Medusa's Child

THIRTY-THREE

Amidst a flurry of wide-eyed bridge activity more intense than anything he could remember in peacetime, the captain of the Eisenhower sat in his command chair and shook his head in wonder. The solution had been there all along, but no one—not even the ex-F-14 jockey stuck in a crippled 727 whose life was on the line—had thought of it until the last minute.

There were, he knew, myriad problems. This was no piece of cake. For one thing, as the officer serving as airboss had pointed out, it would be far too dangerous for McKay to use minimum approach speed over the edge of the deck, in case there was a sudden lessening of wind speed. McKay should carry at least an extra ten or fifteen knots.

But even then the figures added up. If the deck winds stayed at one hundred and five knots and McKay used one hundred twenty-five for an approach speed, the 727 would float over the edge at twenty knots.

Matching the aircraft's flight path with the wildly pitching deck would be the biggest challenge. He'd ordered a quick review of squadron records to make sure his memory of McKay's excellent flight history was accurate.

It was. McKay—Tigger, he corrected himself—had been a superlative pilot, well disciplined, well liked, and very professional. If anyone could master the challenge, he could.

And if not, well, he had almost forgotten the relay from the Commander in Chief to do everything possible to save those lives. The message was a flash in writing, and he ordered an extra copy made and put in the bridge safe. If the USS Eisenhower ended up host to a damaging tragedy, he had been following presidential orders to the letter.

The captain looked out over the approach end of the flight deck, where the deck crew was finishing the rigging of the aircraft-catching net. He was worried about someone being blown off the ship in the process, but they seemed to be managing. Normally the flight deck was shut down with winds over fifty knots. The upper lip of the net was high enough to catch the nose of a 727, and as long as it did, the right wing should never get close to the multistory superstructure on the right side of the flight deck known as the island.

The radio discussion between Scott McKay and airboss had subsided now. The ship was coming steady on a course of one-seven-zero, and the few deck crewmen assigned to stay outside were lashing themselves down against the hundred-knot winds now howling over the deck, rattling even the windows on the bridge.

"Steady on course, Captain," the OOD reported.

"Very well, all engines ahead flank, indicate nine nine nine."

"Uh, nine nine nine, Captain?"

"All she has, mister. If we're going to create a hurricane within a hurricane, let's do it right."

"Aye, sir. All engines ahead flank, indicate nine nine nine."

The sound of an engine telegraph ringing and being answered reached his ears as he picked up the field glasses and trained them on the 727 now almost hovering less than a half mile to the north, off the stern, at five hundred feet.

The captain picked up the interphone to the airboss.

"Up to speed, and you're cleared for recovery operations."

"Yes, sir."

"And keep those cameras rolling. This will be one for the books, however it turns out."

"Scott, we've got to do it now. We're literally down to fumes."

Scott nodded. "Okay. If we misjudge it and flame out before the main wheels are over the edge of the deck, I'll bank left and put her down in the wake of the ship."

Doc nodded.

"Tell him we're commencing approach, Doc."

Doc relayed the word as Scott nudged up the throttles slightly to fly them up to the appropriate glide slope, indicated by a light system called the meatball.

"Gear down. Landing check," Scott ordered.

Doc ran through the checklist items as the gear lowered into place with the same indication problem on the right main.

"Ignore it. It held at Seymour-Johnson."

"Ignored."

"I'm coming up on the glide slope, Doc. Call my altitude in fifty-foot increments. The radio altimeter will read about a hundred twenty feet as we come over the deck."

"Understood. We're showing five hundred fifty now."

"Okay, slowing to one hundred twenty knots indicated."

Doc nodded.

"No reversers, Doc. Don't let me forget I can not use the thrust reversers. We'd back right off the ship into the water with this wind."

"I'll keep you from retarding the throttles, too, remember?"

Scott nodded, breathing hard. "Right. Thanks, I might have forgotten. We'll keep the thrust at the same levels until they have us tied down. Once we touch, full-forward yoke, raise the flaps, speed brakes out."

"Speed brakes?"

"That's wrong?"

"We won't need more drag, Scott, just less lift."

"Oh. Right. No speed brakes, then."

"We're four hundred feet."

The great ship loomed before them, its deck pitching and rolling in the heavy seas as the nuclear-fired engines thrust its thousand-foot length forward at top speed. The turbulence from the wind whipping around and eddying off the island was a danger, Scott knew, and he was favoring the left side of the glide path as he nursed the 727 forward and down, feeling totally disoriented by the strange mix of speeds: one hundred twenty through the air, fifty over the water, and less than twenty knots in relation to the flight deck. He could feel his heart pounding hard, each beat echoing like a bass drum in his ears.

Again the deck pitched up markedly, drastically changing his aim point. Scott pulled the yoke slightly to readjust his approach angle and adjusted the throttles forward a hair.

"Three hundred fifty feet, Scott."

The altitude was an absolute measurement of the distance from the bottom of the aircraft to the surface of the ocean, more than a hundred feet below the lip of the flight deck.

A sudden zone of heavy turbulence engulfed them, forcing Scott to move the yoke rapidly in several directions to keep aligned. He could imagine how scary the gyrations must look from the perspective of the carrier, especially that of the LSO—the landing safety officer—operating the signal equipment.

The right wing tip entered the wake turbulence of the island, rolling the 727 slightly to the right as Scott fought to bring it back to centerline without losing the glide slope.

"Three hundred feet," Doc called out.

That's two hundred off the deck, Scott reminded himself.

He could see several deck crewmen hunkered down around the landing zone, and the net blowing concave toward him in the amazing gale the ship was creating. He flexed the yoke forward slightly to get back down to glide slope, then had to adjust just as rapidly to keep from sinking too fast.

The deck was dropping sharply as the ship's bow pitched up, but Scott rode it out, holding his approach angle and waiting for the stern to come back up. Chasing every movement could prove disastrous. He had to follow the meatball and keep the center of the ship in his peripheral vision as well.

Yoke forward, brakes full, as soon as we touch, he mentally reviewed. No reversers, no speed brakes.

"Two hundred fifty feet above. Speed is marker plus fifteen," Doc called out.

Once, years ago, he had handled the controls on a Sea King helicopter approaching the deck, and it had felt much the same.

Scott shook his head slightly to expunge the memory. It was dangerous. These controls were different. This was a 727 requiring forward thrust and glide path control. He wasn't landing, he was flying it to a touchdown.

"Two hundred feet."

The stern appeared to rise before him, shudder, then drop suddenly, changing his aim point too far down the deck. It would come back up, he reminded himself, and he was moving so slowly with respect to the deck, he could wait it out.

"One hundred fifty feet—almost there," Doc called.

The stern was still dropping and the aim point creeping forward toward the net. He didn't want to touch that far down the deck, but he had to wait for the upthrust of the stern.

But the temptation to adjust the Boeing's flight path downward was too great, and unconsciously Scott relaxed a bit of back pressure on the yoke and changed the glide path—just as the ship's bow found a massive wave trough and pitched forward.

With a speed he hadn't anticipated, the deck was roaring up from below. They were still a few yards shy of having the nosewheel pass over the lip of the deck, and that edge was now rising in Scott's perspective, threatening to become a barrier to hit rather than a threshold to cross.

He goosed the power and pulled back too sharply, causing the Boeing to leap back up nearly fifty feet, far above the intended glide path, but close in enough to continue.

The stern reached its apex and began dropping again as the cockpit and nose gear moved slowly forward past the rear edge of the flight deck, and he felt the aircraft drifting right.

No, the ship was moving left.

The turbulence from the island caught them full on the right wing, rolling the 727 sharply right as Scott overcontrolled trying to roll it back to the left.

The deck rose to meet him at a frightening rate.

Scott shoved the throttles forward and hauled back on the yoke to abort the approach as the LSO ordered a waveoff at the same moment. The nose of the Boeing was coming up, but not fast enough to prevent the main wheels from impacting the carrier's deck with thunderous force, the left one first, then the right one.

The uneven impacts propelled the 727 back in the air at a dangerous angle as Scott yanked harder on the yoke and banked sharply left to get up and away from the deck.

"Scott. We don't have fuel for a go-around!" Doc yelled.

"I'm just going… off here… to the side… to regroup," Scott struggled to say.

"We're repositioning," Doc snapped into the microphone. "We're not going to break off the approach."

"Wave off, ScotAir. Go around and reinitiate."

"No!" Doc replied. "There's no time. We're almost out of gas."

Scott stabilized the aircraft several hundred feet in the air, just to the left of the ship, and throttled back until the airspeed was hanging just below one hundred and eight knots. The carrier was essentially stationary in the cockpit windows to the right, the rear lip of the flight deck roughly aligned with the main gear of the Boeing. Scott brought the yoke forward slightly and dropped until the 727 was a mere fifty feet above deck level, watching as the stern of the carrier fell again and anticipating its next rise.

"I'm going to time the top of this rise and just move over and set down from the left," Scott said.

"Roger, but make it fast, Scott! I'd be afraid to look at the fuel gauges."

The voice of the LSO crackled through the speakers amidst the roar of the wind being transmitted by his mike.

"ScotAir, you can't approach from that position. Wave off. I say again, wave off and go around."

Doc punched the mike button.

"This will be a helo approach from the left quarter of the deck, guys. Get used to the idea, and get ready. We're out of time."

The stern was almost to the apex of its rise now, and Scott moved the yoke enough to slide them smoothly to the right, keeping the 727 a mere fifty feet over the side of the deck as they crossed with a relative forward speed of essentially zero.

They were virtually hovering now, some forty feet over the flight deck, the relative speed of ship and aircraft a perfect zero in an amazing sight Scott almost wanted to hold on to and examine.

But it was a dangerous place to be, and he prepared to move the yoke forward to descend at the exact moment number three engine reached the end of its fuel supply and flamed out with a pop.

The carrier had been stationary in their perspective, but now it began to recede ahead of them, very slowly at first, the rear main landing gear of the 727 moving backward over the remaining flight deck.

Scott and Doc realized what was happening simultaneously.

"Flameout!" Doc saw Scott's hand flash forward, jamming all three throttles forward to the firewall. Any more rearward movement and the main wheels would be over the water, off the back of the ship. They had to land now!

Scott moved the yoke forward smartly, dropping the Boeing toward the pitching deck some forty feet below the main wheels.

From the perspective of the LSO, the 727 had hovered over his head like a blimp, and he could think of nothing of any use to say to the pilot as the huge airliner floated into position over his flight deck and just… stayed there.

Suddenly the jetliner began moving backward as it hovered over the landing spot—slowly at first, then at an alarming rate. He poised his finger over the transmit button to order more power, but the nose was pitching down, the Boeing descending, the main wheels impacting the flight deck with a resounding metallic boom he could hear clearly above the roar of the wind.

They were down. The main gear was a mere ten feet forward of the rear lip of the deck, but they were down. The LSO glanced toward his deck crew, ready to order the 727 tied down, but something was happening in front of him as the ship reached the apex of another wave and began to subside.

The 727 was rolling backward!

As soon as they made contact, Scott jammed the yoke full-forward to hold them on the deck and prevent the nose from bouncing up in the hundred-knot wind. He'd keep the remaining engine at full power to hold their position and carefully move the aircraft forward, away from the rear edge of the carrier, but as he pushed up the throttles, number two engine also popped and died.

Suddenly there was nothing pushing ScotAir SO forward into the hundred-knot wind, and as the carrier's bow pitched up again, riding over another huge wave, Scott realized they were rolling toward oblivion.

"BRAKES!" Doc cried out.

Scott's feet were already full-forward on the brakes as Doc jammed his pedals full-down as well.

Still they were rolling backward.

"Pressure! Brake pressure…" Doc fumbled for the words and pointed toward a small gauge on his forward panel, and Scott understood instantly. The brake accumulator had failed. There was no hydraulic pressure left to stop them.

Scott's hand found the safety-wired emergency air brake handle and turned it before his conscious mind grasped what he was intending to do. There were men running toward them on the deck, waving their arms, and a voice on the radio was calling for them to put on their brakes. There couldn't be much room left behind the main wheels, and the ship's bow was still tilting up, dropping the stern, accelerating them backward.

Scott jammed the handle full to the right, to the stops, remembering the warning that the air pressure did not act immediately. Seconds would tick by, and they didn't have many more.

From the point of view of the LSO, the 727 was going to go off the ship backward. It was too late now, he realized. For some reason the crew couldn't use the brakes, and his deck crew had no way to throw a chain around the gear or raise a barrier in time.

The four wheels of the main landing gear were only a few feet from the edge, but there was a chance the plane would stop as the mains rolled off the edge and the belly smashed onto the deck.

There was a greater chance, he knew, that the nose would simply pitch up and the 727 would slide backward into the sea.

Deep within the plumbing system of the 727's brakes, the air pressure released seconds before from the emergency bottle finally overrode the various valves and pistons and compressed the hydraulic fluid to the necessary pressure, instantly stopping the rotation of the main wheels.

There was a flurry of activity outside, and through a sheet of rain that suddenly lashed the deck, Scott could see several members of the deck crew converging beneath his plane with wheel chocks and lines at the same moment he felt a forward deceleration and realized the captain had probably ordered all engines stopped. He could feel chains being wrapped around the nose gear to hold the 727 in place as a voice came through the cockpit speakers.

"ScotAir, do not release your brakes, and do not lower your rear stairs. Your tail section's hanging over the water."

"Roger that," Doc acknowledged.

Bright searchlights had snapped on all over the flight deck, illuminating the pelting rain that was blowing horizontally beneath the dark, gray skies overhead, still visible in the post-sunset twilight. To Scott, the scene was at once familiar and surreal, as though he had never left the ship.

But here he was in the same spot, this time in an airliner.

From nowhere two helmeted Navy crewmen wearing rain gear appeared in the cockpit door and took a quick measure of the situation. Orders were barked into a handheld radio as one of them knelt down to begin unstrapping Jerry.

Scott sat in shock for what seemed like an eternity until he realized Linda's hand was massaging his shoulder. He patted her hand and heard her seat belt snap open as he released his. Scott turned around in the seat, unprepared for the feminine wave that engulfed him as she wrapped her arms around him, her cheek pressed tightly against his, her body quaking slightly as she tried to catch her breath.

"You did it!" she whispered. "You did it, you did it, you did it! That was amazing!"

Scott's arms slowly moved around her as Doc moved his seat back and sighed, then leaned over and clasped Vivian's outstretched hand.

Another crewman appeared in the cockpit door as the two other crewmen gently moved Jerry out on a stretcher.

"Come on, all of you. NOW! We've got to get you out."

The crewmen wrapped large coats around Vivian and Linda and handed two more to Scott and Doc as the two pilots followed through the forward entry door down a metal ladder held steady by several deck crewmen. The wind was incredible, its strength threatening to blow them over, but it was slowing somewhat below eighty as the Eisenhower's speed diminished.

Several crewmen had scooped up Linda and Vivian and were rushing them toward the island, but another grabbed both Scott and Doc and turned them roughly to look where he was pointing.

"WHAT?" Scott yelled.

"THE CAPTAIN WANTS TO MAKE SURE YOU SEE THIS, SIR!" the crewman yelled back, shaking his finger toward the rear of the 727.

The nose gear of the Boeing had already been lashed to the deck with chains until one of the flight deck's yellow gear—a small tractor—could hook up to move it forward.

But the crewman was pointing to the main landing gear, and Scott followed his gaze, standing transfixed at what at first seemed an optical illusion: The main wheels seemed to be resting on the absolute edge of the rear lip of the Eisenhower's deck.

But it was no illusion.

There was less than a foot of deck space left.