He wasn’t concentrating hard enough. Attempting to rendezvous on a single, flashing light, in a dark universe devoid of any other feature…it was difficult at best and impossible if you weren’t completely focused.
Flap extended the drogue as Jake crossed behind the tanker and surfaced on his right side. “You got the lead,” said the tanker pilot, Chance Malzahn. Jake clicked his mike twice in reply as Chance slid aft. He dropped slightly and disappeared from sight behind. Jake concentrated on flying his own plane, staying in this steady, twenty-degree angle-of-bank turn, keeping on the five-mile arc, holding altitude perfectly.
In seconds the green ready light on the refueling panel went out and the counter began to click off the pounds delivered. The refueling package worked.
“Five Twenty-Three is sweet,” Flap told the ship,
The green ready light appeared again. Malzahn had backed out of the drogue. Now he came up on Jake’s left side.
“You got the lead,” Jake told him as Malzahn’s drogue streamed aft.
The drogue looked like a three-foot-wide badminton birdie. It dangled on the end of a fìfty-foot-long hose aft and slightly below the wash of the tanker. To get fuel, Jake would have to insert his fuel probe, which was permanently mounted on the nose in front of his windscreen, into the drogue and push it in about five feet. When the take-up reel on the tanker had turned the proper amount, electrical switches would mate and begin pumping fuel down the hose into the receiver aircraft.
The trick was getting the probe into the drogue, the basket. If the basket was new, with all the feathers in good shape, it was usually almost stationary and fairly easy to plug. If it was slightly damaged, however, it tended to weave back and forth in the windstream and present a moving target. Turbulence that bounced the tanker and receiver aircraft added to the level of difficulty. And, of course, there was the “pucker factor”—extensive experience has proven that the tension of a pilot’s sphincter is directly proportional to the level of his anxiety, i.e., higher makes tighter, etc.
Tonight, needing only to hit the tanker to “sponge” the excess fuel, Jake’s anxiety level was normal, or even slightly below. He was fat, had plenty of fuel. And the air was fairly smooth. The only fly in the ointment was the condition of that Marine Corps drogue. Tonight it weaved in a small, erratic figure-eight pattern.
Jake stabilized his plane about ten feet behind the drogue and watched it bob and weave for a moment. Flap Le Beau kept his flashlight pointed at it.
“Little Marine bastard is bent.”
“Yeah.” Flap was full of sympathy.
Flopping drogues had cracked bullet-proof windscreens, shattered Plexiglas and fodded engines. Tonight Jake Grafton eyed this one warily, waited for his moment, then smartly added power and drove his probe in. Drove it at that spot where the drogue would be when he got there. He hoped.
Miraculously he timed it right. The probe captured the drogue and locked in. He kept pushing until the green light above the hose chute in the tanker came on. Now he was riding about fifteen feet below the tanker’s tail and ten feet aft. As long as he stayed right here, held that picture, he would get fuel.
“You get twelve hundred pounds,” Chance Malzahn told him.
Two clicks in acknowledgment.
“Nice,” Flap said, referring to the plug, the flashlight never wavering.
When the last of the gas was aboard Jake backed out. He came up on Malzahn’s left side and took the lead as Malzahn reeled in his hose. After a word with Tanker Control, Malzahn cut his power and turned away, headed down on a vector for an approach.
Jake and Flap were now Texaco. Soon two F-4s came to take a ton of fuel each, then they turned away and disappeared in the vast darkness.
Jake took the tanker on up to high station, 20,000 feet, and settled it on autopilot at 220 knots. Around and around the ship, orbiting. Flap got out a paperback book and adjusted his kneeboard light. Jake loosened one side of his oxygen mask and let it dangle.
“Do you ever see the faces of the men you killed?” Jake asked. They had been orbiting the ship at high station for almost half an hour.
“What do you mean?”
Jake Grafton took his time before he answered. “I got shot down last December. We ended up in Laos. Had to shoot three guys before they got us out. They were trying to kill us — me and my BN — and one of them shot me. That’s how I ended up with this scar on my temple.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Had to do it, of course, or they would have killed us. Still, I see them sometimes in dreams. Wake up feeling rotten.”
Flap Le Beau didn’t say anything.
“Dropping bombs, now, I did that for a couple cruises. Bound to have killed a lot of people. Oh, most of the time we bombed suspected truck parks and crap like that — probably killed some ants and lizards and turned a lot of trees into toothpicks. That’s what we called them, toothpick missions — but occasionally we went after better targets. Stuff where there would be people. Not just trees in the jungle and mud roads crossing a creek.”
“Yeah.”
“Toward the end there we were really pounding the north, hitting all the shit that Johnson and McNamara didn’t have the brains or balls to hit six years before.”
“It was fucked up, all right.”
“One mission, close air support of some ARVN, they told me I killed forty-seven of ’em. Forty-seven. That bothered me for a while, but I don’t see them at night. Forty-seven men with one load of bombs…it’s like reading about it in a newspaper or history book…doesn’t seem real now. I still see those three NVA though.”
“I still see faces too.”
Below them an unbroken cloud deck stretched away in all directions. The sliver of moon was fuzzy and there weren’t many stars — they were trying to shine through a gauzy layer of high cirrus.
“Wonder if it’ll ever stop? If they’ll just fade out or something.”
“I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t seem right somehow, to lose fifty-eight thousand Americans, to kill all those Vietnamese, all for nothing.”
Flap didn’t reply.
“I don’t like seeing those faces and waking up in a cold sweat. I had to do it. But damn…”
He wanted to forget the past, forget all of it. The present was okay, the flying and the ship and the men he shared it with. Yet the future was waiting out there, somewhere, hidden in the mists and haze. He was reaching out for something, something that lay ahead along that road into the unknown. Just what it would be he didn’t know. He was ready to make the journey though.
Under the overcast it was raining. At five thousand feet visibility was down to two or three miles and the oncoming tanker had trouble finding them, even with vectors from tanker control. It was that kind of night, with nothing going right. Once he was there Jake slipped in behind, eyed the basket, and went for it. He got it with only a little rudder kick in close and pushed it in.
Nothing. The green light over the hose hole did not illuminate.
“Are we getting any?” Flap asked the other crew.
“No. Back out and let us recycle.”
Jake retarded the power levers a smidgen and let his plane drift aft. The basket came off the probe. He moved out to the right and Flap told the other crew to recycle. They pulled the hose all the way in, then ran it out again.
This time Jake missed the basket on the first try. He stabilized and slipped in on his second attempt.
“Still no gas.”
“Tanker Control, this is Five Two Two, we’re sour.”
“Roger, Two Two. Your signal is dump. Steer Two Two Zero and descend to One Point Two, over.”