Correct?”
“Yes.”
“Now, this is up to you, mind, but if I were you, I’d get back to Holy Loch. Out of danger — if you see what I mean?”
“How about my wife?”
“It’s you they want, lad. Not her. ‘Sides, we’ll keep a close eye on her. We do it for a lot of you chaps. But they’ve not grabbed any of the womenfolk yet. They know we’d never give in to a kidnapping situation. No, as I say, it’s you they’re after.”
There was a long silence, broken finally by the superintendent. “Would you like a wee dram of something stronger in that tea?”
“Yes,” Robert Brentwood replied, “I would.”
“Corporal?”
While they were waiting, the superintendent told the nuclear sub skipper, “She won’t like it, of course — wives never do— but tell her you’ve got orders to sail a few days earlier. Won’t be much of a Christmas, I’m afraid.”
Brentwood nodded tiredly. He realized that then and there, police protection or not, he was going to give Spence Senior his.45, along with the police ID sketch of the two charmers from the B and B. And he was going to tell Richard Spence that if either of the charmers ever showed up around the Spence house, he was to call police emergency straightaway. And if he couldn’t he was to shoot the charmers dead.
Robert Brentwood took the tea and double Scotch in one gulp. It wasn’t safe anywhere.
Coming down toward the postage-stamp-size deck of the carrier, Shirer knew it would be his last chance. He had the carrier’s meatball centered, the green dots either side of it confirming he was on the right glide path, despite the buffeting of the crosswind. The wind had blown the deck clear of fog, and while the salt spray on his cockpit obscured his view, it wasn’t enough to trouble him.
While flying in pattern to use up his fuel, he’d had time to psyche himself up for a barricade engagement should he fail to make a clean-trap, hooking the three wire. Besides this, there was the four wire, and providing he could keep the Tomcat’s ass low, nose high, most of the braking would be over before the nose could lunge and take out the fighter’s Hughes radar and the long-range Northrop target-TV. If all went well, he’d halt the plane fast enough so that even if he slid, the Tomcat would stop before reaching the net. His major problem, which the LSO calmly reminded him of, was that unlike the normal landing when, after hitting the deck at 150 miles an hour, the pilot kept the engine at 75 percent power, ready for touch and go should there be anything wrong, Stirrer’s approach on Bingo fuel would be his only one. And with the barricade up, the Tomcat would be fully committed once it touched the deck, Shirer having to immediately cut power. If he hit the net at three-quarter power, he could “total” any or all of the other aircraft clustered cheek to jowl on the cramped parking area of the flight deck, the carrier able to house only half her aircraft belowdecks.
“Beautiful, two oh three,” came the landing officer’s voice. “Beautiful — on the glide path — on the glide path—”
The bluish-white blot of the deck suddenly became a blur of lights, the narrow deck widened, the orange ball centered, the twenty-five-ton fighter hitting the deck with a force of over forty tons. Below the flight deck, the cable housings crashed like two freight trains. Shirer felt the harness jerk, his body slammed back into the seat with a force of over seventy tons. He cut power and left it to God.
The Tomcat skewed, and halted abruptly, the wire’s “pullback” failing to release the hook so that Elmer Ventral and two other green shirts following a brown-shirted plane captain raced to unhook the plane, but the three wire snapped. The cable whipped through the air. Ventral disappeared, two men near him smacked clear off the deck. As the petty officer and two other men attended the plane’s chocks, another sounded the “man overboard” alarm of his fiber mike, the Klaxon wailing throughout the enormous ship. Immediately the Sea King helo hovering a quarter mile astern moved in.
Ventral’s top half continued writhing close to the island, slithering in its own entrails, the green jackets helping Shirer unstrap, leading him quickly off to flight deck control and debriefing.
The Sea King’s searchlights crisscrossed the sea, the helo hovering above the wide, bubbling wake, whose luminescent plankton made it look like wild, undulating hills of cream.
Neither of the two men were found.
As both the captain’s and the flight deck controller’s investigation would reveal, the oil rag should have raised the alarm that the big one-and-a-half-inch “braking” cable, to which the arrester wires were anchored, had been strained — a loose strand hooking the oil-stained cloth, the worst section of frayed cable hidden from view in the cable’s housing.
Shirer, sitting exhausted in his cabin, knew it wasn’t the first time a wire had gone, and it wouldn’t be the last. He felt bad about it but not guilty. If you went “into guilt,” as the air boss often repeated, you’d soon be “out of” flying.
It was announced on all three of the carrier’s TV channels that there would be a service for Leading Seaman Ventral and the other two flight deck crewmen at 1400 hours next day— “Air Ops permitting.”
Most of the five thousand men aboard
“Shirer?”
It was the air boss’s voice outside his cabin. Shirer found the effort of getting up off his bunk and going to the door as tiring as if he were dragging a bag of cement. “Yes, sir?”
“You okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No you’re not.” The air boss slapped him on the shoulder. “You’re off to Pearl in the morning. Then San Diego and Washington.”
“What’s the scuttlebutt?” Shirer asked.
“Don’t know. Haven’t got a clue.”
“Guess I’ll find out soon enough, sir.”
The air boss smiled and turned to go. “Need anything tonight? We can lay on room service if you like.”
“No, thanks, sir,” replied Shirer. “D’we know what screwed up on that nose wheel?”
“Not as yet. By morning.”
“Yes, sir. Ah — I’d like to attend the burial service for…”
The air boss was shaking his head. “Sorry, but Washington wants you ASAP. Don’t worry — I’ll explain it to the men.”
“Appreciate that, sir.”
“You get some shut-eye.”
Shirer didn’t need an order to sleep. He hadn’t been as tired as this since the dogfights over Adak, when, after three or four sorties, you were ready to sleep on the tarmac. Lying on the bunk, he looked down at his boots. He’d have to undo them before he— His head lolled and he was fast asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
David Brentwood had never dreamed that he would get fan mail as a soldier, and yet here it was: over two hundred letters from admirers waiting to touch, however indirectly, one of the few who had won what General Freeman, in the manner of congratulating an Olympian, had called the “gold and silver”—the Congressional Medal of Honor for David’s single-handed destruction of the Russian fuel dump at Stadthagen, the silver for “conspicuous bravery above and beyond the call of duty” during the assault on Pyongyang.
The letters depressed him. Their writers trusted him so much. They didn’t know, unless they’d been in combat themselves, how thin the line could be between cowardice and bravery, between “thumbs up” and “screw up.” David had seen men, officers like Freeman, who, though they could understand fear, were able to disdain it.
