“Okay.” The voice was thin. Tired, very tired.
“Easy on the power. Call the ball.” The ball call was essential.
It told the LSO that the pilot could see the light, the “meatball,” presented by the optical landing system that was located on the port side of the landing area.
This device used a yellow light arranged above two green reference, or datum, lights to give the pilot a visual indication of his position in relation to the proper glide path. If he kept the ball centered in the datum lights all the way to touchdown, he would catch the third of fourth arresting-gear wires rigged across the deck.
“Intruder ball, Six Point Oh.”
Down in C A T C C the invisible men behind the stat board erased the last fuel state for Devil 505 and wrote “6.0? beside the pilot’s name. Six thousand pounds fuel remaining. Commander Camparelli and the air boss checked the closed-circuit television monitor that gave them a picture from a camera buried under the flight deck and aimed up the glide slope. They waited.
From his perch on the flight deck, beside the landing area, the LSO could see the lights of the approaching plane grow brighter. In C A T C C and in every ready room on the ship, all eyes were fixed on the television monitor with its picture of the glide slope and centerline cross hair and, just visible, the lights of the approaching plane.
Lundeen heard the engines. The faint whine grew louder, and he could hear the compressors spooling up and down as the pilot adjusted the throttles to keep the machine on the glide slope.
Battles’s voice: “You’re starting to go low.” The engines wound up slightly. “Little more power.” The engines surged. “Too much, you’re high.” A whine as the power came off, then a swelling of sound as Jake added power to stabilize his descent.
The A-6 approached the end of the ship, its engines bowling. Battles was six feet out into the landing area, braced against the thirty-knot wind, concentrating on the rapidly approaching Intruder. He realized the plane was about three feet too high even as he heard the throttles come back and saw the nose of the machine sag slightly. He’s going for the deck, the LSO told himself as he screamed into the radio, “Attitude!”
The Intruder flashed by, a gigantic bird feeling for the deck with its tailhook and main landing gear, its wingtip less than fifteen feet from the LSO’s head. Battles sensed, rather than saw, Jake pull the stick back in response to his last call. The A-6 slammed into the deck, and the tailhook snagged the number-two arresting cable, whipping it out. As the plane raced up the deck, the engines wound up toward full power with a blast of sound and hot fury that lashed the two unprotected men. Lundeen almost lost his footing, as he had already begun running up the flight deck the instant he saw the hook pick up the arresting wire.
Training and reflex action had caused Jake Grafton to slam the throttles forward and retract the speed brakes the moment the wheels hit the deck in case the hook failed to snag a wire and he ran off the end of the deck a “bolter.”
As he felt the arresting gear slow the plan he slapped the throttles to idle, flipped the external light master switch off, and raised the flap handle. The A-6 jerked to a halt and rolled backwards.
The pilot pushed the button to raise the hook, then applied the brakes.
The Intruder stopped with another jolt, this time remaining at rest.
Jake could see people running toward the plane from the island. He chopped the right engine and opened the canopy. A corpsman in a white shirt scrambled up the ladder on the BN’s side of the plane and reached McPherson. He raised the bombardier’s head, looked at his neck, then motioned to the overhead floodlights switch on the canopy bow, the steel longitudinal frame that split the top of the canopy plexiglass. Turning it on, the pilot squinted and blinked as naked white light bathed the cockpit.
Rich red blood was everywhere. Blood covered McPherson and coated the panels on his side of the plane. Grafton’s right hand was covered with it, as was the stick grip and everything else he had touched. The cockpit was a slaughter house.
More men were draped over and on the cockpit. They flipped up the ejection seat safety latches to prevent the seat from firing accidentally, then released the fastenings that held the bombardier to the seat. They lifted his body out of the cockpit and passed him to the waiting hands below.
Fighting for self-control, Jake folded the wings an switched off the electronic gear. He became aware of Sammy standing on the ladder beside him.
Lundeen reached into the cockpit and pulled the parking brake handle, then shut down the left engine. Grafton unlatched his oxygen mask and removed his helmet. His eyes were riveted on the stretcher bearing Morgan McPherson to the island superstructure until it disappeared behind a swinging metal door.
Silence descended on the cockpit. The wind down the flight deck dried the sweat coating Jake’s hair and face. He began to chill. He looked again at the blood, on his hand, on the stick, blood everywhere under the harsh white light. The clock in the instrument panel was one of the few things not smeared with blood. The pilot looked up into the face of his friend.
“Sammy-” He felt the burning vomit coming up his throat and caught it in his helmet.
TWO
Early the next afternoon Jake Grafton walked through the hangar bay, picking his way around the planes and past the sailor-mechanics tending the R A-5 Vigilante reconnaissance planes, F-4 Phantom fighters, A-7 Corsair and A-6 Intruder attack planes, a couple of helicopters-all were carefully arranged so that every square foot of space was used.
Here in the hangar were performed the routine maintenance and emergency repairs that could not be done in the wind and rain of the flight deck. Here also were those plan needing spare parts that would be delivered by ship resupply plane. The hangar bay, an impressive acre and a half of aircraft, usually held a fascination for Jake, but not today.
When he reached the back of the bay, he walked through a set of open fireproof double doors into the Engine Repair Facility. A Young men wearing the enlisteds’ usual at-sea attire-bell-bottom jeans and faded denim shirts stained with oil, grease, and hydraulic fluid-attended to a half-dozen jet engines resting on waist-high dollies. Rags dangled from hip pockets, and wrenches and screwdrivers protruded at odd angles. Back in the States, these men must have been dressed much the same way on those long summer evenings when they tinkered with their Chevys and Fords.
Jake approached the shop chief, a trim middle-aged man. “Chief, do you have an old busted wrench or some scrap metal I could have?”
The chief petty officer took in the officer in khakis. About six feet and 175 pounds, Jake Grafton wore pilot’s wings above his left breast pocket and the blue nametag of the A-6 squadron above his right.
Clear gray eyes looked out past a nose that was at least one size too large for the face, and his brown hair had begun to recede from his forehead. Under one arm the officer was carrying a wadded-up flight suit.
“Sure, Mister Grafton.” The chief rummaged through a metal box beside a desk stacked with forms and publications. He selected two pieces of odd-shaped rusted steel, together weighing five or six pounds, and handed them to the pilot.
“Thanks, Chief.”
Jake continued on aft past the shop and stepped through an open hatch onto the fantail of the ship, a giant porch-like structure about fifteen feet above the water with the flight deck aSARoof. Ordinarily the engine mechanics used this space to bolt their jet engines to massive stands and test them before reinstalling them in the aircraft, and often the marine detachment aboard used the fantail for small-arms practice, firing at cans or rags tossed into the wake. Today, though, the place was deserted.
Jake unrolled the flight suit, placed the metal in one of the deep chest pockets, then zipped it closed. Dried blood, now a rusty brown, covered the right sleeve and splotched the one-piece suit. He threw the suit over the rail into the wake, a river of foam reaching toward the horizon. The green cloth floated briefly, then settled beneath the roiling surface on its long trip to the sea’s floor. The cloth would last a few years before it disintegrated but the steel would take maybe as many as a thousand years before it surrendered completely to the ageless sea. But the sea would win. That he knew. Even after the cloth had disappeared several hundred yards astern, he remained
