Final Flight (19 page)

When at last he emerged from the little room with his
semen sample in hand, slightly out of breath,
Callie and the woman doctor were discussing the
sexual act in graphic, explicit terms-
clinical details that somehow sounded more obscene
to Jake than any locker room comment he had ever
heard. He had handed the sample to the nurse and sat
at attention in the chair beside Callie while the
women plowed the territory ovulation and timing and
body temperature and the position of the penis in
relation to the cervix-with only occasional glances in his
direction. “Be fruitful and multiply,” the
doctor had said, and sent them forth armed with a complex
chart that Callie posted on their bedroom wall and
annotated diligently.

He had received telephone calls from Callie in
midafternoon at the squadron, joyous proclamations that
now was the hour. He remembered whispering
embarrassed excuses to the operations officer, dashing
madly home, and ripping off his clothes as he charged
through the door.

Callie collected a library of sex
manuals. He could still see her sitting naked in
bed, legs folded, studying an illustrated
manual he had purchased from a giggling female
clerk whose eyes he had been unable to meet. Their
lovemaking became desperate as they experimented with
positions, Callie’s hunger a tangible thing.
He suspected she was continuing to see the doctor, but
he didn’t ask and she didn’t volunteer.

Then, finally, the crying began, hysterical sobbing
that continued for hours and he could not console. He had
felt so helpless. After almost a month the crying
jags stopped. Their lovemaking became relaxed,
less athletic, more tender. Those gentle hours he
now treasured as the high points of his life. One
day he noticed the wall chart was gone. The sex
manuals were also missing from the closet. He
pretended not to notice. And he had spent so many
months, so many years, away from her! For what?

Tired beyond words, Jake Grafton turned and
walked aft along the catwalk.

The squadron skits were over and the
centurion patches handed out that evening when jake
finally stood up at the air wing officers meeting in
the main wardroom. Apparently no one noticed that
the air wing staff officers hadn’t seized this
opportunity to make fools of themselves.

Every chair in the room was taken and people stood along
the bulkheads.

Bull Majeska sat in the front row with the other
squadron skippers.

Admiral Parker had excused himself earlier and
left for the flag spaces.

The dinner service had been completed an hour before
the meeting started, yet the stained tablecloths remained
on the tables. The combined body heat was overloading the
air conditioning system.

“Okay, gentlemen. Now we find out who the real
carrier pilots are and who just talks a good line.
Without further ado, the LSO’S.” Jake clapped
as he sat down, but he was the only one. A
resounding chorus of boos made the walls shake.

Lieutenant Commander Jesus Chama, the senior
landing signal officer he was attached to Jake’s
staff and flew FirstA-18’s-stood up with a wide
grin and motioned for silence. He was of medium height
and sported a pencil-thin mustache on his
upper lip. “Thank you. Thank you all. I can’t
tell you how gratifying a welcome like that is. It
warms our teeny little hearts.” More boos.

“The list, please.” Chama held out his hand with a
flourish. One of his fellow practitioners of the
arcane art of “waving” aircraft, of scrutinizing
an approach to the ship from a small platform beside the
landing area and helping the pilot via radio when
necessary, handed him a sheet of paper. Chama held it
at arm’s length, squinted, and slowly brought it
toward his face. When he had the paper against his
nose, he lowered it with a sigh and took a set of
glasses from his trouser pocket. The glasses were a
prop Chama had slaved on for hours in the air wing
office. The bottoms of two Coca-Cola
bottles were inserted in the frame in place of
lenses. Chama had had to heat the plastic frame and
bend it to make it hold. He had destroyed three
frames in the process. Now he carefully placed
his masterpiece on his nose, hooking the earpieces
behind each ear.

As the laughter rose to a roar Chama started the
list at arm’s length again and slowly worked it inward.
When it reached his nose, he shouted, “Third
place, squadron boarding average, the
Red Rippers.” The VF-I I skipper stood
up beaming while his officers cheered and clapped behind
him. Everyone else hooted derisively.

The LSO’S graded every approach to the ship, and a
running score sheet for every pilot was posted in the
ready rooms. A squadron average was an
average of the individual scores of every pilot
attached to that squadron.

Chama handed out the second- and first-place
squadron awards, then began on individual
awards. After third and second were handed out, he
motioned to Jake. “Sir, maybe you better give
this last one out. I don’t have the stomach for it.”
Jake stood and looked over Chama’s shoulder at
his list.

“Him?”

“Yes sir.”

“Couldn’t you have fudged it up or something? Everyone
knows you guys rig the scores, anyway.

“Sir!” Chama feigned outrage. “This is very painful.”

“You must do your duty, sir.”

“I suppose. Jake sighed and looked through the
faces in the crowd for the one he wanted. When he
found it, he said, “Okay, Wild, get
up here and collect your award.”

A storm of applause followed as Major
Wild Blue Hickok, an exchange pilot from
the U.s. Air Force, made his way through the
crowd. By the time he arrived beside Jake, his face was
flushed.

“Wild here, in his grungy air force flight
suit, had a boarding average for this at-sea period
of 98.2. That’s figured on ninety- two
passes over almost four months. Gentlemen, that is
one hell of an accomplishment and, so far, stands as a
record for United States. Wild, have you ever
given any thought to an interservice transfer?”

“No, sir. Not since the air farce announced
it’s going to issue leather flight jackets again.”

Howls of glee greeted this remark. After forty
years of nylon and nomex, the air force had
recently announced leather jackets would soon be
issued to combat-qualified flight crewmen as a
career retention measure. The navy men were suddenly
extremely proud of the fact that the navy-their
navy-had never abandoned its World War II
policy of issuing leatherjackets to its aviators.
Wild had been ribbed unmercifully by his navy
comrades, many of whom had taken it upon
themselves to personally inform Wild that anyone who would
stay in any military service to get a leather
jacket was a damned fool.

When Wild Blue and the LSO’S were finally
seated, Jake had the floor to himself. He waited
until the crowd was silent. “We’ve been at sea
for almost four months, flying every day but three, and you
guys have done an outstanding job. You’ve kept the
airplanes properly maintained and in the air.
We’ve met our commitments. We’ve done the job
the navy sent us here to do. I’m proud of each and every
one of you.”

He faced the squadron skippers. “I want
you gentlemen to let every enlisted man in your
squadrons know that I am equally proud of them.

Without our troops the planes wouldn’t fly.”

He directed his attention back to the faces in the
crowd, the bulk of whom were young pilots and naval
flight officers on their first or second cruise.
“This profession of ours requires the best that we can
give it. Three men who were here for our last little
soiree aren’t here tonight. Sometimes your best isn’t
good enough, and you have to live with that. Sometimes nobody’s best is good enough. Those are the hazards.”
Out of the corner of his eye Jake saw Bull
Majesla staring at the floor. Jake picked out a
young face he did not recognize about ten rows
back and tried to talk to him. “In wartime officers
are promoted due to their ability to lead in battle.
In peacetime, too often, they are promoted because they
are good bureaucrats. In case you guys haven’t
figured it out, the navy is a large bureaucracy.”
Chuckles stirred the crowd.

“Pushing paper isn’t enough. And driving an
airplane through the wild black yonder isn’t
enough. There is something else, something that’s a little
difficult to put into words.” All this had seemed so
simple this afternoon in his office as he doodled and thought
about what he wanted to say.

He put his hands in his pockets and walked to a
new position, then searched again for that anonymous,
smooth young face he had been talking to. “You have
to have faith-faith in yourself, faith in the guy beside you,
faith in your superiors, and faith in the people who work for
you.

“You see, a military organization is a team
of people who have to rely on each other. The more complex our
equipment becomes, the more intricate our operations,
the greater the reliance has to be. We can’t function
unless every man does his job. We must all
do the absolute best we can, each and every one of us.
We’ll each do our part. We’ll stick together.
We’ll accept responsibility. Not for personal
gain, not for glory, not for promotion, not for …”
He ran out of words and searched the faces looking at
him.

Did they understand? Could they understand? It sounded so
trite when he said it aloud. Yet he had believed
it all his adult life and had tried to live it.

“You must have faith. And you must keep the faith.”
The faces, these faces, tan, black, brown; he
had been looking at these faces for twenty years.
Even the names were the same, American names, from every
dusty, weary corner of the earth. And the
nicknames-Slick, Box, Goose, Ace-all the
same. He felt old and worn. He walked
toward the door and a lieutenant standing near it called
the room to attention.

JAKE GRAFTON hurried to keep up with
Captain James as he loped along over the
knee-knockers and down the ladders. Behind Jake
trailed the ship’s Damage Control
Assistant-a lieutenant commander-and a first-class
petty officer with a clipboard. The
captain’s marine orderly followed them all.

The official weekly inspection of the ship for
cleanliness and physical condition was accomplished
by junior officers-lieutenants and below-who each
received a group of twenty to thirty compartments, a
zone,” which they toured and graded and commented upon. But
Captain James liked to inspect random compartments
from several zones, then compare his observations with the
written comments of the junior officers assigned those
zones. When the official inspectors missed
serious discrepancies caught by the captain, or
gave a satisfactory or above-average grade
to a compartment the captain judged unsatisfactory,
lively, one-sided discussions ensued on the bridge
near the captain’s chair, with the offending young officer
standing at nervous attention and saying “Yes sir” or
“No sir” at the end of every one of the captain’s
sentences.

Consequently, aboard United States the
junior officers hunted through the compartments for
discrepancies like starving rats searching for crumbs,
and the harried sailors worked like slaves to keep the
ship clean, with all her myriad of systems in good
working order.

The air wing commander didn’t usually
participate in these weekly exercises in
high-stress, power leadership. Today, however,
Captain James had requested his presence and was
leading him through compartments assigned to the air wing.
Jake felt like a parent being shown damage his children
had caused. The captain stopped outside a closed
door and rattled off the compartment number from the plate
near the door as he seized and held the doorknob.

“VF-143 airframe shop, sir,” chirped the
petty officer with the clipboard.

The captain twisted the knob and shot through the door
as it opened.

Someone inside called a hasty “attention on deck.”

James ignored the sailors rising clumsily
to their feet. “Deck’s dirty. Lightbulb out.” He stopped
beside a desk and examined the top. He brushed the paper aside.
There were gouges in the soft material that formed the
writing surface. “See that?” He looked at the
nearest sailor, a third-class petty officer.
“See that? That’s an expensive desk and it’s
damaged. You people will want another one pretty soon
and you won’t get it. I won’t approve it.
You’ve got to learn to take care of this
equipment. Move the desk.”

Two sailors picked it up and moved it away
from the bulkhead. The linoleum was discolored. The
captain bent down and scraped at it with a fingernail.
“Look here, son.” The third-class bent down
obediently.

“This stuff comes off. Just move the desk and strip
this old wax off and rewax it. Clean it up before it
discolors the linoleum.”

“Yes sir.”

“Compartment’s unsat. Get this deck in shape.”
Without another word Captain James led the
inspection party through the door and along a
passageway toward the outside skin of the ship. He
paused before a rest room, a “head.”

“VF-I I space, sir,” the clipboard
man informed him. In the captain went. The enlisted
man in charge of keeping the space clean snapped
to attention. Urinals lined one wall and stalls the
other.

The deck was clean as a wedding dress. Jake
nodded at the sailor, who appeared to be about
nineteen. James looked into crannies on the
bulkhead formed by the angle iron. Nothing there. This
place shone like a new penny. The captain
stuck his head into the nearest urinal and looked around
under the porcelain lip. “Corrosion,” he
announced, straightening. “Take a look,
sailor.”

To his credit, the sailor didn’t hesitate.
He stuck his head in just like the captain, held it
two seconds, then straightened and said, “Yes,
sir. I see it, sir.”

“Captain Grafton, come look at this.” The
Old Man was checking all the others. “Corrosion
in all of them. These men aren’t cleaning the inside of
these urinals. That corrosion will eat through the
porcelain if it’s not removed, and then we’ll have
to replace the urinals. We’ve got a brand new
ship here, three billion dollars” worth, and
unless we take care of it, it’s going to fall apart
around us. I want these urinals kept clean. Get
some soft brushes for these men to use, Captain. The
men will do a good job if they have the proper tools.”

“Yes sir.”

“Other than that, you have a good space here,
sailor,” Captain James said to the man, whose
chest swelled visibly. “Above average.

“What’s your name,” Jake asked the sailor,
who was wearing a T-shirt instead of his
uniform shirt since he was on a cleaning detail.

“ckefoose, sir.”

“Keep up the good work.”

Back in the passageway the captain went over
the results on the clipboard of all the spaces
he had looked at this morning. He had been in
portions of seven zones and he had graded ten
compartments unsatisfactory. “CAG,” he told
Jake, “Tomorrow I would appreciate you and your staff
reinspecting every failed compartment the air wing owns.

Jake would need to use most of the officers on his
staff or he would be at it all day. “I want more
emphasis put on cleanliness and material
condition.”

The captain’s eyes fell on the watertight
doorway in the bulkhead. He ran his finger along
the knife-edge, the bronze edge that the heavy door
sealed against. The knife-edge met a rubber
grommet on the door when the door was closed and
formed a seal. “This knife-edge is nicked. Is it
on the list for the DCA?” The Damage Control
Assistant, the officer standing behind Jake, was in
charge of maintenance on all watertight fittings and
firefighting gear. The damage control petty
officer in each squadron or ship’s
division reported discrepancies to the DCA, who
used his own staff to make repairs.

The first-class flipped to a list on the bottom
of his clipboard.

“Yes sir,” the petty officer announced, and
read off the hatch number.

“When was it reported?”

The date was over two months ago. The captain
merely looked at the DCA, turned, and walked
away. He paused at the first red fire bottle
he came to and flipped the inspection tag up so he
could read it. “How much does a fully charged
CO2 bottle weigh?”

“Fifty-two pounds, sir,” the DCA told
him. “How much does it weigh empty?” The
captain began unstrapping the red bottle from the
bulkhead bracket.

“Thirty-five pounds or so’ Captain.” A
look of foreboding crossed the DCA’S face and he
shot a glance at Grafton.

“The VF-1 I airman who has been weighing
this bottle has been diligent.

He has correctly noted it weighs 35.1
pounds. Every inspection, every month. It’s empty.”

Laird James hefted the bottle,
then passed it to Jake. “CAG, I want a
report from you. I want names and dates. Explain
to me how a sailor can perform his duties
diligently and thoroughly, and still accomplish
absolutely nothing. Explain to me how his efforts
contribute to the combat readiness of this ship. This
sailor’s chief, his division officer, his department
head, and his commanding officer are about to get charged with
dereliction of duty. I want the report in
twelve hours.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Jake Grafton said.
“But these people work for me. I’ll decide when and if
they get disciplined.”

Laird James cocked his head slightly and his
mouth got even smaller than it usually was. He
stared at Jake. In the navy these two officers had
spent their careers in, the air wing commander was an
officer with the rank of commander, and he answered to the
captain of the carrier for a variety of things both
operational and administrative. The CAG used to be
subordinate to the ship’s captain. But not
anymore. The navy had just recently made the air
wing commander a captain’s billet-Super-CAG was
the acronym currently popular-and had given him
almost complete control over the ship’s
airplanes and weapons. Laird James and
Jake Grafton were still feeling out this new
relationship.

Laird James made no secret of the fact
he didn’t like it very much. His lips barely moved
when he spoke. “I won’t tolerate incompetence
on this ship, CAG. Anyone’s incompetence. It
may be your air wing, but this is my ship. There had
better not be any more empty fire bottles in
spaces assigned to your squadrons.” His eyes
flicked to the DCA. “There had better not be any more
empty fire bottles on this ship.”

The captain whirled and loped away for the bridge.
His marine orderly strode along behind, trying to keep
up. As he watched them go, the DCA muttered
to Jake, “That’s the first time I ever saw a captain
in the U.s. Navy stick his head in a urinal.
The Jake cut him off. “He is a captain, and for
some damn good reasons, one of which is he pays
attention to detail. Another is he doesn’t ask
the men to do things he wouldn’t do.”

The skipper of the VF11 Red Rippers, Harvey Schultz,
was short and built like a fireplug. He was on a
permanent diet after a series of confrontations with
medical officers over his borderline
noncompliance with the navy’s body-fat
guidelines. He argued his neck was too skinny,
but the doctors said his waist was too big and their
opinions were the only ones that counted. Behind his back,
his junior officers called him Jack Spratt.
The face above the stocky body was lined and seamed and
looked like a hundred miles of bad road. The
bags under his eyes even had their own bags. He was
so ugly he was handsome, or so Callie had once
told Jake after she met him.

“Find out why Airman Potocky doesn’t know
the difference between an empty fire extinguisher and a
full one,” Jake told Schultz after relating the
incident. “I have to write a report for the captain.

Gimme the names of chief, division officer, and
department head.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Check every fire bottle that kid is
responsible for. Have it done and report back to me
within an hour.”

“Is this fire bottle business going to be a flap, CAG?”

“Nothing like it would have been if there had been a
fire and someone had tried to put it out with that
extinguisher.”

“That’s comforting.”

Jake gulped the air when he stepped out onto the
flight deck. He always thought he could detect the
smell of oil in the processed air inside the
ship. The air inside had a distinctive odor and
right now he had had enough of it.

The sky was laced with broken clouds. The sea
looked almost black, except for the few spots where
the sunlight touched it. The task group was steaming
west around the southern edge of Sicily. The two
alert fighters were sitting in the hookup areas of the
waist catapults, and the crews in the cockpits
waved as he went by, then resumed reading their
paperback novels.

Jake saw Ray Reynolds standing by the port
catwalk near the optical landing system and walked
over to him. Reynolds was watching four marines in
camouflage fatigues install a fifty-caliber
machine gun in the catwalk. Jake knew that two
of the guns would be mounted on each side of the ship
during her upcoming port call.

“Afternoon, XO.”

Reynolds nodded at him, then resumed his
supervision of the marines. In a few minutes the
sergeant announced the gun was ready and sent
a private to the bridge for permission to test-fire
it.

“Sergeant, let’s see you swivel the gun through
its complete field of fire,” Reynolds said.

The sergeant did as requested. “Now depress
it fully.”

“The stern quadrant is completely naked,”
Reynolds muttered to Jake. “And if they get
within a hundred feet of the ship, these guns can’t be
depressed enough.” He spoke again to the sergeant:
“Okay. What’s the drill on test-firing?”

“Every man who will stand watch on these guns will fire
fifty rounds today, sir. We’ll throw some cans from
the galley off the bow and shoot at them as they float
by.”

“Try not to put any holes in those cans over
there,” Reynolds said, and gestured toward the
destroyer a mile away on the beam.

“We won’t, sir.”

Reynolds nodded and turned away. As he and
Grafton walked aft on the deck, he said,
“I’m going to arm the flight deck security watch
this time in port, CAG. Going to give them all
shotguns. Wish we had more M16’s.”
Reynolds threaded his way between two parked
Intruders and stopped at the after end of the flight
deck. He looked down into the wake, sixty feet
below. “I’m putting two marines up here with M16’s.

The liberty boats will be coming in to the fantail
He gestured downward with his thumb. The fantail was
the porch-like structure on the stern of the ship, immediately
under the flight deck. “And we’ll have a couple of
armed marines there to augment the master-at-arms force.
What else can you think of?”

“Looks to me like you have it covered. Are you
expecting trouble?”

Which was a polite way of asking if the XO had
seen an intelligence summary that Jake was not
privy to or had missed.

“Nope. Just worrying, as usual.” He
grinned, holding his upper lip down. “Don’t you do
that?”

“All the time,” Jake said truthfully. The two
men parted, and Jake walked slowly up the deck,
examining the airplanes parked in rows.

He paused beside an F-A18 Hornet and
stared at it. Somehow it didn’t look quite right. It
took him half a minute before he realized the
plane had only eight tie-down chains
holding it to the deck instead of the requisite ten.
He continued up the deck, checking each plane for
open access doors and properly installed chains and
chocks. His eyes roved freely while he thought
about Bull Majeska and empty fire bottles and
dead bombardiers. When he left the flight deck,
he went through Flight Deck Control and told the
handler about the Hornet that needed more chains.

Late that night Jake finished the report on the
fire bottle affair and went to the bridge to see
Laird James. The captain was in his raised
chair on the port wing of the bridge and read the
report. Jake stood beside the chair and watched the
officer-of-the-deck, the OOD, discuss the
intricacies of a formation turn with the junior
officer-of-the-deck.