higher, locked into the aerial racecourse of the carrier’s traffic control holding pattern, called a Marshall stack. They’d been circling there twenty-one miles from the Jefferson while the Air Boss brought in some S-3A Vikings that had been out on a sub patrol.
Tombstone leveled off. He could just make out the Jefferson’s stern far ahead, a gray rectangle nearly lost on the ocean. The flight decks on Nimitz-class carriers covered four and a half acres, but they looked ridiculously tiny from the cockpit of a fighter plane positioning itself for a trap. As they got closer, his eyes shifted to the carrier’s port side where a yellow speck of light, the “meatball,” or Fresnel optical landing system, appeared centered like a bull’s-eye above the LSO platform.
“Two-zero-one,” the voice of the Landing Signals Officer said over Tombstone’s headphones. “Call the ball.”
“Two-zero-one,” Tombstone replied, identifying his aircraft by number.
“Tomcat ball, three point one.” By “calling the ball,” Tombstone was letting the LSO know he had the landing signal in sight, that the incoming plane was a Tomcat with 3, 1 00 pounds of fuel left on board so Jefferson’s recovery crews would know how to set the tension on the arrestor cables stretched across the deck, and that he was properly aligned for a trap.
“Roger ball,” the LSO confirmed. “Looking good.”
Tombstone felt his heart begin to race. It was always like this during a carrier landing, day or night, fair weather or foul. Naval aviators without exception rated recovery on the deck of a carrier as having a higher pucker factor than air-to-air combat or an enemy SAM launch.
He lowered his arrestor hook, cut back on the throttles, and let the Tomcat sink toward the Jefferson’s deck. The carrier’s stern appeared much larger now, swelling rapidly as he dropped from the sky.
Lieutenant Commander Christopher Goodman had the throttles all the way back on his ungainly S-3A Viking as he spit out the arrestor cable and retracted his tail hook. Gently, he eased the throttles forward again, using the rudder pedals to steer the aircraft off the part of the flight deck delineated by broad white stripes to make way for the next incoming plane. A yellow-shirted handler backed away just ahead of the aircraft, arms extended forward, jacking them up and down, up and down as he signaled Goodman to come ahead.
He taxied slowly toward the line of planes along Jefferson’s starboard side, aft of the island. His crew — Lieutenant Hyman Gold, the copilot; Lieutenant j.g. Roger Kelso, the tactical coordinator; and AW-1 Bill Rocco, the systems operator — all were already relaxing now that the trap was successfully completed, unstrapping their seat harnesses and preparing to shut down the bird and log out.
There was very little swell this afternoon, and the Jeff was riding the sea almost rock-steady. That was always a blessing on the rare occasions when it happened. An airplane, any airplane, might be sheer poetry in motion in the sky, but on an aircraft carrier’s deck it was transformed into a bulky, clumsy, and barely manageable beast. With a pitching deck made slippery by ice or rain, things were just that much worse.
The handler gave a two-handed pushing movement to the side, indicating a particular parking space with the aircraft lined up along the starboard side, aft of the island. Goodman swung the foot pedals farther, maneuvering toward the narrow slot. A long line of aircraft noses swept past the cockpit as he turned, all painted in dull pale grays: F-14D Tomcats, wings angled sharply back along their flanks; a pair of bulky E-2C Hawkeyes with their wings rotated sideways and back to avoid the flat, saucer shapes of their radomes mounted above their fuselages; A-6F Intruders with their wingtips nearly meeting above their backs. Space was always at a premium at sea, both on the flight deck and down below, on the carrier’s cavernous hangar deck. Planes were parked side by side with folded wings nearly touching.
Easing the fifteen-ton aircraft toward the target, he gently applied pressure to the tops of the rudder pedals, engaging the wheel brakes.
Nothing happened. Goodman felt a sinking, mushy sensation through his flight boots, then nothing at all. The Viking’s brakes were gone, and Goodman was rolling across the deck toward a narrow cul-de-sac lined with multi- million-dollar aircraft.
There was no time to speak, even to give warning. With one hand he cut the throttles all the way back, then flicked on the Viking’s external lights and dropped the arrestor hook to signal the deck crew that he was in trouble. His momentum was too great to allow the plane to roll to a stop, and if he kept going he was going to roll with irresistible momentum squarely into the side of a Hawkeye. Working the foot pedals, he swung the Viking hard to the left, turning away from the flight line and back onto the one patch of clear flight deck within reach.
Commander Dick Wheeler was Jefferson’s Air Boss, a bald, sour-faced man with a football player’s physique and a voice to match. He was already in motion when he saw Viking 704’s tail hook hit the steel deck in a shower of sparks. If his brakes were gone, the pilot would have no choice but to swing back onto the main flight deck … and squarely into the path of incoming Tomcat 201.
It was a disaster in the making. “Fouled deck!” Wheeler barked over the Pri-Fly frequency that connected him with the deck crew and the LSO.
“Fouled deck!”
The Tomcat was already drifting toward the carrier’s roundoff, scant yards from touchdown …
CHAPTER 3
“Wave off! Wave off!” The words shrilled in Tombstone’s helmet just seconds from the deck. To port, the bull’s-eye of the Fresnel lens lit up red as the LSO triggered the pickle switch he held in one hand.
The warning caught Tombstone completely by surprise. Until that moment he’d been squarely in the groove, with only the slightest of corrections necessary to keep the Tomcat floating gently toward the three wire stretched across the deck in front of him.
Tombstone’s left hand was resting on the F-14’s throttles, ready to provide small adjustments to power and set to engage the afterburners the instant his wheels touched the deck … a standard precaution in case his tail hook missed the arrestor cables and he needed to get airborne again in a hurry. Now he shoved the throttles to full power and brought the Tomcat’s nose up. The wings were already extended to provide maximum lift at low speed. As the Tomcat’s twin engines blazed into afterburners the plane accelerated, passing over the carrier’s roundoff and straight down the flight deck, twenty feet above the dark gray steel.
He caught a blurred image of motion below him, of men running, heads down, of a pale gray aircraft with engine pods slung beneath each wing lumbering into his path.
Tombstone thumbed off the spoilers and eased back on the stick, willing the Tomcat to miss the sharp, skyward thrust of the other plane’s tail.
Acting on instinct alone, he brought the F-14’s right wing up, narrowly missing the Viking’s rudder. Afterburners thundering, he flashed past the island, across the waist catapults, and out over the open sea once more.
“Wheee-oh!” Marusko said from the back seat. CAG had not said a word during the final approach and near- collision, but his relief now was heartfelt and enthusiastic. “Goddamn it, Stoney! You didn’t have to do that to impress me!”
Tombstone found he couldn’t reply, didn’t trust himself to speak. He brought the aircraft into a shallow port turn, circling back for another pass. The S-3A Viking’s tail extended about twenty-two feet above the deck. He’d not seen the actual clearance but doubted that his wingtip had missed the sub-hunter by more than a foot or two.
In all the time that Tombstone had been flying Navy jets, he’d been shot at and shot up. He’d engaged in dogfights, ejected from an aircraft suddenly gone dead, and trapped aboard a carrier deck at night with heavy seas running. Never, he thought, had he been closer to buying the farm than that near-miss. If he’d connected with the Viking, at least six men would have died right there: himself, CAG, and the S-3’s crew of four. God alone knew how
