Lions of the Sky

by Paco Chierici

  A moment later he had reeled up his watertight bag. He cocked the hammer on the silenced QSW-06, opened the hatch, and moved inside. It was 4am and the warship was as still as she would get. This was the witching hour for him, the time where his victims were at their most vulnerable. He moved quietly though the passageways bathed in the weak red of the nighttime lighting. He slid silently down the railings of the ladders on his forearms, neoprene padded feet kissing the deck three times, encountering no one.

  Making his way with confidence, he paused at a floor-to-ceiling locker containing firefighting equipment. He retrieved an explosive from his bag, attached it to the inside of one of the locker doors, then strung an arming wire to the opposite door. He carefully closed the locker and walked away from the booby trap. On the far side of the compartment were the fire mains, two of them, painted bright red. He quickly rigged an explosive to a round handle before making his way aft one compartment, where he paused just outside the door marked Engine Room.

  He entered the engine room in a rush, shooting the stunned sailors playing cards before they could even blink. Three quick pulls of his finger, three muffled burps from his pistol, three bodies slumped to the floor. The controls for the automatic fire detection and suppression system were located precisely as he had been briefed. He yanked the electrical wires from the control box with a violent tug. Now he was ready to proceed with the heart of the mission. He borrowed a wrench then made his way through the maze of pipes to the high-pressure oil lubrication system servicing the propeller shaft. In short time he had removed the input line then bent it, pointing it toward the corner as warm, high-pressure oil squirted freely, pooling rapidly.

  He worked his way through the pipes and machinery back toward the Engine Room entrance, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the rapidly accumulating oil, then removed the last item from his bag. With a twist of the cap, he ignited the white phosphorous flare and tossed it into the far corner. He had almost reached the hatch when fire erupted with a force nearly lifting him from his feet. By the time he had scrambled though the opening, leaving it wide open to feed oxygen to the flames, the metal compartment wall was scalding hot.

  Thick plumes of black smoke chased him up the first ladder. He bumped into a startled Filipino sailor and yelled the only Tagalog word he knew: “Apoy! Apoy!” The man reacted to the word for fire with the predictable response of seamen worldwide—he slid down the handrails to reach the fire locker. As the commando sprinted up the next ladder, the passageway boomed with the sound of the trap detonating. As he made his way up the last ladder the sound of racing footsteps clanged against the steel decks below. He felt the explosion of the second device reverberate through the deck plates as he opened the hatch to the outside. Without pause he leapt, hearing the high-pitched fire alarm sound throughout the frigate as he plunged into the warm embrace of the ocean.

  He swam under the surface for a considerable time then surfaced nearly two hundred meters away. Behind him was a scene of chaos. Flames illuminated the aft portion of the ship as the piercing alarm continued to blare. Teams of men with hoses approached the conflagration, pouring streams of seawater onto the fire with no apparent effect. The commando watched them battle for a few moments, daring for a minute to wonder at the General’s methods, before flipping over and swimming. There were easier ways to disable a ship. The theater of the General’s methods was beyond him, but his was not to wonder why.

  Chapter 15

  04 June

  Virginia Beach, Virginia

  Quick walked from her bedroom yawning and stretching like a cat as she pulled her arm through the sleeve of her flight suit. She caught an orange that Pig tossed her in mid-stride and dropped into a chair, joining her roommates at the kitchen counter. The floor was littered with a dozen or so abused navels.

  “What are you kids doing up to so early? We don’t have to be in class till eight. And what’s with the oranges?”

  She leaned over and sniffed. Her roommates were both dressed for business in clean forest-green flight suits with patches smartly affixed, and Pig was in a stench-free T-shirt, to which she raised a questioning eyebrow. He nudged her away saying, “I got Moto up early to go over the carrier shit. Unfortunately the neckless wonder’s as dumb as he looks so it’s going to take a while. Can’t even juggle and spit out procedures at the same time. He hesitates, I encourage him.” Pig chucked another orange at Moto.

  Quick turned to Moto, who had the procedures manual open to a diagram of the daytime carrier landing pattern. The approach took the shape of a simple oval racetrack with the turns oriented at the top and bottom. There was a drawing of a ship at the 4 o’clock position of the oval. They were supposed to fly first upwind overtop the carrier, then a mile ahead turning a left crosswind, then downwind toward the bottom of the oval, and then finally, a descending left-hand turn to line up with the ship for landing. “What’s the big mystery Moto? You’ve got ten traps from training. Same stuff, bigger plane.”

  He leafed to the next page and tapped it with his finger. It was an illustration of the night carrier pattern. The diagram alone was intimidating. There were complex instructions on where to go into holding and when to depart for the approach, headings to turn to and precise speeds and distances at which to configure for landing, all extremely regimented. “Daytime, okay. I’ve got that nailed.”

  “About fucking time.” Pig snorted.

  Moto ignored him. “But we’ve never done it at night. You got this down yet?”

  She peeled the slightly bruised orange, peeking over at the illustration. “We hold, then we push, gear and flaps, make sure the hook’s down, call the ball and land. Right?” She popped a slice into her mouth and reached for the cup of fresh coffee Moto had prepared for her.

  She moved to the sliding glass door overlooking the pool area and lawn of the apartment complex. It was June already. The grass had recovered from the winter’s brown and the new spears of palmetto were already tall around the edges of the fake pond. The two-and-a-half months of aerial combat had come and gone in the blink of an eye, and the end of the Air-to-Air phase had rushed them into summer. She had loved it. Loved the tumult of being upside down and the frantic, time-compressed pressure of the long-range aerial battles. Lacing her fingers around the mug she took comfort in the warmth and sipped as steam rose past her nose.

  Pig materialized at her shoulder. “You suck at nervous.”

  He was right, of course. But she wasn’t just nervous. She was a little unprepared for it to be over. She had been a student for nearly three years, first earning her pilot’s wings and now earning the Rhino, and in a couple of weeks, give or take, she would be done. For better or worse. Out of the simplicity of the cocoon where the only thing she worried about was the next flight, and into the Fleet where she would need to worry about…well, she wasn’t sure really. She’d never truly looked beyond this last step, carrier qualifications in the Rhino. It was as far as she ever dared imagine. The last Mt. Everest to conquer. There was a strong awareness of the world on the other side—the Fleet. But it was all fuzzy, no details. Somehow it had seemed like bad luck to look too far into the future. The lore of aviation was written in the blood of hubris, from Icarus forward.

  Moto appeared at her other shoulder and silently watched the birds chasing each other on the back deck. She savored the moment, the three of them standing together. It would have been impossible for her to get this far without them.

  As if reading her mind, Pig grunted and returned to the kitchen counter, dropping into the chair like a bag of potatoes. “It’s pretty binary. You make it, you move on. You don’t, all the shit we’ve put ourselves through for the last five, ten years is out the window.”

  Moto leaned his forehead against the sliding door. His breath fogged the glass every few seconds. “No sweat,” he whispered.

  Pig’s words made her imagine a car racing along a dark road, brakes locked, tires screeching as it rushed up to the edge of a cl
iff. Totally binary. You either stopped safely, or…

  “What if…” she started.

  Moto spun around. “Fuck ‘what-if’.” He grabbed his keys. “Let’s go. We’ve got a brief.”

  She shared a bemused shrug with Pig and they followed him to the door.

  “Holy shit, Moto,” Pig needled. “I didn’t think you knew how to drive your own car. You remember which one it is?” Moto held up his middle finger without breaking stride.

  Slammer entered a classroom crackling with nervous anticipation. It was a far cry from the roomful of scared kittens he’d welcomed seven months ago. The students were squawking back and forth like a gaggle of high schoolers just before graduation. Even Dusty was joining in the banter.

  “Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, reaching the front of the room. They quieted at once, turning to face him. He pointed a remote at the projector and it flickered to life, throwing a rectangle of black onto the wall. Then he killed the lights, pitching the room into absolute darkness. He could hear them breathing, the forced calm breathing of a boxer getting his hands taped before the fight.

  Suddenly the screen was illuminated with the faint green symbology of a Rhino Heads-Up-Display. They were watching a recording through the perspective of the pilot, the same as they’d see on their HUD in the cockpit. Watching a HUD recording in the classroom was common enough during their debriefs, but this video was distinct for its complete lack of background images. It was as if the HUD symbology was being superimposed on the insides of closed eyelids. They could discern that the plane was flying from the numbers flicking in the data boxes and the bouncy movement of the velocity vector, but beyond that there was complete absence of light. It was undeniably eerie.

  “I can tell you what this is like a hundred times…” A faint speck of light appeared near the top of the screen, bobbing up and down like a yo-yo.

  “I can show you videos and share stories…” The speck grew to a collection of tiny white lights undulating in the middle of the screen. He could hear the student’s breaths shallow and quicken. The lights resolved into the distant shape of a miniature landing area. A minute white rectangle, maybe the size of a postcard and ceaselessly moving up and down, swallowed by the vast, horizonless blackness of the screen. Muted sequenced flashing lights chased each other down the centerline of the landing area, beckoning the pilot to the middle of the chillingly small safe zone.

  “But until you actually do this…” With sudden, terrifying swiftness the landing area expanded as the ghostly dim outline of an aircraft carrier materialized. He could almost feel them leaning back as they raced toward the deck with impossible speed. He heard them hold their breaths while the symbology on the HUD struggled to stay superimposed on the pitching, heaving deck in the final moments. Then the plane smashed down, jumbling the HUD projection with the violence of a car crash. In an instant the deck edge lights slowed from a blur to a halt and the class exhaled with one breath as the last row of lights—indicating the very end of the landing area, the barrier between steel and water—came to rest just in front of the nose.

  “…you have no idea what you’re in for.” He snapped the lights on to a room full of wide eyes. Not exactly scared, but certainly not comfortable. He could see the moist palms braced against the desks, fingers splayed, the shoulders balled and tense. Quick was first to move, leaning back in her chair and rubbing her sweaty hands against her thighs. He watched her glance left and right at Pig and Moto with a nervous grin. Moto’s face was as pale as milk. Pig managed his traditional wry smile, though with a good deal less wattage than normal.

  He dragged a chair to the center of the room and sat, elbows on knees, leaning toward them. “Look, from now on we’re in this together. You’ve made it past me and Truck and the other instructors. Well done. From here on out, I’m just here to help. Now you just have to measure yourselves against the hard iron of the boat. I’m the Carrier Qualifications Phase Head. This is my specialty. Truck and I are going to work you up for the next few weeks. We’ll practice landings, day and night, here on solid ground in Virginia Beach till you want to puke, and we won’t let anyone go to the boat who we don’t think is ready.”

  He stood. “Alright, everybody on your feet. Dingle, open the blinds.” They stood. The natural light flooded in, returning some color to their faces. They weren’t quite so chatty now, but they were recovering. They were used to the barrage of new challenges after two years in training. This was how it worked—the syllabus was designed to teach under pressure. Every few weeks they were confronted with something completely new, force-fed the material, then thrown into the sky to perform. Once they managed to chew and swallow, but far before they were comfortable, it was onto the next phase. It was a test of resiliency as much as competence.

  “Shake it out, listen up. Once you drop the hook at night, ninety percent of your brain goes dead from the stress. You’re on stem power. We’ve been simulating carrier landings since you got here. A couple Touch-and-Goes at the end of every flight, etching muscle memory and sight picture into your hard drives. We’ll fine tune it over the next couple of weeks and you’ll be ready. Carrier Qualifications are on the west coast, on the Reagan. We’ve got the Fourth of July weekend right before. I’m going to have a party at my house the Friday we finish bouncing. Then you get to dry out for the long weekend and get your asses out to San Diego. Make your wills, pay your bills, and get ready to go. Wednesday we’ll have one last bounce, then Thursday is Showtime. Truck and I will be waiting for you on the boat. You’ll come out and do your day work, shut down for some dinner, then go out again that night.”

  “You guys are two-seat Rhino crews, so you’re going to the boat with each other. Student-student. When I call you out, WSOs and pilots get together. These are the parings for the entire evolution, from practice through qualification.”

  He walked to the whiteboard and wrote the pairings as he spoke them. “Pig, Easy. Moto, Busta. Dusty, HOB. Quick, Dingle. Bud, Luvma.”

  As the students shuffled to pair up, he drew a passable God’s-eye outline of a carrier. The angled-deck jutted with its distinct shape on the left side of the ship like a lone shoulder. He drew a red rectangle in the landing area about a third of the way from the stern. He turned to face them. “This tiny piece of real estate is where you are permitted to place your tailhooks.” He drew four lines across the rectangle. “These are the wires, forty feet between them. So if you add the space before the one-wire, you’ve got one-hundred sixty feet where it’s safe to put the hook.” He touched the stern of the ship. “But the one-wire’s only a hundred seventy feet from the ass end of the ship. Tag it more than once and I’ll send you home. So really,” he erased the bottom quarter of the rectangle, “you’ve only got a space of a hundred-twenty feet by twenty. You’ll be flying at one-hundred thirty-six knots and there will be some deck movement and winds pushing you off course. The best advice I can give you is don’t fuck it up.”

  Chapter 16

  15 June

  Naval Auxiliary Landing Field Fentress, Chesapeake, Virginia

  “At the ninety, four-hundred fifty feet, five-hundred down. Looking good.” Dingle’s monotone cadence streamed into her brain and was processed with all the other data she was crunching. They’d been at the nighttime landing for two weeks now, same thing over and over. Her eyes would be glued to the dim green glow of the cockpit instruments for the first half of the approach turn, descending on faith and training into the black of night. About halfway through the turn she would sneak a peek through the canopy to check her position against the muted outline of the runway lights, fine-tuning her wing angle and power. It was like driving down a spiraling car-park exit ramp at 150 miles per hour with no headlights, looking only inside the car. If you got the turn angle right and the speed right, you didn’t even need to look outside.

  With 45 degrees to go she would begin her transition from the internal cockpit scan to the external light from the meatball positioned on the left
side of the landing area, her gaze flicking inside and out, back and forth, checking and crosschecking a hundred times until she rolled wings level at ¾ of a mile just 250 feet from the surface she could sense but couldn’t see. From there it was fifteen seconds of laser focus keeping the meatball centered till the satisfying thud of the main-mounts on tarmac. A thousand micro-corrections conspired to make it appear smooth and effortless, like balancing on a beach ball.

  Quick and Dingle were on their fifth touch-and-go of the night’s bounce session and she was in the zone. It was a different zone than the dogfighting she had been flying so recently. The threats were not simulated MiGs or missiles anymore; they were mostly inside her head now. If dogfighting was a barroom brawl, landing on a ship was brain surgery. She forced herself into an almost zen state, trying to stay calm, focused, and alert. The calmer she was the more she was able to develop a feel for the big, beastly 40,000 pound plane in the seat of her pants as she struggled to compensate for the forces of nature, entropy, and gravity with gas, stick, and rudder.

  She continued her descending turn with the rate of descent precisely where it needed to be. She held the stick loosely, applying infinitesimal pressure with her fingertips, holding the turn at exactly 27 degrees. She noticed her speed creep up a couple of knots so she adjusted the throttles back a hair and pulled the stick toward her stomach with a few ounces more force. The extra knots bled away in a two even breaths. “Passing three-seventy five, five hundred down; in the groove.”

  She snuck a peek out the left 10 o’clock of her windscreen. From the dark she picked up the meatball, the optical landing system. The orange ball was parked dead center, aligned with the line of green reference lights projecting horizontally from either side of the device. If the ball was high, she was high. Low, she was low. If she sagged to the far bottom it turned red which meant she was danger low and working on dead.