by Gordon Kent
Donitz peered into the haze, then looked at the board. Two F-18s to go and one S-3. The first F-18 was right in the groove already (Hey! We got a rhythm!) and looking good, a nice change after three days of landings that had filled the ready rooms with shouting, helmet-throwing, clutch-your-head-and-try-not-to-cry skipper tantrums. Donitz didn’t have the experience to fathom just how bad this air wing was, but he knew it was not in the same league as the wing where he had been a nugget. Too few old guys here, for one thing. So few that he, a second-tour pilot, was standing on the platform pretending to be a senior LSO. Too many no grades. Too many power calls. And too goddam fast!
The F-18 guy still looked good; hadn’t even waggled his wings. He was seconds away now, and Donitz relaxed.
“Three wire and okay!” he bellowed, even before the tail hook caught the wire. The juniors looked impressed.
Christy Nixon, recovered from her run-in with Admiral Newman, was enjoying her first flight off a carrier. She hadn’t got airsick; she’d survived the cat shot and Rafehausen’s personal air show; and now they were heading into the break, something she had watched from the flight deck but never really understood.
“Tricky?” Rafe said over the intercom.
“Sir?”
“What’s the break for?” Could he read minds?
“No idea, sir.”
“Bleeds off airspeed.” Was he showing off? Coming on to her? Teaching? “It’s also fun to do. It also serves the pilot as a start to a landing routine, okay? I’m going to call off the numbers. We come over the carrier in the break so that we can start the geometry problem of landing the same way every time. Copy?”
“Yes, sir.” Did the new XO give this much attention to every jg who flew in the back seat? She doubted it. She had already wondered if his smile was just a little wider for her, his attention in the passageway as they passed just a little more focused. She looked sideways at the SENSO in the other seat and caught a slight smile and guessed that he was wondering, too. No, the smile was more as if he had stopped wondering and had made up his mind.
“We’ll stay hot-mike.” This was Rafehausen, maybe for everybody’s benefit, maybe for Cutter, the newbie aviator in the righthand seat, whose own attempts at landing the day before had been so bad he had gone round and round, and somebody had said in the Dirty Shirt that the puddles on his side of the aircraft when he finally got it down were sloshing higher than the CV’s bow wave. Everybody had laughed, but the guy was a wreck.
“Tricky?”
“Sir?”
“Once we’re in the break, we start to go dirty—know what that means?”
“Uh—gear and stuff down?”
“Cool. Hang on, guys—goin’ for a r-i-i-i-de—”
The S-3, not one of the sports cars of naval aviation, made like a Lotus as it suddenly propped itself up on its port wing and seemed to pivot on the wingtip. Tricky felt the G-force build on her body and her lunch, and forgotten objects flew past her face. Lesson learned. Out her tiny window she watched the sky, a perfect sunset just amber pink in the part of the sky that swung past. She turned her head to the left and saw the carrier slide past the SENSO’s window. The turn seemed to go on forever, and it was like an amusement park ride, and she found she loved it.
“No whooping in my plane!” Rafehausen called. Had she whooped? She looked over at the SENSO. He gave her a thumbs up. He was smiling that smile again. She guessed she’d whooped.
It was Sneesen’s first full day on the flight deck. He loved it. He loved the air and the noise and the light. He was standing close to the island, tense and almost shivering because he was afraid he would screw up. Just now, he wasn’t supposed to be doing anything, but the parking chief stopped every few minutes to explain what he was doing, which Sneesen thought was really cool. He knew that nobody trusted him to do anything important yet, but it was enough to be there, enough to have the chief take him seriously. And the chief was a great guy, older, serious, with pale blue eyes that really looked at you.
But it was all so fucking fast! Planes landed—no, trapped—and launched after only the briefest check. Guys moved the planes around a lot, hauling them with tractors that moved like waterbugs; other guys got the hook of a newly landed plane off the wire, then walked (often ran) the plane to a spot on the deck where it waited or got turned off, and at once other guys chained it down. At the run. Mostly, today, the newly landed planes were moved straight to the catapults—no, cats—and readied for re-launch. Sneesen understood that this was all done to train the pilots and to test them, but it also served to train the flight-deck guys, like him. So far, the deck was to him like a chessboard to somebody who doesn’t play chess, the positions meaningless, the movements purposeless. He had only the foggiest notion that there was an Air Boss in a bubble high up on the island directing this perilous game; he had no sense that the nonskid under his feet was new and that after three months of daily ops it would be worn down to slick steel; he did not know that only three squadrons were actually on the boat today so that cyclic ops could go almost nonstop, or that, if the whole air wing had been there, the deck would have been full and the hangar deck crowded.
But Sneesen wanted to learn. He wanted to do right for LDCR Rafehausen. He had been on the deck when Rafehausen had come out to pre-flight his bird, and Sneesen had hovered nearby. Rafe had spoken to him—even remembered his name. Said, “Hey, there’s my man!” Then the female jg had joined him—the Alien, Sneesen thought of her as, because she seemed very foreign to him, different, untrustworthy—and Rafehausen had turned away to talk to her. Sneesen thought she was distracting Rafehausen from his job. He didn’t like her.
But just now, he was so frustrated he was angry. Everything on deck was happening too fast. He wanted to join in, but he was afraid that anything he did would be wrong.
Then the plane-spotting chief with the great blue eyes came over, took a big hit off the water bottle, and whacked him on the shoulder.
“Want to try getting the tail hook off the wire, next trap? You don’t touch anything! Just get your ass down where you can see and give me this sign when the hook is clear, got it? Just the way I showed you.” He made the “hook free” sign.
Sneesen felt his stomach drop. He nodded. Oh, Jesus!
“Okay, that FAG in the groove, he’s your bird.” Fag? Sneesen thought. Why’s he a fag? “Garrett, catch a break! Drink some water. Sneesen’s gonna spot the FAG.” Garrett, who was built like a jock and had a lot of friends, gave Sneesen a wave of thanks. Suddenly, Sneesen was a guy. He moved out on the deck with the chief, unconsciously moving just like him.
The F-18 came roaring in as if it was going to hit them. Sneesen, seeing it for the first time from out on the deck, was sure the plane would hit the ramp, then that it would miss all the wires. Instead, it dropped with a tremendous whack and caught the three wire twenty feet away and surged to full power; Sneesen knew enough already to know that you hit the power when you trapped in case you boltered or had to do a waveoff. The seemingly huge aircraft ran out the wire as if it was going to tear it right out of the boat, and then it decelerated as if a big hand had caught it by the scruff of the neck. Sneesen got hit with a wall of heat, and adrenaline rushed like an injected drug.
“Go!” the chief hollered over the aircraft noise, and Sneesen raced out as he had watched Garrett and the others do. He squatted by the wing, clear of the jet blast as the pilot ran his throttle down. Sneesen got his ass really low, the seat of his jeans just off the deck, loving the tension in his thighs; he watched, then heard, the wire tension drop as the hook moved and the wire dropped free, and he gave the sign to the chief. Made the sign! I did it! The chief waved his paddles and the plane rolled forward, clear of the wire and toward the waiting number three cat.
Sneesen trotted back to his spot near the island as if he had just done a space-jam. He thought somebody might high-five him or something. But Garrett was nowhere in sight and the chief was still out there with his paddles, and sud
denly Sneesen had no idea what he was supposed to do next. He felt momentary anger, and then he remembered what the counselor had told him, Try to look at yourself from outside, and he saw that it was okay. Everybody was doing his job. He had done his job. He had helped the pilot bring his plane up the deck. They couldn’t have done it without him!
He looked up and saw another F-18 in the groove. Okay. Same deal. No problem. Cog in the machine.
Then the chief ran up. The look on his face startled Sneesen. The chief plugged in to a comm set and started to jabber. The F-18 they had just spotted was parked behind the jet blast deflector, the big wall that hydraulics moved up out of the flight deck to protect planes ready to take off from the jet blast of those actually launching. Sneesen had watched it all day because he thought it was really cool; somehow, it made the whole launch sequence look like something out of sci-fi. He knew now the rhythm of the launch: plane forward; deflector up; engines to full; bang of the cat. But the plane on this cat wasn’t moving, and its engines were not at full power.
Sneesen looked at the aircraft near him, trying to look over them, through them, to see the pattern of the deck. He hadn’t believed they could get this many planes here. Planes were parked with their tails out over the water, lining the whole deck edge. As he watched, an EA-6B moved out from a parking position and rolled up behind the just-trapped F-18, adding to the clutter near him. But the chief seemed even angrier now, holding his right ear cup and shouting into the mike. The words were carried away from Sneesen by the wind.
The incoming F-18 was well into the groove now.
Sneesen thought the deck looked full. But what did he know?
Down and across the deck on the LSO platform, Donitz watched the incoming F-18 and wished he could have more landings like the last one. This guy’s wings rocked back and forth like he was flying in a hurricane, and he was chasing the ball all the way. Donitz touched the mike at his throat and kept the pickle switch high in his right hand. This guy might need it.
“Power,” he murmured. In his headset, he heard (and tried to ignore) the Air Boss say, “Paddles, I don’t want this aircraft waving off.” Well, Jee-zus H. Christ, Big Guy, do you think I do? “Power,” he said again quietly. “We’ve had too many waveoffs,” the Air Boss pontificated. Yeah, yeah, yeah—Then all of a sudden the Air Boss was gone, leaving Donitz only the ghost of his voice saying something about Catapult Two. Not my problem, Donitz thought.
The F-18 got its nose up and looked better. The kid seemed to have the ball, now. Donitz looked over at the three wire, but some inconsiderate bastard had just parked a giant E-2 Charlie right over their platform and he couldn’t see the deck. At least the E-2’s tail gave some shade.
Way off at the edge of the haze, the unmistakable, ugly bulk of an S-3 was turning upwind toward the groove. Nice. Donitz had liked his break, too. Has to be Rafehausen. Only fucking pilot in that squadron.
“Power,” he said seductively to the F-18. He didn’t want to scare the guy.
One mile astern of the carrier, Rafe had just explained to his captive audience that a pilot wanted to exit this turn lined up with the carrier, in the groove at six hundred and forty feet altitude and around one twenty knots air speed. He and Cutter Sardesson, his newbie copilot, had counted out together the distance from the break to the turn. Rafe liked the fact that the backseaters thought the lesson was for Ms Nixon. Only Rafe and Cutter knew that the lesson was for Cutter, an otherwise sharp kid whose three no-grade landings demanded tutoring. He’d already spent two sessions getting screamed at in the ready room by the skipper. That came with the territory, but Rafe figured a little quiet teaching from the XO wouldn’t hurt.
“Call the ball.”
“Roger, Ball.” Cutter gave the boat their fuel and weight.
Rafe scanned the instruments and liked what he saw. He was dead on. He looked out over the high instrument panel at the boat. Good lineup. Good angle of attack. Something on deck—hard to tell in the haze and dusk. Deck would deal with it.
Rafe loved landing at this hour. Light enough for visibility, dark enough to count as a night trap. A free landing. Rafe was past needing such a crutch, but the feeling remained from his first cruise. He was smiling. He turned to see if he could flash this smile at Nixon, but the view was blocked. He’d hoped she might be craning around to watch him.
Half a mile ahead, Sneesen fidgeted as the chief shouted into the mike. The incoming F-18 was only seconds away; last time, at this point, Sneesen and the chief had been out on the deck, ready for the trap. Was somebody else going to take this plane? Sneesen had no clue. He moved closer to the chief.
In the tower high above the deck, the Air Boss perched on the edge of his big chair. He glanced at the incoming F-18, which looked to be a few seconds from another botched but safe landing. He shrugged and moved his attention back to what seemed to be chaos at catapult two. Colored shirts were massing around it. Broken shuttle? What was the fucking problem? He already felt that he was behind the deck, its choreographed action threatening to slip out of his control. He needed a second to think. He heard the petty officer in charge of spotting planes on the deck trying to get his attention, but he was fixed on the mess at cat two. Was the goddam plane there on fire? Smoke seemed to be coming out of the cockpit. That wasn’t a broken shuttle, that was an electrical fire. The F-14’s canopy opened and smoke burst out with the two aviators. A swarm of deck crew with extinguishers surrounded the plane. A fire party raced toward it.
“Cat two down!” the Air Boss called.
“Sir, I, um, that EA-6B is—”
“Shut up!” The Air Boss had no time for parking problems. “Plat camera on cat two!”
The Air Boss could see that the movements of the badly parked EA-6B had created a traffic jam near elevator four, but that situation hadn’t reached crisis level yet, and he moved back to watching catapult two.
Sixty feet below, the chief gave up on his attempt to solve the parking problem, grabbed Sneesen and raced toward the F-18. It had already trapped, and they were fifteen seconds behind the action. He shoved Sneesen toward the plane, and his mind registered that the kid knew what to do. Smart. The chief looked to their right, toward the bow. Still no room to move the just-landed F-18. He looked aft. The inbound S-3 was much closer than he expected. Sneesen gave him the sign and he began to wave the F-18 forward, but the inexperienced pilot had throttled down too far and was having trouble getting his plane to roll. The chief hit his mike.
“Foul deck!”
He knew he was already too late.
Sneesen heard it, and he looked around. It sounded important, the way the chief was shouting it. Crouched under the F-18, he couldn’t see the incoming S-3.
The F-18 he was squatting under was blocking the landing area, that’s what the chief’s “foul deck” meant. Time stopped for Sneesen. In a way that he would always remember, the whole meaning of the flight deck abruptly became clear to him: suddenly, he saw it all, as if all the rules and the moves of chess had come to him at once. It was like being blind, and then seeing. The LSO couldn’t see that the deck was clogged. That E-2 was in the way.
The F-18 and whatever else the chief was yelling about were clogging the landing area.
The S-3 was seconds away. The pilot should have been able to see the F-18, Sneesen thought. But in the falling dark, he knew in his guts that the chaos on deck might be invisible from the air.
And he knew that the pilot was Rafehausen.
Up in the tower, the newbie, second-class petty officer finally yelled at the Air Boss.
“The deck is foul, sir!” A more experienced man would have grabbed the Air Boss and made him look. A more experienced man would have made him look forty-five seconds ago by using a certain tone of voice, when it still would have been a small crisis. A more experienced man might even have fixed the problem himself, ordering the S-3 waved off and risking the chewing-out that would come if he was wrong. A more experienced man would have known, with dead
certainty, that there was no master plan any more, that the deck was clogged with aircraft and had been unsafe for several minutes. But all the more experienced men were in other jobs, preventing other crises. This ship had too few veterans and they were spread too thin.
The newbie’s fear finally outweighed his caution. His call was a shriek. “Foul deck!”
Seconds too late, the Air Boss turned to look at the incoming S-3 and the F-18 still on top of the wire. He froze. Sixty feet above the deck, entropy triumphed over training.
Six hundred yards aft of the stern, Rafe’s head was briefly down on the instruments as he continued to explain his descent and the concept of angle of attack to his crew. His approach was perfect. But something still bugged him and kept his hand on the throttle.
From the LSO platform, Donitz watched the S-3 with contentment. The deepening dusk would be full dark soon, and this S-3 was his last call. He admired the landing, too. While the turbofan engines could be responsive, the S-3 was notoriously hard to steady up. A rock-solid approach like this was a pleasure to watch, and Donitz had already alerted his three LSOs to pay attention.
Sneesen was still squatting. He could see under the F-18 to the E-2; beyond the E-2 was the LSO’s platform. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he knew it. He couldn’t see Rafehausen’s S-3 but he knew it was there, and when he glanced back and saw the terror on the chief’s face, he knew what was about to happen. Rafehausen would come down on top of the F-18, and a fireball would take out all of them.
