by Ian Slater
“All right, Jimmy. But what’s wrong with your men’s eyes?” He gave the Yalu the back of his hand, the map stand shaking from the impact. “How the hell do a hundred and twenty thousand Chinese regulars, give or take a division, General — that’d be another thirteen thousand, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How do a hundred and thirty-three thousand men move up and down mountains and get across the Yalu without us seeing a goddamned one of them?”
“Sir — it’s an old Chinese maneuver. They used it on Doug MacArthur. They travel only at night. Hide by day. Anyone moves — they execute them — by bayonet — on the spot. Saves a bullet and there’s not even the noise of a shot we can pick up.”
Mayne returned to the desk, his face contorted as much by pain, despite his effort not to show it, as by the sudden catastrophe of China, with its standing army, not counting reserves, of over three million men, having entered and suddenly exploded what the Pentagon in their report to the president were pleased to call “the parameters of the war.”
“Parameters!” said Mayne. “They’ve blown the gate wide open, Jimmy! They’ve—” He sat down in the chair and was silent for a moment. “Jimmy, I don’t want to sound like a hard-ass or anything, but if this is an ‘old Chinese trick,’ like firecrackers, why the hell weren’t you ready for it? Didn’t we have reconnaissance patrols? Aircraft?”
“Yes, sir, but we could only go as far as the Yalu.”
“Christ, Jimmy, I’m no—” Mayne hesitated, his mind searching for the name of an ace pilot. “Frank Shirer. I don’t even have a pilot’s license. But even I know if you fly high enough, you can see over a damn river. See anything move. Our satellite’s supposed to read Pravda in Red Square from space — right?”
“I don’t know who made up that old crock, Mr. President, but it’s far from accurate. More a PR—”
“Don’t nitpick, Jimmy. You know what I mean. How come the first I hear of it is in a national intelligence digest out of Fort Meade who picked up a radio intercept from some poor kid in one of our forward observation posts screaming that he was being overrun by Chinese?”
“The weather, sir. It’s been snowing like crazy the last few days. Not even the satellites could get through that.”
“Before that?” pressed Mayne relentlessly. He wasn’t interested in assigning guilt, but he damn well didn’t want it to happen anywhere else — in Europe, for instance. Or, God forbid, at the Aleutian back door. Or the Middle East. General Grey retracted the pointer. “Sir. We just plain didn’t see them. I mean, that’s pretty tough discipline they have, sir.” The general could see Mayne behind the desk, sitting well back in his chair but far from relaxed, hand massaging his temple.
“Well, I wish we had that kind of discipline. Our boys and the South Koreans are on the defensive again just when I thought we could wrap it up in Korea and divert some of our divisions up to the Aleutians and Europe, now that Doug Freeman’s got us moving again over there.” He sat forward, hands clasped on the green blotter, speaking more slowly now, more reflectively. “Course, if we were like them — had the kind of army where you could shoot a man for moving — I suppose we wouldn’t be fighting them. But — hell, Jimmy, we’ve got to do something. Fast. By pulling back — retreating like this—”
“Some units just plain broke, Mr. President, and ran.”
Mayne’s arms were cradling his head, the thumbs pressing hard into tense neck muscle. “Got to get some stiffener over there or else—” His voice was more agitated than the general had ever heard it. “Or we’ll have a goddamn A-grade, number one, full-blown political and military disaster on our hands.” He was out of the chair again, fingers running about his belt, glancing up at the map for several seconds, then turning toward Grey. “If we lost Korea, Jimmy, as a base — the only one we have on mainland Asia from which to harass Russia’s southern flank, then—” He broke off, his tone suddenly infused with new energy. “Jimmy — we’re still pressing ahead in Europe, am I right? No surprises in the last twenty-four hours or anything?”
“No, sir. Everything’s going as well as can be expected. Doug Freeman’s got the Russkis retreating so fast, he’s in danger of outrunning his own supply line. The British and Norwegians are worried Moscow could panic — throw in the conventional towel and go nuclear while they’ve still got time.”
“They’ll talk peace before that,” said Mayne.
“I’m not so sure, sir. I mean, it might be Politburo policy to talk before anyone pushes the button, but policy gets the bum’s rush when panic sets in. It only takes some nut, some kid on an SS-18 battery, to start it. And remember, the Russians and Chinese have huge shelters. Haven’t a hope of saving most of their population and industry, of course, and they know it, but the Chinese figure on, say, saving twenty percent of their population in the worst possible case. For us that’d be totally unacceptable, but in China, that’s two hundred million people left. Russian estimate used to be they’d lose twenty-four million and still they’d have more than twice our population. We haven’t got anything like their civil defense. Our public was so pummeled with that ‘nuclear winter’ shit — excuse me, sir— that we didn’t think there was any point to civil defense. So if the Russians do panic in the face of Freeman’s advance, we’re in one hell of a lot of—”
“Then we’d better slow down the advance. Tell Freeman to consolidate, give him time to build up supplies. Good point, Jimmy, about the supply lines. Will the joint chiefs go for a halt?”
“They will, sir.”
From the general’s quick response, Mayne guessed the C in Cs had instructed him to make that very argument. “Then I suggest we transfer Doug Freeman immediately — to C in C Korea. Get Anderson out of there. Put Freeman back on his old turf for a while.”
This the general wasn’t ready for. “But — Mr. President. We want to slow down in Europe, yes. But if we take General Freeman out and there’s a Russian counterattack, then—”
“Don’t tell me we haven’t got any other generals over there, Jimmy? Defensive backs?”
“Of course not, sir. I simply mean that Freeman has a high profile. If the Russkis see him withdrawing—”
“It’ll be a demonstration of enormous confidence in all our other field commanders,” countered Mayne. “Most of them trained by you, Jimmy, I might add.”
“Maybe, sir, but still—”
“Jimmy, Freeman knows Korea. He attacked the North Korean capital at night, got in, got out, and gave us time to reinforce the Pusan-Masan perimeter. We need a man like that.”
“You mean someone a little bit crazy?”
“We have to get those Chinese back across the Yalu.”
“I don’t know if even Doug Freeman can do that, Mr. President.”
“Let’s try.”
The general nodded his assent. “Very well, sir.”
“Jimmy?”
“Sir?”
“If you aren’t happy with bringing him out of Europe, how about we play a shell game?”
General Grey frowned.
“General, we live in a country that produces more actors than any other. We breed them by the bushel. Hell, if I remember correctly, one of them occupied this office.”
There was subdued laughter from Trainor. General Grey was warming to the idea. “A double?”
“You won’t have much time,” conceded Mayne.
But Grey, pursing his lips, was considering the logistics. “It might just work. They did it with Montgomery. But how about Freeman’s getting to Korea? If that gets out, the Russians—”
“It won’t,” said Mayne, turning to Trainor. “Under wraps. No press. Shut everything down like Reagan did in Grenada and Bush in Panama. Keep the press right out of it — and only allow two or three of Doug’s top aides to go with him. Leave the rest in Europe. Hell — he’ll need to leave most of them in Europe to execute his strategy over there — until he gets back.”
“Mr. President,” General Grey told h
is commander in chief, “Doug Freeman’ll the without the press — without an audience.”
“Then he’ll the in a good cause,” said Mayne, reaching for the water decanter, a signal to Trainor it was time for the pain pills.
* * *
“Think positive, Frank,” Shirer told himself, as one by one he saw the green blips of Salt Lake City’s brood of aircraft disappearing from his radar screen as they landed safely on the carrier. Finally only one blip remained, approximately three miles starboard aft of the carrier: the “Sea King” helo on its plane guard station. Shirer had been making pattern for thirty minutes, and the nose wheel hadn’t budged, so that now he knew that he had only twenty-seven minutes remaining before he’d have to take her in. “Like a bird, like a bird,” he repeated to himself, recalling the words of his old instructor during his first carrier landing. “Coming in on a carrier’s way different from having a mile of runway to screw around on. Go in like the birds — feet first, get your rear rubber down, hook the wire, and the nose’ll take care of itself.” The only trouble was, this time Shirer knew the nose wouldn’t take care of itself, not with the wheel only halfway down. He tried to remember whether there had ever been a barricade engagement on Salt Lake City—a crash landing racing at 150 miles an hour into the nylon net.
In another three minutes, Commander Harris in flight deck control was watching the last of the Salt Lake City’s air umbrella, an E-C Hawkeye long-range warning aircraft, its rotodome stem retracting, the dome sitting on the plane’s fuselage like a huge white pancake, wings already folding up and back as the plane was being hauled by a mule, a flat yellow tractor, to the port elevator as fast as the crosswind would allow so that it could be moved out of harm’s way in the hangar deck below.
“Soon as that baby’s in the dungeon,” instructed Harris, “let me know.”
“Yes, sir,” replied a tired assistant one deck below in air traffic control, which was part of the combat information center. “Sir — LSO says we may have a foul deck.”
“Chri—” Harris began, checked himself, and asked, “How long’s two oh three got fuel for?”
“Twenty-four minutes, sir.”
The flight deck commander called the LSO. What he needed to know was whether the LSO had any idea of what the debris on the deck might be. And where?
“Can’t tell you, Phil,” came the LSO’s reply. “Might be nothing, but thought I saw something drop off when the last Hawkeye came in.”
“It was a clean trap, wasn’t it?” the FDC asked the LSO.
“Yeah — clean trap. But I thought I saw something after she hit. Could have been thrown up in her wash.”
“Okay. We’d better check it out.”
“Looked like it was near three cat.” He meant the white line that marked the waist catapult run.
“Thanks, Pete,” answered the worried FDC. If it was an obstacle near the waist catapult line, it could be a dislodged nut, fuel tank flap — or anything from the scores of deck vehicles used to push and pull the planes into position. A nut sucked into either one of the Tomcat’s intakes could mean a multimillion-dollar engine gone, or a seabird that had been hit and knocked to the steel-grooved deck could become an instant lubricant the moment the twenty-five-ton aircraft, its nose wheel not fully extended, landed, sending the Tomcat sliding an inch or two out of alignment — which, at over a hundred miles an hour, could wipe out the aircraft and anyone nearby. The FDC lifted the phone for the air boss six decks above him, depressed the other phone atop his right shoulder, and requested a search party for the area around the four arrestor wires. They simply didn’t have time for a full-fledged “walk-down” to make sure the deck was sterile.
Within a minute, the chief petty officer and the sixteen-man search party team were scouring the deck, and it was Seaman First Class Sic. Elmer Ventral, who’d been on the Salt Lake less than a year, who spotted the oil rag caught in the corner of one of the four-feet-diameter circular steel mountings that houses the one-and-a-half-inch-thick cable to which the number one arrestor wire was attached. Whenever the wire hooked an aircraft, the big cable took the strain.
“All right,” said the chief petty officer, whose job it would be to report to flight deck control. “Let’s get inside before we all freeze our butts off.”
Young Ventral, two days away from his twenty-first birthday, married little more than fourteen months and already a father, felt good about having found the oil rag. It couldn’t really have caused that much damage — unless it got sucked in by an air intake — but the air boss was a fanatic about a sterile deck, and Ventral knew it would stand him in good stead.
The CPO who had to tell the FDC wasn’t so lucky.
“Jesus Christ!” Harris bellowed. “What was that doing there?”
“Somebody must have dropped it, sir.”
“I know somebody dropped it, Chief. And I want his ass. You read me?”
“Yes, sir,” said the CPO, but he knew the task would be hopeless. So did the FDC. They were both feeling bad about it, both having worked with the air boss long enough to know that when any single player screwed up, the team screwed up. FDC called PRIFLY and told the air boss what had fouled his deck.
“A rag!” said the air boss, his voice rising like a tenor going for the high C as he walked, or rather stalked, behind the grease pencil status board and stared down into the bluish light that washed the flight deck. “We’ve got a man to come down and some joker’s dropped a fuckin’ rag?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Listen, Phil, I want his ass.”
“Yes, sir.”
The moment he put the phone down, the air boss turned to PRIFLY’s mini boss. “Get Lieutenant Ronson up here pronto.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ronson was the chief of the Salt Lake City’s TV station. The air boss knew there was no chance of finding out who exactly dropped the rag, but he was going to make it item one — cut right into the movie and play it on every shift for the next forty-eight hours. They’d be so goddamned sick of that oil rag—
Meantime he had a plane to get down and, glancing at the real-time PRIFLY clock, saw he had seventeen minutes.
“We going to get this barricade up in time?”
It was more an order than a question, but the mini boss complied. “They’re working on it, sir. They think they’ll make it.”
The air boss picked up his binoculars, looking down at the barricade, a series of tough, hydraulically anchored nylon ribbons forming a vertical netting that stood twenty-four feet high, strung across the flight deck and which he hoped would catch the Tomcat if, due to the necessarily high “up” angle the pilot would have to have on the nose, the Tomcat missed the three wire.
“You done one of these before, Henry?” the air boss asked his assistant.
“No, sir.”
“What time we got, Henry?”
“Sixteen minutes, sir,” replied the mini boss, wondering whether his superior had ever handled a barricade engagement himself.
“Weather report, sir,” interjected a seaman, handing him the printout. “Wind’s dying, but more fog.”
“Great,” said the air boss sardonically. “Just what we fucking need. Be lucky if he can see the meatball. We got rescue and fire all set, Henry?”
“All set, sir.”
“Anyone loses a goddamned oil rag in future and the whole shift pays. Beer ration cut to one can — or zilch.” He shifted his binoculars to look down at the port side of the barricade being laid out, its nylon ribbons flapping furiously in the cross wind. “How much time we got, Henry?”
“Fourteen minutes, sir,” said the mini boss, the other spotter trying to keep visual contact with Shirer’s blinking red light along with the radar blip. The mini boss looked teed off— couldn’t the air boss read a goddamned clock? Everyone was getting too tense.
Five decks below, TV technicians were plugging into the flight deck camera feed. With the crew of over five thousand below decks run ragged by the
day-in, day-out dangerous task of keeping planes constantly airborne, the Tomcat’s final approach might as well entertain as instruct. In the dungeon, above the noise of the mules pushing and pulling planes about and scores of technicians swarming over parked planes, many of the aircraft looking as if they’d been roughly cannibalized for spare parts, some green jackets checking Tomcat avionic “slip-in, pull-out” circuit boards in the black boxes started making book on whether Shirer would make it or not. More navy pilots had been lost in accidents than had been shot down.
Up on the flight deck in the wait room, S1c. Elmer Ventral, whose job it was to race out to release the hook immediately after a plane caught the wire, was being ribbed by the rest of the work crew, who’d awarded him the “ROFOR”—royal order of the fucking oil rag.
Unbeknownst to Ventral, the CPO in charge of the shift Ventral was part of, following carrier tradition, had called down to one of the bakeries aboard to have them bake a cake for Ventral’s birthday — and to decorate it with something that looked like an oil rag.
* * *
Up in PRIFLY, the air boss was going over everything that could possibly go wrong. He called down to flight deck control. “Harris!”
“Yes, sir?”
“Phil — you have the new weight for two oh three?” The loss of weight occasioned by the Tomcat burning up as much fuel as possible before landing would have to be vectored in so the arrestor wires wouldn’t be too taut.
“We’ve got it covered, sir.”
“Good man.”
“Barricade’s up, sir,” reported the mini boss.
“Clear the deck!” ordered the air boss, his voice projected by the powerful PA system designed to cut through any noise on the carrier, including the cacophony of noise attending the launch of a full air operation, when the air boss dispatched the carrier’s planes at a rate of one every thirty seconds.
“Decks clear,” came the confirmation two minutes later.
“Very good,” acknowledged the air boss.
