from a box in a drawer and played with his pen. He doodled awhile. He opened her letter to him and read it through several times. He examined the way the point of the pen slid in and out when he pressed the button on the top. He took the pen apart and looked at the spring and the refill and the little plastic cap. One by one, he dropped the parts into the wastebasket.
The paper he wadded into a ball. He tore Linda’s letter into tiny pieces and dribbled them slowly into the wastebasket.
At least Sharon had had the courage to try. He put the photo back in his safe and slammed it shut. Where did Lundeen keep his whiskeys The following day Jake again flew toward South Vietnam but this time he was the flight leader. Augie Canfield sat beside him in the right-hand seat his wingman was Corey Ford, a quiet aeronautical engineer from M I T who wanted to become a test pilot because it was a first step to becoming an astronaught. Ford’s bombardier was Bob Walkwitz, who had a very different personality from that of his pilot. Where Ford never spoke without weighing his words, Walkwitz was the master of the flip comment. He was noisy and irreverent, a man who lived for the moment. Because of his raging thirst for female companionship which alcohol aggravated, Walkwitz was known to comrades as the Boxman.
This morning the two machines flew south as the controllers on the ground called each other in a vain search for a target. Ordnance in the air was a valuable asset that had to be used before the aircraft ran low on fuel. “Anything in your sector?”
“I have two movers who need a target.”
“Any activity over your way?” Fifty miles north of Saigon, the controller turned the flight northwest toward the central highlands. “Hope this isn’t a wild goose chase,” Big Augie muttered glancing at the fuel gauge.
The rice paddies of the coastal plain gave way to meandering ridges and valleys covered with jungle. Gashes of red earth from old bomb craters appeared occasionally, but this rugged terrain had not suffer the scars of war like the areas around Hue and the Demilitarized Zone far to the north for the simple reason that here the Viet COng reigned supreme.
A low haze lay upon the ridges, but the sky was the temple of the sun.
The nomex-clad airmen perspired freely. Big Augie vainly thumbed the air-conditioning switch, already on its coldest setting.
The controller ordered a frequency shift, and Jake checked in with a F A C, call sign “Nail Two Four.” The A-6 crewmen listened as the F A C briefed them and a flight of A-7s. “I was flying up this road and saw a squad of about nine guys in black pajamas strolling along. They dived into the bush on the south side of the road as soon as they saw me. All were carrying small arms. We’re going to see if we can get ‘em.”
“Any friendlies about?” asked one of the Corsair pilots.
“Nearest friendlies are ten miles away.”
When the Intruders arrived at the scene, they began orbiting to the left at 18,000 feet. Jake saw the pair of A-7s several thousand feet below on the opposite side of the circle. Far below, silhouetted against the treetops, the spotter plane weaved along. When the reconnaissance was completed, the spotter plane fired a smoke rocket “The smoke is the farthest west I want you to go.
I’d like you to work your bombs east, just a pair at a time, along the southern edge of the road. You’re cleared in hot with Nail in sight. Call rolling in and off safe.”
The lead A-7 peeled away from his wingman and pointed his nose at the earth. Seconds later, the shock waves from the concussions of each pair of bombs spread through the foliage in concentric circles. Two by two, the explosions marched along the edge of the road for three hundred yards. Black smoke boiled up. Chatter on the radio was limited to the required calls: “Lead’s in.”
“Off safe.”
“Two’s in. “Off safe.”
Anxious eyes scanned the jungle and the air around each diving plane for muzzle blasts and flak bursts. The planes were most vulnerable when diving, as they were then committed to a descending, predictable straight path. Their eyes searched in vain. Perhaps some of the nine enemy soldiers were shooting with their assault rifles, but if so they were wasting their ammunition. The jets never descended below the maximum effective altitude of of a rifle bullet, which was 3500 feet.
When each Corsair had dropped its ten bombs, the leader had a request: “We have some twenty millimeter to expend, Nail. Permission to make some high strafing runs.”
“Hose down the area south of the bomb impact zone.” This time each Corsair emitted a stream of white smoke as it dived, just a trace really, for several seconds before the machine began its pullout. The twenty- millimeter cannons threw a hundred shells a second at the jungle.
Jake Grafton watched in silence.
What must it be like down there? To be huddled on the ground near one of those trees, perhaps digging frantically in a pathetic attempt to create shelter against random death from the sky? The pilot worked fingertips up under his visor and swabbed the perspiration from his eyes.
When the Corsairs had joined up and disappeared to the northeast, the Intruders began their runs. Each Intruder carried sixteen 500-pounders, which they dropped in Pairs. The impact area was widened and deepened south of the road.
The weapons were randomly spaced. The bombs exploded in white flashes that were immediately engulfed in black smoke. As the fury subsided, the breeze caught the smoke and wafted it away gently.
Jake kept the Nall F A C and Corey Ford in sight and concentrated on the image of the yellow dot in the bombsight as it walked across the jungle below.
Big Augie called the altitudes in a monotonous chant as they dived, but he didn’t mention the dive angle. They were bombing the hell out of an area containing nine tiny men; precision really didn’t matter.
As the A-6s made their final runs, the F A C briefed a flight of arriving A-7s. Grafton pulled out of his last run into a gentle circling climb so Ford could join with him. The pilot scanned the scene below one last time as his wingman worked the inside of the turn and closed the distance. The lush jungle was now pocked with red scars where the bombs had torn and slashed. The earth itself seemed to bleed. Dirty-gray puffs of smoke drifted off in a string toward the northwest.
When Ford was on his right wing Jake turned to the northeast, toward the sea and the waiting ship. He checked the clock on the instrument panel. He would have to hurry to make the recovery. He pushed the throttles forward and slipped the stick back and let the power of the engines carry them upward into the blue emptiness.
Cumulus clouds, all at the same height, floated over the sea. Jake descended until he was skimming the tops, then eased lower and began to thread his way through the silvery mounds. For the first time that day Jake Grafton consciously took note of the sun, which bathed the cockpits and the cloud tops in a tawny glow. He could feel the tension ebbing; a sense of well-being suffused him. This was the last flight of the line period. He glanced in the mirror at Ford and found satisfaction in the precision with which his wingman maintained his place as they weaved downward.
Jake selected a cloud ahead and flew straight toward it. Just short, he lifted the nose and began a slow roll. His eyes caught Ford’s in the mirror, and he saw the wingman hold his position throughout the roll. Jake dropped through a gap between the clouds and descended toward the sea in a series of hard turns, necessary only because he whimsically chose to avoid the cloud pillars. Now they were underneath. Just as the white cloud tops were at a uniform altitude, so were the gray blue bases. Here was a darker world, where the plane cast shadows on an otherwise brilliant sea. From that vantage point Jake sensed he had entered a temple without walls, a shrine composed only of shadow and light.
They saw the ship when they were twelve miles out, Grafton led his wingman in a wide turn that brought them up the ship’s wake at 3000 feet, then he slid into a counterclockwise orbit on the Shilo’s port side that brought him over the ship on each circuit. After he had completed one turn around the circle, the ship began a 180-degree turn into the wind. The ship’s wake had been a mere feather.
Now the mighty screws churned the sea to accelerate the 95,000-ton airfield to 22 knots which, combined with the 8-knot trade wind, would give the Shilo 30 knots of wind across her deck.
Jake could monitor the progress of the planes on deck, their wings still folded, as they moved toward the catapults. He saw the machines on the catapults spread their wings and saw the first two planes, an A-6 on a bow catapult and an F-4 Phantom on one of the waist cats, simultaneously begin their journeys into the sky. At this
