It was a bad scare.
I’ve had a few of those through the years and one more isn’t headline stuff, but still, with the war over and all and me thinking about getting out, that moment was a hard, swift return to cold reality.
I have been thinking a lot about you these last few days. Our time together in Chicago was something very special. Although the visit didn’t wind up quite the way I planned, everything else was super. Theron is a great guy and your folks seem like they would be very pleasant once I got to know them a little better.
He stopped and reread that last paragraph. That bit about the parents wasn’t strictly true, but what could he say? Your dad’s a royal jerk but I like them like that.
Diplomacy. This letter had some diplomacy in it.
When you stop and think about it, life is strange. Some people believe in preordination, although I don’t. Still, you grow up knowing that somewhere out there is the person you are going to fall in love with. So you wonder what that person will be like, how she will look, how she will walk, talk, what she will think, how she will smile, how she will laugh. There’s no way of knowing, of course, until you meet her. The realization that you have finally met her comes as a wondrous discovery, a peek into the works of life.
Maybe a guy could fall instantly in love, but I doubt it. I think love sort of creeps over you — like a warm feeling on a clear blue fall day. This person is in your thoughts most of the time — all the time, actually. You see her when you close your eyes, when you look off into the distance, when you pause from what you are doing and take a deep breath. You remember how her eyes looked when she laughed, how she threw her head back, how her fingers felt when they touched you…
The loved one becomes a part of you, the most valuable part.
At least it is that way with me when I think of you.
As ever,
Jake
7
Visual dive-bombing really hadn‘t changed much since the 1930s, even though the top speeds of the aircraft had tripled and their ordnance-carrying capacity had increased fifteenfold. The techniques were still the same.
Jake Grafton thought about that as the flight of four A-6s threaded their way upward through a layer of scattered cumulus clouds. The four warplanes, spread in a loose finger-four formation, passed the tops at about 8,000 feet and continued to climb into the clear, open sky above.
Perhaps it was the touch of the romantic that he tried with varying degrees of success to keep hidden, but the link to the past was strong within him. On a morning like this in June 1942, U. S. Navy dive bomber pilots from Enterprise and Yorktown topped the clouds and searched across the blue Pacific for the Japanese carriers then engaged in hammering Midway Island. They found them, four aircraft carriers plowing the broad surface of that great ocean, pushed over and dove. Their bombs smashed Kaga, Akagi and Soryu, set them fatally ablaze and turned the tide of World War II.
This morning thirty-one years later this group of bombers was on its way to bomb Hawaii, actually a small island in the Hawaiian archipelago named Kahoolawe.
The oxygen from the mask tasted cool and rubbery. Jake eyed the cockpit altimeter, steady at ten thousand feet, and unsnapped the left side of his mask. He let it dangle from the fitting on the other side as he devoted most of his attention to holding good formation. His position today was number three, which meant that he flew on the skipper’s, Colonel Haldane’s, right side. Number four was on Jake’s right, number two on Haldane’s left.
He glanced at his BN, Flap Le Beau, who had his head pressed against the radar hood. He was using both hands to twiddle knobs and flip switches, but he never took his eyes from the radar. Excellent. He knew the location and function of every knob, button and switch without looking. When the going got tough there would be no time to look, no time to fumble for this or that, no time to think.
The colonel’s BN, Allen Bartow, was similarly engaged. From his vantage point twenty feet out from the colonel’s wingtip, Jake could see every move Bartow made in the cockpit, could see him pull his head aft a few inches and eye the computer readouts on the panel just to the right of the radar screen, could see him glance down occasionally, referring to the notes on his kneeboard.
He had gotten to know Bartow fairly well the last few days. A major with twelve years in the Corps, Bartow was addicted to French novels. He read them in French. Just now he was working his way through everything that Georges Simenon had ever written. He had books stacked everywhere in his stateroom and carried one in his flight suit, which he pulled out whenever he had a few minutes to kill.
“I’m retiring as soon as I get my twenty years in,” he told Jake. “On that very day. Then I’m going to get a doctorate in French literature and spend the rest of my life teaching.”
“Sounds dull,” Jake said, grinning, just to needle him.
To his surprise Bartow had considered that remark seriously. “Maybe. Academic life won’t be like the Corps, like life in a squadron. Yet we all have to give this up sooner or later. I enjoy it now, but when it’s over I have something else I’ll enjoy just as much. Something different. So now I’ve got the flying and the guys and the anticipation of that something else. I’m a pretty rich man.” And he returned Jake’s grin.
Bartow was rich, Jake reflected ruefully as he watched the bombardier sitting hunched over his scope. Richer than Jake, anyway. All Jake had was the flying and the camaraderie. He didn’t even have Callie — he had screwed that up.
Le Beau — he apparently didn’t want anything else. Or did he?
“You got a gal waiting for you?” Jake asked his bombardier without taking his eyes off the lead plane.
“You can fly this thing and think about women too?”
“I always have time to think about women. You got one stashed somewhere?”
“Dozens.”
“A special one?”
“Naw. The ones I want to get serious about don’t want me after they’ve had a good look. I’m just tempered, polished steel, a military instrument. How we doing on fuel, anyway?”
Jake glanced at the gauges. He punched the buttons to get a reading on his remaining wing fuel, then finally said, “We’re okay.”
“Umph. We’re only fifty miles out.” Le Beau went back to the radar. “Don’t embarrass me. Try to get some decent hits.”
The bombs hanging under the wings were little blue twenty-five-pound practice bombs. Each one contained a small pyrotechnic cartridge in the nose that would produce a puff of smoke when the bomb struck, allowing the hit to be spotted. Each A-6 carried a dozen of these things on their bomb racks.
The planned drill was for the pilot of each plane to drop the first half-dozen manually, using the visual bomb sight à la World War II, then the second six using the aircraft’s electronic system. Jake carefully set the optical sight to the proper mil setting for a forty-degree dive with a six-thousand-foot release. Releasing six thousand feet above the target, the slant range was about nine thousand feet. To drop a bomb nine thousand feet from a target and hit it was difficult, of course — nearly impossible when you considered the fact that the wind would affect the bomb’s trajectory throughout its fall. Yet that was the dive bomber’s art.
Hitting the target was the payoff. Five thousand men at sea for months, the treasure spent on ships, planes and fuel, the blood spilled in training, all to set up that moment when the bomb struck the target. If the pilot could get it there.