by T. E. Cruise
“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.”
CHAPTER 11
(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 j
et 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.
“Pay attention to me first, and the ball second,” Greene’s backseater pilot instructor warned on that first flight. The Buckeye was arrowing toward the earth. The ground was coming up so fast that Greene was sure they were going to auger in, but then the PI ordered, “Put her down—now!”
Greene, gritting his teeth, slammed that Buckeye down where the instructor told him to. As the arrestor cable grabbed the Buckeye’s tailhook, Greene’s harness straps bit into his shoulders and the moleskin protective strip mohawking the top of his helmet scraped the inside top of the canopy. The Buck left rubber scorches on the tarmac, but Greene got the fucking job done.
“That was okay… for a first time,” the instructor muttered through the cockpit intercom.
Damn right it was okay. Greene thought. Ain’t nothing the Navy can do the Air Force can’t do better.
But when it came time for it to be Blaisdale’s turn. Buzz froze up. By then, Greene had finished for the day, and was watching from the sidelines as Buzz’s sleek little T-2 Buck made its first approach toward that rectangle painted on the tarmac, shimmering in the Florida heat.
“He’s coming in too low,” remarked one of the squid pilots standing around watching along with Greene.
“He’ll do okay,” Greene muttered hopefully.
But Buzz didn’t do okay at all. He bounced the airstrip, touching down too early and then rising up and dropping down again, totally missing the painted rectangle that represented the carrier’s flight deck.
“If that had been the real thing…” The squid pilot trailed off, shaking his head.
“Hey, it wasn’t the real thing,” Greene said, feeling defensive. “Cut the guy some slack. It was his first try. He’ll do better.”
To the squid’s credit, he didn’t say anything further, not even when Buzz proceeded to botch his remaining landing attempts. Greene felt embarrassed for his friend. That kind of initial performance might have been excusable for an inexperienced pilot, but it was searingly humiliating for Blaisdale.
From then on, Blaisdale was shook. For a fighter jock there is nothing worse than a loss of confidence. Buzz knew what he had to do, but it was as if his reflexes conspired against him. He never did get the hang of hammering his plane into the landing rectangle. For a while, Blaisdale tried talking it out with Greene, but there are some things—the really important things—that talk can’t fix. Eventually, Blaisdale just got kind of quiet and moody. Greene recognized the symptoms. He’d seen them before. Blaisdale may not have known it himself yet, but he’d given up.
The weeks passed. Greene moved ahead in his training. Blaisdale didn’t. He was like a man with a critical illness, lingering on by a thread. Each day the squid instructors took him up and tried to teach him what he couldn’t seem to learn. Sometimes different instructors took him up during the same day. It wasn’t about cruelty on the part of the Navy; the squids didn’t know what else to do. They would have washed out one of their own—plenty of squids did wash out—but in this case the touchy interservice politics of the situation didn’t allow for giving Blaisdale the boot. The Navy wasn’t about to kick Buzz Blaisdale out of Indian Giver; he would have to take himself out of it. By this point, all of the Navy’s efforts were directed toward givi
ng Blaisdale a nudge in that direction.
Finally, the the day came around for Greene to get his feet wet landing on a training carrier. He awoke that morning to find Buzz in his Air Force service uniform: slate-blue trousers and tunic; light-blue shirt and dark-blue tie; visored cap. Buzz was packing his bags.
“Well.” Buzz shrugged, smiling thinly when he saw that Greene was awake. “I’m out of here.”
Greene sat up in bed, scratching, and yawning. “I guess that makes sense,” he said.
He felt terrible, but what could he say? Sorry you didn’t make the cut? Buzz was doing the right thing. His only mistake had been waiting as long as he had. If Blaisdale couldn’t hack the basic necessary flight procedures during Visual Flight Rules, how would he ever manage the rest of CARQUAL? Carrier qualification required proficiency in ILS Instrument Landing System carrier approaches. And what about the night landings?
Outside the trailer, a jeep’s headlights flashed against the curtains, illuminating the gray Florida dawn. A horn honked.
“That’s my ride,” Buzz said, hefting his bags. “See you around, Robbie.”
“Yeah, see you,” Greene murmured.
Blaisdale looked supremely uncomfortable. “I’ll let you know where I’m reassigned,” he said.
“Good,” Greene said, although he knew it was unlikely Blaisdale would do any such thing. Greene had been witness to his friend’s great humiliating failure. Buzz would be anxious to put the shame behind him, and that meant disassociating with everyone who’d been on the scene when he’d failed to make the cut. This was good-bye.
Their eyes never met as Greene rolled out of bed and padded toward the trailer’s narrow stall shower. By the time he was done showering, Buzz was gone.
A couple of hours later, Greene was adorned in his olive-drab, Nomex fire-retardant flight overalls and “speed jeans” G-suit. He was cinched into his parachute harness, wearing his helmet and oxygen mask; strapped into the Buckeye’s pilot’s seat. For a change, his backseater PI on this trip, Lieutenant Commander Bill “Popeye” Popovich, was quiet as they soared past the Florida coastline and out over the blue water, toward the training carrier.
