asked.
The status boards tonight listed twelve airplanes to launch and thirteen to recover.
“How’s tricks?” Jake asked Walker when he finally got off the telephone.
“Terrible. There’s about fifteen knots of wind and it’s shifted sixty degrees in the last hour. We’ve meandered all over compass trying to get it down the deck.” On the bridge the officer-of-the-deck would be ordering course changes as he chased the wind. This would cause havoc with the air controllers’ efforts to stack, or marshal, the planes to be recovered aft of the ship, somewhere near the final recovery bearing. No one knew what the final bearing would be.
“And Five Oh Six hasn’t checked in to Marshal yet.”
Jake glanced at the status board again. 506, Majeska. No fuel state was given. Majeska was the commanding officer of the A-6 Intruder squadron.
Jake stood. “I’m going next door.” As he walked away he heard the assistant air ops officer on the phone to Captain James.
The adjoining compartment housed the radar displays, communications equipment, and status boards to control airborne aircraft. The scopes cast an eerie green light on the faces of the specialists who sat before them. Dim red lights shone down from the ceilings. A senior chief petty officer wearing a headset that allowed him to listen to all the radio transmissions walked back and forth behind the scopes, listening and looking and occasionally issuing an order. The senior chief was a chain-smoker who carried his own ashtray. Consequently the area near the door was a haven for refugees from the clear air of the air ops compartment next door. Here in the inner sanctum amid the scopes the smoke wafted about visibly, alternately green and red, swirled constantly by the ineffectual air-conditioning.
The conversations between the airborne pilots and the controllers came over a loudspeaker and provided the background noise. The same conversations could also be heard next door, in air ops.
The chief saw Jake standing near the door and came over, his headset cord trailing after him. “Where’s Five Oh Six?”
The chief led Jake to one of the radar consoles, where together they stared at the large scope, searching for the coded blip of Majeska’s aircraft. Jake fumbled in his shirt pocket for his glasses. Even with the display expanded to show the airspace within a fifty-mile radius of the ship, the correct blip wasn’t there. “We’ve been calling him for ten minutes,” the chief said to Jake. “Ask Strike if they hold him,” the chief told the controller.
The sailor did as ordered. The chief listened to the conversation. The strike controller hadn’t talked to the A- 6E for almost fifteen minutes. He broadcast the Intruder’s call sign over the air several times, but received no reply.
“Could he be just outside the range of your radar?” Jake asked.
“No, sir. And Combat doesn’t hold him either.” The operators in CDC would be querying the NTDS computer.
“Skin paint?” If the aircraft’s IFF gear had malfunctioned, it was no longer coding the radar energy it received and broadcasting it back to the ship. The shipboard radars could also look at raw blips — that is, uncoded energy bouncing off the skin of the aircraft.
“No, sir. We tried. We can’t find him up there.”
Jake felt the swoosh and thud of a catapult firing. He glanced at the monitor. The launch had started.
An officer stepped up to Jake’s elbow. “Sir, Commander Walker wants you.” Jake thanked the chief and followed the lieutenant through the smoke.
Walker had a telephone to his ear when Jake sat down. “A Greek freighter called on the commercial net. Says he thinks a plane crashed near his ship about twenty minutes ago. You want to go over to Combat and see what they know?”
“Yeah.” Jake heaved himself up. Every eye in the place was on him. He walked out, feeling very tired. The door to Combat was only forty feet or so forward, on the same starboard O-3 level passageway as CATCC. As Jake walked he could feel catapult pistons thudding into the water brakes. More airplanes aloft.
The NTDS computer consoles and their operators were scattered all over the compartment. The watch officer, a lieutenant, was also sucking on a cigarette. Jake wanted one so badly he could taste it.
“Any sign of survivors?”
“The freighter hasn’t found any.”
“What was that plane doing out there?”
“Surface surveillance. Their last transmission was that they were going to check out that freighter that’s in the vicinity. The freighter says it is looking for survivors, but it can’t find any. We’re sending the fighters that just launched to that position to orbit overhead. Maybe they’ll hear a survival radio or see a flare.”
The two men discussed the situation; the location of the destroyer steaming toward the crash site, how long the fighters could hold overhead, the estimated time en route of the helicopter which would be launched from the carrier in a few minutes, when the current recovery was complete. Jake called his deputy air wing commander, Harry March. When he arrived the recovery was in full swing and the compartment vibrated as the planes smashed down on the flight deck, which was the ceiling of all the O-3 level compartments. Jake and March went out in the passageway and walked the fifty feet to the strike ops office, whose denizens wrote the daily air plan, the document that created missions for the ship’s aircraft. A plan for a wreckage and personnel search at first light by air-wing aircraft was quickly put together as the strike operations officer conferred on the telephone with the admiral’s operations officer. Everyone, Jake reflected, had a finger in the pie.
“This would have to happen just before going into port,” one of the strike ops officers said glumly.
“Is that chopper still on deck?”
“Yessir.” Everyone looked at the monitor. The chopper was spreading its rotors. “Harry, tell Walker to hold that chopper on deck until I get there,” Jake said. “I’m going with them. In the meantime, I want you to get all the people you need, right now, and check out the liquid-oxygen system of every A-6 on this boat. And check all the lox servicing gear. If any of those systems are contaminated, seal them.” March nodded. “Go. I’m going to get on that chopper.”
Jake borrowed a filthy flight suit in flight deck control and dashed across the flight deck toward the waiting helicopter, an SH-3 Sea Knight. The men around it began breaking down the tie-down chains when they saw him coming. The breeze down the flight deck was brisk and the sky clear. The first pale hint of the coming dawn was just visible in the east.
Inside the chopper, one of the two rescue crewmen passed him a helmet which trailed a long black electrical lead. He pulled it on and the crewman plugged the end of the lead into a socket on the forward bulkhead. Now he could hear the pilot and copilot running through the pretakeoff checklist. Jake sat on the floor and wiggled into the flight suit, pulling it on over his uniform. Then he donned an inflatable life vest which the second crewman passed to him.
Even with the helmet, the noise level was extremely high as the helicopter lifted off and transitioned to forward flight. Out the open door, Jake saw the lights on the bow of the ship pass from view. Then there was nothing to see in the featureless darkness of night sea and sky. He motioned to the crewman who had given him the helmet and, when he was close enough, shouted in his ear. “How long until we reach the crash site?”
The crewman spoke into his lip mike and Jake heard the answer from the cockpit. An hour and twenty minutes. As the crewmen closed the sliding side door to improve cruising aerodynamics Jake found a kapok life vest to lay his head on and tried to relax. He gnawed a fingernail already into the quick from too much chewing and half listened to the cockpit crew chanting the litany of the post takeoff checklist on the ICS. Why in the name of God had Bull Majeska crashed, a man with three thousand hours in jets, over twenty-five hundred in A-6s? What could have gone wrong? Was the wreckage afloat or had it gone down? Could it be recovered?
Disgusted at himself for his impatience, he finally spit out the fragments of fingernail and forced himself to close his eyes and breathe regularly.
After ten minutes he gave up trying to sleep and stood behind the pilot and copilot where he could see the flight instruments. He exchanged pleasantries with the crew as the dawn chased the stars away and gradually revealed the restless gray sea and blueing sky.
The new day had completely arrived when the radio gave them the news. One of the orbiting jets had located a survivor. He was talking on the radio. It was Bull Majeska.
