“You mean that Kissinger statement ‘Peace is hand’?” Little Augie scoffed.
“Yeah.” Grafton’s voice was so soft that Big shot him a hard glance.
“It won’t be over until the treaty is signed and the gomers let the POWs come home,” Little told him, “isn’t going to happen soon.”
“You don’t think?”
“Nah, they’ve been talking for three years. Heck, took them a year to decide on the shape of the conference table. I figure that at the rate they’ve been going we’ll have a treaty by the turn of the century.” Big said, “Morgan isn’t going to be the last guy, Jake. Don’t blame yourself. There’s a lot of dying left to do.
Jake rose to go.
“Take care,” Little told him.
“You aren’t flying for at least twenty-four hours. Go get a drink,” Big advised.
“I already did that.”
“So get another.”
Back in his stateroom Jake removed his uniform an pulled down a hinged board, part of a dresser recessed into the bulkhead. When lowered, the board became a desk. Papers and books were stored in the cavity, which also contained the safe for classified material. He reached in and turned on the fluorescent tube that because of its recessed position, lighted the small work area but left most of the room in darkness. The subdued light gave the room an intimacy that seemed almost impossible on a 95,000-ton warship with a crew of five thousand. Jake turned off all the other lights in the stateroom so he could seek refuge in the secure world of the lamp.
What could he possibly say to Sharon McPherson? Dear Sharon, I’m sorry I got your husband killed. How could he say he was sorry and make it mean anything?
Her world gets smashed to bits and he’s “sorry.”
His hands were still shaking. Adrenaline aftershock, he decided. He picked up a sheet of paper and placed it on top of his splayed fingertips. The paper vibrated. Like everything else in his life, like the targets, like what happened to Morgan, it was beyond his control. He stared into the shadows of the room. He remembered the look on Morgan’s face, and the gagging, and the blood. Blood everywhere. The body holds an unbelievable amount of blood. Maybe the people he and McPherson had killed had died like that, bleeding to death.
Or maybe they had died instantly from the blast of the bombs. He would never know.
He chewed the pencil, his mind as blank about what he would say to Sharon as the sheet of paper in front of him. What do you say to a widow and mother?
Dear Sharon, We just hit a target that wasn’t worth a damn. Now your husband’s in a body bag in the meat locker. I am sorry as hell he’s dead: sorry, oh so sorry, but he is stone cold dead and sorry won’t bring him back, and you and I and Morgan’s boy have to live with it.
What do you say to the widow of the man who had saved your life?
They had been younger then and the carrier was still in their future.
They had finished their training at the replacement squadron on the same day and had walked across the parking lot side by side to the new hangar, to their new squadron, the fleet squadron. Somehow they were assigned to fly together.
Flying without an instructor was still a new experience then.
They were just getting to know each other much like newlyweds on a honeymoon. The honey moon ended that night.
They had flown south parallel to the coast of Washington twenty miles out to sea as the sunset died on the western horizon. To their right, the day sky slowly surrendered to the night through shades of yellow oranges, and reds.
On their left, layers of heavy stratus reflected the dying glow that was the lingering remnant of the day. Between the layers, blues and purple deepened into black.
They passed the mouth of the Columbia River an continued south for another eighty miles. Jake retarded the throttles and began his descent. At 5000 feet McPherson called the turn and the pilot swung east toward the land, still descending.
They leveled at 1000 feet, and he set the throttles for a 360-knot cruise.
They went in under the clouds, the last of the light gone. Jake selected the search-radar terrain clearance mode on the visual display indicator and rotated the offset impact bar to give himself 10 feet of clearance. The vdi presented a graphic of the terrain ahead generated by the computer from returning radar energy. The information was displayed in a series of bins, or range bins, to give the presentation a three-dimensional effect, and one of the bins was coded with vertical stripes. The pilot had to vary the altitude of the aircraft to keep the fixed offset impact bar on the coded range bin so that the plane maintained the desired degree of clearance, and no less.
Before they had gone very far inland the aircraft entered the clouds. ‘the rotating anticollision light reflected off the clouds and flashed in the cockpit creating a distraction, so the pilot turned it off. Morgan McPherson had his head pressed against the radar hood and was probably unaware that they had entered heavy clouds. The squadron operations manual dictated that this particular training route through the coastal mountains not be flown in instrument conditions. Grafton knew this, but tonight he decided to press on. Perhaps it was a matter of conquering fear by facing it.
Within minutes the plane was threading its way up a valley, and Jake was perspiring profusely. He concentrated on the vdi. The display was updated once a second, and he had to instantly judge the rate of change in the rising topography, and any heading correction necessary, then control the plane accordingly. The aircraft responded to stick displacement, but that displacement merely created a rate of change, not the change itself. Selecting the proper rate of change was the art. Sweat trickled down his forehead and stung his eyes.
McPherson, his head against the scope hood, fed Grafton a running commentary. “We’re in the valley … looks good for five miles ahead, ridges on both sides … the valley will bend right … we’ll be coming right in two miles … your altitude looks good … begin a right turn … harder right … looking good … steady up….”
And so they sped up the valley. In five minutes they crossed the divide and descended into another valley leading toward the interior plain, the desert.
The turns were steep at first, the pilot reluctant to force the nose down, but as the valley widened and straightened he let the machine sink until the impact bar rested on the coded range bin and the radar altimeter read 1000 feet.
“Looks real good . . . ridges moving away from our track… hold this heading … clearance looks good……”
They turned to a heading that would take them to a lake seventy miles away. Halfway there McPherson pushed back from the scope hood and began tapping in the coordinates of their next turnpoint onto the computer keyboard between his knees.
After the fierce concentration of the last fifteen minutes, the pilot unconsciously relaxed, took several deep breaths, and scanned the engine instruments and the fuel gauge as McPherson typed and checked his kneeboard cards. Satisfied that the computer had taken the new information, the bombardier put his head against the scope hood and Jake heard him scream.
“Pull up!”
Now Jake saw the display. They were dead men. The coded range bin was way above the impact bar, up near the top of the display. He slammed the throttles forward and jerked back on the stick. His eyes swung to the radar altimeter.
The needle was sinking through 200 feet.
We’re dead!
The aural warning sounded. The needle passed 100 feet. He had the stick locked aft.
So this is how it feels to die.
The needle on the radar altimeter fell to 50 feet, hovered there for a second, then began to climb. The Pilot’s eyes came back to the vdi. Twenty degrees nose up. He kept the stick locked aft. The radar altimeter needle raced clockwise.
He couldn’t release the back pressure on the control stick. Forty degrees nose up … fifty … sixty …
seventy.
At eighty degrees nose up he felt the stall buffet and then, only then, did he ease the stick to neutral.
Two hundred knots and slowing. They were passing 9000 feet.
He stared at the instruments. He had to do something! They were going almost straight up and running out
