chewing gum from his left sleeve pocket and held it out. “Want one?” Apparently the scene in the locker room was history.
“Yeah, open it for me.”
They climbed in a constant turn that kept the plan on a circle with a five-mile radius. The center of the circle was the carrier.
“Wonder how high this stuff goes?” Razor said.
“To the moon, probably. Maybe even halfway to Mars. Jake leveled the Intruder at 20,000 feet, still circling the carrier. “Better give ‘em the word,” he told the bombardier.
Razor held his oxygen mask to his face. “Tank Control, Devil Five Two-Two.”
“Go ahead, Five Two Two.”
“We’re in the clouds at base plus twelve. ‘ On unscrambled radio transmissions the true altitude was the sum of the reported altitude plus the never-mentioned number, tonight a positive eight. “It’s solid all the way up. Do you want us to find the tops, over?”
The radio was silent for several seconds. Then the reply came back: “Go on up to base plus twenty- two.”
“Wilco.” Jake pushed the throttles forward and eased the stick back.
The altimeter began to climb. Razor chomped on his gum. “Gonna be a bad night at Black Rock for the fighter pukes if they need gas down below,” he observed over the ICS. Tanking was a precision maneuver that required good visibility, especially at night. The aircraft needing fuel was vectored to the vicinity of the tanker, but the pilot of the thirsty plane had to acquire the tanker visually and execute a rendezvous, a join up into close formation. Once the two aircraft were flying side-by-side they could fly into a cloud, but they could not safely join up in one. Tonight the sky seemed to consist of nothing but clouds. But at 27,000 feet, the men saw the glow of the moon. At 28,000 they bounded out of the clouds. Jake climbed another 500 feet above the ragged tops before leveling off. The pale moonlight made the cloudscape look like heaps of cotton.
“Rodger Control, Five Two Two. Tops are at base plus twenty.”
“Roger. Two customers are on their way up. Request you give them three each.”
Jake clicked the mike twice in reply, then let the plane drift on up to 30,000 feet where he leveled at 250 knots and engaged the autopilot. It held the bird nicely in a twelve-degree left turn. In a few moments he saw the first Phantom emerge from the clouds, a winking red anticollision light beaconing through the darkness. The fighter pilot was on an opposite course but soon saw him and turned hard to intercept. Jake turned on the fuel-transfer panel and set the fuel counter for three thousand pounds. He streamed the drogue, a basket twenty-six inches in diameter that resembled a badminton shuttlecock, on the end of a fifty-foot hose. The unit was ready to transfer fuel when the hose was fully extended. After a ton and a half of jet fuel had been pumped, the transfer would automatically cease.
The lead fighter closed smartly on a forty-five-degree bearing; the second F4 was several miles away on the same rendezvous course. Both fighters flew across Jake’s circle to close the distance. “Here they come, Jake said.
In less than a minute the first Phantom joined on the tanker’s left wing.
As Jake watched, the refueling probe emerged from the right side of the plane beneath the canopy and locked out at a forty-five-degree angle Jake made a circular motion with his red flashlight and received in reply two flashes from the fighter’s rear cockpit. Then the fighter slid back and disappear astern- Jake disengaged the autopilot-it had a tendency to porpoise the plane when the receiving aircraft pushed in the drogue-and devoted his attention to maintaining a smooth, steady course on the great circle. The fighter pilot managed to fly his probe into the drogue on his first attempt. When he pushed the six feet toward the tanker, the green light on the refueling panel in the A-6 illuminated, and the counter began to meter the fuel in hundred-pound increments. Jake noticed the second fighter slide in alongside his wing, its grinning shark’s mouth and yellow eye just visible in the sweep of the tanker’s anticollision radar The bombardier reported to the ship that the tanker was “sweet,” that is, it could transfer fuel, so the spare tanker on deck would not be needed. When the Plane had finished, Razor reset the counter and Grafton flashed his light. The second Phantom moved behind the Intruder as the first one took up a cruising position on the right wing. This pilot made two attempts before he captured the drogue. The maneuver required a delicate, sure touch with the stick and throttles, especially if the planes were bouncing in turbulence. One frustrated fighter jockey had been heard to lament, “It’s like trying to stick a banana up a wildcat’s ass.”
When it had taken on its allotted fuel, the second plane crossed to the lead fighter’s right wing. Razor visually checked both planes to make sure they weren’t behind the tanker in the unlikely event that the drogue and hose separated during retraction. When the panel indicator showed that the drogue was stowed, the bombardier glanced again at the lead Phantom. A coning red light flashed from the fighter’s rear cockpit.
The two hunters turned away and took up a course to their assigned station one hundred fifty miles to the northwest of the ship. They constituted the Barrier Combat Air Patrol, the BARCAP, charged with intercepting and shooting down any unidentified aircraft coming out of North Vietnam.
Razor watched them disappear into the moonlit sky. He keyed his radio mike and told the ship that tanking was completed.
They ship replied, “Roger, request you fly a forty-five arc around the ship and see how extensive this cloud cover is.”
Jake leveled the wings and descended until he was just above the clouds.
Although he had slowed to maximum endurance airspeed, 220 knots, they still had the illusion of great speed as the cloud tops raced beneath. Occasionally they collided with a silver ridge, bored through, and popped out the other side. Because of the glass-smooth flying at this altitude, five and a half miles above the ocean, the men felt as though their machine were at rest in space while the earth whirled beneath them.
After they had circled the ship at forty miles, they reported that the clouds were unbroken and returned to the five-mile circle. The great tedium began. With the machine on autopilot, there was little for the crew to do except monitor the fuel and engine instruments and check the night sky for other aircraft. Convinced all was well, Jake removed his gloves and wedged them into the narrow crevice between the left side of the instrument panel and the windscreen. Then he drew his girl’s letter from his sleeve pocket. He read it in the circle of red light from the pencil spotlight mounted the overhead canopy bow.
With every line he felt a growing despondency.
On the first page she recalled the good times they had shared. On the second, she told him she was marrying another man. The third and final page contained her list of all the reasons their relationship would not have worked. He read the letter again slowly, replaced it in its envelope, and returned the envelope to his sleeve pocket.
After his first cruise, when the squadron had flown from the ship to Godbey Island, she had come to me him. She had watched while he climbed from the cockpit and walked across the ramp to her, waiting until he had reached her before opening her arms to welcome him. The other women had run toward the men.
He should have had an inkling then.
Their last time together, that Sunday in San Francisco, they had walked from Fisherman s Wharf to the Corinthian columns at the Palace of Fine Arts.
They had ridden the cable cars, listened to the folk singers and watched the soaring birds as the sun fired the past city. She had said, “You don’t belong in the navy. God, Jake, you pull off the road to look at a rainbow. Why would you want to be part of that system?
“And so many navy fliers we’ve known have died in crashes. I always wonder, after I’ve seen or talked to you, whether I’ll ever see you alive again.” Why hadn’t he known then? The radio squawked. Tanker Control directed them to proceed northwest to tank the BARCAP again. The fighters had enough fuel to stay airborne until recovery time, but it was prudent to have more than enough in case the enemy attacked the task force.
This time the tanker rendezvoused on the fighters. When each fighter had received another twenty-five hundred pounds, the tanker returned at 220 knots to the five-mile orbit.
They tuned the second radio, a luxury the tanker had that the bombers did not possess, to the Strike frequency and finally heard Cowboy Parker, then Sammy Lundeen, call feet wet. The challenge of night landings aboard the carrier lay before them now.
The minutes went by slowly. Grafton had to work to stay awake in spite of his recent fourteen-hour sleep. After a check of the altitude in the cockpit, he took off his mask and helmet and placed them in his lap. The noise level was loud but not intolerable. He extracted a plastic baby bottle from a pocket of his survival vest and poured
