nearby. “This thing’ll be hard to break out of the clutter,” he observed, referring to the radar picture that Cole would be looking at. The bombardier shrugged.
“Have you ever been downtown before?” Jake asked Cole as they packed the charts and radar predictions into the bombardier’s flight bag. “Yeah,” Tiger Cole replied. “How many times?” Abe asked.
“A few.”
“How many is a few?”
“Four or five.”
“How many times exactly?”
“Exactly eight. Back in 1967, late summer and fall. Lyndon Johnson was going to teach them a lesson.
“How was it?” Abe absently tapped his pencil on the table.
“Bad.”
“They shot a lot?”
“It was like sticking your dick into a hornet’s nest. We lost a bunch of airplanes. I don’t think we taught them much, except that we can he had.”
As they left, Steiger momentarily put his arm around Jake’s shoulders.
“Watch your ass,” he advised, his eyes wide and blinking behind his glasses.
In the passageway Jake said, “Well, you sure scared Abe.”
“Then it’s unanimous. We’re all three scared.”
“Why did you agree to do this?”
“Because you asked.” As they went down a ladder Cole first, the bombardier said over his shoulder, “And because you can’t win a war unless you’re willing to fight.”
SEVENTEEN
The sea was a greasy mirror that reflected the grays of the evening sky. Not a breath of wind stirred. Even the swells had flattened under this heavy mass of dead air. In order to launch, the ship had to create a headwind. The deck vibrated as the four screws thrashed the still water into a river of foam that stretched aft into the thick haze that married the sea and sky.
From his cockpit Jake regarded the haze that at few hundred knots would impede visibility and threaten survival. He scoffed at his feeling of unease, but worry still clutched at him.
Jake was sitting behind the jet blast deflector for the number-three catapult on the waist when he saw bosun Muldowski hold up a message board for the pilot of the Phantom on the cat. Although Grafton couldn’t read the message, he could guess its contents. The cat office was advising the pilot that he wouldn’t get the usual fifteen- knots speed above the stall and was asking him to make do with less. The bosun turned away. Undoubtedly he had received a thumbs up from the pilot who really had little choice but to accept whatever endspeed the cat could give him. The chief engineer in the boiler rooms was probably chewing his lip; the boilers couldn’t provide the steam needed for the main turbines to drive the ship at flank speed and operate all four catapults at full power. Consequently he had to ration steam, and the first victims would be the giant catapult accumulators. Lower pressures in the accumulators meant the catapults would toss each plane off at a slower speed and the pilots would have to compensate. As usual, Jake thought, the solution to almost every problem ended up in the cockpit.
The Phantom on cat three wound up to fun power as the catapult crewmen tumbled out from under the plane. The hurricane of exhaust gases over the top of the JBD shook the waiting Intruder. Now the afterburners lit and ten feet of fire shot from each tailpipe. The tailpipe nozzles opened to accommodate the whitehot flames. Muldowski returned the fighter pilot’s salute and swung his arm toward the deck. The Phantom leaped forward toward the sky. As the machine left the deck the nose quickly rose. It rose and rose and rose, until it was almost twenty-five degrees above the horizon.
“Jesus!” Cole exclaimed.
The Phantom pilot had pulled too vigorously on the stick and his plane had gotten away from him. Without the usual excess airspeed, the nose quickly passed the optimum climb attitude and the wings had begun to stall. This caused the center of lift to move forward and the nose to rise further into the stall despite the pilot’s application of full forward stick.
With its nose unnaturally high, the plane hung spread-eagle against the sky: Then the Phantom sank from view below the edge of the deck.
The radio exploded to life. ‘Pickle your bombsight”
“Jettison!”
“Emergency!”
“May day jettison!” The transmissions continued, garbled, cutting in and out.
“There he is,” Cole said, grabbing Jake’s arm.
The fighter was out over the water, the nose of the plane reared back. With the burners almost in the water, the aircraft wallowed in the air, staggering from side to side as one wing fell, then the other.
A giant splash obscured the plane.
“Did he go in?” Jake whispered.
“No, he’s dropped his weapons and external fuel tank.
Almost a mile from the ship, the plane’s nose dropped toward the water and the spray churned up by its engines lessened. The fighter began to rise from the deadly embrace of the sea. Now, he was flying!
The bosun approached the Intruder with his chalk board. “8+ knots” it read. Jake Grafton did as the fighter Pilot before him: he signaled thumbs up.
At least the A-6 has better low-speed aerodynamics than the supersonic F-4, he thought. The edge of the stall is not so razor thin.
Jake pushed the throttles to the stops and wrapped his fingers around the cat grip… cycled the control … a murmur from Tiger Cole… the exhaust gas temperatures and RPMs had stabilized at full power when he snapped a salute to the bosun.
They rocketed forward toward the haze as the Gees mashed them back into the seat. Two and a half seconds later they were over the flat water, and Jake milked the stick, trading some of his precious altitude-he had only sixty feet-for airspeed. As the gear retracted, the needle on the vertical-speed indicator registered progress upward.
“I told Orville and I told Wilbur: that thing’ll never fly,” Cole announced as he turned on the radar and checked the computer.
They waited over the sea for the light to fade from the charcoal sky.
With the autopilot engaged and the engines set at Max conserve, the Pilot listlessly scanned the instruments as Cole tuned the radar and monitored the computer and inertial. Jake wondered if this haze covered the land, and, although he hoped it didn’t, he suspected that it did.
The sky was as placid as the sea, monotonously uniform, lacking definition. It seemed safe. The truth was, as Grafton knew, that moisture reduced visibility, which meant that the glowing artillery shells and the fireballs of the SAMs’ exhaust would be hidden from his sight during the early parts of their flights. On such a night a man could die suddenly, without a chance.
He tugged at his harness straps, already as tight as he could stand it, and looked again at the chart Cole had prepared that depicted their planned route.
The black line was so bold, so purposeful.
I should have written a will, he decided. Should have taken the time.
Well, Morgan, this one’s for you. For you and all that those guys who got zapped for nothing. This one isn’t for nothing, Morgan. With a quart or two of luck some of the gomers who give the orders are going to see hell arrive right through the roof of their National Assembly tonight. Give me some luck, Morg.
Callie, I’m a little scared right now, God knows, a little scared “Let’s do it,” Cole said.
The plane flew in absolute darkness; the heavy moisture absorbed all light. With nothing to see outside, Jake concentrated on his instruments. The radar altimeter did not function over the smooth ocean so Jake used the
