Wingmen (9781310207280) (2 page)

Fred took a
cigarette and matches from the pocket of his uniform shirt and
lighted up. He sat down on the edge of the bed and smoked,
occasionally looking over at the girl. She lay quietly, apparently
asleep. He suddenly noticed he was covered with sweat and figured
the girl was, too, but he didn’t reach out to check.

When he’d
finished with his smoke, he ground it out in the ashtray and padded
naked across the room to the tiny bathroom, retrieving his shorts
on the way. He turned on the bathroom light and closed the door. He
was surprised at the good feeling that privacy—real
privacy—afforded him. There were no other men in the shower with
him, no one using the toilet across the room, no one shaving at the
sink. He turned on the water and stepped into the tub, pulling the
curtain closed behind him.

The female
paraphernalia of shampoos, razor, and bath oils that crowded the
corners of the tub amused him. He washed himself clean, then dried
off on the only towel he could find. Pink and fluffy, it smelled
like the girl. He hung the towel back where he had found it,
straightened the bathroom a little, then went back into the
bedroom.

When he was
dressed, the naked girl turned over and watched him tie his shoes.
“Was it good for you, too?” she asked. Her voice had a dreamy,
sleepy quality.

Fred finished
tying his shoe and let his foot fall to the floor. “Sure,” he
said.

“You’re leaving
now?”

She was, he
thought, really a nice girl. He hoped she didn’t think he was a
love-’em-and-leave-’em type, or feel any guilt about what they had
done.

“Afraid so.” He
touched her arm. “We’ll be flying early tomorrow and I should get
some sleep.”

“What ship are
you on?”

“We don’t have
a ship yet.”

“Why?”

“I’m a pilot
with Fighter Squadron Eight, part of Air Group Number Eight.
They’ll assign us to an aircraft carrier when they have one ready
for us.”

“What’s it
like?”

“What?”

“Flying.”

Fred thought
for a moment, then stood up. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it’s
about the best thing in the world.”

“You’re
kidding,” she said smilingly. She stretched sensuously, then curled
into a satisfied little bundle. Fred covered her with the
sheet.

“Nope,” he
said. “It’s the best.” He crossed the room and opened the door into
the hallway. “Good night,” he said without looking back and closed
the door softly behind him.

Lieutenant Commander
Jack Hardigan was the new skipper of VF-20, the fighter squadron of
Air Group Twenty, soon to embark aboard the carrier
Constitution.
Jack
Hardigan was also more interested in flying his shiny new Hellcat
than in coping with the mess he was confronted with now. The new
aircraft had arrived over a month ago, at about the time he had
received final command of the squadron, and he had yet to log more
than twenty hours of flight time in them. For this he could thank
the former squadron commander, who had just departed for the
continent to form a new air group at whose head he would fly. The
old commander had preferred making speeches and giving pep talks,
in which he would say things like, “It’s an ugly fucking job, but
the sooner we get out there and blast the slanty-eyed bastards to
hell, the sooner this fucking war’ll be over,” and “They’re the
best goddamn pilots in the fleet and I love ’em for it”—to doing
paperwork. So Jack had inherited quite a backlog of it. Jack had
not been fooled by the oratory of VF-20’s former commander. He knew
the man wished the war would never end and was having the time of
his life. He didn’t in fact love his pilots any more than he loved
anyone of the innumerable prostitutes he had bedded in his
enthusiastic pursuit of a colorful reputation. Images, reflected
Jack, were everything to some people.

The latest
VF-20 crisis entailed fitness reports on the pilots, due on
CAG’s—the Air Group Commander’s—desk not later than the third week
in June, which would give him time to review them, make changes,
and sign them into the respective jackets. Jack could easily finish
this minor task in about an hour. CAG, however, another pompous
little man who had hated all fighter pilots since Midway (80
percent of his torpedo squadron had been destroyed there and he had
needed a goat), would undoubtedly send half the completed reports
back with little notes that read, “Unsat, do over.” He would then
rant and rave like a wounded chicken when the week was over and the
reports were due but unfinished. Denied leave, Jack would then
forego everything else, regardless of priority, and stay up all
night to finish the goddamn reports. The crisis would end, only to
be taken up by another, more horrendous crisis—and that would keep
Jack on the ground and out of town until the
next
crisis. Life in Air Group
Twenty was not exactly a bed of roses.

Jack sighed and
shuffled the stack of fitness forms in front of him, dismayed at
their number. Thirty-two pilots needed to be graded. He had done
eight of them because those eight were the division leaders. The
rest were done by the division leaders themselves, men who could
fly well enough but knew absolutely nothing about the English
language—a few, he was convinced, spoke no English at all, just a
smattering of flying slang and profanity, equally mixed. The
reports these officers and gentlemen had composed would have to be
completely rewritten.

Jack sorted the
forms into two stacks, one for the pilots he had known for a while
and one for the new men. Counting himself, only fourteen of the
thirty-three pilots had any operational experience, and only eight
of those fourteen had been in combat. Nineteen of the men were
brand-new. All but one of them were ensigns. Jack found himself
wishing that gaining experience in the ugly game of war for at
least some of the new men would mean something other than the
finality of death.

Jack glanced at
the clock and took the first form from the stack. It was 9:45. The
yeoman and office staff had long since left and he was alone in the
building. Outside, in the warm Hawaiian night, a low-flying Avenger
(he recognized the sound of its engine) droned overhead, then
receded into the darkness. In town and at the Officer’s Club, his
pilots were blowing hundreds of dollars on booze and broads, for no
other reason except that all the other pilots were doing the same
thing. War provided a marvelous opportunity for them to prove their
manhood. But when the time came to manhandle an overladen aircraft
off a pitching carrier deck, only a few would retain that cavalier
attitude. Some would die without ever seeing the enemy.

“Ensign Jacobs
is a fine pilot and always scores above average in shooting.” Jack
winced at the fractured line and rewrote it. “Ensign Jacobs
displays a natural flying ability enhanced by the ability to profit
quickly from the advice and instruction of more experienced
aviators. He has consistently scored in the twenty to twenty-five
percentile group in air-to-air gunnery exercise.” Jack pictured
Jacobs in his mind; he was just a kid. He had probably soloed only
once or twice by the time Jack had fought and survived the
engagement at Midway.

Midway. It
always came back to those few hundred square miles of ocean. Funny,
thought Jack, how such an island could exert such an influence for
so long. He wondered if other pilots who had fought there—and most
of those around at the time had—felt the same as he did. He tended
to think of his life as having started at Midway, that the war
until then had been something of a lark—a little scary perhaps, but
still in the high adventure category. He had been flying off the
Hornet
and
had gone with Colonel Doolittle to Tokyo. Thus he had missed the
Coral Sea engagement, which no doubt had served as the starting, or
stopping, point for a lot of other flyers.
Yorktown
’s and
Lexington
’s groups had been
decimated at Coral Sea. But that was the point: Things like that
happened to other groups, never to yours.

Jack was
blooded at Midway. Drinking buddies and roommates died horribly
before his eyes—or simply vanished into the depths of the Pacific
Ocean. Midway was three days of terror and exhaustion, a
life-changing combination if ever there was one. And Jack had most
certainly changed.

It was almost
midnight before Jack reached a stopping point on the forms. He had
corrected the grammar and spelling on all the reports for the new
pilots, and he would finish the rest the following night. Leaving
the fitness forms, he skimmed through the other items on his hot
list.

Item two
concerned a new ensign named Carruthers who had joined the squadron
three weeks before and was now accused of rape by a local girl. The
investigation into this affair would take another week at least.
Then would come the court-martial, which would take three weeks to
get started. CAG had informed him in strictest confidence that the
air group would ship aboard and sail with the fleet in less time
than that, although how he had managed to obtain that piece of
information, Jack would never know. Then CAG had ordered Jack to
have the offending pilot detached to the naval base (since he was
spending his time in the BOQ under house arrest anyway) and then
locate another pilot in the islands to replace him—as though Jack,
a new lieutenant commander, had friends on Admiral Nimitz’s staff.
Jack had already decided to make a stab at it, then call it quits;
he had enough to do without attempting the impossible.

Item three
concerned three new pilots who had never arrived. They were two
weeks overdue now. Jack had mentioned it to CAG about a week ago in
a memo. He’d offered the opinion that since the squadron was
already more or less up to full strength, perhaps they should do
nothing. Since he felt sure that CAG would find his opinion
unacceptable, he had already requested assistance from the naval
base personnel office in locating them. It was obviously an
administrative error. Three new pilots coming back from
post-flight-training leave would never jump ship, all at the same
time. Jack was more concerned with the effect on the squadron than
with finding the “missing” men, because now he had a man without a
wingman to train with. He had partially solved the problem by
sending his pilots to the Naval Hospital at Pearl Harbor three at a
time and rotating the odd man through the other divisions for
training. That odd, new man probably knew more about the other
pilots in the squadron and the F6F-3 Hellcat, Jack reflected
ruefully, than he did.

He straightened
the papers on his desk, temporarily satisfied that everything was
under control. He snapped out the lamp and darkness engulfed him.
He pulled open the blackout curtains. Straining to see in the dim
moonlight, he could just make out the concrete revetments, the
runway, and the hulking shapes of parked aircraft. He sat for a few
minutes, feeling very lonely. He’d always heard that those in
command were lonely people, but he’d discounted it. Now he craved
someone to talk to, someone with whom he could share his thoughts,
and he realized that he had felt this way before, often. He’d
always written it off before by telling himself he was merely
horny. Now he wasn’t so sure.
It’ll be better when we go to sea
, he
thought. But he sat in the darkness for another ten minutes
wondering about it.

The squadron
insignia for VF-8 made a clever play on words and was nonsensically
sordid. A grinning skeleton sat on the wing of a Wildcat, wearing a
flapping flight helmet and dealing aces and eights from a deck of
cards. One of the aces was severing the head of a surprised
Japanese pilot, who sat in the exposed cockpit of a cartoon
airplane. Over the skeleton’s head were the words “Deal’s Deadly
Dealers” and below it was written “Fighting Eight.” When Fred
Trusteau first saw it, he thought it a joke. He soon discovered
otherwise.

The insignia
was painted on a piece of sheet aluminum. The original wooden one
had been tossed out of the
Enterprise
prior to the Eastern Solomons engagement,
in one of the frequent efforts to rid the ship of nonessential
flammables. Fred wondered if the paint would burn, and he imagined
himself heaving the metal sheet over the side of the ship. It hung
now in front of the longish classroom used by the group as it
re-formed and trained at Kaneohe near Honolulu. Under the
skeleton’s baleful gaze, the squadron received its daily training
in defensive flying, attack techniques, air navigation, shipboard
procedures, and survival.

The skipper of
Fighting Eight was not a large man by any standard other than the
size of his gut. Lieutenant Commander Deal was fast approaching the
age at which he would have to be removed from air combat status
because of his slower reactions. At thirty-seven, he had the
dubious distinction of being the oldest squadron commander in the
fleet. He was in fact older than the Air Group Commander, and would
have been moved up and out long ago had it not been for the battles
at Midway, the Eastern Solomons, and Santa Cruz, eighteen months in
all of continuous wartime operating, which had cut down
considerably on competition for command aviation billets. Now,
however, time was catching up with Lieutenant Commander Deal. Whole
classes of new pilots were arriving in the islands.

Deal swaggered
into the ready room this morning and theatrically took the floor
from his executive officer, who had been briefing the pilots on the
morning’s exercises. He wore a forty-five automatic in a holster
under his left arm, and his khaki uniform showed that it had been
slept in for the past two nights. There were small darkened stains
on the front of the trousers, but they were almost
indistinguishable among the accumulated stains. Deal was too
occupied or too lazy to put out his laundry for the stewards. The
man nauseated Fred.