“Rules were meant to be broken. So you want to?”
“Just don’t hit him. That could really get us in trouble, and wet—I don’t want to go swimming tonight. I’m not wearing my dry suit.”
“Roger that.” Woods pushed the throttles forward.
Tiger, the Air Intercept Controller on the carrier, transmitted: “Victory 207 head outbound at 270, 204 continue inbound 090 to set up another one.”
“That’s it for us,” Wink transmitted in reply. “207’s heading for marshall.”
“Roger that, 207. Good work. See you on deck.”
“Thanks Tiger, good work.”
“Three hundred knots closure,” Wink told Woods. He leaned to his left and looked at the approaching lights of their wingman.
Woods watched his wingman ahead. “He’s skimming along the cloud layer. It’s totally flat—he’s completely in the clouds except his canopy and the two tails.” He pondered their plan for a moment. “We’ll have to go into the clouds to get below him.”
“That’s pretty marginal, Trey. Another time.” Wink knew Woods was willing to lean on the boundaries.
“Nah, we’ll be huge. You got a good lock?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me when we pass under him,” Woods said, lowering the nose of the Tomcat and passing into the darker darkness of the cloud. The approaching lights of their wingman faded, then disappeared.
“One tenth of a mile—three hundred closure,” Wink called, watching the computerized radar image and the raw radar scope simultaneously. They were coming up to their wingman from dead behind with three hundred knots more speed. Wink watched the angle of the radar increase rapidly toward the top of the nose of the Tomcat, then felt the thud as the radar broke lock at a sixty-five-degree up angle and the disappointed antenna returned to its neutral position. “Directly overhead,” Wink said.
“Roger,” Woods replied anxiously. “Think we’re clear?”
“Should be,” Wink replied.
“I’ll give it a few,” Woods said, counting to three in his mind, then pulling back hard on the stick. They came screaming up out of the cloud. The sky cleared and the stars were vivid again. “You got him?” Woods yelled.
Wink grabbed the handle on top of the radar console and used it to turn around and look between the two tails of the Tomcat. “Got him.” Wink watched as their F-14 went straight up at five hundred-fifty knots directly in front of their wingman, like a rocket.
Lieutenant Tony Vialli saw a flash of darkness outlined by anti-collision lights and the green blur of the formation lights on the sides of the Tomcat directly in front of him. As soon as he realized there was something there he tried to dump the nose of his Tomcat toward earth to avoid what he thought was an imminent collision. “Holy shit!” he yelled into his oxygen mask, so loud that Sedge could hear it in the back even though his microphone was off. They came out of their seats as the negative G forces from their evasive action pushed them up. They flew through Woods’s jetwash and entered the clouds at the same time. Vialli forced himself to watch his artificial horizon to avoid vertigo, a loss of reference that could be fatal. He fought to recover his bearings and quickly checked his engine instruments to make sure the jetwash hadn’t caused a flameout.
In the other F-14 Woods and Wink were enjoying the rocket ride into the Mediterranean darkness. “That ought to do it,” Woods said. “Think they saw us?”
The radio jumped to life. “If that was you, you’re dead.” Vialli didn’t even have to say who he was talking to. He was using the radio in the front cockpit, reserved for squadron use, set to the squadron’s private frequency. Woods was the only other squadron airplane airborne on this, the night’s last flight. It was 0145. 1:45 in the morning.
Woods could hear the anger in Vialli’s voice. He realized he might have miscalculated. He keyed the radio with the switch on the throttle. “Yeah, we overshot. Let’s knock it off. See you at marshall.”
“You thumped us” Vialli said furiously as he climbed the F-14 out of the clouds and leveled off.
“See you on deck,” Woods replied.
Sedge answered, “We’re switching. See you guys in marshall.”
“I think they’re pissed,” Wink said as they flew straight up away from the earth.
“They’ll get over it. Got to be ready for anything.”
Wink switched the frequency on the digital display of his radio. “Victory 207 checking in. We’re on the 268 at forty, state 7.3.” They were forty miles from the carrier and had seven thousand three hundred pounds of jet fuel.
“Roger 207” said the controller, the same one who was there every night, the one who mispronounced the same words every night, saying “Roger” with a long “o” and “available” with an extra “i,” “availiable.” His consistent mistakes had come to be highly regarded by the aircrew as signposts of the ship and a comforting familiarity.
“Contact, Victory 207. Standby for your marshall instructions.”
“207,” Wink replied. Unlike Woods, he enjoyed marshall. It was where all the carrier’s planes went before landing aboard the carrier at night, a finely choreographed holding pattern where they circled twenty or more miles from the carrier until their time came and they began their descent to the dreaded night landing.
“Want to go up on the roof?” Woods asked Wink.
“Sure. We’ve got time,” Wink replied as he searched for a card on his knee-board. “As long as we’ve got the gas.”
“We’ve got it,” Woods replied.
“Victory 207, marshall at the 240 radial at twenty two miles, angels 7. Your push time is … standby.”
“Passing thirty,” Wink said to Woods as they passed through thirty thousand feet.
“Push time is 04.”
“207, two four zero at twenty two angels seven, push at 04, roger,” Wink replied. “Passing forty.”
Woods nosed over and started the nose of the Tomcat back toward the horizon. “How high do you want to go?”
“If we go above fifty we’re supposed to wear a pressure suit. Wouldn’t want our blood to boil.”
“Forty-nine, aye,” Woods said. He leveled off at forty-nine thousand feet and set the plane straight and level, heading in the direction of their assigned marshall location, where they would begin their descent to the carrier for their landing. Their push time, when they were to begin their descent to the ship from a very specific spot, was four minutes after the hour—twenty four minutes away. “Ready to darken ship?” Woods asked.
“Affirm,” Wink replied. They both moved their hands around the cockpit, expertly turning down the lights, consoles, and switches that gave off any brightness. They left faint indications of critical information, and shut off or dimmed everything else. They turned down the radio receivers so they couldn’t hear the other pilots checking in to marshall. Wink turned off his radar scope and TID screen, even though the radar stayed on. There were no reflections off the clear Plexiglas canopy which reached over their heads and down below their shoulders.
Woods adjusted the trim of the Tomcat so it would fly straight and level with his hands and feet off the controls. He turned on the autopilot to hold their altitude and heading. As a last step he turned off the anti-collision lights that warned other planes of their presence, the flashing red lights that could be seen for miles. There wasn’t anyone else up that high. There was no risk of hitting another airplane. The Tomcat was completely dark, blending in with the night, invisible to everyone but God.
Woods put his arms up on the railings of the canopy and looked up through the invisible covering at the stars. As beautiful as they were from the ship in the middle of the ocean on a clear night, nothing compared to sitting on the roof, on top of the world in a silent darkened airplane. Woods studied the patterns of galaxies and stars, the vast number and density of them. He loved to fly as high as he could go over the ocean, or anywhere else, for that matter. Even on the top of the highest mountain, the view couldn’t compa
re to the clear sky over the ocean from fifty thousand feet—above the highest mountains, the highest clouds, the highest storms, and the highest airplane traffic. There was no sensation of movement at all. It was like sitting in a planetarium. But even the best planetarium would pale in comparison to this view. The planets had actual size. The stars were closer, clearer, brighter. The ones he could see pointed to the ones behind them—dimmer but clear—and the ones behind them, dimmer still. They were gathered in groups, or clusters, so numerous he couldn’t even count the constellations in one section of the sky. God’s living room.
Woods thought of the other Navy pilots flying their racetrack patterns aimlessly in marshall, waiting for their time to descend and land on the carrier, to go below and watch a movie, or eat ice cream, or do the never-ending Navy paperwork, all without ever looking up.
He leaned back and closed his eyes to moisten them. The oxygen leaking out of the top of his mask had dried them out. He opened his eyes again and looked toward the eastern horizon where the moon would be coming up in forty-five minutes. He could see the faint glow of white as it gathered its energy to rise and illuminate the night.
Wink broke the silence. “Two more months and we head back to Norfolk, Sean.”
“Yep. But some good port calls before then. Like Israel.”
“Never happen. Too much going on. They’ll never let us go.”
“I’ll take that bet. I was on board last cruise when we stopped at Haifa. Same kind of deal.”
“They’ll probably blow somebody up and we won’t get to go. We’ll end up in Naples again.”
“Hey, we’ll be in Naples tomorrow, and my wife will be there. That’s not all bad.”
“Yeah, if you have a wife. We’d better get to marshall.”
“Roger that.” Woods sat for another minute breathing the pure oxygen. Real air was stale and warm compared to the Tomcat’s pure oxygen that seemed to rejuvenate him whenever he put on his mask. He didn’t want to go to marshall and just drill around, waiting. They were supposed to pull in early enough to set up their speed and arrive at their push time within ten seconds. He liked to get there as late as he could and still make it. Somehow they always made it. Maybe it was just his way of putting off the inevitable—landing aboard the carrier.
The mere thought of landing on the ship at night with no moon and an overcast caused his palms to sweat. He had never gotten used to it. He was good at it, one of the best in the squadron. But it was still an unnatural act. Woods turned up the instrument lights and turned on the anti-collision lights. He rolled the F-14 over on its back and headed for marshall. “Let’s do it,” he said.
Copyright
Copyright 1999 by James W. Huston
Excerpt from Flash Point copyright 2000 by James W. Huston
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number. 99-18566
ISBN: 0-380-73160-6
EPub Edition © June 2011 ISBN: 9780062105790
Version 07132012
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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