The Intruders

8

Steam catapults make modern aircraft carriers possible. Invented by the British during World War II, catapults freed designers from the necessity of building naval aircraft that could rise from the deck under their own power after a run of only three hundred feet. So wings could shrink and be swept as the physics of high speed aerodynamics required, jet engines that were most efficient at high speeds could be installed, and airframes could be designed that would go supersonic or lift tremendous quantities of fuel and weapons. A luxury for most of the carrier planes of World War II, the catapult now was an absolute requirement.

The only part of the catapult that can be seen on the flight deck is the shuttle to which aircraft are attached. This shuttle sticks up from a slot in the deck that runs the length of the catapult. The catapult itself lies under the slot and consists of two tubes eighteen inches in diameter arranged side by side like the barrels of a double-barreled shotgun. Inside each tube— or barrel — is a piston. There is a gap at the top of each barrel through which a steel lattice mates the two pistons together, and to which the shuttle on deck attaches.

The pistons are hauled aft mechanically into battery by a little cart called a “grab.” Once the pistons are in battery, the aircraft is attached to the shuttle, either by a linkage on the nose gear of the aircraft in the case of the A-6 and A-7, or by a bridle made of steel cable in the case of the F-4 and RA-5. Then the slack in the bridle or nose-tow linkage is taken out by pushing the pistons forward hydraulically — this movement is called “taking tension.”

Once the catapult is tensioned and the aircraft is at full power with its wheel brakes off, the firing circuit is enabled when the operator pushes the “final ready” button.

Firing the catapult is then accomplished by opening the launch valves, one behind each tube, simultaneously, which allows superheated steam to enter the barrels behind the pistons.

The amount of acceleration given to each aircraft must be varied depending on the type of aircraft being launched, its weight, the amount of wind over the deck, and the outside air temperature. This is accomplished by one of two methods. Either the steam pressure is kept constant and the speed of opening of the launch valves is varied, or the launch valves are always opened at the same rate and the pressure of the steam in the accumulators is varied. Aboard Columbia, the steam pressure was varied and the launch valves were opened at a constant rate.

Although the launch valves open quickly, they don’t open instantaneously. Consequently steam pressure rising on the back of the pistons must be resisted until it has built up sufficient pressure to move the pistons forward faster than the aircraft could accelerate on its own. This resistance is provided by a shear bolt installed in the nose gear of the aircraft to be launched, to which a steel hold-back bar is attached. One end of the bar fits into a slot in the deck. The bolt used in the A-6 was designed to break cleanly in half under a load of 48,000 pounds, only then allowing the pistons in the catapult, and the aircraft, to begin forward motion.

The superheated steam expanding behind the pistons drove them the length of the 258-foot catapults of the Columbia in about 2.5 seconds. Now up to flying speed, the aircraft left the deck behind and ran out into the air sixty feet above the ocean, where it then had to be rotated to the proper angle of attack to fly — in the A-6, about eight degrees nose-up.

Meanwhile, the pistons, at terminal velocity and quickly running out of barrels, had to be stopped. This was accomplished by means of water brakes, tubes welded onto the end of each of the catapult barrels and filled with water. The pistons each carried a tapered spear in front of them, and as the pistons reached the water brakes the spears penetrated the open ends, forcing water out around the spears. Water is incompressible, yet as the spears were inserted the escape openings for the water got smaller and smaller. Consequently the deeper the spears penetrated the higher the resistance to further entry. The brakes were so efficient that the pistons were brought to a complete stop after a full-power shot in only nine feet of travel.

The sexual symbolism of the tapered spears and the water-filled brakes always impressed aviators — they were young, lonely and horny — but the sound a cat made slamming into the brakes was visceral. The stupendous thud rattled compartments within a hundred feet of the brakes and could be felt throughout the ship.

Tonight as he sat in the cockpit of an A-6 tanker waiting for the cat crew to retract the shuttle, Jake Grafton ran through all the things that could go wrong with the cat.

The launching officer, Jumping Jack Bean, was wandering around near the hole in the deck that contained the valves and gauges that allowed him to drag steam from the ship’s boilers to the catapult accumulators. The enlisted man who always sat on the edge of the hole wearing a sound-powered telephone headset that enabled him to talk to the men in the catapult machinery spaces was already in his place, staring aft at the two planes on the cats. The luminescent patches on his helmet and flight deck jersey were readily visible in the dim red glow of the lights from the ship’s island superstructure, almost a hundred yards aft.

If anything goes wrong with the machinery below-decks, Jake Grafton knew, the probable result would be less end speed for the plane being launched. A perfect shot gave the launching aircraft a mere fifteen knots above stall speed. A couple knots less and the pilot would never notice. Five off, the plane would be sluggish. Ten off, a ham-handed pilot could stall it inadvertently. Fifteen or more off, the plane was doomed.

Bad, or “cold,” cat shots were rare, thank God. The catapult was very reliable, more so than the aircraft that rode it. They could have an engine flame out under the intense acceleration, dump a gyro, lose a generator, spring a hydraulic or fuel leak… or the pilot could just become disoriented during the sudden, intense transition from sitting stationary on deck to instrument flight fifteen knots above a stall, at night. The blackness out there beyond the bow was total, a void so vast and bleak that one wanted to avert his eyes. Look at something else. Think about something else.

The hell of it was that there was nothing else to look at— nothing else to think about. Tonight Jake was flying a tanker, which was going to be flung off the pointy end of the boat in just a few minutes right into that black void, climb to 5,000 feet and tank a couple Phantoms, climb up to 20,000 and circle the ship for an hour and a half, then come back and trap. That was it, the whole damn mission. Go around and around the ship. Orbit. At max conserve airspeed. On autopilot. The challenge would be staying awake.

No, the challenge was this goddamn night cat shot. The worst part of the whole flight was right at the start — the blindfolded ride on the rabid pig…

The cat crewmen were now taking the rubber seal out of the catapult slot. Steam wisped skyward from the open slot, steam leaking from some fitting somewhere in the cat. They kept the slot seal in between launches, Jake knew, to help maintain the temperature of those eighteen-inch tubes.

The handler had parked the tanker here on the cat, probably so that the miserable peckerhead pilot would have to sit in the cockpit watching the steam wisp up from the cat against the backdrop of the black void while he thought about dying young.

And his life wasn’t going so good just now. First Callie’s jerk father, then Tiny Dick Donovan, the in-flight engagement, that near-midair…

Maybe God was trying to tell him something.

Or maybe those Phantoms this morning hadn’t been there at all.

What if he had just imagined them? Of course the planes passed each other quickly, but there were at least two Phantoms and four A-6s, two guys in each plane. A total of twelve men, and he was the only one who had seen the varmint.

Really doesn’t make sense.

Does it?

“What are you staring at through that windshield?” Flap Le Beau.

“There’s a naked woman out there. If you look real careful you can see her nipples.”

“You look like you’re mentally composing your will. That isn’t good leadership. You are supposed to be impressing me with your self-confidence, calming my fears. The stick’s on your side, remember?”

“What if those F-4s weren’t really there this morning? What if I just imagined it?”

“Are you still on that? You saw ’em. They were there.”

“How come no one else is in a sweat?”

“What do you want me to do, fill my drawers? Slit my wrists? Fate fired a bullet and it missed.”

“You could have the common courtesy to look nervous, sweat it a little.”

“You’re making me nervous.”

“That’ll be the day,” Jake Grafton replied disgustedly.

“Okay, I’m sweating. It’s dripping out of my armpits. Every jerk pilot I ever met has tried to kill me. I’m waiting for you to give it a whirl.”

“How come you got into aviation, anyway?”

“Jungle rot. Pretty bad case. They tell me I’m now a paragraph and photo in a medical textbook. Little did I know when I signed up for this glamorous flying life how much jungle I still had to visit.”

The brown-shirt plane captain standing beside the aircraft waved his wands to get Jake’s attention, then signaled for a start.

Time to do it.

“It could have been worse,” Flap told Jake as he started the left engine. “I could have made medical history with a spectacular social disease. Wouldn’t that have been a trip? For a hundred years every guy going overseas would have had to watch a movie featuring my diseased, ulcerated pecker.”

Six minutes later Jake rogered the weight board and eased the plane forward into the shuttle. He felt the nose-tow bar drop into the shuttle slot and came off the brakes and added power at the yellow-shirt’s signal.

The engines began winding up. Another small jolt as the hydraulic arm shoved the cat pistons into tension, taking all the slack out of the hold-back bar. Now just the shear-bolt was holding them back.

Full power, wipe out the controls, check the gauges, cat grip up…“You ready?” he asked Flap.

“I’m really really ready.”

He could feel the vibration as the engines sucked air and blasted it out the exhausts against the jet blast deflector, feel rather than hear the ear-splitting roar. He swept his eyes across the annunciator panel — all warning lights out. The exterior light master switch was on the end of the cat grip, right beside his left thumb. He flicked it on.

The cat officer took a last look at the island, looked up the cat at the void, then swept his yellow wand down in a fencer’s lunge until he touched the deck, then he came up to a point.

The catapult fired. The G’s slammed him back…and both fire warning lights illuminated.

They were big red lights, one on each side of the bombsight on the top of the instrument panel. Labeled L FIRE and R FIRE, both lights shone into his eyes like spotlights as the acceleration pressed him deeper into the seat back.

Oh, God, he thought, trying to take it in as the adrenaline whacked him in the heart.

His eyes went to the engine instruments, white tapes arranged vertically in front of his left knee. They looked—

The acceleration stopped and the plane was off the cat, the nose coming up. A glance at the airspeed — not decaying. Angle-of-attack gauge agreed. He grabbed the stick and slapped the gear handle up. Wings level, check the nose…

His left hand rose automatically toward the emergency jettison button above the gear handle. If he pushed it and held it down for one second the five drop tanks, each containing two thousand pounds of fuel, would be jettisoned from the aircraft. She would instantly be five tons lighter and could then fly on one engine. He was sorely tempted but he didn’t push it. His hand came back to the throttles.

Which engine was it?

Both lights were screaming at him!

Which fucking engine?

Engine tapes still okay…airspeed okay…eight degrees nose up. He was squinting against the glare of the red fire lights. He had let the left wing sag so he picked it up. Climbing through two hundred feet, 160 knots…

Both fire lights—the book said to pull the affected engine to idle, but he had both lights on!

Fire!

Was he on fire? If he was it was time to eject. Jettison this fucking airplane. Swim for it. He looked in the mirrors. Black. Nothing to see.

He became aware that Flap was on the radio. “… both fire lights…declaring an emergency…Boss, can you see any fire?”

The reply was clear in his ears. “Off the bow, you look fine. You say you have both fire lights on?”

Jake cut in on Flap. “Both of them. We’d like a dump charley.”

“Your signal dump. It’ll be about eight more minutes until we have a ready deck. We’ll call you.”

“Roger.”

His heart was slowing. She didn’t seem to be on fire. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Accelerating through 185 knots, he raised the flaps and slats, then toggled the switches for the wing and main dump valves. They were carrying 26,000 pounds of fuel and the max he could take aboard the ship was 6,000. He needed to dump ten tons of fuel into the atmosphere.

And as he reached for the switch that would isolate a portion of the combined hydraulic system, he looked at the hydraulic gauges. For the first time. He had forgotten to look at the hydraulic gauges before. Now, squinting against the glare of the fire lights, he saw the needle on the right combined system pump flickering.

Uh-oh. A fire could be melting hydraulic lines. Hydraulic fluid itself was nonflammable, but the lines could melt.

“We have hydraulic problems,” he told Flap.

“How come those fire lights are so bright?” Flap asked. “I can barely see the gauges.”

“Dunno.” Jake was too busy to cuss out that comfortable, anonymous bureaucrat who had specified the wattage of the bulbs in the fire warning lights. They were certainly impossible to miss. You are about to die, they screamed.

“Maybe you better stop dumping the main tank.”

Flap was right. Jake secured the main tank dump. Still 8,500 pounds there.

By now he had the plane at 2,500 feet headed downwind, on the reciprocal of the launch bearing, steady at 250 knots. When he pulled the power back the fire lights stayed on.

Did they have a fire? Modern jet aircraft utilized every cubic inch of space inside the fuselage for fuel, engines, pumps, switches, hydraulic lines, electronic gear, wires, etc., and the spars and stringers that held the whole thing together. A fire anywhere within the plane had to be burning something critical. And if it got to the fuel tanks…well, the explosion would be spectacular.

Jake again checked the rearview mirrors for a glow. Nothing.

“Get out the checklist,” he told Flap as he turned off the cabin pressurization system. Unfortunately the ducts carrying bleed air from the engines had failed on a half-dozen occasions in the past: the resulting fires had cost the Navy men and airplanes. Jake had no desire to add his name to that list. If there was a leak downstream of the valve that controlled cabin pressurization, closing the valve should isolate it.

“Got it right here. You ready?”

“Yeah.”

Flap read the comments and recommended procedure over the ICS. One of the comments read, If a fire warning light stays illuminated, secure the affected engine.

He only had two engines and both fire lights were lit. So much for that advice.

The right combined hydraulic system gauge read zero. The needle on the left one was sagging, twitching. And a hydraulic leak was a secondary indication of fire! But did he have one?

“Marine airplanes are shit,” he groused to Flap, who shot back:

“Yeah, the Navy gives us all the crap they don’t want.”

Flap got busy on the radio and reported the hydraulic failure. Soon he was talking to Approach. The controller put them in an orbit ten miles aft of the ship. Jake slowed to 220 knots and checked the fuel quantity remaining in the wings. Still a few thousand. In the glow of the left wing-tip light he could just make out the stream from the dump pipe gushing away into the slipstream.

Well, he had it under control. Other than the nuisance glare of the fire lights, everything would be fairly normal. He would blow the gear down, lower the flaps electrically and just motor down the glide slope. He could hack it.

He released the left side of his oxygen mask. He sniffed carefully, then swabbed the sweat from his face. His heart rate was pretty much back to normal and the adrenaline was wearing off. There was no fire — he was fairly confident of that.

Wing fuel read zero. OK. He would leave the dump open a moment or two longer to purge the tank, then secure it. He reached down and punched the button to make the needle on the fuel gauge register main tank fuel. And stared, unable to believe his eyes. Only 3,500 pounds.

Holy…!

Yes, the main dump switch was off. But the valve never closed! All the fuel in the main tank had dumped, right down to the top of the standpipe, which prevented the last 3,600 pounds from going overboard. And he had already burned a hundred pounds of that 3,600.

He slapped on the mask and spoke to the controller. “Uh, Approach, War Ace Five Two One has another problem out here. The main dump valve didn’t close. We’re down to Three Point Five. How soon can you give us a charley?”

“Standby, War Ace.”

Flap leaned across the center consol and stared at the offending fuel gauge for several seconds, then straightened up. He didn’t say anything.

“How far is it to Hickam Field?” Jake asked.

Flap consulted the notes on his kneeboard. “About a hundred fifty miles.”

“We’re almost to bingo!” Jake exclaimed, his horror evident in his voice. “We’ve got to have a tanker right now!”

Flap Le Beau keyed the radio: “Approach, War Ace Five Two One, our state is Three Point Five. We’re eight hundred pounds above bingo. Apparently the fuselage dump valve stuck open. Request a tanker ASAP.”

“Negative, War Ace. We’ll take you aboard in about eight or ten more minutes.”

A sense of foreboding seized Jake Grafton. They were in deep and serious trouble. “How’s the spare tanker?” he asked.

“We’re still trying to launch it,” was the reply. “We should have it off in a few minutes.”

Jake couldn’t help himself. “Is there some problem with the spare?” He felt like a condemned man asking if he could have one more cigarette.

“Yes.” One word.

“They’re digging us a hole,” Flap told Jake.

The pilot glumly examined the instruments. What else can go wrong? Bingo was the fuel state that required he depart for the shore divert field on a max range profile flight. Bingo was a low fuel emergency. And he was eight hundred pounds above that state. He had to leave for the shore field before his fuel reached that level or he would flame out before he got there.

Without additional fuel which only a tanker could provide, Jake had to trap or eject. Well, he still had some time. Right now he was burning four thousand pounds of fuel per hour. When he blew the gear down he would be unable to raise them again. And his fuel consumption would immediately jump to six thousand pounds per hour in level flight. More in a climb. At this moment he had three thousand four hundred.

Why had he switched the fuel gauge from the fuselage tank to the wings? So he could monitor dumping. Of course, there was a totalizer there under the needle, but it was usually unreliable. Over the years he had developed a habit of ignoring it. What a fool he was! The lash stung and he laid it on hard.

He could stand the glare of the fire warning lights no longer. He took the L-shaped flashlight hanging on the webbing of his survival vest and pounded the offending lights until they shattered. The cockpit was darker, a lot darker, and that calmed him.

At least the weather was good tonight. Ceiling was high, maybe ten thousand feet, and the visibility underneath was ten miles or so. He could see the lights of the carrier eight miles away, just a little collection of red and white lights in the dark universe, and here and there, the little globs of light that were her escorts. At least he could fly alongside a destroyer or frigate when he had to eject. Then he and Flap wouldn’t have to depend on the rescue helicopter to find them.

That was something. A straw to grasp.

Exasperated, his thoughts turned to Callie. It was four-thirty in the morning in Chicago; she was probably in bed asleep.

Thirty-one hundred pounds on the fuel gauge. A-6s had been known to flame out with as much as seven hundred pounds showing on the gauge. He could have as little as twenty-four hundred.

He got a pen from the sleeve pocket of his flight suit and did some figuring on the top card on his kneeboard, which as usual he wore strapped to his right thigh. The numbers told him he was burning sixty-seven pounds of fuel a minute, about ten gallons. Every six seconds a gallon of gas went into the engines. Twenty-four hundred divided by sixty seven — hell, he could dangle here twisting slowly in the wind for thirty-five more minutes. What’s the problem? What’s the sweat? Well, when he lowered the gear the power requirements would go up. He might bolter. The deck could stay fouled. The weather could go to hell. Something else could go wrong with this plane— like the gear might not come down or the hook might stay up. Or…He felt frustrated and outraged. The plane had betrayed him!

The second hand on the clock caught his eye. It swept around and around and around.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I stole a police car?” Flap asked.

“No, and I don’t need to hear it now.”

“Stole a cruiser, with a bubble-gum machine on top, siren, police radio, even a shotgun on a rack in the front, the whole deal. Fellow in Jersey wanted it for a farm truck. He wanted to take the trunk lid off and weld up a pickup bed. Was gonna use it to haul manure. He was a retired Mafia soldier. Now I didn’t know Mafia guys ever retired, but this one apparently had. He was out of the rackets and had him a little farm in north Jersey. A brother I knew told me there was five hundred bucks in it for me if I could come up with a police car. Luckily I knew another bro who was screwing a cop’s daughter pretty regular, so I got to thinking. Five hundred bucks was real money to me back then. Anyway…”

Jake could hear pilots in other planes checking into marshal. It all sounded pretty normal. Well, the weather was good, no one was shooting…

“Ninety-nine planes in marshal, ninety-nine planes in marshal, this is Approach.” Ninety-nine meant “all.” “Your signal, max conserve. Add ten minutes to your commence times. Add ten minutes to push times.”

Now what?

Should he ask? He waited a minute, waited while another sixty-seven pounds of fuel went into the engines. Then he said, “Approach, War Ace Five Two One. Does that ten minutes apply to me too?”

“Affirm.”

“Uh, what’s the problem?”

Silence. Then, “The nose gear collapsed on a Phantom on Cat Three. The deck is foul.” Cat Three was on the waist, in the landing area.

“War Ace Five Two One has Two Point Eight. Any word on Texaco?” Texaco was the tanker.

“We’re working on it, War Ace.”

Flap left his story unfinished. Jake stared at the offending fuel gauge. Should he just say Bingo and go?

The ship was headed northwest, into the prevailing wind. Hickam was northeast. As the minutes passed they were getting no closer to Hickam, but on the other hand, they were getting no farther away. Without more fuel, what did it matter?

The minutes ticked by. Five, six, seven…

The needle on the fuel gauge passed twenty-four hundred pounds and kept descending. One pass — that was it. They would get one lousy pass at the deck. If he boltered for any reason, he and Flap were going to have to swim for it.

The crew fidgeted.

The hell of it was that they were betting everything on the emergency gear extension system. Compressed nitrogen would be used to blow the gear down since hydraulic fluid was no longer available to do the job. If any one of the three wheels failed to lock down, they could not trap aboard the ship. They would have to eject.

Betting your ass on any one system in an airplane with a variety of other problems is not the recommended path to a long and happy life.

Jake Grafton sat monitoring the instruments and thinking about the black ocean beneath him. At least the water was warm. With warm water came sharks. He hated sharks, feared them unreasonably. Sharks were his phobia. If he went into the water he would have to fight back the panic, have to keep functioning somehow.

He had never told anyone about the sharks. The thought of being down there with them made him nauseated. And at night, when he couldn’t see. Of course he would be bleeding somewhere. Nobody ever ejected without getting cut somehow. Blood in the water, trying to keep from drowning…

“War Ace Five Two One, your signal charley.”

“Five Two One,” Jake acknowledged bitterly, then bit his lip. He should have told the brass to go to hell and bingoed.

First came ten degrees of flaps, which had to be lowered electrically. Linked to the flaps were the slats on the leading edge of the wing; they also came out. The flaps and slats changed the shape of the wings and allowed them to develop lift at lower airspeeds. They also added drag, slowing the plane.

Next came the hook. Jake merely pulled the handle and made sure the transition light disappeared.

The Intruder was slowing…170…160…150…“Here goes nothing,” he told Flap as he lowered the gear handle to the gear down position, then rotated the knob on the end ninety degrees and pulled it out. The up-up-up indications on the panel barber-poled.

He waited. He could feel the drag increasing on the plane, could see his airspeed decreasing, and added power. The fuel-flow tapes surged upward.

C’mon, baby. Give me three down indications. Please!

The nose gear locked down first. Two seconds later the mains locked down. Seventeen hundred pounds of fuel left in the main bag.

“They’re down,” he announced to Flap and God and whoever else was listening.

Approach controller was giving him a steer.

“Hell!” Flap exclaimed disgustedly between calls from the controller, “it wasn’t even close. We don’t even have a low fuel light.” The low fuel warning light would come on at about 1,360 pounds.

“We aren’t down yet,” Jake pointed out.

“Oh ye of little faith, take note. We’re almost down.”

Jake concentrated on flying the plane, staying on speed, smoothly intercepting the glide path. He was carrying less power than normal since the speed brakes were inoperative after the hydraulic failure, and while this saved a few gallons of gasoline, it caused its own problems. If he got high, retarding the throttles would be less effective than usual — the plane would tend to float.

He saw the ball two miles out. At a mile he called, “Five Two One, Intruder ball, One Point Four.”

“Roger ball. Paddles has you. Looking good…fly the ball!”

The meatball began to rise above the datums and he pulled power aggressively while watching that angle-of-attack needle.

Paddles was talking to him. “Power back on…too much, off a little…No, little more…lineup…”

Any second would come the burble, the swirl of air disturbed by the ship’s island. He anticipated it just a smidgen on the power and didn’t have to slam on too much, then he was quick to get it off.

Coming across the ramp the airspeed decayed a tad and the ball began to sink.

“Power!” shouted the LSO.

Slam! The wheels hit. Throttles to the stops…and the welcome, tremendous jerk as the hook snagged a wire.

“Two wire, I think,” Flap told him.

Jake didn’t care. A huge sigh of relief flooded through him.

Here came the yellow-shirts. He raised the flaps and slats electrically while they chocked the plane, then cut the engines.

They were back.

Walking across the flight deck with their helmet bags in their hands, with the warm sea wind on their wet hair, the firm steel deck beneath their flight boots, Flap repeated, “It wasn’t even close.”

No, Jake Grafton acknowledged to himself, it wasn’t. Not tonight. But a man can’t have luck all the time, and someday when he reached into that tiny little bag where he kept his luck, the bag would be empty. A hold-back bolt would break at the wrong time, a taxiing plane would skid into another, the airborne tanker would go sour, the weather would be bad…some combination of evil things would conspire against the man aloft and push him over the edge. Jake Grafton, veteran of more than 340 cat shots and arrested landings, knew that it could happen to him. He knew that as well as he knew his name.

The brass had taken the net from under the tightrope when they didn’t let him bingo, and he was infuriated and disgusted with himself for letting them do it.

I think, Jake wrote to Callie that night, that a man’s fate is not in his control. We are under the illusion that we can control our destinies, that the choices we make do make a difference, but they don’t. Chance rules our lives. Chance, fate, fortune— whatever you wish to call it — sets the hook and pulls the string and we quiver and flail, jerk and fight. Maybe pray.

I don’t think praying helps very much. I do it anyway, just in case. I ask Him to be with me when I fall.