The Cannibal Queen Read online

  I’m flying at 3,500 feet now, my visibility limited only by the haze. As the minutes tick by I begin to fidget. Let’s see, we left Cooperstown at 5:21 P.M. on a course for Norwich, thirty miles away. That town on the right should be New Berlin, but where the heck is the sawmill south of town? And that race track to the east, that’s not on the chart. Well, it’s got to be New Berlin, that’s the only place it could be, so I’ll mark us here at 5:34.

  More minutes pass. Where is Norwich? Well, it’s a cinch it should be around here someplace. The wind must be drifting me north.

  I scan southward and see a town. The town’s in a valley, that’s right. … I fly south. Boy, I sure got pushed off course. That’s a good breeze from the south.

  But that isn’t Norwich! Norwich has an airport north of town. That town has an airport … is that the airport? Yes, the airport is on the western edge of town. That’s Sidney.!

  Oops!

  I swing the plane northwest and study the chart. Ah ha, that town I thought was New Berlin was really this little village of Morris, which has a racetrack. So the wind is out of the north, and I compounded the error by turning south. You should have noticed that, Steve! You should have noticed the drift on the last leg, down the lake toward Cooperstown. You should have been examining the chop to see which way the wind was blowing, but you were thinking about guys with flintlock rifles in birchbark canoes.

  Feeling rather asinine, I ponder how devilishly easy it is to make a mistake like this even when I am flying at 3,500 feet with eight or ten miles visibility.

  Just then the engine stumbles. Just a hiccup, a half second of dead sound.

  The adrenaline whacks me in the heart; the heart and respiration rate instantly double.

  With a shaky hand I shove the mixture knob forward a half inch and study my three little engine gauges. Oil temperature 160 degrees, oil pressure 55 PSI, and cylinder head temp 190 degrees. All normal.

  I listen like an old maid trying to hear a cat burglar at three in the morning. Now the Lye runs smooth as sipping whiskey. The RPM and manifold pressure needles look like they’re glued in place. The sound is a steady, throbbing hum.

  The mind races. This happened to me once before, so I’m not as scared as I got the first time. I talked to Steve Hall about it and he assured me that there was nothing wrong mechanically.

  “Nothing mechanical,” I chant to myself.

  Steve thought that maybe a slug of water or dirt went through the carb. But he could find absolutely nothing wrong with the aircraft.

  The Cannibal Queen is going to age me before she eats me. That little hiccup cost me two years off the top end.

  As I fly I meditate on the evil perversity that all mechanical devices possess, and decide that I probably had the mixture just a touch too lean. That must have been it.

  Relief floods me when I sight Ithaca in the haze and pull the power back for a descent. The tower gives the altimeter setting as 29.78 inches of mercury. The barometer is dropping. Another front is on the way!

  I don’t care. I’ve had enough excitement for one day.

  At 7 A.M. on Sunday morning at a Sheraton in Ithaca I stare glumly at the rain pouring down, watch the lightning flashes, listen to the booming of the thunder. I haven’t seen a storm like this since Florida, and it’s only seven o’clock in the morning! The front is no longer west of here someplace; it’s right over my head!

  Out at the airport the Cannibal Queen is getting another bath. She’ll be the cleanest dirty airplane in six states when this is over. Unfortunately rainwater will not take off the oily grime. Dirt and dust yes, but not the real crud.

  Grounded in Ithaca without a car. Sounds like the title of a soap opera. If only David were here, with his cowlicks and braces and impish grin; he’d liven things up.

  16

  AT 9 A.M. THAT SUNDAY THE RAIN STOPPED. AT 11:20 I WAS airborne and headed northwest for blue skies and Niagara Falls. The plan was to get fuel at the Niagara Falls airport, fly over the falls and photograph it, then head southwest for Ohio. Alas, my schemes rarely go as planned and this one was no exception. The weather was fine, about 4,500 scattered, visibility about 30 miles near Rochester but deteriorating as I neared Buffalo. I bucked fifteen knots of headwind from Rochester westward as the engine hummed merrily, no stumble or burble or hiccups. Lord, what do you think?

  The Flight Service briefer thought I was trying to be funny when I called from the Niagara Falls airport and told her I wanted to go southwest VFR in the general direction of Cleveland. Intense thunderstorms covered half the sky in Detroit and Cleveland, Erie was IFR, and I should keep my antique flying machine firmly on the ground.

  “But tomorrow will be better,” she told me, trying to soften the message. “The front will have passed by then. The prog (forecast, or prognosis, charts) shows patchy ground fog in the morning across your route, but it will burn off by ten or eleven o’clock.”

  I thanked her and tied the Queen down in the grass beside the fueling mat. Yeah, tomorrow will be better. I’ve heard that song before. I can even hum it and sing a few stanzas.

  The fuel attendant was a guy named Chuck who looked at the big yellow Stearman with affection. “Haven’t seen one of those since the Red Baron Pizza Team was here.” He told me the team gives pricey rides in Niagara Falls every year and donates the proceeds to Children’s Hospital. “And they sell a lot of pizza,” he added.

  I’m familiar with Red Baron Pizza’s red-and-white Stearmans. They were out in Colorado this spring giving rides. They did aerobatics near Boulder and I watched them from my porch. The 450-HP R-985 Pratt & Whitneys they run sound impressive (read loud) I suspect the pizza team Stearmans are fully IFR-capable or they wouldn’t be running them around the country eight months of the year like they do.

  “They don’t have naked women on their planes,” Chuck said, and grinned. “Just a lot of little pizzas.”

  The vision of a squadron of pepperoni pizzas adorning the Cannibal Queen’s flanks made me shudder. “Some people got no class,” I agreed.

  So here I was marooned in Niagara Falls. I decided to do what any normal person would do in Niagara Falls—rent a car and go see the thing. So I told Chuck I desired wheels. The rental place at the airport was closed Sundays, but he called the Hertz man at home. One car had been returned that morning, so he said he would come out and rent it to me, which he did.

  At the Hertz office in the terminal he glanced at my Colorado driver’s license, then advised, “Try and avoid the traffic over the bridges to Canada in the evening. Half of Canada comes here to shop now that they jacked taxes over there again. And they’ll all be going home on Sunday evening.”

  Of course I wanted to know why they shopped here instead of Canada. I was told that everything in Ontario costs two or three times as much as it does in the states. “It’s taxes. They tax the hell out of everything over there to pay for socialism. I don’t know where they think Canada’s going, but it sure is a bonanza for our businesses. Even gas costs twice as much over there. Every other car in the filling stations here has a Canadian tag on it. Canadians come in here all the time and rent cars to drive to the malls. That’s why I’m out of cars, as usual.

  “Had a schoolteacher in here yesterday that claimed he made sixty thousand dollars a year in Canada and can retire at fifty-five. That’s what’s wrong with that country. He was painting his house, he said, and house paint over there costs thirty-five dollars a gallon. Imagine that! So he earns his huge salary over there and buys his house paint over here. And they’re buying houses here— a house here costs a third of what it does in Ontario.”

  He got me a discount on a hotel room downtown and warned me not to park my car on the Canadian side. “Lots over there charge you six bucks a pop. Walk across the bridge.”

  My hotel had a maple leaf flag flying out front and a big banner hanging in the lobby. “Welcome Canadians!” In my room was a give-away newspaper that told Canadians where to shop in Niagara Falls and Buf
falo.

  Americans know a good thing when they see it. They’re cashing in.

  When I was growing up in West Virginia everyone, and I mean everyone, honeymooned in Niagara Falls. I heard the hotels had whole floors full of bridal suites with mirrors on the ceilings. My hotel did not give me a bridal suite, probably because I was paying a discounted rate and had no nervous bride fidgeting beside me. There was no mirror on the ceiling, either.

  The pay telephones and pop machines in the lobby had prominent signs posted about the evil things that would happen if you fed them Canadian coins, which jam them. Banks won’t change these coins into American money, so they are essentially worthless unless you’re planning a trip to Canada in the near future. Unwary American merchants end up with a till full. Some of these coins then get passed as change to unsophisticated rustics like me.

  Standing on Goat Island and watching the cataract, I was seized by a powerful urge to throw coins in. This urge also struck many of my fellow observers of this natural wonder, especially boys under ten years. I thus got rid of the three Canadian coins I had pocketed during my travels—one quarter and two dimes. I suspect a good percentage of the Canadian mint’s production goes into this river. Someday this riverbed will be a tin mine.

  The observation platforms on Goat Island were like a sauna. The mist off the falls raised the humidity to 99.99 percent, which combined with the 85-to-90-degree July heat to make the sweat roll off everybody like they were fat ladies at a Labor Day picnic.

  The Niagara Falls Chamber of Commerce should be justly proud of the public relations job it has done worldwide. From the look of the international crowd and the sounds of Spanish, Japanese, Swedish, German and Italian that I heard, this waterfall is on the itinerary of every foreigner alive who’s planning a trip to the States.

  On a sour note, part of the river below the falls is covered with foam caused by industrial chemicals and other pollutants in the water. Americans will be pleased to hear that the soapsuds are mostly on the Canadian side of the river. However, most of the stuff that made the suds came from cities and factories on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes.

  Still, even with the suds, it’s a heck of a waterfall. Best I’ve ever seen. This is the Grand Canyon of waterfalls, absolutely the biggest and most stunning, so standing here in the heat and humidity parboiling slowly, American hearts swell with pride. It’s too darn bad we have to share this waterfall with the Canadians. If we could only get them to sell us a hundred-yard-wide strip of Ontario shoreline for a mile in each direction, it would be all ours.

  The thing that impressed me most was not the falls, which are indeed impressive, but the wide river coming down the chutes toward the falls. In the chutes this stupendous quantity of water accelerates, losing elevation quickly, and becomes a raging torrent racing toward the brink where it will shoot into space and fall the 160-odd feet to the rocks below. This white-water fury seems to possess infinite energy. No wonder the name of the river—Niagara—has taken on this connotation in our language.

  The waters of the four upper Great Lakes have been racing these rapids to leap the falls since the end of the last ice age. This is the power of the eternal. We humans are but small motes in nature’s scheme.

  Before I came to the Falls, while I was waiting for the Hertz man to arrive at the airport, Chuck and I visited. He told me about the last air show they had at Niagara Falls International, three years ago.

  It seems the two solo Blue Angels were doing an opposing loop—that is, one came racing in from the east, one from the west, and after passing each other they pulled up in a loop to pass again on the top, then a third time on the bottom. This time, Chuck said, instead of passing on the top, the two planes collided. One pilot was killed on impact. The other pilot ejected and his plane crashed in a junkyard off the east end of the runway.

  Niagara Falls hasn’t had an airshow since, Chuck told me. The insurance companies want $3 million now to insure the airshow, so it’s history.

  That story got me thinking again about the only ex-Blue Angel I ever met in my nine years of active duty in naval aviation. I met him on my second combat cruise aboard USS Enterprise, the last cruise of the Vietnam War.

  The ex-Angel was the executive officer of one of the two F-4 fighter squadrons we had aboard. He stood out like a sore thumb. He was the only flyer I ever met who spit-shined his flight boots—they looked like patent leather but it was Kiwi shoe polish. This guy sat down in his stateroom at night and layered the stuff on and polished and polished. Me? I never shined my boots, not once. I thought shoe polish might melt or burn, and anyway, I had better things to do, like read Playboy or play poker.

  In those days the attack community to which I belonged feuded endlessly with the fighter guys, and vice versa, a rivalry assiduously cultivated over the years with mutual insults and one-upsmanship. The fighters in those days were F-4 Phantoms, which were designed as interceptors and were fuel thirsty. The Navy used them as fighters from necessity—it was the only fighter the Navy had except for the F-8 Crusader, which lacked the Phantom’s sophisticated radar system. But since the North Vietnamese rarely sent a MiG aloft for the Phantoms to jump and shoot down, the fighter crowd insisted that their Phantoms be loaded with bombs so they could get into the war.

  You must understand the irony here—for twenty years the fighter jocks had talked about attack pukes dropping bombs because they didn’t know any better, laughed about the air-to-mud guys, usually to their faces. Now they wanted six 500-pound bombs—all their plane would carry—and they wanted an A-6 tanker aloft to give them enough gas to get to the target and back. Six 500-pound bombs was a joke to the A-6 squadrons. Our airplane would carry up to twenty-eight 500-pounders, although twelve or eighteen was a more usual load. Yet we had to devote half our flight time and half our maintenance effort to keeping tankers aloft so the fighter guys could drop their pissy little bomb loads on Vietnam in addition to their aerial guard-duty chores. Now these prima donnas wanted to drop bombs, because otherwise, without MiGs to fight, they wouldn’t get any Air Medals.

  And they wanted medals. Whenever any reporter showed up aboard Enterprise, the fighter jocks would roll out the red carpet to ensure they got plenty of press. They wore little silk dickies all the time aboard ship, even when flying. The dickies were the last straw with us, flaming proof, if any more were needed, that our comrades in arms were totally devoid of couth and class.

  So imagine our ex-Angel on the very last day of fighting before the armistice went into effect, decked out in his spit-shined boots and tastefully arranged yellow dickie. He mounted his trusty F-4 Phantom and blasted into the blue with his six little green bombs, hit the KA-6D tanker for gas and headed for the DMZ to give the gomers hell.

  Meanwhile our skipper was leading a flight of four A-6s to the DMZ. He was given orbit instructions—which meant that he held his flight of four overhead while the ex-Angel and his wingman made their runs.

  The ex-Angel told the Forward Air Controller, the FAC, that he could make six runs. That meant he would drop one lousy bomb per run. On the last day of the war. With the armistice signed, sealed, and delivered. If he had put one into General Giap’s outhouse with Giap on the throne, it would have made no difference at all—the war was over. Well, you guessed it— the North Vietnamese got the lead just right on the fourth or fifth pass and shot our hero out of the sky.

  The Radar Intercept Officer—the guy in back—never got out. He was killed in the crash. The ex-Angel got on his survival radio and the FAC went in for a look. The bad guys blew the FAC out of the sky with a shoulder-launched heat-seeking missile, a Strella. He didn’t get out of his plane.

  The ex-Angel was never heard from again. Apparently the North Vietnamese weren’t taking any prisoners that day. Maybe they had all the POWs they wanted. Maybe they were irritated about being bombed.

  Our skipper called an all-officers meeting that night after the last plane landed. The war was over. The shooting had stopped. No p
eace treaty, just a ceasefire. Yet the skipper knew and we junior officers knew and the North Vietnamese knew that the United States wasn’t going back to Vietnam unless the North Viets detonated a thermonuclear device on Los Angeles.

  However, that wasn’t what the AOM was about. Even though the war was over, the skipper wanted to tell us what he would do to anyone in his squadron who was damn fool enough to make multiple runs in a hot area. And he wanted to say what he thought about Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara and all that political crowd that had gotten so many good men killed for seven long years for no reason. And he wanted to tell us what he really thought about asshole fighter pilots. And asshole ex-Angels.

  Then he stalked out and went to his stateroom, where he probably got stinking drunk. It was that kind of war.

  That memory from the early months of 1973 came flooding back as I listened to Chuck tell about the Niagara Falls airshow crash three years ago. I’ll bet after they landed, the four surviving Blue Angels taxied in and shut down in tight formation, put on their khaki fore-and-aft caps and marched away in a neat row, in step, the sun gleaming on their spit-shined boots. Being Blue Angels, that’s what they should have done.

  That’s showmanship of course, the P. T. Barnum side of the job. The military is in love with that kind of showmanship, and occasionally it gets substituted for thinking. Too often.

  Vietnam left me with a profound distrust of politicians, an antipathy bordering on contempt. As a writer I have to work to put it in my pocket and sit on it because the general public doesn’t share it and wouldn’t understand. For seventeen years newspaper and magazine journalists have liked to refer to the “so-called theory” that the U.S. military could have won in Vietnam if they had been given free rein by the politicians to win the war. I think Desert Storm showed what a professional, well-led modern armed force can do. The U.S. military could have crushed the North Vietnamese just as easily. But our politicians didn’t want to “win,” they didn’t want to take the chance that Red China would be drawn into the war. Yet they were afraid to leave. So 58,000 Americans died and God only knows how many Vietnamese. For nothing.