Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 6 - Intruders

by Intruders (lit)

  "Power. Power! Power!" At the third power call the Real McCoy triggered the wave-off lights, but it was too late.

  Even as the Corsair's engine wound up, the wheels hit the very end of the light deck and there was a bright flash. With the engine winding up to full screech the plane roared up the deck, across all the wires, and rotated to climb away. McCoy shouted "Bolter, bolter, bolter," on the radio.

  Now McCoy handed the radio and Fresnel lens pickle to the nearest ISO. He began running toward the fantail. Jake Grafton followed.

  The dim light made seeing difficult. The deck was really moving here, 550 feet aft of the ship's center of gravity. The ship was like a giant seesaw. Keeping your knees bent helped absorb the thrusts of the deck.

  McCoy took a flashlight from his hip pocket and played it on the ramp, the sloping end of the flight deck. The ramp dropped away at about a thirty-degree angle, went down ten or twelve feet, then ended. That was the back end of the ship. The flashlight beam stopped three feet right of the centerline stripe, at a deep dent.

  "Hook strike," Jake shouted.

  "No, that's where his main mount hit." Real scanned with the flashlight and stopped at another dent, the twin of the first. "There's where the other wheel hit.

  His hook hit below the ramp." Then McCoy turned and ran for the LSO platform, with Jake following.

  Back on the LSO platform McCoy told the sailor wearing the sound-powered phones, "His hook hit the back end of the ship and disintegrated. He doesn't have a hook now.

  Tell Air Ops." Without a hook, the plane could be trapped aboard only with the barricade, a huge nylon net that was rigged across the landing area like a giant badminton net. Or it could be sent to an airfield in Japan.

  Air Ops elected to send the crippled plane to Japan.

  McCoy got back to the business of waving airplanes. He had the Vigilante on the hall, with an A-6 and EA-6But behind him, then the E-2 Hawkeye and KA-6 tanker to follow.

  This time the Vigie pilot drifted right of centerline and corrected back toward the left.

  He leveled his wings momentarily, so McCoy let him keep coming. Then, passing in close, the left wing dropped. The Vigilante stewed toward the LSO'S' platform as McCoy screamed "Wave-off" and dived to the right.

  Jake had his eyes on the approaching plane, but McCoy was taking everyone on the platform with him.

  Jake was almost to the edge when the RA-5 swept overhead in burner, his hook almost close enough to touch.

  Instinctively Jake ducked.

  That was closely Too close. Now Jake realized that he and McCoy were the only two people still on the platform. He looked down to his right. Two hands reached up out of the darkness and grabbed the edge by Jake's foot. Eve"...yone else went into the net.

  They clambered back up, one by one. The talker picked up his sound-powered headset where he had dropped it and put it back on.

  McCoy leaned toward the talker. "Tell Air Ops, that I recommend he send the Vigie to the beach for fuel and a turnaround. Give that guy some time to calm down." And that is what Air Ops did.

  The last plane was still two miles out when a sailor brought a lump of metal to the platform and gave it to McCoy. "We found this down on the fantail. There's a lot of metal shards down there but this was the biggest piece.

  I think it's a piece of hook point." McCoy examined it by flashlight, then passed it to Jake.

  as a piece of the A-Ts hook point, all right. About a of it. The point must have shattered against the structhe ship and the remnants rained down on the fantail.

  When the last plane was aboard, Jake followed McCoy down the ladder to the catwalk, then down another flight into the ship.

  "That was exciting," Jake Grafton told the LSO.

  "You dumb ass. You should have gone into the net." "Well, I didn't think-was "That Vigie about got us. No shit." "Hell of a recovery." "That's no lie. Did you hear about the A-7 that had the ramp strike?" "No." "The talker told me. The guy had a total hydraulic failure on the way to the beach and ejected. He's in the water right now." "You're kidding." "The rebound of the hook shank probably severed his hydraulic lines. He's swimming for it. Just another great Navy night." The pilot of the RA-5Can Vigilante who had so much trouble with lineup on this recovery landed in Japan and refueled.

  He returned to the ship for the last recovery of the evening and flew a fair pass into a three-wire.

  The A-7 pilot with the hydraulic failure wasn't rescued until ten o'clock the next morning.

  He spent the night in his LIFE raft, buffeted by heavy seas, overturned four times, though each time he regained the safety of the raft. He swallowed a lot of seawater and did a lot of vomiting. He vomited and retched until blood came up. Still retching when the helicopter deposited him back on the carrier, he had to be sedated and given an IV to rehydrate him. He was also suffering from a serious case of hypothermia. But he was alive, with no bones broken. His shipmates trooped to sick bay in a steady procession to welcome him back to the company of living men.

  THE SOVIET INTELLIGENCE SHIP REDUKTOR JOINED THE TASK group during the night and fell in line astern. At dawn she was two miles behind the carrier wallowing heavily. When the sun came up she held her position even though the task group raised its speed to twelve knots.

  When the sea state eased somewhat the Soviet ship rode steadier.

  Jake came up on deck for the first launch of the day only to find that the AGI was dropping steadily astern. Her captain knew the drill. The carrier had been running steadily downwind, but to launch she would turn into the wind, toward the AGI. So now the Soviet ship was slowing to one or two knots, just enough to maintain steerageway.

  At the brief the air intelligence officers showed the flight crews file photos of this Okean-class intelligence collector.

  She was a small converted trawler. Had she not been festooned with a dazzling array of radio antennas that rose from her superstructure and masts, one would assume her crew was still looking for fish.

  So there they were. Russians. In Reduktor's compartments they were busy with their reel-to-reel tape drives-probably all made in Japan-recording every word, peep or chirp on every radio frequency that the U.s.

  Navy had ever been known to use. Doubtlessly they monitored other frequencies occasionally as well, just in case. These tapes would be exammed by experts who would construct from them detailed analyses of how the U.s. Navy operated and what its capabifities were. Encrypted transmissions would be turned over to specialists who would try to break the codes.

  In short, the crew of Reduktor were spies.

  They were going about their business in a lawful manner, however, in plain sight upon the high seas, so there was nothing anyone in the U.s. Navy could do about it.

  In fact, the American captains and watch officers had to make sure that their ships didn't accidentally collide with the Soviet ship.

  There was one other possibility, not very probable, but possible. Reduktor might be a beacon ship marking the position of the American task group for Soviet forces. Just in case, American experts aboard the U.s. ships monitored, recorded and analyzed every transmission that Reduktor made.

  Anticipating the coming of a Soviet AGI, the U.s. task group had already reduced its own radio transmissions as much as possible.

  During the day the air crews from Columbia operated "zip-lip," speaking on the radio only when required. Specialists from the Communications Security Group-4COMSEGRU'-HAD visited every ready room to brief the crews.

  This morning Jake Grafton spent a moment watching the old trawler, then went on with his preflight. He would, he suspected, see a lot of that ship in the next few months.

  After four days of operations in the Sea of Japan, Columbia and her escorts called at Sasebo and stayed for a week.

  Reduktor was waiting when they came out of port.

  The first week of August was spent operating off the southern coast of Korea, then the task group steamed south and spent a week flying in the South China
Sea. The Soviet AGI was never far away.

  Here, for the first time, the air wing began flying the Alpha strikes that Jake had helped plan with CAG Ops.

  Jake didn't get to go on the first one, when Skipper Haldane led the A-6's. Due to his bombing scores, however, he was scheduled to lead the A-6's the next day. He and Flap spent half the night in Strike Planning with the other element leaders making sure they had it right.

  CAG Kai] sat in a corner and sipped coffee during the entire session. He didn't say much, yet when he did you listened carefully because he had something to say worth listening to. He also smiled a lot and picked up names easily.

  After an hour you thought you had known the man all your life. That night in his bunk the thought tripped through Jake Grafton's mind that he would like to lead the way Chuck Kall did.

  Well, tomorrow he would get his chance. Six Intruders were scheduled to fly and the maintenance gunny said he would have them. The target was an abandoned ship on a reef a few miles off the western coast of Luzon, the northernmost of the Philippine Islands. Today's strike had pretty well pulverized the ship, but there were enough pieces sticking out of the water to make an aiming point. The water was pretty shallow there. To make sure there were no native fishing boats in the target area tomorrow before live bombs rained down, an RA-5Can was scheduled to make a prestrike low pass.

  Jake had so many things on his mind that he had trouble falling asleep. He took the hop minute by minute, the climbout, the rendezvous, frequency changes, formation, airplane problems, no-radio procedures, the letdown to roll-in altitude... he drifted off to sleep and dreamed about it.

  The morning was perfect, a few puffy low clouds but widely scattered. The brisk trade wind speckled the sea with whitecaps and washed away the haze.

  After a quick cup of coffee and check of the weather, Jake met with the element leaders for two hours. Then he went to the ready room for the crew briefs, briefed the A-6's portion of the mission, read the maintenance logbook on his assigned plane and donned his flight gear. By the time he walked out onto the flight deck with Flap Le Beau he had been working hard for four hours.

  The escort ships looked crisp and clean upon a living blue sea. The wind-he inhaled deeply.

  He and Flap took the time to inspect the weapons care fully. For today's mock attack they had live bombs, four Mark-84 two-thousand-pounders.

  A hit with one of these bombs would break the back of any warship that was cruiser-size or smaller. The multiple ejector racks that normally carried smaller bombs had been downloaded so the one-ton general purpose bombs could be mated to the parent bomb racks. There were two of these on each wing. As usual, the centerline belly station carried a two-thousandpound drop tank. One of the bombs, the last one to be dropped, had a laser-seeker in the nose. The other three were fused with a mechanical nose fuse and an electrical tail fuse.

  The mechanical nose fuse was the most reliable fuse the Navy possessed, which made it the preferred way to fuse bombs. A bare copper wire ran from a solenoid in the parent rack forward across the weapon to the nose, where it went through a machined hole in the fuse housing and then through the little propeller at the very front of the fuse. The wire physically prevented the propeller from turning until the weapon was ejected from the rack. The wire then pulled out of the fuse and stayed on the rack, which freed the propeller. As the bomb fell the wind spun the propeller for a preset number of seconds and armed the fuse. When the nose of the bomb struck its target, the fuse was triggered.

  After a small delay--one hundredth of a second to allow the weapon to penetrate the target-the fuse detonated the high explosive in the bomb.

  If the mechanical fuse was defective, the electric tail fuse would set the bomb off. That fuse was armed by a jolt of electricity in the first two feet of travel as the bomb fell away from the parent rack, then its arming wire, an insulated electrical cable, pulled loose.

  The BN'S job on preflight was to check to ensure the ordnance-men had rigged bombs, fuses and arming wires correctly. Since any error here could ruin the mission, Jake Grafton always checked too. Today he and Flap stood side by side as they examined each weapon, Everything was fine.

  The bomb with the laser-seeker in the nose was the technology of the future, the technology that had already made unguided free-fall bombs obsolete and would itself be made obsolete by guided missiles. One had to aim a laser-light generator at the target and hold the light on it as the bomb fell. If the bomb was dropped into the proper cone above the target, the seeker would guide it to the reflected spot of laser light by manipulating small canards on the body of the device.

  In two or three years the A-6 would have its own laserlight generator in the nose of the aircraft. Now the generators, or "designators," were hand-held. Today a radarintercept officer in the backseat of an F-4 orbiting high above the target would aim the designator while Intruders, Corsairs and other Phantoms dropped the bombs. This system worked. Navy and Air Force crews used it with devastating effect on North Vietnamese bridges in the last year of the war, Due to the cost of the seekers, each plane had only one for today's training mission. Dropping three unguided weapons in addition to the guided one had an additional benefit the pilot had to try for a perfect dive to put all four on the target. If one bomb was a bull's-eye and the other three went awry, he screwed up.

  The plane looked good. Strapped in waiting for the engine start, Jake Grafton arranged his charts in the cockpit, then paused for a few seconds to savor the warmth of the sun and the wind playing with his hair. The moment was over too soon. Helmet on, canopy closed, crank engines.

  The cat shot was a hoot, an exhilarating ride into a perfect morning. His airplane flew well, all the gear worked as advertised, none of the other A-6's had maintenance problems and all launched normally.

  The A-6's rendezvoused at 9,000 feet.

  When Jake had his gaggle together, he led them upward to 13,000 feet and slowly eased into position on the right of the lead division, today four Corsairs. When all the other divisions were aboard, the strike leader, the C.o. of one of the A-7 squadrons, rolled out on course to the target and initiated a climb to 23,000 feet.

  The climb took longer than usual. The bombers were heavily loaded. At ninety-eight percent RPM all Jake could out of his plane was 280 knots indicated. He concencoax trated on flying smoothly so his wingmen would not have to sweat bullets to stay with him.

  The six-plane division was broken up into two flights of three. Jake had one wingman on each side. Out farther to the right flew another three-plane flight, but its leader was also flying formation on Grafton. Just before the time came to dive, the man on each leader's left would cross over, then the two flights would join so that there were *six airplanes in right echelon. The plan was for Jake to roll in and the others to follow two seconds apart, so that all six were diving with just enough separation between the planes that each pilot could aim his own bombs. If they did it right, all six would be in the enemy's threat envelope together and divide the enemy's antiaircraft fire. And all would leave together.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  Flap had the radar and computer fired up, so Jake was getting steering to the target. He was merely comparing it to the course the strike leader was flying, however.

  The radio frequency was crowded. The strike leader was talking to the E-2 Hawkeye, the RA-5Can was chattering about a fishing boat that he had chased away from the target and the cloud cover, someone had a hydraulic problem, the tankers wanted to change the poststrike rendezvous position because the carrier wasn't where it was supposed to be when this evolution was put together, and one of the EA-6'S was late getting launched and was going to be late getting to its assigned position. Situation normal, Jake thought He checked the position of his wingmen regularly, yet he spent most of his time scanning the sky and staying in proper position in relation to the strike leader. When he had a spare second he brought his eyes back into the cockpit to check his engine instruments and fuel.

/>   The cumulus clouds below thickened as the strike group approached the coast of Luzon. The bases were at 4,000 feet, but the tops were building. From 23,000 feet the clouds seemed to cover about fifty percent of the sea below.

  Would there be holes over the target big enough to bomb through?

  The twenty-six bombers and their two EA-6 escorts began their descent toward their roll-in altitude of 15,000 feet. The leader left his throttle alone, so the airspeed began to increase.

  The faster the strike could close a Soviet task group, the fewer missiles and less flak it would encounter. In aerial warfare, speed is life.

  Now CAG was on the radio. He was at 30,000 feet over the target in an F4. "Where are the Flashlights?" Flashlight was the F4 that would illuminate the target with the laser designators Actually there were two F-4's, both carrying hand-held laser designators. The pilots would have to find a hole in the clouds so the RIO'S'-RADAR intercept officers--could aim the designators, then they would have to maneuver to keep the target in sight and avoid colliding with one another. In a real attack on Soviet ships, the pilots would also be dodging missiles and flak.