The Intruders jg-6

by Stephen Coonts

  “Are you always this full of shit or are you making a special effort on my behalf?” Jake asked.

  Le Beau prattled on unperturbed. “It’s tragic that so many Navy persons are dangerously thin-skinned in a world full of sharp objects! One can infer from your crude comment that you share that lamentable trait with your colleagues. It’s sad, very sad, but there are probably gonna be tensions between us. None of that male-bonding horse pucky for you and me, huh? Tensions. Stress. Misunderstandings. Heartburns. Hard feelings. Ass kickings.” He sighed plaintively. “Well, I try to get along by going along. That’s the Cajun in me coming out. I am so very lucky I got this white blood in me, ya know? Lets me see everything in a better perspective.”

  The Marine bent slightly at the waist and addressed his next comment to the deck: “Thank you, thank you, Jules Le Beau, rotting down there in hell.”

  Back to his locker and flight gear—“Lots of the bros ain’t as lucky as I am — they can’t tell trees from manure piles, and—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Flap,” someone in the next row said. “Turn off the tap, will ya?”

  “Yeoww,” Flap howled, “I feel great! Gonna get out there and fly with a Navy ace and see how it’s done by the best of the best!”

  “How did I wind up with this asshole?” Jake asked the major two lockers down.

  “No other pilot wanted him,” was the reply.

  “Hey, watch your mouth over there,” Flap called. “This is my rep you’re pissin’ on.”

  “Pissin’ on, sir!”

  “Sir,” Flap echoed dutifully.

  * * *

  The sun shone down softly through a high thin cirrus layer. The wind out of the northwest was heaping the sea into long windrows and ripping occasional whitecaps from the crests as gulls wheeled and turned around the great ship.

  Two frigates and four destroyers were visible several miles away, scattered in a haphazard circle around the carrier. These were the carrier’s escorts, an antisubmarine screen, faithful retainers that would attend the queen wherever she led.

  On the eastern horizon land was still visible. It would soon drop over the earth’s rim since the carrier would have to spend the next several hours running into the northwest wind, then the universe would consist of only the ships, the sea and the sky. The land would become a memory of the past and a vision of a hazy future, but the solid reality of the present would be just the ships and the men who rode them. Six small moons orbiting one wandering planet…

  Jake’s vision lingered on that distant dark line of earth, then he turned away.

  The ship rode easily this morning, with just the gentlest of rolls, which Jake noticed only because he didn’t have his sea legs yet. This roll would become a pitching motion when the ship turned into the wind.

  Sensing these things and knowing them without really thinking about them, Jake Grafton walked slowly aft looking for his aircraft. There — by Elevator Four.

  She was no beauty, this A-6E Intruder decked out in dull, low viz paint splotched here and there with puke green zinc dichromate primer. An external power cord was already plugged into the plane. Jake lowered the boarding ladder and opened the canopy, then climbed up and placed his helmet bag on the seat. He ensured the safety pins were properly installed in the ejection seat, let his eye rove over the cockpit switches, the gear handle, the wing position lever and the fuel dump switches, then checked the fuel quantity. Ten thousand pounds. As advertised. He toggled the seat position adjustment switches, noted the whine and felt the seat move, then released them. Jake climbed down the ladder to the deck and began his preflight inspection.

  In Vietnam he had flown A-6As, the first version of the Intruder. This plane was an A-6E, the second-generation bomber, the state-of-the-art in American military technology. Most of the updates were not visible to the naked eye. The search and track radars of the A-6A had been replaced with one radar that combined both search and track functions. The A’s rotary-drum computer had been replaced with a solid-state, digital, state-of-the-art version. The third major component in the electronics system, the inertial navigation system, or INS, had not yet been updated, so it was now the weak point in the navigation/attack system. The new computer and radar were not only more accurate than the old gear, they were also proving to be extraordinarily reliable, which erased the major operational disadvantage of the A-6A.

  The E had been in the fleet for several years now, yet it had not been used in Vietnam, by Pentagon fiat. Had the updated E been used there, the targets could have been hit with greater accuracy, with fewer missions, thereby saving lives and perhaps helping shorten the war, but inevitably some of these planes would have been lost and the technology compromised, i.e., seen by the Soviets.

  So lives had been traded to keep the technology secret. How many lives? Who could say.

  As Jake Grafton walked around this A-6E looking and touching this and that, the raw, twisted Vietnam emotions came flooding back. Once again he felt the fear, saw the blood, saw the night sky filled with streaks of tracer and the fiery plumes of SAMs. The faces of the dead men floated before him as he felt the smooth, cool skin of the airplane.

  It seemed as if he had never left the ship. Any second Tiger Cole would come strolling across the deck with his helmet bag and charts, ready to fly into the mouth of hell.

  Jake felt his stomach churn, as if he were going to vomit. He paused and leaned against a main-gear strut.

  No!

  Six months had passed. His knee had healed, he had visited his folks, done a little flight instruction at Whidbey Island, visited Callie in Chicago…thrown that asshole through the window at Sea-Tac…why was he sweating, nauseated?

  This is car quals, for Christ’s sake! It’s a beautiful day, a cake hop, a walk in the park!

  He stood straight and, looking out to sea, took several deep breaths. He should have popped the question to Callie — should have asked her to marry him. And he should have resigned from the Navy.

  He shouldn’t even be here! On the boat again! He had done his share, dropped his share of bombs, killed his share of gomers.

  For God’s sake — another cruise — with a bunch of jack-off jarheads!

  He took his hand off the strut and stood staring at the plane, his face twisted into a frown. Primer splotches everywhere, dirt, stains from hydraulic leaks…And it was a fairly new plane, less than a year old!

  Camparelli would have come screaming unglued if they had sent a plane like this to his squadron. Screaming-meemy fucking unglued!

  Somehow the thought of Commander Camparelli, Jake’s last skipper in Vietnam, storming and ranting amused Jake Grafton.

  “Looks like a piece of shit, don’t it?”

  Bosun Muldowski was standing there staring at the plane with his arms crossed.

  “Yeah, Bosun, but I ain’t looking to buy it. I’m just flying it this morning.”

  “Sure didn’t expect to find you aviatin’ for the jugheads, Mr. Grafton.”

  “Life’s pretty weird sometimes.”

  The bosun nodded sagely. “Heard about that shithead that went through the window at Sea-Tac.”

  Jake nodded and rubbed his hand through his hair. “Well, I guess I lost it for a little bit. I’m not the smartest guy you ever met.”

  “Smart enough. Thanks.”

  With that, the bosun walked forward, up the deck, leaving the pilot staring at his back.

  “Hey, my man! Is this mean green killing machine safe to fly?” Flap. He came around the nose of the plane and lowered the BN’s boarding ladder.

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

  “It’s an embarrassing question to have to ask, I know, yet the dynamics of the moment and the precarious state of my existence here in space and time impel me to ponder my karma and your competence. No offense, but I am growing attached to my ass and don’t want to part with it. What I’m getting at, Ace, is are you man enough to handle the program?”

  The pilot slapped the
fuselage. “This relic from the Mongolian Air Force is going off the pointy end of this boat in about fifteen minutes with your manly physique in it. That’s the only fact I have access to. Will your ass stay attached? Will sweet, innocent Suzy Kiss-me succumb to the blandishments of the evil pervert, Mortimer Fuck-butt? Stay tuned to this channel and find out right after these words from our sponsors.” He turned his back on Flap Le Beau.

  “I have no doubt this thing will go off this scow, but can you get it back aboard all in one piece?”

  Jake Grafton shouted back over his shoulder: “We’ll fly together or die together, Le Beau. None of that macho male bonding crap for hairy studs like us.”

  The bosun — he didn’t have to say that. And it was a beautiful day, the sun glinting on the swells, the high, open sky, the gentle motion of the ship…

  The plane would feel good in his hands, would do just as he willed it. She would respond so sweetly to the throttles and stick, would come down the groove into the wires so slick and honest…

  As the sea wind played with his hair the pilot found himself feeling better.

  4

  Wings spread and locked, flaps and slats to takeoff, Roger the weight-board — it all came back without conscious thought as Jake followed the taxi director’s hand signals and moved the warplane toward the port bow catapult, Cat Two. Flap didn’t help — he didn’t say or do anything after getting the inertial aligned and flipping the radar switch to standby. He merely sat and watched Jake.

  “Takeoff checklist,” Jake prompted.

  “I thought you said you could fly this thing, Ace.”

  Jake ran through the items on his own as he eased the plane the last few feet into the catapult shuttle and the hold-back bar dropped into place.

  The yellow-shirt taxi director gave him the “release brakes” signal with one hand and with the other made a sweeping motion below his waist. This was the signal to the catapult operator to ease the shuttle forward with a hydraulic piston, taking all the slack out of the nose-wheel tow-launching mechanism. Jake felt the thunk as he released the brakes and pushed both throttles forward to the stops.

  The engines came up nicely. RPM, exhaust gas temperatures, fuel flow — the tapes ran up the dials as the engines wound up.

  The Intruder vibrated like a living thing as the engines sucked in rivers of air and slammed it out the exhausts.

  “You ready?” Jake asked the bombardier as he wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the catapult grip while he braced the heel of the hand against the throttles.

  “Onward and upward, Ace.”

  The taxi director was pointing to the catapult officer, who was ten feet farther up the deck. The shooter was twirling his fingers and looking at Jake, waiting.

  Oil pressure both engines — fine. Hydraulics — okay. Jake waggled the stick and checked the movement of the stabilator in his left-side rearview mirror on the canopy rail. Then he saluted the cat officer with his right hand. The shooter returned it and glanced up the cat track toward the bow as Jake put his head back into the headrest and placed his right hand behind the stick.

  Now the cat officer lunged forward and touched the deck with his right hand.

  One heartbeat, two, then the catapult fired. The acceleration was vicious.

  Yeeeaaaah! and it was over, in about two and a half seconds. The edge of the bow swept under the nose and the plane was over the glittering sea.

  Jake let the trim rotate the nose to eight degrees nose up as he reached for the gear handle. He slapped it up and swept his eyes across the instrument panel, taking in the attitude reference on the vertical display indicator — the VDI, the altimeter— eighty feet and going up, the rate of climb — positive, the airspeed—150 knots and accelerating, all warning lights out. He took in all these bits of information without conscious thought, just noted them somewhere in his subconscious, and put it all together as the airplane accelerated and climbed away from the ship.

  With the gear up and locked, he raised the flaps and slats. Here they came. Still accelerating, he stopped the climb at five hundred feet and ran the nose trim down. Two hundred and fifty knots, 300, 350…still accelerating…

  To his amusement he saw that Flap Le Beau was sitting upright in his ejection seat with his hands folded on his lap, just inches from the alternate ejection handle between his legs.

  At 400 knots Jake eased the throttles back. Five miles coming up on the DME…and the pilot pulled the nose up steeply and dropped the left wing as he eased the throttles forward again. The plane leaped away from the ocean in a climbing turn. Jake scanned the sky looking for the plane that had preceded him on the cat by two minutes.

  He had four thousand pounds of fuel — no, only three thousand now — to burn off before they called him down for his first landing, in about fifteen minutes.

  Better make it last, Jake. Don’t squander it. He pulled the throttles back and coasted up to five thousand feet, where he leveled indicating 250 knots in a gentle turn that would allow him to orbit the ship on the five-mile circle.

  Flap sighed audibly over the intercom, the ICS, then said, “Acceptable launch, Grafton. Acceptable. You obviously have done this once or twice and haven’t forgotten how. This pleases me. I get a warm fuzzy.”

  There the major was, almost on the other side of the ship, level at this altitude and turning on the five-mile arc. Jake steepened his turn to cut across above the ship and rendezvous.

  “I almost joined the Navy,” Flap confided, “but I came to my senses just in time and joined the Corps. It’s a real fighting outfit, the best in the world. The Navy…well, the best that can be said is that you guys try. Most of the time, anyway.”

  He talked on as Jake got on the major’s bearing line and eased in some left rudder to lower the nose so he could see the major out the right-side quarter panel. Rendezvousing an A-6 with its side-by-side seating took some finesse when coming in on the lead’s left because the pilot of the joining aircraft could easily lose sight of the lead plane. If he let himself go just a little high, or if he let his plane fall a little behind the bearing line— going sucked, they called it — and attempted to pull back to the bearing, the lead would disappear under the wingman’s nose and he would be closing blindly. This was not good, a situation fraught with hazard for all concerned.

  This morning Jake stayed glued to the bearing. If Flap noticed he gave no indication. He was saying, “… the closest I ever came to being in the Navy was the wife of some surface warrior I met at MCRD”—Marine Corps Recruit Depot—“O Club on a Friday night. She rubbed her tits all over my back and I told her she was going to give me zipper rash. She was all hot and randy so I thought, Why not. We went over to her place…”

  When he was fifty feet away from the major’s plane Jake lowered the nose and crossed behind and under. He surfaced into parade position on the right side, the outside of the turn. The BN gave him a thumbs-up.

  Jake’s BN talked on. “… I just put the ol’ cock to her…”

  After a frequency shift that the major’s BN signaled and Jake had to dial in because Flap wasn’t helping at all, they made two more turns in the circle, then started down.

  “She had those nipples that are like strawberries, you know what I mean? All puffed up so nice and sweet and red and they’re just made for sucking on? I like them the very best. Can’t understand why God didn’t equip more women with ’em. Only about one broad in ten has ’em. It’s a mystery.”

  They were descending through patches of sunlight interspersed with shadow. The occasional golden shafts played on the planes and made the sea below glisten, when Jake could steal a second from holding position on the lead plane and glance down.

  His plane handled well. Slick and tight and responsive. He contented himself with moving his plane a few inches forward on the lead, then a few inches back, staying in absolute control. When he felt comfortable he moved in on the bearing line so that the wing tips overlapped. He stopped when he could feel the dow
ndraft off the lead’s wing and the tip was just two feet from his canopy. He held it there for a moment or two to prove to himself that he could still do it, then eased back out to where he belonged.

  Flying is the best that life offers, Jake Grafton thought. And carrier flying is the best of the flying. These day traps and cat shots are going to be terrific. He fought back the sense of euphoria that suffused him.

  “… as close as I ever came to being in the Navy, I’ll tell you that.”

  If Flap would just shut up!

  But he won’t. So no sense making a scene.

  The two warplanes came up the ship’s wake at eight hundred feet glued together. There were already two other planes in the pattern with their gear and hooks down, two A-7 Corsairs, so the major delayed his break. Then the BN kissed him off and the major dumped his left wing and pulled. Jake watched the lead plane turn away as he counted to himself. At the count of seven he slammed the stick sideways and pulled as he reached for the gear handle with his left hand and slapped it down. Then the flaps.

  Turning level, three G’s…gear coming, flaps and slats coming…seven thousand pounds of fuel.

  Stable on the downwind he toggled the main dump and let seven hundred pounds squirt out into the atmosphere. He wanted to cross the ramp of the ship with precisely six grand.

  Precision. That’s what carrier flying is all about. That’s the challenge. And the thrill.

  “… just don’t see why anybody would want to float around in the middle of the ocean on these bird farms. Eight months of this fun. The Navy is full of happy masturbators…”

  Hook up for the first pass, a touch-and-go. Let the LSO get his look and learn that I’m not suicidal.

  Coming through the ninety, on speed, exactly 118 knots with a three-o’clock angle-of-attack…there’s the meatball on the Fresnel lens. Cross the wake, roll out, coming in to the angled deck, watch the lineup! There’s the burble from the island…power on then off fast. Keep that ball in the center…