by Ward Carroll
“Oh . . .” the commander muttered, angry air completely let out of his balloon. “Ah . . . good job.”
“You want me to call them again?”
Another jet slammed into the roof and failed to catch any of the four arresting cables strung across the flight deck. “Jeezus,” the air ops officer exclaimed. “Viper rep. What do you want to do with that guy?”
“He had plenty of gas at the ball call,” a ruddy-faced Hornet pilot answered rising from his seat in the rep bleachers at the back of the room. “Let’s let him go around and try again.”
“Commander, do you want me to call again?” Petty Officer Sampson repeated.
“What?” the air ops officer asked back, trying to focus on the PLAT as if that would cause the pilots to snag a wire. “No. If you say Furlong called, then we should be good-to-go.” The petty officer shrugged and returned to the coffee machine to rejoin the muted but lively discussion between several of his peers.
The air ops officer wondered how hard an eight-jet recovery could be as another Hornet successfully engaged a wire. At the same time, a voice boomed over the distress frequency. “Slinger one-zero-three, this is Alpha Bravo. Return to CAP station. One-zero-three, return to CAP station. Alpha Bravo, out.”
“Departure, did you hear that Guard transmission?” Spud asked over the radio. “What do you want us to do?”
“Stand . . . by,” the air ops officer intoned with a measured two-beat cadence, quickly losing his patience with the competing multi-source concerns. He fought the urge for drink, but at the same time he sensed life had felt easier when he was drinking. How calming it had been to quietly slink to his stateroom and grab a nip off a well-hidden bottle. Rum was his favorite in those days, the days before the butt-biting incident with the American Counsel General’s wife in Rhodes, Greece, and the follow-on rehab. What a big deal the Navy had made of the rodeo, and how they had repeatedly told him he’d squandered any chance for command, as if that was the sum total of the tragedy. Now, as part of his seemingly ongoing and endless program of contrition, he held down what many considered to be the most thankless job for a commander on the Boat.
He picked up another handset and pressed two numbers.
“Tactical Force Command,” said the voice at the other end, presumably that of the battle watch captain.
“Yeah, this is air ops. Look, right now we don’t have the gas in the air for one-zero-three to play in the admiral’s game. You’re going to have to give me a little time to figure this one out. I mean, the bow is closed now because we’re parking the jets from this recovery and I can’t shoot another Viking for about twenty minutes or so, if the squadron even has another ready jet—”
“This is the Admiral.”
“Say again?”
“I’m the Admiral and this isn’t a game. I want one-zero-three back on station, with or without gas. Send the tanker to him if you have to.”
“Oh, yes, Admiral,” the commander awkwardly returned. “And by ‘game’ sir, I meant—” The line went dead.
“Departure, say intentions for one-zero-three,” Spud demanded.
“One-zero-three, say your state,” the air ops officer commanded with an exasperated heave of his lungs.
“One-zero-three’s state is seven-point-five.”
“Roger, proceed back to station.”
“We can’t make it another cycle without more gas.”
“I know, I know, I know,” the commander said with his head cradled in his left palm, sounding on the frequency every bit as pained as he was beginning to feel. “Proceed to station anyway, by direction of Alpha Bravo. We’ll figure it out later.”
At that point, Fuzzy put the finishing touches on the air ops officer’s headache by getting waved off by the LSOs a quarter-mile from touchdown after throwing a way-below-glide slope approach at them.
“Anybody feel like landing and stopping tonight?” the commander rhetorically asked the gathering of squadron reps before responding to a single buzz on the closed-circuit phone. “Yes, Captain?”
“What’s the game plan to get gas to one-zero-three?”
“Well, the only plan I can think of is to launch a mission tanker after this recovery.”
“What’s his state?”
“He gave us seven-point-five about three minutes ago.”
The captain reached into the depths of his former fighter pilot self and calculated how long a Tomcat could stay airborne with seventy-five hundred pounds of gas. “He’s probably running about twenty-five hundred pounds per hour a side on the fuel flow at conservative airspeeds. How far away is Al Jabar?”
“Still around a hundred twenty miles.”
“So that’s about a four thousand pound bingo.” The captain gave his hair another tug and then held his fingers up to the small reading light in front of him to check the yield of the harvest. He flittered his fingers and allowed the strands to fall to the deck below his elevated chair. “We’ve got him for a half-hour at best before we either land him here or send him to Kuwait.”
“I can’t get any gas airborne in a half hour. Might as well recover him this event.”
“I’m not sure if that’s going to work for the admiral,” the captain said. “Is CAG down there with you?”
“Let me see . . .”
The air ops officer scoured the crowd behind him for the air wing commander, a man currently in pure hell with all the confusion. CAG knew eventually someone would want him to make a decision about something, and he ducked down in his seat on the bleachers and avoided eye contact, hoping somehow the jets would just land and everyone would relax. Nothing in his career had prepared him for nights like these, and he had never sought the challenges they presented.
As a war fighter and tactician he’d been unremarkable, a competent-enough EA-6B Prowler electronic countermeasures officer who’d been a face in the crowd of the four-man jammer. But as an administrator he’d been a standout. Upon completion of his first sea tour, his skipper, a bookish man with an eye for like talent, ushered him to the front door of the Pentagon, and from that day on he’d only emerged on two occasions prior to this duty: once to be a department head for fourteen months in a West Coast Prowler squadron, and once to command an East Coast Prowler squadron for a year. Both jobs were forced on him by his bosses as a way to ensure he didn’t squander his gift for instruction-guided facsimile and wreck his chances for flag rank, the attainment of which, cruelly enough, required some experience at sea. He viewed every minute in and around jets as an opportunity to screw something up and get fired for it.
And in spite of his underlying repulsion toward the idea of venturing out, this time he was rewarded for his syntax with command of an air wing. When he was selected, he didn’t even realize he was being considered, and before he would accept, he had to be assured he could come back to D.C. the minute his god-awful sea duty was over. He was petitioned by his mentors once again to “check the warrior block,” with the guarantee that once he pinned on rear admiral he could carve his own permanent niche in the Pentagon.
“CAG,” the air ops officer said, catching his eye with a wave, “the captain would like to speak with you, sir.” CAG checked his watch: 0247. You don’t know the answer to the question, whatever it is, CAG thought. You’re out of your league again.
He took the receiver from the air ops officer as if he’d been handed a poisonous snake and put it to his ear. “Yes, Captain.”
The captain paused long enough for another Hornet to bolter and disappear back into the blackness. “Quite an evening we’re having, eh, CAG?”
“Yes,” CAG replied simply, his soft face without expression for fear the slightest muscle twitches might cause him to convulse in a spasmodic cry for a return to the natural order. He’d come to dread every interface he was forced to have with the captain; he always walked away from them feeling, accurately enough, like he’d been bullied.
“Have you talked to the admiral recently?” the captain asked. Until the mi
d-1980s, the air wing commander had worked for the aircraft carrier’s commanding officer, but when the warfare commander concept was conceived by the secretary of the Navy in 1985, as a way to make more room at the top for naval aviators, CAG’s rank was elevated from commander to captain. Now, instead of one working for the other, they actually competed on equal terms for the battle group commander’s professional favor. The concept had also caused the carrier CO’s role to become more ship driving and less war fighting—a fact that had not really bothered the captain going into the job but ate at him daily now that he was a witness to CAG’s poorly-hidden repulsion for the idea of leading sailors and being at sea.
“No, I haven’t talked to the admiral. I’ve been watching this recovery here in the control center.”
“I wonder how long he intends to keep up this flying,” the captain said. “You can see by the boarding rate that folks are getting tired.”
“The admiral told me he’s very concerned about the Iranian threat.”
“Gimme a break, CAG. If the Iranians really wanted to take us out, I mean to the point of risking a bunch of pilots and jets, we’d be at the bottom right now. I’m more worried about somebody planting themselves on the ramp of my carrier.”
“Well, I’ve done my job. The squadron COs have all guaranteed me safe flight operations throughout the night.”
“Well then,” the captain returned with every bit of gorge he felt, “there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. What have your trusty COs said about one-zero-three?”
“One-zero-three?”
“I thought you said you were watching the recovery . . . anyway, the admiral wants one-zero-three to remain on station and I don’t think he’s going to have the gas.”
“I guess I’ll have to talk to the squadron reps here and then maybe go next door and talk to the admiral.” It sounded as much a question as a course of action.
“This carrier aviation stuff is really scary, isn’t it, CAG?” The line went dead. CAG was unsure where to replace the receiver so he just stood in place with his arms at his side, feigning interest in the tangle of lines and digits surrounding them, until he was finally relieved of the device by the air ops officer, who needed the phone to either yell at, or to get yelled at by, somebody.
Eventually the event’s Hornets all managed to get aboard and stay aboard, but not before draining the sole tanker down to a thousand pounds of available give. With Punk’s status still in limbo, Fuzzy and the S-3 were the only remaining jets to land this event.
At two miles abeam the port side of the Boat and twelve hundred feet over the water, heading opposite the carrier, Fuzzy fought to get the Tomcat trimmed up before attempting his second pass, but the beast didn’t want to cooperate. He mashed the coolie hat on the stick with his thumb—forward and back, left and right—but there was no response.
“We’ve lost the trim,” Fuzzy reported to Turtle. “Break out the emergency checklist, please.”
“Maybe we should climb up to altitude and troubleshoot the problem,” Turtle suggested as he went through his nav bag in search of his pocket checklist.
“No, we’re fine,” Fuzzy replied. “I can control the jet; I’m just wondering if there’s anything I’m not thinking about here.”
“Do you want to talk to a rep on Departure?”
“No,” Fuzzy said. “I’m sick of the skipper hooting on us for whining on the radios. We’ll just land this pass, and gripe it when we get down to maintenance control. Besides, I’m too tired to screw around with climbing and descending and talking to reps. Let’s just make the pain end.”
Ten miles away from and ten thousand feet above Fuzzy and Turtle, the crew of Slinger 103 considered their course of action. Their pace back to station was a slow one, as the thought of betting on the come for potential gas seemed unduly reckless to both officers. Punk looked at his fuel totalizer: sixty-five hundred pounds.
“Spud, the lowest I can set the fuel flow right now and keep flying looks to be about twenty-two hundred pounds per hour per side.”
Spud was just about done playing the game this particular night. “Hawkeye, say picture.”
“Believe it or not, the picture is clean,” the controller replied dryly from the tube of the E-2. “No activity.”
“Slinger one-zero-three is switching Departure for a rep.” Again, Spud flipped his radio from button one to button fourteen without waiting for a response. “Departure, one-zero-three would like to talk to a rep.”
“Roger, one-zero-three. Standby.”
Several seconds passed and then Smoke’s voice came over the airwaves. “Go ahead, one-zero-three. This is your rep.”
Recognizing his roommate’s voice, Spud said, “We need a reality check on staying out here, Smoke. Our state is below sixty-five hundred pounds right now and I don’t see any gas in sight.”
“Roger, concur. Hold on a second.” Smoke balanced the receiver on his collarbone and attempted to get the attention of the ever-harried air ops officer. “Hey, Commander . . . excuse me, Commander. What’s the plan for one-zero-three?”
The crackle of the controller’s voice on the terminal approach frequency, set at a volume higher than that of the other frequencies piped into the center, interrupted the commander’s response. He held his hand up in response to Smoke and directed his attention toward the PLAT TV hanging from the overhead to the right side of the displays in front of him.
“One-one-four, on glide slope, slightly right, three-quarters of a mile. Call the ball.”
“One-fourteen, Tomcat ball, six-point-zero, no trim,” Turtle replied, indicating that Fuzzy could see the glide slope reference on the deck—the “meatball”—and that they had six thousand pounds of gas left in the jet.
“Roger ball, Tomcat,” the controlling LSO responded from among the small crowd of LSOs gathered on the platform at the deck’s edge on the port side, near the stern. “Copy no trim. Twenty-eight knots of wind down the angle.”
Fuzzy concentrated on the three basic parameters of a carrier approach through bleary eyes and with tired limbs: “meatball,” (glide slope, high or low), “lineup,” (azimuth, left or right), and “angle of attack,” (speed, fast or slow).
“To be honest, amigo,” the air ops officer said in response to Smoke’s question while still watching the TV, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with one-zero-three. I do know the admiral is going to freak out if they don’t get to station soon. Right now, I’ve got two more jets to land and this recovery is history, thank God.”
“Well, I’ll tell you a little secret,” Smoke said as he also watched Fuzzy motor down the chute on the PLAT. “If the admiral comes up Guard one more time and orders one-zero-three to station, he’s going to have a mutiny from inside that jet on his hands.”
Smoke continued to concentrate on the PLAT, and as he noticed the lights of the jet travel above the crosshairs of the target glide slope, he wondered aloud why the LSO was not talking to Fuzzy. “How high is he going to let him get?” Smoke asked the room in general. “You know the guy’s tired. Help him out.”
Just seconds before 114 was over the ramp, the LSO came on the radio with, “You’re fast, don’t go high . . . power back on . . . power!”
Then two voices could be heard as the back-up LSO keyed his handset and joined the controlling LSO with a chorus of, “Wave it off! Wave it off!”
It was too late. Numbed by fatigue and fighting with the untrimmed jet, Fuzzy had overcorrected for his situation and pulled the throttles back too far. He saw the wave-off lights flash red and jammed the throttles to full afterburner, but the increased thrust lagged the pull of gravity. The F-14 smashed down on the steel deck. Sparks flew from the base of the right landing gear. The wheel came flying off and careened down the deck like an errant Frisbee on a windy day at the beach. The Tomcat bounced over the arresting wires and continued down the angle and back into the sky. The LSO inconsequentially called “bolter, bolter, bolter” on the radio, as if Fuzzy had so
me doubt he wasn’t going to stop.
The wheel continued down the deck, bounced off a plane captain, breaking three of his ribs, punched a hole in the right main flap of a Hornet parked across catapult two, and disappeared over the port bow and into the water. Bits of composite from the wing blew back across the deck and toward the stern, fouling the landing area.
In the tower, six stories above the flight deck, perched above the action like two crows on a wire, were the air boss and, to his right, his assistant, the mini boss. When the wheel disappeared from view, the air boss peeled the foil from around another antacid and popped it into his mouth while he keyed the microphone to the flight deck P.A. “All right, on the flight deck, combat FOD walk down, I say again, combat FOD walk down. Let’s get the junk cleared off the angle so the next guy down doesn’t suck something through his intake and ruin a perfectly good motor.”
The air boss turned in his elevated chair and said to the mini, “I guess it’s our turn to jump into this.” He picked up another of the four handsets hung in brass at his knee and said, “One-fourteen, be advised you lost your right wheel.”
Smoke attempted to take control of the situation from his position. “I need one-fourteen to come up Departure, and I’m going to need one-zero-three to check him out visually,” he said to the air ops officer, who sat frozen staring at the PLAT, seemingly unsure of what action to take. “Get one-zero-three up Departure also.”
The air ops officer remained perfectly still. “Hey,” Smoke said, reaching out to shake the commander’s left upper arm. “We’ve got to do this quickly.”
The commander came alive with a jerk as soon as Smoke touched him. “That’s not going to work, goddam it,” he shouted. “The admiral has already reamed me once for one-zero-three not being on station.”
Smoke hissed something in disgust and motioned toward the bleachers for someone to throw him the portable phone. He caught it and dialed the skipper’s stateroom.
