William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

As the Sea King approached the carrier, a great steel playing field plowing through the choppy waters of the South China Sea, Lydecker was aware of a palpable change going through his body. He felt his breathing become shallower and perspiration break out on his forehead. It seemed as if his chest were hollow and filled with throbbing, pulsating air.

Lydecker reported sick on landing and was found to be running a high temperature. The shipboard medics shot him full of penicillin and told him not to report for duty for two days. During that time Lydecker uneasily roved the corridors of the ship, a thinner and more consumptive figure than before, his mind obsessed with the violent images of his shore leave; of his casual unsatisfactory sex, fragments of obscene anecdotes he had heard, murmured accounts of battle-zone atrocities, and above them all, endlessly repeating itself like a video film loop, the vision of the young girl’s ghastly pirouette to expose her ravaged back.

Even Lydecker’s normally uninterested crew-mates commented on his yellowish pallor, the sheen of sweat forever on his forehead and upper lip, his staring red-rimmed eyes. They jokingly accused him of contracting some recondite strain of venereal disease and roared with laughter when he tried haltingly to tell them about the whore and her loathsome scars.

Gradually the nomadic circuit of Lydecker’s thoughts began to focus once again on Pfitz and his Crusader. Covertly, he haunted the below-deck hangar, distantly supervised the fueling and rearming of the plane, observed Pascual and Huq trundle the fat napalm canisters from the magazine elevators. He even took to following Pfitz discreetly whenever he moved from the officers’ quarters, studying the man’s corridor-filling bulk, the contours of his large skull revealed by his razored crew-cut, the pink fleshiness of his neck above the stiff collar of his flying suit. The glimmerings of an idea began to form in Lydecker’s mind. He started to plot his revenge.

His nervous debility persisted, his temperature was regularly above normal and he collected sickness chits without problem.

Then one afternoon he was lounging in a hatchway a few feet from the Crusader’s arming bay. Pfitz was talking to Lee Otis as the mechanic checked a faulty shackle on a napalm canister. Lydecker strained to catch his words.

“… Yeah, there just ain’t nothing to beat this jelly, man. It’s gonna win us the woah. Shit, I can remember the original stuff. It wasn’t so hot. If the dinks were quick enough they could scrape it off. So the scientists come up with a good idea. They started adding polystyrene — yeah, polystyrene. Hell, man, now it sticks better ’n shit to a blanket.” He chortled. Lee Otis’s eyes were glazed with boredom but Pfitz carried on, unaware in his enthusiasm. “Trouble was, if the dinks were fast enough and jumped underwater, it stopped burning. So some wise guy adds white phosphorus to the mix, and — get this, boy — now it can burn underwater .” He reached down and patted the nose cone of the canister. “That thing on okay, now?”

Crouched in his hatchway, Lydecker waited and watched until Pfitz hauled his bulky body into the narrow cockpit of the Crusader. He tasted acid bile in his throat, his fretting hands picked unconsciously at his olive green jacket and a slight shivering ran through his wasted body. It was clear now. Beyond doubt. He couldn’t understand why he had waited so long. Pfitz was the guilty one. For that girl’s sake, Pfitz had to suffer too.

It didn’t take Lydecker long to work out the technicalities of his revenge. The next day he was back on the catapult crew, silent and withdrawn, waiting for his time. In the evenings, with a rubber-based glue bought from the PX, and with sand from the fire buckets, and spare bolts and shards of metal from the machine rooms, he packed the beer can Pfitz had thrown at him with this glutinous hard-setting amalgam until it weighed heavy in his hand, a bright solid cylinder. To his fixated mind it had seemed only right that the beer can should be the agent of Pfitz’s destruction. There was a kind of macabre symmetry in the way events were turning out that he found deeply satisfying.

Patiently, Lydecker studied the mission rotas and the catapult launch schedules, waiting for the day when Pfitz was to be first in line.

It was a bright, windy afternoon that day on the Yankee Station. The mission was close support on some hostile ville on the Cambodian border. Pfitz was in a good mood. He had just heard that he was getting a new Phantom the day after tomorrow. First in the flight, he was towed into position on the catapult and waited with his canopy up for the Chester B . to get up steam and turn into the wind. He saw the rescue helicopters take off and assume their positions a hundred yards out from the sides of the carrier. Pfitz looked at the catapult crew hunched against the rush of wind with their thick goggles and macrocephalic helmets. He saw the thin figure of that shithead Lydecker staring up at him, the wire launch bridle dangling from his hand. Little bastard. He began to feel uncomfortable at the insistent way Lydecker was looking at him. He seemed to remember seeing too much of the little creep around lately. He’d have to kick his butt in when he got back, get the S.O.B, to keep his distance. He hauled down his canopy as he heard the crackle of instructions in his earphones preparing him for takeoff and the Rose Train’s thirty-fifth mission. As he ran through the final cockpit checks he noticed the hunched, beetling figure of Lydecker scuttling up to the nose wheel to secure the catapult bridle. As he moved out of his vision, Pfitz reflected that he’d never really taught the little shit a proper lesson; he should have had him transferred right away.

Lydecker paused for a moment at the nose of the Crusader, out of Pfitz’s line of sight, buffeted by the rush of wind. For an instant he rested his gloved hand on the side of the plane and felt it shuddering from the power of its engine. His ear-muffles dampened all noise to a muted seashell roar. Then he crouched down and fitted both ends of the cables to the shackles on the nose wheel, looping the middle over the protruding shark’s fin of the towing block. He knelt at the front of the plane for a second as if in supplication. And then, making sure his body obscured the view of the catapult officer, he swiftly withdrew the heavy beer can from his jacket and slotted it neatly into the recessed track, like a stubby bolt in a crossbow, just in front of the towing block.

Pfitz should have an unimpeded, normal takeoff until the towing block reached the end of the catapult track. Then there would be a slight but vital check to the momentum imparted by the tons of steam pressure driving the block, as it obliterated the solid can, jamming its clear run to the end of the track. It would be a slight, almost unnoticeable impediment but, Lydecker had calculated, a crucial one.

Lydecker ran back to his station and waved okay to the catapult officer, who barely acknowledged Lydecker’s signal. It was just one launch among hundreds he had supervised, another routine mission. Nothing would happen. You were remote on the Yankee Station, the battles were elsewhere, over the horizon. Nobody attacked you and you never saw the people you atomized, shattered and burned.

Lydecker saw Pfitz lock into full afterburn. The catapult officer swept his arm forward. The seaman across the deck punched the black rubber button on the console and the catapult’s release sent the Crusader blasting down the track.

Only Lydecker observed the tiny explosion as the towing block ploughed through the can, grinding it into the end of the track. A minute, inconsequential impact. But the effect on Pfitz’s Crusader was dramatic. Instead of being thrown up at an angle into the skies, the plane was flung down a shallow slope into the sea some two hundred yards in front and to the left of the carrier. It was over in a couple of seconds. With a huge gout of spray, the Crusader was flipped into the sea, salt water flooding into the gaping intake, the screaming jets plunging the fully loaded aircraft deep under the surface.