Jake broke the news that he was on his way to the Marine squadron going aboard Columbia. He could see by the looks on their faces that they already knew. Bad news rides a fast horse.
Heads bobbed solemnly.
“Well, shore duty gets old quick.”
“Yeah. Whidbey ain’t bad, but it ain’t Po City.”
Their well-meaning remarks gave Jake no comfort, although he tried to maintain a straight face. Not being a liberty hound, the whores and whiskey of Olongapo City in the Philippines had never been much of an attraction for him. He felt close to tears. This was what he wanted more of — the flying without combat, an eight-thousand-foot runway waiting for his return, relaxed evenings on dry land with mountains on the horizon, the cool breeze coming in off the sound, delicious weekends to loaf through.
The injustice of Donovan’s decision was like a knife in his gut. It was his turn, yet he was leaving all the good stuff and going back to sea!
“Lucky you aren’t married,” one of the barflies said. “A little cruise in the middle of a shore tour would drive a lot of wives straight to the divorce court.”
That remark got them talking. They knew four men who were in the process of getting divorces. The long separations the Navy required of families were hell on marriages. While his companions gossiped Jake’s thoughts turned morosely to Callie. She was a good woman, and he loved her. He could see her face, feel her touch, hear her voice even now.
But her father! That jerk! A flash of heat went through him, then flickered out as he surveyed the cold ashes of his life.
“Things happen to Marines,” Tricky Nixon was saying when Jake once again began paying attention to the conversation.
Tricky was a wiry, dark, compact man. Now his brows knitted. “Knew a Marine fighter pilot once. Flew an F-4. He diverted from the ship into Cecil Field one night. Black night. You guys know Cecil, big as half of Texas, with those parallel runways?”
His listeners nodded. Tricky took another swig of beer. After he swallowed and cleared his throat, he continued: “For reasons known only to God, he plunked his mighty Phantom down between those parallel runways. In the grass. Hit the radar shack head-on, smacked it into a million splinters.”
Tricky sighed, then continued: “The next day the squadron maintenance officer went into Cecil on the COD, looked the plane over pretty good, had it towed outta the dirt onto a taxi-way, then filled it with gas and flew it back to the ship. It was a little scratched up but nothing serious. Things happen to Marines.”
They talked about that — about the odds of putting a tactical jet with a landing weight of 45,000 pounds down on grass and not ripping one or more of the gear off the plane.
“I knew a Marine once,” Billy Doyle said when the conversation lagged, “who forgot to pull the power back when he landed. He was flying an F-4D.”
His listeners nodded.
“He went screeching down the runway with the tires smoking, went off the end and drove out across about a half mile of dirt. Went through the base perimeter fence and across a ditch that wiped off the landing gear. Skidded on across a road, and came to rest with the plane straddling a railroad track. He sat there awhile thinking it over, then finally shut ’er down and climbed out. He was standing there looking ’er over when a train came along and plowed into the wreck. Smashed it to bits.”
They sipped beer while they thought about forgetting to pull the throttle to idle on touchdown, about how it would feel sitting dazed in the cockpit of a crashed airplane with the engine still running as the realization sank in that you had really screwed the pooch this time. Really screwed the pooch.
“Things happen to Marines,” Billy Doyle added.
“Their bad days can be spectacular,” Bob Landow agreed in his bass growl. He was a bear of a man, with biceps that rippled the material of his shirt. “Marine F-8 pilot was trans-Pacing one time, flying the pond.”
He paused and lubricated his throat while his listeners thought about flying a single-seat fighter across the Pacific, about spending ten or twelve hours strapped to an ejection seat in the tiny cockpit.
Landow’s growl broke the silence. “The first time he hit the tanker for gas, the fuel cells overpressurized and ruptured. Fuel squirted out of every orifice. It squirted into the engine bay and in seconds the plane caught fire.
“At this point our Marine decides to eject. He pulls the face curtain. Nothing happens. But not yet to sweat, because he has the secondary handle between his legs. He gives that a hell of a jerk. Nothing. He just sits there in this unejectable seat in this burning aircraft with fuel running out of every pore over the vast Pacific.
“This is turning into a major-league bad day. He yanks on the handle a couple more times like King Kong with a hard on. Nothing happens. Gawdalmighty, he’s getting excited now. He tries jettisoning the canopy. Damn thing won’t go off. It’s stuck. This is getting seriouser and seriouser.
“The plane is burning like a blowtorch by this time and he’s getting really excited. He pounds and pounds at the canopy while the plane does smoky whifferdills. Finally the canopy departs. Our Marine is greatly relieved. He unstraps and prepares to climb out. This is an F-8, you understand, and if he makes it past that tail in one piece he will be the very first. But he’s going to give it a try. He starts to straighten up and the wind just grabs him and whoom — he’s out — free-falling toward the ocean deep and blue. Out, thank God, out!
“He falls for a while toward the Pacific thinking about Marine maintenance, then decides it’s time to see if the parachute works. It wasn’t that kind of a day. Damn thing streams.”
“No!” several of his listeners groaned in unison.
“I shit you not,” Bob Landow replied. He helped himself to more beer as his Marine fell from an indifferent sky toward an indifferent sea with an unopened parachute streaming behind him.
“What’s the rest of it?” Tricky demanded.
Landow frowned. There is a certain pace to a good sea story, and Tricky had a bad habit of rushing it. Not willing to be hurried, Landow took another sip of beer, then made a show of wiping his lips with a napkin. When he had the glass back on the bar and his weight lifter’s arms crossed just so, he said, “He had some Marine luck there at the end. Pulled strings like a puppeteer and got a few panels of the rag to blossom. Just enough. Just enough.”
He shook his head wearily and settled a baleful gaze on Jake Grafton. “Things happen to Marines. You be careful out there, Jake.”
“Yeah,” Jake told them as he glanced out the window at the reflection of small puffy clouds on the limpid blue water. “I will.”
3
Jake Grafton was dressed in khakis and wearing his leather flight jacket when he stepped onto the catwalk around the flight deck. The sun was out, yet to the west a layer of fog obscured the higher buildings of San Francisco and all of the Golden Gate Bridge except the tops of the towers. The gentle breeze had that moist, foggy feeling. Jake shivered and tugged his ball cap more firmly onto his head.
The pier below was covered with people. The pilot rested his elbows on the railing of the catwalk and stood taking it all in, listening to the cacophony of voices.
Sailors, Marines, officers and chiefs stood surrounded by their families. Children were everywhere, some clinging to their mothers, others running through the crowd chasing one another, the smaller ones being passed from hand to hand by the adults.
A band was tuning up on Elevator Two, which was in the down position and stuck out over the pier like a porch roof. Even as Jake watched, the conductor got the attention of his charges and whipped them into a Sousa march.