by Robert Gandt
“You’re ten miles from marshal,” she heard DeLancey say. “Make a left-hand entry and start your timing. Don’t screw this one up.”
Spam felt a burst of anger. How dare he talk like that when everyone could hear? Then she realized that she was hearing him on the back radio, the secondary frequency used for plane-to-plane private communications.
“I know what I’m doing,” she snapped back. “Save the lecture for those idiot CATCC controllers.”
That should shut him up.
In the briefing room before the launch, DeLancey had tried to intimidate her with that male senior-fighter-pilot act. Admonishing her about flying a good pass at the ship, staying in position, getting set up in marshal.
She had shut him up him by mentioning her upcoming interview with the senator from California.
DeLancey had nearly choked. “With who?”
“You know, the woman senator who’s investigating the reports about the Navy mistreating women pilots.”
After that he sulked. He was strangely quiet as they rode the escalator to the flight deck. On the radio he was surly and curt, giving her this unnecessary advice.
The two Hornets passed over the marshal holding fix at twenty-two thousand feet. Killer flashed his lights, signaling that Spam was detached from the two-ship formation.
She entered the holding pattern — and became confused. Was the holding radial two-thirty or three-twenty? What was her push time? How the hell was she supposed to get back to the fix when —
“Runner 405, this is Marshal. Where are you going? Your push time is now.”
“I was getting established in this stupid pattern. What’s the hurry?”
“Roger, 405, turn to a heading of zero-five-zero. Start your descent now.”
Spam was rattled and angry. On the back radio she said, “Damn it, this is your fault. You dropped me off too close to the stack. You’re gonna hear about this!”
<>
I hate that bitch. The thought kept playing like a refrain in DeLancey’s head.
He was descending through 8,000 feet. On the marshal frequency, he could hear the controllers issuing instructions to Spam. She had missed her push time and was out of sequence. And, of course, she was arguing.
She was hopeless, thought Delancey. Spam Parker couldn’t navigate her way out of a parking lot. Yet she had everyone — from the captain of the ship to the air traffic controllers — treating her with kid gloves. No one wanted a war with such a belligerent female.
Including Killer DeLancey.
Why did I do it? he wondered again. It was insane, getting involved with her. It was the worst mistake you could make in this business, thinking with the wrong part of your anatomy. Getting laid had taken priority over keeping his job.
He had to find a way out.
Twenty miles from the ship, passing 5,000 feet, he called, “Runner 401, Platform.”
“Roger, switch to final controller.”
On the final control frequency he could no longer hear Spam and her ongoing dispute with the marshal controller. She was still ten miles behind him. That was fine with him. He’d heard enough of her bitching.
A half mile from the carrier, he picked up the glimmer of the deck lighting and the amber meatball. DeLancey flew a steady pass to the deck, snagging the two wire.
Following the lighted wands of the taxi director, DeLancey parked his jet forward of the carrier’s island superstructure. He shut down the engines, but left the battery switch on while he listened to the UHF radio.
Just then, he saw the dark silhouette of a Hornet flash past the port side of the ship. A second later, he heard the roar of twin afterburners — Whooom! A jet was being waved off from its pass at the deck.
Spam, he realized. Getting another wave off by the LSO. This was going to be interesting.
On his UHF radio display he selected the channel on which the LSO was working Spam’s jet. Then he heard rapping on his Plexiglas canopy. Ruiz, the plane captain who maintained DeLancey’s jet, was standing on the boarding ladder.
DeLancey raised the canopy. “There’s something wrong with the radio,” he yelled over the din of deck noise. “It dumped the loaded frequencies. I have to reprogram it.”
“Never mind, sir,” Ruiz yelled back. “I’ll do that.”
DeLancey shook his head. “No, I remember the frequencies. I can do it.” He closed the canopy and busied himself punching numbers into the UHF display. Ruiz shrugged and stepped back down the boarding ladder.
On the radio DeLancey could hear Pearly Gates using his sweetest sugar talk: “— not enough power, then you came on with too much. Go easy with it next time, Spam.”
“You go easy!” Spam snapped back. “I was doing okay until you started giving me all those power calls.”
Listening to the radio exchange, DeLancey began to have an idea. There was a way. Maybe, just maybe, he had found a way out of his predicament.
<>
“You tell me,” Boyce barked, “why the hell is that pilot still wearing wings?”
Maxwell didn’t reply. They both knew it was a rhetorical question. And they both knew why Boyce was asking the question in a loud voice. The skipper of the Reagan, Captain Stickney, had just stormed into CATCC.
The room was flooded in an eerie, red-lighted glow. Flickering consoles were arrayed along each bulkhead. Controllers sat hunched over their displays, directing the Reagan’s jets through the night sky.
Stickney was wearing his old battered Navy flight jacket. “We’re running out of sea room on this heading,” he said. “We’re bearing down on Kharj Island and a cluster of Iranian oil platforms. You’ve got five minutes to get her down or she bingoes.”
Boyce nodded. “Yes, sir. We’ve got the tanker hawking her on the downwind.”
Stickney didn’t look happy. He turned to leave, then said over his shoulder, “Why is that pilot still wearing wings?”
<>
Spam tried to concentrate. Down in the ready room, she knew all the other pilots — the men — were glued to the PLAT, cackling and making bets and having a good old time watching the alien trying to get aboard. Bolter, bingo, or barbecue?
She was on final approach, a quarter mile from the ship. Close enough to see the ball clearly. It was a little low, and that was fine with her. It made for a better pass, she believed, if you kept it on the low side all the way in. It gave you a better shot at the wires.
“Don’t go low,” she heard Pearly say. “A lii—tttlle powerrrrr. . ..”
She responded with a jab of the throttles.
The ball was coming up, almost in the middle. . .
“Eeeeasssy with it.” The LSO’s voice sounded different, she thought.
Then, the same voice, “Don’t go high!”
It didn’t sound like Pearly. CAG must have assigned another LSO to take over.
She snatched the throttles back again.
She heard a garbled transmission. The new voice again: “Don’t go high. Right for line up.”
Obeying, she dipped the right wing, swinging the jet’s nose slightly to the right.
And dropping lower.
Much lower. The ball was descending to the bottom of the lens.
More garbled transmissions. She didn’t understand. What was he saying?
The red wave-off lights were flashing.
The ball was flashing red at the bottom of the lens. She saw the gray mass of carrier looming out of the darkness ahead.
She saw the ramp.
Spam jammed the throttles forward. Seeing the blunt end of the deck swell in front of her, her mind froze.
<>
“Power! Wave Off! Wave Off! Burner!” Pearly Gates was yelling — screaming - into his radio.
It was as if she didn’t hear him. The jet was descending like a rock toward the blunt ramp of the carrier. Suddenly Pearly knew what would happen next.
His only escape was the survival net that hung out over the water beneath the platform. He too
k one last glance at the approaching jet, then dropped his handset. With a running leap he hurled himself over the side of the platform. Astonished, the two other LSOs dropped their notebooks and leaped behind him.
In the next instant, the F/A-18 struck the ramp.
KABLOOOM! The jet broke in half, and the internal fuel tanks exploded.
A torrent of flaming jet fuel swept over the aft flight deck, engulfing the LSO platform.
The aft portion of the fighter, tailhook still attached, slid up the deck and snagged the number one arresting wire. The tail of the jet lurched to an abrupt stop, burning fiercely.
The forward half of the Hornet was wrapped in flame. As if in slow motion, it tumbled end over end down the angled deck. At the end of the angled deck, it pitched into empty space and disappeared in the blackness of the Gulf.
A sheet of flame covered the ramp of the landing area. Trapped in the arresting wires, the aft fuselage was a bright orange fireball. The LSO platform and its electronic console were ablaze.
Klaxon horns blared. The air boss’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers: “Fire! Fire! Fire on the flight deck aft and amidships. Away all support teams. This is not a drill!”
<>
It was a scene of horrific beauty. Whipped by the thirty-knot wind over the deck, the flames cascaded into the sky, lighting up the flight deck. Behind the ship, the surface of the sea shimmered in an orange glow.
Firefighters in asbestos suits moved like mechanical toys over the illuminated deck. Hoses gushed streams of white foam onto the blaze.
Alone, DeLancey watched from the cockpit of his parked Hornet. All the deck crewmen had run to join the fire fighting team. DeLancey allowed himself a smile of satisfaction.
Chapter Twenty
The Cave Dwellers
USS Ronald Reagan
0900, Tuesday, 27 May
Pearly Gates was a mess. Both eyebrows were singed away, and his left arm was bandaged. His ankle was sprained from having the other LSOs land on top of him in the net.
He was taking Spam Parker’s death hard. The worst thing that could happen to an LSO was to lose a pilot he was controlling. He kept shaking his head. “I tried to help her. She wouldn’t respond. She wouldn’t answer my calls.”
“Nobody’s blaming you,” said Maxwell. “You did your best.”
To his surprise, Maxwell’s name had appeared on the letter appointing the investigation board. As squadron executive officer, he wouldn’t normally sit on an investigation. But then he realized the board’s composition had been decided several weeks before the accident, when he was still the squadron operations officer.
The senior member was Commander Duke Zybrowski, executive officer of VFA-34. Also appointed to the board were Craze Manson and the flight surgeon, Knuckles Ball.
“Big Mac got it the worst,” Pearly told the assembled board. “He was the last into the net and he was on top. He got second-degree burns on his back.”
“You guys were lucky,” said Zybrowski. “The LSO platform was roasted. The Fresnel Lens was trashed. It was amazing that no one was killed.” Then he corrected himself. “Except Parker, of course.”
Pearly was still shaking his head. “It was so weird. Like. . . she was getting other instructions.”
“Other instructions?” asked Maxwell, puzzled. “What do you mean, other instructions?”
“I don’t know exactly. It was like she was doing the opposite of what I was telling her.”
“Did you hear anything else on the frequency?”
“No, sir. But I had this feeling that. . . I wasn’t getting through.”
Maxwell’s brain was still processing this information. It didn’t compute. Other instructions?
“Could she have been listening on another frequency?” he asked. “Her back radio?”
“I had good comm with her when she called the ball,” said Pearly. “But when I tried calling her that she was going low, it sounded like the frequency was jammed.”
Maxwell stared at the bulkhead for a moment, trying to reconstruct the scene. Something was nagging at him — a tiny, vague image lurking in the back of his brain.
<>
The board called Killer DeLancey.
He flashed the trademark grin and said, “Okay, guys, fire away. What do you want to know?”
“We’re having a problem establishing Spam’s radio setup the night of the crash,” said Zybrowski. “You were her flight lead. We have the tape record of all transmissions on the number one radio between you and the ship’s controllers. But we can’t find a record of any dialogue between you and Spam on the number two radio.”
“Probably because there wasn’t any,” said DeLancey. “The mission went as briefed. Nothing needed to be discussed on the second radio.”
Maxwell found that peculiar. “You mean Spam didn’t argue or discuss anything while you were airborne? Wasn’t that a characteristic of hers, always making spurious radio calls?”
DeLancey shook his head. “Not anymore. I straightened her out on that. Her attitude had really turned around.”
Maxwell was dubious. From everything he knew, Spam Parker’s attitude, if anything, had gotten even more argumentative. “How about your number two radio? What were you using for a tactical frequency?”
DeLancey gave him a withering look. “What do you think? Squadron common, 295.7 megahertz, just like we’re supposed to.”
Maxwell held up a rectangular card. “This is your kneeboard card from the flight. You didn’t fill in the box with assigned frequency. But there’s a symbol jotted down here — ‘X-W.’ What does that mean?”
DeLancey peered at the card. “’X-W?’ No idea. Something I jotted down while we were briefing. Maybe it meant ‘crosswind.’ Spam was having trouble figuring out wind and drift in the marshal pattern, and I was helping her with it.”
The board members asked more questions about Spam Parker’s flying discipline — or lack of. DeLancey handled all the queries with an easy nonchalance.
The board had no more questions for DeLancey.
“It’s a damn shame,” he said as he rose from his chair. “Parker was turning into a good fighter pilot.”
The board members looked at each other. No one offered a comment.
After DeLancey left the room, Zybrowski asked the others, “Do you think he really believes that shit?”
<>
Lieutenant Commander Big Mac MacFarquhar had a walrus mustache and a booming voice. “Yeah, that was me who flattened Pearly. I was the last one in the net.”
Maxwell winced. Big Mac weighed in at an easy two-fifty. Having an object the size of MacFarquhar land on you from twenty feet above could be lethal.
MacFarquhar peeled away his flight suit and showed Maxwell the bandages on his back. “The fire was already on us when I jumped. One more second and I would’ve been a crispy critter.”
They were in the Air Wing office, where MacFarquhar had his own cubicle with his name on it. Big Mac was the senior LSO aboard the Reagan, and it was his job to supervise all the other squadron LSOs.
Maxwell looked at the yellow pad on which he had jotted notes during the interview with Pearly Gates. “Pearly said it seemed to him as if Spam were getting ‘other instructions.’ What’s your take on that?”
“At first I thought so too. It was like one of the other LSOs had cut in and told her, ‘Easy with it,’ or something like that. But I checked the tapes. Nobody said squat.”
“Then what made her dump the jet onto the ramp?”
MacFarquhar shook his head. “Pilot error. Arrogance. Parker flew into the spud locker. Period.”
“Then why was she even allowed to be out there?”
“You guys tell me. She was your problem, not mine. I told Killer we oughta send her packing.”
“What did Killer say?”
“He said to keep her in the loop, don’t worry because she was getting better.”
“But she wasn’t getting better.”
“Yeah, and now she’s dead. And pardon me if I don’t get all remorseful about it. That dumb broad nearly killed me and all my LSOs.” MacFarquhar glanced around, then lowered his voice. “Good riddance, I say. Too bad it had to cost us a Hornet. I’ll tell you this much, I’ve got no stomach for any more fucking social experiments like Spam Parker.”
Maxwell let MacFarquhar rant for while. Big Mac was a good LSO, but Maxwell knew he was not an objective witness. He was still reliving the horror of the fireball on the flight deck.
Finally Maxwell thanked him and left the office. Walking down the passageway, he pondered again what little he had learned. Why did DeLancey, a fervent anti-feminist, not act when the LSOs told him they wanted Spam taken off flying status?
Why did Spam Parker, who wasn’t known to be crazy or suicidal, ignore the radio calls that would save her life?
It didn’t add up.
<>
Petty Officer Third Class Jose Ruiz was still wearing his flight deck float coat. His cranial protector lay on the padded seat next to him. He scratched his head and said, “Well, sir, it was dark, and I wasn’t paying that much attention.”
They were sitting in the back of the ready room. Maxwell prompted him. “But you definitely saw Commander DeLancey remain in his cockpit after he landed and you had secured the tie-downs?”
“Yes, sir. When he raised the canopy, he told me he was going to reprogram the radio.”
Maxwell tried to visualize DeLancey reprogramming his radio. Something wasn’t making sense. “Why would he do that?”
Ruiz chuckled. “He said he screwed up and forgot to use the ‘crypto hold’ function that saves the frequencies.”
“Isn’t it your job to reprogram the radio when that happens?”
“Sure, but the skipper said he needed the practice. He’s a cool guy, Commander DeLancey. Most of the pilots just walk away and leave that stuff to us.”
