“Did he know about the possibility of the VDI coming out?”
“No. He didn’t.”
Jake turned and walked away without another word.
He was sitting in his stateroom at his desk when the Real McCoy came in. The only light was the ten-watt fluorescent tube above Jake’s desk. McCoy seated himself on his bunk.
“Take a hike, will ya, Real? I need some time alone.”
McCoy thought about it for a few seconds. “Sure,” he said, and left.
Summer in Virginia was his favorite time of year. Everything was growing, the deer were lazy and fat, the squirrels chattered in the trees. The sun there would be hot on your back, the sweat would dampen your shirt. You would feel good as you used your muscles, accomplished tangible work that stood as hard evidence of the effort that had been put into it. The folks up and down the road were solid, hard-working people, people to stand with in good times and bad. And he had given that up for this…
Sitting in his stateroom Jake Grafton could hear the creaks and groans of the ship, the noises made by the steel plates as she rode through the seaway. And man-made noises, lots of them, tapping and hammering, chipping, pinging, clicking, grinding…slamming as doors and hatches were opened and closed.
Responsibility — they give you a tiny little job and you fuck it up and someone dies. In twelve seconds. Twelve lousy seconds…
And he had tried hard. He had taken the time, made the effort to do it right. He had written point after point, gone through the CV NATOPS page by page, paragraph by paragraph. He had covered every facet of carrier operations that he knew about. And had forgotten one item, a scintilla of information that he had heard once, somewhere, about an improperly secured VDI that slid four inches out of the tray in which it sat when the plane went down the catapult. Probably there were messages about it, several years ago, but the Marines didn’t take cat shots then and the info apparently went in one official grunt ear and out the other. Now, when they needed to know that tidbit, he had forgotten to tell them.
Luck is really a miserable bitch. Just when you desperately need her to behave she sticks the knife in and twists it, leering at you all the while.
Rory Smith was dead. No bringing him back. All the teeth gnashing, hair pulling, hand wringing and confessions in the world won’t raise him from the Pacific and breathe life back into his shattered body. The cockpit of War Ace 511 was his coffin. He was in it now, down there on the sea floor. The sea will claim his body and the airplane molecule by molecule, until someday nothing remains. He will then be a part of this ocean, a part of the clouds and the trade winds and the restless blue water.
Jake opened his safe and got out a bottle of whiskey. He poured himself a drink, raised it to Rory Smith, and swallowed it down.
The liquor made him sleepy. He climbed into the top bunk.
This guilt trip was not good. Yet at least it gave him the proper perspective to view the flying, the ship, the Navy, and all those dead men. Morgan McPherson, the Boxman, Frank Allen, Rory Smith, all those guys. All good dead men. All good. All dead. All dead real damn good.
He was going to get out of the Navy, submit a letter of resignation.
Never again. I’m not going to stand in the ready room any more helplessly watching videotapes of crashes. I’m not going to any more memorial services. I’m not packing any more guys’ personal possessions in steel footlockers and sending them off to the parents or widow with any more goddamn little notes telling them how sorry I am. I’m not going to keep lying to myself that I am a better pilot than they were and that is why they are dead and I’m not. I’ve done all that shit too much. The guys that still have the stomach for it can keep doing it until they are each and every one of them as dead as Rory Smith but I will not. I have had enough.
10
Jake and Flap flew a tanker hop the next afternoon, which was the last scheduled flying day before the ship entered Pearl Harbor. They were in the high orbit, flying the five-mile arc around the ship at 20,000 feet, when Flap said, “I hear you are putting in a letter of resignation.”
Since it wasn’t a question, Jake didn’t reply. He had talked to the first-class yeoman in the air wing office this morning, and apparently the yeoman talked to the Marines.
“That right?” Flap demanded.
“Yeah.”
“You know, you are one amazing dude. Yesterday afternoon you dropped six five-hundred-pounders visually and got four bull’s-eyes, then did six system bore-sights and got three more. Seven bull’s-eyes out of twelve bombs. That performance puts you first in the squadron, by the way.”
This comment stirred Jake Grafton. In the society of warriors to which he belonged it was very bad form to brag, to congratulate yourself or listen placidly while others congratulated you on your superb flying abilities. The fig leaf didn’t have to cover much, but modesty required that he wave it. “Pure luck,” Jake muttered. “The wind was real steady, which is rare, and—”
Flap steamed on, uninterested in fig leaves. “Then you motor back to the ship and go down the slide like you’re riding a rail, snag an okay three-wire, find out a guy crashed, announce it’s all your fault because you knew something he didn’t, and submit a letter of resignation. Now is that weird or what?”
“I didn’t announce anything was my fault.”
“Horse shit. You announced it to yourself.”
“I didn’t—”
“I had a little talk with the Real McCoy last night,” Flap explained. “You were moping down in your room. You sure as hell weren’t crying over Rory Smith — you hardly knew the guy. You were feeling sorry for yourself.”
“What an extraordinary insight, Doctor Freud! I can see now why I’m so twisted — when I was a kid my parents wouldn’t let me screw my kitty cat. Send me a bill for this consultation. In the meantime shut the fuck up!”
Silence followed Jake’s roar. The two men sat staring into the infinity of the sky as the shadow cast by the canopy bow walked across their laps. This shadow was the only relief from the intense tropic sunshine which shone down from the deep, deep blue.
“Hard to believe that over half the earth’s atmosphere is below us,” Flap said softly. “Without supplemental oxygen, at this altitude, most fit men would pass out within thirty minutes. You know, you’ve flown so many times that flying has probably become routine with you. That’s the trap we all fall into. Sometimes we forget that we are really small blobs of protoplasm journeying haphazardly through infinity. All we have to sustain us are our little lifelines. The oxygen will keep flowing, the engines will keep burning, the plane will hold together, the ship will be waiting…Well, listen to the news. The lifelines can break. We are like the man on the tightrope above Niagara Falls: the tiniest misstep, the smallest inattention, the most minuscule miscalculation, and disaster follows.”
Flap paused for a moment, then continued: “A lot of people have it in their heads that God gave them a guarantee when they were born. At least seventy years of vigorous life, hard work will earn solid rewards, your wife will be faithful, your sons courageous, your daughters virtuous, justice will be done, love will be enough — in the event of problems, the manufacturer will set things right. Like hell! The truth is that life, like flying, is fraught with hazards. We are all up on that tightrope trying to keep our balance. Inevitably, people fall off.”
In spite of himself Jake was listening to Flap. That was the problem with the bastard’s monologues — you couldn’t ignore them.
“I think you’re worth saving, Grafton. You’re the best pilot I’ve met in the service. You are very very good. And you want to throw it all away. That’s pretty sad.”