The Intruders jg-6

by Stephen Coonts

  Perhaps four seconds had passed, not more.

  The white was fading. He reached for his oxygen mask with both hands and unfastened the right side.

  What the plane was doing he had no way of knowing, although he knew whatever it was, it wasn’t good. But he couldn’t fly blind. His seat-of-the-pants instincts were worthless. Oh, he knew that, had had it drummed into him and had experienced it on so many night carrier landings that he wasn’t even tempted to try to level the wings.

  The white was fading into darkness. He blinked furiously, then remembered his L-shaped flashlight, hanging by a hook on the front of his survival vest. He found it and pushed the switch on.

  In the growing darkness he saw the spot the beam made on the instrument panel. Another few seconds…

  But there was already a spot of light on the needle-ball turn indicator! Flap! He must have had his head in the scope when the lightning hit.

  He could see. The VDI was blank. The standby gyro showed a thirty-degree left turn. Ten degrees nose-down.

  Cross-check with the turn indicator!

  Turn needle pegged left. He rolled right to center it, overdid it and came back left some. The standby gyro responded.

  The altimeter! Going down.

  Back stick. Stop the needle. Gently now. Coming down on eleven hundred feet. Stop it there, center that turn needle. Standby gyro disagrees by five degrees. Ignore it!

  Flap was shouting and he caught the muffled words: “Reese is still with us. He has his lights on. I think he wants to take the lead.”

  Jake could see now. His vision was back to normal. How many seconds had it been?

  He risked a glance in the rearview mirror. There was Reese, with his exterior lights on, bobbing like a cork on Jake’s right wing. Reese must be the world’s finest formation pilot, to hang on through that gyration.

  Should he chance it? Should he pull the power and try to ease back onto Reese’s wing without a radio call or signal?

  Even as the thought shot through his mind, he was retarding the throttles. Reese’s plane began to move forward.

  Okay! Flap was flipping his flashlight at Reese in the EA-6B’s cockpit.

  Pee Wee knows. He wants me to fly on him. It’s our only chance if the TACAN and radar are screwed up. We’ll never find the ship on our own.

  Now Reese was abeam him, the two planes flying wing tip to wing tip and bouncing out of sync in the turbulence.

  Be smooth, Jake. Don’t lose him. Don’t let him slip away into this black shit or you’ll be swimming for it.

  He stabilized in parade position on Reese’s left side, so that he was looking straight up the leading edge of the swept wing into the cockpit. Reese was just a dark shape limned by red light, the glow from his instrument panel.

  No comforting red glow in this cockpit. This place was dark as a tomb.

  The bouncing was getting worse. He had to cross under, get on Reese’s right side so he wouldn’t be looking across the cockpit at the other plane.

  He tucked the nose down gently and pulled a smidgen of power. Now power back on and a little right bank while he wrestled the stick in the chop.

  Right under the tail, crossing, surfacing on Pee Wee’s right wing. Okay. Now hang here.

  Another flash of lightning. He flinched.

  Flap was shouting something. He concentrated, trying to make sense of the words. “… must’ve zapped us with a zillion volts. Every circuit breaker we got is popped. I’m going to try to reset some, so if you smell smoke, let me know.”

  “Okay,” he shouted, and found reassurance in the sound of his own voice.

  All he had to do was hang on to Reese. Hang on and hang on and hang on, and someday, sometime, Reese would drop him onto the ball. The ball would be out there in the rain and black goo, and the drop lights, and the centerline lights, and the wires, strung across that pitching, heaving deck.

  All he had to do was hang on…

  * * *

  As Flap pushed in circuit breakers and the cockpit lights glowed, then went out, then glowed again, the planes flew into and out of deluges. The torrents of rain were worse than they had been coming in. Several times the rain coursing over the canopy caused Reese’s plane to fade until just the exterior lights could be seen.

  Jake concentrated fiercely upon those lights. Each time the rain would eventually slacken and the fuselage of the EA-6B would reappear, a ghostly gray presence in the blacker gloom.

  Finally the clouds dissipated and a blacker night spread out before them. Far above tiny, cold stars shown steadily. They were on top, above the clouds. Behind them lightning strobed almost continually.

  Jake eased away from Reese and put his mask to his face. The oxygen was flowing, cool and rubbery tasting. He lowered it again, then swabbed the sweat from his eyes and face with the fingers of his left hand.

  When he had his mask fixed back in place he glanced at the instruments. The instrument lights were on — well, some of them. It was still dark on Flap’s side. The VDI was still blank, but the standby gyro was working. The TACAN needle swung lazily, steadily, around and around the dial.

  He pushed the button to check the warning lights on the annunciator panel. The panel stayed dark. Both generators were probably fried. Maybe the battery. He recycled each of the generator switches, but nothing happened. Finally he just turned them off.

  Fuel — he checked the gauge. Nine thousand pounds. He pushed the buttons on the fuel panel to check the quantity in each tank. The needle and totalizer never moved. They were frozen.

  Flap was still examining the circuit breaker panel with his flashlight.

  “Hey, shipmate, you there?” Flap — on the ICS.

  “Yeah.”

  “A whole bunch of these CBs won’t stay in.”

  “Forget it.”

  “We’re gonna need—”

  “We’ll worry about it later.”

  Later. Let’s sit up here in the night above the storms and savor this moment. Savor life. For we are alive. Still alive. Let’s sit silently and look at the stars and Reese’s beautiful Prowler and breathe deeply and listen to our hearts beating.

  19

  The radome on the nose of the aircraft had a hole in it. Jake and Flap examined it with their flashlights. It was about the size of a quarter and had black edges where the Plexiglas or whatever it was had melted. They had shut down on Elevator Two so the plane could be dropped below to the hangar deck.

  Now they stood looking at the hole in the radome as the sea wind dried the sweat from their faces and hair and the overcast began to lighten toward the east.

  Dawn was coming. Another day at sea.

  The hole was there and that was that.

  “Grafton, you’re jinxed,” Flap Le Beau said.

  “What do you mean?” Jake asked, suddenly defensive.

  “Man, things happen to you.”

  “I was doing fine until I started flying with you,” Jake shot back, then instantly regretted it.

  Flap didn’t reply. Both men turned off their flashlights and headed for the island.

  Lieutenant Colonel Haldane had rendezvoused with Pee Wee Reese and Jake had transferred over to his wing. An approach with a similar aircraft was easier to fly. Fortunately the weather had cleared somewhat around the ship, so when the two A-6s came out of the overcast with their gear, flaps and hooks down they were still a thousand feet above the water. There wasn’t much rain. The ship’s lights were clear and bright.

  Jake boltered his first pass and made a climbing left turn off the angle. He and Flap had been unable to get the radio working again, so he flew a close downwind leg and turned into the groove as if he were flying a day pass. He snagged a one-wire.

  The debrief took two hours. After telling the duty officer to take him off the schedule for the rest of the day, Jake went to breakfast, then back to his bunk. The Real McCoy woke him in time for dinner.

  Jake and Flap didn’t fly again for four days. The skipper must have told the
schedules officer to give them some time off, but Jake didn’t ask. He did paperwork, visited the maintenance office to hear about the electrical woes of 502, did more paperwork, ate, slept, and watched three movies.

  The maintenance troops found another lightning hole in the tail of 502. Jake went to the hangar deck for a look.

  “Apparently the bolt went in the front and went clear through the plane, then out the tail,” the sergeant said. “Or maybe it went in the tail and out the front.”

  “Uh-huh.” The hole in the tail was also about quarter size, up high above the rudder.

  “Was the noise loud?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Thought it must be like sitting beside a howitzer when it went off.”

  “Just a metallic noise,” Jake said, trying to remember. Funny, but he didn’t remember a real loud noise.

  “You guys were sure lucky.”

  “Like hell,” Jake told him. He was thoroughly sick of these philosophical discussions. “Pee Wee Reese was on my wing and the lightning didn’t hit him. It hit me. He didn’t get a volt. He had the luck.”

  “You were lucky you didn’t blow up,” the sergeant insisted. “I’ve heard of planes hit by lightning that just blew up. You were lucky.”

  “Planes full of avgas, maybe, but not jet fuel.”

  The sergeant wasn’t taking no for an answer. “Jets too,” he said.

  Thanksgiving came and went, then another page was ripped off the ready room calendar and it was December.

  Jake had that feeling again that his life was out of control. “You just got to go with the flow,” the Real McCoy said when Jake tried to talk to him about it.

  “It’s a reaction to the lightning strike,” Flap said when Jake mentioned it to him. Jake didn’t bother telling him he had had it off and on for years.

  Yet gradually the feeling faded and he felt better. Once again he laughed in the ready room and tried to remember jokes. But he refused to think about the future. I’m going to take life one day at a time, he decided. If a guy does that there will never be a future to worry about. Just the present. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

  * * *

  “What does it feel like to die?” Flap Le Beau asked.

  He and Jake were motoring along at 350 knots at five thousand feet just under a layer of cumulus puffballs. Beneath them the empty blue sea spread away to the horizon in every direction. This afternoon they were flying another surface surveillance mission, this time a wedge-shaped pattern to the east of the task group. They were still on the outbound leg. They had not seen a single ship, visually or on radar. The ocean was empty.

  All those ships crossing the Indian Ocean, hundreds of them at any one time, yet the ocean was so big…

  “Did you ever think about it?” Flap prompted.

  “I passed out once,” Jake replied. “Fainted. When I was about fourteen. Nurse was taking blood, jabbing me over and over again trying to get the needle into a vein. One second I was there, then I was waking up on the floor after some nightmare, which I forgot fifteen seconds after I woke up. Dying is like that, I suspect. Not the nightmare part. Just like someone turned out the light.”

  “Maybe,” Flap said.

  “Like going to sleep,” Jake offered.

  “Ummm…”

  “What got you thinking about that, anyway?”

  “Oh, you know…”

  The conversation dribbled out there. Flap idly checked the radar, as usual saw nothing, then rearranged his fanny in his seat. Grafton yawned and rubbed his face.

  The radio squawked to life. The words were partially garbled: the aircraft was a long way from the ship — over two hundred miles — and low.

  “This is War Ace Five Oh Eight,” Flap said into his mask. “Say again.”

  “Five Oh Eight, this is Black Eagle. We’ll relay. The ship wants you to investigate an SOS signal. Stand by for the coordinates.”

  Flap glanced at Jake, shrugged, then got a ballpoint pen from the left-shoulder pocket of his flight suit and inspected the point. He scribbled on the corner of his top kneeboard card to make sure the pen worked, then said, “War Ace is ready to copy.”

  When he had read back the coordinates to the controller in the E-2 Hawkeye to ensure he had copied them correctly, Flap tapped them into the computer and cycled it. “Uh-oh,” he muttered to Jake. “It’s over four hundred miles from here.”

  “Better talk to the controller.”

  Flap clicked his oxygen mask into place. “Black Eagle, Five Oh Eight. That ship looks to be four hundred twenty-nine miles from our present position, which is”—he pushed another button on the computer—“two hundred forty-two miles from the ship. We don’t have the gas and we can’t make the recovery.”

  Grafton was punching the buttons, checking the wing fuel. They launched with a total of 18,000 pounds, and now had 11,200.

  “Roger, War Ace. They know that. We’re talking to them on another frequency. They want you to go look anyway. They only got about fifteen seconds of an SOS broadcast, which had the lat-long position as a part of it. The ship thinks you can get there, give it a quick look-over, then rendezvous with a tanker on the inbound leg on this frequency.”

  Already Jake had swung the plane fifteen degrees to the right to follow the computer’s steering command to the ship in distress. Now he added power and began to climb.

  “Set up a no-rad rendezvous, just in case,” Jake told Flap.

  He wanted to know where to find the tanker even if the radio failed. The only way to fix positions in this world of sea and sky was electronically, in bearings and distances away from ships that were radiating electronic signals that the plane’s nav aids could receive. Unfortunately the A-6’s radar could not detect other airplanes. And the tanker had no radar at all. Of course, Flap could find the carrier on radar if he were within 150 miles of it and the radar worked, and they could use the distance and bearing to locate themselves in relation to the tanker. If the radar kept working.

  There were a lot of ifs.

  The ifs made your stomach feel hollow.

  Seventeen days had passed since their night adventure in the thunderstorm and here they were again, letting it all hang out.

  Jake Grafton swore softly under his breath. It just isn’t fair! And the ship in distress might not even be there. A fifteen-second SOS with the position. Sounded like an electronic program, one that could have easily broadcast the wrong position information. The ship could be hundreds of miles from the position they were winging their way to, and they would never find it.

  The emergency broadcast might have been an error — a radioman on some civilian freighter might have inadvertently flipped the wrong switch. There might not be any emergency at all.

  No doubt the bigwigs on the carrier had considered all that. Then, safe and comfortable, they had sent Jake and Flap to take a look. And to take the risks.

  Finding the tanker would be critical. Jake eyed the fuel gauge without optimism. He would go high, to forty thousand feet, stay there until he could make an idle descent to the ship in distress, make a quick pass while Flap snapped photographs, then climb back to forty thousand headed toward the carrier. The tanker would be at 150 miles, on the Zero Nine Five radial, at forty grand. If it were not sweet, or this plane couldn’t take fuel, they wouldn’t be able to make it to the ship. They would have to eject.

  At least it was daytime. Good weather. No night sweats. No need to do that needle-ball shit by flashlight. That was something.

  Now Jake turned in his seat to look behind him at the sun. He looked at his watch. There should be at least a half hour of daylight left when they reached the SOS ship, but the sun would be down by the time they got to the tanker. Still, there would probably be some light left in the sky. Perhaps it would be better if the sky were completely dark, then they could spot the tanker’s flashing anticollision light from a long distance away. But it would not be dark. A high twilight, that was the card the gods of fate had dealt
.

  One of these fine Navy days we’re gonna use up all our luck. Then we two fools are gonna be sucking the big one. That’s what everyone is trying to tell us.

  “We won’t descend unless you have a target on the radar,” Jake told Flap.

  “Uh-huh.”

  That was a good decision. No use squandering all that fuel descending to sea level unless there was a ship down there to look at. And if there was a ship, it would show on radar.

  What if the ship had gone under and the crew was in lifeboats? Lifeboats wouldn’t show on radar, not from a long distance.

  “How far can you see a lifeboat on that thing?” he asked Flap, who had his head pressed against the scope hood.

  “I dunno. Never looked for one.”

  “Guess.”

  “You were right the first time. We don’t go down unless we see something.”

  He leveled at forty thousand feet and retarded the throttles. Twenty-two hundred pounds per hour of fuel to each engine would give him.72 Mach. Only they had used four thousand pounds climbing up here. Seven thousand eight hundred pounds of fuel remaining. It’s going to be tight. He retarded the throttles still farther, until he had only eighteen hundred pounds of fuel flowing to each engine. The airspeed indicator finally settled around 220 knots, which would work out to about 460 knots true.

  Flap unfolded a chart and studied it. Finally he said, “That position is in the channel between the islands off the southern coast of Sumatra.”

  “At least it isn’t on top of a mountain.”

  “True.”

  “Wonder if the brain trust aboard the boat plotted the position before they sent us on this goose chase.”

  “I dunno. Those Navy guys…You never can tell.”

  After much effort, Flap got the chart folded the way he wanted it. He wedged it between the panel and the Plexiglas so he could easily refer to it, then settled his head against the scope hood. After a bit he muttered, “I see some islands.”

  Land. Jake hadn’t seen land in over a month, not since the ship exited the Malay Strait. Columbia was scheduled to spend three more weeks in the Indian Ocean, then head for Australia.