The Bridges at Toko-ri (3 page)

“I see him,” Nestor said.

Mike immediately called to the wingman: “1592. Go on home. This is Mike Forney and everything’s under control.”

“Mike!” the wingman called. “Save that guy.”

“We always save ’em. Scram”

“That guy down there is Harry Brubaker.
The one whose wife and kids are waiting for him in Yokosuka.
But he
don’t
know it. Save him!”

Mike said to Nestor, “You hear that? He’s the one whose wife and kids came out to surprise him.”

“He looks froze,” Nestor said, lowering the sling.

Suddenly Mike’s voice lost its brashness. “Nestor,” he said quietly, “if you have to jump in … I’ll stay here till the other copter gets you.”

In dismay, Nestor watched the sling drift past the downed pilot and saw that the man was too frozen to catch hold. So he hauled the sling back up and said, “I’ll have to go down.”

Voluntarily, he fastened the sling about him and dropped into the icy waves.

“Am I glad to see you!” the pilot
cried.

“He’s OK,” Nestor signaled.

“Lash him in,” Mike signaled back.

“Is that Mike?
With the green hat?”

“Yep.”

“My hands won’t ...”

They tried four times to do so simple a thing as force the sling down over the pilot’s head and arms but the enormous weight of water-soaked clothing made him an inert lump. There was a sickening moment when Nestor thought he might fail. Then, with desperate effort, he jammed his right foot into the pilot’s back and shoved. The sling caught.

Nestor lashed it fast and signaled Mike to haul away. Slowly the pilot was pulled clear of the clutching sea and was borne aloft. Nestor, wallowing below, thought, “There goes another.”

Then he was alone. On the bosom of the great sea he was alone and unless the second helicopter arrived immediately, he would die. Already, overpowering cold tore at the seams of his clothing and crept in to get him. He could feel it numb his powerful hands and attack his strong legs. It was the engulfing sea, the icy and deadly sea that he despised and he was deep into it and his arms were growing heavy.

Then, out of the gathering darkness, came the
Hornet
’s copter.

So Mike called the
Savo
and reported, “Two copters comin’ home with two frozen mackerel.”

“What was that?” the
Savo
asked gruffly.

“What I said,” Mike replied, and the two whirly birds headed for home, each dangling below it the freezing body of a man too stiff to crawl inside.

Meanwhile Admiral Tarrant was faced with a new problem. The downed pilot had been rescued but the incoming wingman had fuel sufficient for only one pass, and if that pass were waved off the pilot would have to crash land into the sea and hope for a destroyer pickup, unless one of the copters could find him in the gathering dusk.

But far more important than the fate of one Banshee were the nineteen ships of the task force which were now closing the hundred fathom mark. For them to proceed farther would be to invite the most serious trouble. Therefore the admiral judged that he had at most two minutes more on course, after which he would be forced to run with the wind, and then no jet could land, for the combined speed of jet and wind would be more than 175 miles, which would tear out any landing hook and probably the barriers as Well. But the same motive that had impelled the wingman to stay at the scene of the crash, the motive that forced Nestor Gamidge to plunge into the icy sea, was at work upon the admiral and he said, “We’ll hold the wind a little longer. Move a little closer to shore.”

Nevertheless, he directed the four destroyers on the forward edge of the screen to turn back toward the open sea, and he checked them on the radar as they moved off. For the life of one pilot he was willing to gamble his command that there were no mines and that Russia had no submarines lurking between him and the shore.

“1592 approaching,” the squawk box rasped.

“Warn him to come straight in.”

Outside the bull horn growled, “Prepare to land last jet, straight in.”

Now it was the lead cruiser’s turn to leave the formation but the
Savo
rode solemnly on, lingering to catch this last plane. On the landing platform Beer Barrel’s watcher cried, “Hook down, wheels down.
Can’t see flaps.”

The telephone talker shouted, “Pilot reports his flaps down.”

“All down, Beer Barrel droned.

“Clear deck!”

“Clear deck.”

Now even the carrier
Hornet
turned away from the hundred fathom line and steamed parallel to it while the jet bore in low across her path. Beer Barrel, on his wooden platform, watched it come straight and low and slowing down.

“Don’t watch the sea, Junior,” he chanted. “Watch me. Hit me in the kisser with your left wing tank and you’ll be all right, Junior.” His massive arms were outstretched with the paddles parallel to the deck and the jet screamed in, trying to adjust its altitude to the shifting carrier’s.

“Don’t fly the deck, Junior!” roared Beer Barrel and for one fearful instant it looked as if the onrushing jet had put itself too high. In that millionth of a second Beer Barrel thought he would have to wave the plane off but then his judgment cried that there was a chance the plane could make it. So Beer Barrel shouted, “Keep comin’,
Junior
!” and at the last moment he whipped the right paddle across his heart and dropped the left.

The plane was indeed high and for one devastating moment seemed to be floating down the deck and into the parked jets. Then, when a crash seemed inevitable, it settled fast and caught number nine. The jet screamed ahead and finally stopped with its slim nose peering into the webs of the barrier.

“You fly real
good
, Junior,” Beer Barrel said, tucking the paddles under his arm, but when the pilot climbed down his face was ashen and he shouted, “They rescue Brubaker?”

“They got him.”

The pilot seemed to slump and his plane captain ran up and caught him by the arm and led him to the ladder, but as they reached for the first step they stumbled and pitched forward, so swift was the
Savo
’s groaning turn back out to sea.

As soon as the copters appeared with little Gamidge and the unconscious body of the pilot dangling through the icy air, Admiral Tarrant sent his personal aide down to sick bay to tell the helicopter men he would like to see them after the flight doctor had taken care of them. In a few minutes they arrived in flag plot, Forney in trim aviator’s flight jacket and Gamidge in a fatigue suit some sizes too large.

The admiral poured them coffee and said, “Sit down.” Forney grabbed the comfortable corner of the leather davenport on which the admiral slept when he did not wish to leave this darkened room of radar screens, repeating compasses and charts, but Gamidge fumbled about until the admiral indicated.
where
he was to sit. Pointing at the squat Kentuckian with his coffee cup, the admiral said, “It must have been cold in the water.”

“It was!” Forney assured him. “Bitter.”

“I hope the doctor gave you something to warm you up.”

“Nestor’s too young to drink,” Forney said, “but I had some.”

“You weren’t in the water.”

“No, sir, but I had the canopy open.”

“How’s the pilot?”

“When
me
and Gamidge go out for them we bring them back in good shape.”

“They tell me he wasn’t able to climb into the sling.”

“That pilot was a real man, sir.
Couldn’t move his hands or arms but he never whimpered.”

“Because he fainted,” Nestor explained.

The admiral invariably insisted upon interviewing all men who did outstanding work and now he pointed his cup at Gamidge again. “Son, do you know any way we could improve the rescue sling?”

The little Kentuckian thought a long time and then said slowly, “Nope. If their hands freeze somebody’s got to go into the water to get them.”

The admiral put his cup down and said brusquely, “Keep bringing them back. Navy’s proud of men like you.”

“Yes, sir!”
Forney said. He always pronounced
sir
with an insinuating leer, as if he wished to put commissioned officers at ease. Then he added, “There is one thing we could do to make the chopper better.”

“What’s that?”

“I got to operate that sling quicker. Because it seems like Nestor goes into the sea almost every time.”

“You know what changes to make?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then make them.”

The two enlisted men thanked the admiral and as they went down the ladder Tarrant heard Forney ask, “Nestor, why’d you stand there with your mouth shut, like a moron? Suppose he is a mean old bastard. No reason to be scared of him.”

“By the way,” the admiral called. “Who was the pilot?”

“Brubaker, sir,” Forney cried, unabashed.

The name struck Tarrant with visible force. He backed into the darkened flag plot and steadied himself for a moment. “Brubaker!” he repeated quietly.
“How strange that it should have been Brubaker!”

Shaken, he slumped onto the leather davenport and reached for some papers which had been delivered aboard ship by dispatch plane that afternoon.
“Brubaker!”
He scanned the papers and called sick bay.

“Doctor,” he asked, “any chance I could talk with Brubaker?”

A crisp voice snapped back, “Admiral, you know the man’s suffered exposure.”

“I know that, but there’s an urgent matter and I thought that when he found himself in good shape ...” He left it at that.

Then he thought of Brubaker, a twenty-nine-year-old civilian who had been called back into service against his will. At the start of the cruise he had been something of a problem, griping ceaselessly about the raw deal the navy had given him, but gradually he had become one of the two or three finest pilots. He still griped, he still damned the navy, but he did his job. The admiral respected men like that.

But Brubaker had a special significance, for on recent cruises Admiral Tarrant had adopted the trick of selecting some young man of about the age and rank his older son would have attained had the Japs not shot him down while he was trying to launch a navy fighter plane on the morning of Pearl Harbor. Tarrant found satisfaction in watching the behavior of such pilots, for they added meaning to his otherwise lonely life. But in the case of Harry Brubaker the trick had come close to reality. The Banshee pilot had the quick temper of his sons, the abiding resentments,
the
courage.

Admiral Tarrant therefore desperately wanted to leave flag plot and go down into the ship and talk with Brubaker, but custom of the sea forbade this, for the captain of any ship must be supreme upon that ship, and even the flag admiral who chances to make his quarters aboard is a guest. So Admiral Tarrant was cooped up in flag plot, a tiny bedroom and a special bridge reserved for his use. That was his country and there he must stay.

There was a knock upon the door and the aide said, “Sir,
it’s
Brubaker!”

The good-looking young man who stuck his head in was obviously a civilian. He wore two big bathrobes and heavy woolen socks but even if he had worn dress uniform he would have been a civilian. He was a little overweight, his hair was a bit too long and he wasn’t scared enough of the admiral. Indelibly, he was a young lawyer from Denver, Colorado, and the quicker he got out of the navy and back into a courtroom, the happier he’d be.

“You can scram now,” he told the medical corpsman
who
had brought him up to the admiral’s country.

“Come in, Brubaker,” the admiral said stiffly.
“Cup of coffee?”
As he reached for the cup Brubaker didn’t exactly stand at attention but the admiral said quickly, “Sit down, son.
How’s the Banshee take
the water?”

“All right, if you fly her in.”

“You keep the tail down?”

“I tried to. But as you approach the water every inclination is to land nose first. Then from way back in the past I remembered an October night when our family was burning leaves and at the end my mother pitched a bucket of water on the bonfire. I can still recall the ugly smell.
Came back to me tonight.
I said, ‘If I let water get into the engines I’ll smell it again.’ So I edged the plane lower and lower.
Kept the engines up and the tail way down.
When the nose finally hit I was nearly stopped. But I was right. There was that same ugly smell.”

“How was the helicopter?”

“’That kind in back deserves a medal.”

“They handle the rescue OK?”

“This man Forney.
When I looked up and saw that crazy hat I knew I had it knocked.”

Admiral Tarrant took a deep gulp of coffee and studied Brubaker across the rim of his cup. He knew he oughtn’t to discuss this next point with a junior officer but he had to talk with someone. “You say the green hat gave you a little extra fight?”

“You’re scared. Then you see an opera hat coming at you out of nowhere. You relax.”

“I would. Forney was in here a few minutes ago. Put me right at ease. Implied I was doing a fair job. You’ve got to respect a character like that. But the funny thing is ...” He looked into his cup and said casually, “Captain of the ship’s going to get rid of Forney.
Says the hat’s an outrage.”

Brubaker knew the admiral was out of line so he didn’t want to press for more details but he did say, “The pilots’d be unhappy.”

The admiral, far back in his corner of the davenport, studied the bundled-up young man and jabbed his coffee cup at him. “Harry, you’re one of the finest pilots we have. You go in low, you do the job.”

Brubaker grinned. He had a generous mouth and even teeth. His grin was attractive. “From you, sir, I appreciate that.”

“Then why don’t you stay in the navy?
Great future here for you.”

The grin vanished. “You know what I think of the navy, sir.”

“Still bitter?”

“Still.
I was unattached. The organized units were drawing pay. They were left home. I was called. Sometimes I’m so bitter I could bitch up the works on purpose.”