This morning thirty-one years later this group of bombers was on its way to bomb Hawaii, actually a small island in the Hawaiian archipelago named Kahoolawe.
The oxygen from the mask tasted cool and rubbery. Jake eyed the cockpit altimeter, steady at ten thousand feet, and unsnapped the left side of his mask. He let it dangle from the fitting on the other side as he devoted most of his attention to holding good formation. His position today was number three, which meant that he flew on the skipper’s, Colonel Haldane’s, right side. Number four was on Jake’s right, number two on Haldane’s left.
He glanced at his BN, Flap Le Beau, who had his head pressed against the radar hood. He was using both hands to twiddle knobs and flip switches, but he never took his eyes from the radar. Excellent. He knew the location and function of every knob, button and switch without looking. When the going got tough there would be no time to look, no time to fumble for this or that, no time to think.
The colonel’s BN, Allen Bartow, was similarly engaged. From his vantage point twenty feet out from the colonel’s wingtip, Jake could see every move Bartow made in the cockpit, could see him pull his head aft a few inches and eye the computer readouts on the panel just to the right of the radar screen, could see him glance down occasionally, referring to the notes on his kneeboard.
He had gotten to know Bartow fairly well the last few days. A major with twelve years in the Corps, Bartow was addicted to French novels. He read them in French. Just now he was working his way through everything that Georges Simenon had ever written. He had books stacked everywhere in his stateroom and carried one in his flight suit, which he pulled out whenever he had a few minutes to kill.
“I’m retiring as soon as I get my twenty years in,” he told Jake. “On that very day. Then I’m going to get a doctorate in French literature and spend the rest of my life teaching.”
“Sounds dull,” Jake said, grinning, just to needle him.
To his surprise Bartow had considered that remark seriously. “Maybe. Academic life won’t be like the Corps, like life in a squadron. Yet we all have to give this up sooner or later. I enjoy it now, but when it’s over I have something else I’ll enjoy just as much. Something different. So now I’ve got the flying and the guys and the anticipation of that something else. I’m a pretty rich man.” And he returned Jake’s grin.
Bartow was rich, Jake reflected ruefully as he watched the bombardier sitting hunched over his scope. Richer than Jake, anyway. All Jake had was the flying and the camaraderie. He didn’t even have Callie — he had screwed that up.
Le Beau — he apparently didn’t want anything else. Or did he?
“You got a gal waiting for you?” Jake asked his bombardier without taking his eyes off the lead plane.
“You can fly this thing and think about women too?”
“I always have time to think about women. You got one stashed somewhere?”
“Dozens.”
“A special one?”
“Naw. The ones I want to get serious about don’t want me after they’ve had a good look. I’m just tempered, polished steel, a military instrument. How we doing on fuel, anyway?”
Jake glanced at the gauges. He punched the buttons to get a reading on his remaining wing fuel, then finally said, “We’re okay.”
“Umph. We’re only fifty miles out.” Le Beau went back to the radar. “Don’t embarrass me. Try to get some decent hits.”
The bombs hanging under the wings were little blue twenty-five-pound practice bombs. Each one contained a small pyrotechnic cartridge in the nose that would produce a puff of smoke when the bomb struck, allowing the hit to be spotted. Each A-6 carried a dozen of these things on their bomb racks.
The planned drill was for the pilot of each plane to drop the first half-dozen manually, using the visual bomb sight à la World War II, then the second six using the aircraft’s electronic system. Jake carefully set the optical sight to the proper mil setting for a forty-degree dive with a six-thousand-foot release. Releasing six thousand feet above the target, the slant range was about nine thousand feet. To drop a bomb nine thousand feet from a target and hit it was difficult, of course — nearly impossible when you considered the fact that the wind would affect the bomb’s trajectory throughout its fall. Yet that was the dive bomber’s art.
Hitting the target was the payoff. Five thousand men at sea for months, the treasure spent on ships, planes and fuel, the blood spilled in training, all to set up that moment when the bomb struck the target. If the pilot could get it there.
Colonel Haldane expected his pilots to do their damnedest. Last night he taped a poster to the ready room bulkhead with the names of all his pilots on it. The poster was just as large, just as prominent as the one on the bulkhead that recorded each pilot’s landing grades. You had to be able to get aboard ship safely to be a carrier pilot, but you weren’t much use in combat unless you could hit the target when the chips were down. Haldane said as much. He went further:
“In this squadron, after the upcoming Hawaiian ops period, the pilots who are going to lead sections and flights are the pilots with the best bombing scores. I guarantee you, your bombing scores will appear on your fitness report. I expect each and every one of you to earn your pay on the bombing range.”
First Lieutenant Doug Harrison couldn’t resist. “Hey, Skipper. You can fly on my wing.”
“If you can out-bomb me, I will,” Haldane shot back.
Harrison was number four today, flying on Jake’s right wing. You had to admire Harrison, for his chutzpah if nothing else. Haldane had spent years in Vietnam dive-bombing under fire and Harrison was just a year out of flight school. No fool, Harrison well knew how good the experienced professionals were and risked ignominy anyway.
Although he was less vocal about it, Jake Grafton took a backseat to no one when it came to pride in his own flying skills. He had seen his share of flak and dropped his share of bombs. His name would be at the top of that ready room poster if it were humanly possible to get it there.
Major Bartow pumped his fist at Jake, who scooted farther away from the lead plane. Number two, Captain Harry Digman, came under the lead, his canopy just a few feet below Haldane’s exhausts, and surfaced where Jake had been. Now the formation was in right echelon.
Colonel Haldane did the talking on the radio. Cleared into the target area as a flight of F-4s were leaving, he led his echelon down in a gentle, sweeping left turn to 15,000 feet, then straightened out for the run up the bearing line. Over the target he broke to the left. Ten seconds later the second plane broke, and Jake ten seconds after that.
Around they came, now strung out, each pilot verifying his clearance from other airplanes, then concentrating on the target and flying his own plane.
The first essential for a successful run is to get to the proper roll-in point. This is that location in space from which you can roll in and arrive on the proper run-in heading at the preselected dive angle, today forty degrees. Practice targets, with run-in lines bulldozed into the earth and marks gouged out as reference points, help the pilots develop a feel for that correct, perfect place to roll in.
And “roll in” describes the maneuver. Today Jake approached the bearing line obliquely, at about forty-five degrees off, waiting, watching the target get nearer and nearer as he ran the trim to one degree nose-down, the 500-knot setting, while he held the plane level with back stick.
Now!
He slaps the stick sideways and in a heartbeat has the A-6 past the vertical, in 135 degrees of bank. Now the stick comes sharply back and the G’s smash them into their seats as the pilot pulls the nose of the aircraft to just below the target while he adjusts the throttles. Since he is carrying low-drag practice bombs today, Jake sets the throttles at about eighty percent RPM.
G off, stick right to roll her hard to the upright position.
Flap flips on the master armament switch and makes the radio call: “War Ace Three’s in hot.”
If the pilot has rolled
in properly, the plane is now in a forty-degree dive, the pipper in the bombsight below the target and tracking toward it. This is where Jake finds it now, although just a little too far right. He corrects this instantly by forcing the stick to the left, then jerking the wings back level. This is no place to try to be smooth — it is imperative that he quickly get the plane into the proper dive with the pipper tracking so that he will have as many seconds as possible to solve the drift problem. Jake flies his dives with both hands on the stick, muscling the plane to the position he wants.
A glance at the airspeed — over 400 and increasing — now the altimeter. Flap is calling the altitudes: “Fourteen…thirteen…forty-one degrees…twelve…”
The wind is drifting the pipper leftward. Jake rolls right and forces the pipper back to the right. He wants the pipper to the right of the bearing line and drifting left toward it, yet at the moment of release it must still be slightly right of the bull’s-eye. The bomb will continue to drift during its fall.
And he is steep. He must release with the pipper just a smidgen short of the target to compensate for that.
“… Ten…nine…eight…”
Coming down with the pipper tracking toward the bull’s-eye, today a painted white spot in the middle of a white circle, he glances at the G-meter. Steady on one. He releases his death grip on the stick so that he can feel the effect of the trim. Coming toward neutral, which means he is getting toward 500 knots true airspeed, 465 indicated. The briefest glance at the airspeed indicator—445 and increasing…
“Seven…”
And since the target is several hundred feet above sea level and he has synchronized the movement of the pipper with the descent, he releases the bomb two hundred feet above six thousand feet with the pipper at a five o’clock position on the bull.
And pulls.
Wings level and throttles forward to the stops, pull until the G-meter needle hits four, then hold it there. He reaches for the master arm switch with his right hand — his arm weighs a ton with all this G on — and toggles it off.
Flap again on the radio: “War Ace Three’s off safe.”
With his nose passing the horizon Jake Grafton relaxes the G and scans the sky for the airplane in front of him. There! And farther around, the skipper. Okay. Nose on up and let her soar, converting that diving airspeed back into altitude.
The spotters on the ground are calling the hits. The skipper’s first one was seventy-five feet at seven o’clock. His wingman gets a called score of a hundred-ten feet at twelve. Jake gets a score of fifty feet at five.
“Overcompensated for the wind,” he mutters to Flap, who has no comment.
Now they are back at 15,000 feet and he pulls the throttles back, steers a little wider as he makes his turn. He glimpses the flashing wings of the plane ahead as it rolls into its dive.
“War Ace Four, your hit seventy-five feet at nine o’clock.”
“Harrison’s holding his own with the colonel,” Jake tells Flap, and chuckles.
He checks the drift of the puffs of smoke from the practice bombs. He eyes the clouds, glances behind to see where Harrison is, checks his fuel, checks the annunciator panel for warning lights, then eyes the target to see where he should go to get to the roll-in.
Master Arm switch on, roll and pull!
“Don’t you just love this shit?” Flap says between altitude calls on their second dive.
“Bull’s-eye,” the target spotter says as Jake soars upward after release, and he reaches over and slaps Flap on the thigh.
“With a spoon, Flapjack!” He slams the stick sideways and the aircraft spins on its longitudinal axis. He stops it after precisely 360 degrees of roll.
“Okay, okay, you’re the best in the west,” Flap says. “Just keep popping them in there.”
* * *
After their sixth dive, it was Flap’s turn. He had the radar and computer ready. This time as Jake rolled he had to point the fixed reticle of the bombsight exactly at the target. Then he squeezed the commit trigger on the stick and began to fly the steering commands on the vertical display indicator, the VDI, in the center of the instrument panel in front of him.
Squeezing the commit trigger told the computer where the target was and told the radar to track it. While Flap monitored the velocities the computer was getting from the inertial, the computer providing steering commands, wind-compensated of course, to guide Jake to the proper release point, which was that point in space where the bomb could be released to fall upon the target.
Jake concentrated upon the steering commands and followed them as precisely as he could. When the computer gave him a pull-up command he laid on the G while concentrating fiercely on keeping the wings level. The computer released the weapon and he kept the nose coming up.
“Seventy-five feet at six o’clock.”
He went around to do it again.
“You know,” he said to Flap, “it’s like they invented a machine to hit a baseball.”
“Just follow steering, Babe Ruth. This gizmo is smarter than you are.”
“Yeah, but I’m an artiste!”
“We ain’t dodging flak today, Jake.”
This was the eternal war — the pilot wanted to drop them all visually and the bombardier wanted to use the system every time. Both men knew the system was better and they both knew Jake would never admit it. Today at this practice target the pilot had ideal conditions: a stationary target with a known elevation, a plowed run-in line, visual cues on the ground, no flak, the luxury of repeated runs that allowed him to properly dope the wind. The system of this A-6E was a first-time, every-time sure thing.
But a machine is hard to love.
* * *
The four A-6s rendezvoused off target and Harrison, the number-four man, slid under the other three checking them for hung bombs. Then Jake checked Harrison. Harrison and number two each had one little blue bomb still hanging on the racks.
The skipper led them up to 20,000 feet and Flap dialed in the ship’s TACAN, a radio navigation aid. The mileage readout refused to lock — they were still too far out — but Flap soon had the ship on radar. One hundred thirty-two miles.
After checking the cockpit altitude — stable at 10,000 feet— Jake took his mask off and hung it on the left side mirror on the canopy rail. He swabbed the sweat off his face.
The planes were in parade formation, only about fifteen feet from the cockpit to the wing tip of the next man. Flying this close to another plane was work, but Jake Grafton enjoyed it. The restless air always affected the planes differently as they sliced through it, so constant adjustments were required from the wingman. The lead just flew his own machine.
If you were the wingman, you kept the wing tip of the lead plane just below and behind the canopy. This look must be maintained with continuous small adjustments of stick and throttles, occasionally rudder. If you did it right, you could hang here no matter what the lead plane was doing — flying straight and level, banking, climbing, diving, executing wing-overs, loops; whatever.
Jake settled in and concentrated. Doing this on a sunny morning in clear, fairly calm air was merely drill. Doing it on a stormy, filthy night with the planes bouncing in turbulence over an angry ocean demanded a high level of skill and confidence. With an emergency and a low reading on the fuel gauge, your ability to hang on someone’s wing became your lifeline.
Barrow was motioning him out. A pushing motion.
“We’re opening it up,” he told Flap, who glanced at Bartow, then gave the identical signal to Harrison, on Jake’s right wing.
When he had opened the gap to about sixty or seventy feet, Jake stabilized and checked Harrison. He looked at the skipper’s wingman, on the skipper’s left wing. Everybody about right. Okay.
Flap had written down all the scores and now he was tallying them, figuring each crew’s CEP — circular error probable. He did this by finding the sixth best hit. Half the bombs would hit within a circle with this radius.
In
the skipper’s cockpit Bartow was looking at his radar. Jake glanced at the mileage readout on the radar repeater between his legs: 126. Then his eyes flicked across the instrument panel. Airspeed 295 indicated, altitude 20,040 feet, warning lights out, hydraulic pressures okay. Fuel — about 7,600 pounds remaining.
He looked straight ahead, saw nothing, then glanced again across that gap toward Bartow.
He had his eyes focused on Bartow when an F-4 Phantom crossed his line of vision. Between him and the skipper. Flashed by going in the opposite direction, and at the same time another Phantom went by the skipper’s left side, between him and his wingman.
They were there only long enough to register on Jake’s brain, then they were gone. The A-6 jolted as it flew into the edges of the wash of the Phantom’s wings.
“What was that?” Flap asking, raising his head and looking around.
Jake grabbed his oxygen mask and snapped it on. “You won’t believe this,” he said on the ICS, “but a Phantom just went between us and the skipper. And another went down the skipper’s left side, between him and Digman.”
“What?”
“Yeah, a flight of Phantoms just went through our flight. I shit you not. The skipper went between the lead and his wingman and one of them went between us and the skipper. We missed by inches.”
Jake stared across the gap that separated him from Bartow. Bartow was looking back at him. Had he seen the F-4s?
“If we had been still in parade formation,” Jake told Flap, “you and me would be tapping on the pearly gates right now.”
Say the fighters were also going 300 indicated — that’s a closing speed of 600 knots indicated, over 800 knots true. Almost a thousand miles per hour!
He had looked straight ahead just a second or two before they got here — and seen nothing.
But they were there, coming head-on, like guided missiles.
And he didn’t see them. Of course the distance was over a half mile two seconds before they arrived, but still…He should have seen something!
He broke into a sweat. His mouth and lips were dry. He tried to swallow.
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