mesmerized by the water agitated in the wake of the ship’s four massive screws. The water came up white with a tinge of green ceaselessly renewing itself. Except for the steel and the bloody cloth sinking slowly into the depths, not a trace of man’s passage would remain after the wake disapated miles behind the ship.
Maybe I’ll end up there, he thought, trapped in a shot-up cockpit or drowned after ejecting from a plane at night. He visualized sharks. Attracted by the smell of blood or the thrashings of a man trying to stay afloat the gray shapes would come out of the dark and rip a man to pieces. He imagined how it might be when the sharks tore at his flesh.
He grimaced and turned away.
Commander Camparelli’s stateroom was two decks below the hangar deck, off a quiet passageway. Jake made sure his shirttail was properly tucked in before he knocked and stepped inside.
Camparelli sat in a chair at the desk. Lieutenant Commander Cowboy Parker, the squadron’s operations officer, sat on the bunk and the executive officer, Commander Harvey Wilson, had the sofa. The top of the small refrigerator, conveniently close to the desk, made a handy place for Camparelli’s file stacks.
The only other furniture was a knee-high table in front of the sofa and a dresser-locker recessed into one bulkhead As the commanding officer of the A-6 squadron aboard the Shilo, Frank Camparelli was responsible for sixteen aircraft, forty officers, and three hundred sixty enlisted men. Twenty years had gone into learning this assignment, and he regarded it as the high point of his career. He was just getting used to all these men calling him “Skipper.” Behind his back they called him the “Old Man.” The same name was given to every other commanding officer in the navy, but on occasions, such as this evening, Camparelli felt that he in particular richly deserved it. Short and muscular, he had a habit of running his fingertips lightly over the stubble of his crewcut whenever his mind was fully engaged in solving a problem. Tonight the fingertips were in constant motion.
One of Camparelli’s burdens was that he had several bosses. His immediate superior on operational matters was the commander of the air wing. The air wing was composed of the eight squadrons aboard the ship. This officer, a senior commander, was known as the CAG, an acronym from the days when a ship’s squadrons were constituted as an air group. On administrative matters, Camparelli answered to a rear admiral back in the States who supervised all the A-6 squadrons assigned to the navy’s Pacific Fleet. And because the squadron was embarked in a navy ship, the commanding officer of the ship, Captain Boma, had a rather large say both operationally and administratively.
Camparelli had to be an adroit politician to stay afloat in this Byzantine world, complicated by strong personalities and overlapping operational and administrative concerns. The effort challenged his ingenuity and patience, but he felt he usually measured up. Most of the time, in fact, he thrived on it.
“Sit down, Jake.” Camparelli waved at the bunk. Grafton sat down beside Cowboy. “We’d like to hear about the flight, again, and ask you a few questions. Cowboy is getting the operational loss report and the XO is heading the accident investigation. We’ve read your combat report.” The skipper nodded at the papers on his desk.
Jake repeated the essence of his combat report. Others occasionally tossed in a question, but mostly they listened.
Cowboy Parker took notes on a yellow legal pad. As the squadron operations officer, he was responsible for ensuring that the aircraft were operated in accordance with regulations, the “book.” He supervised the preparation of the flight schedule and saw to it that every crewman was properly trained. He was teacher, coach, and, when necessary, slave driver. Because he was regularly required to make judgement calls, he was guaranteed a place on the hot seat at the first hint of trouble.
In spite of his authority, Parker was popular with the junior officers; they respected his professional abilities and delighted in his willingness to occasionally participate in a sophomoric prank.
Tonight, as usual, his angular face revealed nothing of his thoughts.
Harvey Wilson, the executive officer, or XO took few notes even though he was the nominal head of the accident investigation team. He had a bulging midrif and little black currant eyes that almost disappeared in his fleshy face, Grafton realized that Wilson would expect the junior people on the accident investigation team to do all the research and write the report, which he would then sign after ordering three or four drafts. He would become the next commanding officer of the squadron after Camparelli left a year from now. Jake expected to leave the squadron before Wilson got his chance to be a leader of men in combat. He had even called his detailer, the officer in Washington who wrote orders, for reassurance.
Frank Camparelli, on the other hand, was as good as they come. He listened to Jake’s account of the mission observing the pilot with clear blue eyes that seemed to notice everything. Finally Camparelli leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on the wastebasket “The whole thing sounds like an unavoidable tragedy to me. We’ll get the best results with our airplanes if we use them the way they were designed to be used, that is, low-level night attack. We get the most accurate hits at low altitude. The errors of angle in the radar, computer, and inertial result in larger miss distances the farther away from the target we release the weapons, as you gentlemen are well aware. And if we are up high, alone, five to ten thousand feet, the SAMs are going to make our life rough. Above ten thousand feet we don’t have enough bombs when you figure the probability of an accurate hit.
No,” he concluded, “we have to come in low at night. And occasionally a random bullet is going to do some damage, cost us a plane.” He glanced at Grafton.
“Or a life.”
“If they get too good at shooting at low fliers we may have to mix it up, send some guys in high and some in low to keep them guessing,” the XO offered.
The skipper ignored the comment. Jake wondered how having some planes up high would lessen the threat if the gomers learned to bag the guys down low.
It seemed to him that any low flier would have difficulty regardless of how many were at altitude. But he was only a lieutenant, The skipper spoke to him.
“You said in your combat report that the SAM they fired at you leveled off, then ceased guiding and went ballistic when you descended to 200 feet?”
“Yes, sir, that’s right.”
“Two hundred feet is too damn low,” the XO grumbled. “You hiccup at that height and you’ve bought the farm.”
“Maybe,” the skipper said and turned back to reading the combat report.
Jake fought the urge to tell Wilson he wasn’t given to hiccups over North Vietnam. He looked at Cowboy, who wore his usual blank expression. If you didn’t know better, you’d suspect Cowboy’s IQ was no greater than his age. Jake faced the skipper but examined the XO out of the corner of his eye. Wilson’s reluctance to fly at night was the subject of whispers and sneers among the junior officers- Behind his back he was known as “the Rabbit.” McPherson buys the farm, Grafton thought, and assholes like Wilson just keep on ticking. Damn it, Morg why did it have to be you?
“The thing I’m worried about is this,” the skipper said. “Are the North VietNamese getting enough technical improvements from the Soviets to break us out of the ground clutter on their radar? Or putting heat seekers on those SAMs? If they do either, those missiles are going to start coming down on us and we’ll be in real trouble.”
“Out of altitude and out of luck, I could do without that,” looking up from his pad.
The skipper sucked at his pencil, then directed his attention to Cowboy.
“Parker, you tell the ordinance shop to start loading a couple of those infrared flares in the chaff tubes. Maybe the fourth and twelfth tubes That should give us an IR flare for each of the first two missiles, so if they do put heat seekers on those things we’ll already have them foxed.” Cowboy made a note “And keep Jake off the flight schedule tonight.” Cowboy shot a look at Grafton.
“Okay, fellows. That’s all. I want to talk to Jake for a moment.” The XO and Cowboy left. Camparelli waited until the footsteps had faded in the passageway before he spoke. “I think you know how I feel. Losing Morgan is damned tough.”
“Yessir, it is.”
“I want you to write a letter to Morgan’s wife. I’ll mail it in a few days with one from me. That’ll give her a little time to get over the first shock.”
“Sure.”
“Anything you want to tell me about that hop that you don’t want in the official reports?”
Jake was surprised, and it showed. “No, sir.”
