Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 6 - Intruders

by Intruders (lit)

Maybe in my next incarnation.

  The Intercontinental was a huge, modern hotel built on a slight hill. The lobby was a cavern seven or eight stories high. Marble floors accented with giant potted plants, a raised bar with easy chairs in the middle, all the accents a plush burgundy, polyester fabric glued to the walls-- --yuck!

  Jake settled into one of the bar's overstuffed polyester chairs and tilted his head back. You could almost get dizzy looking up at the balconies, which were stacked closer and closer together until they met at the ceiling. Tropical plants hung from planters along each balcony, so the view upward was green. Dark green, because the fighting up there was very poor"...Grotesque, isn't it?" He dropped his gaze from the green canopy above to the young woman walking toward him. He stood and grinned.

  "Yep." "The interior designer was obviously demented." Neu Douglas settled into the chair opposite.

  A waiter appeared and hovered.

  "Something to drink?" Jake asked her politely.

  ,"A glass of white wine, please." "Scotch on the rocks." The waiter broke hover and disappeared behind a large potted leafy green thing T HE IN TRUD ER S "So how was your flight in?" "Bumpy. Storms over the South China Sea.

  How's your hand?" "You heard about that, huh?" "The other girls were all atwitter. Your black friend really impressed them." "Flap can move pretty fast when he wants to. He's handy to have around." "If the necessity arises to knock people senseless.

  Is he lurking nearby now, just in case?" Vaguely uneasy, Jake flashed a polite smile. "No, I think he came ashore earlier today hoping to cheat some opal merchants. And my hand's fine." He wiggled his fingers at her, pretending she cared.

  Their drinks came and they sat sipping them in silence, both man and woman trying to sense the mood of the other.

  After a bit Nell said, "He's some kind of trained killer, isn't he?" That comment was like glass shattering. Amazingly, Jake Grafton felt a tremendous sense of relief. It had been a nice fantasy, but this woman was not Callie.

  "I guess everyone in combat arms is," he said slowly, "if you want to look at it that way. I deal in high explosives myself. I fly attack planes, not airliners." He took the plastic stir stick from his drink and chewed at it. Why do they put these damn things in a drink that is nothing but whiskey and ice? He took it out of his mouth and broke it between his fingers as he examined her face.

  "I started the fight," he continued, now in a hurry to end it. "One of the soldiers referred to Captain Le Beau as a nigger. He happens to be my BN and a personal friend. He is also a fine human being. The fact that his skin is black is about as important as the fact that my eyes are gray. That word is an insult in America and here. The man who said it knew that." "The only black people in Australia are aborigines." "I guess you have to be an American to understand." "Perhaps." The waiter reappeared with his credit card and the in 247 voice. Jake added a tip, signed it and pocketed the card and his copy.

  Her face was too placid. Blank. Time to get this over with.

  "Would you like to go to dinner?" Nell Douglas looked this way and that, apparently searching for something to say.

  Finally she sat her wineglass on the table and leaned forward slightly. She looked him in the eye.

  "It was wonderful the other night, and I am sure you are a fine person, but let's leave it at that." He nodded and finished his drink.

  "We grew up on opposite sides of the world." She stood and held out her hand. "Thanks for the drink." "Sure." Jake stood and shook. She threaded her way through the potted jungle and made for the elevators.

  "Did you get laid?" the Real McCoy asked late that night in their stateroom aboard ship.

  "She said we grew up on opposite sides of the world." "You idiot. You're supposed to fuck 'em, not discuss philosophy." "Well, it probably turned out for the best," Jake said, thinking of Callie. He desperately wished she would write.

  She could write anything-if she would just put something in an envelope and stick a stamp on it.

  He decided to write her.

  He got a legal pad, climbed into the top bunk and adjusted the light just so. Then he began.

  He went through their relationship episode by episode, almost thought by thought, pouring out his heart. After eight pages he ground to a halt.

  Every word was true, but he wasn't going to send it.

  He wasn't going to take the chance that he cared more than she did.

  You aren't going to get very far with the fairer sex if you aren't willing to take some risks.

  I'm tired of taking risks. Someone else can take a few.

  Faint heart never wonIf she cared, she'd write. End of story.

  THE IN TRUD ERS The night before the ship weighed anchor Lieutenant Colonel Haldane asked Jake to come to his stateroom. According to the duty officer.

  Jake went.

  Flap was already there sitting in the only chair.

  Jake sat on the colonel's bed and Flap passed Will a sheet of paper.

  It was a letter from the commander at Changing. Fight in the pavilion. Jake scanned it quickly and passed it back to Flap, who handed it to Haldane, who tossed it on his desk.

  "The skipper of the ship got this. He wants me to investigate, take action, and draft a reply for his signature. What can you tell me?" Jake told the colonel about the incident, withholding nothing.

  "Any comments, Captain Le Beau?" "No, sir. I think Mr. Grafton covered it." Haldane made a face. "Okay. That's all. We're having a back-in-the-saddle NATOPS do in the ready room at zero seven-thirty. See you there." Both the junior officers left. Jake closed the door behind him.

  Twenty frames down the passageway he asked Flap, "Was that it? We aren't in hack or candidates for keelhauhng?" "Naw. Haldane will apologize profusely to our allies, tell them that he's ripped us a new one, and that's that. It was just a friendly little social fight. What more could there be?" Jake shrugged. "My hand's still sore." "Next time kick 'em. in the balls." AT DAWN ONE MORNING THE TASK GROUP WEIGHED ANCHOR and entered the Strait of Malacca. With Sumatra on the left and the Malay peninsula on the right, the ships steamed at 20 knots for the Indian Ocean, or the 10 as the sailors called it, pronouncing each letter.

  In the narrows the strait was a broad watery highway with land on each horizon. The channel was dotted with fishing boats and heavily traversed by tankers and freighters. As many as a half dozen of the large ocean-going ships were visible at any one time.

  As usual in narrow waterways, the carrier's flight deck and island superstructure were crowded with sightseeing sailors" Typically, Jake Grafton was among them, standing on the bow facing forward. With all of the great ship behind him the sensation was unique, almost as if one were a seabird soaring along at sixty feet above the water into the teeth of a 20-knot wind.

  This morning Jake watched the steady stream of civilian ships and marveled. He had flown enough surface surveillance missions over the open ocean to appreciate how empty the oceans of the earth truly were. Often he and Flap flew a two-hour flight and saw not a single ship, just endless vistas of empty sea and sky. Yet here the ships plowed the brown water like trucks thundering along an interstate highway.

  A hundred years ago these waters hosted sailing ships. As he stood on the bow watching the ships and boats this morning he thought about those sailing ships, for Jake Grafton had a streak of romance in him about a foot wide. Clipper ships bound for China for a load of tea left England and the eastern ports of the United States and sailed south to round the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa.

  The sailors would have gotten close enough to land for a glimpse of Africa only in good weather.

  Then they crossed the vast Indian Ocean and entered this strait, where they saw land for the first time since leaving England or America.

  Months at sea working the ship, making sail, reefing in storms, watching the officers shoot the sun at noon and the stars at night when the weather allowed, then to hit this strait after circumnavigating half the globe-it was a great thing
, a thing to be proud of, a thing to remember for the Test of their lives. Exotic China still lay ahead, but here the sailors probably saw junks for the first time, those flatbottomed the commerce of the Orient. Here two worlds touched.

  Jake looked at the freighters and tankers with new interest. Perhaps he should look into getting a mate's license, consider the merchant marine after the Navy. It was a thing to think on.

  Standing on the bow with the moist wind in his hair and the smell of the land filling his nostrils as the task group transited this narrow passage between two great oceans, he was struck by how large the earth really was, ho'w diverse the human life, how many truths there must be. The U.s. Navy was a tiny part of it, surely, but only a tiny part. He had been confined long enough. He needed to reach out and embrace the whole.

  The Indian Ocean lay ahead, beyond that watery horizon.

  The flying there would be blue water ops, without the safety net of a divert field ashore. The ship would be hundreds of miles from land, so when the planes burned enough fuel to get down to landing weight there would be no dry spot on earth they could reach with the fuel remaining in their tanks.

  They had to get aboard. Airborne tankers could provide fuel for another handful of attempts, but their presence would not change the scenario-every pilot would have to successfully trap or eject into the ocean.

  Carrier aviation never gets easier. The challenge is to develop and maintain skills that are just good enough. In this war without bullets the stakes were human lives. Each pilot would have only his skill and knowledge to keep him alive in the struggle against the weather, chance, the vagaries of fate. Some would lose. Jake Grafton knew that as well as he knew his name. He might be one of them.

  Thinking about that possibility as he stood here on the bow, he took a deep breath of the moist sea air and savored it.

  A man never knows.

  Well, he would do his best. That was all he could do. God had the dice, He would make the casts.

  Jake was standing the squadron duty officer watch in the ready room one night when first Lieutenant Doug Harrison came in from a flight. He gave Jake his flight time figure and handed him the batteries from his emergency radiothe batteries were recharged in a unit above the duty officer's desk-then dropped into the skipper's empty chair as Jake annotated the flight schedule. Only then did Grafton turn and take a good look at the first-cruise pilot. His face was pasty and covered with a sheen of perspiration.

  "Tough flight, huh?" Harrison dropped his eyes and massaged his forehead with a hand. "No... Got a cigarette?" "Sure." Jake passed him one, then held out a light.

  After Harrison had taken three or four puffs, he took the cigarette from his mouth and said softly, "After we landed, I almost taxied over the edge." "It's dark out there." "I've never seen anything like it. No light at all, the deck greasy, rain on top of the grease... it was like trying to taxi on snot." "What happened?" "Taxi director took me up to the bow on Cat One, then turned me. Wanted me to taxi aft on Cat Two. It was that turn on the bow.

  Sticking out over the fucking black ocean.

  I was sure I was going right off the bow, Jake.

  I about shit myself. I kid you not. Pure, unadulterated terror, two-hundred proof. I have never had a feeling like that in an airplane before.

  "Uh-huh." "I was turning tight, I could feel the nose wheel sliding, the yellow-shirt was giving me the come-ahead signal with the wands, and the edge was right there!

  And there isn't even a protective lip. You know how the bow just turns down, same as the stem?" "So what did you do?" "Locked the left wheel and goosed the right engine.

  The plane moved about a foot. I could feel the left wheel sliding.

  To make things perfect I could also feel the deck going up and down, up and down. Every time it started down the vomit came up my throat. Then the yellow-shirt crossed his wands and had the blue-shirts chock it right where it sat.

  When I climbed down from the cockpit I couldn't believe it-the nose wheel was like six inches from the edge! It was so dark up there that I had to use my flashlight to make sure. There was no way the nose wheel was going around that corner. Even if it had, the right main wouldn't have made the Turn-4t would have dropped off the edge." Harrison took a greedy drag on his cigarette, then continued: "My BN couldn't even get out of the cockpit. The plane captain didn't have room to drop his ladder. He had to stay in the cockpit until they towed the plane to a decent parking place." "Why'd you keep taxiing when you knew you were that close to the edge?" Harrison closed his eyes for a second, then shook his head. "I dunno." "I know," Jake Grafton told him positively. "You jarheads are spring-loaded to the yessir position. Doug, if it doesn't feel right, don't do it. You have only one ass to lose." Harrison nodded and sucked on the cigarette.

  The color was slowly coming back to his face. After a bit he said, "Did you ever watch those RA-5 pilots taxi at night? The nose wheel is way aft of the cockpit. They are sitting out over the ocean when they taxi that Vigilante to the deck edge and turn it. I couldn't do that. Not in a million years. Just watching them gives me the shivers." "Don't obey a yellow-shirt if it doesn't look right," Jake said, emphasizing the point.

  "It isn't the fall that kills you, Doug, or the stop at the bottom-it's the sudden realization that, indeed, you are this fucking stupid." When Doug wandered off Jake went back to the notes of his talks on carrier operations. He was expanding and refining them so he could have them typed. He thought he would send them back to the senior ISO at the West Coast A-6 training squadron, VA-128 at Whidbey Island. Maybe there was something in there that the LSO'S could use for their lectures.

  Boy, if he wasn't getting out, it would sure be nice to go back to VA-128 when this cruise was over. Rent a little place on a beach or a bluff overlooking the sound, fly, teach some classes, kick back and let life flow along. If he wasn't getting out... If Tiny Dick Donovan was willing to take hun back. Forgive and forget.

  But he was getting out! No more long lonely months at sea, no more night cat shots, no more floating around the IO quietly rotting, no more of this Allen Bartow came up to the desk. "When you get off here tonight, we're having a little game down in my room.

  We need some squid money in the pot." "I've still got a lot of jarhead quarters from the last game.

  I'll bring those." "The last of the high rollers He wasn't going to miss it, he assured himself, for the hundredth time.

  Not a bit.

  One of the most difficult tasks in military aviation is a night rendezvous. On a dark night under an overcast the plane you are joining is merely a tiny blob of lights, flashing weakly in the empty black universe. Without a horizon or other visual reference, the only way the trick can be done is to keep your instrument scan going inside your cockpit while you sneak peeks at the target aircraft. The temptation is to look too long at the target, to get too engrossed in the angles and closure rate, and if that happens, you are in big trouble.

  On this particular night Jake Grafton thought he had it wired. He was rendezvousing on the off-going tanker at low station, 5,000 feet over the ship on the five-mile arc.

  There it was, its lights winking weakly.

  "Ten o'clock," Flap said.

  "Roger, I got it." "He'll be doing two-fifty-,, Jake glanced at his airspeed. Three hundred knots indicated. He would have to work that off as he closed.

  But not quite yet.

  The tanker would be in a left-hand turn. Jake cranked his plane around until he had his nose in front of it and was looking at it through the right quarter panel, across the top of the radar scope-hood. He eased in a little left rudder and right flaperon to help keep his plane in a position where he could see the tanker.

  With the target plane on the right side the A-6 was difficult to rendezvous because the cockpit was too wide-the BN sat on the pilot's right. This meant that the right glareshield and canopy rail were too high and, as the planes closed, would block the pilot's vision of the target aircraft if he allowed himself to
get just a little behind the bearing line or get a tad high. Jake knew all this. He had accomplished several hundred night rendezvous and knew the problems involved and the proper techniques to use without even thinking about it. Tonight he was busy applying that knowledge.

  Yet something was wrong. Jake checked his instruments.

  All okay. Why was the tanker moving to the right?

  Instinctively he rolled more wings level, rechecked his attitude gyro, the altimeter, the airspeed... All okay. And still the sucker is moving right!

  "Texaco, say your heading." "Zero Two Zero." Hell! Now Jake understood. He was still on the outside of the tanker's turning radius, not on the inside as he had assumed. He leveled his wings and flew straight ahead to cross behind the tanker, feeling slightly ridiculous. He had assumed that he was on the inside.

  Now, indeed, he was on the inside of the tanker's turn.