Fplsom suddenly dropped his arms and the red wands in his hands went out. He squatted down and reached into a bag at his feet, pulled out two new wands, turned them on, revealing dim green lights, stood up, and again extended his arms. On the flight deck, the helicopter’s fuselage rotating red beacon came on and the pitch of the blades began to change.
Folsom, looking down over the railing, pointed the wands at the aircrewmen and made a sweeping motion by swinging his arms back and forth across each other. The aircrewmen, watching for the signal, unsnapped the chains and kicked the chocks away from the wheels. They scampered out from under the blades, keeping low, their arms full of tie-down chains, paused for an instant to show the chains to the pilots, ‘and then ducked under the partially closed hangar door in front of the helo. Folsom confirmed that they were clear, straightened his arms out again, and slowly lifted them up to a V. In response, the big white helicopter lifted off the deck and hovered momentarily about ten feet over the deck, close enough that through the windshield Brian could see the pilot’s legs working the controls.
Then the helo dipped to port and swooped across the port-side lifelines and buzzed away into the darkness, leaving behind a sudden silence and the stink of burned kerosene.
Brian took his fingers out of his ears. Folsom and the chief saw him at about the same moment and Folsom pulled the cranial off his head. Brian realized he could see perfectly well now that his eyes were night-adapted, aided by the red flight-deck spotlights. A small crowd of dark figures had appeared on the flight deck below. The fire crews remained onstation, relaxing into dark lumps amidst their firefighting gear.
“Sight-seein’, boss?” asked the chief.
“Yeah, Boats. One ME woke me up, so I thought I’d come watch. What happens next?”
Folsom answered, “Well, the controller in Combat will run Big Mother down the bearing of the guy in trouble and try to position the helo in the area where they punch out.”
“I heard the guy was on fire when I stopped through Combat,” Brian said.
Folsom was about to reply when there was a chorus of shouts from the flight deck below. Brian looked down and saw several arms pointing into the black sky to the west. Brian lifted his head in time to see a flickering glow up in the overcast that progressed in color from dark red through orange, its deadly significance emphasized by the absence of any sound other than that of the wind created by the ship’s own motion across the sea. The glowing cloud dimmed for an instant and then changed from orange to bright yellow before being extinguished in a flash of light that looked like heat lightning, followed moments later by a muffled thump.
“He ain’t flyin’ no more,” observed the chief.
“I just hope they had time to punch out,” said Folsom. He shook his head as if to acknowledge the low probability of the aircrew having had time to eject.
“Shit,” Brian said.
Folsom was staring down at the deck. He shook his head again. “Well,” he said, “we’ll be up here a while.
They’ll keep that helo out looking until they’re bingo fuel. Sometimes one of ‘em gets out. I’ve heard some real survival stories up here in the Gulf.”
“Bingo—meaning?”
“Bingo state means you have enough fuel to get back to the bird farm and land. When a guy’s bingo, he’s gotta beat feet for home plate.”
“I guess I’d better go get some coffee,” said Brian, glancing at his wristwatch.
“It’s almost time for my next watch.”
“Catch you on the phones, Mr. Holcomb.”
Brian made his way down to the wardroom to get a cup of soup and half a cheese sandwich, standard fare for midnight rations, or midrats, as it was called. The midnight-to-four watch was supposed to be relieved by 2345, which meant that the oncoming watch stander usually got up at 2300, held reveille on his face, stumbled down to the mess decks or the wardroom for something to eat and a cup of coffee, and then went to his watch station.
Enlisted turnovers took about a minute; for the evaluator in Combat, the process could take as long as an hour, depending upon what was going on.
Brian returned to Combat by 2330, and Austin spent the next twenty minutes handing over the watch as he reviewed what tracks were up over the Gulf, what enemy indications were active, what the carrier-flight cycles for the night entailed, the plan of the day for the next day, and the captain’s night orders. Since there were no strikes planned for the next twenty-four hours, the turnover was routine. Garuda Barry conducted the same turnover with Fox Hudson. The final part of the brief concerned the helo search for survivors from the Air Force reconnaissance F-4.
“Big Mother Five-three is out there in the area of the probable splash point,” said Austin, pointing down to the SWIC’s screen. “Although they reported seeing nothing of any size come down. There’s been no beeper, and nothing on the Guard frequency to indicate a survivor.
But they’ll conduct a directed search for another two hours or so, then they’ll have to come in.”
“I saw the fireball, or rather, its reflection.”
“Yes, well. Sometimes they get lucky. But usually what we find is some burned insulation, an oil slick, and a helmet filled with brains the next day. The helmets float, you see.”
“Wonderful.”
“Yes. You’ve heard the old saying, The aviators don’t earn any more money than the rest of the Navy with all that flight pay; they just earn it sooner. Any questions?”
“Who’s directing the search?”
“We’ve got one of the AICs directing; he’s using the surface console over there.”
“Will we launch the Clementine helo?”
“No. We would if we had had indications of an ejection or survivors—a beeper, flares, a call on Guard— something besides a fireball. For a long search, the SH Three is the bird of choice—they can set it down in the water if they have to, and they carry a bigger crew. And if they picked someone up while we had the Clem bird rolled out on deck, we’d have a clobbered deck until we could launch Clem. Sometimes getting a guy back to the ship quickly makes a big difference. So, no—Clem stays in the barn.”
“Got it.”
“This is Mr. Austin. Mr. Holcomb is the evaluator in Combat,” Austin announced.
“This is Mr. Holcomb, I have the evaluator watch,” announced Brian.
There was a chorus of
“Aye, aye, sir,” and, at a few minutes before midnight, Austin and Fox Hudson left Combat. They would be back at 0630 to resume the watch. Garuda fired up his first cigarette of the midwatch and reached for the large brown jar of aspirin tablets kept in a rack above the SWIC console.
“Headache already?” Brian asked, lowering himself into the evaluator’s chair.
“Yes, sir, midwatches always give me a pain.” Garuda popped two pills in his mouth and chewed them audibly.
“Jesus. You chew that shit?”
“Yes, sir. Then I wash it down with coffee and a -Csw smoke. Mouth tastes so bad after that, it keeps me awake for the first half of the mid; after that, it’s downhill.”
“I’m gonna stay awake just thinking about that.
Where’s that helo now?”
“Recommend you go over to surface and let them brief you on the search plan and everything. They’re operating on the twenty-mile scale, and I have to keep the two hundredand-fifty-mile scale here at SWIC. I collapse my picture, it takes me a while to get it back. The ole air side-surface side problem, remember?”
“Right. I forgot.” Brian walked over to surface, where Radarman First Class Rockheart had assumed the surface supervisor’s watch. Rocky walked him through the mechanics of the search pattern, an expanding square search around the most likely point of entry for the aircraft wreckage.
Brian was impressed by Rocky’s calm professionalism; Rockheart had a good reputation in the eyes of the wardroom officers.
“It doesn’t help that this guy went in at midnight,” Rockheart was saying. “If it was dayli
ght, there’d be more aircraft out here looking, but at night, and with no indications they got out before it went bang, well …”
“Yeah. So they’ll do this square search until their fuel gets low, and that’ll be it?”
“They’ll come in for fuel and crew rest, then they’ll probably go back out at first light. We’ll hang around the area for the next few days—we’re still on the edge of our PIRAZ box, so it doesn’t cost us anything to hang around and keep an eye out.”
“And there were no last-minute transmissions before the guy blew up?”
“No, sir,” said the AIC. “Monty had him on Guard, steering him to Red Crown. Last thing the guy said was, “Descending out of angels threefive.’ He was already on fire then. The BARCAP came down on the deck for forty minutes after the guy went in, but they didn’t see anything and then they were bingo.”
Brian watched the little blob of video drive around the computer-generated lines on the scope for a few minutes and then returned to D and D. The captain called up for a status, but there was little to report.
Combat quieted down. Most of the surveillance and special-flight aircraft had gone home for the night, back to their bases in Vietnam, the Philippines, Guam, or Thailand. The status board said that one of the two carriers at Yankee Station was in stand-down mode for twenty-four hours to let the crew rest. The other was flying minimum sorties for missions such as the BARCAP station to the west of Hood’s station. The weather messages told the tale: There had been heavy fog for the past week over the North, especially in the target-rich Red River Valley. The carrier strikes were suspended until the next front swept out of China and blew away the fog.
Brian sat at the evaluator table, leafing through the huge stack of messages that had come in since he had left Combat at 1800. Combat’s daily mail. His mind wandered off to the letter he had written Maddy a few hours before.
He had told her about the Sea Dragon operation and what had happened to Berkeley, omitting the gory parts. He had also decided to tell her about the staff captain’s visit and his own suspicions that there was a fairly significant drug problem in the ship. He had closed with almost a page of encouragement for the home front, noting that by the time she got this letter there would be less than six months to go before the ship got back. Pushing it a little, he thought, but what the hell—sounds better than seven months.
He continued to sort through the stack of messages, discarding most of them but keeping any that bore on the PIRAZ operations. Message air plans, logistics reports, admin traffic, Navy policy messages, fleet schedules, intelligence summaries, and the countless reports flowing out from the MACV headquarters down in Saigon accumulated at the rate of six hundred separate messages every day. Each of the evaluators had to sort the stack continuously during his watch to keep up with it.
“Feel like a goddamn message clerk,” Brian grumbled.
“Yes, sir, there’s a ton a that shit. And wait till they get the strikes going again—it doubles.”
Brian groaned. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open, and several of the messages blurred as he thumbed through them. Then there was a commotion over in surface.
“Evaluator, Surface,” came a voice over the bitch box. “Five-three reports a tracer!”
“All right!” exclaimed Garuda. He switched over to an air-control circuit to call the airborne early-warning E-2 aircraft to relay the news to the carrier. Brian went over to surface to stand behind the controller, who was talking urgently to the SAR helicopter pilot.
“What’s a tracer?” he asked. “Where was it?”
Rockheart pointed to a glowing symbol near the helicopter’s video.
“Right there, Mr. Holcomb. The pilots carry a thirty-eight with tracer bullets. On a night SAR, they’re supposed to shoot ‘em off when a helo gets close enough to see them. Mother says he’s on a flare-out now to hover in the area and see if they get another one.”
“Second tracer! They have a guy—they have a guy in sight!” shouted the controller. “Five-three on final to datum, swimmer on the wire!”
Brian went back over to D and D and buzzed the captain to report that Big Mother 53 had a possible survivor and was preparing to lower a swimmer down to pick him up.
“Call the exec, and make sure there’s a medical team back there on the flight deck when Five-three lands,” ordered the captain. “You inform CTF Seventy-seven yet?”
“No, sir, I was waiting to make sure they pick the guy up and give us an initial condition report before I called CTF Seventy-seven.”
“Okay, but then tell ‘em right away.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Brian hung up. Garuda was grinning sheepishly.
“What?”
“I reported the tracer to the E-Two on UHF secure; they’ll have told the staff on the carrier. I didn’t realize —”
“Yeah, that’s okay. I just didn’t want to get bombarded with questions before I had at least one or two answers.”
“I’D ask the next time. I forgot who was the evaluator.”
“Well, hell, Garuda, I didn’t tell you not to. It’s no big deal.” The bitch box’s red light came on.
“Evaluator, Surface, Big Mother Five-three reports one soul recovered and they are RTB.”
“Evaluator, aye. Garuda,” he said, “what’s—”
“RTB means returning to base, or in aviator-speak, returning to boat.
They’re on their way back. You better call the XO.”
“Oh shit, yes. I forgot.” Brian got on the phone as Garuda called out to the bridge to get the ship back on flight course and speed.
Twenty minutes later, Ensign Folsom came into Combat from the bridge. He was still dressed out in his flight deck gear, with a green jersey pulled over his khaki shirt and two Navy flashlights jammed in his pockets. He wore a CO2 life jacket in a pouch strapped to his waist and he was carrying his cranial helmet. Coming in from the darkness of the bridge, he blinked his eyes rapidly in the relatively bright lights of CIC. The lower part of his face was red from the winds across the deck and the rotor downwash. He walked over to where Brian was standing.
“Got one back!”
“Yeah, you did. The CO’s really pleased, not to men don the CTF Seventy-seven people. They’ve passed the word to the Air Force. Guy able to tell what happened?”
“Sort of, but Jesus, you should’ve seen him.” Folsom shook his head as if trying to dislodge the memory.
Garuda was turned around in his chair, and the surface module watch slanders were gathered in the doorway to D and D, listening hard.
“What, was he badly injured?”
“Well, from what the baby doc says, no.
But apparently you punch out of an F-Four at altitude, there’s shit that comes with the territory—his eyes, for instance. His eyes were like fucking baseballs. I mean he looked like some kinda space alien.
Something to do with the sudden pressure drop. And his ears were bleeding, the rest of his face looked like raw hamburger, and his ankles looked like softballs puffing up through his poopy suit. When they brought him out of Big Mother on a stretcher, I almost puked. Bad shit.”
He shook his head again.
“And did he say what happened to the other guy—was this the pilot or the backseater?”
“Guys in the helo said this was the RIO, the back seater. He said the pilot command ejected him, that the bird was on fire both sides, and that it blew up a few seconds later. He said it happened too fast for the pilot to have made it out. Guy saved his RIO’s ass but bought the farm.”
“Damn. They take the guy to sick bay?”
“Yes, sir. They’ll keep him there with the medical officer overnight and then take him off on the log helo tomorrow, I guess. They better not let anybody see him with those eyes, though. Guys’ll be having nightmares.
You should’ve heard the chief boats when he saw him— started talking Indian shit.”
“I’m guessing it’s sort of like explosive decompression,” said
Brian.
“His eyes should be normal by morning.
We have to be grateful for getting one back at least.
Garuda, we have to do some Op reps or anything?”
“No, sir, I’ve made the reports by voice. The CTF Seventy-seven people will send out the Op reps. What we gotta do now is secure from flight quarters.” The other people standing around D and D began to drift away to retell the story.
“Right.” Brian keyed the bitch box’s key down and called the bridge, telling the OOD to secure from flight quarters. He looked at his watch; it was 0230. For his first midwatch on Red Crown, time was moving right along. For the first time in days, he felt enthusiastic and energized.
By the following morning, however, the reality of being up since midnight began to intrude. At 0930, Brian found his eyelids drooping as he plowed through the backlog of departmental paperwork. He decided it was time to get out on deck for some fresh air. Maybe have his little talk with Louie Jesus. What a name. He called down to the Weapons office and told the yeoman to find the chief boatswain. Five minutes later, Chief Martinez tapped on the stateroom door; it sounded like he was using a two by-four. He stuck his head in and Brian grabbed his ball cap and took the chief by the wardroom to get coffee.
They went out onto the weather decks, through the breaks, and up on to the forecastle, shifting the hot paper coffee cups from hand to hand.
It was a typical day in the Gulf. The sky was overcast and hazy, a mass of warm, humid air suspended over a flat, glare-filled sea. The horizon was indistinguishable except where the dark underside of a rainsquall marked the demarcation between sea and sky. Hood was barely moving, maintaining station in the PIRAZ box and conserving fuel. There were none of the usual sea sounds, or even a hint of a breeze. Patches of dried sea salt sparkled at the base of the missile launcher.
Three sweating crews of deckhands were chipping paint and chasing rust spots on the forecastle. A boatswain’s mate second class by the name of Strickland was supervising the work in the style of boatswain’s mates everywhere: leaning against the side of the missile launcher, positioned so he could watch all three gangs, one foot hooked over a sound-powered phone box, the beginnings of a pendulous beer belly hanging over his belt, along with a holster for his rig and knife, a dirty china mug of black coffee in his hand, and his ball cap pulled down over his eyes against the glare.
The Edge of Honor Page 20