by Ward Carroll
Maybe Punk was a bit over-critical of the skipper, but he was growing tired of always playing the game on Soup’s field with Soup’s ball. Actually, they were all getting to that point in a cruise where everybody bugs everybody else. Five months down; at least one to go. There may have been a light at the end of the tunnel for them, but it was yet too faint to make out. They’d been at sea for twenty-seven days now and had another week to go before pulling into Bahrain for a port call, their last before beginning the three-week transit back to Norfolk. The lab rats needed to get out of the maze for a few days.
Without giving the commander time to change his mind about his charity, Punk unstrapped and went through the off-going routine that Biff had performed with him hours before. Heading down the boarding ladder, he noticed that Spud was still slumping forward, asleep.
“Wake up, sleepy time.”
Spud grumbled, gathered his things, and got out of the plane. He helped the skipper’s RIO, Lieutenant (junior grade) Paul Francis, strap into the rear cockpit. Paul had only been in the squadron a few days and had not stepped on his crank in any fashion during that time, and therefore he still went by his Christian name. He came from the F-14 training squadron with Top Scope honors and seemed like an okay guy to the first-tour cabal, which was the strongest endorsement they ever gave to new aviators. The skipper had toyed with the idea of allowing Paul to remain stateside and join them upon their return, but the department heads had convinced the CO it would be a good idea to get the new RIO some hands-on fleet experience, even if that meant just teaching the new officer how to get from ready room to stateroom, or how to stand the duty.
“Well, I broke the seat in for you,” Spud said, attempting to put the new backseater at ease as he manned his first alert. “Seriously, just relax. I don’t want to burst your bubble, but I doubt you’ll launch. I’ve stood twelve of these in the last month and I haven’t done anything but sleep during every one of them.” The young RIO nodded and smiled politely.
Spud joined Punk at the base of the ladder and they headed up the flight deck toward the bow and then below to Wardroom One. Breakfast awaited, the meal even the Navy couldn’t screw up, as Spud often remarked. Punk started to salivate as he wrestled with the decision between pancakes and an omelet.
Once into the wardroom they were greeted by the warm, woody redolence of bacon frying. After stepping out of their harnesses, hanging them on chair backs, and placing their helmets and nav bags on adjacent shelves, the aviators backtracked through the dining area, shuffled by the scullery and made their way along the narrow passage and around two bends to the vacant food line.
Wardroom One, known as “the dirty shirt” because flight suits and deck jerseys were permitted, was the air wing’s wardroom, as opposed to Wardroom Two four decks below, which was a stuffy place that demanded pressed khakis and table manners and was frequented by ship’s company officers. The dirty shirt was conveniently located on the same level as all nine of the squadron ready rooms. The pace was slow at this early hour as most aviators didn’t get out of bed until lunchtime because the flight schedule usually didn’t end until after midnight.
Punk yielded to Spud’s seniority and Spud grabbed a plastic tray from the stack and placed it on the aluminum railing in front of the glass-covered food bins. “Well, lookie here, my favorite cook is in the house,” Spud said to the sailor at the grill. “Good morning, Petty Officer Byrne.”
“Good morning, sir,” the petty officer answered as he scraped the gristle from his latest effort off the otherwise shiny cooking surface and into a collection bin at the front of the appliance. “Not used to seeing you around this early.”
“Well, I don’t generally like to be around this early, if you know what I mean.”
The mess specialist laughed and asked, “Is anything going on out there?”
“Just the standard stuff of making the world safe for democracy, the same thing you’re doing down here.”
Petty Officer Byrne smiled as if he’d heard exactly what he’d needed to hear. He turned from the grill and moved toward the two aviators. “In that case, I’ll bet you could use an omelet with all the fixings.” He proudly held his tray of chopped red and green peppers, mushrooms, and onions up for Spud to inspect.
“You’re a surgeon, Petty Officer Byrne, nothing but a goddam surgeon,” Spud said. “Give me the works, my friend. You know I’ll eat whatever you’re serving.”
Punk admired Spud’s genuine manner with the troops. His sincerity was born of having been in their shoes. Most enlisted guys had a sensitive B.S. meter—they resented officers who went through motions just to make themselves feel as if they were reaching in and getting their hands dirty for the drill of it. Spud suffered no such problems in his dealings with the crew.
As Spud’s omelet sizzled to life, the mess cook turned his attention to Punk. “How ’bout you, sir?”
Recognizing Spud was a tough act to follow in terms of grassroots congeniality, Punk made no attempt to mirror his RIO’s folksy vibe as he requested a tall-stack of pancakes. Both meals were served up in short order, complete with bacon and toast, and the aviators headed back into the dining room with their trays.
“I guess the skipper must’ve gotten a good letter from home or something, maybe an X-rated e-mail from the wife,” Punk said as he pulled a glass out of the top of a stack of eight-glass-by-eight-glass green plastic holders. “That was wild of him to relieve us early.” He scooped some ice out of the nearby metal bin and moved the glass under one of the soda machine nozzles.
“Yeah, wild all right,” Spud replied.
“I never thought of him as the giving type,” Punk said.
“Giving? You’d better wake up and smell the Coke, buddy boy,” Spud said. “There’s only one place we got it and that’s where the sun don’t shine.”
“What do you mean?” Punk asked.
Spud removed the articles from his tray and placed them on the table at his setting, and then handed the tray to an undertasked wardroom attendant who seemed happy to have something to do. “I mean if the skipper got his ass out of bed this early without being scheduled, and went to the trouble of waking up young Paul to join him, then he was in the possession of some information that you and I did not have.” Spud scooted his chair in and reached for a paper napkin from the holder at the center of the round table. “The intel geeks must’ve told him something.” He spread a napkin on his lap, focused on his plate and voraciously crunched down on the first of the nine pieces of bacon he had drawn.
Intel geeks: the intelligence officers who worked out of CVIC, the carrier’s information center. They weren’t aviators, although a number of them had washed out of flight school. Aircrew viewed them as officers who had access to volumes of information, but seldom knew anything useful to the war fighters. The intelligence officer’s job was mostly administrative although most of them viewed themselves as high-tech spies right out of a Tom Clancy novel. They wore flight jackets (which they’d either procured surreptitiously or had “forgotten” to return as they were banished from the halls of Pensacola) to ward off the constant equipment-directed cold of CVIC, and on them they’d sewn a patch that read, “In God we trust, all others we monitor.” They conducted general information briefs over the ship’s closed circuit TV system before each flight, droning on with clunky monotones and jerky intonations that made it obvious to the aircrew the intel officers had no idea what they were talking about as they wrestled with the acronym-rich lexicon of naval aviation. They also debriefed crews after hops, but the questions weren’t on the order of, “Did you see anything the President needs to know about ASAP?” They were more like, “How much gas did you take from the tanker during in-flight refueling?”
Each squadron typically had one intelligence officer, although VF-104, also tasked with the mission of tactical reconnaissance, had two: one male, one female, both androgynous in a more mannish than neutral way, and hard to differentiate to the degree that it was a little
bit creepy. They were the same height and build, and both wore Navy-issue glasses with thick brown plastic frames. The female, Ensign Holly Dunbar, had further contributed to the illusion by styling her hair very short—not a feminine pixie look, but a regulation Navy male, complete-with-part, hairdo. Her male twin, Ensign Steven (not Steve) Grimes, had been in the squadron four months longer than Holly. He had quickly made a name for himself by throwing a fit because the operations officer had refused to install Dungeons and Dragons on the ready room’s computer. “So how are we supposed to have any fun?” he’d raged, a response that had unintentionally become the rallying cry for the squadron’s junior officers and was already the front-runner in the contest for the deployment’s theme.
“So what did the Pats tell the skipper?” Punk asked. Collectively the VF-104 intel officers were known as the Pats, a reference to an old recurring skit on Saturday Night Live. “And why didn’t they tell us about it instead?”
“Well, say what you will about them, they’re not without survival instincts,” Spud said. “They wanted to shake the hand that feeds.” At that moment the sound of the retracting catapult shuttle could be heard overhead. The distinctive clack, clack, clack meant only one thing: the Boat was about to launch airplanes.
Punk jumped up from the table and turned the nearest television on and switched to the PLAT (Pilot Landing Assistance Television), the channel that displayed what was happening topside. The PLAT camera showed Slinger 102’s stabilizers, spoilers, and rudders deflecting in the dance that always preceded takeoff as the pilot cycled the stick in the cockpit during his final check of authority over the machine. At the same time, the exhaust nozzles puckered as both General Electric F-110 engines roared to full military power. Once he was satisfied the dog would hunt, the skipper snapped a salute at the catapult officer who returned the gesture in kind. The cat officer crouched down and touched the flight deck and then extended his left arm dramatically forward, signaling the enlisted operator in the port catwalk to push the button that activated the launch sequence. A second later, sixty-seven thousand pounds of F-14 went screaming across the deck, and 2.2 seconds after that the fighter was thrown into the sky. The camera followed the jet through a left-hand clearing turn, watched the landing gear retract, and then returned to the deck to show an F/A-18 Hornet taxiing forward to the catapult.
“Those bastards,” Punk muttered. “They knew they were going to launch all along, didn’t they?”
“Bingo,” Spud sang like a retiree at a church bazaar. “No wonder that new guy gave me his cat-with-the-mouse grin.”
“Well, you’ve gotta like that,” Punk said with resignation. “We sit in the ready room for two hours in our flight gear and then up there for ninety minutes in the dark, doing nothing, and then the skipper cruises in and takes the gouge daytime hop . . .” His voice trailed off.
“What good is power if you don’t abuse it?” Spud asked paternally.
“I practically jumped out of the airplane for him,” Punk said with an air of self-deprecation. “I’ll tell you what: the skipper has a convincing poker face. He should go into politics.” He fast-balled the last half-slice of toast to the plate and rose to head back to his stateroom.
“Actually, he’s already in politics, or haven’t you noticed?” Spud replied before pausing to allow the cacophony of the Hornet’s launching overhead to pass. “Don’t worry about it too much, though. They’ll probably just drill holes through the clouds for a while. The Pats are wrong more often than they’re right.”
The Tomcat Punk and Spud had been seated in just minutes before was now fifteen nautical miles from the carrier and climbing through twenty-five thousand feet. The skipper and Paul went through their weapon systems’ checks and sharpened the Tomcat’s claws.
Their jet was loaded with a variety of long- and medium-range radar-guided Phoenix and Sparrow missiles, and two heat-seeking short-range Sidewinder missiles. The Tomcat was also armed with a nose cannon. While the notion of downing an opponent with bullets was somewhat dated, crews felt comforted knowing they still had offensive capability once they ran out of missiles.
Paul had the backseat UHF radio on preset button one, the primary control frequency labeled Strike. Strike was monitored by the E-2 Hawkeye control aircraft, the battle group’s northernmost cruiser and the admiral’s rep, the battle watch captain.
“Slinger 102, say your state,” the controller in the E-2 requested.
“One-oh-two’s state is sixteen-point-zero,” Paul answered, indicating sixteen thousand pounds of fuel remaining, which would keep them airborne for a while, depending on how much the skipper selected afterburner.
“Do you have a station for us?” the skipper asked, his thick, salty radio voice in stark contrast to Paul’s nascent utterances. Although most of the radio communication was performed by the RIO, the skipper had a habit of jumping on the frequency himself. Soup’s RIO worked for Soup, and was not an equal-voting member of the crew. Paul was allowed to handle the administrative or routine communications.
The controller answered the skipper’s question, “Slinger, your station is Mother’s zero-nine-zero for thirty miles.” They needed to position themselves thirty miles east of the Boat. “Report when on station.” The skipper wondered why they wanted him to report on station when they had a planeload of black boxes to track him to within a foot. He felt good in light of the launch, so he had Paul comply with the request instead of righting the wrong in the name of professional semantics.
They uneventfully held on station for a time, scribing five-nautical-mile-long racetrack patterns through the sky, although in execution the shape looked more like an oval than a racetrack. The length of the legs was less than ideal due to the navigational constraints of the Northern Gulf, and didn’t afford Paul much time to build a radar picture in any direction. The Boat was navigating Carrier Operating Area Four (CVOA 4), which wedged it and its airplanes between Kharg Island twenty-five miles to the north-northeast and the one-mile-square Farsi Island twenty miles to the south. Iran claimed both small tracts as sovereign territory, and the act of inadvertently flying over them was a diplomatic hot button, not really with the Iranians, but with the United States, which did not want to give the hostile Gulf states any grounds for lodging an international complaint against the carrier’s operations in the region.
The center of CVOA 4 was also only about sixty miles west of the air base at Bushehr on Iran’s upper Gulf coast. Fifth Fleet had imposed a twenty-mile standoff distance from the mainland, and Slinger 102’s current station pushed them right against that limit. And they couldn’t very well defend the ship by orbiting on the far, or western, side of the carrier—that would’ve been like defending a basketball goal by standing next to the sports photographers and cheerleaders behind the baseline.
The airborne Hornet occupied the northern station and was able to fly a more relaxed pattern over the more open waters, but if the Pats were correct, the skipper was on the better of the two stations in terms of intercept potential. Good photos of Iranian aircraft always translated into good visibility with the admiral, and that spoke to the skipper. As he thought about it, a wave of paranoia washed over him.
“Hey Francis, you brought a camera, right?”
“Roger that, skipper,” Paul answered over the intercom. “Got it right here on the console next to my nav bag.”
“Put it on around your neck,” the skipper shot back. “It ain’t gonna do us any good sitting next to your nav bag. C’mon, now. Stay up with the situation. I can’t do everything.”
Paul fumbled to throw the camera’s strap over his helmet and flight gear as he struggled to remain resilient in the face of the skipper’s sudden acrimonious shift. This was only their third flight together, and although Paul had experienced the skipper’s quick temper over seemingly minor issues in the jet before, he hoped the CO would begin to calm down as they became more familiar with each other. He had felt quite the skipper’s confidant as the CO had rev
ealed his insider information on the way to the jet, but how many flights would it take to gain his complete trust? Well, obviously more than three.
Paul had graduated from Annapolis three years behind Punk, but his school had been a much different place than the dodge-the-bullet institution Punk had attended. Like his father and grandfather before him, young Francis strode up Stribling Walk and achieved and achieved and achieved—academically, athletically, and militarily. He was the über-mid: Brigade Commander, 3.6 GPA, and three-year varsity letter winner on the crew team. And unlike many of his classmates who’d walked into service selection with either an apathetic or lesser-of-all-evils mind set, Paul’s desire to “Fly Navy” had the strength of the Fly Navy sticker’s bond to the rear bumper of his Honda Accord, even with his poor eyesight. No, he wouldn’t be a pilot like his Corsair-driving grandfather or his Crusader-flying father, but he was going to wade in amongst ’em catapulting off the front end of the Boat. Hell, the day his father had pinned his NFO wings on him had been the greatest day of his life, even better than graduation day at Annapolis when the President of the United States had awarded him his diploma and commission. Just thinking about those moments gave him clenched-fist motivation. If the Punks of the Navy accused him of believing the hype, Paul would counter with something his father had told him long ago: “If you can make a living doing what you love, you don’t have much choice.”
But he knew he had arrived the first time he talked to Spud in the ready room and watched his fellow fleet RIOs in action at sea. There was so much he hadn’t been exposed to before his arrival in VF-104: targeting pods for precision-guided bombs, jam-resistant auto-frequency hopping radios, hand-held global positioning systems. He’d even drawn a pistol and a blood chit (a message written in Cyrillic that promised payment for his repatriation in the event he fell into the hands of apolitical locals) for his second flight in the squadron, an Operation Southern Watch hop patrolling the no-fly zone over Iraq. Now here he was on his first alert launch.