The crews were strapped into the airplanes. The pilot of the Phantom on Cat Four was reading a paperback novel, Jake could see, but he couldn’t make out the title.
On the deck behind the waist catapults sat two more fighters and a tanker on alert-fifteen status, which meant that their crews were flaked out in their respective ready rooms wearing all their flight gear, ready to run for the flight deck if the alarm sounded.
Alert duty kept flight crews busy any time that planes were not aloft. Except in waters just off the shore of the United States, it was rare for a carrier to be below alert-thirty status. Alert-fifteen was the usual status for the high seas, with alert-five reserved for the South China Sea during the war just ended or other locations where a possible threat existed. Today a possible threat existed. Intelligence expected the Soviets to try to overfly the carrier task group as it transited to Japan with land-based naval bombers from Vladivostok or one of the fields on Sakhalin Island or the Kamchatka peninsula.
The Russkis were going to have their work cut out for them overflying the ship in this low visibility, Jake thought, if they came at all. He sat watching the frigate on the port beam labor into the swells, ride up and then bury her bow so deep that white spray was flung aft all the way to the bridge.
Columbia’s ride was definitely more pleasant, but Jake could feel her pitching and see the leading edge of the angled deck rise and fall as she rode the restless sea.
To Jake’s right, in the bombardier-navigator’s seat, Flap Le Beau was reading a book by Malcolm X. Every time he got to the bottom of a page, he lowered the paperback and glanced around, his eyes scanning several times while he turned the page.
On one of Flap’s periscope sweeps, Jake asked, “That book any good?”
“Guy sure is interesting,” Flap said and resumed his reading.
“What’s it about?”
“You don’t know Malcolm X?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Hated honkeys. Believed the races should have their own enclaves, no mixing, that kind of stuff.”
“Do you believe that?” Jake asked tentatively. Flap was only the second or third black naval aviator Jake had ever met, and he had never discussed race with one.
“He had some good ideas,” Flap said, glancing at Jake. “But no, I think the races should be integrated. America is for Americans — black, white, brown, yellow, green or purple. But what about you? You’re from rural Virginia, nigger-hating redneck heaven, one-party bigot politics, pot-gutted klagel sheriffs— what d’ya think?”
“Ol’ X should’ve had you writing his speeches.”
Jake Grafton wasn’t stupid enough to proclaim himself a true believer in racial equality and brotherly love, certainly not to a black man probably capable of forcing him into the bigot cesspool with just a little effort.
“Who knows, if this Marine Corps gig goes sour, I might go into politics,” Flap allowed, then resumed reading his book.
His father had two black employees on his farm during the years Jake was growing up. They were both huge men, with hands like pie plates and upper arms larger than Jake’s thighs. They were barely able to sign their names but they could work any four white men into the dirt. In their younger days they had worked on railroad track-repair gangs swinging sledgehammers. “Georgia niggers,” his father, Sam, had called them. How they came to end up on the Grafton farm Jake never quite understood, but Isaiah and Frank allowed from time to time that they had absolutely no intention of crossing the Virginia line south-bound. Then they would shake their heads and laugh at some private joke, creating the vision in the boy’s mind of bloodthirsty southern sheriffs eager to avenge spectacular, unmentionable crimes.
His father treated the two blacks like the whites he hired occasionally, worked alongside them, shared food and smokes and jokes. Young Jake liked the men immensely.
Yet, like most of the boys of his generation in southwestern rural Virginia, he accepted racial segregation as natural, as unremarkable and logical as the deference men showed women and the respect accorded the elderly. That is, he did until 1963, the year he turned eighteen. One evening while watching the network news show footage of Negro children in Birmingham being blasted with streams from high-pressure fire hoses, his father had let out an oath.
“I guess it’s a damn good thing that I’m not colored,” Sam Grafton declared. “If I were, I’d get me a gun and go to Birmingham and start shooting some of those sons of bitches. And I’d start with that bastard right there!” His finger shot out and Jake found himself staring at the porky visage of Bull Connor.
“Sam!” exclaimed his mother disgustedly.
“Martha, what the hell do they have to do to get treated decent by whites? The colored people have put up with a hell of a lot more crap than any Christian should ever have to deal with. Those sons of bitches laying the wood to them aren’t Christians. They’re Nazis. It’s a miracle the colored people haven’t started shooting the damned swine.”
“Do you have to cuss like that?”
“It’s high time some white people got mad at those bigots,” Sam Grafton thundered. “I wish Jack Kennedy would get his ass out of his rocking chair and kick some butt. The President of the United States, saying there’s nothing he can do when those rednecks attack children! By God, if Bull Connor was black and those kids were white he’d be singing a different tune. He’s just another gutless politician scared of losing the bigot vote. Pfft!”
That evening had been an eye-opener for Jake. He started paying attention to the civil rights protests, listening to the arguments. His father had always been a bit different than his neighbors, marching to a different drummer. And he was usually right. He was that time, too, his son concluded.
Remembering that evening, he sighed, then glanced around the flight deck. People were lying on the deck beside their equipment, napping.
He was in the middle of a yawn when he heard the hiss of the flight deck loudspeaker system coming to life. “Launch the alert-five. Launch the alert-five. We have bogies inbound.”
The lounging men on the flight deck sprang into action. Jake Grafton twirled his fingers at the plane captain, received a twirl in response. He turned on the left engine-fuel master switch and pushed the start button. With a low moan the engine began to turn. When the RPM was high enough he came around the horn with the throttle, then sat watching the temperatures and RPMs rise while he pulled his helmet on.
By the time he got the second engine started and the canopy closed, the chopper on the cat tracks was engaging its rotors. The ship was turning — Jake could see the list on the flight deck — coming about forty degrees left into the wind. Now the deck leveled out. The Columbia’s rudder was centered. Thirty seconds later the angel lifted off. It left the deck straight ahead. When it was safely past the bow the chopper pilot laid it into a right turn.
Now the catapult shuttles were dragged back out of the water brakes into battery while the final checkers inspected the two fighters and gave their thumbs-up. Red-shirted ordnancemen pulled the safety pins from the missile racks and showed them to the pilots. The yellow-shirted taxi director gave the pilot of the plane in front of Jake a come-ahead signal and let him inch the last two feet forward onto Cat Three while the green-shirted catapult hook-up men crawled underneath with the bridle and two more greenies installed the hold-back bar, on the Phantom a ten-foot-long hinged strap with the hold-back shear-bolt attaching to the airplane’s belly and the other end going into a slot in the deck. The weight-board man flashed his board at the pilot and got a thumbs-up, then showed it to the cat officer, who also rogered. The whole performance was a ballet of multicolored shirts darting around, near and under the moving fighter, each man intent on doing his job perfectly.