Flight of the Intruder jg-1

by Stephen Coonts

  “Yeah, open it for me.”

  They climbed in a constant turn that kept the plan on a circle with a five-mile radius. The center of the circle was the carrier.

  “Wonder how high this stuff goes?” Razor said.

  “To the moon, probably. Maybe even halfway to Mars. Jake leveled the Intruder at 20,000 feet, still circling the carrier. “Better give ‘em the word,” he told the bombardier.

  Razor held his oxygen mask to his face. “Tank Control, Devil Five Two-Two.”

  “Go ahead, Five Two Two.”

  “We’re in the clouds at base plus twelve. ‘ On unscrambled radio transmissions the true altitude was the sum of the reported altitude plus the never-mentioned number, tonight a positive eight. “It’s solid all the way up. Do you want us to find the tops, over?”

  The radio was silent for several seconds. Then the reply came back: “Go on up to base plus twenty-two.”

  “Wilco.” Jake pushed the throttles forward and eased the stick back.

  The altimeter began to climb. Razor chomped on his gum. “Gonna be a bad night at Black Rock for the fighter pukes if they need gas down below,” he observed over the ICS. Tanking was a precision maneuver that required good visibility, especially at night. The aircraft needing fuel was vectored to the vicinity of the tanker, but the pilot of the thirsty plane had to acquire the tanker visually and execute a rendezvous, a join up into close formation. Once the two aircraft were flying side-by-side they could fly into a cloud, but they could not safely join up in one. Tonight the sky seemed to consist of nothing but clouds. But at 27,000 feet, the men saw the glow of the moon. At 28,000 they bounded out of the clouds. Jake climbed another 500 feet above the ragged tops before leveling off. The pale moonlight made the cloudscape look like heaps of cotton.

  “Rodger Control, Five Two Two. Tops are at base plus twenty.”

  “Roger. Two customers are on their way up. Request you give them three each.”

  Jake clicked the mike twice in reply, then let the plane drift on up to 30,000 feet where he leveled at 250 knots and engaged the autopilot. It held the bird nicely in a twelve-degree left turn. In a few moments he saw the first Phantom emerge from the clouds, a winking red anticollision light beaconing through the darkness. The fighter pilot was on an opposite course but soon saw him and turned hard to intercept. Jake turned on the fuel-transfer panel and set the fuel counter for three thousand pounds. He streamed the drogue, a basket twenty-six inches in diameter that resembled a badminton shuttlecock, on the end of a fifty-foot hose. The unit was ready to transfer fuel when the hose was fully extended. After a ton and a half of jet fuel had been pumped, the transfer would automatically cease.

  The lead fighter closed smartly on a forty-five-degree bearing; the second F4 was several miles away on the same rendezvous course. Both fighters flew across Jake’s circle to close the distance. “Here they come, Jake said.

  In less than a minute the first Phantom joined on the tanker’s left wing.

  As Jake watched, the refueling probe emerged from the right side of the plane beneath the canopy and locked out at a forty-five-degree angle Jake made a circular motion with his red flashlight and received in reply two flashes from the fighter’s rear cockpit. Then the fighter slid back and disappear astern- Jake disengaged the autopilot-it had a tendency to porpoise the plane when the receiving aircraft pushed in the drogue-and devoted his attention to maintaining a smooth, steady course on the great circle. The fighter pilot managed to fly his probe into the drogue on his first attempt. When he pushed the six feet toward the tanker, the green light on the refueling panel in the A-6 illuminated, and the counter began to meter the fuel in hundred-pound increments. Jake noticed the second fighter slide in alongside his wing, its grinning shark’s mouth and yellow eye just visible in the sweep of the tanker’s anticollision radar The bombardier reported to the ship that the tanker was “sweet,” that is, it could transfer fuel, so the spare tanker on deck would not be needed. When the Plane had finished, Razor reset the counter and Grafton flashed his light. The second Phantom moved behind the Intruder as the first one took up a cruising position on the right wing. This pilot made two attempts before he captured the drogue. The maneuver required a delicate, sure touch with the stick and throttles, especially if the planes were bouncing in turbulence. One frustrated fighter jockey had been heard to lament, “It’s like trying to stick a banana up a wildcat’s ass.”

  When it had taken on its allotted fuel, the second plane crossed to the lead fighter’s right wing. Razor visually checked both planes to make sure they weren’t behind the tanker in the unlikely event that the drogue and hose separated during retraction. When the panel indicator showed that the drogue was stowed, the bombardier glanced again at the lead Phantom. A coning red light flashed from the fighter’s rear cockpit.

  The two hunters turned away and took up a course to their assigned station one hundred fifty miles to the northwest of the ship. They constituted the Barrier Combat Air Patrol, the BARCAP, charged with intercepting and shooting down any unidentified aircraft coming out of North Vietnam.

  Razor watched them disappear into the moonlit sky. He keyed his radio mike and told the ship that tanking was completed.

  They ship replied, “Roger, request you fly a forty-five arc around the ship and see how extensive this cloud cover is.”

  Jake leveled the wings and descended until he was just above the clouds.

  Although he had slowed to maximum endurance airspeed, 220 knots, they still had the illusion of great speed as the cloud tops raced beneath. Occasionally they collided with a silver ridge, bored through, and popped out the other side. Because of the glass-smooth flying at this altitude, five and a half miles above the ocean, the men felt as though their machine were at rest in space while the earth whirled beneath them.

  After they had circled the ship at forty miles, they reported that the clouds were unbroken and returned to the five-mile circle. The great tedium began. With the machine on autopilot, there was little for the crew to do except monitor the fuel and engine instruments and check the night sky for other aircraft. Convinced all was well, Jake removed his gloves and wedged them into the narrow crevice between the left side of the instrument panel and the windscreen. Then he drew his girl’s letter from his sleeve pocket. He read it in the circle of red light from the pencil spotlight mounted the overhead canopy bow.

  With every line he felt a growing despondency.

  On the first page she recalled the good times they had shared. On the second, she told him she was marrying another man. The third and final page contained her list of all the reasons their relationship would not have worked. He read the letter again slowly, replaced it in its envelope, and returned the envelope to his sleeve pocket.

  After his first cruise, when the squadron had flown from the ship to Godbey Island, she had come to me him. She had watched while he climbed from the cockpit and walked across the ramp to her, waiting until he had reached her before opening her arms to welcome him. The other women had run toward the men.

  He should have had an inkling then.

  Their last time together, that Sunday in San Francisco, they had walked from Fisherman s Wharf to the Corinthian columns at the Palace of Fine Arts.

  They had ridden the cable cars, listened to the folk singers and watched the soaring birds as the sun fired the past city. She had said, “You don’t belong in the navy. God, Jake, you pull off the road to look at a rainbow. Why would you want to be part of that system?

  “And so many navy fliers we’ve known have died in crashes. I always wonder, after I’ve seen or talked to you, whether I’ll ever see you alive again.” Why hadn’t he known then? The radio squawked. Tanker Control directed them to proceed northwest to tank the BARCAP again. The fighters had enough fuel to stay airborne until recovery time, but it was prudent to have more than enough in case the enemy attacked the task force.

  This time the tanker rendezvoused on the fighters. When each fight
er had received another twenty-five hundred pounds, the tanker returned at 220 knots to the five-mile orbit.

  They tuned the second radio, a luxury the tanker had that the bombers did not possess, to the Strike frequency and finally heard Cowboy Parker, then Sammy Lundeen, call feet wet. The challenge of night landings aboard the carrier lay before them now.

  The minutes went by slowly. Grafton had to work to stay awake in spite of his recent fourteen-hour sleep. After a check of the altitude in the cockpit, he took off his mask and helmet and placed them in his lap. The noise level was loud but not intolerable. He extracted a plastic baby bottle from a pocket of his survival vest and poured some water down the back of his neck.

  That helped wake him up. He took a swig of the warm water, which tasted of plastic. He poured some in his hair and rubbed it on his face. Then he poured more on his hair and rubbed his head vigorously. He felt it trickle down his forehead and nose, ad one little rivulet scooted down the back of his neck.

  He capped the bottle, put it away, then replaced his helmet and oxygen mask.

  “Five Two Two, are you up?” It was Lundeen’s voice.

  “Affirm,” he replied over the radio “Go Tactical,” was the reply.

  Jake rotated the radio-channel selector knob to the squadron’s assigned frequency, waited five seconds then said, “Devil’s up.”

  “Where are you, Jake?”

  “Overhead at base plus twenty-two.”

  “I’ll be there to see you in a bit.”

  Click, click.

  “Let’s go secure.”

  Razor keyed the ICS as Jake turned on the scrambler “What do you think?”

  Grafton shrugged. He had no idea why Sam wanted to rendezvous over the ship. Maybe he needed fuel. Maybe he had a problem with his airplane. Maybe he just wanted to grin and wave and fly along together under the moon and stars because Jake was his friend and Sammy was like that. They would soon know.

  The pilot checked the amount of fuel left in each drop and internal tank.

  He did this by depressing the button for the appropriate tank and getting a reading on the fuel gauge. Normally the gauge gave only a total , but like every other electrical or mechanical device, the totalizer could fail. The careful man who hoped to eventually die in bed always checked. The arithmetic of fuel calculation was unforgiving of error, there were no negative numbers. They had transferred eleven thousand pounds, had used two thousand in their launch and climbout, and were now consuming a mere four thousand pounds per hour at maximum endurance airspeed. After an hour and a half of flight Jake reckoned, they should have seven thousand pounds remaining. The gauge totals came to seventy two hundred pounds. Close enough. All the drop tanks were empty, as were the wing tanks. The two fuselage tanks held the remaining fuel. With twenty or thirty minutes to go until he crossed the ramp of the carrier he should recover with about five thousand pounds. He leaned back in the seat.

  “How far to Da Nang?” he asked Razor. That would be the nearest friendly airfield ashore if he couldn’t get aboard the ship for any reason.

  The bombardier consulted his briefing notes. “One fifty,” he told the pilot.

  “Better verify that with the ship.” Razor asked the question of the controller at the radar screen in Strike Ops, deep inside the big ship 30,000 feet below. After a pause, the controller informed them the distance was one hundred forty miles and gave them the heading. Both men jotted it down on their kneeboards.

  Sammy should be coming in from the northwest. Jake began to search that quadrant for the telltale flashing-red anticollision light.

  In less than a minute it caught his eye. He watched the light grow brighter as the Intruder came on and waited for it to change course to rendezvous, which would mean that the bomber crew had seen them. When no such change occurred after fifteen seconds, he keyed the radio. “I’m at your ten o’clock, Sam.” Now the other plane began to turn.

  Lundeen joined up on Grafton’s left wing. “Look me over, Jake,” he said.

  “I’ve got the lead.” With the lead change, Grafton now had the responsibility of maintaining the separation between the two aircraft.

  Grafton clicked his mike and retarded the throttles. He slid aft and down so that the other Intruder filled the windscreen. “Hit them with your white flashlight.” he instructed Razor. McPherson would not have needed prompting.

  The beam played over the pale gray skin of the bomber. The bomb racks were empty; the copper arming wires glistened in the weak beam. Each mechanical bomb fuse had a wind-driven propeller vane on the nose that the arming wire held immobile while the weapon waited on the rack.

  As the bomb fell away, the wire was extracted. The wind spun the vane for a preset number of seconds, and the weapon was thus armed a safe distance from the aircraft.

  An absence of arming wires on a bomber returning from a mission meant that all the bombs it had dropped had been duds, the wires had prevented the propeller vanes from spinning and arming the bombs.

  Razor shone the flashlight over the right wing, then began to work aft toward the tail. Behind the wing root, on the right side of the fuselage in front of the horizontal stabilizer, they saw the holes. Many tiny jagged holes.

  “Work the light aft,” Jake said. More holes splattered the right side of the vertical tail and horizontal stabilizer. Jake eased the tanker in until less than ten feet separated him from the bomber’s tail. He could feel the wash of the other plane forcing his left win down, and he compensated with right stick.

  “Sammy, you have a hundred or so little holes on the right side, aft of the wings, on the fuselage and the tail. Looks like flak bursts.”

  “Check the pilot tube.”

  Jake’s eyes flicked to the top of the bomber’s tail. The tube that measured the bird’s speed through the atmosphere was gone. He told Lundeen.

  “I thought so,” Lundeen sighed. “The airspeed indicator reads one hundred ten knots. Better check the other side, too.”

  Jake slid across and Razor moved the light along the tail and forward up the fuselage. They found one medium-sized hole in the port flap.

  “Now take a squint at the gear doors,” Lundeen directed.

  Jake slipped forward until they were immediately beneath the bomber. The doors- were stained with grease and yellow preservative but appeared intact. If they weren’t, the tires within would probably be flat. Razor informed the bomber crew that they could find no other damage.

  “We have no airspeed indicator, the computer’s frozen solid as an ice cube, the radar altimeter’s kaput, the TACAN is intermittent, and our I C S is screwed up. A D F isn’t working, either. Let me drop the hook and let’s see if it comes down.” It did and Grafton told him so.

  “Maybe we had better go down on your wing,” Sammy said.

  “Okay,” Jake said. He slid out to the left and pulled abreast of the bomber.

  “I’ve got the lead now. Let’s go to Approach and you tell them your story.”

  “Uh, while we’re doing that how about giving me a sip? I could use a grand.”

  Jake checked the fuel indicator again. He wasn’t going to have any reserve as it was, and he had already informed Tanker Control he had no more gas to give. But Sammy wouldn’t ask if he didn’t need it. He flipped the power switch on the tanker package and streamed the drogue.

  “You’re cutting it pretty goddamned fine,” Razor complained.

  “I’ll get just as wet as you if we punch out,” the pilot said. “That could be us over there.”

  Razor voiced no more objections.

  After an extensive conversation with Approach, the two Intruders were issued Marshall instructions. “Your Marshall one six zero degrees at two four.

  Pushover at zero one four eight. Five Two Two will drop Five Oh Six on the ball, be vectored downwind, and trap on the next pass.”

  Razor repeated the controller’s instructions, received an acknowledgment, then looked at Grafton. “Nine thousand feet at twenty-four miles.�
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  agree.

  Marshall points were holding fixes whereby aircraft were stacked to await recovery at night or in weather too bad for a visual approach. The lowest altitude that could be assigned was five thousand feet at a distance of twenty miles from the ship. Each subsequent aircraft would receive a fix a thousand feet higher and a mile farther away. So the fixes were defined as five thousand feet and twenty miles, six thousand and twenty-one, seven thousand and twenty-two, and so on. The altitude was omitted from the radio call because it is always fifteen less than the mileage assigned. When the pushover time, or moment of descent, arrived, the pilots were expected to have their planes exactly at the Marshall fix inbound to the ship.

  Pushover times were assigned at one-minute intervals, and because approaches were flown at 250 knots until the landing gear was extended at twelve miles, the planes would be strung out one minute apart on the approach to the ship. Such was the theory at any rate thought Jake, and it worked out in practice most of the time, except for nights such as this when the weather was so crummy.

  He listened as the other aircraft checked into Marshall. They were all assigned lower altitudes and early approach times. On this recovery, there would be only six aircraft: the two Phantoms that had been BARCAP, the two A-6 bombers, the E A-6B electronic warfare aircraft, and Jake’s KA-6D tanker An E-2 HawkEye early-warning turboprop was also airborne, but since it had such a low rate of fuel consumption it would remain aloft for its usual four hours and land on the second recovery. On this recovery Jake’s tanker would be the last plane to come aboard. If Lundeen crashed on deck or couldn’t be towed out of the landing area, then only the tanker would be stranded aloft low on fuel. This couldn’t be helped because someone had to lead Sammy down.

  When Lundeen had his fuel, Jake lowered the nose of the tanker, let the airspeed increase to 250 knots then retarded the throttles. “Trim your mirror a little. Razor obligingly tweaked the rear-view mirror on the canopy rail above his right leg. Jake could now see his wingman with only a glance at the mirror. He reached for the light panel and secured his anticollision light, which would reflect off the clouds and disorient Lundeen.