Firespill (26 page)

By the time he got back to barracks at Freeth at about nine-thirty that night, Si Johnson was resolved to try a new sport, not because he had been soundly thrashed—he didn’t care whether he lost or won—but because the game was starting to bore him. Maybe he would try squash. Some of the other guys in the wing had said that you got the feel of squash much quicker and that for the same amount of time you could keep much fitter. The question of fitness, indeed the idea of sports in general, wouldn’t have mattered to Johnson except that next month the whole wing would have to undergo the detailed yearly physical. Burke, the captain of
Ebony I
and leader of the wing, had said he would have any man who was overweight grounded until he lost the additional poundage. It wasn’t that Si Johnson liked flying so much that grounding would have added to his general apathy, but at least he was occupied while he was in the air.

As he showered, Johnson let the water pound on the back of his neck to relieve the headache that he believed the new lights at the court had given him. His leg was still shaking, but the trembling in his arm had largely subsided. He glanced at his watch. It was 9:40. At around a quarter to ten Stokely, the front gunner in
Ebony I
, would come with the jeep to collect him and the rest of the three-plane Ebony group and take them to the officers’ mess for the surprise birthday party that the nine-plane wing was about to spring on Noel Burke. At forty, Burke was considered almost a grandfather by the younger members of the Seventeenth.

Si didn’t want to go to the party. He’d given up parties. He had nothing against the captain, but the drinks made him sick now and the talk was boring. He’d heard it all before: the same jokes, usually about prostitutes and homosexuals, in that order, and the tale of near escapes, in bedrooms and in bombers. And of course they still talked about Vietnam. They had loved Vietnam.

No matter what the protesting veterans in Washington said, the air force had loved Vietnam. It was easy enough to understand; you never had to see a face you killed, as the ground forces did. Most of the time you just dropped the load on some beautiful lettuce green and rust red papier-mâche map with all the hills in fascinating relief and all the people invisible. You just…

The pounding in his head got worse, spreading until it was a band of pain clamped to his temples. He turned the hot water off and the cold on full. While the rest of his body shivered from the shock the pain reluctantly withdrew, retreating low into his neck, where it continued to stab him but where it was more tolerable. He would mention the headaches to the doctor at the medical. Perhaps a flight would do him good. It was the fall, the sudden change in humidity, not the new lights, that was causing the pain. A more rarefied atmosphere might do him some good.

As he reluctantly pulled on a pair of long black woolen socks his mother had knitted him for the coming Alaskan winter, the jeep screamed to a stop and Stokely’s footsteps pounded outside the door. Simultaneously he heard the penetrating blast of the emergency takeoff alarm. Automatically he got up, opened the khaki green locker, and reached in for his flying suit.

“Party’s off, Si.” It was Stokely, framed by the doorway and practically exploding with excitement.

“Why?” asked Johnson, tom between relief that the celebration would not take place and apprehension about whatever it was that had preempted it.

“We’re up tonight—that’s why. Wild black yonder.”

Si zipped down the elasticized legs. “Mideast?” he asked.

“What—no, no. Nothing like that. It’s this frappin’ great fire that’s searin’ the pants off of everybody. Something to do with a rescue. We’re gonna have some fun. Some egg time at last—just in time. All this quiet was gettin’ on my nerves.”

Johnson carefully closed his locker and spun the combination lock drum.

“Bombs?”

“Yes, sir. Grade B—conventional, but eggs all the same. You’re gonna get a chance to show that new boy how good you are, eh? Bang! Right on target. Christ, it’ll be like Nam.”

Outside, Johnson saw that the jeep was being driven by Peters, the recently arrived replacement radar operator for
Ebony I
. Si turned to Stokely. “Sure it isn’t just a practice emergency run?”

“No, Daddy, this is for real. They’re setting up special briefing boards in the ops room.”

Peters nodded to Si with some deference. Fresh out of training school, he was still in awe of the Vietnam veterans. “Evening, sir.”

“Huh—oh, hi.”

Stokely put his arm around Si, and as the jeep started off down towards base center, he called over to Peters, “Hey, kid, it’s your lucky night. You’re flying with the
crème de la crème
. Right, Si?”

Si ignored him. The jeep pulled up at another hut, collected the electronics warfare officer for the lead bomber, and then went on to the briefing hall, into which men were filing as quietly as the swishing flying suits would allow them. The electronics expert remarked to Si. “Hey, I was there when the message came through. Capt’n Burke says the President himself asked for us. Reckon only the conventional wing can handle it.”

“Naturally,” added Stokely in a jocular mood. “We’re fast
and
sure—right, guys?”

“Right,” answered Peters, who was reveling in the easy camaraderie. It was already making him feel right at home. Si Johnson said nothing. His right arm and leg were starting to tremble again, and the veins on the right side of his head felt tight and swollen. He resolved to exercise more to work whatever it was out of his system.

Twelve hundred miles to the south and five hundred miles southeast of the firespill, the moon’s rays slipped through a break in the gathering stratus cloud over southern British Columbia and turned the surface of Harrison Lake from black to silver. In the hotel built around the hot springs on the south shore, guests were preparing for bed, though not necessarily for sleep.

Luxuriating in the deep, autumn-colored carpet and admiring herself in the gilded full-length mirror, Fran Lambrecker sprayed herself liberally with Chanel cologne, not caring whether it dampened the transparent red negligee that swept and clung about her. Indulging her rich-girl fantasies, she moved her head this way and that, opening and pouting her red lips in what she imagined would be alluring and provocative poses for some future lover. She could have done with less perfume, but Morgan liked the smell; he said it turned him on. Everything, it seemed, turned Morgan on, so much so that she was growing a little tired of his indiscriminate lust. He hung around her every waking moment like a stray dog around a bitch in heat, as if he had to fulfill a quota before he’d consider the money for the hotel well spent. But she put up with it. He wasn’t a bad sort, she thought. Maybe he did drink too much, but at least he never took himself too seriously, and in bed he was inventive in a clumsy sort of way. And whatever else, he loved fun.

She rarely thought of her husband these days. The three months they had been apart had finally convinced her that she wouldn’t see him anymore. She didn’t hate him—probably she never really had—but she had resented him. She had been constantly angry with him for his refusal to socialize, to “go out on the town” as she called it. After two years of marriage she had felt like a prisoner, with the sameness of each housebound day dragging on interminably. Now she knew she’d married too early—if she was ever meant to marry at all. Fran’s idea of a full life was to be always “doing different things,” which mostly seemed to mean to be sleeping with different men, as Lambrecker had suspected and Morgan was about to discover.

At the memory of her early romance with Lambrecker, her mouth twisted with disgust. She had been another woman then. She guessed it had all had something to do with the uniform; she had always found men in uniform attractive. Even Morgan, whose beer belly hung over his belt like a distended wine sack, looked nice in his “walking out” greens.

She looked out the window at the broad, moonlit lake, and to the west among the tall, dark pines she could see a long spiral of vapor escaping from the bubbling hot springs. It reminded her of a country song she had heard—something about love vanishing like steam from a cup of coffee. For her attraction for her husband had long gone. Once she had thought he was really romantic, but since then she had felt nothing, not even the last time he came home on leave. She was honest enough to hold herself largely responsible for what had happened to them. She had read in some women’s magazine that when couples finally reached the point of breaking up, they often discovered that despite all the problems, they really felt more for each other than they had believed. Fran knew that this wasn’t the case with them. Not with her, anyway. She had decided that she would tell him when he returned—but not to his face. He would go wild if she did that. Instead she would write him a letter. She hated writing letters, but she would keep it simple. Maybe it would be best to sign off “Love, Fran”—something nice, she thought.

Morgan had difficulty getting through the door, loaded down as he was with bottles of ginger ale, collins mix, and a king-sized bag of crushed ice in his determined effort to beat the cost of room service.

“My God!” Fran laughed. “What have you got?”

When he saw that Fran had changed into the negligee he had insisted on buying her from the hotel boutique, Morgan’s eyes bulged. “Geez,” he said, and began putting the bottles down with such haste that he dropped the ice.

“You’re a gorilla,” she protested gaily as he dragged her off the soft stool onto the deep shag. He went into a crouch position, then, grunting and letting his arms hang apelike, he proceeded to scratch his armpit in the manner of a baboon

She laughed aloud and threw her nightdress open. “Come on,” she said.

As he fumbled for the dresser light, she was happy that she did not feel at all guilty about what she was doing. She was enjoying it. She wished Lambrecker would stay away forever.

She put her arms around Morgan’s neck as he closed his eyes and buried his head in the rug, already starting to grunt. But Fran’s eyes stayed open in the darkness, and fear began to grow cold about her. She realized that all this time, ever since he had slammed the door three months ago, she had been acting as if Lambrecker were dead. Even when she had planned the final note to him a little while ago, she had composed it as if he would simply read it and everything between them would stop, just like that. But suddenly she remembered that the submarine was on its way back. What would he do when he found out—when he came home? He would probably threaten to kill her. He might smash into her with his fist…

With an effort, she closed her eyes and pulled hard at Morgan.

Nineteen

The roar of the bombers was deafening, each of the seventy-two Pratt and Whitney engines screaming in the darkness, gathering its twenty thousand pounds of thrust, as the nine B-52’s formed themselves into the three cells designated Ebony, Gold, and Purple, of three planes each, which together made up the wave.

One by one the bombers began “crabbing it,” sliding down the runway with their wheels turned at an angle into the crosswind. Quickly gathering speed, they thundered down the tarmac, each one rising into the night in a shattering crescendo that shook every window on the base.

Once airborne, Noel Burke, the aircraft commander of the lead bomber,
Ebony I
, and so commander of the wave, looked about him at the various pinpoints of the bombers’ takeoff lights to check the formation. The bomber to his left, number two of his cell, still had Southeast Asian combat markings—a khaki camouflage pattern on top and its belly painted pitch black to terrify civilian populations during daylight raids. It was a change, thought Burke, to be on a mission of mercy.

It was 2200 hours Pacific Time, and Si Johnson computed that the wave, traveling at six hundred miles per hour one thousand feet above the sea, ready for low bombing, would arrive at the sub site in thirty-seven minutes, at 2238, give or take a few minutes for possible change in wind speed due to the buildup of the southbound Arctic front. And they would also have to allow a minute or two for picking up Cape Bingham on the northern tip of Chichagof Island, their initial point of reference, or IP, before turning southwards towards the fire. There he, as radar navigator, would start his stopwatch and the bombing run would begin. He scanned his calculations again, in the faint hope that somewhere they could pick up a few extra minutes, even seconds. But the figures told him the same as before. At the most they would have an eleven-minute margin between the time they arrived and the end of the sub’s power and air.

Burke looked around to check the clusters of extender bombs on the aircrafts’ wings. With their eight-foot-long “hosepipes” sticking out in front, housing the delayed fuses for the high explosives, these bombs were too long for the main bays, which each carried eighty-four five-hundred-pound contact bombs. In all, each hundred-and-fifty-seven-foot-long B-52 in the wave could carry more bombs than fifteen of the B-17’s used in World War Two. In the old days, the President would have had to dispatch a hundred and thirty-five planes—nine squadrons of heavy bombers—to do the same job as these nine.

Burke tried to see whether the fine wires from the wings which would pull out the safety pins from the outside bombs were set properly, but he could not tell. Each plane carried forty thousand gallons of kerosene in its long wings, so the wingspan was in effect a hundred-and-eighty-five-foot fuel bladder. He would have to trust that the ground crew had done their job properly and that there would be no hung bombs left swinging under all that fuel after he pushed the release button.

Unlike the contact bombs housed in the main bays, the extender bombs on the wings were set to explode above and below the water. Normally he would be carrying rockets on the wings as well, but their nuclear heads were considered useless for the present purposes. Despite the absence of the nuclear tips, Burke viewed the mission as an excellent combat drill for his crews