The Intruders jg-6

by Stephen Coonts

  Oh, yes. He was glad.

  Other LSOs were climbing to the platform now, so Jake moved as far back as he could to stay out of the way. All these specialists were here to observe, to see another dozen landings, to polish their skills, to learn. This was normal. The platform was packed with LSOs on every recovery.

  The last airplane to be launched was upon the catapult at full power when the lights of the first plane on the glide slope appeared out of the gloomy darkness astern. In seconds the catapult fired and the deck became unnaturally silent.

  The Real was already three feet out onto the deck holding the radio headset against his ear with his left hand while he held the Fresnel lens control handle in his right over his head, a signal to his colleagues that he was aware the deck was foul. Jake leaned sideways and looked forward around the edge of the canvas screen. The waist catapult crewmen were working furiously to put the protector plate over Cat Three’s shuttle and clear the launching gear from the flight deck. Until they were out of the landing area, the deck would remain foul.

  “Come on, people,” the air boss roared over the flight deck loudspeaker. He seemed to believe that his troops worked best when properly stimulated. In any event, he didn’t hesitate to stimulate them. “We’ve got a Phantom in the groove. Let’s clear the deck.”

  The last flight deck tractor zipped across the foul line near the island, yet three cat crewmen were still struggling with the protector plate.

  Jake lifted one side of his mouse ears away from his head. He heard McCoy roger the ball call.

  The air boss on the loudspeaker again: “He’s called the ball. Let’s get this deck clear now, people!”

  There, the cat crewmen were running for the catwalk. Jake looked aft. The Phantom was within a half mile, about two hundred feet high, coming fast. On his nose-gear door was a stop-light arrangement of little lights, red, yellow and green, that was operated by the angle-of-attack instrument in the cockpit. Red for slow, yellow for on speed, and green for fast. The yellow light was lit, but even as Jake saw it, the red light flickered.

  “You’re going to go slow,” Real told the pilot. “Little power.”

  The red foul deck light went out and the green light came on.

  “Clear deck,” shouted the LSO talker.

  “Clear deck,” McCoy echoed, and lowered his right arm.

  The jet was slamming through the burble caused by the island, his engines winding up, then decelerating. In seconds the Phantom crossed the ramp with its engines wailing, its hook reaching for a wire. Then the hook struck in a shower of sparks and the main gear thumped down. The hook snagged the second wire as the engines wound up to their full fury — a futile roar, because the big fighter was quickly dragged to a quivering halt. The exterior lights went out. The hook runner raced across the foul line with his wands signaling “hook up.” Seconds later the Phantom was taxiing out of the landing area and the wings were folding.

  Meanwhile McCoy was giving the grade to another LSO, who was writing in the log. “Little slow in the middle, OK Two.”

  McCoy glanced at Jake. “Nice pass. Pitching deck and reduced visibility and he handled it real well. I bet I couldn’t do as well on a shitty night like this.”

  Then he was back out into the landing area listening to the radio. In seconds another set of lights came out of the goo. Another Phantom. This guy had more difficulty with the pass than the first fighter, but he too successfully trapped. The third Phantom boltered and McCoy waved off the fourth one. It was going to be a long recovery.

  One of the LSOs handed Jake his radio. He put it to his ear in time to hear the RA-5C Vigilante call the ball.

  The Vigilante was the most beautiful airplane the Navy owned, in Jake’s opinion. It was designed as a supersonic nuclear bomber back when nuclear bombs were big. The weapon was carried in an internal bay and was ejected out a door in the rear of the plane between the tailpipes. The Navy soon discovered this method of delivery didn’t work: the bomb was trapped in the airplane’s slipstream and trailed along behind— sometimes for seconds at a time before it fell free. The weapon’s impact point could not be predicted and there was a serious danger that the bomb would strike the aircraft while it was tagging along behind, damaging the plane and the weapon. So the Vigilantes were converted to reconnaissance aircraft. Fuel tanks were installed in the bomb bays and camera packages on the bellies.

  With highly swept wings and empennage, a needle nose, and two huge engines with afterburners, the plane was extraordinarily fast, capable of ripping through the heavens at an honest Mach 2+. And it was a bitch to get aboard the ship. Jake thought the Vigie pilots were supermen, the best of the best.

  Yet it was the guys in back who had the biggest cojónes, for they rode the beast with no control over their fate. Even worse, they rode in a separate cockpit behind the pilot that had only two tiny windows, one on each side of the fuselage. They could not see forward or aft and their view to either side was highly restricted. A-6 BNs with their seats beside the pilot and excellent view in all quadrants regarded the Vigie backseaters with awe. “It’s like flying in your own coffin,” they whispered to one another, and shuddered.

  Tonight the Vigie pilot was having his troubles. “I got vertigo,” he told McCoy on the platform.

  “Fly the ball and keep it coming,” the LSO said. “Your wings are level, the deck is moving, average out the ball. You’re slightly high drifting left…Watch your lineup!” The Vigilante was a big plane, with a 60-foot wingspan — the foul lines were 115 feet apart.

  “Pick up your left wing, little power…right for lineup.”

  Now the Vigie was crossing the ramp, and the right wing dropped.

  “Level your wings, ” McCoy roared into the radio.

  The Vigilante’s left wing sagged and the nose rose. Jake shot a glance at the PLAT monitor: the RA-5 was way too far right, his right wingtip almost against the foul line.

  His gaze flipped back to the airplane, just in time to hear the engines roar and see the fire leap from the afterburners, two white-hot blowtorches fifteen feet long. The light ripped the night open, casting a garish light on the parked planes, the men standing along the right foul line, and the ship’s superstructure.

  With her hook riding five feet above the wires and her left wing slightly down, the big swept-wing jet crossed the deck and rose back into the night sky. Only then did the fire from the afterburners go out. The rolling thunder continued to wash over the men on the ship’s deck, then it too dissipated.

  An encounter with an angry dragon, Jake thought, slightly awed by the scene he had just witnessed.

  “A nugget on his first cruise,” McCoy told his colleagues, then dictated his comments to the logbook writer.

  The motion of the ship was becoming more pronounced, Jake thought, especially here on the platform. When the deck reached the top of its stroke, he felt slightly light on his feet.

  McCoy noticed the increased deck motion too, and he switched the lens to a four-degree glide slope, up from the normal three and one half. The talker informed the controllers in Air Ops.

  In seconds there was another plane on the ball, this time an A-7 Corsair. “Three One Zero, Corsair ball, Three Point Two.”

  “Roger ball, four-degree glide slope. Pitching deck.”

  This guy was an old pro. McCoy gave him one call, a little too much power, and that was all it took. He snagged a three.

  The next plane was the Phantom that boltered, and this time he was steadier. Yet the steeper glide slope fooled him and he was fast all the way, flattened out at the ramp and boltered again.

  The next plane, an A-7, took more coaching, but he too caught a wire. So did the Phantom that followed him, the one that had waved off originally. The next A-7 had to be waved off, however, because the deck was going down just before he got to the in-close position, while he was working off a high and slightly fast. If he had overdone his power reduction he would have been descending through the glide slope just as the
deck rose to meet him: a situation not conducive to a long life.

  An A-6 successfully trapped, then the Phantom came around for his third pass. Clear sky and the tanker were twenty-one thousand feet above, so the pressure was on. McCoy looked tense as a coiled spring as he stood staring up the glide slope waiting for the F-4’s lights to appear out of the overcast.

  There!

  “One Zero Two, Phantom ball, Four Point Two, trick or treat.” Trick or treat meant that he had to trap on this pass or be sent to tank.

  “Roger ball, four-degree glide slope, it’ll look steep so fly the ball.”

  A dark night, a pitching deck, rain…these were the ingredients of fear, cold, clutching, icy as death. A carrier pilot who denied he ever experienced it was a liar. Tonight, on this pass, this fighter pilot felt the slimy tentacles of fear play across his backbone. As he crossed the ramp he reduced power and raised the nose. The heavy jet instantly increased its rate of descent.

  “No,” screamed McCoy.

  The hook slapped down and the main mounts hit and the number one wire screamed from its sheaves.

  “There’s one lucky mother,” McCoy told the writer and the observing signal officers when the blast of the Phantom’s two engines had died to an idling whine. “Spotted the deck and should have busted his ass, but the deck was falling away. Another military miracle. Who says Jesus ain’t on our side?”

  More A-7s came down the chute. The first one got aboard without difficulty but the second announced he had vertigo.

  “Roger that. Your wings are level and you’re fast. Going high. Steep glide slope, catch it with power. More power.” He was getting close and the red light on his nose gear door winked on. He was slow. “Power. Power! Power!”

  At the third power call the Real McCoy triggered the wave-off lights, but it was too late. Even as the Corsair’s engine wound up, the wheels hit the very end of the flight deck and there was a bright flash. With the engine winding up to full screech the plane roared up the deck, across all the wires, and rotated to climb away. McCoy shouted “Bolter, bolter, bolter,” on the radio.

  Now McCoy handed the radio and Fresnel lens pickle to the nearest LSO. He began running toward the fantail. Jake Grafton followed.

  The dim light made seeing difficult. The deck was really moving here, 550 feet aft of the ship’s center of gravity. The ship was like a giant seesaw. Keeping your knees bent helped absorb the thrusts of the deck.

  McCoy took a flashlight from his hip pocket and played it on the ramp, the sloping end of the flight deck. The ramp dropped away at about a thirty-degree angle, went down ten or twelve feet, then ended. That was the back end of the ship. The flashlight beam stopped three feet right of the centerline stripe, at a deep dent.

  “Hook strike,” Jake shouted.

  “No, that’s where his main mount hit.” Real scanned with the flashlight and stopped at another dent, the twin of the first. “There’s where the other wheel hit. His hook hit below the ramp.” Then McCoy turned and ran for the LSO platform, with Jake following.

  Back on the LSO platform McCoy told the sailor wearing the sound-powered phones, “His hook hit the back end of the ship and disintegrated. He doesn’t have a hook now. Tell Air Ops.”

  Without a hook, the plane could be trapped aboard only with the barricade, a huge nylon net that was rigged across the landing area like a giant badminton net. Or it could be sent to an airfield in Japan.

  Air Ops elected to send the crippled plane to Japan.

  McCoy got back to the business of waving airplanes. He had the Vigilante on the ball, with an A-6 and EA-6B behind him, then the E-2 Hawkeye and KA-6 tanker to follow.

  This time the Vigie pilot drifted right of centerline and corrected back toward the left. He leveled his wings momentarily, so McCoy let him keep coming. Then, passing in close, the left wing dropped. The Vigilante slewed toward the LSOs’ platform as McCoy screamed “Wave-off’ and dived to the right.

  Jake had his eyes on the approaching plane, but McCoy was taking everyone on the platform with him. Jake was almost to the edge when the RA-5 swept overhead in burner, his hook almost close enough to touch. Instinctively Jake ducked.

  That was close! Too close. Now Jake realized that he and McCoy were the only two people still on the platform. He looked down to his right. Two hands reached up out of the darkness and grabbed the edge by Jake’s foot. Everyone else went into the net.

  They clambered back up, one by one. The talker picked up his sound-powered headset where he had dropped it and put it back on.

  McCoy leaned toward the talker. “Tell Air Ops that I recommend he send the Vigie to the beach for fuel and a turnaround. Give that guy some time to calm down.”

  And that is what Air Ops did.

  The last plane was still two miles out when a sailor brought a lump of metal to the platform and gave it to McCoy. “We found this down on the fantail. There’s a lot of metal shards down there but this was the biggest piece. I think it’s a piece of hook point.”

  McCoy examined it by flashlight, then passed it to Jake.

  It was a piece of the A-7’s hook point, all right. About a pound of it. The point must have shattered against the structure of the ship and the remnants rained down on the fantail.

  When the last plane was aboard, Jake followed McCoy down the ladder to the catwalk, then down another flight into the ship.

  “That was exciting,” Jake Grafton told the LSO.

  “You dumb ass. You should have gone into the net.”

  “Well, I didn’t think—”

  “That Vige about got us. No shit.”

  “Hell of a recovery.”

  “That’s no lie. Did you hear about the A-7 that had the ramp strike?”

  “No.”

  “The talker told me. The guy had a total hydraulic failure on the way to the beach and ejected. He’s in the water right now.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The rebound of the hook shank probably severed his hydraulic lines. He’s swimming for it. Just another great Navy night.”

  The pilot of the RA-5C Vigilante who had so much trouble with lineup on this recovery landed in Japan and refueled. He returned to the ship for the last recovery of the evening and flew a fair pass into a three-wire.

  The A-7 pilot with the hydraulic failure wasn’t rescued until ten o’clock the next morning. He spent the night in his life raft, buffeted by heavy seas, overturned four times, though each time he regained the safety of the raft. He swallowed a lot of seawater and did a lot of vomiting. He vomited and retched until blood came up. Still retching when the helicopter deposited him back on the carrier, he had to be sedated and given an IV to rehydrate him. He was also suffering from a serious case of hypothermia. But he was alive, with no bones broken. His shipmates trooped to sick bay in a steady procession to welcome him back to the company of living men.

  13

  The Soviet intelligence ship Reduktor joined the task group during the night and fell in line astern. At dawn she was two miles behind the carrier wallowing heavily. When the sun came up she held her position even though the task group raised its speed to twelve knots. When the sea state eased somewhat the Soviet ship rode steadier.

  Jake came up on deck for the first launch of the day only to find that the AGI was dropping steadily astern. Her captain knew the drill. The carrier had been running steadily downwind, but to launch she would turn into the wind, toward the AGI. So now the Soviet ship was slowing to one or two knots, just enough to maintain steerageway.

  At the brief the air intelligence officers showed the flight crews file photos of this Okean-class intelligence collector. She was a small converted trawler. Had she not been festooned with a dazzling array of radio antennas that rose from her superstructure and masts, one would assume her crew was still looking for fish.

  So there they were. Russians. In Reduktor’s compartments they were busy with their reel-to-reel tape drives — probably all made in Japan — recording ever
y word, peep or chirp on every radio frequency that the U.S. Navy had ever been known to use. Doubtlessly they monitored other frequencies occasionally as well, just in case. These tapes would be examined by experts who would construct from them detailed analyses of how the U.S. Navy operated and what its capabilities were. Encrypted transmissions would be turned over to specialists who would try to break the codes.

  In short, the crew of Reduktor were spies. They were going about their business in a lawful manner, however, in plain sight upon the high seas, so there was nothing anyone in the U.S. Navy could do about it. In fact, the American captains and watch officers had to make sure that their ships didn’t accidentally collide with the Soviet ship.

  There was one other possibility, not very probable, but possible. Reduktor might be a beacon ship marking the position of the American task group for Soviet forces. Just in case, American experts aboard the U.S. ships monitored, recorded and analyzed every transmission that Reduktor made.

  Anticipating the coming of a Soviet AGI, the U.S. task group had already reduced its own radio transmissions as much as possible. During the day the aircrews from Columbia operated “zip-lip,” speaking on the radio only when required. Specialists from the Communications Security Group — COMSEGRU— had visited every ready room to brief the crews.

  This morning Jake Grafton spent a moment watching the old trawler, then went on with his preflight. He would, he suspected, see a lot of that ship in the next few months.

  After four days of operations in the Sea of Japan, Columbia and her escorts called at Sasebo and stayed for a week. Reduktor was waiting when they came out of port.

  The first week of August was spent operating off the southern coast of Korea, then the task group steamed south and spent a week flying in the South China Sea. The Soviet AGI was never far away.