The Intruders (22 page)

The last flight deck tractor zipped across the foul line near the
island, yet three cat crewmen were still struggling with the protector
plate.

Jake lifted one side of his mouse ears away from his head.

He heard McCoy roger the ball call.

The air boss on the loudspeaker again: “He’s called the ball. Let’s get
this deck clear now, people!”

There, the cat crewmen were running for the catwalk.

Jake looked aft. The Phantom was within a half mile, about two hundred
feet high, coming fast. On his nose-gear door was a stop-light
arrangement of little lights, red, yellow and green, that was operated
by the angle-of-attack instrument in the cockpit. Red for slow, yellow
for on speed, and green for fast. The yellow light was lit, but even as
Jake saw it, the red light flickered.

“You’re going to go slow,” Real told the pilot. “Little power.”

The red foul deck light went out and the green light came on.

“Clear deck,” shouted the LSO talker.

“Clear deck,” McCoy echoed, and lowered his right arm.

The jet was slamming through the burble caused by the island, his
engines winding up, then decelerating. In seconds the Phantom crossed
the ramp with its engines wailing, its hook reaching for a wire. Then
the hook struck in a shower of sparks and the main gear thumped down.
The hook snagged the second wire as the engines wound up to their full
fury-a futile roar, because the big fighter was quickly dragged to a
quivering halt. The exterior lights went out.

The hook runner raced across the foul line with his wands signaling
“hook up.” Seconds later the Phantom was taxiing out of the landing area
and the wings were folding.

Meanwhile McCoy was giving the grade to another LSO, who was writing in
the log. “Little slow in the middle, OK 111wo.”

McCoy glanced at Jake. “Nice pass. Pitching deck and reduced
visibility and he handled it real well. I bet I couldn’t do as well on
a shitty night like this.”

Then he was back out into the landing area listening to the radio. In
seconds another set of lights came out of the goo. Another Phantom.
This guy had more difficulty with the pass than the first fighter, but
he too successfully trapped. The third Phantom bottered and McCoy waved
off the fourth one. It was going to be a long recovery.

One of the LSOs handed Jake his radio. He put it to his ear in time to
hear the RA-5C Vigilante call the ball.

The Vigilante was the most beautiful airplane the Navy owned, in Jake’s
opinion. It was designed as a supersonic nuclear bomber back when
nuclear bombs were big. The weapon was carried in an internal bay and
was ejected out a door in the rear of the plane between the tailpipes.
The Navy soon discovered this method of delivery didn’t work: the bomb
was trapped in the airplane’s slipstream and trailed along
behind—sometimes for seconds at a time before it fell free. The
weapon’s impact point could not be predicted and there was a serious
danger that the bomb would strike the aircraft while it was tagging
along behind, damaging the plane and the weapon. So the Vigilantes were
converted to reconnaissance aircraft. Fuel tanks were installed in the
bomb bays and camera packages on the bellies.

With highly swept wings and empennage, a needle nose, and two huge
engines with afterburners, the plane was extraordinarily fast, capable
of ripping through the heavens at an honest Mach 2+. And it was a bitch
to get aboard the ship. Jake thought the Vigie pilots were supermen,
the best of the best.

Yet it was the guys in back who had the biggest coj6nes, for they rode
the beast with no control over their fate. Even worse, they rode in a
separate cockpit behind the pilot that had only two tiny windows, one on
each side of the fuselage.

They could not see forward or aft and their view to either side was
highly restricted. A-6 BNs with their seats beside the pilot and
excellent view in all quadrants regarded the Vigie backseaters with awe.
“It’s like flying in your own coffin,” they whispered to one another,
and shuddered.

Tonight the Vigie pilot was having his troubles. “I got vertigo,” he
told McCoy on the platform.

“Fly the ball and keep it coming,” the LSO said. “Your wings are level,
the deck is moving, average out the ball.

You’re slightly high drifting left … Watch your lineup!”

The Vigilante was a big plane, with a 60-foot wingspanthe foul lines
were 115 feet apart.

“Pick up your left wing, little power … right for lineup.”

Now the Vigie was crossing the ramp, and the right wing dropped.

“Level your wings,” McCoy roared into the radio.

The Vigilante’s left wing sagged and the nose rose. Jake shot a glance
at the PLAT monitor: the RA-5 was way too far right, his right wingtip
almost against the foul line.

Ms gaze flipped back to the airplane, just in time to hear the engines
roar and see the fire leap from the afterburners, two white-hot
blowtorches fifteen feet long. The light ripped the night open, casting
a garish tight on the parked planes, the men standing along the right
foul line, and the ship’s superstructure.

With her hook riding five feet above the wires and her left wing
slightly down, the big swept-wing jet crossed the deck and rose back
into the night sky. Only then did the fire from the afterburners go
out. The rolling thunder continued to wash over the men on the ship’s
deck, then it too dissipated.

An encounter with an angry dragon, Jake thought, slightly awed by the
scene he had just witnessed.

“A nugget on his first cruise,” McCoy told his colleagues, then dictated
his comments to the logbook writer.

The motion of the ship was becoming more pronounced, Jake thought,
especially here on the platform. When the deck reached the top of its
stroke, he felt slightly light on his feet.

McCoy noticed the increased deck motion too, and he switched the lens to
a four-degree glide slope, up from the normal three and one half. The
talker informed the controllers in Air Ops.

In seconds there was another plane on the ball, this time an A-7
Corsair. “Three One Zero, Corsair ball, Three Point Two.”

“Roger ball, four-degree glide slope. Pitching deck.”

This guy was an old pro. McCoy gave him one call, a little too much
power, and that was all it took. He snagged a three.

The next plane was the Phantom that boltered, and this time he was
steadier. Yet the steeper glide slope fooled him and he was fast all
the way, flattened out at the ramp and boltered again.

The next plane, an A-7, took more coaching, but he too caught a wire. So
did the Phantom that followed him, the one that had waved off
originally. The next A-7 had to be waved off, however, because the deck
was going down just before he got to the in-close position, while he was
working off a high and slightly fast. If he had overdone his power
reduction he would have been descending through the glide slope just as
the deck rose to meet him: a situation not conducive to a long life.

An A-6 successfully trapped, then the Phantom came around for his third
pass. Clear sky and the tanker were twenty-one thousand feet above, so
the pressure was on.

McCoy looked tense as a coiled spring as he stood staring up the glide
slope waiting for the F4’s lights to appear out of the overcast.

There!

“One Zero Two, Phantom ball, Four Point Two, trick or treat.” Trick or
treat meant that he had to trap on this pass or be sent to tank.

“Roger ball, four-degree glide slope, it’ll look steep so fly the ball.”

A dark night, a pitching deck, rain … these were the ingredients of
fear, cold, clutching, icy as death. A carrier pilot who denied he ever
experienced it was a bar. Tonight, on this pass, this fighter pilot
felt the slimy tentacles of fear play across his backbone. As he
crossed the ramp he reduced power and raised the nose. The heavy jet
instantly increased its rate of descent.

“No,” screamed McCoy.

The hook slapped down and the main mounts hit and the number one wire
screamed from its sheaves.

“There’s one lucky mother,” McCoy told the writer and the observing
signal officers when the blast of the Phantom’s two engines had died to
an idling whine. “Spotted the deck and should have busted his ass, but
the deck was falling away. Another military miracle. Who says Jesus
ain’t on our side?”

More A-7s came down the chute. The first one got aboard without
difficulty but the second announced he had vertigo.

“Roger that. Your wings are level and you’re fast. Going high. Steep
glide slope, catch it with power. More power.”

He was getting close and the red light on his nose gear door winked on.
He was slow. “Power. Power! Power!”

At the third power call the Real McCoy triggered the wave-off lights,
but it was too late. Even as the Corsair’s engine wound up, the wheels
hit the very end of the light deck and there was a bright flash. With
the engine winding up to full screech the plane roared up the deck,
across all the wires, and rotated to climb away. McCoy shouted “Bolter,
bolter, bolter,” on the radio.

Now McCoy handed the radio and Fresnel lens pickle to the nearest ISO.
He began running toward the fantail. Jake Grafton followed.

The dim light made seeing difficult. The deck was really moving here,
550 feet aft of the ship’s center of gravity. The ship was like a giant
seesaw. Keeping your knees bent helped absorb the thrusts of the deck.

McCoy took a flashlight from his hip pocket and played it on the ramp,
the sloping end of the flight deck. The ramp dropped away at about a
thirty-degree angle, went down ten or twelve feet, then ended. That was
the back end of the ship. The flashlight beam stopped three feet right
of the centerline stripe, at a deep dent.

“Hook strike,” Jake shouted.

“No, that’s where his main mount hit.” Real scanned with the flashlight
and stopped at another dent, the twin of the first. “There’s where the
other wheel hit. His hook hit below the ramp.” Then McCoy turned and
ran for the LSO platform, with Jake following.

Back on the LSO platform McCoy told the sailor wearing the sound-powered
phones, “His hook hit the back end of the ship and disintegrated. He
doesn’t have a hook now.

Tell Air Ops.”

Without a hook, the plane could be trapped aboard only with the
barricade, a huge nylon net that was rigged across the landing area like
a giant badminton net. Or it could be sent to an airfield in Japan.

Air Ops elected to send the crippled plane to Japan.

McCoy got back to the business of waving airplanes. He had the
Vigilante on the hall, with an A-6 and EA-6B behind him, then the E-2
Hawkeye and KA-6 tanker to follow.

This time the Vigie pilot drifted right of centerline and corrected back
toward the left. He leveled his wings momentarily, so McCoy let him
keep coming. Then, passing in close, the left wing dropped. The
Vigilante stewed toward the LSOs’ platform as McCoy screamed “Wave-off”
and dived to the right.

Jake had his eyes on the approaching plane, but McCoy was taking
everyone on the platform with him. Jake was almost to the edge when the
RA-5 swept overhead in burner, his hook almost close enough to touch.
Instinctively Jake ducked.

That was closely Too close. Now Jake realized that he and McCoy were
the only two people still on the platform. He looked down to his right.
Two hands reached up out of the darkness and grabbed the edge by Jake’s
foot. Eve?yone else went into the net.

They clambered back up, one by one. The talker picked up his
sound-powered headset where he had dropped it and put it back on.

McCoy leaned toward the talker. “Tell Air Ops, that I recommend he send
the Vigie to the beach for fuel and a turnaround. Give that guy some
time to calm down.”

And that is what Air Ops did.

The last plane was still two miles out when a sailor brought a lump of
metal to the platform and gave it to McCoy. “We found this down on the
fantail. There’s a lot of metal shards down there but this was the
biggest piece.

I think it’s a piece of hook point.”

McCoy examined it by flashlight, then passed it to Jake.

as a piece of the A-Ts hook point, all right. About a of it. The point
must have shattered against the structhe ship and the remnants rained
down on the fantail.

When the last plane was aboard, Jake followed McCoy down the ladder to
the catwalk, then down another flight into the ship.

“That was exciting,” Jake Grafton told the LSO.

“You dumb ass. You should have gone into the net.”

“Well, I didn’t think-”

“That Vigie about got us. No shit.”

“Hell of a recovery.”

“That’s no lie. Did you hear about the A-7 that had the ramp strike?”

“No.”

“The talker told me. The guy had a total hydraulic failure on the way
to the beach and ejected. He’s in the water right now.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The rebound of the hook shank probably severed his hydraulic lines.
He’s swimming for it. Just another great Navy night.”

The pilot of the RA-5C Vigilante who had so much trouble with lineup on
this recovery landed in Japan and refueled.

He returned to the ship for the last recovery of the evening and flew a
fair pass into a three-wire.

The A-7 pilot with the hydraulic failure wasn’t rescued until ten
o’clock the next morning. He spent the night in his LIFE raft, buffeted
by heavy seas, overturned four times, though each time he regained the
safety of the raft. He swallowed a lot of seawater and did a lot of
vomiting. He vomited and retched until blood came up. Still retching
when the helicopter deposited him back on the carrier, he had to be
sedated and given an IV to rehydrate him. He was also suffering from a
serious case of hypothermia. But he was alive, with no bones broken.
His shipmates trooped to sick bay in a steady procession to welcome him
back to the company of living men.

THE SOVIET INTELLIGENCE SHIP REDUKTOR JOINED THE TASK group during the
night and fell in line astern. At dawn she was two miles behind the
carrier wallowing heavily. When the sun came up she held her position
even though the task group raised its speed to twelve knots. When the
sea state eased somewhat the Soviet ship rode steadier.

Jake came up on deck for the first launch of the day only to find that
the AGI was dropping steadily astern. Her captain knew the drill. The
carrier had been running steadily downwind, but to launch she would turn
into the wind, toward the AGI. So now the Soviet ship was slowing to
one or two knots, just enough to maintain steerageway.

At the brief the air intelligence officers showed the flight crews file
photos of this Okean-class intelligence collector.

She was a small converted trawler. Had she not been festooned with a
dazzling array of radio antennas that rose from her superstructure and
masts, one would assume her crew was still looking for fish.

So there they were. Russians. In Reduktor’s compartments they were
busy with their reel-to-reel tape drives-probably all made in
Japan-recording every word, peep or chirp on every radio frequency that
the U.S. Navy had ever been known to use. Doubtlessly they monitored
other frequencies occasionally as well, just in case. These tapes would
be exammed by experts who would construct from them detailed analyses of
how the U.S. Navy operated and what its capabifities were. Encrypted
transmissions would be turned over to specialists who would try to break
the codes.

In short, the crew of Reduktor were spies. They were going about their
business in a lawful manner, however, in plain sight upon the high seas,
so there was nothing anyone in the U.S. Navy could do about it. In
fact, the American captains and watch officers had to make sure that
their ships didn’t accidentally collide with the Soviet ship.

There was one other possibility, not very probable, but possible.
Reduktor might be a beacon ship marking the position of the American
task group for Soviet forces. Just in case, American experts aboard the
U.S. ships monitored, recorded and analyzed every transmission that
Reduktor made.

Anticipating the coming of a Soviet AGI, the U.S. task group had
already reduced its own radio transmissions as much as possible. During
the day the air crews from Columbia operated “zip-lip,” speaking on the
radio only when required. Specialists from the Communications Security
Group-4COMSEGRU-had visited every ready room to brief the crews.

This morning Jake Grafton spent a moment watching the old trawler, then
went on with his preflight. He would, he suspected, see a lot of that
ship in the next few months.

After four days of operations in the Sea of Japan, Columbia and her
escorts called at Sasebo and stayed for a week.

Reduktor was waiting when they came out of port.

The first week of August was spent operating off the southern coast of
Korea, then the task group steamed south and spent a week flying in the
South China Sea. The Soviet AGI was never far away.

Here, for the first time, the air wing began flying the Alpha strikes
that Jake had helped plan with CAG Ops.

Jake didn’t get to go on the first one, when Skipper Haldane led the
A-6s. Due to his bombing scores, however, he was scheduled to lead the
A-6s the next day. He and Flap spent half the night in Strike Planning
with the other element leaders making sure they had it right.

CAG Kai] sat in a corner and sipped coffee during the entire session. He
didn’t say much, yet when he did you listened carefully because he had
something to say worth listening to. He also smiled a lot and picked up
names easily.

After an hour you thought you had known the man all your life. That
night in his bunk the thought tripped through Jake Grafton’s mind that
he would like to lead the way Chuck Kall did.

Well, tomorrow he would get his chance. Six Intruders were scheduled to
fly and the maintenance gunny said he would have them. The target was
an abandoned ship on a reef a few miles off the western coast of Luzon,
the northernmost of the Philippine Islands. Today’s strike had pretty
well pulverized the ship, but there were enough pieces sticking out of
the water to make an aiming point. The water was pretty shallow there.
To make sure there were no native fishing boats in the target area
tomorrow before live bombs rained down, an RA-5C was scheduled to make a
prestrike low pass.

Jake had so many things on his mind that he had trouble falling asleep.
He took the hop minute by minute, the climbout, the rendezvous,
frequency changes, formation, airplane problems, no-radio procedures,
the letdown to roll-in altitude … he drifted off to sleep and dreamed
about it.

The morning was perfect, a few puffy low clouds but widely scattered.
The brisk trade wind speckled the sea with whitecaps and washed away the
haze.

After a quick cup of coffee and check of the weather, Jake met with the
element leaders for two hours. Then he went to the ready room for the
crew briefs, briefed the A-6’s portion of the mission, read the
maintenance logbook on his assigned plane and donned his flight gear. By
the time he walked out onto the flight deck with Flap Le Beau he had
been working hard for four hours.

The escort ships looked crisp and clean upon a living blue sea. The
wind-he inhaled deeply.

He and Flap took the time to inspect the weapons care fully. For
today’s mock attack they had live bombs, four Mark-84
two-thousand-pounders. A hit with one of these bombs would break the
back of any warship that was cruiser-size or smaller. The multiple
ejector racks that normally carried smaller bombs had been downloaded so
the one-ton general purpose bombs could be mated to the parent bomb
racks. There were two of these on each wing. As usual, the centerline
belly station carried a two-thousandpound drop tank. One of the bombs,
the last one to be dropped, had a laser-seeker in the nose. The other
three were fused with a mechanical nose fuse and an electrical tail
fuse.

The mechanical nose fuse was the most reliable fuse the Navy possessed,
which made it the preferred way to fuse bombs. A bare copper wire ran
from a solenoid in the parent rack forward across the weapon to the
nose, where it went through a machined hole in the fuse housing and then
through the little propeller at the very front of the fuse. The wire
physically prevented the propeller from turning until the weapon was
ejected from the rack. The wire then pulled out of the fuse and stayed
on the rack, which freed the propeller. As the bomb fell the wind spun
the propeller for a preset number of seconds and armed the fuse. When
the nose of the bomb struck its target, the fuse was triggered.

After a small delay–one hundredth of a second to allow the weapon to
penetrate the target-the fuse detonated the high explosive in the bomb.

If the mechanical fuse was defective, the electric tail fuse would set
the bomb off. That fuse was armed by a jolt of electricity in the first
two feet of travel as the bomb fell away from the parent rack, then its
arming wire, an insulated electrical cable, pulled loose.

The BN’s job on preflight was to check to ensure the ordnance-men had
rigged bombs, fuses and arming wires correctly. Since any error here
could ruin the mission, Jake Grafton always checked too. Today he and
Flap stood side by side as they examined each weapon, Everything was
fine.

The bomb with the laser-seeker in the nose was the technology of the
future, the technology that had already made unguided free-fall bombs
obsolete and would itself be made obsolete by guided missiles. One had
to aim a laser-light generator at the target and hold the light on it as
the bomb fell. If the bomb was dropped into the proper cone above the
target, the seeker would guide it to the reflected spot of laser light
by manipulating small canards on the body of the device.

In two or three years the A-6 would have its own laserlight generator in
the nose of the aircraft. Now the generators, or “designators,” were
hand-held. Today a radarintercept officer in the backseat of an F-4
orbiting high above the target would aim the designator while Intruders,
Corsairs and other Phantoms dropped the bombs. This system worked. Navy
and Air Force crews used it with devastating effect on North Vietnamese
bridges in the last year of the war, Due to the cost of the seekers,
each plane had only one for today’s training mission. Dropping three
unguided weapons in addition to the guided one had an additional benefit
the pilot had to try for a perfect dive to put all four on the target.
If one bomb was a bull’s-eye and the other three went awry, he screwed
up.

The plane looked good. Strapped in waiting for the engine start, Jake
Grafton arranged his charts in the cockpit, then paused for a few
seconds to savor the warmth of the sun and the wind playing with his
hair. The moment was over too soon. Helmet on, canopy closed, crank
engines.

The cat shot was a hoot, an exhilarating ride into a perfect morning.
His airplane flew well, all the gear worked as advertised, none of the
other A-6s had maintenance problems and all launched normally.

The A-6s rendezvoused at 9,000 feet. When Jake had his gaggle together,
he led them upward to 13,000 feet and slowly eased into position on the
right of the lead division, today four Corsairs. When all the other
divisions were aboard, the strike leader, the C.O. of one of the A-7
squadrons, rolled out on course to the target and initiated a climb to
23,000 feet.

The climb took longer than usual. The bombers were heavily loaded. At
ninety-eight percent RPM all Jake could out of his plane was 280 knots
indicated. He concencoax trated on flying smoothly so his wingmen would
not have to sweat bullets to stay with him.

The six-plane division was broken up into two flights of three. Jake
had one wingman on each side. Out farther to the right flew another
three-plane flight, but its leader was also flying formation on Grafton.
Just before the time came to dive, the man on each leader’s left would
cross over, then the two flights would join so that there were *six
airplanes in right echelon. The plan was for Jake to roll in and the
others to follow two seconds apart, so that all six were diving with
just enough separation between the planes that each pilot could aim his
own bombs. If they did it right, all six would be in the enemy’s threat
envelope together and divide the enemy’s antiaircraft fire. And all
would leave together.