brown girls with only wisps of pubic hair who would perform almost any sex act imaginable for the right price. And to the never-ending delight of the horny Americans, the right price was always ridiculously low.
Tonight, two days out of port, the doctors an corpsmen in the hospital spaces were buying five-buck squares in the clap pool: The nearest square to the exact number of VD cases diagnosed in the next line period would take the pot. Up in the captain’s office a yeoman was putting the finishing touches on a report of drug-overdose death from the ship’s last port visit. In the galleys the night shift, busy baking the fifteen hundred loaves of bread and the five thousand doughnuts the crew would consume the following day, were calculating the number of loaves and doughnuts between them and Subic Bay. From the keel to the signal-bridge, every man aboard was looking forward to nights ashore as the ship lay tied to the Cubi Point carrier pier.
Beneath the flight deck in the cubicle that housed the Strike Operations office, the men charged with directing the ship’s combat sorties sat over coffee an cigarettes, considering a map of the war zone spread o the table before them. On top of the map lay the lateest weather forecast, which was consulted again and again The Gulf of Tonkin, where the ship was located, an North Vietnam were blanketed by rain clouds that also covered Hainan Island and most of northern South Vietnam. The men decided, after a few questions to the weather forecasters, on a new air plan for the twelve hours beginning at midnight, and the plan was quickly written, printed, and distributed throughout the ship The ship would sail south. Beginning at midnight, the A-6s would be launched at the preassigned targets in the North.
Their electronic eyes could penetrate the clouds and rain and darkness.
The Phantoms would still provide fighter cover for the task force, and the early warning planes, the E-2s, would fly above the weather and ensure that the sky and sea remained free of unfriendly ships and planes.
At dawn everything that could fly and carry bombs would head south to work with Air Force Forward Air Controllers (FACs). “Hate to let the boys up North have a day off, but I don’t see any other way,” the strike ops boss said to his staff.
In response to the new air plan, the ship’s navigator plotted a new course to first-launch position and handed it to the OOD. The watch officer notified the carrier’s escorting ships of the new course and necessary maneuvers and checked their positions in relation to the carrier before he ordered the course change. He watched the helmsman spin the wheel to bring the ship about, then glued his head to the radar repeater to ensure that none of the screening ships attempted a turn across the behemoth’s bow. The huge ship heeled only two or three degrees in a long, slow turn. Rainwater sluiced off the flight deck into the scuppers, then fell the sixty feet to the sea.
Someone was shaking him. He was coming up from a long way under and someone was shaking his arm. “Rise and shine, Jake. Time to go fly.” Lundeen shook him one more time to make sure he was awake.
From his bunk, Jake watched his tall roommate lather up his face. Every muscle in Jake’s body was relaxed. “How long did I sleep?”
“At least fourteen hours. You were really zonked.”
Lundeen hummed as he shaved. “We have a brief in five minutes for the first launch at midnight,” he said. “You have a tanker.”
“Weather?”
“Heavy sea running. Raining enough to float the Ark. Another great navy day.” Lundeen continued humming.
Jake looked at his watch, 10:25. Reluctantly, he kicked away the sheet and sat up. He was covered with a fine layer of perspiration. He stretched and yawned.
“Your humming is really inspirational. What’s the tune?”
“I don’t know. I make it up as I go along.” Jake pulled on his new olive-drab flight suit, one-piece fire- resistant coveralls. As he laced up his steel-toed flight boots, he asked, “Sammy, if you could bomb any target in North Vietnam, what would you bomb?”
“Why are you asking?”
“What’s the most important asset they have?”
“Ho Chi Minh’s grave.”
“Be serious.”
“I am serious. They don’t have anything worth piddle. If they did, we’d have bombed it.”
“Bullshit. You know that isn’t true.”
Sammy rinsed his razor and wiped his face. “It’d be in Hanoi. If they have anything valuable, it’s in Hanoi where it can be defended. And about all the navy ever bombed there were the bridges and the rail yards. Maybe a power plant or two.”
Both men opened their desk safes, drew out their revolvers, and dropped them in a chest pocket.
The baggy one-piece suits sagged. They locked the safe turned off the lights, and locked the stateroom door behind them. “But you can’t just go bomb something on your own, Jake, and you know it,” Sammy said as they walked toward the ready room.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t get any big ideas.”
“Sure, Sam. You know me. Jake stopped at the main wardroom pantry adjacent to their ready room. He filled a mug with coffee and scrounged a slab of roast beef from the steward, leftover from the evening meal which he had slept through. He even cadged a bread roll, tore it in half and put it around the beef.
Inside the ready room the brief was in progress.
Grafton settled into one of the large padded chairs beside Razor Durfee, his BN for the flight. Razor was taking notes from the briefing being broadcast over the closed-circuit television, which was mounted high in one corner. The same show was playing in all eight of the ship’s ready rooms. One of the A-6 squadron’s air intelligence officers, Abe Steiger, was giving the brief to the air wing for the first launch. Jake ate his sandwich while Razor took notes.
“Real tough about Morgan,” Durfee whispered, his eyes on the television.
Jake grunted and kept eating. Yeah, it was tough. And Morgan had despised Durfee. As he thought about it, he concluded he didn’t think much of the man, either. He watched the bombardier take notes. Razor’s hairline was in full retreat and, as if in compensation, he sported a luxuriant mustache that he stroked compulsively.
Sammy Lundeen and Marty Greve would fly one s while Cowboy Parker and Miles Rockwell flew the other. Little Augie and Big Augie had the standby tanker; they would man up but launch only if Grafton’s plane had a mechanical problem. All the men in the room had settled into the high-backed padded chairs, and most had their feet propped up on the backs of the chairs in front of them. A more casual-looking crowd would be difficult to find. From hard experience they all knew that forced relaxation was the best way to control the agitation of stomach and nerves as launch time . Perceptible nervousness being contagious, enforced cool was the unwritten law.
When Abe Steiger finished listing the targets on the television, the camera panned to clouds, the duty weatherman. Everyone’s eyes zeroed in on the charts at the end of Clouds’s pointer. “Not a good evening, gentlemen.
“Overcast and raining throughout the Gulf of Tonkin, Hainan Island, and most of North Vietnam. This layer extends inland to the backbone range of mountains that divides Vietnam from Laos and Cambodia. Tops should be about eighteen thousand feet winds out of the northeast at twelve to fifteen knots on the surface. Currently seas are running six to eight feet out of the southeast. We’ll have the Winds Aloft Chart in a moment. Forecast is for freshening winds and seas and continued rain and clouds for at least the next twelve hours. To the south, however, from a point about fifty miles south of Da Nang, the clouds begin to break up. Later today when the sun rises, the folks down there should have a reasonably nice day with scattered clouds and scattered showers.” Charts of the winds and temperatures aloft appeared on the screen and Clouds went over them.
Jake closed his eyes for a moment. He could feel the movement of the ship in the seaway. Back on the fantail, five hundred fifty feet behind the ship’s center of gravity, the movement would be pronounced.
It was going to be a bad night to get aboard.
“And now back to Mister Steiger, who has an entry in the ‘Name the Dirty Baby’ contest.” Steiger reappeared on the screen, all ears and glasses and teeth.
He held up a six-inch doll, an obscenely voluptuous female. The camera panned to the figure that Steiger held with a fingertip on each side of the waist.
“This entry Comes from Ready Three,” Steiger said as the camera lingered on the Dirty Baby. “Looks like Sonny Bob Battles sent this in. ‘Pussless Peggy, the Olongapo Pussycat.”‘ Somewhere in the studio one person
