President, the first Democrat to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter, needed every good card he could lay his hands on now that it looked like the Soviets were bursting back on the world stage with a vengeance.
The thought made Tombstone cringe inwardly. He had never been comfortable with the hero treatment even though he’d come to terms with it after North Korea. But his staff job at the Pentagon had been little more than an excuse to keep him available for public appearances, Congressional testimony, and media events. He had joined the Navy to become an aviator, to fly a fighter like his father and his uncle before him. Boring paperwork and exercises in public relations had never been his goal. A sleek fighter and open sky were all Matthew Magruder wanted or needed.
If his return to active duty on the Jefferson was intended or just another piece of PR work, Tombstone thought, then the people who’d ordered it were going to be surprised. He wouldn’t allow anyone to saddle him with another rear-echelon role. Never again, he vowed silently.
The moonlight gleamed off the Intruder’s wing again. The bomber was drifting right, out of formation. Magruder bit his lip and keyed in his radio. “Mercury Five-one-one, Mercury Leader,” he said. “Let’s tighten it up, there, Lieutenant.”
The reply was a startled “Sorry, sir.” Slowly the Intruder nudged back into formation.
It had been a long flight, and all four pilots were tired. This had been the most sustained flying Magruder had done in two years, and he imagined the others weren’t much better prepared. They’d been drawn from Reserve Air Groups in the States, and like Tombstone they wouldn’t have had much excuse for practicing any of the types of operations that were routine for carrier-based flyers.
Two Tomcats, two Intruders … and at that they’d still be short of a full complement by three more planes. That accident on Jefferson’s flight deck had been a messy one. It wasn’t the best way Tombstone could think of to get the assignment he’d coveted, especially when the Deputy CAG he was replacing had been a friend from the old days. Commander Isaac “Jolly Green” Greene, who’d survived a shoot-down during the Wonsan operation, and had played a key role in the Alpha Strike that had stopped the war between India and Pakistan, hadn’t been all that well liked by his comrades on the Jefferson back then, but he’d been a first-class Intruder pilot and a fine squadron commander with a reputation for guts and determination. He’d beaten Magruder out for the coveted Deputy CAG post when Jefferson’s new deployment had first been announced, and despite his own disappointment Tombstone had been glad that it had been Jolly Greene who took it away from him.
It seemed wrong somehow that the big, sarcastic man had bought it in a flight deck accident. He had survived deadly Triple-A fire over Wonsan and the icy waters off the Korean coast, only to die when the Intruder he was riding in as an observer had skidded while landing on a wet deck. His ejection seat had thrown him clear of the carrier … but hours of searching by SAR copters had never found him.
That wasn’t how Tombstone would have wanted his homecoming to start … but now he’d be stepping into the dead man’s shoes whether he liked it or not.
Tombstone buried the thought. At least he was back on carrier duty again, where he belonged. That was what really counted.
CHAPTER 3
“Mercury One-oh-nine, Charlie now.”
Tombstone acknowledged Jefferson’s order to break out of the holding pattern and start his final approach. The rest of Mercury Flight had already landed safely, though one of the Intruder pilots had nearly lost it in the last few seconds. Some good coaching from the Landing Signals Officer down on the carrier deck had kept the kid from cracking up, but it had been a close call.
That incident, coming hard on the heels of his own refueling problem, was the sort of thing that would have warned off someone who believed in bad omens. Tombstone had never considered himself superstitious, but this flight was shaking his skepticism.
Now only Darkstar, the KA-6 tanker that had flown back from the rendezvous point with them, remained aloft with the Tomcat. It would keep on circling until the F-14 had landed, in case Tombstone needed to tank up again before landing.
Fat chance, he told himself. The thought of another refueling like the last one was the best inducement he’d ever had for getting his landing right the first time.
He reduced speed to 250 knots, overriding the flight computers attempts to extend the aircraft’s swing wings to their full wing-forward position. The Tomcat’s sleek lines wouldn’t be visible in the darkness, but Tombstone, like most aviators, made it a point of pride to keep the wings back and the F-14 looking its best all the way down.
The action brought back an old memory of a young RIO who had referred to the forward wing position as “goose mode” because it made the Tomcat look like an awkward goose flaring out as it landed on some still lake.
As the seconds ticked by he checked his airspeed and angle of approach on the Vertical Display Indicator in the center of his control panel, carefully lining up the Instrument Landing System cross-pointers on the glowing cursor that represented the Jefferson’s location with built-in corrections for wind direction and speed. He didn’t like flying by the ILS, but it was the only way to make a carrier landing approach at night. Except in the brightest moonlight, sea and sky tended to merge into a featureless black cave, and without reference points a pilot could quickly lose his orientation. Vertigo was one of the milder problems associated with trying to fly when it was impossible to judge distance or direction. When traveling at nearly three hundred miles per hour, it only took an instant’s confusion to end up a casualty.
At best the carrier itself would be no more than a tiny dot of light set in an otherwise featureless gloom, and that only at comparatively close ranges. That made the ILS essential.
Once the cross hairs were centered Tombstone kept them precisely in position. Luckily, the throttle on a Tomcat adjusted speed automatically, allowing him to concentrate on course corrections and his angle of attack. The F-14 covered ten miles — half the distance between the carrier and the final fix that had been the jump-off point for the approach — in just over two minutes, dropping two thousand feet per minute. Magruder kept his attention focused on the VDI, resisting the temptation to look through the canopy and try to spot the Jefferson.
When the range indicator on the display indicated ten miles he “dirtied up” the Tomcat by hitting the switches that dropped landing gear, flaps, and tail hook. He was flying level now, at twelve hundred feet, with airspeed dropping. The ILS cross-pointers were centered near the top of the display, but they crept toward the middle of the screen as the Tomcat continued its approach.
Three miles out he started his descent again, still entirely dependent on instruments. It took experience to handle this part of a night approach, a precise knowledge of just how much to compensate for tiny course deviations. The carrier wasn’t a stable, motionless platform, but a moving target plunging through wind and wave at better than twenty knots. And wind was only one of many factors that were making the Tomcat drift off the mark. Correcting for drift was a constant thing, and the closer the fighter got to the carrier the more Tombstone had to anticipate the behavior of the aircraft so his corrections could be applied in time.
His two years away from constant carrier ops had left him rusty, but he found all the old instincts coming back to him. Man and machine worked as the perfect team.
“Two miles out,” Jefferson’s radio controller said. “Left one, slightly below glide path.”
He corrected automatically, almost before the radio call.
As the range indicator showed one mile left, he looked up from the VDI and saw the carrier immediately. It was like a tapering box outlined in white lights, bisected by a centerline that projected out of the bottom edge of the box. Orange lights at the end of the centerline marked the drop line hanging down the stern of the ship, indicating the edge of the flight deck.
He picked out the tiny rectangular shape of the optical glide-path indicator to the left of the white lights, the
