The Intruders (20 page)

“They aren’t gonna shoot all those missiles at the first American planes
they see,” CAG said softly. He always spoke softly so you had to listen
hard to catch his words.

“It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that half those missile launchers
are out of service for lack of maintenance. Be that as it may, these
numbers should dispel any notions anybody might have that smacking the
Russians is going be easy.

These people aren’t rice farmem-they are a first-class bluewater Navy.
Putting them under with conventional, free-fall bombs is going to be
really tough. We’re going to lose a lot of people and airplanes getting
it done.”

“We’ll probably never have to,” someone said, and three or four heads
bobbed in agreement.

“That’s right,” Kall said, almost whispering. “But if the order comes,
we’re going to be ready. We’re going to have a plan and we’re going to
have practiced our plan. We’re not going to try to invent the wheel
after war is declared.”

There were no more comments about the probability of war with the Soviet
Union.

“We’ll plan Alpha strikes,” CAG said. “When we get to the Sea of Japan
we’ll schedule some and see how much training we need to make that
option viable. At night and in bad weather, however, the A-6s are going
to have to go it alone. I’d like to have the A-6 crews run night
attacks against our own destroyers to develop a profile that gives them
the best chance of hitting the target and surviving.

Colonel Haldane and his people can work out a place to start and we’ll
go from there.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Haldane said.

ONE MORNING WHEN JAKE CAME INTO THE READY ROOM THE duty officer, First
Lieutenant Doug Harrison, motioned to him. “Sir, the skipper wants to
see you in his stateroom.”

“Sir! What is this, the Marines?”

“Well, we try.”

Jake sighed. “You know what it’s about?”

“No, sir.”

“For heaven’s sake, my name is Jake.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You try too hard. Let your hair grow out to an inch.

Take a day off from polishing your shoes. Do twenty-nine pushups
instead of thirty. You can overdo this military stuff, Doug.”

The skipper’s stateroom was on the third deck, the one below the ready
room deck. Entry to the skipper’s subdivision was gained by lowering
yourself through a watertight hatch, then going down a ladder.

Jake knocked. The old man opened the door. “Come in and find a seat.”

The pilot did so. Colonel Haldane picked up a sheaf of paper and
waggled it, then tossed it back on his desk. “Your letter of
resignation. I have to put an endorsement on it.

What do you want me to say?”

Jake was perplexed. “Whatever you usually say, sir.”

“Technically your letter is a request to transfer from the regular Navy
to the Naval Reserve and a request to be ordered to inactive status. So
I have to comment about whether Or not you would be a good candidate for
a reserve commission. Why are you getting out?”

“colonel, in my letter I said-”

“I read it. ‘To pursue a civilian career.” Terrific. Why do you want
out?”

“The war’s over, sir. I went to AOCS because it was that or get
drafted. I got a regular Navy commission in 1971 because it was-
offered and my skipper recommended me, but I’ve never had the desire to
be a professional career officer. To be frank, I don’t think I’d be a
very good one. I like the flying, but I don’t think I’m cut out for the
rest of it. IT be the first guy to volunteer to come back to fight if
we have another war. I just don’t want to be a peacetime sailor.”

“You want to fly for the airlines?”

“I don’t know, sir. Haven’t applied to any. I might, though.”

“Pretty boring, if you ask me. Take off from point A and fly to point
B. Land. Taxi to the gate. Spend the night in a motel. The next day
fly back to A. You have to be a good pilot, I know, but after a while,
I think a man with your training and experience would go quietly nuts
doing something like that. You’d be a glorified bus driver.”

“You’re probably right, sir.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, Skipper.”

“Hells bells, man, why resign if you don’t have something to go to? Now
if you had your heart set on going to grad school or into your dad’s
business or starting a whorehouse in Mexicali, I’d say bon voyage-you’ve
done your bit. That doesn’t appear to be the case, though, I’ll send
this in, but you can change your mind at any time up to your release
date. Think it over.”

“Yessir.”

“Oh, by the way, the skipper of the Snake-eyes had some nice words for
the way you tanked Two Oh Seven and dropped him off on the downwind. A
quick, expeditious rendezvous, he said, a professional job.”

“Too bad Two Oh Seven caught fire.”

“As soon as he slowed to landing speed the gas seeped into the engine
bays around the edges of the engine-bay doors. The engines ignited the
fuel. From the time the fire first appeared visually, it was a grand
total of two and a half seconds before the hydraulic lines burned
through. The pilot punched when the nose started down. He pulled back
stick and there was nothing there.”

Jake Grafton just nodded. I I

“This is a man’s game,” Haldane said. He shrugged.

“There’s no glamour, no glory, the pay’s mediocre, the hours are
terrible and the stakes are human fives. You bet your LIFE and your
BN’s every time you strap on an airplane.”

The carrier and her escorts sailed west day after day. Columbia’s
airplanes remained on deck in alert status as her five thousand men
maintained their machinery, coped with endless paperwork, and drilled.
They drilled morning, afternoon, and evening: fire drills, general
quarters, nuclear, biological and chemical attack, collision, flooding,
engine casualty, and flight deck disasters. The damage control teams
were drilled to the point of exhaustion and the fire fighting teams did
their thing so many times they lost count.

The only breaks in the routine came in the wee hours of the night when
underway replenishment&-LTNREPS-were conducted. The smaller escorts
came alongside the carrier every third day to top their tanks with
NSFO-Navy standard fuel oil-from the carrier’s bunkers.

Nowhere was seamanship more on display than during the hours that two or
three vastly dissimilar ships steamed side by side through the heavy
northern Pacific night seas joined by hoses and cables.

The destroyers and frigates were the most fun to watch, and Jake Grafton
was often on the starboard catwalk to look and marvel. The smaller
warship would overtake the carrier from astern and slow to equal speed
alongside. The huge carrier would be almost rock-steady in the sea, but
the small ship would be pitching, rolling, and plunging up and down as
she rode the sea’s back. Occasionally the bow would bite so deep into
the sea that spray and foam would cascade aft, hiding the forward gun
mount from view and dousing everyone topside.

As the captain of the destroyer held his ship in formation, a line would
be shot across the seventy-five-foot gap between the ships to be snagged
by waiting sailors wearing hard hats and life jackets. This rope would
go into sheaves and soon a cable would be pulled across the river of
rushing water. When the cable was secured, a hose would go across and
soon fuel oil would be pumping. Three hoses were the common rig to
minimize the time required to transfer hundreds of tons of fuel. Through
it all the captain of the small boy stood on the wing of the bridge
where he could see everything and issue the necessary orders to the
steersman and engine telegraph operator to hold his ship in formation.

One night a supply ship came alongside. While Jake watched, a frigate
joined on the starboard side of the supply ship, which began
transferring fuel through hoses and supplies by high-line to both ships
at once. Now both the frigate and carrier had to hold formation on the
supply ship. To speed the process a CH-46 helicopter belonging to the
supply ship lifted pallets of supplies from the stem of the supply ship
and deposited them on the carrier’s flight deck, a VERTREP, or vertical
replenishment.

Here in the darkness on the western edge of the world’s greatest ocean
American power was being nakedly exercised. The extraordinary produce
of the world’s most advanced economy was being passed to warships in
stupendous quantity: fuel, oil, grease, bombs, bullets, missiles, toilet
paper, movies, spare parts, test equipment, paper, medical supplies,
canned soft drinks, candy, meat, vegetables, milk, flour, ketchup,
sugar, coffee,-the list went on and on. The supply ship had a trainload
to deliver.

The social organization and hardware necessary to produce, acquire and
transport this stupendous quantity of wealth to these powerful warships
in the middle of nowhere could be matched by no other nation on earth.
The ability to keep fleets supplied anywhere on the earth’s oceans was
the key ingredient in American sea power, power that could be projected
to anyplace on the planet within a thousand miles of saltwater. For
good or ill, these ships made Washington the most important city in the
world; these ships made the U.S. Congress the most important forum on
earth and the President of the United States the most powerful,
influential person alive; these ships enforced a global Pax Americana.

The whole thing was quite extraordinary when one thought about it, and
Jake Grafton, attack pilot, history major and farmer’s son, did think
about it. He stood under an A-6’s tail on the flight deck catwalk
wearing his leather jacket with the collar turned up against the wind
and chill, and marveled.

“I hear you’re going to get out,” the Real McCoy said one evening in the
stateroom.

“Yeah. At the end of the cruise.” Jake was in the top bunk reading his
NATOPS manual.

McCoy had the stock listing pages of the Wall Street Journal spread
across the floor, his cruise box, bunk and desk.

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his notebook full of
charts on his lap. He had fallen into the habit of annotating his
charts each evening after the ship received a mail delivery. He leaned
back against his locker, stretched out his legs, and sighed.

“I’ve thought about it,” he said, “Getting exiled to the Marines got the
wheels spinning. Being ten days behind the markets makes them spin
faster. But no.” He shrugged.

“Maybe one of these days, but not now.”

Jake put down his book. “What’s keeping you in? I thought you really
liked that investment stuff?”

“Yeah, makes a terrific hobby. I think my problem is I’m a compulsive
gambler. Stocks are the best game aroundthe house percentage is next to
nothing-just a brokerage fee when you trade. Yet it’s just money. On
the other hand, you take flying-that’s the ultimate gamble: your LIFE is
the -q Pon wager. And waving-every pass is a new game, a new challenge.
all you have is your wits and skill and the stakes are human fives.
There’s nothing like that in civilian life-except maybe trauma medicine.
If I got out I’d miss the flying and the waving too much.”

Jake was slightly stunned. He had never before heard flying described
as a gamble, a game, like Russian roulette.

Oh, he knew the risks, and he did everything in his power to minimize
them, yet here was a man for whom the risks were what made it worth
doing.

“If I were you,” Jake told the Real, “I wouldn’t make that crack about
waving down in the ready rooms.”

“Oh, I don’t. A lot of these guys are too uptight.”

“Yeah.”

“They think the LSO is always gonna save them. And that’s what we want
them to think, so they’ll always do what we tell them, when we tell
them. If they get the notion in their hard little heads that we might
be wrong, they’ll start second-guessing the calls. Can’t have that now,
can we?”

“Unimm.”

“But LSOs are human too. Knowing that you can make a mistake, that’s
what keeps you giving it everything you’ve got, a11 the time, every
time.”

“What if you screw up, like the CAG LSO did with me?

Only somebody dies. How are you going to handle that?”

“I don’t know. That’s the bad thing about it. You do it for the
challenge and you know that sooner or later the ax will fall and you’re
going to have to live with it. That’s why flying is easier. If you
screw up in the cockpit, you’re just dead. There’s a lot to be said for
betting your own ass and not someone else’s.”

“Aren’t many things left anymore that don’t affect someone else,” Jake
muttered.

“I suppose,” said the Real McCoy, and went back to annotating his stock
charts.

Columbia and her retinue of escorts entered the Sea of Japan one morning
in late July through the Tsugaru Strait between the islands of Hokkaido
and Honshu. Transiting the Strait, the five-minute alert fighters were
parked just short of the catapults with their crews strapped into the
cockpits, but a mob of sailors stood and sat around the edge of the
flight deck wherever there was room between the planes. Some were
off-duty, others had received their supervisors’ permission to go
topside for a squint, many worked on the flight deck.

Land was visible to the north and south, blue, misty, exotic and
mysterious to these young men from the cities, suburbs, small towns and
farms of America. That was Japan out there-geisha girls, kimonos, rice
and raw fish, strange temples and odd music and soft, lilting voices
saying utterly incomprehensible things. And they were here looking at
it!

Several large ferries passed within waving distance, and the Japanese
aboard received the full treatment-hats and arms and a few shirts.
Fishing vessels and small coasters rolling in the swells were similarly
saluted as the gray warships passed at fifteen knots.