“Helos,” he said. “What happens to the daily helo dance? We don’t still—”
The exec and Austin laughed out loud; even the captain smiled.
“Never fear, Weppo, you still get to play ringmaster for your beloved helos, only now you get continuous flight-deck operations for SAR birds.
Big Mother and Clementine will alternate pn-station every time a strike goes in—on top of everything else. And you haven’t lived until one of the fling wings breaks down on deck while the other guy is still out there.”
“I hate helos,” grumbled Brian. His face was so glum that the others laughed even harder. Everyone hated helos.
The meeting broke up and Brian headed back to his stateroom while Austin and the exec went back topside to Combat. He flopped down in his rack, fully dressed, in anticipation of having to get back up in an hour, then remembered that Benedetti was going to take his mid. He got back up, stripped, and took a Hollywood shower, standing in the rain locker for a full five minutes instead of the get wet, turn off the water, soap up, turn on the water, get rinsed, and get out regulation Navy shower.
He put on clean Skivvies, set his alarm for 0630, and was asleep in one minute. He awoke with a start at 1030 the next morning, having slept through reveille, breakfast, his alarm, and most of the morning. He felt better than he had in weeks. He shaved, dressed, and headed down to the wardroom. As he came out of his stateroom, he discovered that someone had taped a do not disturb sign on his door.
At 1600, nearly the entire wardroom, minus only the bridge watch standers, was assembled in D and D. Brian and Garuda had the watch.
There were already indications on the screens that something was up, with extra support aircraft beginning to fill the eastern sectors of the Gulf. There had been six recce runs made since midnight, which Brian felt had surely given the game away.
The captain replayed his briefing for the principals, which included the three evaluators, the SWICs, all the AICs, the senior helo pilots, and the LSO, Jack Folsom, as well as the module supervisors from each watch section.
Brian found it interesting that the bridge watch standers were not included, but then he remembered that, on a scale of 250 miles, the movements of the ship itself were not particularly important. Hood would probably remain in her box for the duration of the strikes.
Austin briefed the message air plans, and the status board supervisors busied themselves posting all the call signs and identification codes from the various carrier squadrons that would be involved. The senior helo pilot reviewed the endurance rules for continuous SAR operations, generally trying to put the best face he could on the circus that would be played out on Hood’s flight deck over the next three days. Everyone mentally rolled his eyes at the thought of seventy-two hours of nearly continuous helo ops; Chief Martinez’s firefighting crews would camp out in the flight-deck catwalks for the next three days and nights.
Brian went down to the evening meal, but then, not feeling sleepy after getting an entire night’s sleep, went back to Combat to watch. He wasn’t the only one with the same idea. D and D was crowded with khaki, as most of the principals had come up to take a look at their deployment’s first Alfa-strikes. The captain sat in his chair, with the exec standing beside him. They were watching the action on SWIC’s screen, which was a blur of amber, with a stream of tracks going to and from the carriers down on Yankee Station, and the heavenly host, as the support tracks were called, filling the skies over the Gulf with electronic-warfare jammers and listeners, Navy tactical radio-relay aircraft, SAR birds and their escorts, the Iron Hands, the ubiquitous E-2, who was controlling the strikes, and the Wager Bird, whose KC135 tanker now came to him during the course of the strikes.
Brian could not get close enough to the SWIC scope to see details, so he went into the surface module, where, as he expected, the surface guys had their NTDS console tuned into the air show going on to their west.
Because he was an evaluator, they made room for him at the console, even asking him who was who in the myriad of symbols streaming across the scope. It gave him a small surge of pride to be able to identify which symbols were the bombers, which the escorting Iron Hands, and to point out the crazy, taunting tracks of the Wild Weasels trying to stir up SAM sites. He watched for an hour as one wave tracked out of North Vietnam, to be overflown by the next wave coming in. The radio speakers in Combat were alive with crackling reports of targets engaged, SAM sites neutralized, and the yelled warnings among the strike aircraft of SAMs punching up into the night sky. The exec wandered into surface and nudged Brian on the arm.
“Just can’t stay away, huh?” he said to Brian.
“No, sir. It’s quite a show.”
“Well, it’s going to be here for another three days and nights. I recommend you go hit your tree; you’re making the Count nervous.”
Brian looked surprised. “Why is that, sir?”
“Well, he wants to make sure you get back here on time to relieve him.
And remember, it will take more than fifteen minutes to turn this show over. You should be up here by twenty-three hundred at the latest.”
“Aye, aye, sir. And thanks for getting Vince back into the game. I think I was at the end of my rope.”
“Yeah, well, you will be again if you don’t get your tree time while you can.”
“Yes, sir.” Brian hesitated, pointing at the screen with his chin. “All this doing any good?”
The exec shrugged. “Yeah, I suspect it is. They’re going after troop concentrations, vehicle parks, ammo and fuel dumps, all the things the NVA needs to sustain its operations in the DMZ and farther south. Their logistics system is primitive, which makes it hard to find worthwhile targets most of the time. When they do stack it up or park it somewhere, yeah, this sort of surge does a lot of damage.”
“Don’t they do anything about it? Like send up their Migs?”
“Not usually. I mean, look at the scope. Half that shit is attack birds; the other half is support and CAP— BARCAP, Migcap, SARCAP, Iron Hand—basically, a whole gruncha fighters tooling around praying that a Mig will show its Communist face. No, we won’t see Migs until the dust settles. Even the Migs that usually come up around Hanoi are going to stay in their bunkers. Now, you quit spectatin’ and lay below.”
Brian grinned and left Combat.
To a passing outside observer, the ship did nothing for the next three days but push along at a sedate five knots, boring endless holes in the sullen waters of the Tonkin Gulf, cranking up speed and turning into the wind every ninety minutes to recover and launch the next SAR helo.
The bridge watch standers fought boredom and sunburn and the engineers sweated in 110-degree heat in their steel jungle of steam lines and roaring machinery. While some of the deck apes continued their relentless pursuit of running rust, the bulk of the Deck Division spent their time dressed out in firefighting gear, hunkering down in sweaty lumps along the 01 level aft, by the sides of the helo hangar, around their hoses and foam generators, rising to their stations about every ninety minutes as Big Mother, the log helo, or Clementine exchanged places on the deck.
Throughout the rest of the ship, the mess cooks toiled through four meals a day, while the yeomen and disbursing clerks and the personnelmen pursued their paperwork.
Only the occasional distant thunder of jet engines or multiple contrails across the sky gave any indication to the rest of the crew as to what was going on. For about half of them, there was simply nothing going on.
The ship was just killing time before the Subic port visit.
For Brian and the other half of the crew, the next three days and nights passed in a blur of scope symbology and radio transmissions as hundreds of Navy sorties screamed over the long coastline of North Vietnam, raining 750-pound general-purpose bombs, napalm, and cluster-bomb units on truck-staging areas, tank parks, ammo dumps, and artillery concentrations across the countryside. Some of the attack aircraft skimmed along the numerous canals and inland wate
rways, dropping five-hundred-pound bombs configured as mines into them to interdict nocturnal barge traffic. The military airfield at Vinh and-three other southern bases were struck and their runways cratered from end to end.
No Migs were found.
The grueling tempo of the bombing campaign began to take its toll by the third day as the air controllers started to lose their edge and require relief more frequently and the trackers in the Cave began to screw up the correlation of radar video to symbols. The pilots turned querulous as their own fatigue began to poison their physiological effectiveness.
On the morning of the third day, after having done no SARs in the previous thirty hours, Hood scrambled to conduct three. They were all in daylight and all successful. But that afternoon, two outbound A-6 bombers collided in midair twenty miles west of the Red Crown station as they executed a low-altitude join-up for the trip back to the carrier.
Both plunged into the sea before anyone got out, a fact witnessed by a third A-6, which called off the SAR with a chillingly laconic
“Ain’t no point—nobody walked” report. The captain requested permission to take the ship into the area of the crash site anyway for the few remaining hours of daylight, and CTF 77 concurred.
As the ship nosed through the area of the crashes, the bulk of the crew not on watch came topside into the late afternoon light to assist in spotting wreckage and any possible survivors. Hood steamed slowly through the area, encountering widely scattered patches of shimmering jet fuel and streaks of confetti-sized debris but finding nothing of consequence. Brian, who had the evaluator watch, did not bother to call Vince Benedetti, as this was not officially an SAR operation. He kept the duty SAR helo in its designated offshore holding area to be ready for any new SAR, one where there might be better prospects for recovering someone alive. The fate of the men in the two A-6s was a foregone conclusion, as nothing bigger than a dollar bill was sighted in the area.
At sundown, the captain called it off and headed back to his station in the Gulf. Most of the crew drifted back inside, uninterested in the spectacularly glowing sunset unfolding behind them. Brian had to write a message report on the incident, but the controller who had watched it happen could tell him nothing more than “one of ‘em fucked up and ran into the other one; guys’re tired.”
CTF 77 must have agreed with that sentiment, because he suspended the round-the-clock strike ops at 1700 that evening, ordering up the beginning of single-carrier cyclic ops for noon the following day. The break was welcomed in Combat, as many of the augmenting watch standers could get an entire night’s sleep for the first time in three days.
Brian had relieved Austin at 1800 and was scheduled to be relieved by Benedetti at midnight. An hour after Brian had taken the watch, Austin called him from his stateroom.
“The snipes have apparently managed to co ntaminate the boiler feed-water system forward with salt water.
Vince has been down there since noon, so I’ll be relieving you at midnight. Make sure the wake-up people get the word.”
“Can do. Does this mean we’re back on port and starboard?” Austin sighed. “Hopefully not. I’m planning on calling Vince at oh-five-thirty.
But we’ll see.”
“Wonderful.”
Brian groaned as he hung up the phone. He dreaded the thought of going back to a watch and watch schedule.
He looked around Combat. Compared with the past three days, the place seemed deserted and quiet. Garuda was on with him for the first time in the two days of the staggered watch rotations. They had taken over the watch and now concerned themselves with the business of staying awake.
The screen was almost entirely clear, with only the BARCAP idling overhead at forty thousand feet, patrolling their endless sixty-mile racetrack pattern along the coast of North Vietnam. The ship was on the western edge of the Red Crown box, where she had remained for the previous three days to be closer to the SAR helo stations. The only air activity around the carriers to the south was the single tanker launched to refuel the BARCAP. Both of Hood’s helos were on deck for the first time in three days, with maintenance crews poring over them. Hoodoo, the controller who had most recently caught some sleep, had been elected the duty AIC by the rest of the AICs, and RD1 Rpckheart had the surface module. The Cave was quiet; with almost nothing to track, the operators sent ticktacktoe patterns from console to console in order to stay awake. Garuda, who usually spotted new video before any of the kids in the Cave did, let their games slide for the moment.
“Chee-rist, what a breeze, as the parrot said,” declared Brian, stirring a cup of coffee. Garuda nodded.
They were both glad for the respite.
“I’ll bet the bad guys are glad it’s over for a while, too.
The receiving end of that many sorties must have been medium shitty.”
“Noisy, anyway. But they’re Commies; they deserve it. Besides, one a the basketballs said our jungle bunnies had been catchin’ a lot of artillery in the DMZ. Fuckers knocked it off about an hour into the Alfa-strikes.”
Brian shook his head. “But the little bastards always seem to manage to come back. It reminds me of clapping my hands over my head to get rid of a cloud of gnats—a moment of silence and then there they are again. I think maybe’s there’s just too many of ‘em.”
Garuda snorted. “Problem is, we’re smackin’ the shit outta the doggies in the weeds, but the gutless bastards back in Washington won’t let us do anything about all them Russian ships full of new tanks, new trucks, ad new SAMs, all parked up in Haiphong Harbor. We go get that shit, they won’t any of ‘em come back so quick.”
“BARCAP are off-station for happy hour,” announced Hoodoo.
“SWIC, aye,” intoned Garuda, lighting up in an indignant cloud of blue smoke while Brian stood behind him, staring down at the scope, focusing on the familiar amber hook of the coastline near Vinh airfield to the west. The two symbols that represented the BARCAP drifted to the southeast, headed for their rendezvous with the airborne tanker. Brian studied the eerily clear picture of the North Vietnamese coastal mountains being produced by the digital air-search radar. If the atmospheric conditions were just right, the big SPS-48 radar would give as good a surface picture as the SPS-10. After a moment of silence, he saw what appeared to be a tiny piece of the land echo move. He blinked his eyes for a moment and waited for the 48 radar’s sweep to come back around the scope. He saw it again.
“Hey, is that moving?” he asked Garuda, touching the screen with his right index finger. Garuda stopped in midinhale and positioned the cursor on the speck of video. The next sweep came around and the video had moved to the right, out from under the cursor, heading north along the coast. Hoodoo, overhearing Brian’s question, had expanded his scope picture to focus into the land smear. He saw it about the same time Garuda confirmed the motion and slapped an unknown track symbol on it.
“Where those BARCAP?” asked Garuda.
“They off-station. Like I jes reported. They right at minimum combat package.”
“What the hell, we can move the tanker. See if we can get ‘em back; let’s see if we can bag this guy.”
“This a Mig?” asked Brian, already knowing the answer. A couple of the guys near the doorway of the Cave straightened up at the sound of the word Mig.
“It ain’t one of ours, that’s for damn sure. Good eye on seem’ that sumbitch. Hoodoo, take it in special track so you’re ready for engagement.”
“I roger that,” Hoodoo replied. “But them BARCAP, they aren’t gonna be no good. They below minimum package; cain’t engage nobody, Mr. SWIC. You know the rules.”
“Yeah. Shit. And this guy is ten miles, naw, fifteen outta range for our missiles. Shit, I hate this, just watching these bastards. They know, they fuckin’ know when the BARCAP go off-station! Shit!”
“Maybe someday we ought to fuck around,” Brian said. “You know, tank the BARCAP before they assume station, then let ‘em wander off when it’s about the right time. Mig
comes up, jump his ass.”
“Damn right. We should do just that.”
“Evaluator, D and T, Alfa Whiskey wants us to confirm the unknown track in the system.”
Garuda responded. “Tell ‘em we have video and a good skin paint, but the BARCAP are famished. And you guys in the Cave, get hot, down the games, and start looking at your fucking scopes. The evaluator shouldn’t be the first guy to see a fucking Mig.”
“D and T, aye.”
Brian and Garuda stared down at the scope in frustration.
The unknown was making a steady course up the north coast. The data readouts said he was at fifteen thousand feet, heading 340, speed 350, composition unknown.
Hoodoo bent over his scope, tracking the unknown with all the concentration of a spider on its web.
“You call the Old Man?” asked Garuda, adjusting his cursor.
“Christ, no, I forgot.” Brian was reaching for the captain’s phone when an emergency late-detect alert came buzzing in from the Cave onto the SWIC’s scope.
“Son of a bitch, lookit that!” Garuda exclaimed, rising halfway out of his chair.
To the southwest, at a range of about seventy miles and with speed leaders pointing in their direction, were three distinct pieces of video. In the time it took Brian to digest the fact that something bad was happening, the NTDS computers automatically slapped late-detect symbols on the new video, classifying them as unknowns.
Garuda just about simultaneously changed the unknowns to hostiles and sent an engagement order to FCSC.
Suddenly, consoles were buzzing all over Combat. The sound of the missile-director amplidynes spinning up one deck above Combat filled the forward end of Combat, and then the rumbling began as the Spook 55s snapped around to pierce the night with the acquisition beams.
“What’s the range?” asked Brian.
“Sixty and inbound. Those sonsofbitches. I can’t believe they’re doing this shit! Hey, Mr. Holcomb—you ever call the Old Man?”
“Fuck me, no, I didn’t.” As he reached for the phone again, he asked Garuda, “Shouldn’t we be going to GQ?”
The Edge of Honor Page 28
