We were deployed to Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, as part of the Pacific Tanker Task Force. That night we were the last plane out on a typhoon evacuation to Guam. We would have been earlier except for a maintenance delay, and by the time the jet was fixed the first tendrils of the storm were sweeping the field with blinding sheets of rain driven by wind gusts that rocked the airplane alarmingly. I watched my radar with a deepening sense of foreboding while the pilot argued with the tower about whether the winds were out of limits or not. Technically, they were, but if we didn’t go then what were they going to do with the plane? There was no place safe to put it, which was why we were evacuating in the first place. They finally let us take off in a lull between squalls and closed the runway behind us as we climbed out.

I buried my face in the radar scope hood for most of the climbout, calling out turns to avoid the worst of the nastiness. Ever see a typhoon on radar? It looks like a monstrous, whirling octopus, with feeder bands of thunderstorms for tentacles. Any one of the storm cells in those bands could dismantle the airplane around us and dump us into the frothing ocean.  Even staying as clear of them as I could was no picnic. St Elmo’s fire crawled across the windshield, when there wasn’t rain so heavy I thought it would drown our engines. Turbulence slammed us around so hard that I could barely read my instruments – and at times I couldn’t. Aircraft have lost engine pods, control surfaces, chunks of wing and other useful parts in turbulence like that. The pilots were working hard, yanking the controls from stop to stop in an effort to keep the old bird more or less upright and pointed in the right direction. Over their shoulders, the few times I peeked out the windshield, I glimpsed enormous, brooding cliffs and canyons and flat-topped mountains of cloud, lit from within by purple flashes of lightning. It got to where I was afraid to look forward for fear of what I might see.

We headed generally southeast, flying down the tentacles until I could find a gap big enough to duck through, then edging our way back toward planned course. Fortunately the oceanic air traffic control authorities were most obliging about our meanderings, essentially clearing us to wander aimlessly about the Northern Pacific. And why not? Who else would be dumb enough to be flying through a typhoon in the middle of the night?

Finally the brutal slams eased up into hard bumps, a light chop, and then to an eerie smoothness. I sat back in the seat, rubbing a nasty crick which had developed in my neck, and risked a glance out front. There were still clouds out there but they were below us, lit by a bright three-quarter moon in a starry sky. I keyed the intercom. "Well, that sucked."

Dick, the pilot, turned around and grinned at me. "Gotta heading, Nav?" he asked, in much the same way he might have requested another beer. He should have been as frazzled as I felt. Next to him Jaime, the copilot, was busy with the fuel panel.

"Just a second," I answered, spreading my chart and comparing coordinates with the best guess of my magic box, also called an inertial navigation system ("INS" for short). The computer's position was consistent with the general direction of our ramblings, so I used it to develop a heading to give him, promising to follow up with some celestial to check it. Wai, who'd been sitting in the instructor pilot - "IP" - seat behind and between the pilots (as many good boom operators do, to monitor the engine and fuel gauges), folded the seat and tipped it out of the way so she could get ready to do the sextant shooting for me.

A word about military interpersonal relations protocols (written and unwritten) might be helpful here. Like many crews we were on a first-name basis most of the time, but in the airplane we addressed each other by our positions and in public it was strictly “Captain Patterson,” “Lieutenant Ramos,” “Senior Airman Fong” and “Lieutenant Anderson.” After all, we flew, deployed, sat alert, and socialized together. Wai and I were unmarried and I suppose it was natural for some people to see us as a couple: for example, my mother. She thoroughly approved of Wai and couldn’t understand why we weren’t dating. “She’s so pretty! Don’t you think she looks just like Joey Wang, the Chinese actress?” I tried to explain about Air Force fraternization rules: “Mom, I’m an officer, she’s enlisted,” but it never seemed to penetrate, even though my mother was herself an Air Force wife. “So she’s a little taller than you, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.” “MOM, THAT’S NOT IT!!!”

I plotted the INS coordinates on my chart and drew a line from there to Guam, throwing in a couple of intermediate points to meet the requirements of our air navigation regulations. There is a certain romance attached to the idea of “finding your way by the stars,” but in practice celestial navigation involves a great deal of thumbing through books of tables, crunching numbers, peering through the eyepieces of sextants (which look nothing like what most people think of as sextants) and plotting lines on charts. Great precision is required during the process, but the result is hardly precise; if you can keep the aircraft within ten miles or so of its planned track after several hours over water with no other aids to navigation, you’re doing all right. With the inertial system helping us we could, of course, do better than that, but we were still required by tiresome regulation to shoot celestial, just in case.

We shot one star off our wing. This gave us a line-of-position roughly parallel with our track, that would tell me how far right or left of course we were. (Note: Shooting celestial gives you a line of position rather than a dot. We call this line an "LOP." You get fixes by crossing two or more LOPs.) The celestial and the box agreed pretty closely, so I began to relax.

"Pilot, Nav; we're okay for now. Boom, we'll shoot again in thirty minutes or so. I'll call you."

 

It was in the wee, wee hours of the morning when things began to happen. I had precomputed another shot, this time a star off our nose to check our groundspeed, and had kicked back to vegetate a moment. Normally I would have given Wai a few minutes warning, but out of the corner of my eye I could see her lounging in her seat and figured that even if she was asleep I could get her up onto the sextant stool in time.

I checked my watch. Thirty seconds to go.

"Boom, Nav. Thirty seconds to start shot."

"Nav, Boom. I'm back in the pod!" was her indignant reply.

"What?" I turned around. Sure enough, the seat was empty. Well, my fault, I had told her I'd give her fair warning. Grumbling to myself about what time warp had allowed her to get to the other end of the airplane so fast, I stood up and did the shot, then sat down to resolve the position. The box and the LOP agreed pretty well again, so I gave the pilot a minimal alter heading - just so he'd know I was paying attention - and leaned back.

"Nice view, huh?" somebody said over the intercom. The pilots looked at each other, then back at me. I shrugged and keyed the mike.

"Boom, was that you? What nice view?"

"Out the pod window of course. Can't you see it?"

"See it? I'm in the cockpit."

"The cockpit? Then who's . . . YAHHH!"

"Boom! Wai! What's the matter!"

"Somebody was in the pod with me!" said a voice next to my ear. I jumped and turned around. Sure enough, there was Wai. "That was quick," I said to her. Then, over intercom:

"Pilot, Nav. We may have a stowaway."

 

Wai and I eased open the cockpit door and peeked into the cargo bay. We were crouched side-by-side, because I was clutching the crash axe in one hand and Wai said she wouldn't feel safe behind me or in front of me if I started waving that thing around. Couldn't blame her, really; the crash axe is for chopping your way out of a wrecked airplane in a hurry and looks like something Crusaders might have whacked armored Saracens with, or vice-versa. We figured its appearance would be menacing enough to intimidate just about any stowaway.

Just to our right was the latrine. The cargo bay looked clear, so we unplugged our headsets from the comm cords (they wouldn't reach any farther than the door) and tiptoed around to where Wai could yank open the curtain and I could flash the axe. We did, but nobody was there. What a letdown.

Our plan after that was to go the interphone/oxygen panel just aft of the cargo door and plug into the long walkaround cords there before exploring further. We and the pilots gesticulated at each other for a moment, then we tiptoed over to the panel and plugged in. "Comm check. We're back up."

"Gotcha. See anything?"

We dropped back into our ninja crouches and looked around. That was when we realized that we had sneaked right by the galley, a waist-high box across from the latrine, without a second glance. Anybody could have hidden behind it and ambushed us. Sheepishly, we checked it just to be sure. "No, nothing yet."

"How about the boom pod?"

Well, how about the boom pod? "We were getting to it," I answered testily. In the back of the compartment was a row of fat, yellow oxygen bottles, and on each side was a slot about the size and shape of an open grave. Beneath these was the pod where Wai lay on her couch to operate the refueling boom and "pass gas" to our receivers. On trips like this it was also a nice place just to lay down and watch the world go by backwards. Since she had already encountered the intruder there it was the obvious place to look. For the same reason we were in no big hurry to do so.

Wai and I were halfway down the bay, bunched together like a couple of kids in a graveyard, when Dick called sharply. "Where are you guys?"

We both jumped. "Almost to the boom pod, honest!" I replied.

"So if you're back there," Jaime broke in, "WHO'S IN THE IP SEAT?"

Our feet lifted off the floor. We floated around with our comm cords snaking behind us for a moment, before Wai looked into my face and screamed "Zero-G!" The KC-135A's generators don't function at zero-g. As if her shout had just reminded them of that fact they kicked off line, and the cargo bay filled with inky blackness.

I was still holding the ax. I tried to keep it far enough away from me so that if I started bouncing off walls I wouldn't hurt myself, but close enough so I didn't chop Wai with it. I sure as hell didn't want to let go and have it wandering around unattended. No telling what it might have gotten into. The absolute dark didn't help either. I was suspended in space with no idea where up, down or Wai were located.

On second thought, the dark wasn't absolute. There were two little red lights, like funny-shaped warning lights, up where I suspected the cockpit to be. Oddly, they seemed to be getting closer, bobbing a little from side to side, as if they were the glowing red eyes of something that was walking toward me from the cockpit, getting closer and closer as I floated helplessly. Something that came right up to me (I guess, because I closed my eyes about then) and brushed against me, leaving behind a shuddery feeling as if I'd walked naked into a cobweb.

Then gravity came back, as Dick and Jaime pulled the aircraft out of its screaming dive, and I slammed onto the floor. On a KC-135 the floor is wooden and covered with what the Air Force calls carpeting. This "carpeting" consists of textured gray plastic backed by a half-inch or so of foam rubber. When one smacks into it from an uncontrolled position up near the ceiling it makes a poor landing mat.

I opened my eyes. The lights were on. The pilots must have gotten the generators back on line. The first thing I saw was Wai’s face, a furrow of concern between her perfect eyebrows. "Andy, are you okay?" She was holding the axe, which I didn't remember handing to her.

"Fine. Are you all right?"

"Sure."

“Did I ever tell you that you look like Joey Wang?”

The furrow deepened, and I could almost see the word “concussion?” forming in a thought bubble over her head. “No,” she said cautiously.

“Good.”

I rolled over, got painfully to my feet, and hobbled back to the nav station to assess the damage. My helmet was on the floor. I hung it back on the side of the console and slid into the seat, comforted to think that at least the inertial navigation system, with its backup battery, must still be working.

It wasn't. Evidently the battery had died. And the Doppler's drift and groundspeed were reading bizarre numbers, like something you might read in a helicopter flying sideways.

The panel went black on me again. I looked at the pilots, startled, as they flicked more switches on the overhead panel and swore in two languages. The panel lights flickered back on, but I realized that all of my darling electronic toys had been well and truly spiked. Even my radarscope was dead, which wasn't an immediate problem but serious, since even though we were clear of the typhoon a squall line was forecast between us and Guam.

"Nav, Pilot; is the transponder working? If it is, you better squawk 'Emergency' because the radios are out and I think we lost our navaids."

Oh, great. I reset the transponder, but there was no way to be really sure it was working until somebody's radar interrogated it. It, too, was electronic, and the recent shock treatment couldn't have done it any good. As with the radios and navaids, their failure added a whole new dimension to the panic welling up within me.

 Safe, routine aerial navigation depends on communicating with air traffic control authorities while traveling along defined airways to a destination airport and then flying an approach to it. This requires the use of radios and electronic aids to navigation, of which we suddenly had none. With the radar, if I got us reasonably close to Guam with celestial and dead reckoning then we could dodge the weather, locate the island - and the base - and fly a visual approach, even at night. It would be sporty, hard work, but I was fairly confident that I could place us within ten to fifteen miles or so of our destination, even after picking our way through the squall line.

If only we had the radar.

"Nav, Pilot; can you get us to Guam without the radar?"

"Probably," I said slowly. "There's a technique called a celestial landfall. You aim to miss a target on one side, then shoot an LOP that goes through it. Then you turn and fly up the LOP to the target."

"Why do you aim to miss?"

"So you know which way to turn. It’s a well-known technique,” I added, “been around a long time. I'm pretty sure this is what Fred Noonan was trying to do.”

“Who’s Fred Noonan?”

“Amelia Earhart's navigator.” Dick turned around and looked at me, nonplussed. Oops.

"Maybe it's just a fuse," the copilot suggested hurriedly.

"Let's worry about that later," I said. I didn't want to think about the fuse, or more particularly, about what I'd have to do to replace it. "Boom, we're going for a three-star fix on the next shot, so suck a little oxygen for your night vision and get ready."

We shot cel fix after cel fix, which is something we rarely even practiced, but it was all I had to work with. For my dead reckoning positions I compared the flight plan's winds with computed fix-to-fix winds, and developed a best guess as to what they really were. I was so absorbed in my calculations that when the pilot said "Hey, Nav," over the intercom and then pointed out in front of us it took a moment for me to figure out what he meant.

A puffy line of thunderstorms, pale blue against the black sky and lit by jagged purple flashes, seemed to rise from the horizon ahead of us.

My mouth went dry. "I guess it's time for the radar," I said. To change the fuse I would have to climb down into the nose compartment beneath the floor of the cockpit. I zipped my flight suit the rest of the way up and put on my jacket and gloves. It was going to be cold down there. And dark. And close.

There was something I'd never shared with the rest of my crew, and needless to say, with the Air Force either. I have this problem with enclosed spaces. It hadn't really manifested itself except in the altitude chamber. This is a big steel box with pressure doors and thick portholes that look like they came off a decommissioned submarine. They put you in this and then pump out most of the air in order to simulate the atmospheric conditions at high altitude. The primary purpose of this training is to teach you what your hypoxia symptoms are and how to use your oxygen equipment, so if the aircraft suffers a decompression you’ll know what’s happening and can react properly instead of passing out and, inevitably, dying. Besides this I got excellent practice suppressing an urge to claw my way out of that steel box with my fingernails.

Wai raised and latched the floor grill. I took off my headset and dropped it on the nav table. There was nowhere to plug it in down there, and our cords wouldn't reach. And even if they could reach, they'd snag.

"It's in the back somewhere," Jaime yelled encouragingly. I nodded. I knew by "It" he meant our "stowaway," and didn't think of it as 'he' or `she' anymore either.

"Don't forget this," Wai said, handing me a 'pax kit,' a portable passenger oxygen kit. I threw the strap over my head and one shoulder so it would hang behind, hopefully out of the way, and sat at the edge of the entry chute. The entrance into the nose compartment was in the side of the chute. I groped for the edge with one foot, careful not to step on the inside of the hatch. If I stepped on it all that would be between me and being gulped out into the thin air would be the latch, which I certainly wasn't going to trust with my life.

I got both feet on the edge of the compartment's opening, then ducked and wriggled inside. The light switch didn't work. Groovy. I twisted on my penlight and looked around. The floor was curved and the ceiling flat, the opposite of the crew cabin above, and the slipstream noise, which above was a susurration as soothing as a waterfall, was down here a thundering cascade. Everything was stark, the walls a yellow-green and the clutter of electronics boxes black and gray. The place reeked of hydraulic fluid and ozone.

The radar's receiver/transmitter unit was in a big, black can on shock mounts on the far side of the clutter. As I worked my way over to it protrusions snagged me with virtually every movement, and at one point I had to squeeze through a space I honestly wasn't sure I could fit through. I was breathing hard, only partly from the exertion, and beginning to get lightheaded.

When I finally arrived the only way to fit was to squat with one foot higher than the other, my head bent over sharply to avoid the ceiling and the radar can jammed into my chest. The fuses were in just about the worst place they could have been, short of being pressed against the floor. By twisting around I could either see them or touch them, but not both at the same time. I couldn't help but wonder how a tall person could possibly deal with a fuse change. As an aviator there are some advantages to being a runt, but this wasn't one I had ever anticipated.

I was fumbling with the fuse when the whispering started. It seemed to be coming from the bulkhead behind me, which was crazy, because there was nothing back there but a fuel cell. I held the old fuse up to the light. My hand was trembling, but I could still see that the fuse was bad. I stuck it in a chest pocket and reached for the replacement. The whispering almost sounded like two voices, now, mixed with a soft chuckle now and then. Where was that fuse? Look, grope, look, grope . . . there! The trembling was almost shaking, but in the jittering light the fuse appeared to be good. What a relief. Sometimes the maintenance guys would swap them out and forget to replace the bad one. Now to find the hole, the right hole, and stick the fuse in and twist it until it locked into place.

The whispering from the fuel cell stopped in mid-chuckle but two little red lights appeared in the shadows, at the far end of the compartment. The lights moved, in a swaying motion like somebody duck-walking in the confined space, up to the other side of the R/T. They seemed to bring some of the darkness with them.

The holes by themselves were harder to find than when they had had the fuses in, and somehow I was having trouble remembering which one needed to be filled with the good fuse. With the light I could see them, but when I poked with the fuse it just skittered around. I was afraid to grope with my finger in case the R/T still had a charged capacitor lurking in wait to zap me.

The red eyes tilted, as if whatever it was cocked its head. I had one hand on top of the R/T while I fumbled around with the other. All right, enough's enough! I looked at the holes, decided which one to put the fuse in, stuck two of my fingers in them to be sure I had the right ones, used them to guide my thumb and forefinger into the right place, and promptly dropped the fuse with a clatter on the floor.

The thing had touched my other hand.

 

We were still comm-out when we arrived at Anderson AFB, Guam, so they cleared us to land with a green light from the tower. We packed up our stuff as we taxied in and popped the hatch as soon as the marshallers stopped us in our parking spot. The crew chief secured the hatch brace and started to climb up the ladder, but stumbled back as helmet bags, overnight kits, and leather briefcases rained on him. Most of it he caught and put aside, and what he missed he broke the fall of with no more than a scowl. He did blurt out an expletive when he saw the sharp, rectangular bottom of our insulated steel water jug coming at him, but Wai answered with an aggrieved "I wasn't gonna drop that on you," and there was a quiet moment while he maneuvered the heavy, angular object onto the ground.

Then there was a flurry of boots on the ladder as we tumbled down and grabbed our stuff. (Comparing notes later we couldn't decide who was first or last off the plane, the consensus being that we must have gotten out together, somehow.) 

"I don't recommend going up there," Jaime told the crew chief as we got on the crew bus. "Wait until daylight. Yo! Driver! Let's go!"