incursions, and the ghost contacts, they’d lost an airman. While the tactical errors would be debriefed endlessly, no amount of analysis could change the result for Airman Alvarez.
He’d already talked to the squadron CO about Bird Dog, and he had a fairly good idea of what the pilot was like. Now that all the aircraft were back on deck, and the pilot had been debriefed by both the Safety Officer and the JAG Officer, it was Tombstone’s turn to try to determine exactly what had happened.
Not so different from any of us at that age. First cruise, still psyched about flying Tomcats. By now, it’s feeling normal to strap on a jet after breakfast and launch screaming into the wind, but that hasn’t cut through the sheer excitement of it all. He knows about fear, just a little, from trying to get back onboard at night, but he hasn’t faced the reality of it yet. Not how bad the fear can really get.
He thought back to his own earlier days on the carrier. With far more experience than this pilot had, Tombstone himself had had to face the fear that was a daily part of their lives. Two bad passes at the carrier, at night in foul weather, and Lieutenant Commander Magruder, hotshot F-14 pilot, had been ready to call it quits and settle into civilian life with Pamela. In the process of helping Batman fight his own personal demons, Tombstone had come to terms with his own. Flying F-14s wasn’t a guarantee of immortality — every student pilot knew that — but it took time and age to assimilate that fear.
“You know there’ll be a formal JAG investigation,” he said. He kept his eyes fixed on the pilot’s face. Deep in the blue eyes, he saw his own image reflected back at him.
The pilot nodded and looked down at the floor. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do. It all happened so fast. One second I was taxiing, the next second the brakes are blown and I’m heading for the side. I remember thinking about the E-2’s, wondering if I’d clear them. That Plane Captain — he just appeared out of nowhere. I’d just taxied through that part of the flight deck, and he wasn’t there then. Then all at once …” The pilot’s voice trailed off.
“That’s the way it happens,” Tombstone said. “Even in the air. Four hundred knots, ten knots — makes no difference. You train to react without thinking, because there’s never enough time. You either do the right thing, or you’re dead. Sometimes you do the right thing and you’re still dead.”
“I keep seeing him — just those last couple of seconds.” The younger pilot’s voice was a low monotone. “He’d snagged a pad-eye. I cut the engines as soon as I saw him, but it wasn’t fast enough. He was looking at me, and I could see him screaming. I don’t think it was words, not from the way his mouth was moving, just screaming. I keep wondering what I could have done to prevent it, why I didn’t just ram into the JBD or one of the E-2’s and save the kid’s life. Then I realize there wasn’t time; I couldn’t have gotten turned fast enough by the time I saw him. Maybe if I’d looked before I turned, maybe-“
“Maybe you could have,” Tombstone said, interrupting the emotionless recital of the facts. Bird Dog’s voice suggested that he was still in shock. The sooner Tombstone could cut through the cocoon that was isolating the pilot from reality, the sooner he’d start to deal with what had happened. “It’s not probable, but it is possible.”
Bird Dog flinched as though Tombstone had struck him. “You’re saying it was my fault.”
“It doesn’t matter right now. It might have hours ago, when either you or a plane captain might have noticed the hydraulics leak that caused your brakes to fail. But nothing you can do will change what happened. You either learn to live with it, or you’ll be tossing your wings on CAG’s desk before the cruise is over.”
“Maybe I should just do that now,” Bird Dog said. He shut his eyes for a moment and tried to imagine taxiing an F-14 on the flight deck again. All he could see was the screaming face, eyes hidden by the goggles and cranial helmet, one arm stretched out against the baking black nonskid, the fingers slipping, the horrifying rumble of the Tomcat’s right engine, the wet sucking grinding, metal clashing on metal as the body and the tie-down chains were ingested. Two turbine blades tore through the fuselage, barely missing Gator, ripping narrow bloody gashes in the cockpit.
It had been as sudden and unexpected as the destruction of the Spratly rock. One minute the tank crew had been alive, staring up at his aircraft. If he’d been closer to the island during those last moments, he might have seen the same expression on their faces as he’d seen on Alvarez’s — a stark realization that cut to the heart of each man, the inevitable truth that no man was immortal. He shuddered and tried to block the vivid details out of his mind, as well as the logical conclusion to that train of thought. If he’d been close enough to see the tank crew’s faces, to look into their eyes in the split second before they’d died, he would have been close enough to die himself. Even if the missile had not sought out the Tomcat as preferred prey in the deadly long-range game of strike warfare, fragments of debris thrown aloft by the explosion would have surely been sucked into the Tomcat’s jet engine. FOD. A silly-sounding acronym for Foreign Object Damage, FOD was a long-standing nightmare for some pilots. It was odd the things they came to fear, it occurred to him. Each pilot had his or her own peculiar fixation. Some obsessed about cold cats, the failure of steam pressure during the flight stroke. Others worried about hydraulics leaks, or the wiring harnesses that carried the complex electronic connections between the pilot’s instruments and the avionics black boxes. Unlike most of his peers, Bird Dog had never had a particular item he worried about. Coalescing in his gut, however, was a conviction that it was not any one thing so much as a particular accidental sequence of events that would finally get him. Something meaningless, like a hydraulics leak. He shut his eyes and shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. It kept coming back to him, one persistent thought. Had Alvarez been conscious long enough that the deadly blades would work their way up his body to his torso, then his head? Had he had those milliseconds to know that he was dying in one of the most horrible ways possible on an aircraft carrier? To Bird Dog, that was the most horrendous thing he could think of — to see death coming, and to know there was no way to avoid it. “Stop,” Tombstone ordered. “Look at me.”
Bird Dog opened his eyes and stared at the admiral.
“There are two things you’re going to do. First, you’re going to Sick Bay. Second, you’re going to get some sleep. If you’re going to make it through this, it’s better that we find out immediately. Commander,” Tombstone said, turning to the squadron CO.
“Understood, Admiral,” the commander said. “He’s back on the flight schedule tomorrow.”
Bird Dog stared at them dully. Back on the flight schedule, back on the flight deck. Strapped inside a jet with no way out, other than ejecting, which was as likely to kill him as anything else. Just like Alvarez … a little faster if he hit the canopy and snapped his neck, a little slower if his seat launched too soon and flung him into the flaming exhaust of his RIO’s seat.
How easy it was to die on an aircraft carrier! Somehow, that wasn’t something that had ever really sunk in, despite numerous hours of safety lectures and briefings. He shuddered, wondering if anyone else in the squadron knew how dangerous it was on the flight deck.
Of course they did, he reminded himself. They’d been doing this for years. Hell, Bird Dog had lost classmates all the way through the training pipeline. Aircraft broke, pilots did stupid things, and aviators died.
But somehow it’d never been brought home quite as dramatically. It was one thing to launch with another aircraft and never see the aviator again. It was another experience altogether to have a young sailor shredded by the blades of your jet engine. And to know that you were partially responsible.
A picture flashed in his mind, something he’d seen as he’d staggered out of the Tomcat after the accident. What was it? it was important, he was sure. Suddenly it came to him.
Across the flight deck from him, perched on the top of a Tomcat, had been Airman Shaughnessy. He could almost see the jet blast and wind ruffling her short hair, tossing it over in front of her eyes. Her hair! That was it! Shaughnessy had been on top of the Tomcat without her cranial on, a clear violation of every flight deck safety regulation.
Hot anger flooded him. People ignored safety rules at their own peril. Look where it’d gotten Airman Alvarez. He’d forgotten the first rule of flight deck survival and hadn’t kept his eyes continually scanning the area around him.
Bird Dog might not be able to do anything about Alvarez’s death — not now — but he might be able to keep another airman from dying through her own stupidity. He stopped abruptly and reversed his direction. He’d put a stop to her dangerous attitude right now. He finally tracked Chief Franklin down in the Chiefs’ Mess. The Mess was a combination galley and lounge that provided some privacy for the more senior enlisted members on the ship. Its door was decorated with an intricately woven display of “fancy work,” a collection of specialized knots and braided line that enclosed the anchor insignia of a chief petty officer’s collar insignia.
Bird Dog knocked on the door and then pushed it open without waiting for a response. Twenty chiefs, both male and female, were clustered around the room, drinking coffee, playing cards, and just generally trying to unwind. A few glanced up as he entered the compartment. It wasn’t unheard of for an officer to look for a Chief in the Mess, but it was considered bad form to discuss business in the Mess. Common courtesy and tradition dictated
