I've listened to you Wavers preach and moan for so long that I could probably do it myself." McCoy snorted. "That'll be the day!" Jake did a clumsy tap dance for several seconds, then struck a pose. "He looked good going by me." McCoy groaned and closed his eyes. He was a selfproclaimed master of the short catnap, so Jake timed it.
Sixty-five seconds after the LSO closed his eyes he was snoring gently.
They came out of the skin of the ship by climbing a short ladder to the catwalk that surrounded the flight deck, yet was about four feet below flight deck level.
The noise of twenty jet engines at idle on the flight deck was piercing, even through their ear protectors. Raindrops swirling in the strong wind displaced by the ship's structure came from every direction, seemingly almost at once, even up through the gridwork at their feet. The wind blew with strength, an ominous presence, coming from total darkness, blackness so complete that for a second or two Jake felt as if he had lost his vision. This dark universe of wind and water was permeated by the acrid stench of jet exhaust, which burned his nose and made his eyes water.
Gradually his eyes became accustomed to the red glow of the flight deck lights and he could see things-the outline of the catwalk, the rails, the round swelling shapes of the life raft canisters suspended outboard of the catwalk railing, and in the midst of that void beyond the rail, several fixed lights. The escorts. Above his head were tails of airplanes.
He and McCoy crouched low as they proceeded aft toward the LSO platform to avoid those invisible rivers of hot exhaust that might be flowing just above their heads. Might be. The only sure way to find one was to walk into it.
Somewhere aloft in the night sky, high above the ship, were airplanes. With men in them. Men sitting strapped to ejection seats, studying dials and gauges, riding the turbulence, watching fuel gauges march mercilessly toward zero.
Jake and the Real McCoy climbed a ladder to the LSO'S" platform as the first of the planes on deck rode a catapult into the night sky. Both men watched the plane's lights as it climbed straight ahead of the ship. There-they were getting fuzzy.
And then they were gone, swallowed up by the night.
"Six or seven hundred feet, a couple of miles viz. nat's it," McCoy roared into Jake's ear.
The petty officer who assisted the LSO'S was already on the platform getting out the radio handsets, plugging in cords, checking the PLAT monitor, domung his sound-powered headset and checking in with the enlisted talkers in Pried-Fly and Air Ops.
The platform was not large, maybe six feet by six feet, a wooden grid that jutted from the port side of the flight deck.
To protect the signal officers from wind and et blast, a pie ice of black canvas stretched on a steel frame was rigged on the forward edge of the platform, like a wall. So the platform was an open stage facing aft, toward the glide slope.
Under the edges of the platform, aft and on the seaward side, hung a safety net to catch anyone who inadvertently fell off the platform. Or jumped.
Because if a pilot lost it on the glide slope in close and veered toward the platform, going into the net was the only way for the LSO'S to save their lives.
Jake Grafton glanced down into the blackness.
And saw nothing. "Relax, shipmate," McCoy told him. "The net's there. Honest Injun." The platform was just aft of the first wire, about four hundred feet away from the ship's center of gravity, so it was moving. Up and down, up and down.
As McCoy checked the lights on the Fresnel lens, which was several hundred feet forward of the platform, Jake watched. McCoy triggered the wave-off lights, the cut lights, adjusted the intensity of the lens. The lights seemed to behave appropriately and soon he was satisfied.
The Fresnel lens was, in Jake's mind, one of the engineering triumphs that made carrier aviation in the jet age possible. In the earliest days, aboard the old Langley, pilots made approaches to the deck without help. One windy day one of the senior officers grabbed a couple signal flags and rushed to the fantail to signal to a young aviator who was having trouble with his approach. This innovation was so successful that an officer was soon stationed there to assist all the aviators with signal flags, or paddles. This officer helped the pilot with glide slope and lineup, and since the carriers all had straight decks, gave the vital engine "cut" signal that required the aviator to pull his throttle to idle and flare.
When angled decks and jets with higher landing speeds came along, it became obvious that a new system was required. As usual, the British were the innovators. They rigged a mirror on one side of the deck and directed a high intensity light at it. The light was reflected up the glide slope.
By rigging a set of reference lights midway up on each side Of the mirror, a datum was established. A pilot making his approach would see the light reflected on the mirror-the ball-rise above the datum lights when he was above glide slope, or high, and descend below it when he was low.
The landing signal officer was retained to assist the pilot with radio calls, and to give mandatory wave-offs if an approach became unsafe.
The Fresnel lens was the mirror idea carried one step further. The light source was now contained within five boxes, stacked one on top of the other.
The datum lights were beside the middle, or third, box. Due to the way the lens on each light was designed, a horizontally wide but vertically narrow beam of light was directed up the glide slope by each box.
Crossing the fantail, the beam from the middle box, the "centered ball," was a mere eighteen inches in height.
This was the challenge: a pilot must fly his jet airplane through turbulent air into an eighteen-inch-thick window in the sky. At night, with the deck moving as the ship rode a seaway, hitting this window became extraordinarily difficult, without argument the most difficult challenge in aviation.
That anyone other than highly skilled, experienced test pi lots could do it on a regular basis was a tribute to the training the Navy gave its aviators, and was the reason those who didn't measure up were ruthlessly weeded out.
You could do it or you couldn't-there was no in between.
And yet, no one could do it consistently every time. The task was too difficult, the skills involved too perishable. So night after night, in fair weather and foul, they practiced, like they were doing on this miserable night in the Sea of Japan, eighty miles west of Honshu.
As Jake Grafton stood on the platform staring into the darkness as the wind swirled rain over him, he was glad that tonight was not his night. It felt so good to be here, not up there sweating bullets as the plane bounced around, trying to keep the needles steady, watching the fuel, knowing that you were going to have to fly that instrument approach to the ball, then thread the needle to get safely back aboard.
To return to the world of the living, to friends, to food, to letters from loved ones, to a bunk to sleep in, to a world with a past and a future. There in that cockpit when you were flying the ball there was only the present, only the airplane, only the stick in your right hand and the throttles in your left and the rudder beneath your feet.
There was only the now, this moment for which you had lived your whole life, this instant during which you called upon everything within you to do this thing.
Oh, yes. He was glad.
Other LSO'S were climbing to the platform now, so Jake moved as far back as he could to stay out of the way. All these specialists were here to observe, to see another dozen landings, to polish their skiffs, to learn. This was normal.
The platform was packed with LSO'S on every recovery.
The last airplane to be launched was upon the catapult at full power when the lights of the first plane on the glide slope appeared out of the gloomy darkness astern. In seconds the catapult fired and the deck became unnaturally silent.
The Real was already three feet out onto the deck holding the radio headset against his ear with his left hand while he held the Fresnel lens control handle in his right over his head, a signal to his colleagues that he was aware the
deck was foul.
Jake leaned sideways and looked forward around the edge of the canvas screen. The waist catapult crewmen were working furiously to put the protector plate over Cat Three's shuttle and clear the launching gear from the flight deck. Until they were out of the Ian area, would remain foul.
"Come on, people," the air boss roared over the flight deck loudspeaker. He seemed to believe that his troops worked best when properly stimulated. In any event, he didn't hesitate to stimulate them. "We've got a Phantom in the groove. Let's clear the deck." The last flight deck tractor zipped across the foul line near the island, yet three cat crewmen were still struggling with the protector plate.
Jake lifted one side of his mouse ears away from his head.
He heard McCoy roger the ball call.
The air boss on the loudspeaker again: "He's called the ball. Let's get this deck clear now, people!" There, the cat crewmen were running for the catwalk.
Jake looked aft. The Phantom was within a half mile, about two hundred feet high, coming fast. On his nose-gear door was a stop-light arrangement of little lights, red, yellow and green, that was operated by the angle-of-attack instrument in the cockpit. Red for slow, yellow for on speed, and green for fast. The yellow light was lit, but even as Jake saw it, the red light flickered.
"You're going to go slow," Real told the pilot.
"Little power." The red foul deck light went out and the green light came on.
"Clear deck," shouted the LSO talker.
"Clear deck," McCoy echoed, and lowered his right arm.
The jet was slamming through the burble caused by the island, his engines winding up, then decelerating. In seconds the Phantom crossed the ramp with its engines wailing, its hook reaching for a wire. Then the hook struck in a shower of sparks and the main gear thumped down. The hook snagged the second wire as the engines wound up to their full fury-a futile roar, because the big fighter was quickly dragged to a quivering halt. The exterior lights went out.
The hook runner raced across the foul line with his wands signaling "hook up." Seconds later the Phantom was taxiing out of the landing area and the wings were folding.
Meanwhile McCoy was giving the grade to another LSO, who was writing in the log. "Little slow in the middle, OK 111wo." McCoy glanced at Jake. "Nice pass.
Pitching deck and reduced visibility and he handled it real well. I bet I couldn't do as well on a shitty night like this." Then he was back out into the landing area listening to the radio. In seconds another set of lights came out of the goo. Another Phantom. This guy had more difficulty with the pass than the first fighter, but he too successfully trapped. The third Phantom bottered and McCoy waved off the fourth one. It was going to be a long recovery.
One of the LSO'S handed Jake his radio. He put it to his ear in time to hear the RA-5Can Vigilante call the ball.
The Vigilante was the most beautiful airplane the Navy owned, in Jake's opinion. It was designed as a supersonic nuclear bomber back when nuclear bombs were big. The weapon was carried in an internal bay and was ejected out a door in the rear of the plane between the tailpipes. The Navy soon discovered this method of delivery didn't work: the bomb was trapped in the airplane's slipstream and trailed along behind--comsometimes for seconds at a time before it fell free. The weapon's impact point could not be predicted and there was a serious danger that the bomb would strike the aircraft while it was tagging along behind, damaging the plane and the weapon. So the Vigilantes were converted to reconnaissance aircraft. Fuel tanks were installed in the bomb bays and camera packages on the bellies.
With highly swept wings and empennage, a needle nose, and two huge engines with afterburners, the plane was extraordinarily fast, capable of ripping through the heavens at an honest Mach 2 plus. And it was a bitch to get aboard the ship. Jake thought the Vigie pilots were supermen, the best of the best.
Yet it was the guys in back who had the biggest coj6nes, for they rode the beast with no control over their fate. Even worse, they rode in a separate cockpit behind the pilot that had only two tiny windows, one on each side of the fuselage.
They could not see forward or aft and their view to either side was highly restricted. A-6 BN'S with their seats beside the pilot and excellent view in all quadrants regarded the Vigie backseaters with awe. "It's like flying in your own coffin," they whispered to one another, and shuddered.
Tonight the Vigie pilot was having his troubles. "I got vertigo," he told McCoy on the platform.
"Fly the ball and keep it coming," the LSO said.
"Your wings are level, the deck is moving, average out the ball.
You're slightly high drifting left.
Watch your lineup!" The Vigilante was a big plane, with a 60-foot wingspanthe foul lines were 115 feet apart.
"Pick up your left wing, little power... right for lineup." Now the Vigie was crossing the ramp, and the right wing dropped.
"Level your wings," McCoy roared into the radio.
The Vigilante's left wing sagged and the nose rose. Jake shot a glance at the PLAT monitor: the RA-5 was way too far right, his right wingtip almost against the foul line.
Ms gaze flipped back to the airplane, just in time to hear the engines roar and see the fire leap from the afterburners, two white-hot blowtorches fifteen feet long. The light ripped the night open, casting a garish tight on the parked planes, the men standing along the right foul line, and the ship's superstructure.
With her hook riding five feet above the wires and her left wing slightly down, the big swept-wing jet crossed the deck and rose back into the night sky. Only then did the fire from the afterburners go out. The rolling thunder continued to wash over the men on the ship's deck, then it too dissipated.
An encounter with an angry dragon, Jake thought, slightly awed by the scene he had just witnessed.
"A nugget on his first cruise," McCoy told his colleagues, then dictated his comments to the logbook writer.
The motion of the ship was becoming more pronounced, Jake thought, especially here on the platform. When the deck reached the top of its stroke, he felt slightly light on his feet.
McCoy noticed the increased deck motion too, and he switched the lens to a four-degree glide slope, up from the normal three and one half. The talker informed the controllers in Air Ops.
In seconds there was another plane on the ball, this time an A-7 Corsair. "Three One Zero, Corsair ball, Three Point Two." "Roger ball, four-degree glide slope.
Pitching deck." This guy was an old pro. McCoy gave him one call, a little too much power, and that was all it took. He snagged a three.
The next plane was the Phantom that boltered, and this time he was steadier. Yet the steeper glide slope fooled him and he was fast all the way, flattened out at the ramp and boltered again.
The next plane, an A-7, took more coaching, but he too caught a wire. So did the Phantom that followed him, the one that had waved off originally. The next A-7 had to be waved off, however, because the deck was going down just before he got to the in-close position, while he was working off a high and slightly fast. If he had overdone his power reduction he would have been descending through the glide slope just as the deck rose to meet him: a situation not conducive to a long life.
An A-6 successfully trapped, then the Phantom came around for his third pass. Clear sky and the tanker were twenty-one thousand feet above, so the pressure was on.
McCoy looked tense as a coiled spring as he stood staring up the glide slope waiting for the F4's lights to appear out of the overcast.
There!
"One Zero Two, Phantom ball, Four Point Two, trick or treat." Trick or treat meant that he had to trap on this pass or be sent to tank.
"Roger ball, four-degree glide slope, it'll look steep so fly the ball." A dark night, a pitching deck, rain... these were the ingredients of fear, cold, clutching, icy as death. A carrier pilot who denied he ever experienced it was a bar. Tonight, on this pass, this fighter pilot felt the slimy tentacles of fear play
across his backbone. As he crossed the ramp he reduced power and raised the nose. The heavy jet instantly increased its rate of descent.
"No," screamed McCoy.
The hook slapped down and the main mounts hit and the number one wire screamed from its sheaves.
"There's one lucky mother," McCoy told the writer and the observing signal officers when the blast of the Phantom's two engines had died to an idling whine. "Spotted the deck and should have busted his ass, but the deck was falling away. Another military miracle. Who says Jesus ain't on our side?" More A-7's came down the chute. The first one got aboard without difficulty but the second announced he had vertigo.
"Roger that. Your wings are level and you're fast.
Going high. Steep glide slope, catch it with power. More power." He was getting close and the red light on his nose gear door winked on. He was slow.
Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 6 - Intruders Page 20