Jake Grafton looked at the bombardier. Blood, black in the glow of the red cockpit lights, spurted from between McPherson’s fingers.
“Morg?”
McPherson gagged again. His eyes bulged and he stared at the pilot. His eyebrows knitted. He spat up blood. “Jake,” he gurgled. He coughed repeatedly with the ICS mike keyed.
Jake tore his eyes from McPherson and thought furiously as he checked the instrument panel. What could have happened?
Without noticing he had dragged the stick back and the aircraft was up to 700 feet over the delta tableland and exposed on every enemy radar screen within range. He shoved the stick forward. “Don’t try to talk, Morg. I’ll get you home.”
He leveled the plane at 300 feet and was once again hidden amid the ground return.
Jesus! Jesus Christ! Something must have come through the canopy, a piece of flak shrapnel or random bullet.
A whisper: “Jake . . .” McPherson’s hand clutch Jake’s arm, then fell away. He raised his hand and again clutched at Jake, this time more weakly.
Morg slumped over, his head resting on the scope holder. Blood covered the front of his survival vest. Holding the stick with his left hand, Jake struggled to unfasten McPherson’s oxygen mask. Blood spilled from the rubber cup. Blood stains covered the sleeve of his flight suit where McPherson’s hand had seized him.
A battery of guns opened up ahead with short bursts of orange tracers that floated aloft: 37 millimeter. They were shooting generally off to the right, so Jake Grafton turned the plane slightly to fly directly over the muzzle blasts.
He guided the plane into a gentle climb and as the guns disappeared under the nose, he savagely mashed the bomb-release pickle on the stick bump, thump, thump, thump; the RockEyes fell away a third of a second apart.
“Take that, you motherfuckers!” he screamed in his mask, his voice registering hysteria.
He looked again at McPherson, whose arms dangled toward the floor of the cockpit. Blood still throbbed from his throat.
With one hand on the stick, Jake pulled the bombardier upright where the shoulder harness engaged and held him. He searched for the wound with his fingers. He could feel nothing with his flying glove on, so he tore it off with his left hand and probed for the hole with his bare fingers. He couldn’t find it.
He glanced back at the instruments. He was rapidly becoming too busy, an error that he knew would be fatal for both himself and McPherson. The plane would not fly itself and certain death was just below. Raise the left wing, bring the nose up, climb back to 500 feet, then attend to the wounded man. He felt again in the slippery, pulsing blood of McPherson’s neck. Finding the wound, he clamped down with his fingers, then turned back to flying the plane.
Too high. Flak ahead. Trim the plane. He jerked his left hand from the stick to the throttles, which he pushed forward. They were already hard against the stops. He could feel the throbbing of the flow from McPherson’s neck noticeably lessening. He felt elated as he wrestled the plane, thinking that the pressure on the wound might be effective, but the euphoria faded quickly.
How could he possibly land the plane like this?
His head swiveled to the unconscious man beside him, taking in the slack way his body reacted to each bump and jolt of the racing aircraft. Jake pressed harder on the wound, pressed until his hand ached from the unnatural position and the exertion.
He remembered the hot-mike switch that would allow him to talk to the bombardier without keying the ICS each time. He released the stick momentarily and flipped it on with his left hand. “Hey, Morgan,” he urged, “hang in there, shipmate. You re going to make it. I’ll get you back. Keep the faith, Morg.”
He could feel nothing now, no pulse, no blood pumping against his fingers. Reluctantly, he pulled his hand away and wiped it on his thigh before grasping the stick. He found the radio-transmit button and waited until the scrambler beeped. “Black Eagle, Devil Five Oh Five, over.”
“Devil Five Oh Five, this is Black Eagle, go ahead.
“My bombardier has been hit. I’m declaring an emergency. Request you have the ship make a ready deck for recovery on arrival. I repeat, my bombardier has been shot.” His voice sounded strong and even which surprised him as he felt so completely out of control.
“We copy that, Five Oh Five. Will relay.” The radio fell silent.
As he waited he talked to McPherson. “Don’t you give up on me, you sonuvabitch. You never were quitter, Morg. Don’t give up now.”
More flak came up. He pushed at the throttles again unconsciously trying to go faster. They were already traveling at 505 knots. Perhaps he should dump some fuel. He still had 10,000 pounds remaining. No, even with the fuel gone the old girl would go no faster; she was giving her all now, and he might need the fuel to get to Da Nang if the ship couldn’t recover him immediately.
Finally, the white-sand beach flashed beneath. Grafton turned the IFF to Emergency. “Devil Five Oh Five is feet wet.” McPherson had not moved.
“Black Eagle copies, Devil Five Oh Five. Wagon Train has been notified of your emergency. Do you have any other problems, any other damage, over Wagon Train was the ship’s radio call sign.
Jake Grafton scanned the instruments, then stole another look at Morgan McPherson. “Just a BN terrible shape, Black Eagle.”
“Roger that. We have you in radar contact. Your steer to the ship is One Three Zero degrees. Squawk One Six Zero Zero.”
“Wilco.
The pilot settled on the recommended course, then flipped on the TACAN, a radio navigation aid that would point to the carrier’s beacon. As the needle swung lazily several times he turned the IFF to the requested setting, the “squawk.” The TACAN needle stopped swinging, steady on 132 degrees. Jake worked in the correction. He leveled off at 5000 feet and kept the engines at full throttle. The TACAN distance measuring indicator finally locked in, showing ninety-five miles to the ship.
The overcast hid the moon and stars. Inside the clouds he felt as though he were the only human being alive on earth. He kept glancing at McPherson, whose head rolled back and forth in rhythm to the motion of the plane. He squeezed McPherson’s hand tightly, but there was no response. Still he held on, hoping McPherson could feel the presence of a friend. He tried to speak on the ICS but found his voice merely a croak.
The commanding officer of the U.S.S Shilo was on the bridge when news of Devil 505’s emergency reached him. Captain Robert Boma had spent twenty-seven years in the navy and wore pilot’s wings on his left breast. Tall, lean, and graying, he had learned to live on three hours sleep with occasional catnaps; he was in his elevated easy chair on the bridge every minute that the carrier had aircraft aloft. “How far is it to Da Nang?” he asked the officer-of-the-deck (OOD) as he weighed the options. Da Nang was the nearest friendly airfield ashore.
“Nearly two hundred miles, sir.”
“We’ll take him aboard.” The captain leaned over and flipped a few switches on the intercom. “This is the captain. Clear the landing area. Make a ready deck. We have an emergency inbound.”
Within seconds the flight deck became organized bedlam. Arming and fueling activities ceased, and the handlers began respotting aircraft forward on the bow, clear of the landing area on the angled deck.
Minutes after the order was given, the carrier’s landing area was empty and the ship had turned into the wind. The duty search-and-rescue helicopter, the Angel, to up a holding pattern off the starboard side. The crash crew, wearing asbestos suits, started the engine of the flight-deck fire truck. A doctor and a team of corpsmen appeared from deep within the ship and huddled beside the island, the ship’s superstructure.
Grafton’s roommate, Sammy Lundeen, was smoking a cigar in the A-6 squadron’s ready room when the news came over the intercom mounted on the wall of the duty officer’s desk. The squadron skipper, Commander Frank Camparelli, put down his newspaper as he listened to the squawk box. Lundeen drew his cigar from his mouth and fixed his eyes on the meta
l intercom.
“Sam, you go up to the LSO’s platform and standby on the radio.”
Camparelli looked at the duty officer. “Hardesty, I’m going to CATCC. Get the executive officer and tell him to come to the ready room and stand by here.”
Commander Camparelli strode out of the room headed for the Carrier Air Traffic Control Center Sammy Lundeen right behind on his way to the landing signal officer’s platform.
Lundeen’s cigar smoldered on the deck where he had dropped it.
“How badly is the BN hit?” the air operations officer asked the strike controller over a hot-line telephone.
In the next compartment the controller, focusing on a small green dot moving slowly toward the center of the radar screen, stepped on his microphone switch.
“Devil Five Oh Five, Wagon Train Strike. State nature and extent of BN injuries, over.”
Jake Grafton’s voice came over the public-address system in the control center. “Strike, Five Oh Five, I think my bombardier’s been shot in the neck. It’s hard to tell. He’s unconscious now. I want a Charlie on arrival.”
“Devil Five Oh Five, Strike. Your signal is Charlie on arrival.” Charlie was the command to land.
“Roger that.”
“Five Oh Five, switch to Approach on button three, and squawk One Three Zero Zero, over.”
“Switching and squawking.”
At the next radar console the approach controller noted the blip on his screen that had blossomed with the new IFF code. When the pilot checked in on the new frequency, the controller gave him landing instructions.
The air ops boss turned to the A-6 skipper who had just entered the compartment. “Frank, looks like your boy must be hit pretty badly. He should be at the ramp in six or seven minutes.”
Commander Camparelli nodded and sat down in an empty chair beside the boss’s chair. The room they sat in was lit entirely by dim red light. On the opposite wall a plexiglass status board seven feet high and twenty feet long listed every sortie the ship had airborne and all the sorties waiting on deck to be launched. Four enlisted men wearing sound-powered telephone headsets stood behind the transparent board and kept its information current by writing backwards on the board with yellow greasepencils. A black curtain behind them and the red light made the men almost invisible and caused the yellow letters to glow.
Commander Camparelli stared at the board. “505, Grafton, 9.0,” it read.
Camparelli’s thoughts began to drift. Grafton and McPherson. Morgan’s married to that dark-haired stewardess with United and has a two-year-old boy. Christ, he thought, I hope I don’t have to write and tell her she’s a widow.
“What kind of pilot is this Grafton?” the air ops boss asked.
“He’s on his first tour, second cruise over here. Steady,” said Camparelli. He added, “Good driver,” but the ops officer had already turned away, trying to sort out what flights could be launched after Grafton had been recovered.
Frank Camparelli breathed deeply and tried to relax. Twenty years of fast planes, stormy nights, and pitching decks had given him a more than casual acquaintance with violent death. And he had found a way to live with it. Eyes open, half listening to the hushed voices around him, he began to pray.
The wind on the landing signal officer’s platform tore at Sammy Lundeen’s hair and clothing and roared in his ears as he stood on the lonesome perch jutting out from the port side of the landing area. He saw the Angel, the rescue helicopter, circling at 300 or 400 feet off the starboard side. Looking aft he could see the ship’s phosphorescent wake and the running lights of the plane guard destroyer bobbing along a mile astern waiting to rescue aircrews who ejected on final approach to the ship-if the chopper couldn’t find them and if the destroyer crew could. Too many ifs. Small clusters of lights several miles away on either beam revealed the presence of two more destroyers.
“Here’SARadio, Lundeen.” The landing signal officer on duty tonight, Lieutenant Sonny Bob Battle handed him a radio transceiver, which looked like a telephone, and then turned to the sound-power telephone operator, an enlisted airman called a “talker.”
“Where is he?” Battles asked.
The talker spoke into the large microphone held by a harness on his chest.
“Twelve miles out, sir. Level twelve hundred feet.”
“What freq?”
“Button three.”
The LSO bent and twirled the radio channelization knob on the large control console mounted level with the deck edge. He and Lundeen held their radio transceivers up to their ears and heard the approach controller talking.
“Five Oh Five, hold your gear until eight miles.”
“Wilco.” Jake sounded tired.
The LSO was an A-7 pilot, but like most aviators who acquire the special designation of landing signal officer, he was qualified to “wave” aboard all the types of aircraft the ship carried. He was prepared to talk a pilot aboard using only his eyes and the experience he had acquired observing more than ten thousand carrier approaches and almost as many simulated approaches at runways ashore. He had various sensors arrayed in a panel at his feet, but he rarely had time to glance at them.
“Who’s driving Five Oh Five, Sam?”
“Grafton.”
“Flies with McPherson?”
“Yeah.”
Sonny Bob nodded. Both men heard Grafton give his gear-down call.
The approach controller started Devil 505 descending on the glide slope. “Five Oh Five, call your needles.”
“Up and right.”
“Concur.” A computer aboard ship located the A-6 and provided a glide slope and azimuth display on an instrument in the cockpit. But Jake would have to fly the jet down the glide slope and land it manually, a task that was as nerve-racking and demanding as any aviation had to offer.
On the LSO’s platform Battles and Lundeen searched the darkness.
The LSO keyed his mike. “Lights. Jake Grafton had forgotten to turn on the aircraft’s exterior lights when he crossed the VietNamese coast line on his way out to sea. Now the lights came on, making Devil 505 visible. Lundeen thought that if Jake had forgotten the lights perhaps he had also failed to safe the weapons-release circuits. “Check your master armament switch,” he told Jake. He heard two clicks of the mike in reply, a pilot’s way of responding when he was too busy to speak.
“Green deck,” the telephone operator shouted.
“Roger green deck,” Battles replied. The landing area was now clear and the arresting gear set to receive an A-6.
The Intruder moved up and down on the glide path and shifted left of the center line, to Battles’s right. The LSO keyed the mike. “Paddles has you now, Five O Five. Watch your lineup.”
The A-6 turned toward the centerline, where it should be.
“Just settle down and keep it coming. How do you feel?”
“Okay.” The voice was thin. Tired, very tired.
“Easy on the power. Call the ball.” The ball call was essential.
It told the LSO that the pilot could see the light, the “meatball,” presented by the optical landing system that was located on the port side of the landing area.
This device used a yellow light arranged above two green reference, or datum, lights to give the pilot a visual indication of his position in relation to the proper glide path. If he kept the ball centered in the datum lights all the way to touchdown, he would catch the third of fourth arresting-gear wires rigged across the deck.
“Intruder ball, Six Point Oh.”
Down in C A T C C the invisible men behind the stat board erased the last fuel state for Devil 505 and wrote “6.0″ beside the pilot’s name. Six thousand pounds fuel remaining. Commander Camparelli and the air boss checked the closed-circuit television monitor that gave them a picture from a camera buried under the flight deck and aimed up the glide slope. They waited.
From his perch on the flight deck, beside the landing area, the LSO could see the lights of the approachin
g plane grow brighter. In C A T C C and in every ready room on the ship, all eyes were fixed on the television monitor with its picture of the glide slope and centerline cross hair and, just visible, the lights of the approaching plane.
Lundeen heard the engines. The faint whine grew louder, and he could hear the compressors spooling up and down as the pilot adjusted the throttles to keep the machine on the glide slope.
Battles’s voice: “You’re starting to go low.” The engines wound up slightly. “Little more power.” The engines surged. “Too much, you’re high.” A whine as the power came off, then a swelling of sound as Jake added power to stabilize his descent.
The A-6 approached the end of the ship, its engines bowling. Battles was six feet out into the landing area, braced against the thirty-knot wind, concentrating on the rapidly approaching Intruder. He realized the plane was about three feet too high even as he heard the throttles come back and saw the nose of the machine sag slightly. He’s going for the deck, the LSO told himself as he screamed into the radio, “Attitude!”
The Intruder flashed by, a gigantic bird feeling for the deck with its tailhook and main landing gear, its wingtip less than fifteen feet from the LSO’s head. Battles sensed, rather than saw, Jake pull the stick back in response to his last call. The A-6 slammed into the deck, and the tailhook snagged the number-two arresting cable, whipping it out. As the plane raced up the deck, the engines wound up toward full power with a blast of sound and hot fury that lashed the two unprotected men. Lundeen almost lost his footing, as he had already begun running up the flight deck the instant he saw the hook pick up the arresting wire.
Training and reflex action had caused Jake Grafton to slam the throttles forward and retract the speed brakes the moment the wheels hit the deck in case the hook failed to snag a wire and he ran off the end of the deck a “bolter.”
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