“Call the ball!” the LSO barked.
“Doing my best,” Armstrong assured him.
“Best isn’t good enough! You’re a naval aviator. Snag it!”
“Roger ball!” said Chipper, confirming he had the amber light and row of green okay lights below it in his line of sight. It was a technique pioneered by a British official in Whitehall who had his secretary sight his desk as if it were a British carrier, telling her to keep a ball in sight. It required her to lower her torso comically, like someone forced to keep walking with some invisible weight on her head, pressing her down farther and farther as she came nearer to the desktop.
In the next nine seconds aviator Armstrong, Eagle Evans behind him in silent prayer, dropped the Super Hornet to thirty-five feet above the wounded carrier’s fantail, the fighter-bomber, its nose up, approaching at 143 knots, or approximately 158 mph.
“Bit too fast,” said someone in Air Traffic Control, “considering the crosswinds.”
Armstrong raised the nose a fraction higher, his tail hook lowering. Hitting the deck at 160 mph, he immediately gunned the twin turbofan-enhanced performance engines to full power, the scream of the turbofans and the thud of the landing or “controlled crash” deafening several off-duty sailors up on Vulture’s Row.
Armstrong and Evans were thrust forward with such violence by the stopping force of the first wire jerking out its cable from the hydraulically reined spools on the gallery deck below that Evans would have bruise strips down both pectorals.
In milliseconds the “colors” swarmed the Super Hornet, the green-vested “hook-runner” and blue-shirted “handlers” the first in action, the latter guiding Armstrong away from the crater area to the second elevator forward of the island.
“Get ’er down!” hollered the blue shirt boss. “Manowski’s about to break.”
Armstrong’s wingman was in fact already beginning his approach, his fuel alarm blinking an urgent warning, delivered verbally in the dulcet tone of a woman calmly telling him he was rapidly approaching empty. “I know it, sweetheart. Dammit,” said Manowski, who, during long missions, was more disposed than usual to what the battle group’s senior surgeon called “politician gut.” The agony of his gaseous condition was not helped now by his mounting anxiety about the tiny slab of holed blacktop rushing up at him. It felt as if his politician gut was about to explode against the restraint of his seat harness, the prospect of the sudden negative G upon landing more frightening than the approach of any bogey. Dammit, all he needed was to fart — but no, that’d be too helpful, and that bastard Murphy was clearly determined to make him suffer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Admiral Jensen was happy to hand over the NR-1B to its two scientists and crew. He’d issued a huge sigh of relief as he watched the research sub slide off its badly singed but still functional trailer under the watchful eyes of the Marine guard. Inside the small waiting room, one of the two scientists, a Brit, grateful to the four Marines who’d risked hypothermia to check the waters about the ramp, now produced a flask of brandy, handing it to the Marines, who were warming themselves up. “I think I’ll partake of the medicinal elixir myself,” he told them, his nerves, he added, “still rather fragile” following the terrifyingly near fatal confrontation between the ferry’s captain and the gun-festooned USS
Outside the waiting room, Jensen, standing with the Marine captain, watched as the other scientist, about to descend the conning tower’s ladder, his eyes shaded from the sunlit-mirrored water, glanced back at the singed and partly splintered wood of the sub’s trailer. This oceanographer, a white-bearded man in his mid-fifties — onetime mentor to Alicia Mayne, who had been so badly burned in the attack on the
“The blast didn’t damage the hull,” Jensen called out to reassure him. “We went over it with a fine-tooth comb. Not even a hairline fracture.”
The oceanographer, whom the Marine captain had already dubbed “Santa” because of his long white beard, waved and took a pen-size flashlight out of the pocket of his sky-blue coveralls, the latter bearing the proud sailing-ship insignia of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “We’ll take a look anyway,” he told the admiral. With that, he and two crew members, one a female naval officer with a distinctly mannish haircut and serious demeanor, disappeared down into the super high-tech research sub whose side-scan sonar, the most sensitive in the world, was capable, according to one Marine, of detecting a safety pin on the sea bottom.
The Marine captain asked Jensen about this claim. “Is that true, sir?”
“No,” replied Jensen, the admiral’s response accompanied by a smile. “It’s like those satellites that are supposed to be able to read a newspaper in Red Square. It can spot the newspaper — not the print. Maybe a four- inch headline or a big photo, but not—”
Santa reappeared, standing waist-high in the small conning tower. “It’s buggered!”
“What d’you mean, buggered?” shot back Jensen, but he knew well enough. What the scientist was telling him was that the NR-1B was out of commission.
“The nacelle,” said the scientist, by which he meant the nose section of the sub, “has been spalled.”
Surprisingly, at least to the Marine captain, the admiral didn’t seem to understand what Santa meant by “spalled”—that while the terrorists’ explosion of C4 beneath the bitumen road hadn’t so much as scratched the NR-1B externally, the tremendous concussion of the explosive against the NR-1B’s three-inch-thick high-tensile steel had been akin to someone striking a forty-four-gallon drum with a rubber-headed sledgehammer. Minute flakes of rust from the inside wall of the drum or, in this case, flecks of paint on the inside wall of the sub’s nose cone, had broken free at supersonic speed from the impact. This spalling, red-hot, paint-flaked shrapnel had sprayed the delicate if firmly housed electronic array that was the research sub’s prized sonar.
In effect, the eyes of the NR-1B, which had so successfully searched for and recovered vital parts of the ’86 space shuttle
“Can we replace it?” Jensen called out, on realizing the damage. “The sonar?”
“Yes,” said the oceanographer.
“When?”
“Two weeks — maybe less. Then we’d need sea trials to calibrate the—”
Jensen had his hands over his face — hiding sheer frustration, or tears, or both — the Marine captain wasn’t sure.
“Same thing when a tank’s hit,” said the Marine, by way of relieving the gloomy silence that had descended like sudden rain over the sun-glinting sea. “Doesn’t matter if the round penetrates, force of the hit fills the air inside with tiny white-hot metal fragments. Like a swarm of—”
“Why the hell didn’t you think of that before?” Jensen cut in, as if it would have made a difference. The fact was, the NR-1B was effectively a write-off until the Navy and its civilian contractor could rush in a replacement sonar. And even then, the job of extracting the ruined components from the NR-1B would be a singularly time- consuming task of negotiating awkward angles in confined spaces. The tiny NR-1B, unlike Rorke’s former Virginia- class sub, did not have the advantage of add-on, take-off modular architecture, whereby whole remotely controlled or man-crewed submersible modules could easily be added or removed as needed for special missions.
“Freeman’s on his own,” Jensen said disconsolately, overwhelmed by the bitter irony that the very man who had given him the reputation-salvaging chance of helping to zero in on the cause of the U.S. Navy’s catastrophe in the Juan de Fuca Strait was now denied the assistance of the NR-1B because he — Jensen — had failed to deliver the boat safely to the Keystone dock.
“They’ll call me the ’Keystone admiral’!” Jensen told the Marine captain bitterly. But the officer, of a younger generation, failed to get the analogy to the infamously incompetent Keystone Kops of celluloid screen.
“You could send the
“Yes,” agreed Jensen, wracked by indecision. He knew that to dispatch the patrol craft would leave only one to guard the Hood Canal bridge, and thus the egress of any submarine out of Bangor, which could invite further disaster.
