Flight of the Intruder

ONE

The starboard bow catapult fired, and the A-6A Intruder accelerated down the flight deck with a roar that engulfed the aircraft carrier and reverberated over the night sea. The plane’s wings bit into the air, and the machine began to climb into the blackness. Fifteen seconds later the bomber was swallowed by the low flying clouds.

In a few minutes the climbing Intruder broke free of the clouds.

The pilot, Lieutenant Jake Grafton abandoned the instrument panel and contemplated the vaulted stars. A pale slice of moon illuminated the cloud layer below. “Look at the stars tonight, Morg.

Lieutenant (junior grade) Morgan McPherson, the bombardier-navigator, sat on the pilot’s right, his face pressed against the black hood that shielded the radar screen from extraneous light. He straightened an glanced up at the sky.

“Yeah,” he said, then readjusted the scope hood and resumed the never-ending chore optimizing the radar presentation. He examined the North VietNamese coastline a hundred miles away. “I’ve got an update. I’m cycling to the coast-in point. He pushed a button on the computer, and the steering bug on the pilot’s visual display indicator (vdi) slipped a quarter-inch sideways, giving the pilot steering information to the point on the coast where the Intruder would cross into North Vietnam.

Grafton turned the aircraft a few degrees to follow the steering command.

“Did you ever stop to think maybe you’re getting too wrapped up in your work?” he said. “That you’re in a rut?”

Morgan McPherson pushed himself back from the radar hood and looked at the stars overhead. “They’re still there, and we’re down here. Let’s check the ecm again.”

“The problem is that you’re just too romantic,” Grafton told him and reached for the electronic counter-measures panel. Together they ran the equipment through the built-in tests that verified the ecm was working. Two pairs of eyes observed each indicator light, and two pairs of ears heard each beep.

The ecm gear detected enemy radar emissions and identified them for the crew. When the ecm picked up radar signals it had been programmed to recognize as threatening, it would broadcast false images to the enemy operator.

Satisfied all was working properly, the airmen adjusted the volume of the ecm audio so that it could be heard in their earphones yet would not drown out the intercom system (ICS), over which they talked to each other, or the radio.

The two men flew on without speaking, each listening to the periodic bass tones of the communist search radars sweeping the night.

Each type of radar had its own sound: a low beep was a search radar probing the sky; higher pitched tones were fire-control radars seeking to acquire a target; and a nightmare falsetto was a locked-on missile-control radar guiding its weapon.

Fifty miles from the North VietNamese coast, Jake Grafton lowered the nose of the Intruder four degrees, and the A-6 began its long descent. When he had the aircraft trimmed, Jake tugged all the slack from the harness straps securing him to his ejection seat, then exhaled and, like a cowboy tightening a saddle girth pulled the straps as snugly as he could. That done, he asked for the combat checklist.

Leaving nothing to chance or memory, McPherson read each item off his kneeboard card and both men checked the appropriate switch or knob.

When they reached the last detail on the checklist, Jake shut off the aircraft’s exterior lights and turned the IFF to standby The IFF, or “parrot,” radiated electronic energy that enabled an American radar operator to see the aircraft as a coded blip he could readily identify as friend or foe. Grafton had no desire to appear as a blip, coded or uncoded, on a North VietNamese radar screen. In fact he hoped to escape detection by flying so near the ground that the radar return reflected from his plane would merge with the radar energy reflecting off the earth-the “ground return.”

The pilot keyed his radio mike. The voice scrambler beeped, then Jake spoke: “Devil Five Oh Five strangling parrot. Coast-in in three minutes.”

Devil was the A-6 squadron’s radio call sign.

“Roger, Five Oh Five,” responded the airborne controller circling over the Gulf of Tonkin in an E HawkEye, a twin engine turboprop with a radar dish mounted on top of the fuselage. The HawkEye also had launched from the carrier.

The Intruder was going on the hunt. Camouflaged by darkness and hidden by the earth itself from the electronic eyes of the enemy, Jake Grafton would fly as low as his skill and nerves allowed, which was very low indeed.

The pilot cast a last quick look at the distant stars. Flying now at 450 knots, the bird plunged into the clouds. Jake felt the adrenaline begin to pump.

He watched the pressure altimeter unwind and shot curious glances at the radar altimeter, which derived its information from a small radar in the belly of the plane that looked straight down and measured the distance to the ground or sea. He briefly wished that he could turn it off because he knew its emissions could be detected, but he needed this device.

The pressure altimeter told him his height above sea level, but tonight he would have to know just how high he was above the earth. As he passed 5000 feet, the radar altimeter began to function and matched the readings of the pressure altimeter perfectly, just as it should over the sea. The pilot breathed deeply and forced himself to relax.

Dropping below 2000 feet, he eased the stick back and slowed the rate of descent. With his left hand he advanced the throttles to a high-cruise power setting. The airspeed stabilized at 420 knots, Grafton’s preferred speed for treetop flying. The A-6 handled very well at this speed, even with the drag and weight of a load of bombs. The machine would fly over enemy gunners too fast for them to track it even if they should be so lucky as to make out the dark spot fleeting across the night sky.

Jake Grafton’s pulse pounded as he brought the plane down to 400 feet above the water. They were below the clouds now, flying in absolute darkness, not a glimmer of light visible in the emptiness between sea and sky. Only the dimmed lights of the gauges, which were red so as not to impair the night vision of the crew, confirmed that there was a world beyond the cockpit. Jake peered into the blackness, trying to find the telltale ribbon of white sand that marked the VietNamese coast on even the darkest nights. Not yet, he told himself.

He could feel the rivulets of sweat trickle down his face and neck, some running into his eyes. He shook his head violently, not daring to take his stinging eyes from the red gauges on the black panel in front of him for more than a second. The sea was just below, invisible, waiting to swallow the pilot who fail for a few seconds to notice a sink rate.

There, to the left… the beach. The pale sand caught his eye, Relax….

Relax, and concentrate The whiteness flashed beneath them.

“Coast-in,” Jake told the bombardier.

McPherson used his left hand to activate the stop clock on the instrument panel and keyed his radio mike with his left foot. “Devil Five Oh Five is feet dry. D Five Oh Five, feet dry.”

A friendly American voice answered. “Five Oh Black Eagle. Roger feet dry. Good hunting.” Then silence. Later, when Devil 505 returned to the coast they would broadcast their “feet wet” call. Grafton and McPherson knew that now they were on their own because the HawkEye’s radar could not separate the A-6’s image from the earth’s return without the aid of the IFF.

Jake saw moonlight reflecting faintly off rice paddies indicating a break in the overcast ahead. The weather forecasters were right for a change, he thought. Out of the corner of his eye the pilot saw flashes: intermittent flashes in the darkness below.

“Small arms fire, Morg.”

“Okay, Jakey baby.” The bombardier never looked up from his radar scope. His left hand slewed the computer cross hairs across the scope while his right tuned the radar. “This computer is working great, but it’s a little . . .” he muttered over the ICS.

Jake tried to ignore the muzzle flashes. Every kid and rice farmer in North Vietnam had a rifle and apparently spent the nights shooting randomly into the sky at the first rumble of jet engines. They never saw their target but hoped somewhere in the sky a bullet and American warplane would meet. Big morale boost Jake thought. Lets every citizen feel he’s personally fighting back. Jake saw the shuttering muzzle flashes of a submachine gun. None of these small arms fired tracer bullets so the little droplets of death were everywhere, and nowhere.

Patches of moonlight revealed breaks in the clouds ahead. The pilot descended to 300 feet and used the moonlight to keep from flying into the ground. He was much more comfortable flying visually rather than on instruments. With an outside reference he could fly instinctively; on instruments he had to work at it.

Off to the right antiaircraft artillery opened fire. The tracers burned through the blackness in slow motion. The warble of a Firecan gun-control radar sounded for a second in his ears, then fell silent.

A row of artillery fire erupted ahead of them. “Christ, Morg,” he whispered to the bombardier. He picked a tear in the curtain of tracers, dipped a wing, and angled the jet through. McPherson didn’t look up from the scope. “You got the river bend yet?” Jake asked as the flak storm faded behind them.

“Yep. Just got it. Three more minutes on this heading.” McPherson reached with his left hand and turned on the master armament switch. He checked the position of every switch on the armament panel one more time. The dozen 500-pound bombs were now ready to be released. “Your pickle is hot,” he told the pilot, referring to the red button on the stick grip which the pilot could press to release the weapons.

Again and again fiery streams of antiaircraft shells spewed forth like projectiles from a volcano. The stuff that came in the general direction of Devil 505 seemed to change course and turn behind them, an optical illusion created by the plane’s 700-feet-per-second speed. The pilot ignored the guns fired behind or abreast and concentrated on negotiating his way through the strings of tracers that erupted ahead. He no longer even noticed the flashes from rifles and machine guns, the sparks of this inferno.

A voice on the radio: “Devil Five Oh Eight is dry, feet dry.”

There’s Cowboy, Jake thought. Cowboy was Lieutenant Commander Earl Parker, the pilot of the other A-6 bomber launched moments after them. Like Jake, and McPherson, Cowboy and his bombardier were now racing across the earth with a load of bombs destined for a target not worth any man’s life, or so Jake told himself as he weaved through the tracers, deeper and deeper into North Vietnam.

“Two miles to the turnpoint,” the bombardier reminded him.

An insane warble racked their ears. A red light labeled “MISSILE” flashed on the instrument panel, two feet from the pilot’s face. This time McPherson looked up.

The two men scanned the sky. Their best chance to avoid the surface-to-air missile was to acquire it visually, then outmaneuver it.

“There’s the SAM! Two o’clock!” Jake fought back the urge to urinate.

Both men watched the white rocket exhaust while Grafton squeezed the chaff-release button on the right throttle with his forefinger. Each press released a small plastic container into the slipstream where it disbursed a cloud of metallic chaff-that would echo radar energy and form a fake target on the enemy operator’s radar screen. ‘The pilot carefully nudged the stick forward and dropped to 100 feet above the ground. He jabbed the chaff button more times in quick succession.

The missile light stopped flashing and the earphones fell silent as death itself.

“I think it’s stopped guiding,” McPherson said with relief evident in his voice. “Boy, we’re having fun now,” he added dryly. Grafton said nothing. They were almost scraping the paddies. The bombardier watched the missile streak by several thousand feet overhead at three times the speed of sound, then turned his attention to the radar. “Come hard left,” he told the pilot.

Jake dropped the left wing and eased back slightly on the stick. He let the plane climb to 300 feet. The moonlight bounced off the river below. “See the target yet?”

“Just a second, man.” Silence. “Steady up.” Jake leveled the wings. “I’ve got the target. I’m on it. Stepping into attack.” The bombardier flipped a switch, and the computer calculated an attack solution. The word “ATTACK” lit up in red on the lower edge of the vdi, and the computer-driven display became more complex. Symbols appeared showing the time remaining until weapons release, the relative position of the target, the drift angle, and the steering to the release point.

Jake jammed the throttles forward to the stops and climbed to 500 feet.

The Mark 82 general-purpose bombs had to fall at least 500 feet for the fuses to arm properly; they were equipped with metal vanes that would open when the weapons were released and retard them just long enough to allow the plane to escape the bomb fragments.

The needle on the airspeed indicator quivered at 480 knots. The stick was alive in the pilot’s hand. Any small twitch made the machine leap. Jake’s attention was divided among the mechanics of instrument flying, the computer-driven steering symbol on the vdi, and the occasional streams of yellow and red tracers. He felt extraordinarily alive, in absolute control. He could see everything at once: every needle, every gauge, every fireball in the night. With his peripheral vision, he even saw McPherson turn on the track radar.

“Ground lock.” The bombardier noted the indication on the track radar and reported it to the pilot with an affectation of amazement. The damn track radar often failed. McPherson was glued to the radar screen, his entire world the flickering green lights. “Hot damn we’re gonna get ‘em.”

He feels it too, Jake thought. With the track radar locked on the target the computer was getting the most accurate information possible on azimuth and elevation angle.

On this October night in 1972, Devil 505 closed the target, a “suspected truck park,” jargon for penciled triangle on a map where the unknown person who picked the targets thought the North VietNamese might have some trucks parked under the trees, away from the prying eyes of aerial photography.

Trucks or no trucks, the target was only a place in the forest.

The bomb run was all that existed now for Jake Grafton. His life seemed compressed into this moment without past or future. Everything depended on him well he flew Devil 505 to that precise point in space where the computer would release the bombs to impact upon the target.

The release marker on the vdi marched relentlessly toward the bottom of the display as the plane raced at 490 knots. At the instant the marker disappear the 500-pound bombs were jettisoned from the bomb racks. Both men felt a series of jolts, a physical reminder that they had pulled a trigger. The attack literally was extinguished when the last weapon was released and only then did Grafton bank left and glance outside. Tracers and muzzle flashes etched the night. “Look back,” he told the bombardier as he flew the aircraft through the turn.

Morgan McPherson looked over the pilot’s shoulder in the direction of the target, obscured by darkness. He saw the explosions of the bombs-death flashes-twelve in two-thirds of a second. Jake saw the detonations in his rear-view mirror and roll out of the turn on an easterly heading. Without the drag of the 500-pounders, the two engines pushed the low fleeing warplane even faster through the night, now 500 knots, almost 600 miles per hour.

“Arm up the RockEyes, Morg.”

The bombardier reset the armament switches that enabled the pilot to manually drop the four RockEye cluster bombs still hanging under the wings.

“Your pickle is hot,” he told Grafton. He put his face back against the scope hood and examined the terrain ahead.

Grafton kept the engines at full throttle as he scanned the darkness for an antiaircraft artillery piece he could destroy with the waiting RockEyes. It would have to be fairly close to his track and firing off to one side so that he could approach it safely. He referred to this portion of the mission as “killing rattlesnakes.”

Somewhere below, a North VietNamese peasant heard the swelling whine of jet engines approaching, first faintly, then rapidly increasing in intensity.

As the whine quickly rose to a crescendo, he lifted an ancient bolt-action rifle to his shoulder, pointed it at a 45-degree angle into the night above, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet punched a tiny hole in the lower forward corner of the canopy plexiglass on the right side of the plane. It penetrated Morgan McPherson’s oxygen mask, deflected off his jawbone, pierced the larynx, nicked a carotid artery, then exited his neck and spent itself against the side of the pilot’s ejection seat. Reflexively, Morgan keyed his ICS mike with his right foot, gagged, and grabbed his neck.

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 metal 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 approaching 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.”

As he felt the arresting gear slow the plan he slapped the throttles to idle, flipped the external light master switch off, and raised the flap handle. The A-6 jerked to a halt and rolled backwards.

The pilot pushed the button to raise the hook, then applied the brakes.

The Intruder stopped with another jolt, this time remaining at rest.

Jake could see people running toward the plane from the island. He chopped the right engine and opened the canopy. A corpsman in a white shirt scrambled up the ladder on the BN’s side of the plane and reached McPherson. He raised the bombardier’s head, looked at his neck, then motioned to the overhead floodlights switch on the canopy bow, the steel longitudinal frame that split the top of the canopy plexiglass. Turning it on, the pilot squinted and blinked as naked white light bathed the cockpit.

Rich red blood was everywhere. Blood covered McPherson and coated the panels on his side of the plane. Grafton’s right hand was covered with it, as was the stick grip and everything else he had touched. The cockpit was a slaughter house.

More men were draped over and on the cockpit. They flipped up the ejection seat safety latches to prevent the seat from firing accidentally, then released the fastenings that held the bombardier to the seat. They lifted his body out of the cockpit and passed him to the waiting hands below.

Fighting for self-control, Jake folded the wings an switched off the electronic gear. He became aware of Sammy standing on the ladder beside him.

Lundeen reached into the cockpit and pulled the parking brake handle, then shut down the left engine. Grafton unlatched his oxygen mask and removed his helmet. His eyes were riveted on the stretcher bearing Morgan McPherson to the island superstructure until it disappeared behind a swinging metal door.

Silence descended on the cockpit. The wind down the flight deck dried the sweat coating Jake’s hair and face. He began to chill. He looked again at the blood, on his hand, on the stick, blood everywhere under the harsh white light. The clock in the instrument panel was one of the few things not smeared with blood. The pilot looked up into the face of his friend.

“Sammy-” He felt the burning vomit coming up his throat and caught it in his helmet.