Jake chanced a quick glance downward.
Nothing. Only clouds. What a mess! His peripheral vision picked up dark gray puff balls of exploding flak, probably fired blindly through the clouds.
Too many people were talking too fast on the radio. From out of nowhere a lone A-7 flashed in front of Camparelli going from right to left. The strike had fallen apart.
“You got the target?” Jake asked Virgil Cole.
“Steering’s good.” The pilot’s eyes went to the visual display indicator.
Steering was pegged right so he rolled hard right, away from the skipper, and dropped the nose.
“Attack when you can,” Jake shouted above the radio and ecm noise. He needed computer steering to the weapons-release point, the attack phase, not to the target. Obediently, Cole pushed the button and the attack light came on under the vdi. Grafton checked outside for other planes and glimpsed a string of bombs disappearing into the cloud deck. Someone had dumped his load so he could maneuver better, and five would get you ten that the weapons went armed.
God only knew where they’d hit.
When the vdi steering symbol was centered Jake leveled his wings. The Intruder was in a twenty-degree dive. The clouds enveloped them as they rocketed down.
The steering symbol swung hard left and Grafton slammed the stick over to follow, Cole reported, “Ignore steering. Cursors are ruining- We’re out of attack.”
Shit! A computer or inertial problem. Over 500 knots. Get out of the good and try again. He leveled the wings and pulled the nose up.
“And New Guy’s lost us. They exploded out of the clouds at 13,000 feet climbing steeply. The Pilot continued upward until the bomber threatened to run out of airspeed, then flattened the angle but continued to climb. Below airplanes flashed by and every now and then a SAM popped out of the clouds.
Two hundred fifty knots and climbing.
“What the hell are you doing up here this slow? Cole demanded. “We’re gonna be assholed by a SAM!”
“I’m looking for a hole. We came to bomb. Now get the goddamn system running again or we’ll be up here all fucking day.”
The higher he went, the better his view of the cloud deck below.
Then he saw it: a hole in the clouds, a narrow jagged tear. He swung toward it, trying to see how far down it reached.
“The guys on the ground’ll be shooting up that hole hoping some damn fool’ll fly down it,” Cole said At the bottom of the hole was dark green earth An a river. And a railroad track. And a power plant.
The bomber shuddered on the edge of a stall. Jake inverted the plane, and the earth and the power plant beside the river were above his head. The nose came down and the Power plant was dead ahead, straight down.
The Intruder leapt forward under the combined pull of gravity and two engines at full power. The controls regained their sensitivity as the volume of air over the wings increased. The target was in his bombsight and growing as they hurtled down. Flak puffs mingled with the gray cloud that lined the tunnel. Cole called the altitude. Something on the ground twinkled like diamondmuzzle flashes.
At 900, Jake kicked the bombs loose and pulled out of the tunnel and into the clouds. Four Gees. He didn’t feel the effect of the Gees.
Five thousand feet in the clouds. They were coming out of the dive, 540 knots. He felt the buffetting through the seat as they pushed at the sonic shock wave that prevented any increase in airspeed. He relaxed the Gees and let the plane continue down as his instincts and the bowling missile warning urged him to get free of the clouds so that he could see again.
Jake leveled at 2000 feet in rain and foggy gray tendrils that reached down toward the water-covered paddies. The missile warnings had ceased and the excited voices of other pilots filled his ears. He started a shallow turn to the southeast and looked around for other airplanes. He was alone.
Below he saw muzzle flashes and people running along the paddy dikes, but the sea was ahead and they were going home. “Goddamn,” he shouted at Virgil Cole. “We made it.” He pounded Cole on the arm with his right hand and pumped the stick back and forth with his left.
Heavy-caliber guns flashed, probably out of the Haiphong area, but he rolled and jinked the airplane with the ease of a horse switching its tail.
They were invulnerable.
Safely out to sea, Jake and Cole released one side of their oxygen masks and let them dangle from their helmets. Grafton grinned at Cole and the bombardier did his miserable best to grin back. “Call Red Crown, ” Jake suggested, “and tell them to expect a low pass. ” The bombardier dialed the radio and made the call.
The pilot retarded the throttles and deployed the speed brakes when the radar picket destroyer appeared on the sea ahead. As they slowed through 250 knots, dropped the gear and flaps. He stabilized at 150 and the machine dropped toward the water. The destroyer was rolling and heaving in the heavy sea, taking spray over the bow. He went down the starboard side at 50 feet Cole waved to the T-shirted sailors looking out of the open hatches.
He cleaned up the plane-raised the gear and flaps and climbed. Above the clouds they found the sun.
Jake Grafton took a long last drag on his cigarette and used the stub to light a new one from a crumple pack in his G-suit pocket. He leaned back in his chair adjusted his torso harness straps so they did not impinge upon his testicles, and listened to the men gathered in the Intelligence Debriefing room.
“What a zoo.” The CAG was lighting a cigar. “The strike just went ape shit when those SN4s came squirting out.”
An A-7 pilot looked up from the debriefing sheet he was filling out. “The weather was so lousy we wouldn’t have had any way to bomb accurately even if the gooks hadn’t fired a round.”
The CAG shook his head. He looked tired. He would have to talk to the admiral in a few minutes. “We’ gonna have to get our shit in one sock or we’ll never make the target, good weather or not. All those bombs … all that gas and sweat. Wasted. And one plane stuck on the hangar deck for three or four weeks with battle damage.” He looked over at the intelligence officers in their pressed khaki uniforms. “Did anyone hit the goddamn target?”
Abe Steiger answered. “Yessir. Grafton, over there, dropped visually and one of the other A-6s made a system drop.”
The CAG swiveled around to Jake. “Hit anything?”
“Don’t know, sir. I didn’t have a chance to look back. I was hauling it out of there. The cloud on the pullout had made sightseeing impossible.
The CAG turned to the senior intelligence officer, a lieutenant commander. “I want to see those Vigilante pictures as soon as they’re developed. I’ll be on the flag bridge. Call me.” The RA-sC Vigilante photoreconnaissance plane had flown over the target at low altitude minutes after the scheduled drop time.
The head spy nodded and the CAG walked out puffing on his cigar, not caring a damn who saw him smoking in the passageways.
Grafton and Cole picked up their helmet bags. In the passageway they met New Guy on his way to debrief. New Guy said he had lost Grafton in the pullout from the aborted system run and had attempted a system delivery himself, only to be thwarted by radar failure. Jake murmured sympathetically. New Guy didn’t seem much the worse for wear after his first combat mission. “In the future, really try and stay with the leader,” Jake advised. “A wingman has to stick like stink on shit.”
Jake knew that New Guy’s self-image as a professional, as a member of the club, required that he win the ungrudging esteem of the more experienced men.
He patted New on the back. “Ya’ did good,” Jake said. A smile of thanks creased the cherubic face.
In the locker room, as they stowed their flight gear, Cole said, “I guess you’re stuck with me.”
“What d’ya mean?”
“If you’d turned out to be a candy-ass, I was gonna ask for a new pilot. But you’ll do.”
“They want you up in the CAG office, Grafton. Some reporter wants to interview you.” Boxman was the duty officer, and he delivered the message with a sneer. “Your hometown paper sent the guy. You’re going to be on the front page of the county bugle, right between the 4-H news and a picture of a lady who’s a hundred and two.”
“Box, you’re an asshole. Didn’t your mother ever teach you?”
“Seriously, some reporter wants to interview you, Jake!”
