computer had never worked properly, anyway. Still, the old girl had held together and had brought back Cole and him.
He climbed up a work stand placed against the rear of the fuselage and stepped across to the horizontal stabilizer. The holes in the tail were about threequarters of an inch in diameter and went clear through.
Five of them.
Peering through one jagged hole, he saw that the internal structure had been damaged, one metal stringer being completely severed.
Lieutenant Commander Joe Wagner, the squadron maintenance officer, stood near the nose of the plane and Jake climbed down to join him. “Really a mess, huh?” Wagner called.
Jake nodded.
“You’re a lucky man, Grafton, a lucky man. I just came up here to look at this wreck again and marvel at your luck and see if some’ll rub off on me.”
Jake snorted. “You wouldn’t want my luck.”
“Don’t be so sure. See those holes? My guess is fourteen point five millimeter. One, maybe two, of those shells had explosive heads. But they didn’t explode. That’s where you were extremely fortunate, because if they had you might have lost half the vertical fin. I don’t know if this thing will fly with half a tail. Those shells penetrated the only spot on this plane that has so little resistance that the contact fuses in the shells weren’t crushed.
Come here, I’ll show you something else.” He led Jake over to the right intake and stood back so Jake could see.
Most of the axial fairing inside the intake was gone, and the compressor blades were badly twisted and bent. “I suspect that shell was a thirty-seven millimeter, a big momma. It hit dead center on the fairing and smashed it, and the pieces of the fairing were sucked into the compressor. Luckily you shut the engine down right quick, or the compressor blades would’ve been flung off through the fuselage, cutting this aluminum skin like a knife through butter. On the inside, the blades probably would have cut into the main fuel cell, and fuel would have shot back onto the hot engine, and this plane would have blown up about one-thousandth of a second later. Even if the blades didn’t cut into the fuel cell, if you’d kept the engine turning at power, it would have torn itself off its mountings since the first two bearings were destroyed by the shell.”
Jake Grafton nodded. “A thousandth of a second. That is just about how long Ford and Box had. They were there, then they were gone in a fire ball.”
Joe Wagner looked away. “Maybe an explosive shell in the main fuel cell. Maybe a shell hit one of the bombs and detonated it. We’ll never know.” They talked awhile, then Jake left Joe and climbed to the flight deck. He picked his way aft until he reach the island, then he descended to the catwalk.
An ammunition ship lay alongside the enormous Shilo. Jake could see down onto the bridge of the supply ship which rose and fell with the swells much more than the carrier. Deadly weapons flowed from the smaller vessel to the larger.
Wires spanned the space between the ships, and the bombs swung across, occasionally dipping into the swells. Jake watched the operation forklifts darting here and there, the men struggle with the heavy crates of unfused bombs-and felt it had no connection with his deliveries of the same bombs. Then he turned up the collar of his flight jacket and walked away.
The flight schedule told him he had two watches in Pried-Fly after the sun came up. It was now only midnight. Restless, unable to steep, he made his way down to the dirty-shirt wardroom where he ate a hamburger as the space reverberated under the pile-driver strokes of the bow catapults launching the first flights of the new day. When the catapult shuttles smashed to a stop in the water brakes, making a stupendous crash, the room shook and the crockery rattled. Jake lingered over his coffee and smoked a cigarette as he thought about the men riding the catapults into the night sky. When the launch was over he doused his butt in the coffee cup and left for the ready room to check his mail, hoping for a letter from Callie. Tonight, though, his mailbox contained only official paperwork. Taking a seat, he began to plow through it.
After a few moments he sensed that New Guy was surreptitiously watching him from his chair at the duty officer’s desk. Except for the two of them, the room was empty. Jake kept his eyes locked on the paperwork. What was New thinking? Was he angry at Grafton, or perhaps at Ford and Box for having the ill grace to get killed? Or was he angry at himself, comparing himself with the pilots who passed through the ready room?
New Guy had once been one of them, had once sat in the padded chairs and had listened to the briefs. Like them, he had opened his locker and reached in for his survival vest, G-suit, and torso harness, and smelled the stale sweat and remembered the past terrors even as he prepared to go aloft again. Was he ashamed of himself for quitting? If so, he wouldn’t blame himself long. He’d blame others: the skipper, the system, the other pilots, or his wife.
The phone on the duty officer’s desk rang, and New Guy seized it as if it were a rope thrown to a drowning man. When he hung up he kept his hand on the telephone and said, “Jake, the Skipper wants to see you in his stateroom.”
Moving slowly, Jake returned his papers to to mailbox. He glanced back at New Guy on his way out and saw that he was slumped over the flight schedule rereading yet again the names of those men among whom he had once counted himself.
Jake’s knock was answered with a grunt. He enter and found the Old Man at his desk and Cowboy Parker on the bunk, looking grim.
Commander Camparelli looked Jake over from head to toe, then waved in the direction of the couch.
Camparelli lit a cigarette and ran his fingertips through his crewcut. Jake waited while he scanned a document. The skipper edged around in his chair an eyed Grafton. “A dead bombardier, a plane blown out of the sky, and now this.”
He shook the paper in his hand and scrutinized Grafton as if he were a scientific curiosity. “Do you know what this is?”
“No, sir.”
“This is a secret message from me to Seventh Fleet with copies to everyone in the chain of command. Your name’s smeared all over it. Care to guess what tidbits about you this little missive contains?”
Jake shook his head.
“Yesterday I was up in Mission Planning looking at the order-of-battle SAM charts and for the life of me I couldn’t find all those SAM sites that fired at you when you were going after the Bac Giang power plant. So I looked up the daily intelligence reports and asked a couple questions here and there. Then I sat down an had a friendly chat with your pal Steiger. What do you think he might have said?”
“I don’t know, sir.” Jake’s breathing quickened.
“Too bad. I would bet a thousand dollars you could’ve guessed,” His face was contorted and the veins in his neck stood out.
“Mister Steiger had a confession to make. This happened after he tried to explain why all those missiles you dodged around Bac Giang were not in the intelligence report or on the maps, even though I’d given him a direct order to include them. Seems he knew the sites weren’t exactly where you said they were in your after-action report.”
His voice rose to a parade’ground bellow. “In short, he said you and Cole weren’t around Bac Giang when those SAMs were trying to asshole you. He allowed as how you were down over Hanoi on a little private party.” Jake dropped his eyes.
“So it’s true, huh? Do you have any idea just what the hell you’ve done?
Before I get through with you, you’re going to wish to God it had been you instead of McPherson that stopped that fucking bullet. Stand at attention, Mister Grafton.” The “mister” curled off his lips contemptuously.
Jake snapped to attention, eyes fastened on the bulkhead.
Camparelli moved to within inches of him. “I’ve been in the navy for twenty years and worked my ass off to get this command. Now, behind my back, you’ve abused the trust, my trust, and the trust of every officer in this squadron. My God, don’t you understand that the military runs on trust? No one except your bombardier can ride in that plane with you. If you can’t, or won’t follow orders, you’re not worth a tinker’s damn. Even that chicken half-wit Newton is worth ten of you. I can trust him to be a yellow coward. But I can trust him. Do you understand me?”
He shouted the last question.
