The Intruders jg-6

by Stephen Coonts

  The gear officer looked up the glide slope. Yep, it was an A-6. He glanced forward up the deck. The landing area was clear. No aircraft protruded over the foul lines, there were no people in the landing area, so he squeezed a trigger switch on the pistol grip he held in his right hand.

  This switch operated a stop-light affair arranged twenty feet or so aft of the landing signal officer’s platform on the port side of the landing area. The LSO waving tonight, Hugh Skidmore, saw the red light go out and a green light appear.

  “Clear deck,” he called, and the other LSOs on the platform echoed the call.

  “Clear deck!”

  This entire evolution had taken about fifteen seconds. The ship was ready to recover the inbound A-6. Now if Jake Grafton could just fly his plane into that little sliver of sky that would give him a three wire…

  He was trying. He was working the stick and throttles, playing them delicately, when he slammed into the burble of air disturbed by the ship’s island. The plane jolted and he jammed on some power, then as quickly pulled it off as he cut through the turbulence into the calm air over the ramp. On he came, aiming for that eighteen-inches-thick window where the third wire waited, coming in at 118 knots in an eighteen-ton plane, the hook dangling down behind the main gear, coming in…

  Hugh Skidmore strode about five feet into the landing area, inboard of the LSO’s platform. Against his ear he held a telephonelike radio headset connected with the ship’s radios by a long cord. Forward of the LSO’s platform was a television monitor, the PLAT — pilot landing assistance television — which he checked occasionally to ensure the plane in the groove was properly lined up. He could hear the approach controller and he could hear and talk to Jake Grafton. Yet there was nothing to say. The A-6 was coming in like it was riding rails.

  Then it was there, crossing the ramp.

  Jake still had a steady centered yellow ball as the wheels smashed home. The ball shot off the top of the lens as he slammed the throttles to the stops and the hook caught, seemingly all at the same time. The deceleration threw the pilot and bombardier forward into their harnesses.

  The A-6 Intruder was jerked to a halt in a mere two hundred and sixty feet.

  It hung quivering on the end of the arresting gear wire, then Jake got the engines back to idle and the rebound of the wire pulled the plane backward.

  The gear runner was already twenty feet out into the landing area signaling the pilot with his wands: hook up. When he saw the aircraft’s tailhook being retracted, the runner waved one of his wands in a huge circle, the signal to the arresting gear operator in the fantail catwalk to retract the engine.

  Obediently the operator selected the lever for number-three engine and pulled it down. Since the lever was connected by a wire over three hundred feet long to a hydraulic actuating valve on the engine, this pull took some muscle. When he had the yard-long lever well away from the bulkhead, the sailor leaped on it with his feet and used the entire weight of his body to force the lever down to a ninety-degree angle.

  By now the A-6 that had just landed was folding its wings as it taxied out of the landing area. By the time the tail crossed the foul line, the third engine operator said “battery,” and the retract man got off the lever and let it come back to its rest position. As he did he heard the Pri-Fly talker sing out, “Set Two Seven Zero A-7.”

  On the LSO platform Hugh Skidmore leaned over to his writer, tonight the Real McCoy. “Give him an OK three. Little lined up left at the start.”

  McCoy scribbled the notation in his pocket logbook like this: 511 OK3 (LLATS).

  Then both men turned their full attention to the A-7 in the groove as they waited for the clear-deck light to illuminate.

  * * *

  The second cat shot, into a sky as black as the ace of spades, went well. Jake leveled at 1,200 feet and turned downwind, as directed by the controller. He held 250 knots until the controller told him to dirty up, which he did at the same time he told Jake to turn base. So Grafton was turning as he changed configuration — slowing, retrimming and trying to maintain a precise altitude, all at the same time. He lost a hundred feet, a fact that Flap instantly commented upon.

  Jake said. nothing, merely kept flying his plane. This is the big leagues. Gotta do it all here and do it well. Flap has a right to comment.

  A short, tight pattern left him still searching for a good steady start when he hit the glide slope. The secret to a good pass is a good start, and Jake didn’t have it. He wasn’t carrying enough power and that caused a settle. By the time he was back up to a centered ball he was fast, which he was working off when he hit the burble. He added power. Not quite enough. The ball was a tad low when the wheels hit the deck.

  “A fair two-wire,” he told Flap as they rolled out.

  * * *

  Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (Equipment) Third Class Johnny Arbogast enjoyed his work. He operated the number-three arresting gear engine, the one that got the most traps and therefore required the most maintenance. Still, Johnny Arbogast loved that engine.

  During a slow, rainy day in port this past spring, the gear chief had worked out how much energy an engine absorbed while trapping an F-4 Phantom. The figure was nine million foot-pounds, as Johnny recalled. Nine million of anything is a lot, but man! Those planes make this engine sing.

  Any way you cut it, an arresting gear engine was one hell of a fine piece of machinery. And Johnny Arbogast was the guy who ran Columbia’s number three, which was pretty darn good, he thought, for a plumber’s kid from Cotulla, Texas, who had had to struggle for everything he ever got.

  The engine consisted of a giant hydraulic piston inside a steel cylinder about thirty inches in diameter that was arranged parallel with the ship’s beam. Almost fifty feet in length, the cylinder containing the piston sat inside a large steel frame. Around the piston were reeved two twelve-hundred-foot strands of arresting gear cable, one-and-five-eighths-inch-thick wire rope made of woven steel threads. These two cables ran repeatedly around sheaves at the head and foot of the main piston and squeezed it as the aircraft pulled out the flight deck pennant above Johnny’s head. It was the metering of the fluid squeezed by the piston from the cylinder — pure ethylene glycol, or antifreeze — through an adjustable orifice that controlled the rate at which the aircraft was arrested. Johnny set the size of this orifice for each arrestment as ordered by the talker in Pri-Fly.

  To maintain proper tension on the engine cable as the aircraft on the flight deck was pulling it out, two anchor dampners that held the bitter ends of each cable stroked simultaneously. These fifty-foot-long pistons inside cylinders about twelve inches in diameter pulled slack cable off the back, or idle, side of the engine, thereby keeping the wire taut throughout the system.

  When he first reported aboard Columbia, the arresting gear chief had impressed Johnny with a story about an anchor dampner that sheared its restraining nut during an arrestment. The suddenly free dampner, as big as a telephone pole, was forcibly whipped through the aluminum bulkhead of the engine room into the 0-3-level passageway where it cut a sailor on his way to chow sloppily in half. The running cable whipped the dampner like a scythe. It sliced through a dozen officers’ stateroom bulkheads as if they were so much tissue paper. When the dampner had accomplished a 180-degree turn, it reentered the engine room and skewered the engine like a mighty spear, exploding sheaves and showering the room, and the operator, with sharp, molten-hot metal fragments. All this took place in about a second and a half. Fortunately the plane on the flight deck was successfully arrested before the now-unanchored cable could run completely off the engine, but the engine room was a shambles and the operator went to the hospital with critical injuries.

  As a result of this little story, Johnny Arbogast developed a habit of running his eyes over the anchor dampners after each arrestment. Tonight, after setting the engine to receive an A-6, he saw something that he had never before seen. As the anchor dampners stroked back into battery after the last engagem
ent, the steel cable on one of them had kinked about six inches out from the connecting socket that held the bitter end of the cable to the dampner piston.

  A kink, like a kink in a garden hose.

  Johnny Arbogast stared, not quite sure his eyes could be believed.

  Yep, a kink.

  If this engine takes a hit, that cable could break, right there at the kink!

  Johnny fumbled with the mouthpiece of the sound-powered phone unit hanging on his chest. He pushed the talk button and blurted, “Three’s foul. Three’s not ready.’

  “What?” This from the deck-edge operator, who had already told the arresting gear officer that all the engines were set. And he had delivered this message over a half minute ago, maybe even a minute.

  “Three’s not ready,” Johnny Arbogast howled into his mouthpiece. “Foul deck!”

  And then Johnny did what any sensible man would have done: he tore off the sound-powered headset and ran for his life.

  Up on the fantail catwalk the deck-edge operator shouted at the arresting gear officer, “Three’s not ready.”

  The gear officer was still standing on the starboard foul line on the flight deck and he didn’t hear what the operator said. He eyed the A-6 in the groove and bent toward the sailor, who was also looking over his shoulder at the approaching plane, now almost at the ramp.

  “Foul deck,” the sailor roared above the swelling whine of the engines of the approaching plane.

  The gear officer’s reaction was automatic. He released the trigger on the pistol grip he held in his hand and shouted, “What the hell is wrong?”

  Across the landing area on the LSO’s platform the green “ready deck” light went out and the red “foul deck” light came on.

  Hugh Skidmore was looking intently at the A-6 Intruder almost at the ramp when he saw the red light on the edge of his peripheral vision. He was faced with an instant decision. He had no way of knowing why the deck was foul — he only knew that it was. A plane may have rolled into the landing area, a man may have wandered into the unsafe zone…any one of a hundred things could have gone wrong and all one hundred were bad.

  So Hugh Skidmore squeezed the red button on the pistol grip he held in his hand, triggering a bank of flashing red lights mounted above the meatball. At the same time he roared into his radio-telephone, “Wave-off, wave-off.”

  * * *

  The flashing wave-off lights and the radio message imprinted themselves on Jake Grafton’s brain at the same time. His reaction was automatic. The throttles went full forward as he thumbed in the speed brakes and the control stick came aft.

  Unfortunately jet engines do not provide instantaneous power as piston engines do: the revs can build only as fast as the burners can handle the increasing fuel flow, which is me-tered through a fuel control unit to prevent flooding the engine and flaming it out. And power builds with revs. Tonight the back stick and the gradually increasing engine power flattened the A-6’s descent, then stopped it… four feet above the deck.

  The howling warplane crossed the third wire with its nose well up, boards in, engines winding to full screech, but with its tailhook dangling.

  From his vantage point near the fantail the arresting gear officer watched in horror as the tailhook kissed the top of the third wire, then snagged the fourth. The plane continued forward for a heartbeat, then seemed to stop in midair.

  It was a lopsided contest. An 18-ton airplane was trying to pull a 95,000-ton ship. The ship won. The airplane fell straight down.

  * * *

  As he took the wave-off, Jake Grafton instinctively knew that it had come too late. The ship was right there, filling the windscreen. He kept the angle-of-attack on the optimum indication — a centered doughnut — by feeding in back stick while he tried to bend the throttles over the stops.

  Somehow he found the ICS switch with his left thumb and shouted to Flap, “Hook up!” but the aircraft was already decelerating. The angle-of-attack indexer showed slow and his eye flicked to the AOA gauge on the panel, just in time to see the needle sweep counterclockwise to the peg as the G threw him forward into his harness straps.

  Then they fell the four feet to the deck.

  The impact snapped his head forward viciously and slammed him downward into the seat, stunning him.

  He got his head up and tried to focus his eyes as cold fear enveloped him. Are we stopped? Or going off the angled deck? Dazed, scared clear through and unable to see his instruments, he instinctively placed the stick in the eight-degree-nose-up position and kept the engines at full power.

  * * *

  The air boss exploded over the radio: “Jesus Christ, Paddles, why’d you wave him off in close?”

  On the LSO platform Hugh Skidmore was having trouble finding the transmit button on his radio. He fumbled for it as he stared forward at the A-6 straining futilely against the fourth wire with its engines still at full power. Miraculously the airplane seemed to be all in one piece. Here a hundred yards behind those two jet exhausts without the protection of a sound-suppression helmet the noise was awesome, a thunder that numbed the ears and vibrated the soul.

  Unwilling to wait for Skidmore’s response, the air boss now roared over the radio at Jake Grafton: “We got you, son. Kill those engines! You aren’t going anywhere now.”

  Long seconds ticked by before the pilot complied. When he did, finally, the air boss remembered Skidmore:

  “El Ss Oh, if you ever, ever, wave off another airplane in close on this fucking boat I will personally come down there and throw your silly ass into the goddamn wake. Do you read me, you mindless bastard?”

  Skidmore found his voice. “The deck went foul, Boss.”

  “We’ll cut up the corpse later. Wave off the guy in the groove so we can get this squashed A-6 out of the gear and clean the shit out of the cockpit.”

  The plane in the groove was still a half mile out, but Skidmore obediently triggered the wave-off lights. As he did so he heard the engines of the A-6 in the gear die as the pilot secured the fuel flow.

  Already the arresting gear officer had his troops on deck stripping the pennant from number-three engine. The rest of the recovery would be accomplished with only three engines on line.

  Skidmore turned to the Real McCoy. “I guess I screwed the pooch on that one.”

  McCoy was still looking at the A-6 up forward. The yellow shirts were hooking a tow tractor to the nose wheel. He turned his gaze on Skidmore, who was looking into his face.

  He had to say something. “Looks like the boss is safety-wired to the pissed-off position.”

  Skidmore nodded toward the stern. “I thought he could make it. I didn’t think he was that close.”

  “Well…”

  “Oh, hell.”

  * * *

  Jake Grafton stood rubbing his neck in Flight Deck Control, the room in the base of the carrier’s island superstructure where the aircraft handler directs the movement of every plane on the ship. Flap Le Beau stood beside him. Someone was talking to the handler on the squawk box, apparently someone in Air Ops. The handler listened awhile, then leaned toward Jake and said, “You need two more traps. The in-flight engagement was your fourth.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you’re feeling up to it, we’ll give you another plane and send you out for your last two. Or you can wait until we get to Hawaii and we’ll do the whole night bit again. It’s up to you. How do you feel?”

  Jake used a sleeve to swab the sweat from his forehead and eyes. “What about tomorrow night?” he asked.

  “The captain won’t hold the ship in here against this coast just to qual one pilot. We have to transit to Hawaii.”

  Jake nodded. That made sense. He flexed his shoulders and pivoted his head slowly.

  The fear was gone. Okay, panic. But it was gone. He was still feeling the adrenaline aftershock, which was normal.

  “I’m okay,” he told the handler, who turned to relay the message into the squawk box.

  Flap
pulled at Jake’s sleeve. “You don’t have to do this tonight. There’s no war on. It doesn’t matter a whit whether you get quailed tonight or a week from now in Hawaii.”

  Jake stared. The flippant, kiss-my-ass cool dude he had flown with all day was gone. The man there now was serious and in total control, with sharp, intelligent eyes. This must be the Flap Le Beau that was the legend.

  “I can hack it. Are you okay?”

  “I am if you are.”

  “I am.”

  “I gave you a load of shit today just to see if you could handle a little pressure. You can. You don’t have anything to prove to anybody.”

  Jake shook his head from side to side. “I have to go now so the next time I’ll know I can.”

  A trace of a smile crossed Le Beau’s face. He nodded, just the tiniest dip of the head, and turned toward the handler.

  “What plane do they want us to aviate, Handler-man? Ask the grunts in Ready Four and have them send up the book.”

  “Please, sir!”

  “Of course, sir. Did I leave the please out? What’s come over me? I must still be all shook up. You know, we came within two inches of being chocolate and vanilla pudding out there. If we’d fell another two inches you’d be cleaning us up with spoons. I’m gonna write a thank-you letter to Jesus. Praise God, that was a religious experience, Amen! I feel born again, Amen! The narrowness of our escape and my ecstasy must have made me the eensiest bit careless in my military manners. I apologize. You understand, don’t you, sir?”

  “Ecstasy! What crap! Go sit over there in that corner with your Amens and keep your mouth shut until your fellow jar-heads get the maintenance book up here for your pilot to read. He can read, can’t he?”

  “Oh yes, sir. He’s Navy, not Marine. He’s got a good, solid, second-grade education. His mamma told me he did just fine in school until…”

  Jake Grafton decided he was thirsty and needed to take a leak. He wandered away to attend to both problems.

  He was slurping water from a fountain in the passageway outside the hatch to Flight Deck Control when he realized that Lieutenant Colonel Haldane was standing beside him. Haldane was wearing his uniform tonight, not his flight suit. His I-been-there decorations under his gold aviator wings made an impressive splotch of color on his left breast.