Stranger to the Ground

I watch Two, and in the curved plexiglass of the canopy I see myself reflected as I watch; a Martian if I ever saw one. Hard white helmet, smooth-curved glare visor down and looking like a prop for a Man in Space feature, green oxygen mask covering all the face that the visor does not cover, oxygen hose leading down out of sight. No indication that there is a living thinking creature behind the hardware. The reflection watches Ricochet Two.

There it is, the grey wisp from the gunports in the nose. The target is still and waiting as though it will stand a year before seeing a sign of motion. Then, suddenly, the thick fountain of dust. To the left of the panel a twig on the ground jumps into startled life and leaps into the air. End over end, slowly it turns, shifting after its first instant into the familiar slow motion of things caught in the swift rain of machinegun bullets. It twists two full turns above the fountain and sinks gracefully back beneath the thick cloud of it. The concrete highway is torn to rock and the twig survives. That should carry a moral.

“Two is off.” Smoke disappears from gunports. The airplane turns its oval nose to the sky and streaks away from the target.

“Three is in.”

What is the moral of the twig? I think about it and I turn sharply into the base leg of the pattern, rechecking the gunsight, right index finger pointing forward at the altimeter. What is the moral of the twig?

The wisp of smoke trails from the gunports of the smooth aluminum nose of Ricochet Three, and I watch his pass.

There is no moral. If the target was a pile of twigs, the hail of copper and lead would turn it into a scattered blanket of splinters. This was a lucky twig. If you are a lucky twig, you can survive anything.

“Three is off.”

The safety panel is white, the gun switch is at guns, and slam the stick whips to the right under my glove and my airplane rolls like a terrified animal to the right and the sky goes grey with the G of the turn and the G-suit inflates to press me in a hard vise of trapped air.

I have never been so rushed, when I fly my airplane, that I do not think. Even in the gunnery pattern, when the airspeed needle is covering 370 knots and the airplane is a few feet from the ground, the thinking goes on. When events happen in split seconds, it is not the thinking that changes, but the event. Events fall obediently into slow motion when there is a need for more thought.

As I fly tonight, navigating with the TACAN locked firmly onto the Laon transmitter, there is plenty of time for thought, and obligingly, events telescope themselves so that seven minutes will pass in the moment between the haunted land of Abbeville and the TACAN transmitter at Laon, France. I do not pass time as I fly, time passes me.

The hills slip away. There is a solid layer of black cloud from the ground to within a thousand feet of my airplane. The ground is buried, but in my chariot of steel and aluminum and plexiglass I am carried above, and the stars are bright.

In the red light, on the windowed face of the radiocompass, are four selector knobs, one switch, and one coffee-grinder tuning crank. I turn the crank. It is as old-fashioned in the cockpit of a fighter plane as would be a hand-wound telephone in an atomic research center. If it was much more quiet and if I wore no helmet, perhaps I could hear the crank squeak as it turned. I turn the handle, imagining the squeaks, until the frequency needle comes to rest over the number 344, the frequency of the Laon radio-beacon.

Turn up the volume. Listen. Crank the handle a little to the left, a little to the right. Static static crank dih-dih. Pause. Static. Listen for L-C. Dah-dih-dah-dih. . . . Dih-dah-dih-dih. . . . That is it. My right glove turns the selector from antenna to compass, while the left has the unnatural task of holding the control stick grip. The slim luminous green radiocompass needle spins majestically from the bottom of its dial to the top—a crosscheck on the TACAN—Laon radiobeacon is ahead. A little adjustment with the crank, an eighth of an inch, and the radiocompass is locked strong on Laon. Turn down the volume.

The Laon radiobeacon i

s a solitary place. It stands alone with the trees and the cold hills in the morning and the trees and the warm hills in the afternoon, sending its L-C into the air whether there is a pilot in the sky to hear it or whether there is nothing in the sky but a lone raven. But it is faithful and ever there. If the raven had a radiocompass, he could find his way unerringly to the tower that broadcasts the L-C. Every once in a long while a maintenance crew will go to the beacon and its tower and check its voltages and perform some routine tube-changing. Then they will leave the tower standing alone again and jounce back the rough road the way they came.

At this moment the steel of the tower is cold in the night and the raven is asleep in his stony home on a hillside. The coded letters, though, are awake and moving and alive, and I am glad, for the navigation is working out well.

The wide TACAN needle shares the same dial with the radiocompass needle, and they work together now to tell me that Laon is passing beneath my airplane. The radiocompass needle is the most active of the two. It twitches and quivers with stiff electronic life, like some deep sea life dredged and placed on a microscope slide. It jerks to the left and right; it quavers at the top of the dial, swinging in wider and wider arcs. Then, in one decisive movement, it swings all the way around, clockwise, and points to the bottom of the dial. The Laon radiobeacon has passed behind. The TACAN needle swings lazily five or six times around the dial and finally agrees with its more nervous companion. I am definitely past Laon.

That part of my thought that paid serious attention to navigation classes guides my glove to tilt the stick to the left, and the crowd of instruments in the center of the panel swings into an awareness of the seriousness of my action. Heading indicator moves on tiny oiled bearings to the left, turn needle leans to the left a quarter of an inch. The miniature airplane on the attitude indicator banks to the left against its luminous horizon line. Airspeed needle moves down a knot, altimeter and vertical speed needles drop for just a second, until I see their conspiracy and add the thought of back pressure through the right glove. The errant pair rise again into line.

Once again, the routine. Ready with the position report, thumb down on microphone button.

Though the cloud is almost at my flight level, and very dark, it looks as if the forecaster has once again gone astray, for I have not seen a flash of lightning since over the Channel. Whatever severe weather is afoot tonight over France is keeping itself well hidden. I am not concerned. In fifty minutes I shall be landing, with my precious sack of documents, at Chaumont.

CHAPTER THREE

“France Control, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Laon.” There is quiet static in the soft earphones. I wait. Perhaps my call went unnoticed.

“France Control, France Control, Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, how do you read on frequency three one seven point eight.” There is no answer.

It is not at all unusual for a radio to break down in flight, for radios are temperamental things. But it is never a comfortable feeling to fly at night above weather without some way of talking to the people on the ground. My glove moves to the right, to the frequency selector of the UHF command radio. I do not bother to watch it work, for it is simply changing a sliding square knob one click, from manual to preset. An indicator on the instrument panel juggles numbers in small windows, and finally decides to present the number 18, in small red-lit figures. In that one click I am aligned with a different set of people, away from the busy hub of the France Control Center to the quiet and pastoral surroundings of Calva Radar. I know that the stereotype is not a valid one, for radar stations are only smaller places than traffic control centers, and are often far more rushed and busy. Yet whenever I call a radar site, I feel a little more at ease, and imagine a small red brick building set in a field of brilliant green grass, with a cow grazing not far away.

“Calva Radar, Calva Radar, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, how do you read channel one eight.” There is perhaps one chance in three that the UHF will work on this frequency when it did not work on the frequency for France Control. The cow outside the brick building is asleep, a sculptured boulder in the dark of the grass. A light is in the window of the building, and a man’s shadow moves across the glass as he reaches for his microphone.

“. . . ero five . . . . d you . . . . . arbled . . . . . Calva?”

The UHF is definitely on its way out of commission. But even if it goes completely out, I am still cleared to maintain flight level 330 all the way to the Chaumont TACAN holding pattern. There are occasional moments like this when I wish that the airplane had just one more communication radio installed. But the F-84F was built for fighting, not for talking, and I must make do with what I have.

“Calva Radar, Four Zero Five unable to contact France Control, was Laon at one zero, flight level three three zero assigned instrument flight rules, estimating Spangdahlem at two eight, Wiesbaden.” A wild try. A shot in the dark. But at least the information was said, and I have made the required report. I hear Calva’s microphone button go down.

“. . . ive . . . ort . . . . . mly garb . . . . come up . . . point zero . . .”