“How about it, 103? You ready for a drink?” Fastball recognized the voice of Rabies’s copilot.
“I sure could use a tall cold one about now,” he answered. “How about you just funnel one on back here? I hear the S-3 has a cooler full of beer onboard just to keep you guys occupied.”
“Yeah, right,” Rabies broke in. “Listen, junior, you just take care of business, okay?”
Fastball concentrated on lining up on Rabies, approaching from below and slightly behind. He eased the Tomcat into position, concentrating on the basket, trying not to overcontrol. On his first pass, the probe slid smoothly home. The green light lit up on his console, indicating a solid plug. “I have a green board,” he announced.
“Green board,” the copilot agreed. “Three thousand pounds, Fastball. Don’t say I never gave you nothing.”
Fastball watched as the fuel indicator showed aviation fuel flowing into his tanks. He probably wouldn’t need that much, although his two runs on afterburner had eaten at fair amount of fuel. Still, he could feel this was a good day for the deck. Three wire, first pass. There was no doubt in his military mind that this was going to be one hell of a landing. No doubt.
Within just a few minutes, the refueling was completed. “Disengaging,” Fastball said, watching the indicator. As soon as the light turned red, he slowed ever so slightly, and dropped down below the tanker. Once he was well clear, he broke right, descending in a clean, sweeping turn as he headed back to the carrier.
“That went well, I thought,” he said cautiously, trying to find some noncontroversial subject to approach with Rat.
“Not bad,” she replied offhandedly. “I’ve seen better.”
Damn the bitch! Couldn’t she find anything nice to say? Fastball concentrated on putting it out of his mind, compartmentalizing and maintaining his focus. He slid smoothly into the starboard pattern, taking his place in the queue of aircraft waiting to get back on deck. He watched the aircraft ahead of him, descending and spiraling down as one by one, the lowest Tomcat in the stack broke off to make an approach. Finally, it was his turn.
“Tomcat 103, inbound,” he announced.
“Roger, 103, maintain course and speed and call the ball,” the operation specialist said.
The ball was a Fresnel landing light located on the port side of the carrier. The combination of green and red lights told a pilot whether he was too high or to low on approach. The last two miles behind the carrier were a critical time during which Fastball lined up with the carrier, shot his approach, and eased 60,000 pounds of Tomcat down gently onto the deck in a controlled crash.
In addition to the Fresnel lens, he would rely on the judgment of the landing signals officer, or LSO. The LSO was an experienced Tomcat aviator who would make visual observations on Fastball’s approach, verifying the correctness of his needles, or his glide path indicator, and pitch into a perfect landing attitude.
When he spotted the ball, Fastball said, “Ball, 103,”
“103, ball,” the LSO agreed. “Say needles.”
“Needles high and right,” Fastball said.
“103, disregard needles. I have you on path, at altitude. Continue on.”
Damn. A slight annoyance, but no major problem. For a wide variety of reasons, the needles were often off.
The carrier deck which looked so small at altitude now loomed before him. It looked like a cliff rising out of the water, a dangerous cliff at that, as though the ship was an iceberg just waiting to smash his Tomcat to bits. He concentrated on looking at the lens rather than the shape of the ship. As long as the light was white, he was on the correct glide path and would not smash into the ass end of the ship, called a ramp strike.
“Looking good, 103. Keep coming,” the LSO said. His voice was calm, confident, pitched so as to reassure any pilot strung out on adrenaline or shaky on his approach. It was like having a RIO, Fastball thought. A RIO standing on the stern of the ship.
Three wire, three wire… it would be a perfect landing, he decided. People would talk about it in the ready room later, as they always did. Each squadron LSO maintained a list of each pilot’s landings, rating them according to whether there were any problems or whether they were satisfactory. The ratings were posted daily on the bulletin board for everyone to see.
Still, there were good landings, and there were
Suddenly, the Tomcat coughed, an abrupt sound that made his balls draw up close against his body. Microseconds later, the Tomcat rolled hard to the left, trying to do a barrel roll on its own. Red lights lit up all around the cockpit.
“Fire in the port engine,” the LSO shouted, his voice more agitated now. “One zero three, you’ve lost your left engine — punch out. Eject, eject.”
But it was already too late. Fastball looked up to the canopy and saw black, hungry water. If he ejected now, the rocket engines mounted beneath their seats would simply drive both he and Rat far below the surface of the ocean. But they had to get out — the Tomcat was clearly out of control and there was no way to survive hitting the water in her. Incandescent jet engines plus cold seawater equal explosion. Even if the impact didn’t kill them, fragments of metal and turbine blades from the jet engines would shred the cockpit, destroying everything in the path. No, they had to eject, but—.
“No!” he shouted, knowing that Rat was already reaching for the ejection handle. “No, hold on two seconds while I…” the Tomcat completed its wing-over and rolled back into level flight for just a few moments. Just at the right instant, Fastball yanked down hard on the ejection handle.
The explosive bolts on the canopy fired, blowing the canopy away from the fuselage. Microseconds later, the ejection seats themselves fired, the RIO’s four-tenths of a second ahead of the pilot’s. They arced out at different angles, so as not to collide, both clearing the fuselage.
The next few seconds were a dizzying kaleidoscope of flashes of sky, water, and gut-wrenching, all- encompassing nausea. He spun violently through the air, the seat falling away and his parachute deploying. His hand went instinctively to the handle of the secondary chute, even as he knew that there would be no time. They had one shot, maybe not even that. So close to the water, too close — no ejection should take place at this altitude. It simply wasn’t survivalable. He felt a hard jerk upwards on his groin and shoulders, and saw the canopy billowing overhead. It tried to fill with air, but there simply wasn’t time. It was enough to break his fall, but no more.
Too fast, black water closed over his head. He lost consciousness on impact, for only a split second, then the warm water lapping over his face, filling his nose and stinging his eyes shocked him back into consciousness. He tried to scream, and was rewarded with water trying to flood his lungs.
Actions practiced so often in flight school came back to him as though they were instinct. It was reflex, ingrained so deeply on purpose into every pilot that they might have a chance of doing the right thing even under the most grueling circumstances. He slapped the release latch, freeing himself from the now-deadly parachute cords. He was still descending into the water, the pressure on his ears growing more painful. It was dark, as though the sun had been doused as well. Something snaked around his right arm, and he jerked, disoriented, trying to figure out which way was up. A sea snake, small, yet deadly? But it was only a line from his parachute trying to trap him.
Training again took over. He watched the bubbles, blocking out all other thoughts, and saw which way they were moving. Up — follow the bubbles. With his lungs screaming for air, he kicked hard and felt a flash of deep, deadly pain in his right leg. Broken? No time for that now — if he didn’t make it to the surface soon, he was certain his lungs would explode.
It seemed to go on forever as he struggled to reach the surface. Minutes, maybe hours, passed. The water around him grew lighter and lighter, and then, just when he thought he could bear no more, that he must suck down a lungful of anything, even seawater, to douse the pain building there, he broke free at the surface.
His life jacket had deployed automatically, but the buoyancy alone but not have been enough to get into the surface in time, he thought.
He sucked down great lungfuls of air, coughing up seawater as he did, desperate to get oxygen into his brain.
