The Intruders

12

One morning when jake came into the ready room the duty officer, First Lieutenant Doug Harrison, motioned to him. “Sir, the skipper wants to see you in his stateroom.”

“Sir! What is this, the Marines?”

“Well, we try.”

Jake sighed. “You know what it’s about?”

“No, sir.”

“For heaven’s sake, my name is Jake.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You try too hard. Let your hair grow out to an inch. Take a day off from polishing your shoes. Do twenty-nine pushups instead of thirty. You can overdo this military stuff, Doug.”

The skipper’s stateroom was on the third deck, the one below the ready room deck. Entry to the skipper’s subdivision was gained by lowering yourself through a watertight hatch, then going down a ladder.

Jake knocked. The old man opened the door. “Come in and find a seat.”

The pilot did so. Colonel Haldane picked up a sheaf of paper and waggled it, then tossed it back on his desk. “Your letter of resignation. I have to put an endorsement on it. What do you want me to say?”

Jake was perplexed. “Whatever you usually say, sir.”

“Technically your letter is a request to transfer from the regular Navy to the Naval Reserve and a request to be ordered to inactive status. So I have to comment about whether or not you would be a good candidate for a reserve commission. Why are you getting out?”

“Colonel, in my letter I said—”

“I read it. ‘To pursue a civilian career.’ Terrific. Why do you want out?”

“The war’s over, sir. I went to AOCS because it was that or get drafted. I got a regular Navy commission in 1971 because it was offered and my skipper recommended me, but I’ve never had the desire to be a professional career officer. To be frank, I don’t think I’d be a very good one. I like the flying, but I don’t think I’m cut out for the rest of it. I’ll be the first guy to volunteer to come back to fight if we have another war. I just don’t want to be a peacetime sailor.”

“You want to fly for the airlines?”

“I don’t know, sir. Haven’t applied to any. I might, though.”

“Pretty boring, if you ask me. Take off from point A and fly to point B. Land. Taxi to the gate. Spend the night in a motel. The next day fly back to A. You have to be a good pilot, I know, but after a while, I think a man with your training and experience would go quietly nuts doing something like that. You’d be a glorified bus driver.”

“You’re probably right, sir.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, Skipper.”

“Hells bells, man, why resign if you don’t have something to go to? Now if you had your heart set on going to grad school or into your dad’s business or starting a whorehouse in Mexi-cali, I’d say bon voyage—you’ve done your bit. That doesn’t appear to be the case, though. I’ll send this in, but you can change your mind at any time up to your release date. Think it over.”

“Yessir.”

“Oh, by the way, the skipper of the Snake-eyes had some nice words for the way you tanked Two Oh Seven and dropped him off on the downwind. A quick, expeditious rendezvous, he said, a professional job.”

“Too bad Two Oh Seven caught fire.”

“As soon as he slowed to landing speed the gas seeped into the engine bays around the edges of the engine-bay doors. The engines ignited the fuel. From the time the fire first appeared visually, it was a grand total of two and a half seconds before the hydraulic lines burned through. The pilot punched when the nose started down. He pulled back stick and there was nothing there.”

Jake Grafton just nodded.

“This is a man’s game,” Haldane said. He shrugged. “There’s no glamour, no glory, the pay’s mediocre, the hours are terrible and the stakes are human lives. You bet your life and your BN’s every time you strap on an airplane.”

The carrier and her escorts sailed west day after day. Columbia’s airplanes remained on deck in alert status as her five thousand men maintained their machinery, coped with endless paperwork, and drilled. They drilled morning, afternoon, and evening: fire drills, general quarters, nuclear, biological and chemical attack, collision, flooding, engine casualty, and flight deck disasters. The damage control teams were drilled to the point of exhaustion and the fire fighting teams did their thing so many times they lost count.

The only breaks in the routine came in the wee hours of the night when underway replenishments — UNREPS — were conducted. The smaller escorts came alongside the carrier every third day to top their tanks with NSFO — Navy standard fuel oil — from the carrier’s bunkers.

Nowhere was seamanship more on display than during the hours that two or three vastly dissimilar ships steamed side by side through the heavy northern Pacific night seas joined by hoses and cables.

The destroyers and frigates were the most fun to watch, and Jake Grafton was often on the starboard catwalk to look and marvel. The smaller warship would overtake the carrier from astern and slow to equal speed alongside. The huge carrier would be almost rock-steady in the sea, but the small ship would be pitching, rolling, and plunging up and down as she rode the sea’s back. Occasionally the bow would bite so deep into the sea that spray and foam would cascade aft, hiding the forward gun mount from view and dousing everyone topside.

As the captain of the destroyer held his ship in formation, a line would be shot across the seventy-five-foot gap between the ships to be snagged by waiting sailors wearing hard hats and life jackets. This rope would go into sheaves and soon a cable would be pulled across the river of rushing water. When the cable was secured, a hose would go across and soon fuel oil would be pumping. Three hoses were the common rig to minimize the time required to transfer hundreds of tons of fuel. Through it all the captain of the small boy stood on the wing of the bridge where he could see everything and issue the necessary orders to the steersman and engine telegraph operator to hold his ship in formation.

One night a supply ship came alongside. While Jake watched, a frigate joined on the starboard side of the supply ship, which began transferring fuel through hoses and supplies by high-line to both ships at once. Now both the frigate and carrier had to hold formation on the supply ship. To speed the process a CH-46 helicopter belonging to the supply ship lifted pallets of supplies from the stern of the supply ship and deposited them on the carrier’s flight deck, a VERTREP, or vertical replenishment.

Here in the darkness on the western edge of the world’s greatest ocean American power was being nakedly exercised. The extraordinary produce of the world’s most advanced economy was being passed to warships in stupendous quantity: fuel, oil, grease, bombs, bullets, missiles, toilet paper, movies, spare parts, test equipment, paper, medical supplies, canned soft drinks, candy, meat, vegetables, milk, flour, ketchup, sugar, coffee — the list went on and on. The supply ship had a trainload to deliver.

The social organization and hardware necessary to produce, acquire and transport this stupendous quantity of wealth to these powerful warships in the middle of nowhere could be matched by no other nation on earth. The ability to keep fleets supplied anywhere on the earth’s oceans was the key ingredient in American sea power, power that could be projected to anyplace on the planet within a thousand miles of saltwater. For good or ill, these ships made Washington the most important city in the world; these ships made the U.S. Congress the most important forum on earth and the President of the United States the most powerful, influential person alive; these ships enforced a global Pax Americana.

The whole thing was quite extraordinary when one thought about it, and Jake Grafton, attack pilot, history major and farmer’s son, did think about it. He stood under an A-6’s tail on the flight deck catwalk wearing his leather jacket with the collar turned up against the wind and chill, and marveled.

“I hear you’re going to get out,” the Real McCoy said one evening in the stateroom.

“Yeah. At the end of the cruise.” Jake was in the top bunk reading his NATOPS manual.

McCoy had the stock listing pages of the Wall Street Journal spread across the floor, his cruise box, bunk and desk. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his notebook full of charts on his lap. He had fallen into the habit of annotating his charts each evening after the ship received a mail delivery. He leaned back against his locker, stretched out his legs, and sighed.

“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “Getting exiled to the Marines got the wheels spinning. Being ten days behind the markets makes them spin faster. But no.” He shrugged. “Maybe one of these days, but not now.”

Jake put down his book. “What’s keeping you in? I thought you really liked that investment stuff?”

“Yeah, makes a terrific hobby. I think my problem is I’m a compulsive gambler. Stocks are the best game around — the house percentage is next to nothing — just a brokerage fee when you trade. Yet it’s just money. On the other hand, you take flying — that’s the ultimate gamble: your life is the wager. And waving — every pass is a new game, a new challenge. All you have is your wits and skill and the stakes are human lives. There’s nothing like that in civilian life — except maybe trauma medicine. If I got out I’d miss the flying and the waving too much.”

Jake was slightly stunned. He had never before heard flying described as a gamble, a game, like Russian roulette. Oh, he knew the risks, and he did everything in his power to minimize them, yet here was a man for whom the risks were what made it worth doing.

“If I were you,” Jake told the Real, “I wouldn’t make that crack about waving down in the ready rooms.”

“Oh, I don’t. A lot of these guys are too uptight.”

“Yeah.”

“They think the LSO is always gonna save them. And that’s what we want them to think, so they’ll always do what we tell them, when we tell them. If they get the notion in their hard little heads that we might be wrong, they’ll start second-guessing the calls. Can’t have that now, can we?”

“Ummm.”

“But LSOs are human too. Knowing that you can make a mistake, that’s what keeps you giving it everything you’ve got, all the time, every time.”

“What if you screw up, like the CAG LSO did with me? Only somebody dies. How are you going to handle that?”

“I don’t know. That’s the bad thing about it. You do it for the challenge and you know that sooner or later the ax will fall and you’re going to have to live with it. That’s why flying is easier. If you screw up in the cockpit, you’re just dead. There’s a lot to be said for betting your own ass and not someone else’s.”

“Aren’t many things left anymore that don’t affect someone else,” Jake muttered.

“I suppose,” said the Real McCoy, and went back to annotating his stock charts.

Columbia and her retinue of escorts entered the Sea of Japan one morning in late July through the Tsugaru Strait between the islands of Hokkaido and Honshu. Transiting the strait, the five-minute alert fighters were parked just short of the catapults with their crews strapped into the cockpits, but a mob of sailors stood and sat around the edge of the flight deck wherever there was room between the planes. Some were off-duty, others had received their supervisors’ permission to go topside for a squint, many worked on the flight deck.

Land was visible to the north and south, blue, misty, exotic and mysterious to these young men from the cities, suburbs, small towns and farms of America. That was Japan out there— geisha girls, kimonos, rice and raw fish, strange temples and odd music and soft, lilting voices saying utterly incomprehensible things. And they were here looking at it!

Several large ferries passed within waving distance, and the Japanese aboard received the full treatment — hats and arms and a few shirts. Fishing vessels and small coasters rolling in the swells were similarly saluted as the gray warships passed at fifteen knots.

This was the first cruise beyond America’s offshore waters for many of these young men. More than a few sniffed the wet sea wind and thought they could detect a spicy, foreign flavor that they had never whiffed before in the nitrogen-oxygen mixture they had spent their lives inhaling back in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Even the homesick and lovelorn admitted this was one hell of a fine adventure. If the folks at home could only see this…

So steaming one behind the other, the gray ships transited the strait while the young men on deck soaked up impressions that would remain with them for as long as they lived.

Those men standing on the carrier’s fantail saw something else: two thousand yards astern the thin sail of a nuclear-powered attack submarine made a modest bow wave. How long she had been there, running on the surface, no one on the flight deck was sure, but there she was. Those with binoculars could just make out a small American flag fluttering from the periscope.

Once through the strait, the ship went to flight quarters and the tourists cleared the flight deck. Except for the few pilots who had launched in the interception of the Russian Bears, most of the aviators had not flown for nine days. This layoff meant that they needed a day catapult shot and trap before they could legally fly at night. With this requirement in mind, the staff had laid on a series of surface surveillance missions in the Sea of Japan. These missions would also show the flag, would once again put carrier-borne warplanes over the merchantmen and warships that plied these waters just in case anyone had become bored listening to American ambassadors. By the time the carrier hurled her first planes down the catapults, the submarine had quietly slipped back into the depths.

Jake was not scheduled to fly today. He was, however, on the flight schedule — two watches in Pri-Fly and one after dark in the carrier air traffic control center, CATCC, pronounced cat-see. During these watches he was the squadron representative, to be called upon by the powers that be to offer expert advice on the A-6 should such advice become necessary. There was an A-6 NATOPS manual in each compartment for him to refer to, and before each watch he found it and checked it to make sure it was all there. Then he stood with observers from the other squadrons with the book in his hand, watching and listening.

In addition to ensuring the air boss and Air Ops officer had instant access to knowledgeable people, these watches were a learning experience for the observers. Here they could observe how the aircraft were controlled, why problems arose, and watch those problems being solved. In CATCC they could also watch the air wing commander, known as CAG, and their own skippers as they sat beside’ the Air Ops officer on his throne and answered queries and offered advice. Air Ops often conferred with the skipper of the ship via squawk box. Every facet of night carrier operations was closely scrutinized and heavily supervised. While the junior officer aloft in the night sweated in his cockpit, he was certainly not alone. Not as long as his radio worked.

During the day the seas became rougher and the velocity of the wind increased. By sunset the overcast was low and getting lower. Below the clouds visibility was decreasing. A warm front was coming into the area.

Jake watched the first night recovery on the ready room PLAT monitor as he did paperwork. The deck was moving and there were three bolters. The second night recovery Jake spent in CATCC with the NATOPS book in his hand. It was raining outside. Two pilots were waved off and four boltered, one of them twice. One of the tankers was sour and a flailex developed when the spare tanker slid on the wet catapult track during hook-up and had to be pushed back with a flight deck tractor. While this mess kept the deck foul, the LSOs waved off three planes into the already-full bolter pattern.

When the last plane was aboard — the recovery took thirty-eight minutes — Jake headed for his stateroom to work on a training report.

He was still at it half an hour later when the Real McCoy came in, threw his flight deck helmet and LSO logbook onto his desk and flopped into his bunk. “Aye yei yei! What a night! They’re using those sticks to kill rats in the cockpits and the weather is getting worse.”

“You were on the platform?” Jake meant the LSO’s platform on the edge of the flight deck.

“Yep. I’m wavin’ ’em. Another great Navy night, I can tell you. A real Chinese fire drill. Three miles visibility under a thousand-foot overcast, solid clag up to twenty-one grand, ten-foot swells — why didn’t I have the sense to join the Air Farce? The boys in blue would have closed up shop and gone to the club three hours ago.”

“The next war,” Jake muttered.

“Next war, Air Force,” McCoy agreed. “So, wanna stand on the platform with me for the next act?”

Jake regarded his half-finished report with disgust, got out of his chair and stretched. “Why not? I’ve listened to you wavers preach and moan for so long that I could probably do it myself.”

McCoy snorted. “That’ll be the day!”

Jake did a clumsy tap dance for several seconds, then struck a pose. “He looked good going by me.”

McCoy groaned and closed his eyes. He was a self-proclaimed master of the short catnap, so Jake timed it. Sixty-five seconds after the LSO closed his eyes he was snoring gently.

They came out of the skin of the ship by climbing a short ladder to the catwalk that surrounded the flight deck, yet was about four feet below flight deck level.

The noise of twenty jet engines at idle on the flight deck was piercing, even through their ear protectors. Raindrops swirling in the strong wind displaced by the ship’s structure came from every direction, seemingly almost at once, even up through the gridwork at their feet. The wind blew with strength, an ominous presence, coming from total darkness, blackness so complete that for a second or two Jake felt as if he had lost his vision. This dark universe of wind and water was permeated by the acrid stench of jet exhaust, which burned his nose and made his eyes water.

Gradually his eyes became accustomed to the red glow of the flight deck lights and he could see things — the outline of the catwalk, the rails, the round swelling shapes of the life raft canisters suspended outboard of the catwalk railing, and in the midst of that void beyond the rail, several fixed lights. The escorts. Above his head were tails of airplanes. He and McCoy crouched low as they proceeded aft toward the LSO platform to avoid those invisible rivers of hot exhaust that might be flowing just above their heads. Might be. The only sure way to find one was to walk into it.

Somewhere aloft in the night sky, high above the ship, were airplanes. With men in them. Men sitting strapped to ejection seats, studying dials and gauges, riding the turbulence, watching fuel gauges march mercilessly toward zero.

Jake and the Real McCoy climbed a ladder to the LSOs’ platform as the first of the planes on deck rode a catapult into the night sky. Both men watched the plane’s lights as it climbed straight ahead of the ship. There — they were getting fuzzy…And then they were gone, swallowed up by the night.

“Six or seven hundred feet, a couple of miles viz. That’s it,” McCoy roared into Jake’s ear.

The petty officer who assisted the LSOs was already on the platform getting out the radio handsets, plugging in cords, checking the PLAT monitor, donning his sound-powered headset and checking in with the enlisted talkers in Pri-Fly and Air Ops.

The platform was not large, maybe six feet by six feet, a wooden grid that jutted from the port side of the flight deck. To protect the signal officers from wind and jet blast, a piece of black canvas stretched on a steel frame was rigged on the forward edge of the platform, like a wall. So the platform was an open stage facing aft, toward the glide slope.

Under the edges of the platform, aft and on the seaward side, hung a safety net to catch anyone who inadvertently fell off the platform. Or jumped. Because if a pilot lost it on the glide slope in close and veered toward the platform, going into the net was the only way for the LSOs to save their lives.

Jake Grafton glanced down into the blackness. And saw nothing. “Relax, shipmate,” McCoy told him. “The net’s there. Honest Injun.”

The platform was just aft of the first wire, about four hundred feet away from the ship’s center of gravity, so it was moving. Up and down, up and down.

As McCoy checked the lights on the Fresnel lens, which was several hundred feet forward of the platform, Jake watched. McCoy triggered the wave-off lights, the cut lights, adjusted the intensity of the lens. The lights seemed to behave appropriately and soon he was satisfied.

The Fresnel lens was, in Jake’s mind, one of the engineering triumphs that made carrier aviation in the jet age possible. In the earliest days, aboard the old Langley, pilots made approaches to the deck without help. One windy day one of the senior officers grabbed a couple signal flags and rushed to the fantail to signal to a young aviator who was having trouble with his approach. This innovation was so successful that an officer was soon stationed there to assist all the aviators with signal flags, or paddles. This officer helped the pilot with glide slope and lineup, and since the carriers all had straight decks, gave the vital engine “cut” signal that required the aviator to pull his throttle to idle and flare.

When angled decks and jets with higher landing speeds came along, it became obvious that a new system was required. As usual, the British were the innovators. They rigged a mirror on one side of the deck and directed a high-intensity light at it. The light was reflected up the glide slope. By rigging a set of reference lights midway up on each side of the mirror, a datum was established. A pilot making his approach would see the light reflected on the mirror — the ball — rise above the datum lights when he was above glide slope, or high, and descend below it when he was low. The landing signal officer was retained to assist the pilot with radio calls, and to give mandatory wave-offs if an approach became unsafe.

The Fresnel lens was the mirror idea carried one step further. The light source was now contained within five boxes, stacked one on top of the other. The datum lights were beside the middle, or third, box. Due to the way the lens on each light was designed, a horizontally wide but vertically narrow beam of light was directed up the glide slope by each box. Crossing the fantail, the beam from the middle box, the “centered ball,” was a mere eighteen inches in height.

This was the challenge: a pilot must fly his jet airplane through turbulent air into an eighteen-inch-thick window in the sky. At night, with the deck moving as the ship rode a seaway, hitting this window became extraordinarily difficult, without argument the most difficult challenge in aviation. That anyone other than highly skilled, experienced test pilots could do it on a regular basis was a tribute to the training the Navy gave its aviators, and was the reason those who didn’t measure up were ruthlessly weeded out.

You could do it or you couldn’t — there was no in between. And yet, no one could do it consistently every time. The task was too difficult, the skills involved too perishable. So night after night, in fair weather and foul, they practiced, like they were doing on this miserable night in the Sea of Japan, eighty miles west of Honshu.

As Jake Grafton stood on the platform staring into the darkness as the wind swirled rain over him, he was glad that tonight was not his night. It felt so good to be here, not up there sweating bullets as the plane bounced around, trying to keep the needles steady, watching the fuel, knowing that you were going to have to fly that instrument approach to the ball, then thread the needle to get safely back aboard. To return to the world of the living, to friends, to food, to letters from loved ones, to a bunk to sleep in, to a world with a past and a future. There in that cockpit when you were flying the ball there was only the present, only the airplane, only the stick in your right hand and the throttles in your left and the rudder beneath your feet. There was only the now, this moment for which you had lived your whole life, this instant during which you called upon everything within you to do this thing.

Oh, yes. He was glad.

Other LSOs were climbing to the platform now, so Jake moved as far back as he could to stay out of the way. All these specialists were here to observe, to see another dozen landings, to polish their skills, to learn. This was normal. The platform was packed with LSOs on every recovery.

The last airplane to be launched was upon the catapult at full power when the lights of the first plane on the glide slope appeared out of the gloomy darkness astern. In seconds the catapult fired and the deck became unnaturally silent.

The Real was already three feet out onto the deck holding the radio headset against his ear with his left hand while he held the Fresnel lens control handle in his right over his head, a signal to his colleagues that he was aware the deck was foul. Jake leaned sideways and looked forward around the edge of the canvas screen. The waist catapult crewmen were working furiously to put the protector plate over Cat Three’s shuttle and clear the launching gear from the flight deck. Until they were out of the landing area, the deck would remain foul.

“Come on, people,” the air boss roared over the flight deck loudspeaker. He seemed to believe that his troops worked best when properly stimulated. In any event, he didn’t hesitate to stimulate them. “We’ve got a Phantom in the groove. Let’s clear the deck.”

The last flight deck tractor zipped across the foul line near the island, yet three cat crewmen were still struggling with the protector plate.

Jake lifted one side of his mouse ears away from his head. He heard McCoy roger the ball call.

The air boss on the loudspeaker again: “He’s called the ball. Let’s get this deck clear now, people!”

There, the cat crewmen were running for the catwalk. Jake looked aft. The Phantom was within a half mile, about two hundred feet high, coming fast. On his nose-gear door was a stop-light arrangement of little lights, red, yellow and green, that was operated by the angle-of-attack instrument in the cockpit. Red for slow, yellow for on speed, and green for fast. The yellow light was lit, but even as Jake saw it, the red light flickered.

“You’re going to go slow,” Real told the pilot. “Little power.”

The red foul deck light went out and the green light came on.

“Clear deck,” shouted the LSO talker.

“Clear deck,” McCoy echoed, and lowered his right arm.

The jet was slamming through the burble caused by the island, his engines winding up, then decelerating. In seconds the Phantom crossed the ramp with its engines wailing, its hook reaching for a wire. Then the hook struck in a shower of sparks and the main gear thumped down. The hook snagged the second wire as the engines wound up to their full fury — a futile roar, because the big fighter was quickly dragged to a quivering halt. The exterior lights went out. The hook runner raced across the foul line with his wands signaling “hook up.” Seconds later the Phantom was taxiing out of the landing area and the wings were folding.

Meanwhile McCoy was giving the grade to another LSO, who was writing in the log. “Little slow in the middle, OK Two.”

McCoy glanced at Jake. “Nice pass. Pitching deck and reduced visibility and he handled it real well. I bet I couldn’t do as well on a shitty night like this.”

Then he was back out into the landing area listening to the radio. In seconds another set of lights came out of the goo. Another Phantom. This guy had more difficulty with the pass than the first fighter, but he too successfully trapped. The third Phantom boltered and McCoy waved off the fourth one. It was going to be a long recovery.

One of the LSOs handed Jake his radio. He put it to his ear in time to hear the RA-5C Vigilante call the ball.

The Vigilante was the most beautiful airplane the Navy owned, in Jake’s opinion. It was designed as a supersonic nuclear bomber back when nuclear bombs were big. The weapon was carried in an internal bay and was ejected out a door in the rear of the plane between the tailpipes. The Navy soon discovered this method of delivery didn’t work: the bomb was trapped in the airplane’s slipstream and trailed along behind— sometimes for seconds at a time before it fell free. The weapon’s impact point could not be predicted and there was a serious danger that the bomb would strike the aircraft while it was tagging along behind, damaging the plane and the weapon. So the Vigilantes were converted to reconnaissance aircraft. Fuel tanks were installed in the bomb bays and camera packages on the bellies.

With highly swept wings and empennage, a needle nose, and two huge engines with afterburners, the plane was extraordinarily fast, capable of ripping through the heavens at an honest Mach 2+. And it was a bitch to get aboard the ship. Jake thought the Vigie pilots were supermen, the best of the best.

Yet it was the guys in back who had the biggest cojónes, for they rode the beast with no control over their fate. Even worse, they rode in a separate cockpit behind the pilot that had only two tiny windows, one on each side of the fuselage. They could not see forward or aft and their view to either side was highly restricted. A-6 BNs with their seats beside the pilot and excellent view in all quadrants regarded the Vigie backseaters with awe. “It’s like flying in your own coffin,” they whispered to one another, and shuddered.

Tonight the Vigie pilot was having his troubles. “I got vertigo,” he told McCoy on the platform.

“Fly the ball and keep it coming,” the LSO said. “Your wings are level, the deck is moving, average out the ball. You’re slightly high drifting left…Watch your lineup!” The Vigilante was a big plane, with a 60-foot wingspan — the foul lines were 115 feet apart.

“Pick up your left wing, little power…right for lineup.”

Now the Vigie was crossing the ramp, and the right wing dropped.

“Level your wings, ” McCoy roared into the radio.

The Vigilante’s left wing sagged and the nose rose. Jake shot a glance at the PLAT monitor: the RA-5 was way too far right, his right wingtip almost against the foul line.

His gaze flipped back to the airplane, just in time to hear the engines roar and see the fire leap from the afterburners, two white-hot blowtorches fifteen feet long. The light ripped the night open, casting a garish light on the parked planes, the men standing along the right foul line, and the ship’s superstructure.

With her hook riding five feet above the wires and her left wing slightly down, the big swept-wing jet crossed the deck and rose back into the night sky. Only then did the fire from the afterburners go out. The rolling thunder continued to wash over the men on the ship’s deck, then it too dissipated.

An encounter with an angry dragon, Jake thought, slightly awed by the scene he had just witnessed.

“A nugget on his first cruise,” McCoy told his colleagues, then dictated his comments to the logbook writer.

The motion of the ship was becoming more pronounced, Jake thought, especially here on the platform. When the deck reached the top of its stroke, he felt slightly light on his feet.

McCoy noticed the increased deck motion too, and he switched the lens to a four-degree glide slope, up from the normal three and one half. The talker informed the controllers in Air Ops.

In seconds there was another plane on the ball, this time an A-7 Corsair. “Three One Zero, Corsair ball, Three Point Two.”

“Roger ball, four-degree glide slope. Pitching deck.”

This guy was an old pro. McCoy gave him one call, a little too much power, and that was all it took. He snagged a three.

The next plane was the Phantom that boltered, and this time he was steadier. Yet the steeper glide slope fooled him and he was fast all the way, flattened out at the ramp and boltered again.

The next plane, an A-7, took more coaching, but he too caught a wire. So did the Phantom that followed him, the one that had waved off originally. The next A-7 had to be waved off, however, because the deck was going down just before he got to the in-close position, while he was working off a high and slightly fast. If he had overdone his power reduction he would have been descending through the glide slope just as the deck rose to meet him: a situation not conducive to a long life.

An A-6 successfully trapped, then the Phantom came around for his third pass. Clear sky and the tanker were twenty-one thousand feet above, so the pressure was on. McCoy looked tense as a coiled spring as he stood staring up the glide slope waiting for the F-4’s lights to appear out of the overcast.

There!

“One Zero Two, Phantom ball, Four Point Two, trick or treat.” Trick or treat meant that he had to trap on this pass or be sent to tank.

“Roger ball, four-degree glide slope, it’ll look steep so fly the ball.”

A dark night, a pitching deck, rain…these were the ingredients of fear, cold, clutching, icy as death. A carrier pilot who denied he ever experienced it was a liar. Tonight, on this pass, this fighter pilot felt the slimy tentacles of fear play across his backbone. As he crossed the ramp he reduced power and raised the nose. The heavy jet instantly increased its rate of descent.

“No,” screamed McCoy.

The hook slapped down and the main mounts hit and the number one wire screamed from its sheaves.

“There’s one lucky mother,” McCoy told the writer and the observing signal officers when the blast of the Phantom’s two engines had died to an idling whine. “Spotted the deck and should have busted his ass, but the deck was falling away. Another military miracle. Who says Jesus ain’t on our side?”

More A-7s came down the chute. The first one got aboard without difficulty but the second announced he had vertigo.

“Roger that. Your wings are level and you’re fast. Going high. Steep glide slope, catch it with power. More power.” He was getting close and the red light on his nose gear door winked on. He was slow. “Power. Power! Power!”

At the third power call the Real McCoy triggered the wave-off lights, but it was too late. Even as the Corsair’s engine wound up, the wheels hit the very end of the flight deck and there was a bright flash. With the engine winding up to full screech the plane roared up the deck, across all the wires, and rotated to climb away. McCoy shouted “Bolter, bolter, bolter,” on the radio.

Now McCoy handed the radio and Fresnel lens pickle to the nearest LSO. He began running toward the fantail. Jake Grafton followed.

The dim light made seeing difficult. The deck was really moving here, 550 feet aft of the ship’s center of gravity. The ship was like a giant seesaw. Keeping your knees bent helped absorb the thrusts of the deck.

McCoy took a flashlight from his hip pocket and played it on the ramp, the sloping end of the flight deck. The ramp dropped away at about a thirty-degree angle, went down ten or twelve feet, then ended. That was the back end of the ship. The flashlight beam stopped three feet right of the centerline stripe, at a deep dent.

“Hook strike,” Jake shouted.

“No, that’s where his main mount hit.” Real scanned with the flashlight and stopped at another dent, the twin of the first. “There’s where the other wheel hit. His hook hit below the ramp.” Then McCoy turned and ran for the LSO platform, with Jake following.

Back on the LSO platform McCoy told the sailor wearing the sound-powered phones, “His hook hit the back end of the ship and disintegrated. He doesn’t have a hook now. Tell Air Ops.”

Without a hook, the plane could be trapped aboard only with the barricade, a huge nylon net that was rigged across the landing area like a giant badminton net. Or it could be sent to an airfield in Japan.

Air Ops elected to send the crippled plane to Japan.

McCoy got back to the business of waving airplanes. He had the Vigilante on the ball, with an A-6 and EA-6B behind him, then the E-2 Hawkeye and KA-6 tanker to follow.

This time the Vigie pilot drifted right of centerline and corrected back toward the left. He leveled his wings momentarily, so McCoy let him keep coming. Then, passing in close, the left wing dropped. The Vigilante slewed toward the LSOs’ platform as McCoy screamed “Wave-off’ and dived to the right.

Jake had his eyes on the approaching plane, but McCoy was taking everyone on the platform with him. Jake was almost to the edge when the RA-5 swept overhead in burner, his hook almost close enough to touch. Instinctively Jake ducked.

That was close! Too close. Now Jake realized that he and McCoy were the only two people still on the platform. He looked down to his right. Two hands reached up out of the darkness and grabbed the edge by Jake’s foot. Everyone else went into the net.

They clambered back up, one by one. The talker picked up his sound-powered headset where he had dropped it and put it back on.

McCoy leaned toward the talker. “Tell Air Ops that I recommend he send the Vigie to the beach for fuel and a turnaround. Give that guy some time to calm down.”

And that is what Air Ops did.

The last plane was still two miles out when a sailor brought a lump of metal to the platform and gave it to McCoy. “We found this down on the fantail. There’s a lot of metal shards down there but this was the biggest piece. I think it’s a piece of hook point.”

McCoy examined it by flashlight, then passed it to Jake.

It was a piece of the A-7’s hook point, all right. About a pound of it. The point must have shattered against the structure of the ship and the remnants rained down on the fantail.

When the last plane was aboard, Jake followed McCoy down the ladder to the catwalk, then down another flight into the ship.

“That was exciting,” Jake Grafton told the LSO.

“You dumb ass. You should have gone into the net.”

“Well, I didn’t think—”

“That Vige about got us. No shit.”

“Hell of a recovery.”

“That’s no lie. Did you hear about the A-7 that had the ramp strike?”

“No.”

“The talker told me. The guy had a total hydraulic failure on the way to the beach and ejected. He’s in the water right now.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The rebound of the hook shank probably severed his hydraulic lines. He’s swimming for it. Just another great Navy night.”

The pilot of the RA-5C Vigilante who had so much trouble with lineup on this recovery landed in Japan and refueled. He returned to the ship for the last recovery of the evening and flew a fair pass into a three-wire.

The A-7 pilot with the hydraulic failure wasn’t rescued until ten o’clock the next morning. He spent the night in his life raft, buffeted by heavy seas, overturned four times, though each time he regained the safety of the raft. He swallowed a lot of seawater and did a lot of vomiting. He vomited and retched until blood came up. Still retching when the helicopter deposited him back on the carrier, he had to be sedated and given an IV to rehydrate him. He was also suffering from a serious case of hypothermia. But he was alive, with no bones broken. His shipmates trooped to sick bay in a steady procession to welcome him back to the company of living men.