinge. The ship was scheduled to sail at eight the next morning.

One of the squadron’s pilots, Snake Jones, was drinking near the door.

“How was Hong Kong, guys?”

“Great,” Lundeen replied. “I’m going to live there during my next incarnation.”

“You’ll have to speak up. I can’t hear a goddamn word.” Lundeen hollered, “Great.”

“Too bad you had to come back,” Snake said.

“By the way, you’ll have to fetch your own drinks. The waitresses were grossed out over an hour ago.”

“What happened?”

“Some A-7 jockey stood on the table and took off all his clothes.

Then he passed out. His buddies carrie him down to the Tailhook Room. He’s laid out down there on the bar.”

The two newcomers shouldered through the crush around the bar. “Happy Hour prices, boys,” the bartender said and collected a dime from each of them.

“What luck!” Lundeen said to Jake. “You can get skunk-drunk for four bits.”

Jake clinked his beer glass against Sammy’s and drank deeply. He replaced his glass on the bar and, while waiting for a refill, peered around the smokefilled room. At the far wall the fighter crews were carolling obscene songs and throwing their empty glasses into the fireplace. Fighting valiantly to hold his own in the decibel ratings, the lead singer was belting out a tune from a platform in the middle of the vast room. Between the band and the bar, dice players were running Klondike games at four tables.

The roommates made their way to the tables. Jake estimated that only a hundred dollars or so was in play at each table, but the night was young. He knew that when the evening had worn on and empty glasses had accumulated, as much as six or seven hundred would be riding on a single roll, and that just before the club closed-when checks were suddenly acceptable some men would lose a month’s pay. The same sports sat at the tables night after night, but the high rollers showed up only the night before the ship sailed. Then the real money was on the line.

Cowboy Parker presided over one table, fronted by a hefty pile of twenties. He nodded at Jake and Sammy, said something Jake couldn’t catch above the uproar, then refocused his attention on the game. Jake recalled that Cowboy once told him he had furnished a house from his winnings on his first WestPac cruise.

They spotted Razor Durfee and Abe Steiger with several other men at a table away from the band, below the bar, and cut a path through the human thicket to join them.

“Meet your new bombardier, Jake,” Razor said. The uniformed man beside Razor stood up and stuck out his hand. He was a couple of inches taller than Jake, with wide shoulders and sunbleached hair.

Cold, penetrating blue eyes looked out from a suntanned face. Under his wings he wore three rows of ribbons. The upper left one was the Distinguished Flying Cross with two gold stars.

“Virgil Cole.” Jake’s right hand was gripped in a firm handshake.

Sammy shook hands, too, then drifted off. Jake sat down to get acquainted.

Cole settled back, apparently content to let Razor do the talking.

Throughout the recitation of his resume, Cole only sipped his beer.

“And after two combat cruises, he was an instructor bombardier at VA-42. Now he’s joined our posse,” Razor concluded.

“He’s been in the navy eight years,” Steiger pitched in.

Razor leaned over to Jake and whispered in his ear, “Cole ain’t a big talker.” Grafton had formed that impression already. “And he ain’t a big smiler, either.

Jake directed several questions at Cole, asking him where he had grown up and where he had attended college. In reply Jake received, “Winslow, Arizona, and “Phoenix.”

Jake lapsed into silence while the hubbub swirled around him. As Razor introduced Cole to various people, Jake observed him carefully.

The hard blue eyes searched each new face.

The corners of his mouth remained turned up in a smile of sorts, but the smile never developed. Only the eyes moved in the mask that was Cole’s face. He projected an aura of amused superiority.

The new man’s reluctance to engage in conversation soon caused the talk to turn in other directions. No one mentioned the alligator pond incident so Jake assumed with relief that it had blown over, as Lundeen had predicted. The group discussed the two other new members of the squadron, a pilot and a bombardier, both just graduated from VA-128. The two had been flying every day and were now ready, Jake overheard, to requalify with six day and three night traps tomorrow when the ship was at sea. The pilot had carrier qualified in A-6s just a month before, but as Jake knew, he would have to do it again on the Shilo to satisfy Camparelli and the CAG.

Lundeen had returned to the fold in time to ask, “Where are these guys?”

Told they were in the Tailhook Bar, he motioned to Jake, who stood up.

“Come on, Cole,” Jake said. “Let’s go downstairs.”

The bombardier followed the two pilots down the hall to the side door. As they crossed the lawn toward a low cinderblock structure, the annex of the club, Jake asked Cole what he liked to be called.

“Virgil’s fine. Or Cole. Doesn’t matter.” It was the most he had said since Jake met him.

The Tailhook Bar had originally been the basement for a larger building that had either never been built or had been torn down. But that was some time before the memory of the men who congregated there now, and none of them bothered to ask. It was in the Tailhook Bar that the serious rowdies and drinkers hung out. Patrons could buy a hot sandwich from a short-order grill and all the liquor they wanted for a dime a drink during Happy Hour and a quarter thereafter. No women were allowed.

The place was packed when Jake, Sammy, and Cole entered. Every man there looked as though he had forsaken sobriety hours ago. Sea stories-anecdotes on nautical or aviation themes with presumably some basis in fact-were being recounted in loud voices to listeners less than a foot away. Sure enough, as Snake had told them, a naked, unconscious man lay face down on the bar.

Between the cheeks of his buttocks someone had placed a maraschino cherry.

“How come he’s on his stomach?” Grafton asked.

“Christ, Jake.” Little Augie came up. “Where’ve you been all your life? Everyone knows you always put a drunk face down so he won’t drown if he pukes. Weren’t you ever in the Boy Scouts?”

“Makes sense,” Jake replied and took a glass from Little Augie, who had two, and gulped down half its contents. Then he handed it back.

“That was my specimen for Mad Jack, Grafton. you want any more, just let me know.”

“Thanks.” Lundeen leaned across the nude and yanked the bartender’s sleeve. “Scotch on the rocks . . .” He glanced at Grafton and Cole. “Three of them.”

As they worked on their drinks, they watched the activity that centered around a mock cockpit set on rails near the back wall. This contraption was infamously known as “the beast.” Propelled forward on the rails by a compressed-air charge, the cockpit ran level for about twenty feet, then down a slight decline, through a set of open French doors, and out to a stagnant pond.

The only way to avoid being doused in the water as the cockpit slid to a halt was to adroitly manipulate the only control in the cockpit, a lever that activated a spring loaded tailhook that could snag a restraining wire rigged across the tracks just before the decline.

To catch the wire required split-second timing. Tonight the machine was getting a workout as man after man splashed into the water to the roars of “bolter, bolter bolter” from the revelers.

Ferdinand Majellon and a man Jake didn’t recognize walked over and introduced themselves. The stranger was indeed the new pilot. He looked barely twenty an exuded an innocence that promised to make him the butt of much crude humor.

As they chatted, Jake noticed Cowboy standing beside the group. “Tired of the game?” he asked.

Parker shook his head in disgust. “Too early. Chintzy bastards won’t bet enough yet. I’ll go back later. I see you met Virgil.” Jake nodded. What could one say about this guy?

“How was Hong Kong?” Cowboy asked.

“Okay,” said Jake.

“Get laid?” Cowboy demanded.

“Yeah,” Lundeen leered as Jake flushed. Jake saw Cole glance from one man to the other. Those eyes were a goddamn X-ray machine, Grafton thought.

Everyone else was watching the most recent rider of the beast being assisted from the device, dripping wet.

“We’ve got a man for the beast,” Cowboy announced in stentorian tones.

The crowd parted like the waters of the Red Sea, and Parker grabbed Jake’s shoulders and thrust him forward. Jake yelled, “Find someone else. Get this lunatic off me! I don’t want to ride the damned thing.

He felt more hands seize him. He was lifted roughly off the floor and carried toward the scum-coated beast. Accepting his fate, Jake allowed himself to be placed in the cockpit and strapped in.

Lundeen and Cowboy fiddled with the control panel “How do you turn the damn air on, anyway?” Sammy muttered. Perhaps because someone turned a knob the wrong way, a valve blew and compressed air shot the control handle across the room, shattering a mirror behind the bar. Two men barely ducked the projectile and the bartender, with his back turned, jumped when the glass exploded. The crowd considered all this hilarious.

“You idiots,” bellowed a burly fellow with a handlebar mustache. “Get outta the way, Lundeen, before you kill somebody. You too, Tex. ” Amid another outburst of laughter, Cowboy and Lundeen were shoved aside and replaced by more experienced hands.

Someone passed Jake a drink while he waited for the handle to be reinstalled and a new air bottle hooked up. He was beginning to enjoy this. He leaned back, fished out a cigarette, and propped one foot on the side of the cockpit. “Anytime you fellows get a handle on the situation-” Then he saw Cole, apparently cold and aloof, taking it all in, those blue eyes fixed upon him He wondered how in God’s name was he going to fly with this man every day? He recoiled at the idea of so many hours of enforced togetherness. At that moment Cole winked at him.

Jake grinned and handed his glass to the nearest spectator. “Are you guys going to take all night?” he asked of the repair party behind him. “We have bandits inbound at ten knots and they’re going to blast in through the French doors if you fellows don’t shake a leg.

“Who’s gonna launch this guy?” Handlebar shouted “I am, by God,” boomed a voice from the dee South. Bosun Marion Muldowski stepped up. He stood six feet two and transported a substantial pot belly. Bosun Muldowski was a warrant officer an had worked his way up from the enlisted ranks, “up the hawse pipe,” as the expression ran. He had been the catapult maintenance officer on the Shilo for as long as Grafton had been aboard and regularly took a turn launching aircraft. His commanding presence inspire awe in the officers and instant obedience from the sailors, who regarded him with a mixture of respect an fear. Even the air boss, a commander who headed the department that included all the flight-deck division had been known to slip and call Muldowski “Sir.”

Every eye in the room was on the southern Pole as he surveyed Jake Grafton and the beast. “You ready in there, shipmate?” he bellowed.

Jake took his foot down and tightened the shoulder straps. “Let’s do it, Bosun.”

Muldowski drained his beer, crushed the can with his fist, then tossed it outdoors into the pond. He unbuttoned and removed his shirt.

On his T-shirt was emblazoned a legend in flaming red: “World’s Finest Cat Officer.” Snickers rippled through the crowd.

The big man glowered at several people who had had the temerity to snicker. Silence reigned. “I’ve pissed more saltwater than you puppies ever sailed over.” His face was grim. “You back there,” he said to Handlebar. “Are you ready yet?”

Handlebar flung both hands above his head and held them there, the standard signal to the cat officer that the cat was ready to fire.

“Satisfactory,” the bosun pronounced. “Anytime you care to go we will oblige you,” he told Jake. The pilot sat at attention with his hand on the hook lever, watching the bosun from the corner of his eye. “Well?” demanded Muldowski.

“Well?” repeated Jake.

“I don’t hear your engine running and I don’t see a salute,” Muldowski said as though he were talking to a seventeen-year-old boot recruit from Iowa.

Taking the cue, everyone in the place, Jake included, began to roar like a jet engine. The thunder from threescore voices filled the room and rolled through the open doors, across the pond, and out into the night. Jake saluted and immediately put his hand back on the hook mechanism. He took a deep breath and chomped down on his cigarette. He tried to watch both the bosun and the safety wire at the same time. The bosun’s right hand twirled above his head, then he lunged to his right and his hand came down in a wide arc to touch the floor, the classic launch signal. Grafton tried to look back for the target wire, but it was too late.

Down the track he hurtled. He jerked on the handle but the beast continued to accelerate. He flashed down the incline. Water cascaded over him as the beast slid to a stop.

Jake puffed on his soggy cigarette. He looked back into the barroom. Some of the shouting, laughing men pointed at him with one hand and pounded the bosun on the back with the other.

When the car had been cranked back into batter the bosun inquired in his flight-deck voice, “How was your flight?”

“Smoother than silk, but the landing was a little rough. Maybe we’d better try it again.”

Lundeen leaned in with some whispered advice “This time watch the wire, not the bosun.”

With another mighty warwhoop Grafton swept down the track. And into the pond. As they hauled him bac he announced to the crowd, “That was practice.

This time I mean it.”

When the hook arrested the beast on the third flight he almost hit his head on the panel. Applause rattle the windows as a laughing Sammy Lundeen helped him out of the cockpit. Someone thrust another drink at him.

“Which of you shit-hot flyboys is next?” the bosun boomed.

Jake yelled, “Sammy Lundeen.”

“Hell, no,” said Lundeen without conviction. Eager hands propelled him into the slimy seat. “Now watch the greatest pilot who ever lived catch the wire on the very first try,” Sammy chortled. “I was born in a cockpit. I could fly before I could walk.”

“Bet that made nursing a lot more fun,” someone hooted. “Did you just hover there, like a humming bird?”

“Watch and weep, swine.”

“Have you any money, my boy?” the bosun inquired.

“Fifty bucks, infidel dog, ye of little faith, follower of the false prophet-“

“I’ll take ten.”

“Me, too,” was the chorus.

“Thanks, guys,” Lundeen announced triumphantly after he grabbed the wire. “It’s always a pleasure spending your money.” Pocketing his winnings, he and Grafton retreated to the bar where Cole was waiting, the corners of his mouth curving upward a fraction of an inch. The three of them watched Cowboy and five others wrestle the bosun toward the machine.

Jake surveyed the naked drunk on the bar and decided that modesty should be given at least a token nod. He took off his wet socks and put them on the feet of the unconscious Corsair pilot. This accomplished, he turned to Lundeen.

“Thanks for taking me to Hong Kong. That was one hell of a good time.”

“No sweat.”

“Damn, I sure feel good. It’s been one fine in-port period. No lie, Sam, I really feel great.”

“You’re drunk, Jake. You always feel great when you’re drunk.”

Grafton acknowledged to himself the truth of the statement. He was getting loaded again, and that always felt good.

“Well,” said a voice behind them, “this one certainly seems quiet enough.” A navy captain in short-sleeve whites observed the nude on the bar.

Above his left shirt-pocket, the captain wore four rows of ribbons topped with gold pilot’s wings. The uppermost left ribbon was the Silver Star. His close-cropped black hair was shot through with gray, and his cap, with scrambled eggs on the visor, perched precariously on the back of his head. “Is he alive?” the captain asked Sammy in a conversational tone.

“Yessir. Last time we checked, he was.”

The captain turned to the small civilian who stood behind him. “I thought you said this man was completely naked?”

“I did and he is. He stood on a table upstairs and stripped down and greatly embarrassed our female staff.”

“He has socks on now. He’s partially dressed,” the captain observed.

“Sir, we can’t keep our employees if this kind of behavior goes on.

And who’s going to pay for all the breakage upstairs? And this mirror?” The club manager gestured toward the glass fragments behind the bar.

“I’m sure you’ll have no trouble getting or keeping help. I have over a hundred applications on file for every civilian job on this base, including yours.

And I’m sure these officers are willing to stand good for the breakage. Just send me a tally for everything you want replaced and I’ll see that it’s paid.”

“But-“

“Go on upstairs and manage this place. Send me the list tomorrow.” The captain smiled at Grafton and Lundeen. “And how is the evening going?”

“Just fine, sir. But if I may make a suggestion? You better remove your cap before someone demands that you buy a round.”

The captain put a hand to his cap, then withdrew it. “That is the custom, isn’t it? Barkeep!” The Captain raised his voice. “There is a man in the house with his cover on. Drinks for everyone!” More than sixty men surged toward the bar.

Armed with a drink, the captain scanned the crowd and spotted Bosun Muldowski. “Ski! I thought you retired off my ship four, five years ago?”

“Aye, Captain Harrington, I shore did. But I got tired of sitting’ on my ass and listening to the ol’ lady, and with the war on and all…. Well, here I am!”

The captain surveyed the bosun’s wet clothes. “I see you also undertook to give these young gentlemen some lessons.”

The bosun looked down at his wet T-shirt in disgust.

“That’s about the size of it.”

The atmosphere in the bar had mellowed. Muldowski fell into a talkative mood, so the men plied him with beer and listened to his stories. He solved all the navy’s problems, told Congress where to go, cussed out everyone on earth not wearing navy blue, and gave the men a well-received assessment of most civilians: “Lower than whale shit at the bottom of the sea. At about two in the morning, four or five guys from one of the A-7 outfits came in and collected their naked shipmate. He was snoring happily before they cranked him up, but once aroused demanded another drink. They gave him ice water, and he gurgled back to life.

Jake walked outside and sat down in the grass some fifty feet away from the building. He could see the Shilo, illuminated with floodlights, lying at the carrier pier. Even from a mile and a half away, she looked gigantic.

Beyond her the black water of the bay extended to the high hills on the western shore, while off to the south lay the entrance to the bay. The breeze blowing in off the sea, laden with the wild smell of salt, felt good. He stretched out on the grass and looked up at the stars.

In two days he would be flying again. More worthless targets with lots of flak and no results. He remembered the suspected truck park he and Morgan had bombed back was it? A week, ten days ago? All that flak. Although it seemed long ago, he would never forget how the cockpit looked after they opened the canopy. All that blood.

He ran his hands through the grass and felt the damp earth. Then he sat up. Wondering about Callie and the future, he looked at the enormous bulk of the carrier and at the dark sea just beyond the entrance to the bay.