Nell Douglas looked this way and that, apparently searching for something to say.
Finally she sat her wineglass on the table and leaned forward slightly. She looked him in the eye. “It was wonderful the other night, and I am sure you are a fine person, but let’s leave it at that.”
He nodded and finished his drink.
“We grew up on opposite sides of the world.” She stood and held out her hand. “Thanks for the drink.”
“Sure.”
Jake stood and shook. She threaded her way through the potted jungle and made for the elevators.
“Did you get laid?” the Real McCoy asked late that night in their stateroom aboard ship.
“She said we grew up on opposite sides of the world.”
“You idiot. You’re supposed to fuck ’em, not discuss philosophy.”
“Well, it probably turned out for the best,” Jake said, thinking of Callie. He desperately wished she would write. She could write anything — if she would just put something in an envelope and stick a stamp on it.
He decided to write her.
He got a legal pad, climbed into the top bunk and adjusted the light just so. Then he began. He went through their relationship episode by episode, almost thought by thought, pouring out his heart. After eight pages he ground to a halt.
Every word was true, but he wasn’t going to send it. He wasn’t going to take the chance that he cared more than she did.
You aren’t going to get very far with the fairer sex if you aren’t willing to take some risks.
I’m tired of taking risks. Someone else can take a few.
Faint heart never won—
If she cared, she’d write. End of story.
The night before the ship weighed anchor Lieutenant Colonel Haldane asked Jake to come to his stateroom. According to the duty officer. Jake went.
Flap was already there sitting in the only chair. Jake sat on the colonel’s bed and Flap passed him a sheet of paper. It was a letter from the commander at Changi. Fight in the pavilion. Jake scanned it quickly and passed it back to Flap, who handed it to Haldane, who tossed it on his desk.
“The skipper of the ship got this. He wants me to investigate, take action, and draft a reply for his signature. What can you tell me?”
Jake told the colonel about the incident, withholding nothing.
“Any comments, Captain Le Beau?”
“No, sir. I think Mr. Grafton covered it.”
Haldane made a face. “Okay. That’s all. We’re having a back-in-the-saddle NATOPS do in the ready room at zero seven-thirty. See you there.”
Both the junior officers left. Jake closed the door behind him.
Twenty frames down the passageway he asked Flap, “Was that it? We aren’t in hack or candidates for keelhauling?”
“Naw. Haldane will apologize profusely to our allies, tell them that he’s ripped us a new one, and that’s that. It was just a friendly little social fight. What more could there be?”
Jake shrugged. “My hand’s still sore.”
“Next time kick ’em in the balls.”
17
At dawn one morning the task group weighed anchor and entered the Strait of Malacca. With Sumatra on the left and the Malay peninsula on the right, the ships steamed at 20 knots for the Indian Ocean, or the IO as the sailors called it, pronouncing each letter.
In the narrows the strait was a broad watery highway with land on each horizon. The channel was dotted with fishing boats and heavily traversed by tankers and freighters. As many as a half dozen of the large ocean-going ships were visible at any one time.
As usual in narrow waterways, the carrier’s flight deck and island superstructure were crowded with sightseeing sailors. Typically, Jake Grafton was among them, standing on the bow facing forward. With all of the great ship behind him the sensation was unique, almost as if one were a seabird soaring along at sixty feet above the water into the teeth of a 20-knot wind.
This morning Jake watched the steady stream of civilian ships and marveled. He had flown enough surface surveillance missions over the open ocean to “appreciate how empty the oceans of the earth truly were. Often he and Flap flew a two-hour flight and saw not a single ship, just endless vistas of empty sea and sky. Yet here the ships plowed the brown water like trucks thundering along an interstate highway.
A hundred years ago these waters hosted sailing ships. As he stood on the bow watching the ships and boats this morning he thought about those sailing ships, for Jake Grafton had a streak of romance in him about a foot wide. Clipper ships bound for China for a load of tea left England and the eastern ports of the United States and sailed south to round the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa. The sailors would have gotten close enough to land for a glimpse of Africa only in good weather. Then they crossed the vast Indian Ocean and entered this strait, where they saw land for the first time since leaving England or America. Months at sea working the ship, making sail, reefing in storms, watching the officers shoot the sun at noon and the stars at night when the weather allowed, then to hit this strait after circumnavigating half the globe — it was a great thing, a thing to be proud of, a thing to remember for the rest of their lives. Exotic China still lay ahead, but here the sailors probably saw junks for the first time, those flat-bottomed Chinese sailing ships that carried the commerce of the Orient. Here two worlds touched.
Jake looked at the freighters and tankers with new interest. Perhaps he should look into getting a mate’s license, consider the merchant marine after the Navy. It was a thing to think on.
Standing on the bow with the moist wind in his hair and the smell of the land filling his nostrils as the task group transited this narrow passage between two great oceans, he was struck by how large the earth really was, how diverse the human life, how many truths there must be. The U.S. Navy was a tiny part of it, surely, but only a tiny part. He had been confined long enough. He needed to reach out and embrace the whole.
The Indian Ocean lay ahead, beyond that watery horizon. The flying there would be blue water ops, without the safety net of a divert field ashore. The ship would be hundreds of miles from land, so when the planes burned enough fuel to get down to landing weight there would be no dry spot on earth they could reach with the fuel remaining in their tanks. They had to get aboard. Airborne tankers could provide fuel for another handful of attempts, but their presence would not change the scenario — every pilot would have to successfully trap or eject into the ocean.
Carrier aviation never gets easier. The challenge is to develop and maintain skills that are just good enough. In this war without bullets the stakes were human lives. Each pilot would have only his skill and knowledge to keep him alive in the struggle against the weather, chance, the vagaries of fate. Some would lose. Jake Grafton knew that as well as he knew his name. He might be one of them.
Thinking about that possibility as he stood here on the bow, he took a deep breath of the moist sea air and savored it.
A man never knows.
Well, he would do his best. That was all he could do. God had the dice, He would make the casts.
Jake was standing the squadron duty officer watch in the ready room one night when first Lieutenant Doug Harrison came in from a flight. He gave Jake his flight time figure and handed him the batteries from his emergency radio — the batteries were recharged in a unit above the duty officer’s desk — then dropped into the skipper’s empty chair as Jake annotated the flight schedule. Only then did Grafton turn and take a good look at the first-cruise pilot. His face was pasty and covered with a sheen of perspiration.