The Intruders

19

The radome on the nose of the aircraft 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 lighten 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?”

“Oh, 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. “Uh-oh,” 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 exited 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 English — sort 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.”

“The 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 stern 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 stern. 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 consol 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.

“Fifteen miles.”

The roll was left. Full right rudder, left engine up. The roll stopped but the nose came down. Full back stick didn’t help. He ran the trim nose-up as he pulled the right engine to idle.

The nose was coming up. Yes, coming, so he started the trim nose-down. The wing was slowly rising, oh so slowly, rising…

They bottomed out at fifteen hundred but the plane began a very slow roll to the right, the nose still climbing.

He reversed the engines and rudder, played with the trim.

Slowly, agonizingly, the wings responded to the pilot’s inputs. Now the nose fell to the horizon and kept going down.

Full nose-up trim! He held the button and glanced at the trim indicator on the bottom of the stick. Still nose-down! Come on!

They bottomed out this time at one thousand feet and the entire cycle began again.

“We won’t make it the next time,” Jake told Flap.

“Let’s jump at the top, when the wings and nose are level.”

“You first and I’ll be right behind you.”

Nose coming down, right wing coming down, soaring up, up, to…to twenty-three hundred feet.

“Now,” Jake shouted.

An explosion and Flap was gone. Jake automatically centered the rudder as he pulled the alternate firing handle. Instantly a tremendous force hit him in the ass. The cockpit disappeared. The acceleration lasted for only an instant, then he began to fall.