All he had to do was hang on…
As Flap pushed in circuit breakers and the cockpit lights glowed, then went out, then glowed again, the planes flew into and out of deluges. The torrents of rain were worse than they had been coming in. Several times the rain coursing over the canopy caused Reese’s plane to fade until just the exterior lights could be seen.
Jake concentrated fiercely upon those lights. Each time the rain would eventually slacken and the fuselage of the EA-6B would reappear, a ghostly gray presence in the blacker gloom.
Finally the clouds dissipated and a blacker night spread out before them. Far above tiny, cold stars shown steadily. They were on top, above the clouds. Behind them lightning strobed almost continually.
Jake eased away from Reese and put his mask to his face. The oxygen was flowing, cool and rubbery tasting. He lowered it again, then swabbed the sweat from his eyes and face with the fingers of his left hand.
When he had his mask fixed back in place he glanced at the instruments. The instrument lights were on — well, some of them. It was still dark on Flap’s side. The VDI was still blank, but the standby gyro was working. The TACAN needle swung lazily, steadily, around and around the dial.
He pushed the button to check the warning lights on the annunciator panel. The panel stayed dark. Both generators were probably fried. Maybe the battery. He recycled each of the generator switches, but nothing happened. Finally he just turned them off.
Fuel — he checked the gauge. Nine thousand pounds. He pushed the buttons on the fuel panel to check the quantity in each tank. The needle and totalizer never moved. They were frozen.
Flap was still examining the circuit breaker panel with his flashlight.
“Hey, shipmate, you there?” Flap — on the ICS.
“Yeah.”
“A whole bunch of these CBs won’t stay in.”
“Forget it.”
“We’re gonna need—”
“We’ll worry about it later.”
Later. Let’s sit up here in the night above the storms and savor this moment. Savor life. For we are alive. Still alive. Let’s sit silently and look at the stars and Reese’s beautiful Prowler and breathe deeply and listen to our hearts beating.
19
The radome on the nose of the aircraft had a hole in it. Jake and Flap examined it with their flashlights. It was about the size of a quarter and had black edges where the Plexiglas or whatever it was had melted. They had shut down on Elevator Two so the plane could be dropped below to the hangar deck.
Now they stood looking at the hole in the radome as the sea wind dried the sweat from their faces and hair and the overcast began to lighten toward the east.
Dawn was coming. Another day at sea.
The hole was there and that was that.
“Grafton, you’re jinxed,” Flap Le Beau said.
“What do you mean?” Jake asked, suddenly defensive.
“Man, things happen to you.”
“I was doing fine until I started flying with you,” Jake shot back, then instantly regretted it.
Flap didn’t reply. Both men turned off their flashlights and headed for the island.
Lieutenant Colonel Haldane had rendezvoused with Pee Wee Reese and Jake had transferred over to his wing. An approach with a similar aircraft was easier to fly. Fortunately the weather had cleared somewhat around the ship, so when the two A-6s came out of the overcast with their gear, flaps and hooks down they were still a thousand feet above the water. There wasn’t much rain. The ship’s lights were clear and bright.
Jake boltered his first pass and made a climbing left turn off the angle. He and Flap had been unable to get the radio working again, so he flew a close downwind leg and turned into the groove as if he were flying a day pass. He snagged a one-wire.
The debrief took two hours. After telling the duty officer to take him off the schedule for the rest of the day, Jake went to breakfast, then back to his bunk. The Real McCoy woke him in time for dinner.
Jake and Flap didn’t fly again for four days. The skipper must have told the schedules officer to give them some time off, but Jake didn’t ask. He did paperwork, visited the maintenance office to hear about the electrical woes of 502, did more paperwork, ate, slept, and watched three movies.
The maintenance troops found another lightning hole in the tail of 502. Jake went to the hangar deck for a look.
“Apparently the bolt went in the front and went clear through the plane, then out the tail,” the sergeant said. “Or maybe it went in the tail and out the front.”
“Uh-huh.” The hole in the tail was also about quarter size, up high above the rudder.
“Was the noise loud?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Thought it must be like sitting beside a howitzer when it went off.”
“Just a metallic noise,” Jake said, trying to remember. Funny, but he didn’t remember a real loud noise.
“You guys were sure lucky.”
“Like hell,” Jake told him. He was thoroughly sick of these philosophical discussions. “Pee Wee Reese was on my wing and the lightning didn’t hit him. It hit me. He didn’t get a volt. He had the luck.”
“You were lucky you didn’t blow up,” the sergeant insisted. “I’ve heard of planes hit by lightning that just blew up. You were lucky.”
“Planes full of avgas, maybe, but not jet fuel.”
The sergeant wasn’t taking no for an answer. “Jets too,” he said.
Thanksgiving came and went, then another page was ripped off the ready room calendar and it was December.
Jake had that feeling again that his life was out of control. “You just got to go with the flow,” the Real McCoy said when Jake tried to talk to him about it.
“It’s a reaction to the lightning strike,” Flap said when Jake mentioned it to him. Jake didn’t bother telling him he had had it off and on for years.
Yet gradually the feeling faded and he felt better. Once again he laughed in the ready room and tried to remember jokes. But he refused to think about the future. I’m going to take life one day at a time, he decided. If a guy does that there will never be a future to worry about. Just the present. That makes sense, doesn’t it?
“What does it feel like to die?” Flap Le Beau asked.
He and Jake were motoring along at 350 knots at five thousand feet just under a layer of cumulus puffballs. Beneath them the empty blue sea spread away to the horizon in every direction. This afternoon they were flying another surface surveillance mission, this time a wedge-shaped pattern to the east of the task group. They were still on the outbound leg. They had not seen a single ship, visually or on radar. The ocean was empty.
All those ships crossing the Indian Ocean, hundreds of them at any one time, yet the ocean was so big…
“Did you ever think about it?” Flap prompted.
“I passed out once,” Jake replied. “Fainted. When I was about fourteen. Nurse was taking blood, jabbing me over and over again trying to get the needle into a vein. One second I was there, then I was waking up on the floor after some nightmare, which I forgot fifteen seconds after I woke up. Dying is like that, I suspect. Not the nightmare part. Just like someone turned out the light.”
“Maybe,” Flap said.
“Like going to sleep,” Jake offered.
“Ummm…”
“What got you thinking about that, anyway?”
“Oh, you know…”
The conversation dribbled out there. Flap idly checked the radar, as usual saw nothing, then rearranged his fanny in his seat. Grafton yawned and rubbed his face.