“Great night to be out aviating, Mister Grafton.”
“If I were a flying fish, Maggot, I’d probably agree with you.”
“Looking forward to getting into port?”
“Sure, how about you?”
“Yep. Can’t stand working outside in all this rain. I’ve beat off so many times in the shower, every time it rains I get a hard on.”
The pilot grinned. “Just don’t fall down and break something. By the way, heard anything about your dad?”?
Maggot’s father had suffered a heart attack recently and no word had come through from the family asking for the son to return home on emergency leave. “Not yet, sir. I’m going to call ‘em when we get to Cubi if I ain’t heard nothing by then.”
“Talk to Mister Lundeen in Personnel and he’ll get it fixed up so you can use a government line. Won’t cost you any money.”
“Okay, Mister Grafton. I’ll do that.” Maggot was not finished now, yet he lingered on the ladder. “Us plane captains were real sorry about what happened to mister McPherson. He was an all right guy and a good officer.”
Jake looked at the sailor. Wet with rain, the earnest Young face glistened in the red light. He had never ridden the catapult or seen the flak and the missiles, but he respected the men who had. Did they deserve that respect? Well, at least McPherson had. “We’re all going to miss him,” the pilot replied.
“You gents have a good flight and catch a three wire.” Maggot descended to the deck and pressed the external canopy-close button to keep the rain off the crew. Razor sat with his head back against the headrest and his eyes closed, apparently working on recovering his temper.
Jake held his helmet in his lap and looked past the edge of the flight deck into the black nothingness beyond. He hated night catapult shots. So much could happen on the way down the cat, all of it bad. Any problem would demand the pilot’s instant attention even as he was recovering from the acceleration of the shot and trying to coax the plane to fly in the night air, sixty feet above the sea. He went over some of the more likely emergencies and what he would do if one occurred. He moved his left hand from the throttles to the gear handle. If an engine quits or a fire light flashes, gear UP. His fingers climbed to the emergency jettison button. Push that and hold for one second.
All five drop tanks will then be jettisoned. Ten thousand pounds lighter, maybe the plane will still fly on one engine. His eyes flicked to the standby gyro. Keep eight degrees nose-up no matter what. Much less and we go into the water; much more and we’ll stall and go into the drink anyway. He checked the gauges: airspeed, pressure altimeter, angle-of-attack, radar altimeter, the gyro. These instruments had the information that would keep them alive. And if one of the instruments failed, he had to immediately notice that its information did not jibe with the other gauges and disregard the culprit.
He felt his stomach knot up, and automatically he reached between his legs and checked the position of the alternate firing handle for the ejection seat. There might not be time to reach the primary handle over his head.
Every moment that passed was only preparation for the coming instant when he would be catapulted out over the dark ocean just fifteen knots above stall speed in a machine near maximum gross weight-in a machine that was merely a cunning collection of complex equipment that failed too often. His life depended on the correctness of his every thought, on his touch with the stick, on the quickness of his reflexes, on the knowledge and skill he possessed. The penalty for failure would be swift and sure. And the man beside him would also pay.
What if we lose the generators? He reached back to his left to check the position of the ram-air turbine handle. A tug on this handle would cause the winddriven emergency generator to pop out of the wing and power the flight instruments and critical cockpit lights. Closing his eyes, he began touching and identifying every switch, knob, and handle around him. He knew this cockpit better than he knew his car: he knew it better than he knew anything else in the world.
He looked down the catapult, as he had countless times before. Beyond the deck was the end of the world. He was marooned on an island of red light adrift in a black universe. Only the here and now, this place and this time, existed.
The rain drummed on the canopy. The men on the flight deck stood motionless, waiting for the “start engines” signal. They waited like horses in the rain resigned to their misery. The ship began its turn into the wind and the sailors leaned into the quickening breeze. The height of the plane above the deck and the buoyancy of the high pressure tires magnified the effect of the shift of the deck. The pilot could feel the motion as the ship shouldered the swells aside.
He glanced again at Razor. The BN had not change his position, but his face appeared relaxed. Had he recovered from his locker room doubts, or was he just working overtime on his prelaunch cool?
He wouldn’t be so damn complacent if he knew how my stomach felt, the pilot reflected. How do these BNs do it? How did Morgan do it? The BNs sit there and ride these pigs to hell and back with almost no control over their fate. Day in and day out they climb into that right-hand seat.
The men who rode the right-side seats, who mastered the complex equipment and conquered the natural reactions of their stomachs, were professionals with great pride in their abilities. Like most of the pilots who respected the naval flight officers with whom they flew, Jake paid them tribute by bowing to the unexplainable. He never once thought to ask a BN why he continued to do his job.
To do so would mean asking the same question of himself. So he regarded the bombardiers’ motivations as mysterious, as inexplicable as love, faith, or loyalty.
The deck loudspeakers blared. The time had come Grafton and Durfee put on their helmets. The plane captain twirled his fingers for the starting sequence.
When both engines were at idle and all the aircraft’s systems were functioning properly, Jake and Razor turned on their red, L-shaped flashlights. Jake clipped his to the front of his survival vest.
He tapped the standby gyro and Razor nodded. The bombardier would hold his flashlight in his hand and keep it focused on the standby gyro for the critical seconds after launch. This way, if both generators failed, the pilot could still see the attitude reference. The gyro, only three inches in diameter, would provide vital information without electrical power for at least thirty seconds. That would be more than enough. They would be either safe or dead long before it spun down. Jake spread and locked the wings and lowered the flaps.
Now the taxi director gave Jake the signal to come forward. He released the parking brake and eased the laden plane to the waiting shuttle. He felt a jolt as the metal pieces mated. The pilot jammed the throttles forward to the stops and cycled the controls as he watched the stabilator and the horizontal flaperons move in his mirrors. He put the heel of his left hand behind the throttles and curled his fingers around the catapult grip. This would prevent an inadvertent throttle retardation during the catapult stroke. One more look at the gauges and another wiggle for the stick. Engine temperatures normal, controls free and easy: all was as it should be.
At full power the machine quivered like a hound on a leash. His heart pounded, and he could feel his temples throb.
“You ready?” he asked Razor.
“I was born ready. Leter rip.”
Jake placed his head back in the headrest and used his left thumb to flip the exterior-light master switch on the catapult grip. He saw in his rear-view mirror that the light on top of the tail had come on.
The catapult officer saluted and swung his yellow wand in a long arc until it touched the deck, then brought it up to the horizontal where it froze, pointing down the catapult track.
Soon … any second … it’s coming … The catapult fired.
FIVE
The altimeter recorded their upward progress. 10, 11,000, 12,000 …
They were still in clouds.
“Looks like the weather guys were wrong about the tops of this stuff,” Razor remarked. He fished a pack of
