Flame Out

CHAPTER 3

“Mercury One-oh-nine, Charlie now.”

Tombstone acknowledged Jefferson’s order to break out of the holding pattern and start his final approach. The rest of Mercury Flight had already landed safely, though one of the Intruder pilots had nearly lost it in the last few seconds. Some good coaching from the Landing Signals Officer down on the carrier deck had kept the kid from cracking up, but it had been a close call.

That incident, coming hard on the heels of his own refueling problem, was the sort of thing that would have warned off someone who believed in bad omens. Tombstone had never considered himself superstitious, but this flight was shaking his skepticism.

Now only Darkstar, the KA-6 tanker that had flown back from the rendezvous point with them, remained aloft with the Tomcat. It would keep on circling until the F-14 had landed, in case Tombstone needed to tank up again before landing.

Fat chance, he told himself. The thought of another refueling like the last one was the best inducement he’d ever had for getting his landing right the first time.

He reduced speed to 250 knots, overriding the flight computers attempts to extend the aircraft’s swing wings to their full wing-forward position. The Tomcat’s sleek lines wouldn’t be visible in the darkness, but Tombstone, like most aviators, made it a point of pride to keep the wings back and the F-14 looking its best all the way down.

The action brought back an old memory of a young RIO who had referred to the forward wing position as “goose mode” because it made the Tomcat look like an awkward goose flaring out as it landed on some still lake.

As the seconds ticked by he checked his airspeed and angle of approach on the Vertical Display Indicator in the center of his control panel, carefully lining up the Instrument Landing System cross-pointers on the glowing cursor that represented the Jefferson’s location with built-in corrections for wind direction and speed. He didn’t like flying by the ILS, but it was the only way to make a carrier landing approach at night. Except in the brightest moonlight, sea and sky tended to merge into a featureless black cave, and without reference points a pilot could quickly lose his orientation. Vertigo was one of the milder problems associated with trying to fly when it was impossible to judge distance or direction. When traveling at nearly three hundred miles per hour, it only took an instant’s confusion to end up a casualty.

At best the carrier itself would be no more than a tiny dot of light set in an otherwise featureless gloom, and that only at comparatively close ranges. That made the ILS essential.

Once the cross hairs were centered Tombstone kept them precisely in position. Luckily, the throttle on a Tomcat adjusted speed automatically, allowing him to concentrate on course corrections and his angle of attack. The F-14 covered ten miles — half the distance between the carrier and the final fix that had been the jump-off point for the approach — in just over two minutes, dropping two thousand feet per minute. Magruder kept his attention focused on the VDI, resisting the temptation to look through the canopy and try to spot the Jefferson.

When the range indicator on the display indicated ten miles he “dirtied up” the Tomcat by hitting the switches that dropped landing gear, flaps, and tail hook. He was flying level now, at twelve hundred feet, with airspeed dropping. The ILS cross-pointers were centered near the top of the display, but they crept toward the middle of the screen as the Tomcat continued its approach.

Three miles out he started his descent again, still entirely dependent on instruments. It took experience to handle this part of a night approach, a precise knowledge of just how much to compensate for tiny course deviations. The carrier wasn’t a stable, motionless platform, but a moving target plunging through wind and wave at better than twenty knots. And wind was only one of many factors that were making the Tomcat drift off the mark. Correcting for drift was a constant thing, and the closer the fighter got to the carrier the more Tombstone had to anticipate the behavior of the aircraft so his corrections could be applied in time.

His two years away from constant carrier ops had left him rusty, but he found all the old instincts coming back to him. Man and machine worked as the perfect team.

“Two miles out,” Jefferson’s radio controller said. “Left one, slightly below glide path.”

He corrected automatically, almost before the radio call.

As the range indicator showed one mile left, he looked up from the VDI and saw the carrier immediately. It was like a tapering box outlined in white lights, bisected by a centerline that projected out of the bottom edge of the box. Orange lights at the end of the centerline marked the drop line hanging down the stern of the ship, indicating the edge of the flight deck.

He picked out the tiny rectangular shape of the optical glide-path indicator to the left of the white lights, the “meatball” that helped aviators estimate their height and approach path as they made the final drop to the deck. It was still indistinct at this range, and not very reliable until the range was considerably shorter. But visual acquisition of the meatball meant that Tombstone was ready to bring the Tomcat down.

“Mercury One-oh-nine,” he said over the radio. “Tomcat ball. Four point eight.” The signal told Jefferson who he was, what kind of plane he was flying, and signaled that he had visual sighting of the meatball with 4800 pounds of fuel remaining.

“Roger ball,” the Landing Signals Officer said. “Deck’s going up. You’re looking good.”

The meatball was designed to give the approaching pilot a visual indication of his position relative to the deck. If the center of the five Fresnel lenses was illuminated, the approaching aircraft was right on its glide path. It was high if one of the upper lenses was lit, too low if a lens below the midpoint glowed. But at a mile out one notch of the meatball represented thirty-two feet of altitude, so it wasn’t the most accurate way to judge the approach. Tombstone kept his descent constant at five hundred feet per minute and relied on the advice of the LSO, a veteran aviator with a much better perspective on the approach than Magruder had himself, to keep him on track.

“Remember, you’ll tend to fly low,” the LSO went on. The best LSOs were the ones who dropped hints without giving detailed instructions. If Tombstone screwed up the approach enough to become a real danger, the laid-back, friendly tone would change. Right now the LSO was simply a calming voice who worked with the pilot, not against him.

The square of white lights that defined the flight deck was like a hole opening up in front of the Tomcat. There was a tendency for pilots to feel they were too high at this stage of the approach, but it was an illusion. Tombstone eased up on his descent rate, conscious of the other potential hazard, that he would over-correct and come in too high. It might result in an embarrassing fly-by … or, if his hook caught a wire even though his landing gear wasn’t on the deck, it could end up in a messy crash.

Nearing the half-mile point, Magruder could see the carrier taking on a ghostly shape for the first time. Now he could use the visual clues that simplified carrier landings, including the meatball. There was the usual burst of confidence, and the usual quick realization that there was nothing to be confident about yet. As the last few seconds of the approach ticked away the impression that the deck was really just a square hole came back stronger than ever.

“Come down, Stoney. Down a little,” the LSO said urgently. Magruder could picture him getting ready to punch the button on the “pickle switch” in his hands that would signal a wave-off and send the Tomcat back in the air for another run. Tombstone compensated, knowing that too much correction could slam the plane into the ramp.

The landing gear hit hard as the Tomcat touched down, and Tombstone realized instantly that he had overshot the ideal touchdown point. Four arresting wires stretched across the deck, and the optimum landing was one that snagged the number-three wire. The F-14 had been high, and missed that one.

He shoved the throttle full forward, according to standard procedure, so that the Tomcat could get airborne again if it missed the “trap.” Even though it was common enough to botch a night landing he felt his face turning red with anger and embarrassment. For Tombstone Magruder, the great naval hero and the new Deputy CAG, to pull a bolter on his first approach …

But sudden deceleration caught him by surprise as the tail hook caught the four wire and the Tomcat jerked to a halt. “Good trap! Good trap!” he heard in his headphones.

They were down.

“Gotcha! I’ve got our boy nailed, compadre. Bearing zero-four-one, range eighty-three miles. He’s down on the deck. A hundred, maybe a hundred fifty feet.”

“Nice going, Malibu,” Batman replied over the ICS. He switched to his radio. “You got him, Tyrone?”

“Affirmative,” Powers replied tersely. The young pilot seemed determined to fly the mission strictly by the book.

“Hey, this dude’s really trying to catch a bodacious wave,” Malibu interjected. “He gets any lower and they’ll be scraping fish off the front of that thing.”

“Trying to duck our radar,” Batman said. “And maybe sucker us into taking a bath if we try to buzz him. Listen up, Tyrone. The Russkies always get a big laugh when they con some capitalist nugget like you into hitting water. You watch your altitude and keep it cool, got it?”

“Roger, Leader,” the other pilot replied.

Tyrone’s RIO, Lieutenant William “Ears” Cavanaugh, spoke up. “I’ve got the bastard too.” He gave a dry chuckle. “Don’t worry, Batman, I’ll keep the kid out of trouble.” True to standard practice, Cavanaugh was an experienced hand teamed with one of the squadron’s rookies. But Batman had seen the RIO in action during the intensive air wing training program at NAS Fallon in Nevada before deploying to the carrier. Ears was a topnotch RIO, but sometimes he was a little too eager.

“Question is, who’ll keep you out of trouble, Ears?” Batman responded. He didn’t give the others a chance to answer him. “Tango Two-fiver, Hound Two-oh-four. We’ve got him on our scopes. Going in to have a look.”

“Roger, Two-oh-four,” came the reply from the Hawkeye. There was a pause. “Mind your ROES, boys. It ain’t a shooting war.”

“Not yet,” Batman muttered. Ever since his first combat experience off North Korea he had mistrusted the limitations set by the Rules of Engagement. They had been designed to keep overeager pilots from precipitating an international incident in the heat of a tense encounter. But they also had the effect of hamstringing those same aviators. Often in modern air combat the first one to lock on and launch was the winner, and when the ROEs said not to fire unless fired upon …

Against the sort of opposition the United States had met in the past — the Libyans in the Gulf of Sidra, for example — it didn’t matter so much. Technological and doctrinal superiority had allowed American pilots to survive enemy attacks and come back swinging. But against first-class Soviet opposition the same might not be true. If the Russians planned on starting something this flight might be Batman’s last.

The dark thoughts flashed through Batman’s mind in an instant, but all he said aloud was, “Roger, Tango Two-fiver.”

He dropped the Tomcat into a sharp bank and started the descent. The Bear was low, but the Russians had underestimated the accuracy of American radar surveillance. Thank God for the Hawkeye, Batman thought. Without the E-2C the Russians might have been able to get much closer before they were spotted.

Bears were archaic by modern standards, but the Bear-D reconnaissance bird was still a deadly threat. That wasn’t so much because of the weaponry it could carry, but rather because it could help more sophisticated Badgers or Blackjacks to get a fix on American ships without exposing themselves to detection. And a Badger armed with stand-off missiles could play havoc with the battle group in a matter of minutes.

Each Bear hunt had to be treated as if it was the real thing. And if the reports from Norway were true, tonight the threat was worse than ever before.

He could feel the huge Soviet aircraft long before he saw it. The low, steady rumble of the plane’s four Kuznetsov turboprops shook the night sky like distant thunder. He strained to see ahead, looking for some sign.

“Tally-ho!” The old aviator’s hunting call came over the radio. Excitement made Tyrone’s voice shrill. “Eleven o’clock, Batman, and right down on the deck!”

Batman spotted it then, the constellation of red and green navigation lights that marked the Soviet plane. A red beacon strobed its anticollision warning. At least the Bear wasn’t coming in blacked out. That counted for something.

“Tango Two-fiver, Hound Two-oh-four. We have visual on the bandit! Closing now.”

“Two-oh-four, this is Domino.” That was CAG’s voice, relayed by the Hawkeye from Jefferson. “Go easy, but let that guy know he’s not welcome here.”

“Roger, Domino,” Batman replied. “Tyrone, hang back and cover me. Stay one mile out.”

“Roger,” came the laconic reply. Powers was shaping up as a steady hand after all.

Batman turned to port and circled lazily around the Bear, crossing the turbulence of the larger aircraft’s slipstream and falling into place alongside. Batman fought to control his heartbeat and breathing. He was in easy range of the Russian’s NR-23 cannons, and all it would take was one slip to turn this from a routine encounter to the first shots of World War III.

“Remember the time off Korea,” Malibu warned. “They’ll probably hit their searchlight.”

The reminder came just in time. A blinding lance of light shot out from the searchlight mounting near the tail section, enveloping the Tomcat’s cockpit. Batman kept his eyes averted and blinked hard.

Often in night encounters the Russians would illuminate their own plane with the searchlight. It helped avoid misjudged distances and accidental collisions. But within seconds Batman knew that wasn’t their intention this time around.

The light held the Tomcat’s cockpit, challenging, probing.

“Picking up emissions from Big Bulge,” Malibu said. That was the NATO code name for the ship-targeting radar system mounted in the oversized teardrop-shaped housing on the belly of the Bear. It was useless for air-to-air work. The only reason to use Big Bulge was to find surface ships … and maybe steer stand-off missiles toward them.

Batman muttered a curse and rolled sideways, increasing speed slightly to clear the searchlight beam. He steadied the Tomcat back on course even closer to the Bear than before, close enough to see dark figures at the windows of the cockpit and the tail section. They could see him as well.

He held up two fingers, then five, eight, and finally a clenched fist, the signal that he wanted to talk on Channel 258.0. That was common enough in a Bear hunt. In times past crews had exchanged comments, questions, even jokes.

But the only response from the Russian was another light show. Were they deliberately trying to blind him, or were they just trying to take pictures? Photographs from encounters like these had helped both sides learn about the planes their opponents flew, but this didn’t feel like a photo session to Batman. They were doing their best to make things tough for him.

Batman pulled his stick over sharply to port and shoved his throttle to afterburner zone five. The Tomcat surged up and to the left, crossing in front of and above the Bear’s cockpit. He could imagine the Soviet pilot scrambling to avoid the danger.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered Tombstone’s admonishment so long ago. He was risking it all.

He cut power and circled again, watching the Bear warily. “Got anything, Malibu?”

“Big Bulge is still on,” the RIO replied tautly, all trace of his California-surfer persona gone.

“Right.” Batman switched to radio. “Tyrone, give this sucker something to think about. Give him a lock-on.

“R-roger.” Powers sounded nervous. He had every right to be. If the Russian decided an attack was imminent there was no telling what he might do.

Batman drifted close alongside again and repeated the 258.0 signal. This time there was a response, a gabble of Russian and broken English over the radio.

“Stoy! Stoy! Nee streelyaee! Not shoot!”

“Okay, Tyrone, cut the lock,” Batman instructed on their tactical channel. Then, switching to 258.0, he replied to the Soviet, “Russian aircraft, this is Hound Leader. I am the aircraft just off your port wing. Do you copy, over?”

“Hound leader, is Hight Varon. Radar lock is flagrant provocation. I protest this act of aggression. Over.”

“Protest all you want,” Batman shot back. “You are requested to come to course three-zero-zero and turn off that search radar. In the interests of international good will, you know.”

“Nyet! Is not for Americans to order flight plans of Soviet aircraft! Or do you declare exclusion zone?”

Jefferson hadn’t taken that step yet. In wartime or a particularly tense crisis an exclusion zone defined an area in which any unauthorized plane would be fired on automatically. That was a much larger escalation of the current tension than anyone had been willing to order so far.

“Negative, Flight Varon. But in view of the current situation, don’t you think it would be a good idea to avoid … unfortunate incidents?”

“Bah! Is blatant interference!”

Batman switched channels again. “Give him another little tweak, Tyrone,” he said. “Just to remind him what he’s risking.”

“Roger, Leader.” The younger pilot still sounded tense, but in control. “Got him.”

“Flight Varon, this is Hound Leader,” Batman drawled, back on the common frequency. “Request you comply with our suggestion. My partner has an itchy trigger finger.”

There was a long, tense pause. Technically there was nothing Batman could do to stop the Bear unless he was willing to risk a full-blown incident. He was banking on the Russians being as nervous as the Americans.

It was a deadly game of chicken … and millions of lives could hang on the outcome.

The rumble of the Bear’s engines rose in pitch a little as the aircraft accelerated and started to climb away from the encounter. “Big Bulge is off,” Malibu announced.

He watched the Bear turn, not northwest as he’d suggested, but east instead. As it continued to swing slowly around onto a northeasterly heading, Batman rubbed the bridge of his nose. They were on the right heading for a return to Russia. Had the reconnaissance flight been on a routine mission, or had it been especially directed against the battle group?

The answer to that question might tell a lot about Soviet intentions in the unfolding crisis.