four miles away, just as he did the last time. He was far enough away that he was invisible to the men on the boat, hidden in the darkness beyond the flare’s light.
The boat maintained its course toward the task force.
Jake thoughtfully fingered the wing fuel-dump switch, checked the small needle on the fuel gauge, then toggled it. He watched the gauge as three thousand pounds of wing fuel ran out into the atmosphere. He listened to Strike directing the other A-6, now airborne, to a holding fix. When the wing fuel was gone, Jake closed the dump valves. Without the wing fuel the plane would maneuver better, and there was less chance of an explosion if a flak shell went through the wing.
“You ready?” Jake asked Reed.
“For what?”
Jake turned on the exterior lights. He cranked on a four-G turn and pointed the plane’s nose at the boat. The radio altimeter warning sounded. He didn’t have time to reset it.
Down they came, 400 feet, 300, the throttles forward against the stops. He leveled at 250 feet, two miles from the boat. Above them shone the ghastly white light of the magnesium flare.
A string of tracers reached for the cockpit from straight ahead. “He’s shooting!” Reed shouted in disbelief.
Jake rolled hard right and flipped off the lights with his left hand. He kept the nose coming up and the turn in. The tracer stream weaved, trying to correct. It was a belt-fed weapon, maybe 14.5-millimeter.
The shells reached for them, crossing just under the plane. Jake was rolling and jinking, turning hard to get away from the boat and the gun.
The gunner was shooting bursts of five or six shells. God, they were close!
Jake jammed the stick forward and they floated under negative G as the streaks crossed above the cockpit. As the end of a tracer string went by he hauled the stick aft and began a four-G pull up, toward the clouds above.
Reed was on the radio, “He’s shooting.” His voice had gone up an octave.
Now they were up into the clouds, which glowed from the flare underneath.
Jake kept climbing. “Well,” he said to the bombardier.
“It sure as hell ain’t no fishing boat.”
“Battlestar Strike, Shotgun. We took some tracer fire from the bogey, which appears to be some kind of speedboat. It has no fishing gear or missiles that we could see, but it’s carrying an X-band radar, which it’s using occasionally. Tracers were probably fourteen point five mike mike, over. Looks like he’s laying his gun with some kind of an optical night-sight, over.”
“Roger. Your vector One Eight Zero degrees.” Jake pulled the throttles back and soared to 3,000 feet, where he leveled and turned to southern heading.
“Do you think we’ll have to bomb it?” Reed asked.
“I suspect so,” Grafton replied. He didn’t think the admiral had any other choice, except possibly sink it with naval gunfire. And every mile the boat closed the task group increased the missile threat to the ships.
Twenty miles south of the target Jake swung the plane around and Reed checked that the computer crosshairs, the cursors, were still on the boat. The boat was still on a westerly heading.
“What’s the bogey’s speed?” Jake asked.
“About nineteen knots, sir.” At last, Grafton noted, Reed thought he was worth a ‘sir.’”
“Shotgun Five Zero Two, Strike.”
“Go ahead.”
“Sink the bogey. I repeat, sink the bogey. Use Rockeye, over.”
“Understand sink it with Rockeye.”
“That’s affirmative.” Apparently the admiral didn’t want to expend this million-dollar Harpoon missile Jake was carrying. A penny saved …
Jake set up the armament panel to train off all eight of the Rockeye canisters, two at a time. He deselected the flares on station two and selected stations one and five, where the cluster bombs hung. Each of the Rockeye canisters contained two hundred forty-six 1.7-pound bomblets. After the canister was dropped, it would open in midair and the bomblets would disperse into an oval pattern. Each bomblet contained a shaped charge that could penetrate nine inches of cold-rolled steel. Reed was watching him. The BN inadvertently keyed his ICS mike and Jake could hear his heavy breathing. He was muttering to himself, “Jeesuss, ooooh Jeesuss …”
“You ready?” Jake asked as the nose came around toward the target.
“Yessir.”
Jake jammed the throttles to the stops and centered the steering. “Shotgun’s starting the bomb run,” he reported to Strike.
“He’s still heading west and I’m in attack,” Reed said.
“Expect him to turn as we close. Go for a radar lock. Forget the FLIR.”
The X-band warning lit as they passed ten miles inbound. Jake punched chaff and held the plane steady.
The ADI on the panel in front of him was alive with computer symbology which gave him steering commands, time to go to release, drift angle, and relative position of the target. Jake concentrated on keeping the plane level and the steering centered. At five miles to go he pulled the commit trigger on the stick and held it. The weapons would be released by the computer when the aircraft arrived at the release point, that precise point in space where the computer calculated the bombs would fall upon the target given the aircraft’s height, speed, and heading.
The glare from another string of tracers reflected through the clouds. The weaving yellow finger probed for the aircraft, searching like the antennae of a hungry insect, as Jake punched chaff and checked the computer steering against the glow of the rising fireballs. Dead ahead. The gunner was firing blindly, Jake decided. He concentrated on the ADI as the release symbol on the display marched down.
We’ll make it! The bombs were released in a quick series of thumps, and he rolled hard right away from the rising tracers and pulled as the Rockeye canisters flashed open to disperse their bomblets.
“Weapons away,” Jake told the ship.
“Roger.”
In about twenty seconds the antiaircraft fire ceased abruptly. Jake eased the nose down and slid below the clouds. The pilot turned the aircraft slightly and looked back. Gleaming through the darkness was a smear of yellow light. Fire!
“Where’s the coast?” Jake asked the BN.
“Twenty miles east.”
The pilot checked his heading. “Get the FLIR humming. We’ll turn back at eight miles and make another low pass to see what we hit.”
The yellow glow of the fire was the only light visible in the dark universe under the clouds when they turned back inbound. Now a brilliant flash split the night, a fireball that grew and blossomed on the water ahead, then faded almost as suddenly as it appeared. Jake turned away to avoid the debris that he knew would be in the air.
“He blew up,” Reed breathed, amazement in his voice.
“Tell the ship,” Jake Grafton said, and pulled the throttles back to a cruise setting.
At ten miles inbound to the ship Jake Grafton coupled the autopilot to the Automatic Carrier Landing System, the ACLS. He felt the throttles move slightly in response and kept his fingertips lightly on top of them. Now the computer aboard the ship would tell the plane’s autopilot where the plane was in relation to the glideslope and centerline, and the autopilot would fly the plane down, all the way to the deck.
Jake stared at the crosshairs display on the ADI in front of him and watched the horizontal line representing the glideslope descend toward the center of the display. As it reached the center the throttles moved aft and the plane transitioned to a 600-foot-per-minute rate of descent. They were exactly on speed, the angle-of-attack needle frozen in the three-o’clock position. The plane was still in clouds, yet it was rock-steady, descending nicely.
“You’re on glidepath, on centerline,” the approach controller said, confirming what the instruments were telling the pilot.
As far as Jake was concerned, these coupled ACLS approaches, known as Mode One, were the greatest thing to happen to naval aviation since the invention of the tailhook. He had been making these automatic approaches at
