bombardier turned his thumb down. “Well, that’s good, because you both seem to have an independent streak.” He drummed his fingers on Jake’s desk “Y’know, for a while I thought I would-make the navy a career, I mean. But this last year, seeing you guys go out on missions, never risking anything myself well, y’know, it’s gotten to me.” He looked at the two airmen. “Hell, I don’t expect you to understand. You risk your butts out there, and in your eyes I’m just the little weenie who helps plan the missions.”
“Don’t forget,” Cole said, “we’re going right down town. It won’t be any piece of cake.”
Jake caught the bombardier’s eye and shook his head. He let the silence build for a moment before he spoke. “We know you carry your end of the log, Abe. We also realize we’re asking a lot from you. It’s true, as you say, that we put our chips up every night. Maybe it takes a few turns of the wheel to develop gambler’s blood.
“You guys can’t do this little deal without me, can you?” Abe said.
“Suppose you should get bagged. Then I’ll be the pigeon denying any knowledge of what the hell you were doing over Hanoi. And I’m not a very good liar.” He shook his head and his glasses slipped down his sweaty nose. He pushed them back with his middle finger.
“If we thought we couldn’t get back, we wouldn’t go,” Cole said.
“We know you’d be running a big risk,” said Jake.
“I do my job. I put the materials together, interpret the raw data, and help you guys plan the strikes.” After a pause, Steiger added, “My jobs nice and safe.”
Jake lit a cigarette. The match shook in his hands. He glanced at Abe and saw that the air intelligence officer was staring at his own shoes. “Don’t you see, Abe Can’t you see the blood and brains and pieces of smashed human beings?
It’s all murder! Just plain ordinary, barroom murder dressed up so people won’t puke. The people we kill with our bombs are never the right ones. We never get the guys who dug the holes at Hue and machine-gunned the civilians. We never get the guys who are cutting the schoolteachers’ throats. We kill the kids and the old women and guys like you and me who just want to live through this thing. But this time we’re going after the men who give the orders. This time we’re going straight for the sons of bitches at the top.”
“You can’t stop it, Grafton. Not with just one plane. Not just two guys.”
“Three guys,” said Jake. He watched the smoke curl up from his cigarette.
He looked at Steiger. “So we keep making craters in the runways at Kep. How many times have we done that? Or we bomb a ’suspected truck park’ that turns out to be so many acres of forest, or mud flats along a river that somebody labeled a ‘boat yard.” Just this once wouldn’t you like to really hit ‘em where it hurts? If we bomb their headquarters, maybe, just maybe, we’ll take out their leadership.”
“Or die trying.”
“So Grafton and Cole get smoked! Won’t be the end of the world. But if it happens, remember this: we didn’t buy the farm killing dogfaces-we didn’t die gutting little girls who live too close to a bombed-out power plant. We died going for the head motherfucker. You put that on our tombstones.”
Steiger chewed on a fingernail. After a long pause, he said, “Maybe I’ve sat in this safe job long enough, Maybe it’s time I hung out my ass for a change. Tomorrow, during the wardroom movie, why don’t you come up to Mission Planning.” Abe looked glum, then his face brightened. “Hell, maybe if you don’t ‘get the leaders, you might get Jane Fonda or Ramsey Clark.”
Jake laughed. “Abe, if I had that kind of luck I’d have won the Irish Sweepstakes by now and be married to the Playmate of the Year.” He stopped laughing an looked at Steiger. “By the way, Abe, I want to tell you that I’m sorry about shouting at you in the war room.”
“Nah, it was my fault. I shouldn’t have told you those things. I just thought you would want to know.” He picked at a paint blister on the back of the door. “Been thinking about it, if it were me, I wouldn’t want to know. An infantryman has to know. He’s so close. if you don’t have to know, then why would you?”
The chart lay open on the table. Two days had passed since Grafton and Cole had enlisted Steiger. In the interim Abe had been unable to find any information on Party Headquarters among the targeting material aboard ship. “We could get the stuff,” he had toll Grafton and Cole, “but only if we send a message asking for it. That’d be like robbing a bank without a mask and making the getaway in your own car.” They had agreed that the National Assembly building was the next best choice. Things seemed to be breaking their way. The usual night strike carried a dozen 500-pounders, which would have merely scratched the well-built stone building “We have a dozen thousand-pound Snakes for tonight’s strike,” Cole said to Jake and Abe. The Snakes, or Snake-eyes, were conventional general-purpose bombs fitted with clamshell fins that opened when the weapons were released and acted like parachutes to retard the weapons and let them fall almost straight down while the aircraft escaped the ensuing fragmentation. The Snake-eye fins would permit a delivery from as low as 500 feet.
“We’ll dump four on the power plant and eight on the National Assembly,” Cole said. “They won’t be expecting us to turn for Hanoi, so we might be able to scoot across the city without too much opposition.
They all looked again at the chart and the route, which Abe had helped Tiger prepare. A thin black line marked the route they would fly. It stretched away from the ship in a northerly direction one hundred fifty miles to a point about ten miles east of the mouth of the Red River. The line then angled north -northwest across the coast, past the town of Hai Duong, to a fork in a stream a dozen miles short of Bac Giang, a town on the railroad that ran from Hanoi northeast into China. The river confluence was the Initial Point, the I P , and was so marked. Leaving the I P , the black line continued on to Bac Giang and the power station there. That was the target the navy had assigned for their night mission. What the navy didn’t know was that after Bac Giang the black line went down the railroad track to Hanoi, across the city, then southeast, parallel to the Red River, past Nam Dinh to the sea. Jake Grafton and Tiger Cole studied the chart and tried to visualize the reality.
Cole laid a two-year-old photo of the power plant on the table. “We train off the four bombs, point oh six seconds apart.” He then laid a six-year-old photo of the National Assembly on top of the picture of the power plant. “To hit this, we salvo the eight bombs we have left, four at a time, point oh six seconds between salvos.”
“Maximizes the damage but minimizes the possibility of a hit,” Jake observed.
Steiger pulled out a detailed overhead picture of Hanoi. He pointed a pencil at the North VietNamese National Assembly building. “It’s surrounded on three sides by other buildings. I haven’t the foggiest idea what’s in them. Probably government offices, but who can say?”
Jake gestured at the photograph of the stone building where the assembly met. “Maybe we ought to climb high enough to drop the Snakes unretarded. If they’r retarded they may not penetrate deep enough into this building to do a whole lot of damage.”
Cole nodded. “Let’s see how much flak there is and decide at the time.”
Jake was dubious. He studied the photo. “If we drop them retarded they may bounce off this bastard. It looks damn solid to me.”
Each of the men evaluated the Picture. Grafton was right. The bombs had to go in slick, Which meant that the airplane would have to release them from at least 2500 feet above the ground to escape the fragments.
The Pilot picked up the sectional chart that showed in detail the target area in Hanoi. This was the chart he had wanted the other night, but he didn’t mention that to Steiger. He rotated the chart so the land and river lay as he would see them from the cockpit. He tried to memorize the turn of the river, the position of the boulevards, and the location of the target building. if the radar failed at the last moment there just might be enough light to drop visually.
Steiger’s voice broke the silence. “The moon won’t be up until about 2240. It’s on the wane.” But with the amount of flak the pilot suspected they would see, the target might nevertheless be visible. They would find it, one way or the other.
“How about fuel?” Jake asked Tiger.
“There’ll be enough. We’ll be late getting feet wet, but no one’ll notice. If they do, we’ll just say we had to make two runs,”
“Where’s the other strike going?” Jake inquired.
“Joe Wagner is gonna look for trucks on Route One,” Abe replied.
“And the A-6B?”
“Not on this one,” Abe said.
Good! No one in the squadron would ask any questions about all the flak around Hanoi- Some A-7 or F-4 drivers might see the fireworks, but they wouldn’t know who was there nor would they care.
Jake looked closely again at the photo of the National Assembly building. Four buildings of similar size were
