Flight of the Intruder

SEVENTEEN

The sea was a greasy mirror that reflected the grays of the evening sky. Not a breath of wind stirred. Even the swells had flattened under this heavy mass of dead air. In order to launch, the ship had to create a headwind. The deck vibrated as the four screws thrashed the still water into a river of foam that stretched aft into the thick haze that married the sea and sky.

From his cockpit Jake regarded the haze that at few hundred knots would impede visibility and threaten survival. He scoffed at his feeling of unease, but worry still clutched at him.

Jake was sitting behind the jet blast deflector for the number-three catapult on the waist when he saw bosun Muldowski hold up a message board for the pilot of the Phantom on the cat. Although Grafton couldn’t read the message, he could guess its contents. The cat office was advising the pilot that he wouldn’t get the usual fifteen-knots speed above the stall and was asking him to make do with less. The bosun turned away. Undoubtedly he had received a thumbs up from the pilot who really had little choice but to accept whatever endspeed the cat could give him. The chief engineer in the boiler rooms was probably chewing his lip; the boilers couldn’t provide the steam needed for the main turbines to drive the ship at flank speed and operate all four catapults at full power. Consequently he had to ration steam, and the first victims would be the giant catapult accumulators. Lower pressures in the accumulators meant the catapults would toss each plane off at a slower speed and the pilots would have to compensate. As usual, Jake thought, the solution to almost every problem ended up in the cockpit.

The Phantom on cat three wound up to fun power as the catapult crewmen tumbled out from under the plane. The hurricane of exhaust gases over the top of the JBD shook the waiting Intruder. Now the afterburners lit and ten feet of fire shot from each tailpipe. The tailpipe nozzles opened to accommodate the whitehot flames. Muldowski returned the fighter pilot’s salute and swung his arm toward the deck. The Phantom leaped forward toward the sky. As the machine left the deck the nose quickly rose. It rose and rose and rose, until it was almost twenty-five degrees above the horizon.

“Jesus!” Cole exclaimed.

The Phantom pilot had pulled too vigorously on the stick and his plane had gotten away from him. Without the usual excess airspeed, the nose quickly passed the optimum climb attitude and the wings had begun to stall. This caused the center of lift to move forward and the nose to rise further into the stall despite the pilot’s application of full forward stick.

With its nose unnaturally high, the plane hung spread-eagle against the sky: Then the Phantom sank from view below the edge of the deck.

The radio exploded to life. ‘Pickle your bombsight”

“Jettison!”

“Emergency!”

“May day jettison!” The transmissions continued, garbled, cutting in and out.

“There he is,” Cole said, grabbing Jake’s arm.

The fighter was out over the water, the nose of the plane reared back. With the burners almost in the water, the aircraft wallowed in the air, staggering from side to side as one wing fell, then the other.

A giant splash obscured the plane.

“Did he go in?” Jake whispered.

“No, he’s dropped his weapons and external fuel tank.

Almost a mile from the ship, the plane’s nose dropped toward the water and the spray churned up by its engines lessened. The fighter began to rise from the deadly embrace of the sea. Now, he was flying!

The bosun approached the Intruder with his chalk board. “8+ knots” it read. Jake Grafton did as the fighter Pilot before him: he signaled thumbs up.

At least the A-6 has better low-speed aerodynamics than the supersonic F-4, he thought. The edge of the stall is not so razor thin.

Jake pushed the throttles to the stops and wrapped his fingers around the cat grip… cycled the control … a murmur from Tiger Cole… the exhaust gas temperatures and RPMs had stabilized at full power when he snapped a salute to the bosun.

They rocketed forward toward the haze as the Gees mashed them back into the seat. Two and a half seconds later they were over the flat water, and Jake milked the stick, trading some of his precious altitude-he had only sixty feet-for airspeed. As the gear retracted, the needle on the vertical-speed indicator registered progress upward.

“I told Orville and I told Wilbur: that thing’ll never fly,” Cole announced as he turned on the radar and checked the computer.

They waited over the sea for the light to fade from the charcoal sky.

With the autopilot engaged and the engines set at Max conserve, the Pilot listlessly scanned the instruments as Cole tuned the radar and monitored the computer and inertial. Jake wondered if this haze covered the land, and, although he hoped it didn’t, he suspected that it did.

The sky was as placid as the sea, monotonously uniform, lacking definition. It seemed safe. The truth was, as Grafton knew, that moisture reduced visibility, which meant that the glowing artillery shells and the fireballs of the SAMs’ exhaust would be hidden from his sight during the early parts of their flights. On such a night a man could die suddenly, without a chance.

He tugged at his harness straps, already as tight as he could stand it, and looked again at the chart Cole had prepared that depicted their planned route.

The black line was so bold, so purposeful.

I should have written a will, he decided. Should have taken the time.

Well, Morgan, this one’s for you. For you and all that those guys who got zapped for nothing. This one isn’t for nothing, Morgan. With a quart or two of luck some of the gomers who give the orders are going to see hell arrive right through the roof of their National Assembly tonight. Give me some luck, Morg.

Callie, I’m a little scared right now, God knows, a little scared “Let’s do it,” Cole said.

The plane flew in absolute darkness; the heavy moisture absorbed all light. With nothing to see outside, Jake concentrated on his instruments. The radar altimeter did not function over the smooth ocean so Jake used the pressure altimeter to hold them level at 500 feet as they approached the coast. He sneaked glances outside, searching for the beach, convinced that seeing it would be a good omen.

He was still looking when Tiger called feet dry to Black Eagle and started the elapsed-time clock. Then Tiger rotated the safety collar around the master armamanet switch and turned it on.

After a minute the pilot noticed the muzzle flashes, small arms close to the plane. The stuttering blasts of a large weapon, perhaps fifty-seven millimeter, shot through the fog. Four rounds to a clip, white trace yes, it was a fifty-seven. He estimated visibility to be about a mile, sufficient to see the streaks of tracer in time-but not the SAMs. Doing some arithmetic in his head, he figured that a SAM at mach three would traverse the last mile in about two seconds.

The pilot checked the radar altimeter and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

The radar altimeter came into play over land, and he descended to 400 feet.

Flak poured randomly into the sky, a poison spewed reflexively at the sound of approaching engines. A man coming in supersonic would have a quiet ride, Jake thought, because the gomers wouldn’t hear him coming. But these gomers can’t get us, even at only 420 knots. Nothing can get us, he told himself, and he waggled the stick. The sharp, agile movements of the plane provided reassurance.

The antiaircraft guns were usually in a line, from two or three to half a dozen, on roads on top of the paddy dikes. The reddish-orange tracers from the belt-fed lighter weapons-12.7, 14.5, and 23 millimeter floated aloft in long ribbons. Tonight the fog pulsate with their glare. Within the cockpit, though, the deafening thunder was inaudible amid the background noise of the engines, the squawks and screeches of the ecm and the static of the radio.

“Only two knots of wind,” Cole told him. The bombardier was checking the computer readouts.

To keep track of the aircraft’s position and accurately solve the attack problem, the computer needed to know not only the aircraft’s precise position, but the amount of wind affecting the aircraft’s track over the ground as well.

The wind would also affect the trajectory of the bombs after they were released. Any corrections that the bombardier made to velocity errors were understood by the computer to be extra wind.

Tonight the minuscule wind readout meant the INS, the Doppler, and the computer were humming perfectly: they were “tight.” Cole identified the I P for the power plant without trouble. As they approached the initial point, Grafton went to full power.

“I P . New heading two eight seven.”

Jake turned and let the machine climb to 500 feet as he retrimmed for the increasing airspeed. The sensor lights on the instrument panel blinked ominously and the beeps of radars seeking to acquire them sounded in his ears. But the plane was too low to be detected, still safely hidden in the ground cover of the earth. Jake concentrated on staying level at 500 feet and on course. Random muzzle flashes dotted the darkness on his left, like flashbulbs popping in a gigantic stadium.

“I’m on the target and in attack.” The computer-driven display on the v d i assumed a new complexity. The target symbol, a solid little black box, appeared just below the horizon in the center of the display. A highway, or pathway, led from the bottom of the display to a point on the horizon just above the target. On this apex rested the steering symbol, a hollow rectangle, that the computer skewed right or left to show the pilot the proper course to the calculated release point. Jake tuned the display right above a Mig the aircraft to keep the hollow box centered in on the target symbol. On the right side of the display a black fine appeared, the release marker. It began to sink gradually toward the bottom of the display.

The instant it dropped off the vdi the computer would release the weapons.

Without taking his eyes from the radar, the bombardier configured the dozen switches on the armament panel. Jake noted this performance and was impressed. he still had to visually check armament switches.

Pulsating tracers loomed out of the fog. The fireballs were huge-traveling in slow motion and did not change their relative Position-and Jake lifted the plane over the oncoming stream. As he did so a Firecan guns control radar at ten o’clock locked them up.

He punched chaff and descended once he had passed over the fiery flow. He punched off one more bundle of chaff, just to be sure, and was astonished at a bright flash under the aircraft.

“What was that?”

“I R flare in the chaff,” Cole said.

Angry with himself for being startled, Jake divided his attention between the dancing steering symbol and the molten currents of flak.

“Thirty seconds or so,” Cole said. “Ground lock. The pilot could see only darkness ahead. But the power plant was there. Cole said it was. “Gimme a discrete lock, baby,” cole muttered at the Intruder’s tracking radar. If it would lock on the plant, the Computer would read the range information. “No discrete tonight.

Only the track’s depression angle was going to the computer.

Jake dived 200 feet and let a flak stream pass overhead. After five seconds he pumped the stick to get back to altitude so as not to jiggle the accelerometers. “Steady.” Cole whispered “Easy.”

The release marker fell relentlessly. As it dropped off the display Jake squashed the pickle with his thumb backing up the computer’s release signal with a manual one.

The four bombs were gone in a fifth of a second an he let the plane climb 200 feet as he turned hard left to ensure that he would not be caught by bomb fragments if a Snake-eye fin failed to open.

Behind the speeding aircraft the bombs flashed. Jake looked back in time to see the explosions, then looked ahead.

Now for Hanoi.

The steering symbol lashed off to the right. “Ignore that. Cursors running. Your heading two oh five.”

“What’s wrong “Ah, fuck “It’s the the INS or the cursor damn it.”

Tiger administered a healthy kick to the pedestal between his legs.

Actually, this was one of the unwritten procedures taught by experience for freeing the rotary-drum computer that represented state-of-the-art technology-in 1956. This time kicks and curses failed. Cole gave up on the computer and adjusted the radar cursor manually to the weapons-release range he had calculated on the ship. Without the computer, their chance of hitting the National Assembly decreased drastically.

Jake set the switches on the armament panel for the last eight bombs. He decided to leave the mode selector switch in “train,” which meant that instead of dropping the bombs in two sets of four-the “salvo” mode-they would release them one at a time. This increased the likelihood of getting at least one hit, though the damage a hit would cause would be less. Cole nodded his agreement.

As they flew southwest at almost 500 knots, Tiger gave Jake small heading corrections.

They blasted across Bac Ninh at 400 feet, the guns below firing up and the big-caliber tracer shells so bright as they zoomed across the top of the plane that they lighted up the cockpit.

Jake swallowed hard. Hanoi would be heavily defended.

When Cole called ten miles to the target Jake continued to hold the plane low at 400 feet. The flak was getting thicker.

When Cole called eight miles, Jake decided to wait until five miles before climbing. In the glow of the ordnance he could see the outline of the city.

“Six miles.”

Jake pulled the stick aft, reaching 1500 feet before the threat indicator illuminated, warning of Firecan ahead and behind. He continued up and leveled at 2500 feet, where he was not sheltered by ground return. He noted that the visibility was better than he had expected.

A large battery of belt-fed guns exploded into action ahead. Ignoring Cole’s heading calls, Jake turned the plane on a knife-edge and sliced through a gap in the fire.” You gotta hand it to the little fuckers: they give it their best.

He then quickly leveled so that Cole could reidentify the target.

“I think I have it. Right five.”

The pilot yanked the stick to get on course as fast as possible.

He could see the city spread out before him.

It looked unearthly in the flicker of the tracers, and more and more tracers darted up from every street corner.

“Left one … steady now.” Without the computer, Cole would have to provide the steering from studying the radar scope.

The Red River was a black snake slithering across the city.

“Hair left. Hold it.”

The missile light began flashing and the aural warning sounded.

The strobe on the ecm gear was long and brilliant, a powerful signal indicating that enemy radar was very near. The pilot searched the fog in that direction the strobe indicated, from two o’clock.

“Steadeee …

They were much too high for the earth’s shadow to offer any cover.

Grafton felt completely naked. He pumped chaff, hoping the blossoming false targets on the enemy’s screen would fool the operator.

There! Two large fireballs … in the fog. They mesmerized him, but he managed to ease the nose down and, without thinking, dumped more chaff.

Going down, passing 1500 feet, descending….

The first fireball came out of the fog, tracking the descending plane perfectly, coming down toward it. Jake hauled the stick hard aft and the missile flashed beneath their belly where it exploded, the concussion jolting the plane. Jake kept the gees on and saw the glow of the second missile, which was correcting its trajectory. Like the plane, it was climbing.

He inverted the aircraft. Over the top at 3000 feet with the nose coming down … 2000 feet … four gees….

“Roll over. Pull out.” Cole’s voice was strained, urgent.

He waited another second, another lifetime, then slammed the stick sideways and righted the plane. At 1000 feet, fifteen degrees nose down, he pulled and pulled on the stick. The missile overshot them and exploded in a sickening crack that rocked the Intruder again and drove something through the plexiglass that stung Jake’s legs.

They were at 400 feet. “Stay down,” Cole urged. “Make a racetrack circle and give me some room to see the target.”

The pilot complied. Cole held vigil over the radar. “Hill coming up. Climb a little.” They soared to 1000 feet and the radar indicator illuminated again. More chaff. Another I R flare from the chaff dispenser, but this time the pilot merely flinched.

“You’re clear,” Cole told him. “Hold this heading. They were headed back northeast. Jake descended until he was level at 500 feet. The rear-view mirror reflected the streaking fury still rising from Hanoi.

For the first time Jake became aware of his pounding heart. “Now swing it around and we’ll try it again,” Cole said.

Though I walk through the valley …

“Seven miles. Let’s get back up there and see if we can smack ‘em good.”

I shall fear no evil …

The pilot concentrated on climbing and leveled precisely at 2500 feet.

“I’ve got it…. Three degrees right…. looking good.”

The tracers rose from horizon to horizon.

“Get ready.”

A Firecan gun-control radar locked them up and huge white tracers raced from the fog, four at a time Jake desperately pumped the chaff button.

“One degree left…. Steadeee….

Jesus Christ!

The shells streaked behind and under the bomber “Now!”

The bombs kicked loose with a stuttering whump just as a SAM ignited to the right. The visibility was better over the city. The pilot held the heading and watch the missile gain altitude and level off with no change of bearing-it was on a collision course with the plane. Their bombs exploded below as the missile-warning light flashed.

He dropped the nose and turned to the right, away from the radar-controlled gun and across the missile’s path as he released more chaff. But the missile continued tracking them very nicely. He cursed under his breath, fervently, and dropped to 100 feet. The needle on the radar altimeter jumped erratically as they swept across the rooftops. Jake, noticing that the strobe on the ecm gear was long and fat and bright, mutterd “We’re almost on top of this radar.”

“We’re out of chaff,” Cole reported.

“Man, we’re having fun now.”

The missile was at eleven o’clock now, now ten-thirty. He leveled the wings. The muzzle blasts of the flak guns formed an artificial horizon that was almost level with him. He was much too low.

The missile altered course and started down.

Wait a little longer, he told himself just a little more, a little more…. Okay, pull! He began a steady 6-G ascent. The nose wrenched higher and higher. The large needle on the altimeter zipped around the dial.

The missile kept descending. Jake kept hitting the chaff button reflexively.

At nearly mach three the missile flashed beneath them trailing a white-hot exhaust and exploded. Jake heard the pitter-patter of shrapnel pelting the plane’s skin.

“Another!” Cole cried. This one came in on the same bearing as the previous one but was lower and still climbing.

The altimeter registered 3000 feet. Jake kept the stick back and smoothly moved it left to begin a barrel roll. As they went inverted the ghostly city covered the canopy above their heads. The weaving fingers of fire were everywhere but Jake’s eyes were on the missile.

“Nose on the horizon,” Tiger said, advising him.

“Five degrees down.” Still upside down, four Gees on.

“Twenty-five hundred feet.” The missile continued rising.

“Ten down, hundred and twenty degrees of bank, two thousand. . . .”

The missile was correcting, but too slowly. They would beat it!

“Fifteen down . Cole’s voice was rising and cracking.

The missile ceased tracking and began ballistic flight.

Jake forced himself to concentrate on the instrument panel. Sweet Jesus, we’re steep! He rolled faster an the Gees squeezed them and the radar altimeter need sagged sickeningly as they went down, down to waiting death, still down….

The needle on the radar altimeter stopped at 500 feet. Jake held the stick back. Something darker than the surrounding blackness zipped underneath, seemingly close enough to take off the belly tank.

Grafton stabilized at 200 feet and turned southeast sweeping across Hanoi in a long arcing trajectory.

As they banked, it appeared to Jake as though they were below the city, as though the flashes of the guns an shadows of buildings were above them. The optic illusion disoriented him and he wrestled the stick an rudder to avoid the ground. His only hope was to believe the red instruments before him and not his instincts. Don’t lose it now, he thought. We’ve almost made it.

Then they were over the countryside at a safer 400 feet. One of the four hydraulic pumps showed zero pressure. In the rear-view mirror Jake saw the city still riddling the air with fire, trying to bring down the fleeing intruder.

The flak thinned out and the intermittent flickers reflected on the rice paddies. They stole away, the throttles at the stops.

Jake’s red anticollision light reflected on the helmet of the bombardier in the tanker. Big Augie looked across the empty space at the bomber.

“You look okay to us, Jake. You have a smear of hydraulic fluid coming out from between the exhaust pipes, but other than that you look okay. Maybe there’re some little holes we can’t see….

Jake blew the gear down and lowered the flaps electrically before they left the 20,000-foot tanker station. The tanker was dirty, it too had lowered it gear and flaps and so stayed on his wing.

Jake’s flying was erratic; he had lost all his smoothness.

“This landing’s gonna be a piece of cake,” Cole said.

“Yeah.”

“Just a little burbled from the ships island. That’s all. The sea’s calm. That meant the ball will be as steady aSARock.”

“Uh-huh.”

Cole sat in silence as Jake jerked the plane to each new heading.

Finally Cole unzipped his survival vest and opened a plastic baby bottle. “Take a swig of this. It’ll help.”

Jake reached for the bottle and put it to his lips. The liquid was fiery and he almost didn’t get it down. “What the hell is that?”

“Brandy.”

“Fuck! I didn’t need that!”

“Well, you sure as hell need something. Now settle down or you’re going to kill us both on the ramp -” Jake recognized he was 200 feet above the 5000-foot altitude assigned and corrected. “You motherfucker!”

“You can do this, Jake.” Cole’s voice was soft and soothing. “You can grease this plane onto a postage stamp if you have to. Be slow and smooth and keep your scan going. Watch your heading. Nothing to it. Nice. You’ve done this hundreds of times.”

Cole pulled the handle to lower the tailhook. “Let’s get on speed. We’ve plenty of gas and the tanker’s right here.”

“Okay, grandma. I’m okay now.”

“Well, I feel like talking. We really smacked those little fuckers tonight. Now all we have to do is get aboard and we’ll be done. You’re going to fly the best goddamn pass those LSO weenies ever saw and catch the three wire. If you couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t be bombing Uncle Ho with you.”

His voice was calm, so matter-of-fact that Jake’s nervousness dissipated. Cole chattered on, “I think I’m going to buy me a stereo the next time we hit Cubi.

“One of those reel-to-reel Jap jobs that has fifty-two buttons

and six or eight of those little Vu needles though. Never had one of those. Maybe I’ll pick up one like Cowboy’s.”

The controller interrupted with instructions.

He was still soliloquizing about stereos when the ship appeared at a mile on the glide path. His commentary switched to the business at hand. “Your wings are level … six hundred foot sink rate… little more power … you have er nailed… looking good….

The wheels hit the steel and the hook caught.

“Did you hit it?” Steiger asked Jake Grafton and Tiger Cole in the passageway after they had finished the mission debriefing. The airmen still wore their fire gear and reeked of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. Jake had his flight suit unzipped to mid-chest, revealing a sodden T-shirt.

Jake shrugged and stared at the bloodstains on his stinging thighs. The quack would have to pull out those metal slivers, which had penetrated the bladders in his G-suit. I guess I finally get a new G-suit, he thought.

Cole put his hand on Abe’s shoulder. “You heard us tell you in there”-he nodded toward the debriefing room-“that the computer had crapped out.” He shifted his helmet bag to his left hand and rubbed his head, obviously uncomfortable.

“The cursor on the radar screen is a thin line, yet it covers two hundred feet of the ground. We were trying to hit a target that was maybe a hundred fifty feet across. But a plane flying at five hundred knots covers that distance in less than a fifth of a second. We dropped the bombs in train to maximize our chances. The minimum interval between bombs is six-hundredths of a second, so at five hundred knots the bombs land fifty feet apart. Our string was only three hundred fifty feet long.” He shook his head.

“The odds just aren’t that good,” Jake added. “If we were real lucky we didn’t hit a hospital or apartment house a half-mile away.”

Steiger bit his lip and examined each drawn face. It had all seemed so neat and easy in the Mission Planning spaces, with charts and lines and photographs. “You did the best you could. I understand,” he said.

The pilot and bombardier trudged off down the passageway, their shoulders drooping.

Jake Grafton sat on the operating table in Sick Bay in his underwear with his legs dangling as Mad Jack worked on his thighs with tweezers, a needle, and disinfectant. Camparelli was astride a chair, his arms crossed on the backrest.

“tell me about the missiles. Steiger says some of them came down at you.”

“Yessir. A couple of them did. But I don’t think they had heat-seekers. I think they were launching from one place and guiding from a radar that was a lot closer to us. We were just too close to the site that was guiding. And they put a missile in the air and waited for the first stage to drop off before they turned on the radar.

They’re getting smarter, or somebody who speaks Russian is helping them.”

“Maybe.” The Old Man ran his fingers through his short hair. “I didn’t think that power plant would be so heavily defended. They hate to lose them, but they really don’t need the juice. Damned rice farmers.” He shook his head.

“That airplane has a lot of holes in it. Nothing major, no structural damage and the wings weren’t hit, thank God, but it’s going to be a couple days before we can use it.”

Jake said nothing.

“I better go tell Steiger to update the intelligence charts.” He stood and addressed Mad Jack’s round back. “Is he going to be able to fly?”

“Yes. Just some pinhole punctures that a Band Aid will cover.”

The skipper left the room.

They don’t need the power plants, Jake thought, Why the hell even bomb them?

In his mind’s eye he saw the rising flak and the SAMs and once again felt the fear, and he imagined the stone capitol building gutted by explosion and fire.

“Relax a little,” Mad Jack said without looking up “or this is going to take all night.”