Top Gun (27 page)

“Just wait ’til you solo in a jet,” Gold enthused. “It’s something else! It’ll make flying a prop plane feel like driving
a golf cart.” He told Linda: “I used to take Andy flying when he was a kid. I had him doing stunts in the company Cessna when
he was no more than twelve.” He grinned at his nephew. “Right, kid?”

Andrew nodded politely. “Right, Uncle Steve.”

“I never saw anybody take to flying so quickly, except maybe your brother Robbie.”

“Half brother,” Andy corrected firmly.

“Right…” Gold thought sadly that the look in Andy’s eyes was hard far beyond his years.

“I’m pleased to see the company is doing so well,” Andy said, changing the subject.

Gold nodded. “It looks like we’re going to sell a whole bunch of Stiletto fighters to our NATO allies through Skytrain Industrie.”

Andy said, “Speaking of the Stiletto, it’s a real feather in both yours and my dad’s caps that GAT was able to report increased
earnings and revenues this quarter. The fact that you were able to announce an increase in stock dividends to forty-five cents
a share, up from forty cents, and a three-for-two stock split really shut up those loudmouth industry analysts who were claiming
that GAT would go down the tubes without Grandpa.”

Gold’s jaw had dropped. “You really
have
been following the business, haven’t you kid?”

“Well, after all…” Andy shrugged modestly. “I
do
expect to be in the pilot’s seat at GAT someday.”

Gold chuckled. “Your dad and I had better start checking our sixes a little more often now that we know we’ve got
you
gunning for us.”

Andy laughed. “Oh, I’m not in competition with
you
two guys. Uncle Steve.” He glanced at his watch. “Look, I’ve got a flight to catch in about an hour.”

“Back to Colorado Springs?” Linda asked.

“I’ve got classes first thing tomorrow morning,” Andy replied. “But I want to spend a little more time with Grandma.”

“Take off, then,” Steve said.

“Yeah, I guess I’d better.” Andy grinned at Linda. “Welcome to the family. “

“Thank you,” Linda smiled. She waited for Andy to walk away before telling Gold: “If you ask me, that young buck has grown
up and is looking to lock antlers with the resident stag.”

“What? You mean all that showing off the kid was doing spouting those numbers concerning GAT?” Gold shook his head. “He gets
that kind of talk from his old man. And he was just kidding around when he threatened to bump Don and me out of the cockpit
at GAT.”

Linda, smiling, shook her head, squeezing his arm. “No offense, darling, but you’re not the resident stag to whom I was referring.
I think Andy meant it when he said he didn’t see himself in competition with you or his father.” She paused. “But didn’t you
see the way you wiped the smile off his face when you mentioned his brother Robbie?”

“Half
brother,” Gold remarked dourly. “Yeah, I did, but I was hoping it was my imagination. There’s been bad blood between Robbie
and Andy for a long time. Now I don’t think my two nephews exchange half a dozen words a year. It’s like they don’t exist
for one another, except as thorns in each other’s sides. The only thing that’s kept the family peace is the fact that chance
has kept them geographically apart.”

“I wouldn’t count on chance for much longer,” Linda said. “The world can get very small very quickly once
both
of them are Air Force fighter pilots.”

“Tell me about it,” Gold grumbled. “I hate to admit it, but I was somewhat relieved when I found out Robbie wasn’t going to
be able to attend the wedding. I love both my nephews dearly, but I really wasn’t in the mood to be stuck refereeing a furball
mix-up between those two on my wedding day.”

“Where is Robbie?”

“Somewhere he can’t get into trouble,” Gold said firmly.

“What do you mean by that?” Linda laughed.

“It’s really not a laughing matter,” Gold replied, frowning. “I’ve been hearing things about Captain Greene. Things that aren’t
so good. For instance, there was that blowout at Wright-Patterson when he and some buddy of his dive bombed the city of Dayton
or some such crapola, and that wasn’t the first time he broke the rules.”

Linda looked at Gold in mock horror. “He broke the
rules? Your
nephew broke the
rules?
Now who do you suppose taught him to do something like
that?”
She laughed. “Steve, in your career you must have fractured every regulation in the Air Force’s book!”

“Maybe so.” Gold chuckled. I guess I was something of a wild card, but the thing is, in
my
heyday there was usually a war going on. Being needed on the front line in combat cuts a guy a considerable amount of slack,
but things are different in peacetime. The brass tends to take the rules and regs a lot more seriously when they don’t have
a shooting war to distract them. That’s why I’m worried about Robbie. The Air Force is getting buttoned down. It isn’t the
sanctuary for rogues and wild cards that it used to be.” Gold smiled. “But now Robbie’s on an aircraft carrier, stuck out
in the middle of nowhere. Like I said, for once I can breathe easy. Robbie Greene is somewhere where even
he
can’t get himself into trouble.”

(One)

USS

Sea Bear
CV-22

South China Sea

12 May, 1975

It was just past noon. Robbie Greene wasn’t scheduled to fly today, so he was in the flattop’s officer-rec room, having a
cup of coffee and playing solitaire, when he heard about how the Commies in Cambodia had grabbed the
Mayaguez.

The rec room was windowless. It had flat fluorescent lighting, a green vinyl tile floor, gray metal furniture, and two tones
of gray paint on its curved steel walls. The room was decorated with posters of sleek Navy jets like the F-4 Phantom and F-7
Corsair; and even sleeker female rock stars like Linda Ronstadt, beckoning with soulful brown eyes, and Tina Turner making
love to the microphone from the movie
Wood-stock.
There was a bookcase that held a selection of tattered paperbacks, metal shelves stacked with the usual suburban rumpus-room
assortment of board games, and a boom-box portable cassette player. There was also an ever-flickering TV mounted high up on
the wall on one of those hospital-room-type swivel brackets. The carrier’s closed-circuit facility was broadcasting an old
movie,
Mutiny on the Bounty
with Charles Laughton, which Greene thought was a weird choice for programming on a United States Navy military vessel. The
TV’s volume was turned low, because Greene wasn’t watching the movie, and the only other person in the rec room, a lieutenant
JG by the name of Gillis, was dozing in his chair.

Greene put away the cards midway through his game, bored out of his skull. He’d been on this flattop three months now, and
couldn’t wait for this tour to be over. He’d felt some initial excitement when he’d first come aboard—“yo-ho-ho and a bottle
of rum,” and all that—and things had picked up at the end of last month, when the
Sea Bear
had participated in the American evacuation of Saigon. Other than that, as far as Greene was concerned Operation Indian Giver
had turned out to be a bust.

Things started out okay back at Wright-Patterson. Colonel Dougan came through, arranging it so that both Greene and his buddy
Buzz Blaisdale could participate in Indian Giver. The two pilots left Dayton, feeling on top of the world and looking forward
to whatever it was the Navy thought it could dish out. Greene and Blaisdale arrived at the naval air station at Pensacola,
Florida, grimly determined, expecting to be treated like lepers. So they were surprised and gratified at their cordial reception
from the instructors and fledgling-winged squids here for “Jets” training: the fundamentals of jet flight.

Settling into Pensacola, the two Air Force pilots had themselves a problem dealing with their living condition. The Navy,
claiming a lack of room, stuck them out in the boondocks of the base, in a beer can of a trailer surrounded by rusted-out
abandoned vehicles, scrub brush, and palm trees. The only thing missing was a junkyard dog, but then, the alligators probably
ate it. Blaisdale had a really tough time with the cockroaches. The Floridians called them palmetto bugs, but the fuckers
were cockroaches, plain and simple, except that they were on average two inches long and faster off the mark than a Harrier
jump jet. Greene himself wasn’t much fond of bugs, but he’d served his time in hell at Phanrat AFB in Thailand; once you’d
dealt with the creepy-crawlies of Indochina, no bug smaller than a mountain lion indigenous to the States was going to much
upset you.

Accommodations and vermin aside, those first few weeks in Pensacola among the squids were an A-l blast. Greene and Blaisdale
totally enjoyed “regressing,” tooling around in the “turbofan tricycle,” dual-seat, T-l Buckeye primary jet Trainers while
their backseater pilot instructors went through the motions of checking them out on the basics. Pretty quickly the two Air
Force pilots were bumped into the accelerated course to qualify them for carrier ops. The first stage of the training involved
making simulated arrested landing on a “carrier flight deck” painted on a shore runway.

Throughout their intitial stints flying the basics for their appreciative instructors, Greene and Blaisdale kept remarking
to each other on how they couldn’t get over how nice everyone was being to them. The squid pilots were going out of their
way to include them in the late-night bull sessions and the occasional beer blast, and Greene was even encouraged to tell
war stories. All in all, their easy acceptance into the naval frat of fliers was eerie. It was a dream too good to be true….

The honeymoon ended the night before carrier flight training began. On that evening, Blaisdale came stomping into the trailer
to complain that he had accidentally overheard a couple of squid instructors laughing among themselves about the “tiger trap”
betting pool. The betting wasn’t
if
the Air Force “tigers” would wash out during carrier training, but
when.

That night, Greene and Blaisdale glumly put two and two together in their humid, sticky trailer, drinking Coke and listening
to the bugs thumping the window screens. They realized that the squids’ seeming civility was really a form of mockery. Everyone
was being so nice to them because none of the Navy personnel thought a couple of Air Force jocks had a chance in hell of making
it through CARQUAL, carrier qualification. The damn Navy had kissed them hello, all right, but in gleeful anticipation of
kissing them good-bye. They hadn’t been accepted into the naval aviators’ fraternity; far from it, the real hazing had only
just begun.

That night, Greene and Blaisdale vowed they’d show the Navy what a couple of Air Force jocks could do. Thinking back, Greene
knew that Buzz had tried as hard as he could to keep that vow.

It was only in retrospect that Greene came to understand the enormity of the training problem that had faced him and Blaisdale.
Carrier ops was like no other kind of flying. The squid pilots taking carrier training had been flying only a short while,
so for them it was comparatively easy to modify the basic flying techniques they had so recently learned. Unfortunately, it
was an entirely different story for Greene and Blaisdale. They were experienced military fliers, which meant that they had
long ago formed ingrained habits that would die hard. Greene and Blaisdale became the proverbial old dogs, straining to learn
new tricks.

New tricks that Buzz Blaisdale proved incapable of learning.

Everything that the Air Force had drummed into them concerning flared, nose-high, easy-does-it touchdowns had to be erased
from Greene’s and Blaisdale’s memory banks. When you landed on the flight deck of a carrier at 150 miles per hour, you had
to slap down hard, like slamming your fist on the table, So that one of the four arresting cables strung across the deck trapped
your bird’s tailhook, stopping the airplane the way spider’s silk stops a fly. Anything less than that brutal collision with
the runaway and you’d run out of carrier deck and into a whole lot of ocean before you could say “Oh, shitttt—”

Now maybe it was the fact that Greene had been in combat while Blaisdale had missed out on ’Nam that had made the difference
between them. Maybe the experience of having an enemy doing everything it could to knock Greene’s Thud out of the sky during
his bombing runs had served to teach him to blank out his mind, to put himself in the zen warrior state in order to accomplish
whatever it was that had to be done. Then again, maybe it was just that Buzz Blaisdale had a better imagination than Greene.
Maybe poor old Buzz wasn’t able to stop himself from visualizing all the things that could go wrong when you tried to land
on a heaving carrier by rabbit-punching the deck with your airplane.

Or maybe it was that Greene was more ornery. That he was crazier. Or maybe he just wanted it more….

For whatever reason, that first time out trying a simulated carrier landing on dry land, Greene was able to put aside everything
he’d learned about the Air Force way of landing a jet. As he angled his Buckeye trainer down toward that impossibly small-seeming
rectangle painted on the tarmac, he just cleared his mind of distractions and kept his eyes moving between the Fresnel light
landing aid, his instruments, and the looming ground. The Fresnel light landing aid, called “the ball,” was set up along the
side of the runway to give the pilot a point of reference for setting up his glide path. The ball looked something like a
traffic light, with a horizontal bank of lenses extending on both sides to form a cross. If the pilot was making his approach
properly, he’d see the middle vertical lens illuminated in relation to the horizontal lights. Too high and one of the upper
lenses would glimmer; too low and one of the bottom lights would show.