The Intruders Read online

  Really, when one is contemplating the end of civilization the whole problem becomes fantastic, something out of a sweaty nightmare. Could sane men push the button, thereby destroying themselves, their nations, most of the human race? He got bogged down at this point. The politicians would have to figure it out.

  One thing he knew for sure—if there was a war without a nuclear Armageddon, the American admirals would go for the Soviet ships like bulldogs after raw meat.

  It wouldn’t be easy. He knew well that a strike on a single ship would be a fluke, an ambush of a straggler. Like every other navy, the Soviets would arrange their ships in groups for mutual support. Any attack would have to be against a task force.

  Staring at his notes on detection ranges, missile and flak envelopes, Jake could envision how it would be. The ships would be rippling off missiles—the sky would be full of Mach 3 telephone poles. If that weren’t enough, Soviet warships were covered with antiaircraft guns. American ships these days didn’t have many, but then the Soviet Navy had no aircraft carriers to launch strikes against them. The flak from the Soviet ships would be fierce, would literally be a steel curtain the attacking planes would have to fly through.

  An Alpha strike—everything the ship could launch, coming in high and low and in the middle, shielded by EA-6B Prowlers and coordinated as well as possible by an E-2 Hawkeye orbiting safely out of range a hundred miles away—that was the answer he would give Colonel Haldane.

  Wouldn’t ever happen, of course. America and Russia weren’t about to fight a war. Planning an attack on a Soviet task force was just another peacetime military what-if exercise. Yet if it did happen, few of those planes would survive. And of those crews who successfully penetrated the cordon of missiles and flak, only the most fiercely determined would successfully drive the thrust home. For Jake Grafton knew that it was neither ships nor airplanes that won battles, but men.

  Were there men like that aboard this ship? By reputation Flap Le Beau was one, but were there any more?

  Disgusted with the whole problem, he began to think of home. He had visited his parents on their farm in southwestern Virginia this spring. In May, with the leaves on the trees coming out, the grass in the meadows growing green and tender, the cows nursing new-born calves.

  His parents had been so glad to see him. Dad, well, his pride in his son had been visible, tangible. And Mother, smiling through her tears at her man-son come home.

  He had helped his father with the cattle, once again felt the morning chill and smelled the aroma of warm bovine bodies, manure, sweet hay…Just the memory of it made him shiver here in his small stateroom aboard this giant steel ship. The dew in the grass that recorded every step, the sun slanting up over the low ridges and shining into the barn, his father’s voice as he talked to the cattle, reassuring, steady…all of it came flooding back.

  Why are you here, aboard this steel ship on this wilderness of ocean, worried about Russian flak and missiles, contemplating the ultimate obscenity? Why aren’t you there, where you grew up, feeling the warmth of the sun on your back and helping your father in the timeless rituals that ensure life will go on, and on…as God intended? Why aren’t you there to help your mother in her old age? Answer me that, Jake Grafton. You never hated the farm as your elder brother did—you loved it. Loved everything about it. Your parents—you love them. You are of them and they are of you. Why are you here?

  Why?

  Life aboard ship quickly assumed its natural rhythm, which was the rhythm dictated by two hundred years of naval tradition and regulations. Everyone worked, meals were served, the ship’s laundry ran full blast, and every afternoon at precisely 13:30 the PA system came to life and announced a general quarters drill. “This is a drill, this is a drill. General quarters, general quarters. All hands man your battle stations. Go up and forward on the starboard side and down and aft on the port side. General quarters.”

  The aviators’ battle stations were their ready rooms. While the damage control parties fought mock fires and coped with flooding, nuclear, chemical and biological attack, the aviators took NATOPS exams, listened to lectures, and generally bored one another. It was during these drills that Jake gave his lectures on shipboard operations. In addition to the material in the CV NATOPS, he added every tip he could recall from his two previous combat cruises. The lectures went well, he thought. The Marines were attentive and asked good questions. To his amazement, he found he actually enjoyed standing in front of the room and talking about his passion, flying.

  After secure from general quarters the officers scattered to squadron spaces throughout the ship to do paperwork, to which there was no end in this life. The evening of the second day at sea Jake found an opportunity to discuss his Soviet ship project with the skipper, Colonel Haldane, who knew as much about the subject as Jake did. After they had spent an hour going over the problem, the colonel took him to the air wing spaces to meet the air wing ops officer, a lieutenant commander. Here the subject was aired again. The upshot of it was that Jake was assigned to help Wing Ops put together realistic exercises for the ship’s air wing.

  Officers could eat dinner in either of the two wardrooms aboard—the formal wardroom on the main deck, right beside Ready Four, where uniforms were required, or in the dirty-shirt wardroom up forward in the 0-3 level between the bow catapults where flight suits and flight deck jerseys were acceptable. In practice the formal wardroom was the turf of the ship’s company officers who were not aviators, invaded only occasionally by aviation personnel on their best behavior. Here in the evening after dinner a movie was shown, one watched with proper decorum by congressionally certified gentlemen.

  The aviators congregated in their ready rooms for their evening movies, here to whistle, shout, offer ribald suggestions to the characters, moan lustily at the female lead, and throw popcorn at the screen and each other. If a flyer didn’t like the movie in his ready room, he could always wander off to another squadron’s, where he would be welcome if he could find a seat.

  And in the late evening somewhere in the junior officers’ staterooms there was a card game under way, usually nickel-dime-quarter poker because no one had much money. Although alcohol was officially outlawed aboard ship, at a card game a thirsty fellow could usually find a drink. Or several. As long as one didn’t appear in any of the ship’s common spaces drunk or smelling of liquor, no one seemed to care very much.

  Of course, a junior officer could skip the movie and card game and retire to his stateroom to listen to music or write letters. Since a lot of the junior officers were very much in love, a lot of them did this almost every night, Jake Grafton among them. Of course the lonely lovers had roommates, which sometimes presented problems.

  “It’s so damned unfair,” the Real McCoy lamented. “I could get more information about the markets if I were sitting in a mud hut in some squalid village in the middle of India. Anywhere but here.” He turned his woeful gaze on his roommate. “There are telephones everywhere on this planet except here. Everywhere.”

  Jake Grafton tried to look sympathetic. He did reasonably well, he thought.

  “It’s the not knowing,” the LSO continued. “I bought solid companies, with solid prospects, nothing speculative. But I am just completely cut off. Condemned to the outer darkness.” He gestured futilely. “It’s maddening.”

  “Maybe you should put your investments in a trust or something. Give someone a power of attorney.”

  “Who? Anyone who can do as well as I have in the market is doing it, not fooling around with someone else’s portfolio for a fee.”

  “We’ll be in Hawaii in a week. I’ll bet you’ll find that you’re doing great.”

  The Real McCoy groaned and glanced at Jake Grafton with a look that told him he was hopeless. The LSO took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. He looked so forlorn that Jake decided to try to get him talking.

  A question. He should ask a question. After thinking about it for a moment, Jake said, “Hey, what’s the
difference between stocks and shares? In the newspapers they talk about stockholders and shareholders and—”

  He stopped because the Real gave him a withering look and stomped for the door. He slammed it shut behind him.

  Dear Callie,

  We are three days out of San Francisco on our way to Pearl Harbor. We are making about twenty knots. We tried to go faster but the escorts were taking a pounding in heavy swells, so we slowed down. The swells are being kicked up by a typhoon about fifteen hundred miles to the southwest. I got requalified on carrier landings, day and night, the first day out of port, but we haven’t flown since.

  My bombardier-navigator is a guy named Flap Le Beau. He’s from Brooklyn and has been in the Marines for ten years. I’m still trying to figure him out. He appears to be a good BN and a fine officer. He wasn’t too sure about me the first time we flew together and gave me a lot of gas to see if I could take it. What he didn’t know is that I’ve learned to take gas from experts, so his little performance was just a minor irritation. I think he’s a pretty neat guy, so I was lucky there. I think you’d like him too.

  My roommate is a character, fellow called the Real McCoy. He is in a tizzy worrying about what is happening in the stock market while we are out of touch. He’s made a lot of money in stocks and wants to make a lot more. If I knew anything about stocks I would too, but I don’t. I couldn’t make easy money if I owned the mint.

  The skipper is a lieutenant colonel—same rank as a commander—named Richard Haldane. Don’t know where he is from but he doesn’t have an accent like I do. Neither does Flap, for that matter.

  Jake didn’t know he had an accent until Callie told him he did. She was a linguist, with a trained ear. Since she made that remark he was listening more carefully to how other people talked. Just now he said a few words to see if he could detect some flaw in his pronunciation. “My name is Jake Grafton. I work for the government and am here to save you.”

  Nope.

  She wouldn’t kid about a thing like that, would she?

  Colonel Haldane has me giving lectures to the flight crews on flight operations around the ship. It’s easy and sort of fun. It used to be that I didn’t like standing in front of a crowd and saying anything, but now I don’t mind it if I know the material I am going to talk about. I must have a little ham in me.

  The colonel also has me doing some research on how to attack Soviet ships, just in case we ever have to. The research is difficult, especially when you realize that if the necessity ever arises, a lot of American lives are going to depend on how well you did your homework.

  As I mentioned, the first day out of port I got requalified day and night. The day traps went okay, but the night ones were something else. On the fourth one I had an in-flight engagement, which means I caught a wire during a wave-off and the plane fell about four feet to the deck. The impact almost destroyed the airplane. It appears to have survived with only damage to the avionics, which is the electronic gear. Why a wheel didn’t come off I’ll never know.

  Everyone says the in-flight wasn’t my fault, but in a way it was. The LSO gave me a wave-off too late, and I shouldn’t have rotated as much as I did when I poured the power to her. It’s a technique thing. I did it by the book and got bitten, yet if I had deviated from approved wave-off procedure in this particular case, things would have probably worked out better.

  All you can do is hope that when the challenge comes, you will do the right thing through instinct, training, or experience, or some combination of these. The one thing you know is that when the crunch comes you won’t have time to think about how you should handle it. The hard, inescapable reality is that anyone who flies may die in an airplane.

  I suppose I have accepted this reality on some level. Still, the in-flight shook me up pretty good. As the airplane decelerated, still in the air, we were thrown forward into the straps that hold us to the seat. At moments like that every perception is crystal clear, every thought arrives like a bell ringing.

  You are so totally alive that the events of seconds seem to happen so slowly that later you can recall every nuance. As I felt the plane decelerating, I knew what had happened.

  In-flight!

  I could feel her slowing, saw the needle of the angle-of-attack gauge swing toward a stall, saw the engine RPM still winding up…and knew that we were in for it. For an instant there we hung suspended above the deck. Then we fell.

  The jolt of falling about four feet stunned me. I knew exactly what had happened, yet I didn’t know whether or not we were safely arrested. I couldn’t see too well. I didn’t know if the hook had held, or if the cross-deck pennant had held together. Or if the airplane was in one piece—if the fuel tank had ruptured we were only seconds away from blowing up.

  It was a bad scare.

  I’ve had a few of those through the years and one more isn’t headline stuff, but still, with the war over and all and me thinking about getting out, that moment was a hard, swift return to cold reality.

  I have been thinking a lot about you these last few days. Our time together in Chicago was something very special. Although the visit didn’t wind up quite the way I planned, everything else was super. Theron is a great guy and your folks seem like they would be very pleasant once I got to know them a little better.

  He stopped and reread that last paragraph. That bit about the parents wasn’t strictly true, but what could he say? Your dad’s a royal jerk but I like them like that.

  Diplomacy. This letter had some diplomacy in it.

  When you stop and think about it, life is strange. Some people believe in preordination, although I don’t. Still, you grow up knowing that somewhere out there is the person you are going to fall in love with. So you wonder what that person will be like, how she will look, how she will walk, talk, what she will think, how she will smile, how she will laugh. There’s no way of knowing, of course, until you meet her. The realization that you have finally met her comes as a wondrous discovery, a peek into the works of life.

  Maybe a guy could fall instantly in love, but I doubt it. I think love sort of creeps over you—like a warm feeling on a clear blue fall day. This person is in your thoughts most of the time—all the time, actually. You see her when you close your eyes, when you look off into the distance, when you pause from what you are doing and take a deep breath. You remember how her eyes looked when she laughed, how she threw her head back, how her fingers felt when they touched you…

  The loved one becomes a part of you, the most valuable part.

  At least it is that way with me when I think of you.

  As ever,

  Jake

  7

  Visual dive-bombing really hadn‘t changed much since the 1930s, even though the top speeds of the aircraft had tripled and their ordnance-carrying capacity had increased fifteenfold. The techniques were still the same.

  Jake Grafton thought about that as the flight of four A-6s threaded their way upward through a layer of scattered cumulus clouds. The four warplanes, spread in a loose finger-four formation, passed the tops at about 8,000 feet and continued to climb into the clear, open sky above.

  Perhaps it was the touch of the romantic that he tried with varying degrees of success to keep hidden, but the link to the past was strong within him. On a morning like this in June 1942, U. S. Navy dive bomber pilots from Enterprise and Yorktown topped the clouds and searched across the blue Pacific for the Japanese carriers then engaged in hammering Midway Island. They found them, four aircraft carriers plowing the broad surface of that great ocean, pushed over and dove. Their bombs smashed Kaga, Akagi and Soryu, set them fatally ablaze and turned the tide of World War II.

  This morning thirty-one years later this group of bombers was on its way to bomb Hawaii, actually a small island in the Hawaiian archipelago named Kahoolawe.

  The oxygen from the mask tasted cool and rubbery. Jake eyed the cockpit altimeter, steady at ten thousand feet, and unsnapped the left side of his mask. He let it dangle fr
om the fitting on the other side as he devoted most of his attention to holding good formation. His position today was number three, which meant that he flew on the skipper’s, Colonel Haldane’s, right side. Number four was on Jake’s right, number two on Haldane’s left.

  He glanced at his BN, Flap Le Beau, who had his head pressed against the radar hood. He was using both hands to twiddle knobs and flip switches, but he never took his eyes from the radar. Excellent. He knew the location and function of every knob, button and switch without looking. When the going got tough there would be no time to look, no time to fumble for this or that, no time to think.

  The colonel’s BN, Allen Bartow, was similarly engaged. From his vantage point twenty feet out from the colonel’s wingtip, Jake could see every move Bartow made in the cockpit, could see him pull his head aft a few inches and eye the computer readouts on the panel just to the right of the radar screen, could see him glance down occasionally, referring to the notes on his kneeboard.

  He had gotten to know Bartow fairly well the last few days. A major with twelve years in the Corps, Bartow was addicted to French novels. He read them in French. Just now he was working his way through everything that Georges Simenon had ever written. He had books stacked everywhere in his stateroom and carried one in his flight suit, which he pulled out whenever he had a few minutes to kill.

  “I’m retiring as soon as I get my twenty years in,” he told Jake. “On that very day. Then I’m going to get a doctorate in French literature and spend the rest of my life teaching.”

  “Sounds dull,” Jake said, grinning, just to needle him.

  To his surprise Bartow had considered that remark seriously. “Maybe. Academic life won’t be like the Corps, like life in a squadron. Yet we all have to give this up sooner or later. I enjoy it now, but when it’s over I have something else I’ll enjoy just as much. Something different. So now I’ve got the flying and the guys and the anticipation of that something else. I’m a pretty rich man.” And he returned Jake’s grin.