Final Flight

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 soon.” 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.

As Jake rolled out of the turn back on course the ECM was on the line and gave them a visual and audible warning of an X-band radar dead ahead. Jake punched off two bundles of chaff and the warnings flickered out. “What do they have that transmits in X-band, Reed?”

“Uh …”

“This is for fucking keeps, kid. You have to know this shit.”

Ten miles. Reed was tuning the IR screen.

They would never see the boat in the mist at this altitude with the IR, Jake decided, and lowered the nose as he advanced the throttles. He reset the radar altimeter warning for 450 feet and dropped quickly to 500, where he leveled. 480 knots. Five miles. The plane felt sluggish, no doubt because it was still full of fuel.

“The bastard will probably turn, Reed.”

The bombardier dropped his gaze to the scope and reached for the cursor control. “He’s turning left.” Jake’s steering slewed left slightly and he eased the plane left to follow.

“I see him,” Reed announced. The X-band was back. More chaff. The X-band radar stayed with him.

“I don’t see any missiles.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, there’s something on the deck, but it’s covered up with something and I can’t tell what it is.” Reed sounded frustrated.

Jake pulled the commit trigger on his stick grip to the first detent and instantly the usual symbology on the ADI was replaced by the infrared video.

There was the boat! They were almost on top of it, looking straight down at it. There was something under a dark cover on deck, all right, but Jake couldn’t tell what. Even as he looked, the boat was changing aspect as the turret under the plane’s nose swung to keep the boat in view. Now the boat appeared upside down, as if the plane were diving over it.

The radar altimeter warning sounded. The pilot’s eyes flicked to the gyro. Inadvertently he had eased the nose over. He released the stick button and pulled the nose back to the artificial horizon as it replaced the IR video on the ADI.

Jake reported what they had seen to the strike controller. No doubt the admiral, Cowboy Parker, was listening to the radio conversation. He couldn’t be enjoying what he was hearing. Under the rules of engagement dictated by Washington, the admiral could not use weapons except in self-defense. As currently interpreted by the Pentagon, this rule meant that U.S. ships could not open fire unless the target “demonstrated hostile intent,” i.e., shot first. One was left with the frail hope that the evil in the rascals’ hearts would spoil their aim, a straw that apparently gave the politicians some comfort.

“He’s back on his original course,” Reed reported. No doubt the admiral was moving his destroyers and frigates forward to intercept the intruder and keep it away from the carrier.

“Shotgun Five Zero Two, Strike. We have just launched another A-6. In the interim, drop a flare on the bogey and attempt a visual ID.”

Which means, Jake thought grimly, the admiral wants us to troll and see if the bastard will open fire. “Shotgun wilco.”

Reed turned the safety collar on wing station two and pulled the station selector switch down. Then he set the armament panel to release one flare. Jake turned the aircraft back toward the boat. He decided to drop the flare at a thousand feet to give himself a little time to look around underneath as the flare parachuted toward the water.

A minute from the boat, he turned on the master armament switch, which put electrical power to the panel. “Let’s drop the flare about five hundred yards in front of the boat,” he told Reed.

“Roger.” Reed’s head was firmly against the scope hood as he slewed the radar cursors.

The X-band warning squawked. Jake eyed it as he continued inbound. He squeezed the commit trigger as far as it would go, authorizing the computer to release the flare. The release marker marched relentlessly down the ADI display as they approached the boat, then dropped off. The flare was gone.

A few seconds later a brilliant light illuminated aft and below them. “Strike, flare’s burning,” Jake reported as he dropped the nose and left wing and began a descending spiral turn.

He was below the clouds a few seconds before the flare came out. The naked white light, a million candlepower, reflected from the black sea and the ragged tendrils of dirty cloud which covered it. He saw the boat.

He contented himself with glances at the boat as he constantly rechecked his altitude and nose attitude. It would be desperately easy to fly into the water under that artificial sun, which fooled his sense of the natural order of things and gave him vertigo, the aviator’s name for spatial disorientation.

“Do you see any guns, Reed,” Jake asked as he concentrated on the attitude instruments and fought the temptation to roll the plane to put the flare directly overhead.

“Nope.” Reed had never removed his head from the hood. He was staring at the IR scope, using the camera’s lens magnification to see much more than Jake could with the naked eye.

The flare was drifting beneath them now, which increased Jake’s disorientation. He kept the plane circling and limited himself to peeks at the boat. He toggled the stick trigger and glanced at the IR display, remembering to cross-check the gyro and the other flight instruments as he did so. He was perspiring profusely. This was hairy, dangerous flying. Any mistake would be fatal.

“Strike, Shotgun,” Jake said. “The surface bogey has something we can’t identify on his deck. No guns visible. He’s headed your way, over.”

“Concur.” The ship also had him on radar. “Drop another flare.”

Jake put the plane in a climb while Reed reset the armament panel. Dropping flares was not going to solve the admiral’s problem. If the boat had a missile and got within range of the American ship, their close-in weapons systems, the Phalanxes, would have to knock the missile down before it reached its target. These automated guns were aimed by computers and each of them fired fifty very heavy bullets a second at the incoming missile.

The Phalanxes had better work, Jake whispered to himself. He knew Cowboy Parker was at this very moment thinking the very same thing as he stared at the NTDS displays, weighed the options, and maneuvered his forces. Aircraft, ships, guns, missiles, and lives — many lives — men with moms and wives or sweethearts, men with pasts and maybe futures, all packed into these gray ships on this dark sea. And Rear Admiral Earl Parker was the officer responsible for them all. To shoot or not to shoot? Justified or unjustified? Decisions made in seconds would be weighed for weeks by men who had never made a life-or-death decision in their lives, politicians who read the newspapers and keep wetted fingers permanently aloft.

When the second flare was burning, Jake carefully descended again and circled the boat at 500 feet, about four miles away, just as he did the last time. He was far enough away that he was invisible to the men on the boat, hidden in the darkness beyond the flare’s light.

The boat maintained its course toward the task force.

Jake thoughtfully fingered the wing fuel-dump switch, checked the small needle on the fuel gauge, then toggled it. He watched the gauge as three thousand pounds of wing fuel ran out into the atmosphere. He listened to Strike directing the other A-6, now airborne, to a holding fix. When the wing fuel was gone, Jake closed the dump valves. Without the wing fuel the plane would maneuver better, and there was less chance of an explosion if a flak shell went through the wing.

“You ready?” Jake asked Reed.

“For what?”

Jake turned on the exterior lights. He cranked on a four-G turn and pointed the plane’s nose at the boat. The radio altimeter warning sounded. He didn’t have time to reset it.

Down they came, 400 feet, 300, the throttles forward against the stops. He leveled at 250 feet, two miles from the boat. Above them shone the ghastly white light of the magnesium flare.

A string of tracers reached for the cockpit from straight ahead. “He’s shooting!” Reed shouted in disbelief.

Jake rolled hard right and flipped off the lights with his left hand. He kept the nose coming up and the turn in. The tracer stream weaved, trying to correct. It was a belt-fed weapon, maybe 14.5-millimeter.

The shells reached for them, crossing just under the plane. Jake was rolling and jinking, turning hard to get away from the boat and the gun.

The gunner was shooting bursts of five or six shells. God, they were close!

Jake jammed the stick forward and they floated under negative G as the streaks crossed above the cockpit. As the end of a tracer string went by he hauled the stick aft and began a four-G pull up, toward the clouds above.

Reed was on the radio, “He’s shooting.” His voice had gone up an octave.

Now they were up into the clouds, which glowed from the flare underneath.

Jake kept climbing. “Well,” he said to the bombardier.

“It sure as hell ain’t no fishing boat.”

“Battlestar Strike, Shotgun. We took some tracer fire from the bogey, which appears to be some kind of speedboat. It has no fishing gear or missiles that we could see, but it’s carrying an X-band radar, which it’s using occasionally. Tracers were probably fourteen point five mike mike, over. Looks like he’s laying his gun with some kind of an optical night-sight, over.”

“Roger. Your vector One Eight Zero degrees.” Jake pulled the throttles back and soared to 3,000 feet, where he leveled and turned to southern heading.

“Do you think we’ll have to bomb it?” Reed asked.

“I suspect so,” Grafton replied. He didn’t think the admiral had any other choice, except possibly sink it with naval gunfire. And every mile the boat closed the task group increased the missile threat to the ships.

Twenty miles south of the target Jake swung the plane around and Reed checked that the computer crosshairs, the cursors, were still on the boat. The boat was still on a westerly heading.

“What’s the bogey’s speed?” Jake asked.

“About nineteen knots, sir.” At last, Grafton noted, Reed thought he was worth a ‘sir.’”

“Shotgun Five Zero Two, Strike.”

“Go ahead.”

“Sink the bogey. I repeat, sink the bogey. Use Rockeye, over.”

“Understand sink it with Rockeye.”

“That’s affirmative.” Apparently the admiral didn’t want to expend this million-dollar Harpoon missile Jake was carrying. A penny saved …

Jake set up the armament panel to train off all eight of the Rockeye canisters, two at a time. He deselected the flares on station two and selected stations one and five, where the cluster bombs hung. Each of the Rockeye canisters contained two hundred forty-six 1.7-pound bomblets. After the canister was dropped, it would open in midair and the bomblets would disperse into an oval pattern. Each bomblet contained a shaped charge that could penetrate nine inches of cold-rolled steel. Reed was watching him. The BN inadvertently keyed his ICS mike and Jake could hear his heavy breathing. He was muttering to himself, “Jeesuss, ooooh Jeesuss …”

“You ready?” Jake asked as the nose came around toward the target.

“Yessir.”

Jake jammed the throttles to the stops and centered the steering. “Shotgun’s starting the bomb run,” he reported to Strike.

“He’s still heading west and I’m in attack,” Reed said.

“Expect him to turn as we close. Go for a radar lock. Forget the FLIR.”

The X-band warning lit as they passed ten miles inbound. Jake punched chaff and held the plane steady.

The ADI on the panel in front of him was alive with computer symbology which gave him steering commands, time to go to release, drift angle, and relative position of the target. Jake concentrated on keeping the plane level and the steering centered. At five miles to go he pulled the commit trigger on the stick and held it. The weapons would be released by the computer when the aircraft arrived at the release point, that precise point in space where the computer calculated the bombs would fall upon the target given the aircraft’s height, speed, and heading.

The glare from another string of tracers reflected through the clouds. The weaving yellow finger probed for the aircraft, searching like the antennae of a hungry insect, as Jake punched chaff and checked the computer steering against the glow of the rising fireballs. Dead ahead. The gunner was firing blindly, Jake decided. He concentrated on the ADI as the release symbol on the display marched down.

We’ll make it! The bombs were released in a quick series of thumps, and he rolled hard right away from the rising tracers and pulled as the Rockeye canisters flashed open to disperse their bomblets.

“Weapons away,” Jake told the ship.

“Roger.”

In about twenty seconds the antiaircraft fire ceased abruptly. Jake eased the nose down and slid below the clouds. The pilot turned the aircraft slightly and looked back. Gleaming through the darkness was a smear of yellow light. Fire!

“Where’s the coast?” Jake asked the BN.

“Twenty miles east.”

The pilot checked his heading. “Get the FLIR humming. We’ll turn back at eight miles and make another low pass to see what we hit.”

The yellow glow of the fire was the only light visible in the dark universe under the clouds when they turned back inbound. Now a brilliant flash split the night, a fireball that grew and blossomed on the water ahead, then faded almost as suddenly as it appeared. Jake turned away to avoid the debris that he knew would be in the air.

“He blew up,” Reed breathed, amazement in his voice.

“Tell the ship,” Jake Grafton said, and pulled the throttles back to a cruise setting.

At ten miles inbound to the ship Jake Grafton coupled the autopilot to the Automatic Carrier Landing System, the ACLS. He felt the throttles move slightly in response and kept his fingertips lightly on top of them. Now the computer aboard the ship would tell the plane’s autopilot where the plane was in relation to the glideslope and centerline, and the autopilot would fly the plane down, all the way to the deck.

Jake stared at the crosshairs display on the ADI in front of him and watched the horizontal line representing the glideslope descend toward the center of the display. As it reached the center the throttles moved aft and the plane transitioned to a 600-foot-per-minute rate of descent. They were exactly on speed, the angle-of-attack needle frozen in the three-o’clock position. The plane was still in clouds, yet it was rock-steady, descending nicely.

“You’re on glidepath, on centerline,” the approach controller said, confirming what the instruments were telling the pilot.

As far as Jake was concerned, these coupled ACLS approaches, known as Mode One, were the greatest thing to happen to naval aviation since the invention of the tailhook. He had been making these automatic approaches at night all the way to touchdown for the last month, since his night vision had begun to noticeably deteriorate. And my eyes have probably been going downhill for years, he told himself bitterly, and I just haven’t noticed.

He was feeling rather pleased with himself until, at one mile from the ship, under the clouds, the crosshairs disappeared from the ADI and the autopilot dropped off the line.

The angle-of-attack needle rose slightly, so Jake added a smidgen of power and stared into the darkness for the meatball and the deck centerline lights. They were very dim and far away.

He had to see the meatball, the yellow light between the two green reference, or datum, lights of the optical landing system. This visual aid defined the proper glideslope. And he had to see the landing area centerline lights and the red drop lights extending vertically down the fantail of the ship. These lights gave him his proper lineup. “Oh fuck!”

“Three-quarters of a mile. Call the ball.”

Reed made the call. “Five Zero Two, Intruder ball, five point zero.”

“How’m I doing?” Jake asked the BN.

“You’re high.”

Jake made the correction. The lights were still too dim. He fought the controls.

When he glanced away from the angle-of-attack indexer lights on the cockpit glare-shield, he had trouble focusing on the meatball on the left side of the landing area. Then when he looked back at the indexer, it was fuzzy unless he stared at it. So he missed the twitching of the meatball as he approached the ship’s ramp, and by the time he saw movement, the ball had shot off the top of the lens system and he touched down too far down the deck to catch a wire. The Intruder’s wheels hit and he slammed on the power and continued on off the angle as the landing signal officer, the LSO, shouted “Bolter Bolter Bolter,” over the radio.

The next pass was better, but he boltered again. He couldn’t adequately compensate for the twitches of the ball when he just didn’t see them.

He caught the four wire on his third approach, mainly because he assumed he was high and reduced power hoping it was so.

They debriefed in the Strike Operations office, surrounded by Air Intelligence officers, the strike ops staff, and a half-dozen senior officers from the A-6 squadron. The crowd was happy, laughing. They had met the enemy and “taught ’em not to fuck with the U.S. Navy,” in Reed’s words. Reed was the happiest of the lot. Jake Grafton sat in a chair and watched Reed explain every detail of the bomb run to the A-6 skipper, John Majeska, whom his peers knew as “Bull.”

“That tracer was so bright you could read a newspaper in the cockpit,” Reed proclaimed. “And the CAG didn’t even blink. Man, that system was humming! Those fucking A-rabs had better stay perched on their camel humps or they’re all going to sleep with Davy Jones.”

When Bull Majeska turned to Grafton and asked quietly how Reed had really performed, Jake smiled and winked. “He did okay. Let him crow. They were trying to kill him.”

One of the strike ops assistants answered the ringing phone. “CAG, the admiral wants to see you in his stateroom when you’re finished here.”

“Thanks.” Jake gathered his helmet bag and shook Reed’s hand.

“Uh, sir,” Reed said softly. “About that subject we were discussing earlier. Uh, maybe I could come see you tomorrow?”

“Sure, Mad Dog.”

As Jake went out the door the crowd was rigging up the videotape monitor to watch the tape from the aircraft that recorded the radar and IR displays, the computer readouts, and the cockpit conversations. Maybe they could learn more about the sunken boat.

“So how did it go?” Cowboy Parker asked. The two men were in the admiral’s cabin. Jake sat beside the desk watching Parker shave at the little sink.

“They must have been packing a boatload of explosives. It was one big blast. Either the Rockeyes or the fire set the stuff off, or they blew it up themselves. They were on a suicide mission.” Jake took a deep breath. “Good thing for us that someone got trigger-happy.”

“That lot would have been pretty spectacular going off against the side of a ship.” Parker rinsed his razor and attacked his chin. He eyed Jake in the mirror. “Damn good thing for us that someone got shook when you turned on your lights and headed right at them.”

“Hmmm. Even I was surprised when I did that.” Jake chewed on a fingernail. “We don’t have any evidence except our word that it was a terrorist boat. They may announce that the U.S. Navy just offed some poor fishermen, all good Moslems on a sailing pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope. And if those guys had succeeded in damaging an American ship, well …”

“You boltered twice tonight.” Cowboy was examining his face in the mirror, trying to find if he’d missed a spot.

“Yeah. I couldn’t see jack.” Jake stared at his toes.

“Mode One didn’t work, huh?”

“Quit on me at a mile.” Jake sighed. “I’m going to ground myself at night and send a message asking to be relieved. The good part is that this little incident will improve morale on this tub. Everyone can see what we’re up against and they’ll keep their noses firmly on the grindstone.”

“Quitting smoking hasn’t helped the eyes?”

“Not that I can tell.”

“A tough way to end a flying career.” Cowboy rinsed his face and dried it on a towel.

“Cowboy, if I didn’t ground myself, you’d ground me. I know you. You’re yuks and giggles and Texas corn off duty, but you can slice the raw meat when you have to, whether it’s living or dead.”

Parker snorted and sat down at his desk. “I wish you were writing my fitness report.”

Jake rubbed his chin. Over eighteen hours had passed since he had shaved and his face felt like sandpaper. “Those Arabs. Suicides earning their way to Allah’s big tent in the sky. Damn, that’s scary. What would you have done if he hadn’t started shooting?”

Parker stroked his forehead with an index finger. “I’m not going to take a missile hit before I open fire. I don’t give a damn what Washington thinks or how it reads in the newspapers. Every ship in the force was at general quarters tonight. Every gun was ready to fire. The battlewagon was ready with sixteen-inchers and Harpoons. If one of these boats uses a radar on the proper frequency, points its nose at a ship and holds that heading to stabilize the gyros in a missile, I’m going to blow him out of the water. Right then and there.”

“The next guy won’t panic and start shooting,” Jake said. “They learn real fast.”

“We never suck it up and go after these guys. For the life of me, I can’t see why it’s better to drop bombs from an airplane or shells from a ship’s gun than it is to just hunt the terrorists down and execute them on the spot. Our response to hijackings and murder is to merely send some more ships over here to wave the flag. And salt a bomb around every now and then.”

“Where is all this going, Cowboy?”

The admiral scowled and his right hand became a fist. “Israel wants us in bed with them. The terrorists are trying to push us there. The Soviets are hoping to catch us there. Iran claims that’s where we’ve been all along.” His hand slowly opened. “It’s Vietnam all over again, Jake. Our politicians have gotten sucked into taking sides, so our diplomatic options have evaporated. Now the only American card left is the military one, and sooner or later Washington is going to play it. Just as sure as shootin’.” The hand was a fist again, rapping on the desk. “And the politicians aren’t going to do any better here than they did in Vietnam. Those people never learn.”

Jake Grafton’s shoulders rose a half inch, then subsided. “Everybody but us will have God on his side. And we’ll be in the middle.”

“If only we were in the middle,” the admiral mused, drumming his fingertips on the tabletop. “And everyone knew it.”

Jake stood and stretched. “Thanks for giving me the chance to ground myself.”

The admiral’s lips curved into a hint of a smile. “I know you, Jake.”