“Don’t you have a car?”
“Bloody crashed it. Telegraph won’t buy me a new one. Need a beer.”
“Cheers to that,” I said.
“Let’s get pissed then. Celebrate your arrival.”
Formalities over, we sat down with the others.
An hour later, a waiter emerged.
It was an enjoyable evening. Of the two of us, Poole seemed the more down-to-earth, ordering “spag bol” from the Chateau’s bar menu and eating it off his lap while I prodded at an organic tofu salad. It was an odd role reversal, given that I was the one who had gone to a state-run school and “redbrick” university. We shared cigarettes and gossip about reporters we both knew in London. By midnight we had relocated to The Standard, another Sunset Strip hotel. We sat outside, by the soothing glow of the pool, overlooking the infinite, glittering sprawl of Los Angeles. My rival, I concluded, was clearly a talented and energetic, almost hyperactive reporter. But he didn’t appear to be the career-destroying scoop-machine I had feared. And we were very different people, bound to suggest different ideas to our foreign desks. The competition in Hollywood, I reassured myself, was nothing to worry about.
I should, of course, have known better.
“Martin?”
This was me, a few weeks later, on a morning call to Fletcher.
“Yes, what?” The “what” was playful, probably delivered with a handsome, inscrutable smile. I often suspected, however, that there was some genuine annoyance beneath Fletcher’s charm.
“When am I going to get something in the paper?”
“You got something in yesterday.”
“It was a nib.”
“It was a LEAD nib. And besides, long doesn’t mean good.”
“I know… but, still… when I worked for Patien—”
“It’s the war! It’s taking up lots and lots of space. Readers don’t want to read celebrity fluff at the moment. They want to know when Bush will invade; or what kind of gas Saddam puts in his mortar shells.”
“What if I did something war-related? From, er, Hollywood.”
“That would be excellent. The Telegraph did a lovely piece on soldiers’ sperm the other day. What are you offering?”
Soldiers’ sperm? Shit. Bloody Poole.
“Chris?”
“Yes. I’ll come up with something. Promise.”
“Gd.”
The Greyhound banked again, and this time I dry-heaved. I really shouldn’t have ordered the Full American from the hotel’s breakfast menu. I closed my eyes and wondered why I was on a navy plane, about to experience a 150-mile-an-hour impact with the deck of an American supercarrier. Then I remembered: Since arriving in Los Angeles, I had got almost nothing in The Times. Highlights included a piece about a Slovenian swimming the length of the Mississippi (three paragraphs), and an inaccurate prediction that an Irishman would become the new LAPD chief (four paragraphs). The foreign desk had, as Glen predicted, ignored me. I spent my mornings cruising pointlessly around Beverly Hills, wondering whether I had made a terrible mistake. Alana, meanwhile, had got a management job at a magazine and was doing well. She still despised Los Angeles, however. And we had no friends.
I got the idea to visit a navy aircraft carrier after watching a story about the USS Constellation on KCAL-9, a local news channel. Connie, as the ship is known, was the first American aircraft carrier to attack North Vietnam and was likely to become one of the first vessels deployed to “Gulf War II.” When I called the navy’s West Coast headquarters on Coronado Island, near San Diego, I expected to be quickly fobbed off. As it turned out, the opposite happened.
“Hi, I’m calling from the London Times,” I said.
“How y’doin’ today, sir?” said a friendly female voice.
“Er, great. Thanks.”
“Outstanding, sir!”
“I was wondering if, perhaps, I would be able to visit the Constellation?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sorry?”
“Yes, I believe you will be able to visit, sir. Be here at 0700 hours.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Absolutely, sir.”
It turned out I had called at the right time: A group of reporters was set to visit the Constellation early the next morning. Someone had dropped out at the last minute, allowing me to take his place. I drove to San Diego that afternoon, stayed overnight, and got to Coronado Island at 0800, just in time to hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” being played over the PA system. I assumed the reporters would be transported to the Constellation by boat or helicopter. Instead, I was directed to a parking lot next to a taxiway, on which a dirty C-2A Greyhound was idling its engines. I wondered how it could be possible for a twenty-eight-ton transport plane to land on the 320-foot deck of a warship. Then I noticed the metal hook near the aircraft’s tail. I groaned. Glancing around me, I noticed about twenty other dyspeptic journalists, news photographers, and television camera operators gathered on the runway. They all looked as though they were regretting their breakfasts. The look became more pronounced as we were each handed headphones, earplugs, goggles, a life jacket, and crash helmet. Then we were shoved onboard and strapped tightly into our plastic seats.
Now the Greyhound’s engines were shifting pitch. My earwax blistered as we started to lose altitude. Static fizzed and popped through my headset. A distorted scream cut through it: “Brace for landing!”
I was strapped in so tight, I couldn’t brace anything. So I grimaced instead, and screwed up my eyes. If I survived the landing, I said to myself, I would never feel nervous on a commercial flight again.
“Get ready!”
I wondered what would happen if a British Airways pilot acted like this while preparing to touch down at Heathrow.
The turboprops made a thousand-decibel groan and the Greyhound seemed to shake the screws loose from its frame. We swung violently from side to side as we fell out of the sky. I strained to look out the windows, but couldn’t see anything. Our speed increased and I broke out into a sweat.
This must be what it feels like to cra—
Before I could finish the thought, gravity drop-kicked me in my chest, crushing my shoulders into the seat. The force of the deceleration, meanwhile, lifted my buttocks as far as the limited give in the nylon harness would allow. I thought, for a moment, that I would perform a fatal backward somersault into the cockpit’s instrument panel. Then came a terrible mechanical clatter, followed by giddy, weightless release, and a gravity kick from the other direction, into my back. My neck slumped forward and I tasted tongue and blood. I felt the Greyhound fall, then swing upward violently. The engines were hysterical; kamikaze almost. The plane wobbled, corrected itself, then banked. The arresting cable, it seemed, hadn’t arrested us. And now we were low on fuel, in a rainstorm, with two more chances to land.
“Oops,” said the pilot.
I wondered how I would release my seat belt if we ended up in the ocean.
Then the plane started to fall again.
We landed about fifteen minutes later, on the third and final attempt. When the Greyhound’s hatch opened, we might as well have been on another planet. Pressurized steam from the ship’s engines rose through cracks in the deck, as though the scene was being directed by a pop video director for MTV. The noise of the 1,069-foot-long, eighty-thousand-ton warship chopping up the ocean as seventy warplanes idled their jet engines on deck rendered all other human activity silent. All I could hear was the blood inside my ears. And the voice inside my head asking me what the hell I was doing.