Peacemaker

by Gordon Kent

  Pigoreau was there with a French jeep. The driver and a hawk-faced officer sat in the front. “You sober?” Pigoreau said.

  “I don’t know. Probably not a hundred percent. What’s up?”

  Pigoreau handed him a thermos. It was full of French coffee, no cup. He drank straight from the thick-lipped mouth. “People survive drinking this stuff, do they?”

  “Zulu’s out.”

  Dukas looked up at him over the thermos. Out?

  “He’s in the air. Civilian flight, Air Libya, out of Tunis headed for Belgrade. Come on.”

  “Where to? Belgrade?”

  “Michael—! Get in the fucking car.” As soon as Dukas was in, the jeep began to move.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to meet Zulu.”

  Over western Africa.

  Four hours after takeoff, Alan was down to the reserve tank. The auto-pilot had saved his energy; before the fuel situation became critical, he had twice snatched an hour of sleep and awakened to the three different alarms he had set; watch, GPS, auto-pilot. Harry woke with him the first time, drank some water and returned to sleep. Djalik did not wake.

  Djalik’s hand stank. Alan knew gangrene only as a disease that worried characters in C. S. Forester books, but he knew that it reached a point where it began to poison the blood and killed. He wondered if they should have tried to take the hand off. Probably not: he knew more about flying this aircraft than about surgery. O’Neill was no better. So Djalik had to get to a hospital. He planned to fly near Bata and Libreville, but he wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure of them at all—AIDS, Ebola, a continent of low tech and poverty, where needles got re-used—Any country he landed in now would demand visas and country clearances. And explanations—they had too many weapons in the plane, and too much blood on them. Maybe they could ditch the plane, radio the boat, get them to fix it with the local embassy—

  He had landed his Cessna on a virtual Nimitz dozens of times in the Microsoft universe—thus, in a sense, knew it could be done. But that was probably like saying that a child who had killed a bad guy in a fantasy knew it could be done. Knowing it could be done wasn’t doing it, as he’d learn when he hit the ramp. Or the water.

  The terrible truth was that he wanted to be back on the ship. He wanted to take O’Neill and Djalik home.

  But the more immediate concern was that he didn’t have the gas to make it to the Rangoon, much less the Jackson. He’d have to go down for fuel.

  He woke Harry and set him to trying to locate a truck corridor in southern Cameroon on their big-scale map. Then he dialed a minute course change into the auto-pilot.

  In one hour, he was going to try to land. On a road.

  He practiced the lineup twice at low altitude. The third pass, he could see that he had drawn a crowd out of the pale brush that grew on both sides of the black-topped road, which ran like a straight black ribbon north toward Yaounde. Good: he wanted the attention of the people who lived along the truck route.

  A small boy crouched at the edge of the brush, one hand shading his eyes, the other hand pulling his long red kilt up to make a better seat on the cool pavement. He had seen a plane before, but never one that flew low over his own house. Over and over! This was better than the trucks that roared down the highway. He wanted to drive a truck one day.

  Idly, he traced the outline of the plane in the fine grit on the surface of the road. The boy must have been a keen observer, because he traced a reasonable likeness of the plane with the flaps fully deployed. The plane had turned over the road four times now. The boy thought that the plane was going to land but did not say so, for fear that the older people around him would use ridicule. No plane had ever landed there.

  Where the truckers often made their engines roar when they passed, especially when they passed a woman, this one seemed to make his engine quieter as he came down. The throaty roar of the first passes was now a muted rumble. The plane dropped like a stone. Then it dropped more slowly. Then it appeared to glide, and glide, and passed just a few thrilling feet over the boy. Down the road, close to Ab’jans path, the wheels touched, and the plane disappeared in a cloud of swirling grit. Many of the people ran back into the bush. The boy ran after the plane.

  Alan pointed the nose back south by wheeling the plane in a trucker’s turnaround. The stiff wind coming from the south was refreshing, but not nearly as refreshing as landing the plane and not meeting a truck head-on.

  All over sub-Saharan Africa, the trucks on the bad old roads keep civilization together. The truckers are the captains of great ships that ply the spaces between towns. There are no gas stations. He and O’Neill knew that on any truck route, petrol was purchased out of the tall brush beside the road, and no tax was paid to the government. Where does the gas come from? How much is stored beside the road? What impurities does it have?

  Alan couldn’t answer any of those questions, but the plane was full of gas now and the engine ran. One boy had come to the plane first and run off and brought back the first gas. Then a crowd formed, seemingly from nowhere. Eventually there were a few women.

  And then he had heard Harry talking to them in French. He was squatted by the road with the men and boys. It was more of what he had thought about in his confinement, more of what he had said to Djalik on the trail: about family and democracy and decent education for children. He had nothing to give them, he said, but words, because everything he owned had been taken. So he gave them what he had learned. The old men nodded. Boys looked on with widened eyes: a black man who said he was an American had dropped out of the sky to talk to them.

  Alan paid for the fuel with American dollars and got into the plane and called for Harry. Twice. Waiting. At last, Harry broke loose and took his seat, and, after a few final words, closed the hatch. Alan pointed the aircraft into the wind and pushed the throttle and they roared down the black ribbon, an easy takeoff that made him think it was all going to work.

  Beside him, Harry was twisted to look out and down. “That’s what I thought it would be like,” he said. In Africa, he meant. When Alan looked aside at him, Harry had his head down and was crying.

  Alan began trying the handheld radio as soon as they crossed the coast. There had been no decision to by-pass the cities; the decision had been made back in Zaire, when he had first seen the plane. They were going to the Rangoon.

  Alan’s fatigue was a constant now. Djalik seemed to be going into a different phase, starting to twitch and mumble. Harry dabbled water on him and injected more antibiotics.

  “How long?” he said.

  “Hour. About.”

  He raised the Rangoon just after noon, local time. He told them what he intended. A senior officer came on, was stiff but resigned, maybe apologetic. It was Rangoon’s choppers that would have lifted them out.

  “You a qualified pilot, Bear Cub?”

  “Negative.”

  Silence. “We’ll talk you in. Good luck. Over.”

  Even while they talked, Rangoon cleared her deck. Every plane and chopper that could be put in the hangar deck was hustled to the elevator. The two remaining choppers and one Harrier were readied for takeoff, the VSTOL jet to fly wing on him, the helos to be there if he went into the water. The aviators were canvassed for an LSO who knew light aircraft, but the Harrier skipper said it was his responsibility and he’d do it. Even though he sure didn’t want to.

  On the flag deck of the Jackson, Admiral Pilchard got the word from a breathless flag lieutenant who had run all the way from comm. He stared at the younger man; he had been listening to an evaluation of their sub contacts and had to shift gears.

  “Where is he now?”

  “Cleared the coast twenty minutes ago, sir.”

  “You mean—somebody extracted them, after all?”

  “Apparently Craik got himself out, sir. That’s what the message says—‘LCDR Craik at controls.’”

  “Of what?”

  The lieutenant shook his head. “Not specified, sir
. ‘Light aircraft,’ that’s all.”

  The admiral looked at the startled faces around him. He put a hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder. “You get the ship’s chaplains together right now, you tell them this is from me personally, and you have them go on ship’s PA with a prayer. You tell them I want this whole ship praying for somebody who needs all the help he can get.”

  “How far will he go to get his buddy, if he has to?”

  “Pretty far. Real far.”

  The Harrier appeared off their wing twenty minutes later. Alan felt his heart leap at the sight. Almost home. Almost home.

  Harry saw the little attack carrier first. He was craned up in his seat, trying to look over the canopy. It looked unnatural with its deck completely clear.

  “They all look small, coming in,” Alan said to comfort him.

  “Al, don’t shit me—how long is that flight deck, really?”

  “Eight hundred feet.”

  “Can you land this thing in eight hundred feet?”

  “Well—See, normal run-out is about thirteen hundred, but that’s on a field. The theory here is that the carrier will be moving, so we subtract their speed from ours, and when we touch down we’ll be going only twenty-five knots or so, relative. Get it?” He glanced aside. Harry was staring at the carrier. “We shouldn’t need more than four or five hundred feet,” Alan said.

  “They got a net, like on the Jefferson?”

  “No. Goddamit, Harry, in World War II they landed planes a hell of a lot bigger than this one on CVs just like that!”

  “They had hooks.”

  “Well, yeah, they had tail-hooks. But that ship down there doesn’t have a wire, even if we had a hook—Harriers and helos don’t need wires. Harry—the principle is right! They’ll get their speed up; I’ll throttle down; it should be like landing at twenty-five knots!”

  The carrier was closer now, and he could strain a little and see it. At least the flight deck was wide. The island was well over. He’d have some flex in one direction, anyway.

  He asked the Harrier to lead him through the break. He didn’t want to have to think about distances and times; he wanted to concentrate on his lineup and his angle of attack.

  There would be only the one attempt to land. He would have to get the wheels down and the brakes on in the first hundred feet of the deck if he was going to make it, even with the CV steaming. If he miscalculated and touched the wheels too far down the deck, the brakes wouldn’t stop him in time to keep from rolling right off the bow. He had seen it in World War II films. He didn’t mention those to Harry. And there would be no recovery if he bitched it: he wouldn’t have the option available to Rafe of going to full power when he hit the deck, and either catching the wire or flying off for another try. Not enough deck, not enough power.

  Into the break. The LSO had offered a straight-in, but that’s not how he had done it in the simulator and he didn’t want to do anything differently. The LSO had sounded a little strange when he had said, “I’m used to taking the break, sir,” but he’d okayed it.

  He followed the little jet around and lost him. The Harrier was way off ahead, far too fast to throttle down to his speed, and Alan called him off. “Thanks, Harrier One. Nice job.” He risked hubris. “See you on deck.”

  The Rangoon was moving at twenty-nine knots. The little aircraft’s stall speed with full flaps was somewhere around fifty-five knots, meaning that he could, if he did it right, have only twenty-six knots relative airspeed when he hit the deck, just as he’d told Harry.

  Alan put his flaps to full and began his turn for lineup.

  He didn’t think about Harry, and he didn’t think about Djalik. He didn’t think about Rose, or Mikey, or even his father, who must have done this a thousand times in ten different aircraft. He thought about the landing.

  He overshot the lineup and had to chase it.

  “Good for lineup,” said the LSO’s voice from the radio, now in Harry’s lap. The voice was trying to sound soothing.

  He remembered to cut back on the throttle, which gave him more time and cost altitude. He pulled the throttle all the way to idle and let the plane sink.

  The LSO watched the little plane wobble and wobble, chasing the flight deck, and he knew that this guy was new to the game. The problem was, the LSO was a Harrier pilot and had not landed the “long way” on a carrier since Pensacola and T-84s. They were both a little out of their depths here.

  He called the lineup to steady the guy down.

  He looked all right. No, he didn’t look all right. Jesus, this is NOT the way you land on a Tarawa-class ship. Jesus, he’s descending too fast. No, maybe not. Hard to tell. Not really qualified as an LSO for Cessnas.

  “Power!”

  Alan thought that it looked great, but he rammed the throttle forward. His angle of attack almost instantly became level flight, with a sag. He inched the throttle back out.

  Nobody was on the flight deck except the Harrier skipper and the crash and fire crews; the ship itself was at general quarters and collision stations. The ad-hoc LSO was sweating buckets.

  Fuck. Now the guy was too high. Now he’d caught it. Not bad, actually. No! Back to that steep descent. It was going to be close. He could see that the guy wanted the whole run of the deck to brake. He didn’t seem to realize that the carrier was moving almost as fast as he was. It was close. Too close.

  “Power!”

  Alan gave the plane throttle again. The deck filled his vision and the island seemed to be rushing at him. What had seemed to be a long glide to certainty had become a scramble. Harry had the radio up for him. He couldn’t see the deck edge, but it was close, close and he pulled up the nose too fast, to get a few more feet of glide, and the plane stalled. He felt it go. And the nose fell away underneath him.

  The LSO saw the stall and thought it planned. He completely rewrote his view of this guy. The stall killed his airspeed and put him right on the deck. It was a beautiful, gutsy maneuver.

  All three wheels hit the deck, and the plane jerked once as it bounced and went all of twenty feet before Alan recovered enough to set the brakes. The plane stopped. Ahead of them, the flight deck of the Rangoon stretched like two football fields.

  He had taken a hundred and thirteen feet.

  Alan sat and shook. Medics were running for the plane. Harry turned and smiled, sweat beading his dark, yellow-splotched, battered face. A warm hand curled around the back of Alan’s neck.

  When the medics opened the door, the two men were hugging each other and laughing like hyenas.

  He hadn’t figured that they would insist on putting him on a stretcher like the others, but he was wobbly-legged when he climbed out of the little airplane, and they made him lie down. The small carrier felt strange to him, the flight-deck proportions wrong, the sense of movement unstable after so long on land. Hands were holding him up and he was trying to fend them off, and then he was flat and grateful for it, and he craned his head and saw a stretcher with Harry on it moving into the hatch. He shouted. Harry turned his head so his good eye could look at him; Alan sat up on his stretcher, and the medics started to push him down.

  “Harry!” he shouted. “Harry—!”

  O’Neill waved. His words floated down the flight-deck wind: “Goin’ to glory, man!” The hatch closed behind him.

  “Where’s Djalik? My other man—we brought in two guys—”

  “He’s already headed for sick bay, sir. Maybe you’ll see him down there. Just lie back, okay? Everything’s gonna be just fine. Lie back—that’s m’man—”

  And he was asleep. He woke when they put him on a gurney in the ship’s hospital, and after he had argued long enough with a doctor, they wheeled him to the OR where they were already working on Djalik. A nurse went in, because he insisted, and she came out looking bland and untroubled, the way nurses make themselves look so they won’t get too close to feeling, and she said brightly, “He’s in surgery right now. They didn’t lose a sec! He’s going to be great.”<
br />
  “What are they doing?”

  “They’re operating, Commander. He’ll be—”

  “What are they doing?”

  “They’re removing part of his hand.”

  Alan sank back. “And O’Neill?” he said after a moment.

  “I don’t know. I think he’s being prepped.” She sounded slightly pissed-off now. Alan started to worry about that, about O’Neill and Djalik, and then he was asleep again.

  He slept for two hours, he found later, and when he woke, O’Neill’s eye had been “stabilized” and Djalik’s left hand had been mostly amputated. Both men, he was told, were going to be flown to Germany for further treatment.

  “You came through in pretty good shape, on the other hand,” a preppy-looking doctor said. “Exhaustion, lot of insect bites, can’t see much else. Take your malaria prophylaxis? You oughta be okay, then. We’ll do a workup, check your stool, blood, the works. Had the crud? I put that stuff on your hands. Don’t use them for a couple of days.”

  “I have to get to the Andrew Jackson.” He was thinking about Rose.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do.” He got off the gurney, almost fell, and fended off the doctor with a straightened right arm. “They got doctors on the Jackson, too. Come on, Doctor, I’m basically okay, and you know it. Show me where to get a shower, and I want to send a message to my admiral that I’m here.”

  The young doctor grinned. He held out a message paper. “This went out to the battle group two hours ago.”

  Alan read it. It was from Admiral Pilchard, to all hands: LCDR Alan Craik, IS1 David Djalik, and civilian Harold French O’Neill landed on USS Rangoon seventeen minutes ago. Prayers are answered.

  The French zone of Bosnia.

  The jeep had come down into a bowl among hills that swelled farther away into mountains that looked only like gray shadows in the rain. A potholed dirt road had led down into the bowl, where a French soldier in a rain cape had directed them down a muddy track with quick, seemingly angry gestures. Down there, Dukas had already seen, was an airfield.