Flight of the Intruder

THREE

Both fire-warning lights glared a brilliant red,the plane was out of control. The hydraulic gauges still showed plenty of pressure. The nose slammed up and down with an evil perversity, and the machine roll left. He jammed the stick full right, but the left roll continued. He looked at Morgan. His head was gone. Blood spurted in little fountains from the stump of his neck. The canopy glass was gone on the right side, and the wind howled through the cockpit. The stick was firm, yet the plane did not respond. His body slammed back and forth as the G forces and wind tore at him With the altimeter racing down, he fumbled for the ejection handle between his legs. It wasn’t there! His hands went to the primary handle over his head, but it too was gone!

He couldn’t tear his eyes from the wildly spinning altimeter. Maddened by the roar of the hurricane wind, he screamed.

The scream woke him. The darkness and the pain were real. Unable to orient himself, he fought the sheets. One fist struck the bulkhead, and the pain sobered him. He fumbled for the bunk light switch.

He kicked the sheets aside and put his feet on the floor. Sweat covered his brow. He lit a cigarette with trembling hands. ‘Three o’clock in the morning. Sammy Lundeen was flying somewhere over North Vietnam. Morgan McPherson was in a body bag in the ship’s morgue.

He had drunk too much bourbon. His head throbbed and his hands still shook. He levered himself upright and fumbled for some aspirin in the medicine cabinet. He wet a face towel and lay down again with the cool cloth on his forehead. He left the light on. He needed the light.

He concentrated on the sounds of the ship working in the seaway. Metal rubbing on metal, the great weight of the ship rolling ever so gently back and forth as it met the swells, the rhythm of movement. He could also hear the sounds of men and machinery. From the engineering spaces below his room came the ringing of hammer blows. He silently cursed the fellow with the hammer, some boilertender, no doubt, delicately adjusting a precision instrument.

But his mind kept coming back to the flight, obsessively. That bullet that got Morg could have smacked me instead, he thought. Two inches lower and it would have gone under his chin and got me in the ear. Smack. I wouldn’t even have felt it. Just smack: then nothing.

The silent scream started. He felt his guts heave. Stop. Stop! You think about this stuff too much and you’ll be cold meat, just like McPherson.

He rolled out of the bunk, grabbed his towel, and went down the passageway to the showers. Water was being conserved because of recurrent problems with the ship’s evaporators; a notice posted on the door announced that showers were permitted only from 0600 to 0700 and again from 1800 to 1900. Jake ignored the sign. He tried the shower faucets, found they worked, and stood for ten minutes under the tap. Fuck the navy!

And fuck the asshole who can’t keep the goddamned evaporators working!

He dressed in a clean khaki uniform. Before he put on the trousers, he rammed his fist down each pant leg to break up the starch. He went by the ready room decided he wasn’t in the mood for people, and wandered up to the hangar deck. Aircraft 505 was on Elevator two. Two mechanics, on a work stand along side the fuselage, were replacing the damaged canopy pane. One of the men, a first class petty officer who Jake knew by sight, turned toward him.

“Too bad about Mister McPherson.”

Yeah, too bad.

“Not another bullet hole in this whole airplane Mister Grafton. We spent half an hour looking to see if they hit you anywhere else.”

The pilot just nodded and went on. He walked out onto a sponson on the port side amidships. The only light came through the open hatch from the hangar bay, Two large capstans stood ready to take the lines when the ship tied up portside to a pier. Jake heaved himself up on one. He could see the lights of a destroyer frigate several miles away - The wind was heavy with the smell of the sea.

After a half hour or so he went back inside the skin of the ship and climbed the ladders to the 0-3 level, the deck above the hangar bay and immediately below the flight deck. Instead of salt air, he smelled paint and the lubricating oil on the hatch hinges. Following a maze passageways, he located the junior officers’ bunkroom where McPherson had lived.

The door was open. Two navy-gray steel footlockers sat on the floor on one side of the eight-man bunkroom Little Augie Odegard and his bombardier, Joe Canfield, were packing clothes and personal effects into the lockers.

“How’s it going?” Jake muttered as he took a seat on the bunk opposite the pilot.

“Packing out Morg’s stuff. Rotten job,” said Little Augie. “It all has to be packed up so they can ship it home to his wife when we get to the Philippines in three days.” This duty always fell to the roommates of the dead or missing, which was why the two men who made up a crew were not allowed to live together in a double stateroom.

Canfield sat at McPherson’s desk going through the letters, magazines, and souvenirs that McPherson had accumulated in the last six months.

Canfield’s nickname was Big Augie because he was two inches taller than his diminutive pilot and the men bore a remarkable resemblance to each other, even though the pilot was white and the bombardier black. “Morg was squeaky clean, Jake. Not even a porn mag or a letter from an old girlfriend. Man, whoever has to clean out my desk is going to get an eyeful reading my stuff.” He opened another envelope, verified it contained a letter from Morgan’s wife, then replaced the letter in the envelope and added it to a large pile that would eventually go in one of the steel boxes. “Finding out how squared away Morg was is having a beneficial effect on my morals.”

“He was a good guy , Jake said.

‘Sure going to miss him.” Little Augie eyed Jake with a raised eyebrow.

“So how’re you really doing, shipmate?”

“Doing okay. The skipper gave me the night off, but I’ll be on the flight schedule tomorrow.”

“Only a few more days before we go to Subic Bay, Big reminded them.

“I’m just going to lay around the pool and drink gin and tonics,” Little Augie said.

“This time of year it may rain like hell.”

Jake watched the two men work. Little Augie meticulously folded the uniforms, underwear, and civilian clothes before putting them in the boxes. When Morgan McPherson’s personal effects were gone and the paperwork done, the men of the squadron would have finished burying him. When would Jake get him buried?

“Do you guys think the war is about over?”

“You mean that Kissinger statement ‘Peace is hand’?” Little Augie scoffed.

“Yeah.” Grafton’s voice was so soft that Big shot him a hard glance.

“It won’t be over until the treaty is signed and the gomers let the POWs come home,” Little told him, “isn’t going to happen soon.”

“You don’t think?”

“Nah, they’ve been talking for three years. Heck, took them a year to decide on the shape of the conference table. I figure that at the rate they’ve been going we’ll have a treaty by the turn of the century.” Big said, “Morgan isn’t going to be the last guy, Jake. Don’t blame yourself. There’s a lot of dying left to do.

Jake rose to go.

“Take care,” Little told him.

“You aren’t flying for at least twenty-four hours. Go get a drink,” Big advised.

“I already did that.”

“So get another.”

Back in his stateroom Jake removed his uniform an pulled down a hinged board, part of a dresser recessed into the bulkhead. When lowered, the board became a desk. Papers and books were stored in the cavity, which also contained the safe for classified material. He reached in and turned on the fluorescent tube that because of its recessed position, lighted the small work area but left most of the room in darkness. The subdued light gave the room an intimacy that seemed almost impossible on a 95,000-ton warship with a crew of five thousand. Jake turned off all the other lights in the stateroom so he could seek refuge in the secure world of the lamp.

What could he possibly say to Sharon McPherson? Dear Sharon, I’m sorry I got your husband killed. How could he say he was sorry and make it mean anything?

Her world gets smashed to bits and he’s “sorry.”

His hands were still shaking. Adrenaline aftershock, he decided. He picked up a sheet of paper and placed it on top of his splayed fingertips. The paper vibrated. Like everything else in his life, like the targets, like what happened to Morgan, it was beyond his control. He stared into the shadows of the room. He remembered the look on Morgan’s face, and the gagging, and the blood. Blood everywhere. The body holds an unbelievable amount of blood. Maybe the people he and McPherson had killed had died like that, bleeding to death.

Or maybe they had died instantly from the blast of the bombs. He would never know.

He chewed the pencil, his mind as blank about what he would say to Sharon as the sheet of paper in front of him. What do you say to a widow and mother?

Dear Sharon, We just hit a target that wasn’t worth a damn. Now your husband’s in a body bag in the meat locker. I am sorry as hell he’s dead: sorry, oh so sorry, but he is stone cold dead and sorry won’t bring him back, and you and I and Morgan’s boy have to live with it.

What do you say to the widow of the man who had saved your life?

They had been younger then and the carrier was still in their future.

They had finished their training at the replacement squadron on the same day and had walked across the parking lot side by side to the new hangar, to their new squadron, the fleet squadron. Somehow they were assigned to fly together.

Flying without an instructor was still a new experience then.

They were just getting to know each other much like newlyweds on a honeymoon. The honey moon ended that night.

They had flown south parallel to the coast of Washington twenty miles out to sea as the sunset died on the western horizon. To their right, the day sky slowly surrendered to the night through shades of yellow oranges, and reds.

On their left, layers of heavy stratus reflected the dying glow that was the lingering remnant of the day. Between the layers, blues and purple deepened into black.

They passed the mouth of the Columbia River an continued south for another eighty miles. Jake retarded the throttles and began his descent. At 5000 feet McPherson called the turn and the pilot swung east toward the land, still descending.

They leveled at 1000 feet, and he set the throttles for a 360-knot cruise.

They went in under the clouds, the last of the light gone. Jake selected the search-radar terrain clearance mode on the visual display indicator and rotated the offset impact bar to give himself 10 feet of clearance. The vdi presented a graphic of the terrain ahead generated by the computer from returning radar energy. The information was displayed in a series of bins, or range bins, to give the presentation a three-dimensional effect, and one of the bins was coded with vertical stripes. The pilot had to vary the altitude of the aircraft to keep the fixed offset impact bar on the coded range bin so that the plane maintained the desired degree of clearance, and no less.

Before they had gone very far inland the aircraft entered the clouds. ‘the rotating anticollision light reflected off the clouds and flashed in the cockpit creating a distraction, so the pilot turned it off. Morgan McPherson had his head pressed against the radar hood and was probably unaware that they had entered heavy clouds. The squadron operations manual dictated that this particular training route through the coastal mountains not be flown in instrument conditions. Grafton knew this, but tonight he decided to press on. Perhaps it was a matter of conquering fear by facing it.

Within minutes the plane was threading its way up a valley, and Jake was perspiring profusely. He concentrated on the vdi. The display was updated once a second, and he had to instantly judge the rate of change in the rising topography, and any heading correction necessary, then control the plane accordingly. The aircraft responded to stick displacement, but that displacement merely created a rate of change, not the change itself. Selecting the proper rate of change was the art. Sweat trickled down his forehead and stung his eyes.

McPherson, his head against the scope hood, fed Grafton a running commentary. “We’re in the valley … looks good for five miles ahead, ridges on both sides … the valley will bend right … we’ll be coming right in two miles … your altitude looks good … begin a right turn … harder right … looking good … steady up….”

And so they sped up the valley. In five minutes they crossed the divide and descended into another valley leading toward the interior plain, the desert.

The turns were steep at first, the pilot reluctant to force the nose down, but as the valley widened and straightened he let the machine sink until the impact bar rested on the coded range bin and the radar altimeter read 1000 feet.

“Looks real good . . . ridges moving away from our track… hold this heading … clearance looks good……”

They turned to a heading that would take them to a lake seventy miles away. Halfway there McPherson pushed back from the scope hood and began tapping in the coordinates of their next turnpoint onto the computer keyboard between his knees.

After the fierce concentration of the last fifteen minutes, the pilot unconsciously relaxed, took several deep breaths, and scanned the engine instruments and the fuel gauge as McPherson typed and checked his kneeboard cards. Satisfied that the computer had taken the new information, the bombardier put his head against the scope hood and Jake heard him scream.

“Pull up!”

Now Jake saw the display. They were dead men. The coded range bin was way above the impact bar, up near the top of the display. He slammed the throttles forward and jerked back on the stick. His eyes swung to the radar altimeter.

The needle was sinking through 200 feet.

We’re dead!

The aural warning sounded. The needle passed 100 feet. He had the stick locked aft.

So this is how it feels to die.

The needle on the radar altimeter fell to 50 feet, hovered there for a second, then began to climb. The Pilot’s eyes came back to the vdi. Twenty degrees nose up. He kept the stick locked aft. The radar altimeter needle raced clockwise.

He couldn’t release the back pressure on the control stick. Forty degrees nose up … fifty … sixty …

seventy.

At eighty degrees nose up he felt the stall buffet and then, only then, did he ease the stick to neutral.

Two hundred knots and slowing. They were passing 9000 feet.

He stared at the instruments. He had to do something! They were going almost straight up and running out of airspeed!

“Come on, Jake.” Morgan’s calm voice.

The pilot rolled the plane ninety degrees and let the nose drop toward the horizon. Slowly, slowly it came down and the airspeed crept up. When the nose reached the horizon, he rolled wings level.

They were at 13,000 feet. He was shaking uncontrollably. What had he done? He had almost killed them!

Morgan must have sensed how shaken he was. As they droned around on autopilot in a lazy circle with Jake shivering, the bombardier had talked to him. Jake could never remember what Morgan had said. He had just talked to let Jake hear the sound of his voice, calm and soothing; he talked until Jake was over his panic. And when they had landed, McPherson never mentioned the incident to anyone, had never reported the near disaster. He merely shook Jake’s hand in the parking lot and gave him a parting smile.

And he had saved both their lives!

Now he was dead. Two years and hundreds of thousands of miles later, he was dead.

Jake began to write. After three drafts he had the semblance of an acceptable letter. It wasn’t really acceptable, but it was the best he could manage. Two more drafts in ink gave him a letter he was prepared to sign.

Dear Sharon, By now you have been notified of Morgan’s death in action.

He was killed on a night strike on a target in North Vietnam, doing the best he could for his country. That fact will never fill the emptiness that his passing leaves but it will make him shine even brighter in my memory.

I flew with Morgan for over two years. We spent over six hundred hours together in the air. I knew him perhaps as well as any man can know another.

We both loved flying and that shared love sealed our friendship.

Since I knew him so well, I am well aware of the depth of his love for you and Bobby and realize the magnitude of the tragedy of his passing. You have my deepest and most sincere sympathy.

Jake What would she think when she read it? Would she save it and get it out in those moments when the pain must be revisited? Ten or twenty years from now, on a cool spring day when she’s cleaning the attic, would she find this letter from her lost past? The paper would be faded and yellow then. She would remember how he looked when she received it, the final notice that dreams of her youth had died far away, in a forsaken land, in a forgotten cause. Perhaps she would show it to her son when he asked about his father.

He stared at himself in the mirror over the sink. Where would he be in twenty years? Dead like McPherson and the nameless men who died under his bombs Or selling insurance and paying off a mortgage, but with the day-to-day affairs that fill up life yet somehow leave it empty?

He turned off the light and lay down on his bunk. Tired as he was, sleep would not come. He reviewed that last flight from beginning to end. There must be something he could have done differently.

But that bullet had come out of nowhere; he couldn’t have avoided it. Now Morgan was dead, and for what?

He wanted to get the bastards for that! He remembered the RockEye attack on the guns. God, that had felt good! He had pickled the four cluster bombs at precisely the right moment. Too bad the A-6 didn’t have a gun like the A-7 Corsair had. If only he had a gun! He could just drop the nose, put the pipper in the sight a fraction below the target, pull the trigger, and walk those slugs right up onto the gomers. As he lay there in his bunk, he could feel the recoil from the hammering weapon. The sensation was so real he panicked and groped for the light.

With the light on there was only the small room. He found Lundeen’s bottle and, sitting down in his desk chair, took a pull of the liquor.

Camparelli’s words came back to him. “I don’t want anybody in those planes who thinks he’s John Wayne on a vengeance mission.” But it was damn hard not to want revenge. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a body for a body….

So he’s dead and nothing can bring him back. He died bombing a bunch of trees in a shitty little place in a shitty little war that we don’t have the guts to try to win, and he would get a flag for his coffin. Jesus, you lose him like that and you want something more than a flag. You can’t help wishing that if he had to die that he’d died bombing a target that might have meant something. So you could honestly say, so Sharon could truthfully say, so his son could say with pride in the years to come: He died for…. My dad helped win the war by…. He died in the name of…. What? Nothing. Christ, what you want is for his death to mean something. You want a reason.

Maybe you can make his death mean something. You could sneak north some dark night and bomb something worth the trip. Really kick the gomers in the nuts.

He was up and pacing around the little room. It is possible, he told himself. Yes. No one but your bombardier knows where you go after you cross the beach. The Americans can’t follow you on radar, and the gomers have no idea where you’re supposed to go. So you can go anywhere you please and attack any damn thing.

What crazy thoughts! You pull a stunt like that, Jake, and you’ll be court-martialed … crucified.

Fuck that. So what? McPherson’s dead. I want a target that will make the gomers bleed. Like they made Morgan bleed. And Sharon.

And me….

When he lay down on his bunk again, he left the light on and concentrated on the creaks and groans of the ship as its steel beams and plates moved to meet the stresses of the swells.

He lay a long time listening to the sounds of the ship.