The Intruders jg-6

by Stephen Coonts

  One night a supply ship came alongside. While Jake watched, a frigate joined on the starboard side of the supply ship, which began transferring fuel through hoses and supplies by high-line to both ships at once. Now both the frigate and carrier had to hold formation on the supply ship. To speed the process a CH-46 helicopter belonging to the supply ship lifted pallets of supplies from the stern of the supply ship and deposited them on the carrier’s flight deck, a VERTREP, or vertical replenishment.

  Here in the darkness on the western edge of the world’s greatest ocean American power was being nakedly exercised. The extraordinary produce of the world’s most advanced economy was being passed to warships in stupendous quantity: fuel, oil, grease, bombs, bullets, missiles, toilet paper, movies, spare parts, test equipment, paper, medical supplies, canned soft drinks, candy, meat, vegetables, milk, flour, ketchup, sugar, coffee — the list went on and on. The supply ship had a trainload to deliver.

  The social organization and hardware necessary to produce, acquire and transport this stupendous quantity of wealth to these powerful warships in the middle of nowhere could be matched by no other nation on earth. The ability to keep fleets supplied anywhere on the earth’s oceans was the key ingredient in American sea power, power that could be projected to anyplace on the planet within a thousand miles of saltwater. For good or ill, these ships made Washington the most important city in the world; these ships made the U.S. Congress the most important forum on earth and the President of the United States the most powerful, influential person alive; these ships enforced a global Pax Americana.

  The whole thing was quite extraordinary when one thought about it, and Jake Grafton, attack pilot, history major and farmer’s son, did think about it. He stood under an A-6’s tail on the flight deck catwalk wearing his leather jacket with the collar turned up against the wind and chill, and marveled.

  * * *

  “I hear you’re going to get out,” the Real McCoy said one evening in the stateroom.

  “Yeah. At the end of the cruise.” Jake was in the top bunk reading his NATOPS manual.

  McCoy had the stock listing pages of the Wall Street Journal spread across the floor, his cruise box, bunk and desk. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his notebook full of charts on his lap. He had fallen into the habit of annotating his charts each evening after the ship received a mail delivery. He leaned back against his locker, stretched out his legs, and sighed.

  “I’ve thought about it,” he said. “Getting exiled to the Marines got the wheels spinning. Being ten days behind the markets makes them spin faster. But no.” He shrugged. “Maybe one of these days, but not now.”

  Jake put down his book. “What’s keeping you in? I thought you really liked that investment stuff?”

  “Yeah, makes a terrific hobby. I think my problem is I’m a compulsive gambler. Stocks are the best game around — the house percentage is next to nothing — just a brokerage fee when you trade. Yet it’s just money. On the other hand, you take flying — that’s the ultimate gamble: your life is the wager. And waving — every pass is a new game, a new challenge. All you have is your wits and skill and the stakes are human lives. There’s nothing like that in civilian life — except maybe trauma medicine. If I got out I’d miss the flying and the waving too much.”

  Jake was slightly stunned. He had never before heard flying described as a gamble, a game, like Russian roulette. Oh, he knew the risks, and he did everything in his power to minimize them, yet here was a man for whom the risks were what made it worth doing.

  “If I were you,” Jake told the Real, “I wouldn’t make that crack about waving down in the ready rooms.”

  “Oh, I don’t. A lot of these guys are too uptight.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They think the LSO is always gonna save them. And that’s what we want them to think, so they’ll always do what we tell them, when we tell them. If they get the notion in their hard little heads that we might be wrong, they’ll start second-guessing the calls. Can’t have that now, can we?”

  “Ummm.”

  “But LSOs are human too. Knowing that you can make a mistake, that’s what keeps you giving it everything you’ve got, all the time, every time.”

  “What if you screw up, like the CAG LSO did with me? Only somebody dies. How are you going to handle that?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the bad thing about it. You do it for the challenge and you know that sooner or later the ax will fall and you’re going to have to live with it. That’s why flying is easier. If you screw up in the cockpit, you’re just dead. There’s a lot to be said for betting your own ass and not someone else’s.”

  “Aren’t many things left anymore that don’t affect someone else,” Jake muttered.

  “I suppose,” said the Real McCoy, and went back to annotating his stock charts.

  * * *

  Columbia and her retinue of escorts entered the Sea of Japan one morning in late July through the Tsugaru Strait between the islands of Hokkaido and Honshu. Transiting the strait, the five-minute alert fighters were parked just short of the catapults with their crews strapped into the cockpits, but a mob of sailors stood and sat around the edge of the flight deck wherever there was room between the planes. Some were off-duty, others had received their supervisors’ permission to go topside for a squint, many worked on the flight deck.

  Land was visible to the north and south, blue, misty, exotic and mysterious to these young men from the cities, suburbs, small towns and farms of America. That was Japan out there— geisha girls, kimonos, rice and raw fish, strange temples and odd music and soft, lilting voices saying utterly incomprehensible things. And they were here looking at it!

  Several large ferries passed within waving distance, and the Japanese aboard received the full treatment — hats and arms and a few shirts. Fishing vessels and small coasters rolling in the swells were similarly saluted as the gray warships passed at fifteen knots.

  This was the first cruise beyond America’s offshore waters for many of these young men. More than a few sniffed the wet sea wind and thought they could detect a spicy, foreign flavor that they had never whiffed before in the nitrogen-oxygen mixture they had spent their lives inhaling back in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Even the homesick and lovelorn admitted this was one hell of a fine adventure. If the folks at home could only see this…

  So steaming one behind the other, the gray ships transited the strait while the young men on deck soaked up impressions that would remain with them for as long as they lived.

  Those men standing on the carrier’s fantail saw something else: two thousand yards astern the thin sail of a nuclear-powered attack submarine made a modest bow wave. How long she had been there, running on the surface, no one on the flight deck was sure, but there she was. Those with binoculars could just make out a small American flag fluttering from the periscope.

  Once through the strait, the ship went to flight quarters and the tourists cleared the flight deck. Except for the few pilots who had launched in the interception of the Russian Bears, most of the aviators had not flown for nine days. This layoff meant that they needed a day catapult shot and trap before they could legally fly at night. With this requirement in mind, the staff had laid on a series of surface surveillance missions in the Sea of Japan. These missions would also show the flag, would once again put carrier-borne warplanes over the merchantmen and warships that plied these waters just in case anyone had become bored listening to American ambassadors. By the time the carrier hurled her first planes down the catapults, the submarine had quietly slipped back into the depths.

  Jake was not scheduled to fly today. He was, however, on the flight schedule — two watches in Pri-Fly and one after dark in the carrier air traffic control center, CATCC, pronounced cat-see. During these watches he was the squadron representative, to be called upon by the powers that be to offer expert advice on the A-6 should such advice become necessary. There was an A-6 NATOPS manual in each compartment for
him to refer to, and before each watch he found it and checked it to make sure it was all there. Then he stood with observers from the other squadrons with the book in his hand, watching and listening.

  In addition to ensuring the air boss and Air Ops officer had instant access to knowledgeable people, these watches were a learning experience for the observers. Here they could observe how the aircraft were controlled, why problems arose, and watch those problems being solved. In CATCC they could also watch the air wing commander, known as CAG, and their own skippers as they sat beside’ the Air Ops officer on his throne and answered queries and offered advice. Air Ops often conferred with the skipper of the ship via squawk box. Every facet of night carrier operations was closely scrutinized and heavily supervised. While the junior officer aloft in the night sweated in his cockpit, he was certainly not alone. Not as long as his radio worked.

  During the day the seas became rougher and the velocity of the wind increased. By sunset the overcast was low and getting lower. Below the clouds visibility was decreasing. A warm front was coming into the area.

  Jake watched the first night recovery on the ready room PLAT monitor as he did paperwork. The deck was moving and there were three bolters. The second night recovery Jake spent in CATCC with the NATOPS book in his hand. It was raining outside. Two pilots were waved off and four boltered, one of them twice. One of the tankers was sour and a flailex developed when the spare tanker slid on the wet catapult track during hook-up and had to be pushed back with a flight deck tractor. While this mess kept the deck foul, the LSOs waved off three planes into the already-full bolter pattern.

  When the last plane was aboard — the recovery took thirty-eight minutes — Jake headed for his stateroom to work on a training report.

  He was still at it half an hour later when the Real McCoy came in, threw his flight deck helmet and LSO logbook onto his desk and flopped into his bunk. “Aye yei yei! What a night! They’re using those sticks to kill rats in the cockpits and the weather is getting worse.”

  “You were on the platform?” Jake meant the LSO’s platform on the edge of the flight deck.

  “Yep. I’m wavin’ ’em. Another great Navy night, I can tell you. A real Chinese fire drill. Three miles visibility under a thousand-foot overcast, solid clag up to twenty-one grand, ten-foot swells — why didn’t I have the sense to join the Air Farce? The boys in blue would have closed up shop and gone to the club three hours ago.”

  “The next war,” Jake muttered.

  “Next war, Air Force,” McCoy agreed. “So, wanna stand on the platform with me for the next act?”

  Jake regarded his half-finished report with disgust, got out of his chair and stretched. “Why not? I’ve listened to you wavers preach and moan for so long that I could probably do it myself.”

  McCoy snorted. “That’ll be the day!”

  Jake did a clumsy tap dance for several seconds, then struck a pose. “He looked good going by me.”

  McCoy groaned and closed his eyes. He was a self-proclaimed master of the short catnap, so Jake timed it. Sixty-five seconds after the LSO closed his eyes he was snoring gently.

  * * *

  They came out of the skin of the ship by climbing a short ladder to the catwalk that surrounded the flight deck, yet was about four feet below flight deck level.

  The noise of twenty jet engines at idle on the flight deck was piercing, even through their ear protectors. Raindrops swirling in the strong wind displaced by the ship’s structure came from every direction, seemingly almost at once, even up through the gridwork at their feet. The wind blew with strength, an ominous presence, coming from total darkness, blackness so complete that for a second or two Jake felt as if he had lost his vision. This dark universe of wind and water was permeated by the acrid stench of jet exhaust, which burned his nose and made his eyes water.

  Gradually his eyes became accustomed to the red glow of the flight deck lights and he could see things — the outline of the catwalk, the rails, the round swelling shapes of the life raft canisters suspended outboard of the catwalk railing, and in the midst of that void beyond the rail, several fixed lights. The escorts. Above his head were tails of airplanes. He and McCoy crouched low as they proceeded aft toward the LSO platform to avoid those invisible rivers of hot exhaust that might be flowing just above their heads. Might be. The only sure way to find one was to walk into it.

  Somewhere aloft in the night sky, high above the ship, were airplanes. With men in them. Men sitting strapped to ejection seats, studying dials and gauges, riding the turbulence, watching fuel gauges march mercilessly toward zero.

  Jake and the Real McCoy climbed a ladder to the LSOs’ platform as the first of the planes on deck rode a catapult into the night sky. Both men watched the plane’s lights as it climbed straight ahead of the ship. There — they were getting fuzzy…And then they were gone, swallowed up by the night.

  “Six or seven hundred feet, a couple of miles viz. That’s it,” McCoy roared into Jake’s ear.

  The petty officer who assisted the LSOs was already on the platform getting out the radio handsets, plugging in cords, checking the PLAT monitor, donning his sound-powered headset and checking in with the enlisted talkers in Pri-Fly and Air Ops.

  * * *

  The platform was not large, maybe six feet by six feet, a wooden grid that jutted from the port side of the flight deck. To protect the signal officers from wind and jet blast, a piece of black canvas stretched on a steel frame was rigged on the forward edge of the platform, like a wall. So the platform was an open stage facing aft, toward the glide slope.

  Under the edges of the platform, aft and on the seaward side, hung a safety net to catch anyone who inadvertently fell off the platform. Or jumped. Because if a pilot lost it on the glide slope in close and veered toward the platform, going into the net was the only way for the LSOs to save their lives.

  Jake Grafton glanced down into the blackness. And saw nothing. “Relax, shipmate,” McCoy told him. “The net’s there. Honest Injun.”

  The platform was just aft of the first wire, about four hundred feet away from the ship’s center of gravity, so it was moving. Up and down, up and down.

  As McCoy checked the lights on the Fresnel lens, which was several hundred feet forward of the platform, Jake watched. McCoy triggered the wave-off lights, the cut lights, adjusted the intensity of the lens. The lights seemed to behave appropriately and soon he was satisfied.

  The Fresnel lens was, in Jake’s mind, one of the engineering triumphs that made carrier aviation in the jet age possible. In the earliest days, aboard the old Langley, pilots made approaches to the deck without help. One windy day one of the senior officers grabbed a couple signal flags and rushed to the fantail to signal to a young aviator who was having trouble with his approach. This innovation was so successful that an officer was soon stationed there to assist all the aviators with signal flags, or paddles. This officer helped the pilot with glide slope and lineup, and since the carriers all had straight decks, gave the vital engine “cut” signal that required the aviator to pull his throttle to idle and flare.

  When angled decks and jets with higher landing speeds came along, it became obvious that a new system was required. As usual, the British were the innovators. They rigged a mirror on one side of the deck and directed a high-intensity light at it. The light was reflected up the glide slope. By rigging a set of reference lights midway up on each side of the mirror, a datum was established. A pilot making his approach would see the light reflected on the mirror — the ball — rise above the datum lights when he was above glide slope, or high, and descend below it when he was low. The landing signal officer was retained to assist the pilot with radio calls, and to give mandatory wave-offs if an approach became unsafe.

  The Fresnel lens was the mirror idea carried one step further. The light source was now contained within five boxes, stacked one on top of the other. The datum lights were beside the middle, or third, box. Due to the way the lens on each
light was designed, a horizontally wide but vertically narrow beam of light was directed up the glide slope by each box. Crossing the fantail, the beam from the middle box, the “centered ball,” was a mere eighteen inches in height.

  This was the challenge: a pilot must fly his jet airplane through turbulent air into an eighteen-inch-thick window in the sky. At night, with the deck moving as the ship rode a seaway, hitting this window became extraordinarily difficult, without argument the most difficult challenge in aviation. That anyone other than highly skilled, experienced test pilots could do it on a regular basis was a tribute to the training the Navy gave its aviators, and was the reason those who didn’t measure up were ruthlessly weeded out.

  You could do it or you couldn’t — there was no in between. And yet, no one could do it consistently every time. The task was too difficult, the skills involved too perishable. So night after night, in fair weather and foul, they practiced, like they were doing on this miserable night in the Sea of Japan, eighty miles west of Honshu.

  As Jake Grafton stood on the platform staring into the darkness as the wind swirled rain over him, he was glad that tonight was not his night. It felt so good to be here, not up there sweating bullets as the plane bounced around, trying to keep the needles steady, watching the fuel, knowing that you were going to have to fly that instrument approach to the ball, then thread the needle to get safely back aboard. To return to the world of the living, to friends, to food, to letters from loved ones, to a bunk to sleep in, to a world with a past and a future. There in that cockpit when you were flying the ball there was only the present, only the airplane, only the stick in your right hand and the throttles in your left and the rudder beneath your feet. There was only the now, this moment for which you had lived your whole life, this instant during which you called upon everything within you to do this thing.