The Intruders

20

The parachute opened with a shock. As Jake Grafton turned slowly in the shrouds the airplane caught his eye, diving toward the ocean like a wounded gull. The nose rose and it skimmed the sea, then began to climb. It soared skyward in a climbing turn, its right wing hanging low, then the wing fell and the nose went through and it dove straight into the sea. There was a large splash. When the spray cleared only a swirl of foam marked the spot.

The pirates! Where were they?

He got his oxygen mask off and tossed it away, then craned his head. He saw the other parachute, lower and intact with Flap swinging from it, but he couldn’t see the pirate ship or its victim.

Oh, what a fool he’d been. To fly right over a drifting ship with another craft tied to it — and to never once think about the possibility of pirates! These waters were infamous…and the possibility never even crossed his mind. Son of a bitch!

The sea coming toward him brought him back to the business at hand. There was enough of a swell that the height was easy to judge — and he didn’t have much time. He reached down and pulled the handle on the right side of his seat pan. It opened. The raft fell away and inflated when it reached the end of its lanyard. He felt around for the toggles to the CO₂ cartridges that would inflate his life vest. He found them and pulled. The vest puffed up reassuringly.

Good! Now to ditch this chute when I hit the water.

Amazingly, the thoughts shot through his mind without conscious effort. This was the result of training. Every time the ship left port the squadron held a safety training day, and part of that exercise involved each flight crewman hanging from a harness in the ready room while wearing full flight gear. Blindfolded, each man had to touch and identify every piece of gear he wore, then run through the proper procedure for ejections over land and sea. Consequently Jake didn’t have to devote much thought to what he needed to do: the actions were almost automatic.

The wind seemed to be blowing from the west. He was unsure of directions. The way he wanted to go was toward that island — yes, that was south — and the wind was drifting him east. Somehow he also knew this without having to puzzle it out.

The raft touched the water. He felt for the Koch fittings near his collar bones that attached his parachute harness to the shroud lines and waited. Ready, here it comes, and…He went under. Closing his mouth and eyes automatically as the surge of cold seawater engulfed him, he toggled the fittings as he bobbed toward the surface. He broke water gasping for air.

The parachute was drifting away downwind. Now, where was that line attached to the raft?

He fumbled for it and finally realized it was wrapped around his legs or something. He began pulling toward the raft with his arms and finally grabbed the line. In seconds he had the raft in front of him.

All he had to do was get in.

The first time he slipped off the raft and went under on his back. Kicking and gasping, he managed to get upright and swing the raft so it was in front of him again.

This time he tried to force the raft under him. And almost made it before it squirted out and his head went under again.

The swells weren’t helping. Just when he had the raft figured out, a swell broke over him and he swallowed saltwater.

Finally, after three or four tries, he got into the raft. He gingerly rolled so that he was on his back and lay there exhausted and gasping.

A minute or two passed before he realized he was still wearing his helmet. He removed it and looked for a lanyard to tie it to. He might need it again and everything not tied to him was going to be lost overboard sooner or later. He used a piece of parachute shroud line that he had tucked into his survival vest months ago.

Only then did he remember Flap and start sweeping the horizon for him.

The radio! He got out his survival radio, checked it, then turned it on. “Flap, this is Jake.”

No answer.

Jake lay in his bobbing, corkscrewing raft looking at clouds and thinking about pirates and cursing himself. In a rather extraordinary display of sheer stupidity he had managed to get himself and Flap Le Beau shot out of the sky by a bunch of pirates. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. After the war was over! Not just any Tom, Dick or Harry can put an almost-new, squawk-free A-6E into the goddamn drink! Is that talent or what? The guys at the O Clubs were going to be shaking their heads over this one for a long long time.

Colonel Haldane was going to shit nails when he heard the happy news.

He looked at his watch. The damn thing was full of water. It had stopped. Perfect!

And his ass was six inches deep in water. Occasionally more water slopped in, but since the doughnut hole in which he sat was already full, the overflow merely drained out. Useless to try to bail it.

Luckily the water wasn’t too cold. Sort of lukewarm. The tropics. And to think real people pay real money to swim in water like this.

He tried the radio again. This time he got an answer. “Yo, Jake. You in your raft?”

“Yep. And you?”

“Nope. It’s like trying to fuck a greased pig.”

“You hurt?”

“No. You?”

“No.”

“Well, nice talking to you. Now I gotta get into this sonuva-bitching raft.”

“Pull the damn thing under you. Don’t try to climb into it. Pull it under you.”

“Call you back after a while.”

A cigarette. He could sure use a cigarette. He made sure the radio was firmly tied to his survival vest, then laid it in his lap. The cigarettes and lighter were in his left sleeve pocket. He got them out. The cigarettes were sodden. The lighter still worked though, after he blew repeatedly on the flint wheel and dried it off somewhat. It was one of those butane jobs. He extracted a wet cigarette, put it to his lips and lit the lighter. The cigarette refused to burn.

He put the cigarette back into the pack and stowed the pack away. If he ever managed to get ashore he could dry these things out and smoke them.

Wait! He had an unopened pack in his survival vest. Still wrapped in cellophane, an unopened pack would be watertight.

He wanted a cigarette now more than anything else he could think of. He got the left chest pocket of the vest open and felt around inside, trying not to let the rest of the contents spill.

He found it. Thirty seconds later he had a cigarette lit and was exhaling smoke. Aaah!

Bobbing up and down, puffing away, he decided he was thirsty. He had two plastic baby bottles full of water in his survival vest. He got one out and opened it, intending to drink only a little. He drained it in two long gulps.

He almost tossed the empty away, but thought better of it and slipped it back into the vest pocket.

Something on top of a swell to his left caught his eye, then it was gone. He waited. Flap, sitting in his raft, visible for a second or two before the out-of-sync swells lowered Jake or Flap.

He checked the radio. He had turned it off. He turned it on again and immediately it squawked to life. “Jake, Flap.”

“Hey, I saw you.”

“I’ve seen you twice. How far apart do you think we are?”

“A hundred yards?”

“At least. We’ve got to do some thinking, Jake. We’re going to be out here all night. The ship won’t be close enough to launch a chopper until dawn.”

Jake looked longingly at the island, the one he and Flap had been trying to reach when they ejected. He saw flashes of green occasionally, but it was miles away. And the wind was blowing at a ninety-degree angle to it.

“Let’s try to paddle toward each other. If we could get together, tie our rafts together, we’d have a better chance.”

A better chance. The words sprang to his lips without conscious thought, and now that he had said them he considered their import. A night at sea in one of these pissy little rafts was risky at best. The sea could get a lot rougher, a raft could spring a leak, the pirates might come looking, sharks…

Sharks!

A wave of pure terror washed over him.

“Okay,” Flap said. “You paddle my way and I’ll paddle toward you. I don’t think we can make it before dark but we can try. I’m going to turn my radio off now to save the battery.”

Jake inspected himself to see if he was injured, if he was bleeding. Adrenaline was like a local anesthetic; he had been far too pumped to feel small cuts and abrasions. If he were bleeding…well, sharks can smell blood in the water for miles and miles.

He felt his face and neck. Tender place on his neck. He held out his gloved right hand and stared at it: red stain. Blood!

For the love of God!

Must be a shroud burn or Plexiglas cut.

He got up on his knees in the raft. This was an inherently unstable position and he took great pains to ensure he didn’t capsize. Crouching as low as he could, he began paddling with his hands, making great sweeping motions. Then he realized he didn’t know where Flap was, so he forced himself to stop and look. There, just a glimpse, but enough. He turned the raft about sixty degrees and resumed paddling.

It was hard work. Every thread Jake wore was of course soaked, so even though the air was warm and humid, he stayed cool. Stroke for a while, pause to look for Flap, stroke some more, the cycle went on and on.

Finally he became aware that the sun was down and the light was fading. He got out his survival light, triggered the flash, and stuck it onto the Velcro that was glued to a spot on the right rear of his helmet. Then he put the helmet on. Three minutes later he saw that Flap had done the same thing. They were, at this point, maybe fifty yards apart.

Jake paused for a moment to rest.

What a mess! And if he had had a lick of sense, used an ounce of caution, they wouldn’t be floating around out here in the middle of the ocean, at the ends of the earth.

He cussed a while, then went back to work.

It was completely dark when they got the rafts together. Lengths of parachute shroud from their survival vests were quickly tied so the two rafts lay side by side. They arranged themselves so that Jake’s feet were adjacent to Flap’s head, and vice versa.

The two men lay inert in the rafts for minutes, resting. Then Flap said, “This is a fine mess you got us into, Grafton. A very fine how-do-you-do.” I m sorry.

Flap was silent for several seconds. “You really think this is your fault? I’m sorry I said that. It ain’t. It’s the fault of that asshole son of a bitch over there that smacked us with that twenty mike-mike. Talk about a cheap shot! I’d like to cut his nuts off and make him eat ’em.”

“Think Black Eagle heard any of our transmissions?’

“I don’t know.”

“Boy, I hope so. I’d hate to think that that chicken-shit pirate cocksucker might get a free shot at somebody else tomorrow.”

“Turn off that flashing light on your helmet. Makes my eyes hurt.”

Jake did so. He took off the helmet. Then he got out his second baby bottle of drinking water and took a big slug. He held it out for Flap. “Here.” Flap had to feel for it. The darkness was total. There were some stars visible, but the moon wouldn’t be up for some hours yet.

“Shit. This is water.”

“What did you expect? Jack Daniel’s?”

Flap drained the bottle and handed it back. Jake carefully screwed the top back on and stowed it.

“Want to try mine?”

Jake felt in the darkness. Another baby bottle. He sipped it. Brandy. The liquor burned all the way down. He passed it back. “Thanks.”

“So what’s for supper?”

“I got a candy bar in my vest someplace,” Jake told the Marine. “Stuck it in here while we were in the Philippines, so it’s only three months old.”

“I’ll wait. I got one from Singapore. Maybe for breakfast, huh?”

“Yeah. You hurt any?”

“Scratched up in a couple places. Nothing bad.”

“I did a little bleeding from a cut on my neck. Maybe the sharks will come.”

Flap had nothing more to say, so Jake sat thinking about sharks. He hated the whole idea. An unseen terror that stalked and ate you — it was something from a horror movie, some poorly animated, low-budget monstrosity designed to make kids scream at the Saturday afternoon matinee.

But it was real.

Real sharks lived in these waters and they would come — of that he was absolutely certain.

Lying there in the darkness in this rubberized canvas raft with your butt in the water, shivering because the water kept wicking up your flight suit and evaporating, bobbing up and down, up and down, endlessly, up and down and up and down, your mind fixated upon sharks, on the giant predators with row upon row of huge, sharp teeth that even now were following the blood trail, coming closer, coming up from deep deep down toward this flimsy little raft that their teeth could slash through as if it were tissue paper, coming to rip and tear your flesh and eat you!

At some point he realized that he had his Colt automatic in his hand. He hadn’t thumbed off the safety, thank God, but it was there in his hand and he couldn’t remember pulling it from its shoulder holster.

He hefted it.

He had always liked the bulk of it, the thirty-nine ounces of smooth blued steel and oiled wood that promised deadly power if he ever needed it. Tiger Cole had given it to him. It held eight big .45 caliber slugs, any one of which would kill anything from a mouse to a moose. If he shot a shark with this thing, it was going to die quick.

The problem was that the sharks were under water and bullets don’t go very far when fired into water. Certainly not these big slow lead slugs. It would be better if he had his .357, but life wasn’t like that. If the shark would only stick his head out of the water and hold still…

His survival knife! It wasn’t all that sharp and, to tell the truth, wasn’t really much of a knife, but he could stick a shark with it. And probably get his hand ripped off.

He transferred the automatic to his left hand and got the knife from his survival vest.

The first thing the sharks would do was bump the raft. He would feel that, he hoped. They would bump it and rub it with their sandpaper hide and sniff the blood and finally use their teeth. If they punctured the raft he would go into the water. Then he was doomed. Sooner or later they would get a leg or foot and even if he killed the bastard that did it, the blood would draw more sharks that would finish the job, if he hadn’t already bled to death.

He was living a nightmare. If only he could wake up.

He sat in the darkness listening to the slop of the water and waiting for the bump and shivering from the cold. Every sense was alert, straining.

How long he sat like that, half-frozen with fear, listening, he didn’t know, but eventually the moon rose and a sliver of light came through a gap in the clouds. Flap saw him then.

“Hey, what’s the knife and gun for?”

He was so hoarse that he had trouble with the word and had to clear his throat before he got it out. “Sharks.”

“You stick that knife into your raft and you’ll be swimming.”

Jake just sat shivering.

“Throw out some shark repellent. You got some in your vest, don’t ya?”

“It don’t work. Ain’t worth shit.”

“Won’t hurt. Throw it out.”

Now he had the problem of what to do with the gun and knife. “Hold the gun, will ya?”

“Holster it. The knife too. Believe me, there’ll be plenty of time if you need ’em.”

When he had tossed the shark repellent packets into the water, Jake felt better. It was crazy. The repellent — allegedly a mixture of noxious chemicals and ground-up shark gonads— was worthless: someone had done a study and said it had no noticeable effect on sharks and was a waste of government money to acquire. Even though Jake knew all that, throwing the repellent into the water still gave him a sense that he was doing something, so he felt better. Less terrorized and more able to cope.

The moonlight helped too. At least if he got a glimpse he could shoot or stab.

“Sorry I got you into this,” he told Flap.

“If this moonlight cruise causes me to miss Australia, Grafton, I’m going to kick your ass up between your shoulder blades. I’ve been sitting here thinking about Australia and those chocolate aborigine women who will think I’m Sidney fucking Poitier, and believe you me, this buck nigger is really really ready.”

“Those aborigine men may show you how to use a boomerang for a suppository if you mess with their women.”

Flap dismissed that possibility with an airy wave. He was shivering too, Jake noticed.

“Actually I ought to charge you a travel agent’s fee,” Jake told the BN. “You’ll cadge free drinks on this tale for years. A silver moon, a tropical lagoon—”

“And you. I wouldn’t pay ten cents Hong Kong money to go on a moonlight cruise with you. You got all the romance of a…”

They bantered back and forth for a while, then talked seriously about their situation. The U.S. Navy would search until Jake and Flap were rescued or the heavies were convinced they were dead, no matter how long it took. Right this very moment the ships of the task group were making their best speed eastward, eating up the sea miles, their screws thrashing the black water into long foamy ribbons that stretched back under that pale slice of moon to the horizon. At dawn the carrier would pause in her eastward charge only long enough to veer into the wind and launch her planes.

Just in case someone was up there right now, Flap got out his radio and made a few calls. There was no answer, which didn’t upset them.

In the morning. The carrier’s planes would come in the morning. And if that pirate was anywhere around when the sun came up, he was going to Davy Jones’ locker faster than the Arizona went to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

Eventually the conversation petered out and exhaustion caught up with them. Both men dozed as their tiny rafts rocked in the long swells.

Jake woke up to vomit. The equilibrium of the raft was too precarious to stick his head over the side, so he heaved down his chest. He slopped some sea water over himself to ash the worst of it away.

Seasick. Fuck it all to hell!

He heaved until his stomach was empty, then retched helplessly as his stomach convulsed.

Flap was philosophical. He wasn’t sick. “These things happen in the best of families, even to swab jockeys. It won’t kill you. You’re tough.”

“Shut up.”

“Wait until I tell the guys in the ready room about this. Sailor Grafton, puking his guts like a kid on the Staten Island ferry.”

“Could you please—”

“It’ll get worse. You’ll see. You’ll think you’re gonna die. You’re really in for it now.”

The convulsions had subsided somewhat when Jake felt the first nudge, just an irregularity in the motion of the raft. He almost missed it.

His seasickness was forgotten. He was reaching for the automatic when Flap said, “Uh-oh. I think a shark bumped me.”

Now he scanned the water. His eyes were well adjusted to the moonlight. He glimpsed a fin break water, for maybe two seconds. Then it was gone.

“Shark,” he told Flap. “I saw one!”

“See what you caused! All that moaning about sharks and you attracted the sons of bitches.”

Another bump, more aggressive this time. Jake thought he could feel the grinding from the rough hide rubbing against the fabric of the raft. They didn’t have to bite it — if they rubbed it enough they would rub a hole through it.

Fear coursed through him, fear as cold as ice water in his veins. Automatically he had drawn his feet into the raft and tucked his elbows in, which drove his butt deeper into the water. And there was nothing between his butt and those teeth but a very thin layer of rubberized canvas.

He tried to see downward, into the depths where the predators were. Not enough light. It was like looking into a pot of ink.

“See anything?”

“If I scream,” Flap said, “you’ll know they got me.”

“You asshole! You stupid perverted Marine asshole!”

“They’re just curious.”

Another nudge. Jake thought he saw something pass out to his right that was darker than the surrounding blackness, but he wasn’t sure.

“You hope,” Jake muttered. “Maybe they’re hungry too.”

A fin broke water fifty feet or so away, slightly to the right of the way Jake was facing. He thumbed off the pistol’s safety, leveled it and couldn’t see the sights clearly! He squeezed off the shot anyway. The muzzle flash temporarily blinded him.

The report was strangely flat. There was nothing to echo or concentrate the noise. The recoil of the weapon in his hand felt reassuring though.

He blinked his eyes clear and looked at Flap. He had some kind of knife in his right hand and was watching the water intently. It wasn’t a government-issue survival knife.

“What kind of knife is that?”

“Throwing knife. For stabbing.”

“What if you want to cut something?”

“Got another knife for that.”

“What are you, a walking cutlery shop?”

“Just look for sharks, will ya? Try not to shoot me or either of the rafts. If they get you I may need your boat.”

“Maybe they like dark meat. Can I have your stereo?”

“My roommate has first dibs.”

They sat staring intently at the water near them. Occasionally a shark nudged them, but the level of aggression didn’t seem to increase.

Maybe they would get out of this with whole hides. Then again…

A fin broke water just ten feet to Jake’s immediate right. He swung the pistol and squeezed the trigger in almost the same motion. The water seemed to explode.

Dimly he saw a tail slashing furiously and spray cascaded over them. The rafts rocked dangerously.

In seconds it was over. The shark sounded.

“Think that was the only one?” Flap asked, his voice betraying his tension for the first time.

“We’ll see.”

For some reason the terror that had gripped Jake earlier was gone. He still had enough adrenaline coursing through his veins to fuel a marathon and his heart was thudding like a drum, but for the first time he felt ready to face whatever came.

Nothing came.

If there were any more sharks out there, they stayed away from the raft. After a while Flap tried his radio again. This time he got an answer. One of the E-2 Hawkeyes from Columbia was up there somewhere far above, the crew warm, dry and comfortable.

Flap told them of the pirates, of being shot down, of flying south trying to keep the A-6 airborne on the backup hydraulic system and finally ejecting into the sea.

“We’re all right. Both of us are in our rafts, uninjured, and the rafts are lashed together.”

Jake had his radio out by this time and heard a calm voice say, “We’ll get planes off at dawn to look for you. You guys check in after sunrise about every fifteen minutes, okay?”

“Roger that. Keep the coffee hot.”

Jake Grafton spoke up. “Black Eagle, tell the Ops guys that they need to arm the planes. If anybody shoots at them, they need to defend themselves vigorously.”

“I’ll pass that along. Wait one while I talk to the ship on the other radio.”

They sat in the darkness with their radios in their hands. Finally the radio came back to life. “Five Zero Eight Alpha, just how sure are you that you were actually shot at? Is there any way the hydraulic failure could have been a coincidence?”

The question infuriated Grafton. “I’ve been shot at before,” he roared into the radio. “I’ve been shot at and missed and shot at and hit. You tell those stupid bastards on the ship that we were shot down.”

“Roger. You guys hang tough. Talk to you again fifteen minutes after sunrise.”

His anger kept Jake warm for about five minutes. Then he was just cold and tired. With every stitch they wore sopping wet, Jake and Flap huddled in their rafts and shivered. After a time their thirst got the better of them and Flap broke out his two baby bottles full of water. He passed one to Jake, who drank it quickly, afraid he might spill it.

The moon rose higher and gave more light, when it wasn’t obscured by clouds.

Eventually, despite the conditions, exhaustion claimed them and they dozed. Jake’s mind wandered feverishly. Faces from the past talked to him — Callie, his parents, Tiger Cole, Morgan McPherson — yet he couldn’t understand what they were saying. Just when he thought he was getting the message, the faces faded and he was half-asleep in a bobbing raft, wet and cold and very miserable.

Occasionally they talked. Once Jake asked Flap, “If that attack last month against the Russians had been real, do you think we would have made it?”

“I dunno.”

“Think we would have hit the cruiser?”

“Maybe.”

“They said it was eighty percent probable.”

“I say maybe. I don’t do numbers.”

“I think we would be dead.”

“Maybe,” Flap said.

Time passed too slowly, every minute seemed like an hour. The temptation to call Black Eagle to see if he was still up there was very strong and hard to resist. Jake got his radio out twice. Each time he stowed it without turning it on. He might need all the juice in those batteries tomorrow. Wasting battery power now would be stupid.

The worsening sea state brought them fully and completely awake. The swells were bigger and the wind was stronger.

At the top of each swell the rafts pitched dangerously, forcing each man to hang on tightly to keep from being thrown out. They made sure they still had a lanyard attached to each raft.

They had been hanging on to their seats in their frail craft for an eternity when Flap said, “You shouldn’t have called the heavies stupid bastards.”

“I know.”

“Someone will ream you out when we get back.”

“Gives me something to look forward to.”

Gradually they became aware that the sky was lightening up. Dawn. It was coming.

Incredibly, the wind strengthened and began to rip spindrift from the swells. Jake reeled in his helmet — it had fallen overboard at some point during the night — dumped out the water and put it on. He ran the clear visor down to keep the salt spray out of his eyes.

It worked. Incredibly, his head was also warmer. He should have been wearing this thing all night!

“Put on your helmet,” he shouted at Flap, who had his tucked under his thighs.

The clouds were just beginning to show pink when they saw the ship. It was almost bows on and coming this way. A little ship, one stack, coming with a bone in its teeth.

Jake pointed.

“Of all the fucking luck!” Flap Le Beau swore.

It was the pirate ship.