“Yessir,” Harrison said as his squadron mates hooted.
Jake had been spending at least half his time in the squadron maintenance department, and now the skipper made it official. Jake was to assist the maintenance officer with supply problems.
The squadron certainly had supply problems. Spare parts for the planes were almighty slow coming out of the Navy supply system. The first thing Jake did was to sit down with the book and check to see if the requisitions were correctly filled out. He found a few errors but concluded finally that the supply sergeant knew what he was doing. Then he sat down for a long talk with the sergeant.
Armed with a list of all the parts that were on back order, he went to see the ship’s aviation supply officer, a lieutenant commander in the Supply Corps, a staff corps that ranked with law and medicine. Together they went over Jake’s list, a computer printout, then sorted through the reams of printouts that cluttered up the supply office. Finally they went to the storerooms, cubbyholes all over the ship crammed with parts, and compared numbers.
When Jake went to see Colonel Haldane after three days of this, he had several answers. The erroneous requisitions were easily explained — there were actually fewer than one might expect. Yet the Marine sergeant was the odd man out with the Navy supply clerks, who were giving him no help. The system would not work if the people involved were not cooperating fully and trying to help each other.
The most serious problem, Jake told the colonel, was the shortages on the load-out manifest when the ship put to sea. Parts that should be aboard the ship weren’t. Related to this problem was the fact that the supply department had stored some of its inventory in the wrong compartments, effectively losing a substantial portion of the inventory that was aboard. This, he explained, was one reason the clerks were less than helpful with the squadron supply sergeant — they didn’t want to admit that they couldn’t find spare parts that their own records showed they had.
Lieutenant Colonel Haldane went to see CAG, the air wing commander, and together they visited the ship’s supply officer, then the executive officer. Jake didn’t attend these meetings but he read one of the messages the captain of the ship sent out about shortages in the load-out manifest. Sparks were flying somewhere. Two chief petty officers in the supply department were given orders back to the States. Soon parts began to flow more freely into the squadron’s maintenance department. One evening the supply sergeant stopped Jake in the passageway and thanked him.
It was a pleasant moment.
One day the flight schedule held a surprise. From the distant top branches of the Pentagon aviary came tasking for flights to photograph estuaries along the coast of North Vietnam. Told to stay just outside the three-mile limit, the aircrews marveled at these orders. They knew, even if the senior admirals did not, that even if the North Viets were preparing a mighty fleet to invade Hawaii and they managed to get photographs of the ships, with soldiers marching aboard carrying signs saying WAIKIKI OR BUST, the politicians in Washington would not, could not renew hostilities with the Communists in Hanoi. Still, orders were orders. In Ready Four the A-6 crews loaded 35-mm cameras with film, hung them around the BNs’ necks, and went flying.
There were no enemy warships lurking in the estuaries. Just a few fishing boats.
It was weird seeing North Vietnam again, Jake told himself as he flew along at 3,000 feet, 420 knots, dividing his attention between the coast and his electronic countermeasures — ECM— alarms as Flap Le Beau busied himself with a hand-held 35-mm camera. The gomers were perfectly capable of squirting an SA-2 antiaircraft missile out this way, even if he was over international waters. Or two or three missiles. He kept an eye on the ECM and listened carefully for the telltale sounds of radar beams painting his aircraft.
And heard nothing. Not even a search radar. The air was dead.
The land over there on his right was partially obscured by haze, which was normal for this time of year. Yet there it was in all its pristine squalor — gomer country, low, flat and half-flooded. The browns and greens and blues were washed out by the haze. The place wasn’t worth a dollar an acre, and certainly not anybody’s life. That was the irony that made it what it was, a miserable land reeking of doom and pointless death.
Looking at it from this angle four miles off the coast, from the questionable safety of a cockpit, he could feel the horror, could almost see it, as if it were as real and tangible as fog. All those shattered lives, all those terrible memories…
They had fuel enough for thirty minutes of this fast cruising, then they planned to turn away from the coast and slow down drastically to save fuel. First Lieutenant Doug Harrison was somewhere up north just now, taking a peek into Haiphong Harbor. Grafton would meet him over the ship.
They were fifteen minutes into their mission when Jake first heard it — three different notes in his ears, notes with a funny rhythm. Da-de-duh…da-de-duh…
He reached for the volume knob on the ECM panel. Yes, but now there were four notes.
“Hear that?” he asked Flap.
“Yeah. What is it?”
“Sounds like a raster scan.”
“It’s a MiG or F-4, man. Look, the AI light is illumin—”
He got no more out because Jake Grafton had rolled the plane ninety degrees left and slapped on five G’s as he punched out some chaff.
When the heading change was about ninety degrees, Jake rolled out some of the bank and relaxed the G somewhat. The coast was behind him and he was headed out to sea. The Air Intercept light remained illuminated and the tone continued in their ears, although it was back to three notes, a pause, then the three notes again.
“We’re on the edge of his scan, but he sees us all right,” Flap said.
“Hang on.”
Throttles forward to the stops, Jake lowered the left wing and pulled hard until he had turned another ninety degrees. Now he was heading north. He let the nose drop and they slanted down toward the ocean. Meanwhile Flap was craning his head to see behind. Jake was looking too, then coming back inside to scan the instruments. Outside again…too many puffy clouds. He saw nothing.
The adrenaline was really pumping now.
“See anything?” he demanded of Flap.
“You’ll be the first to hear if I do. I promise.”
Probably a Phantom, but it could be a MiG! Out over the ocean, in international waters. If it shot them down, who would know?
Or care?
Goddamn!
This A-6 was unarmed. Sidewinders could be fitted but Jake had never carried one, not even in training. This was an attack plane, not a fighter. And there was no gun. For reasons known only to God and Pentagon cost efficiency experts, the Navy had bought the A-6 without any internal guns. Against an enemy fighter it was defenseless.
The raster beat was tattooing their eardrums. Now they had a two-ring-strength strobe on the small Threat Direction Indicator — TDI. Almost directly aft.
He did another square corner, turning east again, then retarded the throttles to idle to lower the engines’ heat signature and kept the plane in a gentle descent to maintain its speed. The enemy plane extended north, then turned, not as sharply. Now it was at five o’clock behind them.
Jake looked aft. Clouds. Oh, sweet Jesus! Dit-da-de-duh, dit-da-de-duh, dit-da-de-duh…the sound was maddening.
He was running out of sky. Passing eleven hundred feet. The ocean was down here.
He slammed the throttles full forward. As the engines wound up he pushed the nose over to convert what altitude he had into airspeed. He bottomed out at four hundred feet on the altimeter with 500 knots on the airplane. He pulled, a nice steady four-G pull.