Final Flight jg-2

by Stephen Coonts

  Four sailors wearing headsets surrounded the table and pushed the aircraft models around it in response to the observations of spotters stationed high in the island or on the hangar deck. The scale model and the cutout aircraft allowed the handler to instantly ascertain the location of every aircraft on the ship. Although he had four and a half acres of flight deck and two acres of hangar to work with, the handler fought a never-ending battle against gridlock.

  Against the far wall the squadron maintenance chiefs shouted into their headsets and intercom boxes and wrote with grease pencils on a large plexiglas board that showed the maintenance status of every aircraft on the ship. Almost everyone was shouting, at someone else or into a mouthpiece, and the muffled whine of engines at idle or full power provided symphonic background. The airmen in flight gear waiting to man the alert aircraft crammed the rest of the space. Grafton turned back to the window when a sailor near him lit a cigarette.

  “Okay. That’s the last one,” the handler finally roared over the hubbub. “You alert guys give me your weight chits and man ’em up.”

  Grafton passed him a printed form with his aircraft’s weight computation penciled in. The launching officer would need this weight to calculate the proper setting for the catapult in the event the alert birds had to launch.

  The handler glanced at the form, ensuring it was signed by the pilot, then scribbled the number in grease pencil on a status board beside him. The crews donned their helmets and waddled toward the door in pairs — it was hard to walk normally wearing forty pounds of flight gear and a tight torso harness that impinged upon your testicles.

  Grafton opened the hatch to the flight deck and stepped through. He and Reed walked between two aircraft and stopped at the foul line, the right edge of the landing area. The wind and misty rain gave the air a chill, and Jake shivered. The rescue helicopter, the “angel,” came out of the gloom over the fantail and settled onto the forward portion of the landing area. The crewman tumbled out the side door of the SH-3 and began installing tie-down chains as flight deck workers in blue shirts rushed in to help. In moments the chains were installed and the engines died. The rotors spun slower and slower, until finally they came to rest.

  A yellow flight deck tractor towed an F-14 with wings swept aft past the helicopter and spun it around into the hook-up area of Number Three Catapult. When the blue-shirts carrying chocks and chains had it secured, the tractor was unhooked and the nose tow-bar removed. In a few moments another tractor came aft from the bow towing the A-6E that Jake and Reed were to man and parked it just short of the foul line on the port, or left, side of the landing area.

  Tonight the alert aircraft consisted of the two F-14 Tomcats spotted just short of the waist catapults and two A-6 Intruders spotted clear of the landing area. Only one aircraft was aloft now in the night, an E-2C Hawkeye early-warning radar plane. This twin-engine turboprop could easily stay airborne for four hours. The radars aboard the various ships would also be probing the night, but the Hawkeye’s radar, from its vantage point six miles up, had a tremendous range advantage. The information from all these radars was data-linked to the NTDS computer and displayed in the Combat Information Centers aboard every ship in the task group. In the half-light of computer-driven display screens, amid the murmur of radio speakers, the CIC watchstanders coded, analyzed, and identified every object within hundreds of miles. And if any unidentified plane appeared whose course might take it so near the task group as to constitute a possible threat, the alert fighters would be launched. If the bogey was an unidentified surface target, a ship or boat, the A-6 bombers would follow the fighters into the air.

  Tonight the handler had his alert bombers spotted clear of the landing area, so he would only have to respot the two alert fighters when the time came to launch another Hawkeye and trap the returning one.

  Jake Grafton began his walk-around inspection as the tractor backed up to the starboard side of the aircraft and a high-pressure air hose was attached to the plane. Another man dragged a power cable across the deck from the catwalk and plugged it into the aircraft.

  Jake examined the ordnance hanging on the A-6’s wing stations. A Harpoon air-to-surface missile was mounted on the right inboard wing station, station four; a pod of flares hung on the left inboard wing station, station two; and four Rockeye cluster bombs hung on each of the outboard wing stations, stations one and five. The centerline station, station three, contained a two-thousand-pound belly tank, as usual. He checked each weapon to see that it was properly mated to the rack and the fuses were correctly set.

  Jake also examined the grease-penciled numbers in the black area on the port intake to ensure the plane captain had written in the proper weight of the aircraft, including fuel and ordnance. This was yet another check for the catapult officer, whose calculation of the catapult launch valve setting had to be correct or the aircraft would not get enough push from the catapult to get safely airborne.

  One mistake, Jake mused, by any of the dozens of men involved in a launch, if not detected and corrected, would be fatal to the men in the cockpit. Every man had to do his job perfectly all the time, every time. The launching ballet had come to symbolize, for Jake, the essence of carrier aviation.

  Satisfied at last, he mounted the ladder to the cockpit, preflighted his ejection seat, removed the safety pins and counted and stowed them, then maneuvered himself into the seat. The plane captain scurried up the ladder to help him strap in. Reed was busy strapping into the bombardier-navigator’s seat immediately to Jake’s right. Unlike most military planes where the crew sat in tandem, in the A-6 they sat side by side, although the BN’s seat was several inches aft and slightly lower than the pilot’s.

  The pilot’s hands flew around the cockpit arranging switches for the start. All the cockpit lights and dials came alive as electrical power was applied to the plane from the deck-edge cable. As the plane captain twirled his fingers and the huffer bellowed, Jake cranked the left engine. When it was at idle, 60 percent RPM, the plane captain disconnected the huffer, which supplied high-pressure air to the plane, and advanced the left engine to 75 percent. Now he started the right engine using bleed air from the left one. With both engines at idle, he turned on both of the A-6E’s radios and watched Reed complete his set up of the computer and inertial. Finally he gave a thumbs-up to the flight deck bosun who stood in front of the aircraft. The bosun cupped his hand around a lip mike on his headset and informed flight deck control that the alert bomber was ready. Then the engines were shut down and the plane captain closed the canopy and snapped the pilot’s boarding ladder up into the fuselage.

  Now the crew relaxed. They would sit here like this for two hours until they were relieved by another crew. Unless the alert planes launched, it was all very boring, a typical military exercise in hurry up and wait.

  Jake surveyed the cockpit as if it were the front seat of a familiar and treasured automobile. The A-6 had changed significantly in the years since he flew the A-version in Vietnam. The search and track radars of the A-6A had been replaced by one radar that combined both search and track functions. The rotary drum computer was gone, and in its place was a solid-state computer that rarely failed. The old Inertia! Navigation System (INS) had also been replaced by a new system that was more accurate and reliable.

  Above the bombardier-navigator’s radar scope was a small screen much like a television screen. This instrument displayed a picture from a Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera mounted in a turret on the bottom of the fuselage, in front of the nose gear door. Also in the turret were a laser ranger designator and receiver, which the crew could use to obtain very precise range information on a target within ten nautical miles.

  Jake used a rheostat to adjust the level of the cockpit lighting, then he looked around at the other airplanes and the men moving around the deck on random errands. He had difficulty distinguishing features of the other aircraft and the colors of the jerseys worn by the men on deck. He squinted. The island floodlights
didn’t seem to help much.

  This is just an alert, he told himself. Nothing will happen. We won’t launch. He breathed deeply and exhaled slowly, trying to relax.

  “So why do you want to turn in your wings?” he asked Reed over the intercom system, the ICS, as he watched little droplets of rain adhere to the canopy plexiglas.

  “I’m tired of night cat shots,” Reed said finally. “I’m tired of drilling holes in the sky and risking my butt for nothing. I’m going back to school for an MBA, and I don’t see why I should keep doing this until Uncle Sam kisses me good-bye.”

  The fine rain droplets on the canopy occasionally reached a critical mass and coalesced into one large drop, which slid slowly down the glass.

  “After you get your degree, what are you going to do?”

  “I dunno. Go to work for some company, I suppose. Make some money.”

  “Is that what you want? Nine to five? Same shit, different day — everyone in the office creeping toward retirement one day at a time.”

  “The civilians can’t be as fucked up as the navy. They have to turn a profit.”

  Jake listened awhile to the airborne Hawkeye talking to the ship on strike frequency. Only ten days to Naples. He wondered where he would be and what he would be doing if he had left the navy after Vietnam. Should he have resigned years ago? The thought of all the time he and his wife, Callie, had spent apart depressed him. And his parents were getting on without their eldest son around to check on them. Too bad he and Callie had had no children, though, Lord knows, they had wanted them.

  Maybe it’s time for me to pull the plug, too, he thought. Forty-three years old, eyes crapping out, maybe it’s time to go home to Callie. He thought about her, the look and feel and sound and smell of her, and he missed her badly.

  “Shotgun Five Zero Two, Strike, are you up?”

  Jake started. He picked up his mask from his lap and held it to his face. “Battlestar Strike, Shotgun Five Zero Two’s up.”

  “Go secure.”

  “Roger.” Jake threw the switches on the radio scrambler. When the synchronization tone ceased, he checked in with Strike again.

  “CAG, we have been tracking a group of six boats near the Lebanese coast since dusk this evening. Apparently fishing boats. Three minutes ago one of them turned toward the task group and increased speed significantly. If he doesn’t resume course in two minutes, we’re going to launch you. Stand by to copy his position, over.”

  Jake turned toward Reed. He was still sitting there, slightly dazed. Jake keyed the ICS. “Copy the posit, Mister Reed, and put it into the computer.”

  Reed grabbed a pen from the kneeboard strapped to his right thigh and asked Strike for the coordinates. Without realizing he was doing it, Jake tugged his torso harness straps tighter.

  “Steering to the target is good, CAG,” Reed told him.

  Jake read the readout on the panel. Only forty miles. The task group is too goddamn close to the coast! This guy is almost here and he just started. Wonder what kind of weapons he has? He looked at the heading indicator. The ship was steaming southwest, away from the coast. That was a help. But the ship would have to turn into the northerly wind to launch, which would stop relative motion away from the coast and the threat, which was to the east. He felt his stomach tighten.

  The deck loudspeaker blared. “Launch the alert five! Launch the alert five!”

  Jake heard the flight deck tractor come to life and the high-pressure air unit, the huffer, winding toward full RPM as the catapult crewmen came piling out of the catwalk and raced toward the Tomcats in the hookup areas. Kowalski was there, small and chunky, waving directions to his men. The blue-shirts broke down the tie-down chains on the chopper and the rotors engaged. He could feel the ship heel to port as it started a starboard turn into the wind.

  The plane captain twirled his fingers at Jake, signaling for a start. Jake pushed the crank button and advanced the starboard throttle to idle when the engine reached 18 percent RPM. The engine lit with a low moan and the revolutions slowly climbed.

  He had both engines at idle when the chopper lifted off and the two F-14s began to ease forward to the waiting catapult shuttles. The large jet-blast deflectors (JBDs), came out of the deck behind each aircraft and cocked at a sixty-degree angle.

  The taxi director waved his yellow wands at Jake. He released the parking brake and goosed the throttles. The Intruder began to roll. He applied the brakes slightly to test them, felt the hesitation, then released the pedals. He pressed the nosewheel steering button on the stick and followed the taxi director’s signals toward Catapult Three.

  Now the engines of the fighter on Cat Three were at full power. With its new, more-powerful engines, the D-version of the Tomcat no longer needed the extra thrust of afterburner to launch. The roar reached Jake inside his cockpit, through his soundproof helmet, as the Intruder trembled from the fury of the hot exhaust gas flowing like a river over the JBD. The Tomcat’s exterior lights came on. Two heartbeats later it was accelerating down the catapult as the JBD came down. In seconds the catapult officer had the fighter on Cat Four at full power, then he fired the second plane into the waiting void.

  A red-shirted ordnanceman was holding up the red safety flags from the weapons for Jake to see as the yellow-shirt waved him forward toward the cat. As he taxiied, Jake used his flashlight to acknowledge the ordie, okayed the weight board being held aloft by a green-shirted cat crewman with another flashlight signal, and eased the airplane right, then left, to line it up precisely with the catapult shuttle. It looked like utter chaos, this little army of men in their different-colored jerseys surging to and fro around the moving planes, but the steps and gestures of every man were precisely choreographed, perfectly timed.

  Wings spread and locked, flaps to takeoff, slats out, stabilizer shifted, trim set, parking brake off, Reed read off the items on the takeoff checklist and Jake checked each one and gave an oral response as he eased the plane toward the shuttle. He felt the jolt as the metal hold-back bar stopped the aircraft’s forward progress. Then he felt another tiny jolt as the shuttle was hydraulically moved forward several inches to take all the slack from the metal-to-metal contact—“taking tension,” the catapult crewmen called it.

  He released the brakes and jammed both throttles full forward and wrapped his fingers around the catapult grip, a lever that would prevent an inadvertent throttle retardation on the catapult stroke.

  The engines wound to full power with a rising moan. EGT, RPM, fuel flow, oil pressure, all looked good.

  He flipped the external lights on and put his head back in the headrest as the plane trembled under the buffeting of the air disturbed by its engines. His eyes were on the green light in front of the launching officer’s control bubble in the port catwalk. Now the light went out — the cat officer had pushed the fire button.

  Oh lordy, here we go again! The Gs pressed him back into the seat and the forward edge of the angled deck rushed toward him and swept under the nose. As the G subsided he slapped the gear handle up and locked the nose at eight degrees nose up. The rate-of-climb needle rose and the altimeter began to respond. No warning lights.

  Log another one.

  8

  Shotgun five zero two’s airborne.”

  “Radar contact. Your squawk One Three Zero Two. When safely airborne, your vector Zero Niner Five for surface bogey and switch to Strike.”

  “Squawking and switching.” Reed dialed the radio channelization knob to Channel Nine, which was preset to Strike frequency. Jake checked in.

  “Shotgun Five Zero Two, Vector Zero Niner Eight for surface bogey. Make an ID pass at two thousand feet and report. Avoid Lebanese three-mile limit, over.”

  “Wilco.”

  Accelerating through 180 knots indicated he raised the flaps and slats and concentrated on flying the plane as the aerodynamics changed. He leveled at 2,000 feet on course and accelerated toward 400 knots. “Get the FLIR fired up, Reed. We’re gonna need it real s
oon.” Jake secured the aircraft’s exterior lights. No sense in giving anyone with an itchy trigger finger an illuminated target.

  “I’ve got the target, CAG. Steering’s good.”

  The infrared screen was mounted above the radar screen on the BN’s side of the instrument panel, and both were concealed inside a dark, collapsible black hood that shielded the displays from extraneous light. “This mist in the air is degrading the IR, CAG. Maybe if we go lower …”

  “Strike, Shotgun is gonna make that pass at a thousand feet.”

  “Roger.”

  Jake shoved the nose down. Only eighteen miles to go. “Are you ready, Dog?”

  “Uh … Yeah…. He’s a nice little target, easy to see. System’s tight.” Reed adjusted the presentations on the displays without removing his head from the scope hood, while Jake set the radar altimeter to give an aural warning if he descended below 800 feet.

  “Have you got the ECM on?” Jake could see that the electronic countermeasures panel was still dark.

  “Oh, shit. I forgot.”

  Reed turned it on. It would take a while to warm up. Better be safe than sorry, Grafton decided, and dropped the left wing. “Strike, Shotgun is doing a three-sixty to get set up.”

  “Jeeze, I’m sorry, CAG,” Reed said. “I guess I got too busy.” He checked all his switches again. Jake visually checked the master armament switch to ensure that it was off and examined the symbology on the Analog Display Indicator (ADI), a television-like screen mounted in the center of the panel in front of him. This instrument had replaced the Vertical Display Indicator of the A6-A and presented all the information the pilot needed to fly the plane. At the top of the presentation, compass headings moved from left to right as the aircraft turned.