The Intruders

18

A Soviet task group came over the horizon one Sunday in late November. Columbia had no flying scheduled that day, so gawkers packed the flight deck when Jake Grafton came up for a first-hand look. A strong wind from the southwest was ripping the tops off the twelve- to fifteen-foot swells. Spindrift covered the sea, all under a clear blue sky. Columbia was pitching noticeably. The nearest destroyer was occasionally taking white water over the bow.

Up on deck Jake ran into the Real McCoy. “Where are they?”

McCoy pointed. Jake saw six gray warships in close formation, closing the American formation at an angle from the port side, still four or five miles away. The U.S. ships were only making ten knots or so due to the sea state, but the Soviets were doing at least twice that. Even from this distance the rearing and plunging of the Soviet ships was quite obvious. Their bows were rising clear of the water, then plunging deeply as white water cascaded across the main decks and smashed against the gun mounts.

On they came, seemingly aiming straight for Columbia, which, as usual, was in the middle of the American formation.

Gidrograf, the Soviet Pamir-class AGI that had been shadowing the Americans’ for the last month, was trailing along behind the Americans, at least two miles astern. Her speed matched the Americans’ and she made no move to join the oncoming Soviet ships.

“What do you think?” McCoy asked.

“Unless Ivan changes course, he’s going to run his ships smack through the middle of our formation.”

“I think that is exactly what he intends to do,” McCoy said after a bit, when the Russians were at least a mile closer.

“Sure looks like it,” Jake agreed. The angle-of-bearing hadn’t changed noticeably, which was the clue that the ships were on collision courses. He glanced up at Columbia’s bridge. Reflections on the glass prevented him from seeing anyone, but he imagined that the captain and the admiral were conferring just now.

“Under the rules of the road, we have the right of way,” McCoy said.

“Yeah.” Somehow Jake suspected that paper rules didn’t count for much with the Russian admiral, who was probably on the bridge of his flagship with one eye on the compass and the other on the Americans.

The Soviet ships were gorgeous, with sleek, raked hulls and superstructures bristling with weapons and topped with radar dishes of various types. The biggest one was apparently a cruiser. A couple were frigates, and the other three looked like destroyers. All were armed to the teeth.

The American destroyer on the edge of the formation gave way to the Russians. On they came. Now you could see the red flags at their mastheads as dots of color and tiny figures on the upper decks, like ants.

“Big storm coming,” McCoy said, never taking his eyes off the Russians. “Up from the southwest. Be here this evening.”

Jake looked aft, at the carrier’s wake. It was partially obscured by parked aircraft, but he saw enough. The wake was straight as a string. He turned his attention back to the Soviet ships. About that time the collision alarm sounded on Columbia’s loudspeaker system. Then came the announcement: “This is not a drill. Rig for collision portside.”

The Soviet destroyers veered to pass ahead and behind Columbia but the cruiser stayed on a collision course. Now you could plainly see the sailors on the upper decks, see the red flag stiff in the wind, see the cruiser’s bow rise out of the water as white and green seawater surged aft along her decks, see that she was also rolling maybe fifteen degrees with every swell.

But she was a lot smaller than the carrier. The American sailors on the flight deck were well above the Russians’ bridge. In fact, they could see the faces of the Russian sailors at the base of the mast quite plainly. The Russians were hanging on for dear life.

The Russian captain was going to veer off. He had to. Jake jumped into the catwalk so he could see better as the cruiser crossed the last fifty yards and the carrier’s loudspeaker boomed, “Stand by for collision portside. All hands brace for collision.”

The Soviet captain misjudged it. He swung his helm too late and the sea carried his ship in under the carrier’s flight deck overhang. The closest the two hulls came was maybe fifteen feet, but as the cruiser heeled her motion in the sea pushed her mast and several of the radar antennae into the underside of the flight deck overhang. The Russian sailors clustered around the base of the mast saw that the collision was inevitable only seconds in advance and tried to flee. Two didn’t make it. One fell to the cruiser’s main deck, but the other man fell into that narrow river of white water between the two ships and instantly disappeared from view.

The top of the mast hit the catwalk forward of the Fresnel lens and ripped open three of the sixty-man life raft containers. The rafts dropped away. One ended up on the cruiser and the others went into the sea. The Russians’ mast and several radar antennae were wiped off the superstructure and her stack was partially smashed.

Then the cruiser was past, surging ahead of Columbia with her mast trailing in the water on her portside.

Jake bent down and stuck his head through the railing under the life raft containers so that he could keep the cruiser in sight. If the Russian captain cut across Columbia’s bow he was going to get his ship cut in half.

He did cut across, but only when he was at least six or seven hundred yards ahead, still making twenty knots.

The Soviet ships rejoined their tight formation and continued on course, pulling steadily away.

An American destroyer dropped aft to look for the lost Soviet sailor as the air boss ordered the flight deck cleared so he could launch the alert helo.

The helo searched for half an hour. The destroyer stayed on the scene for several hours, yet the Russian sailor wasn’t found.

By evening a line of thunderstorms formed a solid wall to the southwest, a wall that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. As the dusk deepened lightning flashed in the storms continually. Jake was on deck watching the approaching storms and savoring the sea wind when the carrier and her escorts slowly came about and pointed their bows at the lightning.

The ships rode better on the new course. Apparently the heavies had decided to sail through the storm line, thereby minimizing their time in it. Unfortunately the weather on the back side of the front was supposed to be bad; heavy seas, low ceilings and lots of rain. Oh well, no flying tomorrow either.

When the darkness was complete and the storms were within a few miles, Jake went below. This was going to be a good night to sleep.

The ringing telephone woke Jake. The Real McCoy usually answered it since all he had to do was roll over in his bunk and reach, and he did this time. The motion of the ship was less pronounced than it had been when Jake and Real went to bed about 10 p.m., during the height of the storm.

“McCoy, sir.”

Jake looked at his watch. A little after 2 A.M.

After a bit, he heard his roommate growl, “This had better not be your idea of a joke, Harrison, or your ass is a grape…Yeah, yeah, I’ll tell him…In a minute, okay?”

Then McCoy slammed the receiver back on the hook.

“You awake up there?”

“Yeah.”

“They want us both in the ready room in five minutes, ready to fly.”

“Get serious.”

“That’s what the man said. Must be World War III.”

“Awww…”

“If Harrison is jerking our chains he’ll never have another OK pass as long as he lives. I promise.”

But Harrison wasn’t kidding, as Jake and the Real found out when they went through the ready room door. The skipper and Allen Bartow were standing near the duty desk talking to CAG Kall. Flap Le Beau was listening and sipping a cup of coffee. All of them were in flight suits.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” CAG said. He looked like he had had a great eight hours sleep and a fine breakfast. He couldn’t have had, Jake knew. Things didn’t work like that in this Navy.

“ ’Morning, CAG,” McCoy responded. “So it’s war, huh?”

“Not quite. Pull up a chair and we’ll sort this out.”

Apparently the admiral and CINCPACFLT had been burning the airways with flash messages. The Soviet ambassador in Washington had delivered a stiff note to the State Department protesting the previous day’s naval incident in the Indian Ocean, which he called “a provocation.” The powers that be had concluded that the U.S. Navy had to serve notice on the Russians that it couldn’t be bullied.

“The upshot is,” CAG said, “that we have been ordered to make an aerial demonstration over the Soviet task group, tonight if possible.”

“What kind of demonstration, sir?”

“At least two airplanes, high-speed passes, masthead height if possible.”

Eyebrows went up. McCoy got out of his chair and went to the television, which he turned to the continuous weather display. Current weather was three to four hundred feet broken to overcast, three-quarters of a mile visibility in rain. Wind out of the northwest at twenty-five knots.

CAG was still talking. “… it occurred to me that this would be a good time to try our foul weather attack scheme on the Russians. I thought we could send two A-6s and three EA-6Bs. We’d put a Hummer up to keep it safe. The admiral concurred. The Prowler crews and Hummer crews will be here in a few minutes for the brief. What do you think?”

“Sir, where are the Russians?”

“Two hundred miles to the east. Apparently the line of thunderstorms went over them several hours ago and they are also under this system.”

As he finished speaking the ship’s loudspeaker, the 1-MC, came to life: “Flight quarters, flight quarters, all hands man your flight quarters stations.”

In minutes the Prowler and Hawkeye crews came in and found a seat and the brief began. CAG did the briefing, even though he wouldn’t be flying. Forget the masthead rhetoric from Washington — the lowest any of the crews could go was five hundred feet.

The three senior pilots of the Prowler squadron would fly their planes, and the C.O. of the E-2 squadron would be in the left seat of the Hawkeye. Lieutenant Colonel Haldane and the Real McCoy would fly the go A-6s and Jake Grafton would man the spare.

“Uh, skipper,” Flap said, “if I may ask, why McCoy?”

“He’s got the best landing grades in the squadron. Grafton is second. As it happens, they have more traps than anyone else in the outfit and getting back aboard is going to be the trick. As for me, this is my squadron.”

“Yessir, but I was wondering about McCoy. Let’s face facts, sir. When the landing signal officer has the best landing scores — well, it’s like an umpire having the top batting average. There’s just a wee bit of an odor, sir.”

Laughter swept the room as McCoy grinned broadly. He winked at Jake.

“What say you and I flip for the go bird,” Jake suggested to McCoy.

“Forget it, shipmate. If my plane’s up, I’m flying it. Tonight or any other night.”

“Come on! Be a sport.”

The Real was having none of it. And Jake understood. Naval aviation was their profession. Given the weather and sea state, this would be a very tough mission. When you began ducking the tough ones, you were finished in this business. Maybe no one else would know, but you would.

In flight deck control Jake looked at the airplane planform cutouts on the model ship to see where his plane was spotted. Watching the handler check the weight chits as rain splattered against the one round, bomb-proof window and the wind moaned, Jake Grafton admitted to himself that he was glad he had the spare. He wasn’t ducking anything — this was the bird the system gave him and he wasn’t squawking.

All he had to do was preflight, strap in and start the engines, then sit and watch Haldane and McCoy ride the catapult into the black goo. After that he could shut down and go below for coffee. If he went to the forward mess deck galley he could probably snag a couple doughnuts hot from the oven.

The handler was a lieutenant commander pilot who had left the Navy for two years, then changed his mind. The only billet available when he came back was this one — two years as the aircraft handler on Columbia. He took it, resigning himself to two years of shuffling airplane cutouts around this model, two years of listening to squadron maintenance people complain that their airplanes weren’t where they could properly maintain them, two years listening to the air boss grouse that the go birds were spotted wrong, two years checking tie-down chains and weight chits, two years listening to the hopes, dreams and fears of young, homesick sailors while trying to train them to do dangerous, difficult jobs, two years in purgatory with no flying…yet the handler seemed to be weathering it okay. True, his fuse was getting almighty short and he wasn’t getting enough sleep, but his job performance was first-rate, from everything Jake had seen and heard. And behind the tired face with the bleary eyes was a gentle human being who liked to laugh at a good joke in the dirty-shirt wardroom. Here in Flight Deck Control, however, he was all business.

“Forty-six thousand five hundred pounds? That right, Grafton?” The handler was reading from Jake’s weight chit. This would be his weight if he launched.

“Yessir.”

Savoring the hubbub in Flight Deck Control while surreptitiously watching the handler, Jake Grafton felt doubt creep over him. Was getting out a mistake? It had been for the handler. An eight-to-five job somewhere, the same routine day after day…

He turned for the hatch that led to the flight deck. The first blast of cool air laden with rain wiped the future from his mind and left only the present, this moment, this wild, windy night, this airplane that awaited him under the dim red island floodlights.

His bird was sitting on Elevator Four. The tail was sticking out over the water, so he checked every step with his flashlight before he moved his feet. If you tripped over the three-inch-high combing, you would go straight into the ocean to join that Russian sailor who went in yesterday. Poor devil — his shipmates didn’t even stop to look for him. How would you like to go to sea in that man’s navy?

Going around the nose he and Flap passed each other. “What a night,” Flap muttered.

Both men were wearing their helmets. They had the clear visors down to keep the rain and salt spray out of their eyes. The wind made the raindrops hurt as they splattered against exposed flesh.

Jake took his time preflighting the ejection seat. He was tempted to hurry at this point so he could sit down and the plane captain could close the canopy, but he was too old a dog. He checked everything carefully, methodically while he used his left hand to hang tightly to the airplane. The motion of the ship seemed magnified out here on this elevator. The fact he was eight or nine feet above the deck perched on this boarding ladder and buffeted by the wind and rain didn’t help. He pulled the safety pins, inspected, counted and stowed them, then he sat.

The plane captain climbed the ladder to help him hook up the mask, don the leg restraints, and snap the four Koch fittings into place. Then the plane captain went around to help Flap. When both men were completely strapped in, he closed the canopy.

Now Jake checked the gear handle, armament switches, circuit breakers, and arranged the switches for engine start. He had done all these things so many times that he had to concentrate to make sure he was seeing what was there and not just what he expected to see.

When he had the engines started, Flap fired up the computer while Jake checked the radio and TACAN frequencies.

“Good alignment,” Flap reported and signaled to the plane captain to pull the cable that connected the plane to the ship’s inertial navigation system.

They were ready. Now to sit here warm and reasonably dry and watch the launch.

The E-2 taxied toward Cat Three on the waist. A cloud of water lifted from the deck by the wash of the two turboprops blasted everything. The plane went onto the cat, the JBD rose, then the engines began to moan. Finally the wing-tip lights came on. The Hawkeye accelerated down the catapult and rose steadily into the night. The lights faded quickly, then the goo swallowed them.

“Uh-oh,” Flap said. “Look over there at Real’s plane.”

A crowd of maintenance people had the left engine access door open. Someone was up on the ladder talking to McCoy. In less than a minute a figure left the group and headed for Jake’s plane.

The man on the deck lowered the pilot’s boarding ladder while Jake ran the canopy open. Then he climbed up. The squadron’s senior troubleshooter. “Mr. McCoy can’t get his left generator to come on the line,” he shouted. Jake had to hold his helmet away from his left ear to hear. “You’re going in his place.”

“His tough luck, huh?”

“Right.”

“The breaks of Naval Air…”

“Be careless.” The sergeant reached for Jake’s hand and shook it, then shook Flap’s. He went down the boarding ladder and Flap closed the canopy.

“We’re going,” Jake said on the ICS. “In McCoy’s place.”

“I figured. By God, when they said all-weather attack, they meant all-weather. Have you ever flown before on a night this bad?”

“No.”

“Me either. Just to send a message to the Russians, like the Navy was an FTD florist. Roses are red, violets are blue, you hit our ships and we’ll fuck you. The peacetime military ain’t what it was advertised to be. No way, man.”

The yellow-shirted taxi director was signaling for the blue-shirts to break down the tie-downs. Jake put his feet on the brakes. “Here we go.”

It never gets any easier. In the darkness the rain streaming over the windshield blurred what little light there was and the slick deck and wind made taxiing difficult. Just beyond the bow the abyss gaped at him.

He ran through possible emergencies as he eased the plane toward the cat.

Total electrical failure while taking the cat shot was the emergency he feared the most. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what to do — he did. The doing of it in a cockpit lit only by Flap’s flashlight as adrenaline surged through you like a lightning bolt would be the trick. You had just one chance, in an envelope of opportunity that would be open for only a few seconds. You had to do it right regardless or you would be instantly, totally dead.

“Why do we do this shit?” he muttered at Flap as they taxied toward the cat.

“Because we’re too lazy for honest work and too stupid to steal.”

The truth of the matter was that he feared and loathed night cat shots. And flying at night, especially night instrument flight. There was nothing fun about it, no beauty, no glamour, no appeal to his sense of adventure, no sense that this was a thing worth doing. The needles and gauges were perverse gadgets that demanded his total concentration to make behave. Then the night flight was topped off with a night carrier landing— he once described a night carrier hop as sort of like eating an old tennis shoe for dinner, then choking down a sock for dessert.

Tonight as he ran through the launch procedures and ran the engines up to full power, rancid fear occupied a portion of his attention. A small portion, it is true, but it was there.

He tried to fight it back, to wrestle the beast back into its cage deep in his subconscious, but without success.

Wipe out the cockpit with the controls, check the engine instruments…all okay.

Jumping Jack Bean was the shooter. When Jake turned on his exterior lights, he saluted the cockpit perfunctorily with his right hand while he kept giving the “full power” signal with the wand in his left hand. Jake could see he was looking up the deck, waiting for the bow to reach the bottom of its plunge into a trough between the swells.

Now Bean lunged forward and touched the wand to the deck. The bow must be rising.

The plane shot forward.

Jake’s eyes settled on the attitude instruments.

The forward edge of the flight deck swept under the nose.

Warning lights out, rotate to eight degrees, airspeed okay, gear up.

“Positive rate of climb,” Flap reported, then keyed the radio and reported to Departure Control.

The climb went quickly because the plane was carrying only a two-thousand-pound belly tank and four empty bomb racks. But they had a long way to climb. They finally cleared the clouds at 21,000 feet and found the night sky filled with stars.

An EA-6B Prowler was already there, waiting for them. It was level at 22,000 feet, on the five-mile arc around the ship. Its exterior lights seemed weak, almost lonely as they flickered in the starry night.

The Prowler was a single-purpose aircraft, designed solely to wage electronic war. Grumman had lengthened the basic A-6 airframe enough to accept two side-by-side cockpits, so in addition to the pilot the plane carried three electronic warfare specialists known as ECMOs, or electronic countermeasures officers. Special antennae high on the tail and at various other places on the plane allowed the specialists to detect enemy radar transmissions, which they then jammed or deceived by the use of countermeasures pods that hung on the wing weapons stations. Tonight, in addition to the pods, this Prowler carried a two-thousand-pound fuel tank on its belly station. Although the EA-6B was capable of carrying a couple missiles to defend itself, Jake had never seen one armed.

As expensive as Boeing 747s, these state-of-the-art aircraft had not been allowed to cross into North Vietnam after they joined the fleet, which degraded their effectiveness but ensured that if one were lost, the Communists would not get a peek at the technology. Here, again, America traded airplanes and lives in a meaningless war rather than risk compromising the technological edge it had to have to win a war with the Soviets, a war for national survival.

Jake thought about that now — about trading lives to keep the secrets — as he flew in formation with the Prowler and looked at the telltale outline of helmeted heads in the cockpits looking back at him. Then the Prowler pilot passed Jake the lead, killed his exterior lights, slid aft and crossed under to take up a position on Jake’s right wing.

The Prowler pilot was Commander Reese, the skipper of the squadron. He was about five and a half feet tall, wore a pencil-thin mustache, and delighted in practical jokes. Inevitably, given his stature, he had acquired the nickname of Pee Wee.

Jake retarded the throttles and lowered the nose. In seconds the clouds closed in around the descending planes and blotted out the stars.

“Departure, War Ace Five Oh Two and company headed southeast, descending.”

“Roger, War Ace. Switch to Strike.”

“Switching.”

Flap twirled the radio channelization knob and waited for the Prowler to check in on frequency. Then he called Strike.

Flying in this goo, at night, wasn’t really flying at all. It was like a simulator. The world ended at the windshield. Oh, if you turned your head you could see the fuzzy glow of the wing-tip lights, and if you looked back right you could see your right wing-tip light reflecting off the skin of the Prowler that hung there, but there was no sense of speed or movement. Occasional little turbulence jolts were the only reminder that this box decorated with dim red lights, gauges and switches wasn’t welded to the earth.

The big plan was for each bomber and its accompanying Prowler to run a mock attack on the Soviet task group as close to simultaneously as possible. Jake would approach from the southwest, Colonel Haldane from the northwest. The E-2 Hawkeye, the Hummer, would monitor their progress and coordinate the attack. However, each A-6 BN had to find the task group on radar before they sank below the radar horizon. Then the bombers would run in at five hundred feet. In an actual attack they would come in lower, perhaps as low as two hundred, but not at night, not in this weather, for drill. The risks of flying that close to the sea were too great.

Flap started the video recorder, a device that the A-6A never had. This device would record everything seen on the radar screen, all the computer and inertial data, as well as the conversation on the radio and in the cockpit.

“Recorder’s on,” he told Jake. “Keep it clean.”

This electronic record of the attack could be used for poststrike analysis, or, as CAG had hinted in the brief, sent to Washington to show to any bigwigs or congressmen who wanted to know what, exactly, the Navy had done in response to the collision at sea.

Had the Soviet skipper intended to bump the carrier? Did he tell the truth to his superiors? These imponderables had of course been weighed in Washington, and orders had been sent to the other side of the earth.

It was midafternoon in Washington. The city would be humming with the usual mix of tourists, government workers anxious to begin their afternoon trek to the suburbs, the latest tunes coming over the radios, soap operas on television…

Jake wondered about the weather there. Late November. Was it cold, rainy, overcast?

All those people in America, finishing up another Monday, and he and Flap were here, over the Indian Ocean, passing ten thousand feet with a Prowler on their wing and a Soviet task group somewhere in the night ahead.

“See it yet?”

“No. Stop at eight thousand and hold there.”

As they flew eastward the turbulence increased. Jake had Flap arrange his rearview mirror so he could keep tabs on the Prowler. Pee Wee Reese seemed to be hanging in there pretty well. He had to. If he lost sight of the bomber, he would have to break off. Two planes feeling for each other in this soup would be a fine way to arrange a midair collision.

“The Commies aren’t where they’re supposed to be,” Flap said finally.

“You sure?”

“All I know is that the radar screen is empty. Rocket scientist that I am, I deduce the Reds aren’t where the spies said they would be. Or Columbia’s inertial was all screwed up and this is the wrong ocean. Or all the Reds have sunk. Those are the possibilities.”

“Better ask Black Eagle.”

It turned out the E-2 was also looking for the Soviets at the maximum range of its radar. It soon found them, steaming hard to the northeast, directly away from Jake and Flap and directly toward the line of thunderstorms that had just passed over them.

“They know something’s up,” Jake said.

“Terrific. They’re at general quarters expecting us and we’ll have to go under thunderstorms to get to them. And to think we almost didn’t get a date for this party.”

“Man, we’re having fun now.”

Flap didn’t reply. He was busy.

After a bit he said, “Okay, I got ’em. Give me a few moments to get a course and speed and then we’ll go down.”

While he was talking the electronic warfare (EW) panel chirped. A Soviet search radar was painting them. In addition to the flashing light on the panel when the beam swept them, Jake heard a baritone chirp in his headset.

So much for surprise.

The turbulence was getting worse. The bouncing was constant now. Rain coursed around the windscreen and across the canopy. “Radar is getting degraded,” Flap muttered. “Rain. I got them though, course Zero Five Zero at fifteen. Lots of sea return. Swells are big down there, my man.”

“Can we go down?”

“Yeah.”

Jake glanced over at the reflection of the Prowler in the mirror. Pee Wee was riding fairly steadily, cycling up and down as the planes bounced, but never slipping too far out of position. Jake carefully eased the throttle back and let the nose go down a half a degree. When he was sure the EA-6B pilot was still with him, he lowered the nose some more.

A pale green light caught his eye, and he glanced at the windscreen. Dancing tendrils of green fire were playing across it.

“Look at this,” he told Flap. “Saint Elmo’s fire.”

“This makes my night,” the BN said. “All we need is for the Russians to squirt a missile at us and this will be a complete entertainment experience.”

“Will a lightning bolt do?”

“Don’t say stuff like that. God’s listening. You’re passing five thousand.”

“Radar altimeter’s set.”

“Roger. Station one selected, master arm to go.”

They were up to four hundred knots indicated now. The EA-6B was right there, hanging on. Eighty miles to go.

Wasn’t Saint Elmo’s fire an indicator that lightning might strike? Wasn’t that what the old sailors said? Even as he wondered the flickering green fire faded, then disappeared completely.

Black Eagle gave them a turn. Jake banked gently to the new heading. The steering to the target was forty degrees left, but the controller in the E-2 was trying to coordinate the attack. When he had one of the formations four miles farther from the target than the other, he would have them turn inbound and accelerate to five hundred knots. The pilots would call their distance to go on the radio every ten miles. The plan was for the bombers and their EA-6B escorts to pass over the Soviet task group thirty seconds apart. Neither formation would see the other, so this separation was required for safety reasons.

Jake eased his descent passing twenty-five hundred feet. He shallowed it still more passing a thousand and drifted slowly down to five hundred, keeping one eye on the radar altimeter. He adjusted the barometric pressure on the pressure altimeter so it matched the radar altimeter’s reading exactly.

The turbulence had not let up, nor had it increased. The rain was heavier, though. The high airspeed kept the windscreen clear but the water ran across the top and sides of the canopy in sheets.

“War Aces, turn inbound.”

Jake came left to center the steering and fed the throttles forward until they were at ninety-eight percent RPM. Pee Wee stayed right with him.

“Five Oh Two, seventy miles. ”

Fifteen seconds later he heard Haldane’s voice: “Five Oh Five, sixty miles.”

Each plane was inbound on a bomb run at eight and a third nautical miles per minute. They were a little over thirty seconds apart, but the extra margin was an added safety cushion.

“I should get them at about thirty miles, I think,” Flap said.

And when we can see them, they can see us.

Jake reached down and flipped the IFF, the transponder, to standby. No use giving the Reds an easy problem.

He glanced at the EW panel. Still quiet. When they rose above the Russians’ radar horizon it would light up like a Christmas tree.

“Five Oh Two, sixty miles.”

The turbulence was getting vicious. The radar altimeter beeped once when Jake inadvertently dropped to four hundred feet. He concentrated on the instruments, on the attitude indicator on the VDI, on the needle of the rate-of-climb indicator, cross-checking the radar and pressure altimeters, all the while working to keep his wings level and steering centered. Every moment or two he glanced in the mirror to check on Pee Wee Reese, who was sticking like glue. No question, the guy was good.

“Five Oh Two, fifty miles.”

Rain poured over the plane, so much that a film of water developed on the windscreen even though they were doing five hundred knots.

“Five Oh Two, forty miles.”

A lightning flash ahead distracted him for several seconds from the instruments. When he came back to them he had lost fifty feet. He struggled to get it back as he wondered if Haldane had seen the lightning flash. Should they go under a thunderstorm? It was Haldane’s call. Jake wasn’t breaking off the run unless the skipper did.

“Five Oh Two, thirty miles.”

Twenty-nine, twenty-eight…

“They’ve turned,” Flap said. “They’re heading southeast. Follow steering.”

Even as Jake eased right to center the bug, the EW panel lit up and the tones assailed him. X-band, Y-band — the Russians had every radar they had turned on and probing, looking for a target.

Now the tones of the radars became a buzz. The bomber was so close to the EA-6B, which was jamming the Russian radar, that the bomber’s EW gear was overwhelmed.

“Five Oh Two, twenty miles.”

“Master Arm on, we’re in attack,” Flap reported.

The attack symbology came alive on the VDI.

Another lightning flash. Closer. Lots of rain.

“Five Oh Five, ten miles.” That was Haldane.

Fifteen miles…fourteen…thirteen…

“They’re jamming me. Keep on this heading.”

Now Flap flipped on frequency agility, trying to change his radar’s frequency to an unjammed wavelength long enough to get a look.

“Five Oh Two, ten miles.”

Three lightning flashes in a couple seconds. They were flying right under a boomer. The turbulence was so bad Jake had trouble concentrating on the instruments. Pee Wee was still hanging on, though.

Five miles.

Four.

Three.

Symbols marching down toward weapons release.

Lights. The Russian ships should be lit up. He should pass

over them just after weapons’ release. But don’t look! No distractions. Concentrate!

Two.

One.

Release marker coming down. Steering centered. Commit trigger pulled.

Click. Flag drop on the ordnance panel and the attack light on the VDI went out.

If there had been a bomb, it would now be falling.

A searchlight split the night. Three or four, weaving.

Instantly he had vertigo. He stared at the VDI, forced himself to keep his wings level as he tugged the stick slightly aft to begin a climb.

And then the lights were behind. That quick.

More lightning ahead. Jake eased into a left turn, toward the north. The skipper went out to the southeast, so this direction should be clear.

He would climb away from this ocean, turn west to head for the carrier, get out of this rain and turbulence and lightning, and to hell with the Ivans!

Message delivered: fuck you very much, stiff letter to follow.

He had the power back to ninety percent and was up to two thousand feet, in a ten-degree angle-of-bank left turn passing north on the HSI when the lightning bolt struck. There was a stupendous flash of light and a sound like a hammer striking, then nothing.

He was blind. Everything was white. Flash blindness. He knew it.

He keyed the ICS and told Flap, “Flashlight—” but there was no feedback in his headset. A total electrical failure. And he was blind as a bat, two thousand feet over the water, in a turn.

He had to see.

He blinked furiously, trying by sheer force of will to see the instrument panel.

But there was no light, no electricity.

He reached behind him with his left hand, found the handle for the ram-air turbine — the RAT — and pulled hard. Real hard.

The handle came out.

Perhaps four seconds had passed, not more.

The white was fading. He reached for his oxygen mask with both hands and unfastened the right side.

What the plane was doing he had no way of knowing, although he knew whatever it was, it wasn’t good. But he couldn’t fly blind. His seat-of-the-pants instincts were worthless. Oh, he knew that, had had it drummed into him and had experienced it on so many night carrier landings that he wasn’t even tempted to try to level the wings.

The white was fading into darkness. He blinked furiously, then remembered his L-shaped flashlight, hanging by a hook on the front of his survival vest. He found it and pushed the switch on.

In the growing darkness he saw the spot the beam made on the instrument panel. Another few seconds…

But there was already a spot of light on the needle-ball turn indicator! Flap! He must have had his head in the scope when the lightning hit.

He could see. The VDI was blank. The standby gyro showed a thirty-degree left turn. Ten degrees nose-down.

Cross-check with the turn indicator!

Turn needle pegged left. He rolled right to center it, overdid it and came back left some. The standby gyro responded.

The altimeter! Going down.

Back stick. Stop the needle. Gently now. Coming down on eleven hundred feet. Stop it there, center that turn needle. Standby gyro disagrees by five degrees. Ignore it!

Flap was shouting and he caught the muffled words: “Reese is still with us. He has his lights on. I think he wants to take the lead.”

Jake could see now. His vision was back to normal. How many seconds had it been?

He risked a glance in the rearview mirror. There was Reese, with his exterior lights on, bobbing like a cork on Jake’s right wing. Reese must be the world’s finest formation pilot, to hang on through that gyration.

Should he chance it? Should he pull the power and try to ease back onto Reese’s wing without a radio call or signal?

Even as the thought shot through his mind, he was retarding the throttles. Reese’s plane began to move forward.

Okay! Flap was flipping his flashlight at Reese in the EA-6B’s cockpit.

Pee Wee knows. He wants me to fly on him. It’s our only chance if the TACAN and radar are screwed up. We’ll never find the ship on our own.

Now Reese was abeam him, the two planes flying wing tip to wing tip and bouncing out of sync in the turbulence.

Be smooth, Jake. Don’t lose him. Don’t let him slip away into this black shit or you’ll be swimming for it.

He stabilized in parade position on Reese’s left side, so that he was looking straight up the leading edge of the swept wing into the cockpit. Reese was just a dark shape limned by red light, the glow from his instrument panel.

No comforting red glow in this cockpit. This place was dark as a tomb.

The bouncing was getting worse. He had to cross under, get on Reese’s right side so he wouldn’t be looking across the cockpit at the other plane.

He tucked the nose down gently and pulled a smidgen of power. Now power back on and a little right bank while he wrestled the stick in the chop.

Right under the tail, crossing, surfacing on Pee Wee’s right wing. Okay. Now hang here.

Another flash of lightning. He flinched.

Flap was shouting something. He concentrated, trying to make sense of the words. “… must’ve zapped us with a zillion volts. Every circuit breaker we got is popped. I’m going to try to reset some, so if you smell smoke, let me know.”

“Okay,” he shouted, and found reassurance in the sound of his own voice.

All he had to do was hang on to Reese. Hang on and hang on and hang on, and someday, sometime, Reese would drop him onto the ball. The ball would be out there in the rain and black goo, and the drop lights, and the centerline lights, and the wires, strung across that pitching, heaving deck.

All he had to do was hang on…

As Flap pushed in circuit breakers and the cockpit lights glowed, then went out, then glowed again, the planes flew into and out of deluges. The torrents of rain were worse than they had been coming in. Several times the rain coursing over the canopy caused Reese’s plane to fade until just the exterior lights could be seen.

Jake concentrated fiercely upon those lights. Each time the rain would eventually slacken and the fuselage of the EA-6B would reappear, a ghostly gray presence in the blacker gloom.

Finally the clouds dissipated and a blacker night spread out before them. Far above tiny, cold stars shown steadily. They were on top, above the clouds. Behind them lightning strobed almost continually.

Jake eased away from Reese and put his mask to his face. The oxygen was flowing, cool and rubbery tasting. He lowered it again, then swabbed the sweat from his eyes and face with the fingers of his left hand.

When he had his mask fixed back in place he glanced at the instruments. The instrument lights were on — well, some of them. It was still dark on Flap’s side. The VDI was still blank, but the standby gyro was working. The TACAN needle swung lazily, steadily, around and around the dial.

He pushed the button to check the warning lights on the annunciator panel. The panel stayed dark. Both generators were probably fried. Maybe the battery. He recycled each of the generator switches, but nothing happened. Finally he just turned them off.

Fuel — he checked the gauge. Nine thousand pounds. He pushed the buttons on the fuel panel to check the quantity in each tank. The needle and totalizer never moved. They were frozen.

Flap was still examining the circuit breaker panel with his flashlight.

“Hey, shipmate, you there?” Flap — on the ICS.

“Yeah.”

“A whole bunch of these CBs won’t stay in.”

“Forget it.”

“We’re gonna need—”

“We’ll worry about it later.”

Later. Let’s sit up here in the night above the storms and savor this moment. Savor life. For we are alive. Still alive. Let’s sit silently and look at the stars and Reese’s beautiful Prowler and breathe deeply and listen to our hearts beating.