“It could go at any time,” Jake said.
“I know.”
“Let’s get off this freq and talk to Black Eagle.”
Flap got on the radio as they climbed free of the clouds.
The turbulence ceased.
Left turn. Fly around the target and the strike group to seaward.
No. Right turn. Go around on the land side. The other planes would be leaving the target to seaward. Maybe at this altitude. No sense taking any more chances than—
An F-4 shot across the windscreen going from right to left. Before Jake could react the A-6 flew into his wash. Wham! The plane shook fiercely, then it was through.
“If that didn’t set the damned thing off, nothing will,” Flap said.
Like hell. The jolts and bumps might well be cumulative.
Jake concentrated on flying the plane. He was sweating profusely. Sweat stung his eyes. He stuck the fingers of his left hand under his visor and swabbed it away.
Black Eagle suggested a frequency switch to Cubi Point Approach. Flap rogered and dialed the radio.
They were at 18,000 feet now and well above the cloud tops.
Jake glanced at the armed bomb from time to time. If he pickled it the shock of the ejector foot smacking into the weapon to push it away from the rack might set it off.
If the bomb detonated he and Flap would never even know it.
One second they would be alive and the next they would be standing in line to see St. Peter.
What a way to make a living!
Just fly the airplane, fake. Do what you can and let God worry about the other stuff.
“Cubi Approach, War Ace Five Oh Seven. We have an armed Mark Eighty-Four hanging on Station One. We’re carrying three more Mark Eighty-Fours, but they are unarmed. After we land we want to park as far away from everything as possible. And could you have EOD meet us?” EOD stood for explosive ordnance disposal.
“Roger live weapon. We’ll roll the equipment and call EOD.”
Cubi Point was the U.S. naval air station on the shore of Subic Bay, the finest deep-water port in the western Pacific. It had one concrete runway 9,000 feet long. Today Jake Grafton flew a straight-in approach over the water, landing to the northeast.
He flared the Intruder like he was flying an Air Force jet. He retarded the engines to idle, pulled the nose up and greased the main mounts on. He held the nose wheel off the runway until the airspeed read 80 knots, then he lowered it as gently as possible. Only then did he realize that he had been holding his breath.
The tower directed him to taxi back to the south end of the runway and park on the taxiway. As he taxied he raised his flaps and slats and shut down his left engine. Then he opened the canopy and removed his oxygen mask. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his flight suit.
A fire truck was waiting when Jake turned off the runway. He made sure he was across the hold-short line, then eased the plane to a stop. One of the sailors on the truck came over to the plane with a fire bottle, a fire extinguisher on wheels. Jake chopped the right engine. On shutdown the fuel control unit dumped the fuel it contained overboard, and this fuel fell down beside the right main wheel. If the brake was hot the fuel could ignite, hence the fire bottle. The danger was nonexistent if you shut down an engine while taxiing because you were moving away from the jettisoned fuel. But there was no fire today.
One of the firemen lowered the pilot’s boarding ladder. Jake safetied his ejection seat and unstrapped. He left the helmet and mask in the plane when he climbed down.
The thermal casing on the armed bomb had indeed been peeled back by the blast of the slipstream, pulling the arming wire and freeing the fuse propeller.
Jake Grafton was standing there looking at it when he realized that a chief petty officer in khakis was standing beside him.
“I’m Chief Mendoza, EOD.”
Jake nodded at the weapon. “We were running an attack. I just happened to look outside for other planes just before we went into a cloud and saw the propeller spinning.”
Flap came over while Jake was speaking. He put his hands on his hips and stood silently examining the bomb.
“If you’d dropped it like that, sir, it might have gone off when the ejector foot hit it,” the chief said.
Neither airman had anything to say.
“Guess you guys were lucky.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I gotta screw that fuse out. We’ll snap a few photos first because we’ll have to do a bunch of paperwork and the powers that be will want photos. I suggest you two fellows ride on the fire truck. You don’t want to be anywhere around when I start screwing that fuse out.”
“I’ll walk,” Jake said.
Flap Le Beau headed for the fire truck.
The chief turned his back on the weapon while the firemen took photos. He was facing out to sea, looking at the sky and the clouds and the shadows playing on the water when Jake Grafton turned away and began walking.
The pilot loosened his flight gear. He was suddenly very thirsty, so he got out his water bottle and took a drink. The water was warm, but he drank all of it. His hands were shaking, trembling like an old man’s.
The heat radiated from the concrete in waves.
He wiped his face again with his sleeve, then half turned and looked back at the plane. The chief was still standing with his arms folded, facing out to sea.
As he walked Jake got a cigarette from the pack in his left sleeve pocket and lit it. The smoke tasted foul.
14
A week after Jake and Flap visited Cubi point for three whole hours, Columbia maneuvered herself against the carrier pier.
Subic Bay, Olongapo City across the Shit River, the BOQ pool, the Cubi O Club with its banks of telephone booths and the Ready Room Bar out back — Jake Grafton had seen it all too recently and it brought back too many memories.
He got a roll of quarters and sat in a vacant telephone booth with a gin and tonic, but he didn’t make a call. Callie wasn’t in Hong Kong — she was in Chicago. Mail was arriving regularly but there were no letters from her; in fact, she hadn’t written since he called her from Hawaii.
Somehow he had screwed it up. He sat in the phone booth smoking a cigarette and sipping the drink and wondered where it had gone wrong.
Well, you can’t go back. That’s one of life’s hard truths. The song only goes in one direction and you can’t run it backward.
Morgan McPherson, Corey Ford and the Boxman were gone, gone forever. Tiger Cole was undergoing rehab at the Naval Aeromedical Institute in Pensacola and working out each day in the gym where the AOCS classes did their thing, in that converted seaplane hangar on the wharf. Sammy Lundeen was writing orders at the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington, Skipper Camparelli was on an admiral’s staff at Oceana. Both the Augies had gotten out of the Navy — Big was going to grad school someplace and Little was in dental school in Philadelphia.
And he was here, sitting in fucking Cubi Point in a fucking phone booth with the door open, listening to a new crop of flyers get drunk and talk about going across the bridge tonight and argue about whether the whores of Po City were worth the risk.
They’re up there now near the bar, roaring that old song:
All his friends were getting on with their lives and he was stuck in this shithole at the edge of the known universe. The war was over and he had no place to go. The woman he wanted didn’t want him and the flying wasn’t fun anymore. It was just dangerous. That might be enough for the Real McCoy, but it wasn’t for Jake Grafton.