Flight of the Intruder jg-1

by Stephen Coonts

  Jake and Sammy were drinking. Earlier the squadron flight surgeon had stopped by and delivered two airline bottles of twelve-year-old bourbon. He made a point of delivering medicinal whiskey whenever he heard of a particularly harrowing flight.

  “Real sorry about McPherson,” he had said, handing over the bottles. Then he had added, “But these things happen.”

  Grafton had at that instant loathed the man. “Yeah, that’s the breaks of naval air.”

  Jake saw that the sarcasm had registered on the doctor, who was known among the airmen as Mad Jack the Jungle Quack in honor of the tour he had recently completed with the marines in South Vietnam that had left his arms red and inflamed from a tropical skin disease, one that his patients fervently hoped was not contagious.

  “No offense. I’m sorry.” He gazed distractedly around the little stateroom at the rumpled flight suits hanging from hooks, the flight boots lying in the corner and the papers strewn about the two desks. In his mid-thirties, with a roll of fat around his middle, the doctor seemed out of place among the pilots.

  As he departed Mad Jack had paused. “If you want to talk or visit …”

  Grafton had shown no response. So now the two pilots had settled down to business They had finished off the airline bottles, and Jake was working on a bottle of bourbon while Lundeen, who had to fly in eight or ten hours, sipped a can of Coke. Lundeen kept the bottle sequestered in his small desk safe, which the navy provided for the storage of classified documents. Unlike the skipper, they had no refrigerator, so there was no ice. After the first drink, Jake had dispensed with the water.

  Jake watched his friend tip his can of Coke. Lundeen was almost six feet, four inches tall, near the limit for a pilot, and had a great deal of upper body strength and smooth, quick movements. He had been a tight end in college but was too small for the pros. In the compact stateroom he looked huge. Besides flying, he also acted as the squadron’s personnel officer, supervising a chief and five clerks. The only portion of his administrative duties that he did not visibly detest was his work as awards officer. He drafted the citations and recommendations for medals and gave them to the XO Harve Wilson, to approve and forward up the chain of command- Lundeen kept a thesaurus on his desk that he referred to constantly as he drafted the award citations He would gleefully read his better efforts to Jake as proof positive that the military in general and the navy in particular were “all fucked up.”

  “How’d you guys do tonight?” Sammy asked, for he knew Morgan had been hit after the bomb run.

  “Well, you know how hard it is to tell at night. No secondary explosions.

  But Morg had a ground lock with the track radar and the system was tight. If we missed, it sure as hell wasn’t for lack of trying. Of course, what we hit was probably just a couple acres of forest that some jackass thought we ought to drop a few bombs into.”

  “The toothpick hypothesis,” Sammy said. “After we turn all the big trees into toothpicks, they’ll have to surrender.”

  “Damn, I wish we had some decent targets! There has to be something in North Vietnam that’s worth the trip. Morgan gets zapped and we don’t have a goddamn thing to show for it, not even a secondary explosion.”

  Jake splashed more bourbon into his glass. “And the skipper says there’s nothing we can do about it.” He got up and paced the small room. He knew the targets were assigned daily on a master “frag” list.

  The strike orders were further fragmented into a group of targets for each squadron. This chore was handled by the Strike Ops Department, which matched the targets to the capabilities of the various aircraft and the number of aircraft each squadron had available, and gave each target a mission number. The target lists then went to the schedules officer of each squadron, who, after consulting with the squadron operations officer and perhaps its skipper, assigned a crew to each mission.

  The flight schedule was printed and shoved under the door of every crewman at least three, preferably four, hours before the first launch of the day. After consulting the schedule, the A-6 pilots and bombardiers went to the mission Planning section of the ship’s Intelligence Center where coded mission numbers were matched with photographs, map coordinates, and, available, radar photography of the intended target This information was compiled for each mission by the squadron’s air intelligence officers, nonfliers who specialized in this field.

  Surrounded by all the data they could get, the bombardier-navigators planned the flight, usually with their pilots watching over their shoulders.

  The Bns would choose a route that would avoid the worst known enemy defenses, select navigation checkpoint measure headings and distances, and calculate the flight time for each leg of their route. They would write down information from the charts to feed into the navigation attack computer, While the pilots cut up large charts and put together a small strip chart of the route which they’d carry in the cockpit, the bombardiers, applying the skill acquired through countless hours of practice, would sketch predictions of what they believed the target would look like on the radar screen, given the planned angle of approach and altitude. Because the aircraft would approach the target at 500 knots, over 800 feet per second, the bombardier would have only a moment to pick it out from among the hundreds of objects that reflected radar energy and cluttered the scope. A mistake here meant that the bombs would strike in the wrong place, and the whole mission would be for nothing.

  McPherson had been a wizard with the scope, Jake remembered. He had had an uncanny ability to pick out a building or checkpoint from a confused glob ground clutter. The problem wasn’t the bombing, Jake thought, but the unimportance of the targets assigned “Well, at least it won’t go on much longer,” Sammy said, breaking into his thoughts.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Kissinger just announced ‘Peace is at hand.” It was on the closed-Circuit television last night. The war’s almost over.”

  Jake felt as though he had been punched in the stomach.

  “Oh, shit,” Sammy said. “You and Morgan were flying when they announced it. Didn’t anybody tell you?”

  “No.” It was a whisper.

  “Christ, man, I’m sorry. I am really sorry.”

  THREE

  Both fire-warning lights glared a brilliant red,the plane was out of control. The hydraulic gauges still showed plenty of pressure. The nose slammed up and down with an evil perversity, and the machine roll left. He jammed the stick full right, but the left roll continued. He looked at Morgan. His head was gone. Blood spurted in little fountains from the stump of his neck. The canopy glass was gone on the right side, and the wind howled through the cockpit. The stick was firm, yet the plane did not respond. His body slammed back and forth as the G forces and wind tore at him With the altimeter racing down, he fumbled for the ejection handle between his legs. It wasn’t there! His hands went to the primary handle over his head, but it too was gone!

  He couldn’t tear his eyes from the wildly spinning altimeter. Maddened by the roar of the hurricane wind, he screamed.

  The scream woke him. The darkness and the pain were real. Unable to orient himself, he fought the sheets. One fist struck the bulkhead, and the pain sobered him. He fumbled for the bunk light switch.

  He kicked the sheets aside and put his feet on the floor. Sweat covered his brow. He lit a cigarette with trembling hands. ‘Three o’clock in the morning. Sammy Lundeen was flying somewhere over North Vietnam. Morgan McPherson was in a body bag in the ship’s morgue.

  He had drunk too much bourbon. His head throbbed and his hands still shook. He levered himself upright and fumbled for some aspirin in the medicine cabinet. He wet a face towel and lay down again with the cool cloth on his forehead. He left the light on. He needed the light.

  He concentrated on the sounds of the ship working in the seaway. Metal rubbing on metal, the great weight of the ship rolling ever so gently back and forth as it met the swells, the rhythm of movement. He could also hear the soun
ds of men and machinery. From the engineering spaces below his room came the ringing of hammer blows. He silently cursed the fellow with the hammer, some boilertender, no doubt, delicately adjusting a precision instrument.

  But his mind kept coming back to the flight, obsessively. That bullet that got Morg could have smacked me instead, he thought. Two inches lower and it would have gone under his chin and got me in the ear. Smack. I wouldn’t even have felt it. Just smack: then nothing.

  The silent scream started. He felt his guts heave. Stop. Stop! You think about this stuff too much and you’ll be cold meat, just like McPherson.

  He rolled out of the bunk, grabbed his towel, and went down the passageway to the showers. Water was being conserved because of recurrent problems with the ship’s evaporators; a notice posted on the door announced that showers were permitted only from 0600 to 0700 and again from 1800 to 1900. Jake ignored the sign. He tried the shower faucets, found they worked, and stood for ten minutes under the tap. Fuck the navy!

  And fuck the asshole who can’t keep the goddamned evaporators working!

  He dressed in a clean khaki uniform. Before he put on the trousers, he rammed his fist down each pant leg to break up the starch. He went by the ready room decided he wasn’t in the mood for people, and wandered up to the hangar deck. Aircraft 505 was on Elevator two. Two mechanics, on a work stand along side the fuselage, were replacing the damaged canopy pane. One of the men, a first class petty officer who Jake knew by sight, turned toward him.

  “Too bad about Mister McPherson.”

  Yeah, too bad.

  “Not another bullet hole in this whole airplane Mister Grafton. We spent half an hour looking to see if they hit you anywhere else.”

  The pilot just nodded and went on. He walked out onto a sponson on the port side amidships. The only light came through the open hatch from the hangar bay, Two large capstans stood ready to take the lines when the ship tied up portside to a pier. Jake heaved himself up on one. He could see the lights of a destroyer frigate several miles away - The wind was heavy with the smell of the sea.

  After a half hour or so he went back inside the skin of the ship and climbed the ladders to the 0-3 level, the deck above the hangar bay and immediately below the flight deck. Instead of salt air, he smelled paint and the lubricating oil on the hatch hinges. Following a maze passageways, he located the junior officers’ bunkroom where McPherson had lived.

  The door was open. Two navy-gray steel footlockers sat on the floor on one side of the eight-man bunkroom Little Augie Odegard and his bombardier, Joe Canfield, were packing clothes and personal effects into the lockers.

  “How’s it going?” Jake muttered as he took a seat on the bunk opposite the pilot.

  “Packing out Morg’s stuff. Rotten job,” said Little Augie. “It all has to be packed up so they can ship it home to his wife when we get to the Philippines in three days.” This duty always fell to the roommates of the dead or missing, which was why the two men who made up a crew were not allowed to live together in a double stateroom.

  Canfield sat at McPherson’s desk going through the letters, magazines, and souvenirs that McPherson had accumulated in the last six months.

  Canfield’s nickname was Big Augie because he was two inches taller than his diminutive pilot and the men bore a remarkable resemblance to each other, even though the pilot was white and the bombardier black. “Morg was squeaky clean, Jake. Not even a porn mag or a letter from an old girlfriend. Man, whoever has to clean out my desk is going to get an eyeful reading my stuff.” He opened another envelope, verified it contained a letter from Morgan’s wife, then replaced the letter in the envelope and added it to a large pile that would eventually go in one of the steel boxes. “Finding out how squared away Morg was is having a beneficial effect on my morals.”

  “He was a good guy , Jake said.

  ‘Sure going to miss him.” Little Augie eyed Jake with a raised eyebrow.

  “So how’re you really doing, shipmate?”

  “Doing okay. The skipper gave me the night off, but I’ll be on the flight schedule tomorrow.”

  “Only a few more days before we go to Subic Bay, Big reminded them.

  “I’m just going to lay around the pool and drink gin and tonics,” Little Augie said.

  “This time of year it may rain like hell.”

  Jake watched the two men work. Little Augie meticulously folded the uniforms, underwear, and civilian clothes before putting them in the boxes. When Morgan McPherson’s personal effects were gone and the paperwork done, the men of the squadron would have finished burying him. When would Jake get him buried?

  “Do you guys think the war is about over?”

  “You mean that Kissinger statement ‘Peace is hand’?” Little Augie scoffed.

  “Yeah.” Grafton’s voice was so soft that Big shot him a hard glance.

  “It won’t be over until the treaty is signed and the gomers let the POWs come home,” Little told him, “isn’t going to happen soon.”

  “You don’t think?”

  “Nah, they’ve been talking for three years. Heck, took them a year to decide on the shape of the conference table. I figure that at the rate they’ve been going we’ll have a treaty by the turn of the century.” Big said, “Morgan isn’t going to be the last guy, Jake. Don’t blame yourself. There’s a lot of dying left to do.

  Jake rose to go.

  “Take care,” Little told him.

  “You aren’t flying for at least twenty-four hours. Go get a drink,” Big advised.

  “I already did that.”

  “So get another.”

  Back in his stateroom Jake removed his uniform an pulled down a hinged board, part of a dresser recessed into the bulkhead. When lowered, the board became a desk. Papers and books were stored in the cavity, which also contained the safe for classified material. He reached in and turned on the fluorescent tube that because of its recessed position, lighted the small work area but left most of the room in darkness. The subdued light gave the room an intimacy that seemed almost impossible on a 95,000-ton warship with a crew of five thousand. Jake turned off all the other lights in the stateroom so he could seek refuge in the secure world of the lamp.

  What could he possibly say to Sharon McPherson? Dear Sharon, I’m sorry I got your husband killed. How could he say he was sorry and make it mean anything?

  Her world gets smashed to bits and he’s “sorry.”

  His hands were still shaking. Adrenaline aftershock, he decided. He picked up a sheet of paper and placed it on top of his splayed fingertips. The paper vibrated. Like everything else in his life, like the targets, like what happened to Morgan, it was beyond his control. He stared into the shadows of the room. He remembered the look on Morgan’s face, and the gagging, and the blood. Blood everywhere. The body holds an unbelievable amount of blood. Maybe the people he and McPherson had killed had died like that, bleeding to death.

  Or maybe they had died instantly from the blast of the bombs. He would never know.

  He chewed the pencil, his mind as blank about what he would say to Sharon as the sheet of paper in front of him. What do you say to a widow and mother?

  Dear Sharon, We just hit a target that wasn’t worth a damn. Now your husband’s in a body bag in the meat locker. I am sorry as hell he’s dead: sorry, oh so sorry, but he is stone cold dead and sorry won’t bring him back, and you and I and Morgan’s boy have to live with it.

  What do you say to the widow of the man who had saved your life?

  They had been younger then and the carrier was still in their future.

  They had finished their training at the replacement squadron on the same day and had walked across the parking lot side by side to the new hangar, to their new squadron, the fleet squadron. Somehow they were assigned to fly together.

  Flying without an instructor was still a new experience then.

  They were just getting to know each other much like newlyweds on a honeymoon. The honey moon en
ded that night.

  They had flown south parallel to the coast of Washington twenty miles out to sea as the sunset died on the western horizon. To their right, the day sky slowly surrendered to the night through shades of yellow oranges, and reds.

  On their left, layers of heavy stratus reflected the dying glow that was the lingering remnant of the day. Between the layers, blues and purple deepened into black.

  They passed the mouth of the Columbia River an continued south for another eighty miles. Jake retarded the throttles and began his descent. At 5000 feet McPherson called the turn and the pilot swung east toward the land, still descending.

  They leveled at 1000 feet, and he set the throttles for a 360-knot cruise.

  They went in under the clouds, the last of the light gone. Jake selected the search-radar terrain clearance mode on the visual display indicator and rotated the offset impact bar to give himself 10 feet of clearance. The vdi presented a graphic of the terrain ahead generated by the computer from returning radar energy. The information was displayed in a series of bins, or range bins, to give the presentation a three-dimensional effect, and one of the bins was coded with vertical stripes. The pilot had to vary the altitude of the aircraft to keep the fixed offset impact bar on the coded range bin so that the plane maintained the desired degree of clearance, and no less.

  Before they had gone very far inland the aircraft entered the clouds. ‘the rotating anticollision light reflected off the clouds and flashed in the cockpit creating a distraction, so the pilot turned it off. Morgan McPherson had his head pressed against the radar hood and was probably unaware that they had entered heavy clouds. The squadron operations manual dictated that this particular training route through the coastal mountains not be flown in instrument conditions. Grafton knew this, but tonight he decided to press on. Perhaps it was a matter of conquering fear by facing it.

  Within minutes the plane was threading its way up a valley, and Jake was perspiring profusely. He concentrated on the vdi. The display was updated once a second, and he had to instantly judge the rate of change in the rising topography, and any heading correction necessary, then control the plane accordingly. The aircraft responded to stick displacement, but that displacement merely created a rate of change, not the change itself. Selecting the proper rate of change was the art. Sweat trickled down his forehead and stung his eyes.