Flight of the Intruder

SIXTEEN

When the movie started, Jake went down to his state room and undressed, then headed for the shower. The water felt good, and he was tempted to let it run while he soaped up but thought better of it.

Lathered from head to toe, he opened the taps again The water squirted, slowed to a trickle, then to individual drops. Someone, somewhere on the ship had secured the water. Jake sagged against the side of the stall. The soap suds on his body made little popping noises.

Back in his stateroom, he sponged off the soap wit water from the sink.

After he used his towel to mop up the puddles around him, _he put on clean underwear and sat down at his desk.

He held his hands under the light; they trembled like those of an old man.

He had paperwork to do but couldn’t summon up the energy or interest to do it.

He looked into the shadows of the room and thought of Callie. What was she doing tonight? Dancing with some congressman? Their worlds were so different. Someday he would take her to the hills of Virginia, where the air was clean and smelled of pine.

Back in Virginia, winter would have closed in. The trees would be bare, the leaves on the ground sodden after the late autumn rains. The cold would keep the squirrels in their nests until midday.

The game birds would be lying in their secret places, the deer curled up in theirs. He remembered the deer, so graceful, so cautious.

The does would jump from a bed beneath a laurel or pine bough, bound through the stark trees and perhaps pause at a safe distance and stare back at him, an intruder.

All would be still. The only sounds would be his breathing and his footfalls on wet leaves. He would find a stump or a log and sit with a cigarette or chew of tobacco. After a while the breeze -would chill him. It would come out of the north or west, a gentle wind that would drift through the trees and flow up the hollows, seeking the gaps in the hills. Eventually the gathering clouds-would thicken, and he would see a few lazily falling flakes, borne on the wind. He had sat through many snows in the forest, when the millions of airborne crystals would shrink the world to less than a hundred feet. In silence nature would transform a landscape. But soon the cold would seep through his clothing, layer by layer. He’d be forced to rise, to stamp his feet and swing his arms wide as his breath took form in vapor.

He relived the night’s mission again. Waiting for the engine to light as the Intruder approached the stall-that was the longest moment of his life.

Shutting the engines down had been a major mistake, the kind he had told Callie he didn’t believe he would make. The more he thought about the course of his life, the more he felt he was losing control. Worse yet, he wondered if anyone was really in control. Somebody had to be planning the war! But the targets were shit. Lives were risked and lost, changing nothing. And the war went on.

He pounded the starch out of a clean uniform and put it on.

He took his leather flight jacket from a hook near the door and, locking the door behind him, set out down the passageway thinking about party headquarters in Hanoi. Would Cole go? Would Steiger help them find it? That Cole . . . he’SAReal piece of work That was clear after the hop this evening.

But what if he says no? But he’ll say yes. Sure he will. But what if he doesn’t? He ran into Mad Jack in the passageway in front of the Sick Bay. “Why aren’t you in the ready room watching the movie, Grafton?”

“I’m not interested.”

“Rough hop tonight, huh? My prescription is a movie and a good night’s sleep.”

“Sure, Jack, sure. A few giggles and forty winks. Roger that.” Jake kept walking and didn’t slow until he had turned the corner.

Cole listened to Grafton, his face not revealing a clue to his reactions.

They had just finished a night tanker hop. The two men were alone, drinking coffee in the dirty-shirt wardroom. When the pilot finished, Cole asked, “Why do you want to do this?”

“We need to hit something significant, something that’ll convince them to talk seriously at the peace table.”

“Is there any such target?”

“There might be. Party headquarters in Hanoi. The leadership. There’s a chance it might work. I think it’s worth the risk.”

“What do you want me to go?”

“We need Steiger’s help with the planning material. I lost my temper with him in the wardroom before we went into port last time. Things are a little tense between us. I think he’ll help if we approach him the right way, but it’ll be chancy.”

“I’ll talk to him,” said Tiger Cole.

“If Steiger says no and tells somebody, your talking to him will be an affirmative act that could get you zapped the same as me.” Jake shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Anyway, you better think this through before you say a word to Abe. We could get courtmartialed for even suggesting we’re gonna bomb an unauthorized target.”

“The same risk you ran a few minutes ago when you started this conversation?”

“Yeah,” Jake said, flushing slightly.

Cole laughed, a sound like a gate creaking on rusty hinges. “The odds on the two of us dying in bed improve a lot if we’re court-martialed.”

An hour later there was a knock on Grafton’s stateroom door. Jake opened the door to Cole and Steiger.

“Abe has some questions he wants to ask you,” Cole said as the two men found seats.

“Did Cole tell me right? Do you really want to bomb Communist Party headquarters?”

“Yeah. That’s right. We want to kick them in the nuts for a change.”

Abe took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief. He took his time, inspecting them carefully to make sure they were spotless. Jake passed him a can of warm Coke. He opened it and took a long drink. “Why do you want to do this, Jake? Why take the chance someone will figure out it’s you who bombed the reds in Hanoi?”

The pilot rubbed his face with his hands. He looked at Cole, then at Steiger. “We have to kick harder. That’s all. We just have to kick them as hard as we can.”

“Are you two planning on making a career in the navy?” Steiger asked. The pilot shrugged. “Cole?” The bombardier turned his thumb down. “Well, that’s good, because you both seem to have an independent streak.” He drummed his fingers on Jake’s desk “Y’know, for a while I thought I would-make the navy a career, I mean. But this last year, seeing you guys go out on missions, never risking anything myself well, y’know, it’s gotten to me.” He looked at the two airmen. “Hell, I don’t expect you to understand. You risk your butts out there, and in your eyes I’m just the little weenie who helps plan the missions.”

“Don’t forget,” Cole said, “we’re going right down town. It won’t be any piece of cake.”

Jake caught the bombardier’s eye and shook his head. He let the silence build for a moment before he spoke. “We know you carry your end of the log, Abe. We also realize we’re asking a lot from you. It’s true, as you say, that we put our chips up every night. Maybe it takes a few turns of the wheel to develop gambler’s blood.

“You guys can’t do this little deal without me, can you?” Abe said.

“Suppose you should get bagged. Then I’ll be the pigeon denying any knowledge of what the hell you were doing over Hanoi. And I’m not a very good liar.” He shook his head and his glasses slipped down his sweaty nose. He pushed them back with his middle finger.

“If we thought we couldn’t get back, we wouldn’t go,” Cole said.

“We know you’d be running a big risk,” said Jake.

“I do my job. I put the materials together, interpret the raw data, and help you guys plan the strikes.” After a pause, Steiger added, “My jobs nice and safe.”

Jake lit a cigarette. The match shook in his hands. He glanced at Abe and saw that the air intelligence officer was staring at his own shoes. “Don’t you see, Abe Can’t you see the blood and brains and pieces of smashed human beings?

It’s all murder! Just plain ordinary, barroom murder dressed up so people won’t puke. The people we kill with our bombs are never the right ones. We never get the guys who dug the holes at Hue and machine-gunned the civilians. We never get the guys who are cutting the schoolteachers’ throats. We kill the kids and the old women and guys like you and me who just want to live through this thing. But this time we’re going after the men who give the orders. This time we’re going straight for the sons of bitches at the top.”

“You can’t stop it, Grafton. Not with just one plane. Not just two guys.”

“Three guys,” said Jake. He watched the smoke curl up from his cigarette.

He looked at Steiger. “So we keep making craters in the runways at Kep. How many times have we done that? Or we bomb a ’suspected truck park’ that turns out to be so many acres of forest, or mud flats along a river that somebody labeled a ‘boat yard.” Just this once wouldn’t you like to really hit ‘em where it hurts? If we bomb their headquarters, maybe, just maybe, we’ll take out their leadership.”

“Or die trying.”

“So Grafton and Cole get smoked! Won’t be the end of the world. But if it happens, remember this: we didn’t buy the farm killing dogfaces-we didn’t die gutting little girls who live too close to a bombed-out power plant. We died going for the head motherfucker. You put that on our tombstones.”

Steiger chewed on a fingernail. After a long pause, he said, “Maybe I’ve sat in this safe job long enough, Maybe it’s time I hung out my ass for a change. Tomorrow, during the wardroom movie, why don’t you come up to Mission Planning.” Abe looked glum, then his face brightened. “Hell, maybe if you don’t ‘get the leaders, you might get Jane Fonda or Ramsey Clark.”

Jake laughed. “Abe, if I had that kind of luck I’d have won the Irish Sweepstakes by now and be married to the Playmate of the Year.” He stopped laughing an looked at Steiger. “By the way, Abe, I want to tell you that I’m sorry about shouting at you in the war room.”

“Nah, it was my fault. I shouldn’t have told you those things. I just thought you would want to know.” He picked at a paint blister on the back of the door. “Been thinking about it, if it were me, I wouldn’t want to know. An infantryman has to know. He’s so close. if you don’t have to know, then why would you?”

The chart lay open on the table. Two days had passed since Grafton and Cole had enlisted Steiger. In the interim Abe had been unable to find any information on Party Headquarters among the targeting material aboard ship. “We could get the stuff,” he had toll Grafton and Cole, “but only if we send a message asking for it. That’d be like robbing a bank without a mask and making the getaway in your own car.” They had agreed that the National Assembly building was the next best choice. Things seemed to be breaking their way. The usual night strike carried a dozen 500-pounders, which would have merely scratched the well-built stone building “We have a dozen thousand-pound Snakes for tonight’s strike,” Cole said to Jake and Abe. The Snakes, or Snake-eyes, were conventional general-purpose bombs fitted with clamshell fins that opened when the weapons were released and acted like parachutes to retard the weapons and let them fall almost straight down while the aircraft escaped the ensuing fragmentation. The Snake-eye fins would permit a delivery from as low as 500 feet.

“We’ll dump four on the power plant and eight on the National Assembly,” Cole said. “They won’t be expecting us to turn for Hanoi, so we might be able to scoot across the city without too much opposition.

They all looked again at the chart and the route, which Abe had helped Tiger prepare. A thin black line marked the route they would fly. It stretched away from the ship in a northerly direction one hundred fifty miles to a point about ten miles east of the mouth of the Red River. The line then angled north -northwest across the coast, past the town of Hai Duong, to a fork in a stream a dozen miles short of Bac Giang, a town on the railroad that ran from Hanoi northeast into China. The river confluence was the Initial Point, the I P , and was so marked. Leaving the I P , the black line continued on to Bac Giang and the power station there. That was the target the navy had assigned for their night mission. What the navy didn’t know was that after Bac Giang the black line went down the railroad track to Hanoi, across the city, then southeast, parallel to the Red River, past Nam Dinh to the sea. Jake Grafton and Tiger Cole studied the chart and tried to visualize the reality.

Cole laid a two-year-old photo of the power plant on the table. “We train off the four bombs, point oh six seconds apart.” He then laid a six-year-old photo of the National Assembly on top of the picture of the power plant. “To hit this, we salvo the eight bombs we have left, four at a time, point oh six seconds between salvos.”

“Maximizes the damage but minimizes the possibility of a hit,” Jake observed.

Steiger pulled out a detailed overhead picture of Hanoi. He pointed a pencil at the North VietNamese National Assembly building. “It’s surrounded on three sides by other buildings. I haven’t the foggiest idea what’s in them. Probably government offices, but who can say?”

Jake gestured at the photograph of the stone building where the assembly met. “Maybe we ought to climb high enough to drop the Snakes unretarded. If they’r retarded they may not penetrate deep enough into this building to do a whole lot of damage.”

Cole nodded. “Let’s see how much flak there is and decide at the time.”

Jake was dubious. He studied the photo. “If we drop them retarded they may bounce off this bastard. It looks damn solid to me.”

Each of the men evaluated the Picture. Grafton was right. The bombs had to go in slick, Which meant that the airplane would have to release them from at least 2500 feet above the ground to escape the fragments.

The Pilot picked up the sectional chart that showed in detail the target area in Hanoi. This was the chart he had wanted the other night, but he didn’t mention that to Steiger. He rotated the chart so the land and river lay as he would see them from the cockpit. He tried to memorize the turn of the river, the position of the boulevards, and the location of the target building. if the radar failed at the last moment there just might be enough light to drop visually.

Steiger’s voice broke the silence. “The moon won’t be up until about 2240. It’s on the wane.” But with the amount of flak the pilot suspected they would see, the target might nevertheless be visible. They would find it, one way or the other.

“How about fuel?” Jake asked Tiger.

“There’ll be enough. We’ll be late getting feet wet, but no one’ll notice. If they do, we’ll just say we had to make two runs,”

“Where’s the other strike going?” Jake inquired.

“Joe Wagner is gonna look for trucks on Route One,” Abe replied.

“And the A-6B?”

“Not on this one,” Abe said.

Good! No one in the squadron would ask any questions about all the flak around Hanoi- Some A-7 or F-4 drivers might see the fireworks, but they wouldn’t know who was there nor would they care.

Jake looked closely again at the photo of the National Assembly building. Four buildings of similar size were nearby. “This thing’ll be hard to break out of the clutter,” he observed, referring to the radar picture that Cole would be looking at. The bombardier shrugged.

“Have you ever been downtown before?” Jake asked Cole as they packed the charts and radar predictions into the bombardier’s flight bag. “Yeah,” Tiger Cole replied. “How many times?” Abe asked.

“A few.”

“How many is a few?”

“Four or five.”

“How many times exactly?”

“Exactly eight. Back in 1967, late summer and fall. Lyndon Johnson was going to teach them a lesson.

“How was it?” Abe absently tapped his pencil on the table.

“Bad.”

“They shot a lot?”

“It was like sticking your dick into a hornet’s nest. We lost a bunch of airplanes. I don’t think we taught them much, except that we can he had.”

As they left, Steiger momentarily put his arm around Jake’s shoulders.

“Watch your ass,” he advised, his eyes wide and blinking behind his glasses.

In the passageway Jake said, “Well, you sure scared Abe.”

“Then it’s unanimous. We’re all three scared.”

“Why did you agree to do this?”

“Because you asked.” As they went down a ladder Cole first, the bombardier said over his shoulder, “And because you can’t win a war unless you’re willing to fight.”