night all the way to touchdown for the last month, since his night vision had begun to noticeably deteriorate. And my eyes have probably been going downhill for years, he told himself bitterly, and I just haven’t noticed.
He was feeling rather pleased with himself until, at one mile from the ship, under the clouds, the crosshairs disappeared from the ADI and the autopilot dropped off the line.
The angle-of-attack needle rose slightly, so Jake added a smidgen of power and stared into the darkness for the meatball and the deck centerline lights. They were very dim and far away.
He had to see the meatball, the yellow light between the two green reference, or datum, lights of the optical landing system. This visual aid defined the proper glideslope. And he had to see the landing area centerline lights and the red drop lights extending vertically down the fantail of the ship. These lights gave him his proper lineup. “Oh fuck!”
“Three-quarters of a mile. Call the ball.”
Reed made the call. “Five Zero Two, Intruder ball, five point zero.”
“How’m I doing?” Jake asked the BN.
“You’re high.”
Jake made the correction. The lights were still too dim. He fought the controls.
When he glanced away from the angle-of-attack indexer lights on the cockpit glare-shield, he had trouble focusing on the meatball on the left side of the landing area. Then when he looked back at the indexer, it was fuzzy unless he stared at it. So he missed the twitching of the meatball as he approached the ship’s ramp, and by the time he saw movement, the ball had shot off the top of the lens system and he touched down too far down the deck to catch a wire. The Intruder’s wheels hit and he slammed on the power and continued on off the angle as the landing signal officer, the LSO, shouted “Bolter Bolter Bolter,” over the radio.
The next pass was better, but he boltered again. He couldn’t adequately compensate for the twitches of the ball when he just didn’t see them.
He caught the four wire on his third approach, mainly because he assumed he was high and reduced power hoping it was so.
They debriefed in the Strike Operations office, surrounded by Air Intelligence officers, the strike ops staff, and a half-dozen senior officers from the A-6 squadron. The crowd was happy, laughing. They had met the enemy and “taught ’em not to fuck with the U.S. Navy,” in Reed’s words. Reed was the happiest of the lot. Jake Grafton sat in a chair and watched Reed explain every detail of the bomb run to the A-6 skipper, John Majeska, whom his peers knew as “Bull.”
“That tracer was so bright you could read a newspaper in the cockpit,” Reed proclaimed. “And the CAG didn’t even blink. Man, that system was humming! Those fucking A-rabs had better stay perched on their camel humps or they’re all going to sleep with Davy Jones.”
When Bull Majeska turned to Grafton and asked quietly how Reed had really performed, Jake smiled and winked. “He did okay. Let him crow. They were trying to kill him.”
One of the strike ops assistants answered the ringing phone. “CAG, the admiral wants to see you in his stateroom when you’re finished here.”
“Thanks.” Jake gathered his helmet bag and shook Reed’s hand.
“Uh, sir,” Reed said softly. “About that subject we were discussing earlier. Uh, maybe I could come see you tomorrow?”
“Sure, Mad Dog.”
As Jake went out the door the crowd was rigging up the videotape monitor to watch the tape from the aircraft that recorded the radar and IR displays, the computer readouts, and the cockpit conversations. Maybe they could learn more about the sunken boat.
“So how did it go?” Cowboy Parker asked. The two men were in the admiral’s cabin. Jake sat beside the desk watching Parker shave at the little sink.
“They must have been packing a boatload of explosives. It was one big blast. Either the Rockeyes or the fire set the stuff off, or they blew it up themselves. They were on a suicide mission.” Jake took a deep breath. “Good thing for us that someone got trigger-happy.”
“That lot would have been pretty spectacular going off against the side of a ship.” Parker rinsed his razor and attacked his chin. He eyed Jake in the mirror. “Damn good thing for us that someone got shook when you turned on your lights and headed right at them.”
“Hmmm. Even I was surprised when I did that.” Jake chewed on a fingernail. “We don’t have any evidence except our word that it was a terrorist boat. They may announce that the U.S. Navy just offed some poor fishermen, all good Moslems on a sailing pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope. And if those guys had succeeded in damaging an American ship, well …”
“You boltered twice tonight.” Cowboy was examining his face in the mirror, trying to find if he’d missed a spot.
“Yeah. I couldn’t see jack.” Jake stared at his toes.
“Mode One didn’t work, huh?”
“Quit on me at a mile.” Jake sighed. “I’m going to ground myself at night and send a message asking to be relieved. The good part is that this little incident will improve morale on this tub. Everyone can see what we’re up against and they’ll keep their noses firmly on the grindstone.”
“Quitting smoking hasn’t helped the eyes?”
“Not that I can tell.”
“A tough way to end a flying career.” Cowboy rinsed his face and dried it on a towel.
“Cowboy, if I didn’t ground myself, you’d ground me. I know you. You’re yuks and giggles and Texas corn off duty, but you can slice the raw meat when you have to, whether it’s living or dead.”
Parker snorted and sat down at his desk. “I wish you were writing my fitness report.”
Jake rubbed his chin. Over eighteen hours had passed since he had shaved and his face felt like sandpaper. “Those Arabs. Suicides earning their way to Allah’s big tent in the sky. Damn, that’s scary. What would you have done if he hadn’t started shooting?”
Parker stroked his forehead with an index finger. “I’m not going to take a missile hit before I open fire. I don’t give a damn what Washington thinks or how it reads in the newspapers. Every ship in the force was at general quarters tonight. Every gun was ready to fire. The battlewagon was ready with sixteen-inchers and Harpoons. If one of these boats uses a radar on the proper frequency, points its nose at a ship and holds that heading to stabilize the gyros in a missile, I’m going to blow him out of the water. Right then and there.”
“The next guy won’t panic and start shooting,” Jake said. “They learn real fast.”
“We never suck it up and go after these guys. For the life of me, I can’t see why it’s better to drop bombs from an airplane or shells from a ship’s gun than it is to just hunt the terrorists down and execute them on the spot. Our response to hijackings and murder is to merely send some more ships over here to wave the flag. And salt a bomb around every now and then.”
“Where is all this going, Cowboy?”
The admiral scowled and his right hand became a fist. “Israel wants us in bed with them. The terrorists are trying to push us there. The Soviets are hoping to catch us there. Iran claims that’s where we’ve been all along.” His hand slowly opened. “It’s Vietnam all over again, Jake. Our politicians have gotten sucked into taking sides, so our diplomatic options have evaporated. Now the only American card left is the military one, and sooner or later Washington is going to play it. Just as sure as shootin’.” The hand was a fist again, rapping on the desk. “And the politicians aren’t going to do any better here than they did in Vietnam. Those people never learn.”
Jake Grafton’s shoulders rose a half inch, then subsided. “Everybody but us will have God on his side. And we’ll be in the middle.”
“If only we
Jake stood and stretched. “Thanks for giving me the chance to ground myself.”
The admiral’s lips curved into a hint of a smile. “I know you, Jake.”
