Choke Point

“No verification on that, Commander.”

“Now, gentlemen, I have a second announcement.” Everyone who’d done at least one tour with Crowley knew that the big news always came last. “As you know, one of our SSNs missiled Penghu. Satellite BDAs confirm wind deflection, courtesy of Typhoon Jane, extended the missiles’ CEP. Some PLA planes were destroyed, but not — I repeat, not—the runway, ’least not enough to prevent quick repair. The President has therefore asked if we can do the job before the PLA can land aircraft resupply.”

There was some braggadocio, but others were silent. There was that big hole in their roof.

“Any flier has the right to pass this one up without prejudice to his service record.”

The admiral waited for reports from all the ready rooms listening to him. All pilots and aircrew volunteered to go.

“Very well, gentlemen, it’s time. Kick the tires and light the fires!”

Resounding cheers were heard throughout the carrier, and in minutes, unseen even by some high in Primary Flight Control, scores of invisible colored jackets flooded the deck forward of the carrier’s island and the kamikaze’s bomb crater. The crater, having rendered catapults three and four on the carrier’s aft port side inoperable, was now roped off, with a six-man line stationed in front of it to yell at any of the deck personnel who might back up and impede maneuvering aircraft once launch operations got under way. Elevator 1, starboard midships, forward of the island, clunked and emitted its deep hum as it descended yet again to the hangar deck to reload. High up in Vulture’s Row, the salty sea wind chilling their faces, two off-duty sailors — a young barber from Ohio and a young woman, Angela, a purple-jacketed refueler from Arkansas — held hands in the darkness, saying nothing. Their rapt attention had been captured by the wondrously unique ballet of soft yellow flashlights far below them, strobing through the sea spray in a strangely hypnotic dance of war.

The scores of deck personnel holding the flashlights were all but invisible. The only thing that approached it in Angela’s memory was a performance by the Black Theater of Prague that she had seen as a schoolgirl, the players invisible, only things moving on the pitch-black stage, as if by magic. The soft yellow bulbs of the flashlights were conveying the same eerie yet comforting display of connectedness and separation, as if countless glowworms were “coming together, coming apart,” as the song goes, joining, separating, and rejoining as the “foreign object debris walkdown” continued, only personnel on the starboard end of the inspection line coming into full view as they passed through the apron of subdued orange light at the base of the island.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Angela asked her beau.

Despite the cranials they were wearing to protect them from the brain-dulling crescendo that would soon break loose below, the young barber heard her. He’d heard every word she’d said from the moment they’d first met on the boat. “Yes,” he replied. “It is. Like you.”

She elbowed him playfully, their hands still locked together, her grip tightening as the foreign object walkdown ended and the colored shirts went to work, kicking the tires and lighting the fires. Then fierce purple- white jet exhausts pierced the night, the engines’ feral screams shattering any remaining world of glowworms, the afterburners momentarily illuminating the colored jackets whose earlier, gentler ballet was now a rougher thing altogether. Yet within what at first seemed a chaos of disorganized crew running, kneeling, and signaling pilots with lighted wands, there was an organization so intricate and fast that it would make the busiest civil airport appear indolent, the carrier’s night launch all the more impressive given that only catapults one and two were operational.

Angela glimpsed a plane handler wanding the first striker, Chipper Armstrong’s Super Hornet, into position. For an instant the ambient light silhouetted Eagle Evans in the Hornet’s backseat as the catapult’s tow bar was lowered into the shuttle, in position to pull the fighter along the deck. With the nose wheel housing’s holdback rod acting like the reins on a caged stallion, the turbofans could now reach full power before release. The shuttle’s pull, in concert with the plane’s own thrust, would catapult the plane off the deck, providing all went well, the night launch and recovery the ultimate test of an aviator’s skill.

Hunkered down in the CAT control pod set almost flush into the deck, the yellow-shirted “shooter,” or catapult officer, initiated the flow of superwet nonradioactive steam, provided by a secondary loop off the carrier’s reactor plant. The shooter double- and then triple-checked the combined deck-and-ship speed in regulating the steam pressure flow. Too little pressure and the fighter-bomber, unable to attain takeoff, would be pushed into the sea. Too much, and the aircraft’s nose wheel would be torn asunder.

Chipper Armstrong, all preflight checks completed, red-ribbon-tagged ordnance pins out, raised his arms high, as if surrendering, but in fact showing the shooter that his hands were nowhere near the controls.

The shooter, seeing that the green shirts had completed the final checks, gave the okay to Armstrong, who selected “Afterburner” for the Hornet’s twin turbofans and snapped off a salute. The shooter pushed the button and the Hornet rushed forward, Armstrong’s and Evans’s bodies slammed back under the G force, the plane hurtling down the deck, speeding from zero to 150 miles per hour in two seconds. Evans experienced an involuntary erection, his eyes rammed back hard into their sockets, and then the plane was aloft, Chipper taking over the controls.

As they banked, RIO Evans glanced back at the rapidly shrinking deck, seeing an F-14 Tomcat, one of the four fighters assigned to ride shotgun for the Hawkeye, moving into position, its toy-sized launch crew swarming around their charge. If all went well, the F-14 would be off the deck in under three minutes, longer than usual because of the extra maneuvering required forward of the crater. Despite one sailor in the crater’s warning line being knocked down by the combination of crosswind and jet blast freakishly angling off the catapult’s blast shield, all went well. McCain’s squadrons assembled “upstairs” for a standoff attack on Penghu to finish what Johnny Rorke and Encino’s crew had begun.

On Encino, neither the officers nor men knew anything about the instructions given to Crowley and his crew. Now they received orders to turn about and head for home, the submersed “blue”-crewed six-month patrol ending. Upon return to Bangor, through the Juan de Fuca choke point, the sub’s “gold” crew would take over after food, lockers, and vertical launch tubes were restocked.

McCain’s sixteen planes — eight Super Hornets, four A-6E Intruders, and four Tomcats — selected for the mission against the “high-value fixed land target” of Penghu were about to attack. Each surface-to-land missile contained a GPS receiver/processor able to pinpoint the big 1,366-pound missile’s position to within fifty-two feet. And each missile’s erasable programmable read-only memory had received four missions from the pre-launch loader: three possible missions for Penghu, a fourth or alternative target being the PLA-occupied Kinmen Island, a hundred miles west of Penghu.

In Chipper Armstrong’s Super Hornet, Evans had already selected the first of the three Penghu programs— 1.35 minutes before impact the imaging infrared seeker would be activated, each missile’s infrared seeker head “fan-scanning” through 180 degrees and back again in ninety-one seconds. Should anything happen to Chipper’s plane or any other of McCain’s birds, “Mother,” the E-2C Hawkeye, could take over control of the missiles via Hawkeye’s “pancake,” or rotodome. And via McCain’s Super Hornet and Intruder pilot and bombardier/navigator crews, the “standoff” missile’s five-hundred-pound blast fragment warhead had been programmed for “instantaneous” rather than “delayed” fuse.

McCain’s “Hit Parade,” as the crew of just over five thousand called the strike force of Hornets, Intruders, and Tomcats, were under strict instructions — namely for the benefit of the “nuggets,” the rookie aviators — that the SLAMs must be careful of “fratricide,” by which they meant the destruction of a SLAM by either the explosion or debris of the missile fired just ahead of it impacting. The rippled fire of Tomahawks from Johnny Rorke’s Encino had prevented “too fast a rain,” as missile instructors often stressed, because of the time between each launch.

Chipper was scheduled to be first to push the button, the other SLAMs to be fired at fifteen-second intervals, the Hit Parade’s launch points well beyond the range of anything PLA’s air-to-air missile batteries might have hurriedly put into place on Penghu.

It would be hit and run, McCain’s planes returning to the safety of the carrier battle group’s protective screen, for whom there would never again be a “Bizarro” incident. Any bogeys or friendly marked plane approaching the CVBG would be assumed hostiles. And unless proved otherwise by radio-recognized “friend or foe” code, they would be shot down.

“Weapons free” authority was confirmed by Chipper Armstrong’s six “range known” homing antiradar missiles, fired by Tomcats getting close in at ten miles. Low in the protective sea clutter at ten miles, the missiles homed in on either side-lobe or more direct “back” radiation, to take out whatever early warning radars the PLA