some water down the back of his neck.
That helped wake him up. He took a swig of the warm water, which tasted of plastic. He poured some in his hair and rubbed it on his face. Then he poured more on his hair and rubbed his head vigorously. He felt it trickle down his forehead and nose, ad one little rivulet scooted down the back of his neck.
He capped the bottle, put it away, then replaced his helmet and oxygen mask.
“Five Two Two, are you up?” It was Lundeen’s voice.
“Affirm,” he replied over the radio “Go Tactical,” was the reply.
Jake rotated the radio-channel selector knob to the squadron’s assigned frequency, waited five seconds then said, “Devil’s up.”
“Where are you, Jake?”
“Overhead at base plus twenty-two.”
“I’ll be there to see you in a bit.”
Click, click.
“Let’s go secure.”
Razor keyed the ICS as Jake turned on the scrambler “What do you think?”
Grafton shrugged. He had no idea why Sam wanted to rendezvous over the ship. Maybe he needed fuel. Maybe he had a problem with his airplane. Maybe he just wanted to grin and wave and fly along together under the moon and stars because Jake was his friend and Sammy was like that. They would soon know.
The pilot checked the amount of fuel left in each drop and internal tank.
He did this by depressing the button for the appropriate tank and getting a reading on the fuel gauge. Normally the gauge gave only a total , but like every other electrical or mechanical device, the totalizer could fail. The careful man who hoped to eventually die in bed always checked. The arithmetic of fuel calculation was unforgiving of error, there were no negative numbers. They had transferred eleven thousand pounds, had used two thousand in their launch and climbout, and were now consuming a mere four thousand pounds per hour at maximum endurance airspeed. After an hour and a half of flight Jake reckoned, they should have seven thousand pounds remaining. The gauge totals came to seventy two hundred pounds. Close enough. All the drop tanks were empty, as were the wing tanks. The two fuselage tanks held the remaining fuel. With twenty or thirty minutes to go until he crossed the ramp of the carrier he should recover with about five thousand pounds. He leaned back in the seat.
“How far to Da Nang?” he asked Razor. That would be the nearest friendly airfield ashore if he couldn’t get aboard the ship for any reason.
The bombardier consulted his briefing notes. “One fifty,” he told the pilot.
“Better verify that with the ship.” Razor asked the question of the controller at the radar screen in Strike Ops, deep inside the big ship 30,000 feet below. After a pause, the controller informed them the distance was one hundred forty miles and gave them the heading. Both men jotted it down on their kneeboards.
Sammy should be coming in from the northwest. Jake began to search that quadrant for the telltale flashing- red anticollision light.
In less than a minute it caught his eye. He watched the light grow brighter as the Intruder came on and waited for it to change course to rendezvous, which would mean that the bomber crew had seen them. When no such change occurred after fifteen seconds, he keyed the radio. “I’m at your ten o’clock, Sam.” Now the other plane began to turn.
Lundeen joined up on Grafton’s left wing. “Look me over, Jake,” he said.
“I’ve got the lead.” With the lead change, Grafton now had the responsibility of maintaining the separation between the two aircraft.
Grafton clicked his mike and retarded the throttles. He slid aft and down so that the other Intruder filled the windscreen. “Hit them with your white flashlight.” he instructed Razor. McPherson would not have needed prompting.
The beam played over the pale gray skin of the bomber. The bomb racks were empty; the copper arming wires glistened in the weak beam. Each mechanical bomb fuse had a wind-driven propeller vane on the nose that the arming wire held immobile while the weapon waited on the rack.
As the bomb fell away, the wire was extracted. The wind spun the vane for a preset number of seconds, and the weapon was thus armed a safe distance from the aircraft.
An absence of arming wires on a bomber returning from a mission meant that all the bombs it had dropped had been duds, the wires had prevented the propeller vanes from spinning and arming the bombs.
Razor shone the flashlight over the right wing, then began to work aft toward the tail. Behind the wing root, on the right side of the fuselage in front of the horizontal stabilizer, they saw the holes. Many tiny jagged holes.
“Work the light aft,” Jake said. More holes splattered the right side of the vertical tail and horizontal stabilizer. Jake eased the tanker in until less than ten feet separated him from the bomber’s tail. He could feel the wash of the other plane forcing his left win down, and he compensated with right stick.
“Sammy, you have a hundred or so little holes on the right side, aft of the wings, on the fuselage and the tail. Looks like flak bursts.”
“Check the pilot tube.”
Jake’s eyes flicked to the top of the bomber’s tail. The tube that measured the bird’s speed through the atmosphere was gone. He told Lundeen.
“I thought so,” Lundeen sighed. “The airspeed indicator reads one hundred ten knots. Better check the other side, too.”
Jake slid across and Razor moved the light along the tail and forward up the fuselage. They found one medium-sized hole in the port flap.
“Now take a squint at the gear doors,” Lundeen directed.
Jake slipped forward until they were immediately beneath the bomber. The doors- were stained with grease and yellow preservative but appeared intact. If they weren’t, the tires within would probably be flat. Razor informed the bomber crew that they could find no other damage.
“We have no airspeed indicator, the computer’s frozen solid as an ice cube, the radar altimeter’s kaput, the TACAN is intermittent, and our I C S is screwed up. A D F isn’t working, either. Let me drop the hook and let’s see if it comes down.” It did and Grafton told him so.
“Maybe we had better go down on your wing,” Sammy said.
“Okay,” Jake said. He slid out to the left and pulled abreast of the bomber.
“I’ve got the lead now. Let’s go to Approach and you tell them your story.”
“Uh, while we’re doing that how about giving me a sip? I could use a grand.”
Jake checked the fuel indicator again. He wasn’t going to have any reserve as it was, and he had already informed Tanker Control he had no more gas to give. But Sammy wouldn’t ask if he didn’t need it. He flipped the power switch on the tanker package and streamed the drogue.
“You’re cutting it pretty goddamned fine,” Razor complained.
“I’ll get just as wet as you if we punch out,” the pilot said. “That could be us over there.”
Razor voiced no more objections.
After an extensive conversation with Approach, the two Intruders were issued Marshall instructions. “Your Marshall one six zero degrees at two four.
Pushover at zero one four eight. Five Two Two will drop Five Oh Six on the ball, be vectored downwind, and trap on the next pass.”
Razor repeated the controller’s instructions, received an acknowledgment, then looked at Grafton. “Nine thousand feet at twenty-four miles.”
agree.
Marshall points were holding fixes whereby aircraft were stacked to await recovery at night or in weather too bad for a visual approach. The lowest altitude that could be assigned was five thousand feet at a distance of twenty miles from the ship. Each subsequent aircraft would receive a fix a thousand feet higher and a mile farther away. So the fixes were defined as five thousand feet and twenty miles, six thousand and twenty-one, seven thousand and twenty-two, and so on. The altitude was omitted from the radio call because it is always fifteen less than the mileage assigned. When the pushover time, or moment of descent, arrived, the pilots were expected to have their
