The truth was, J. J. was slow. He took longer to do everything—plan his flight, pre-flight his jet, taxi out to the marshaling area, rendezvous with the other jets in his flight. In the bombing pattern, his intervals were too long. His dive angles were too shallow. Sometimes J. J. would roll in on the target—and then pull off again—without releasing his bomb.
“Why didn’t you drop?” Barney wanted to know.
“I wasn’t ready,” the Marine explained.
The instructors were beginning to wonder about this guy Quinn. They were wondering if he would ever be ready.
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Angie Morales didn’t have a call sign yet. “Who ever heard of a fighter pilot named Angie?” said Burner one day in the ready room. “That’s really embarrassing. We gotta fix that.”
So her classmates tried to come up with a call sign. The problem was, Morales just hadn’t distinguished herself by doing anything legendary—bombing the wrong target, getting lost, forgetting her landing gear. She went about her business, completing each phase of the training syllabus without fanfare. She was never the best nor the worst. In a room full of noisy, male fighter pilots, she still blended into the backdrop like a bird in a forest.
One day at happy hour Burner announced that he had a new call sign for Angie: Rambo.
Rambo? At first, no one could figure it out. What kind of a name was that for a girl? Then they got it: She, of course, was so unRambo-like, with her quiet unobtrusiveness, it was funny. Rambo Morales? Why not? It sounded good on the radio. Anything was a better name for a fighter pilot than Angie.
Angie Morales fought it at first. But she had been around long enough to know that was futile. The more you resisted a new call sign, the more it stuck, like Super Glue.
So Rambo it was. What the hell, she figured. It could be worse. At least she hadn’t earned her call sign the way most nuggets did: by doing something stupid.
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One day the Phantom Flathatter came to Fallon.
The Phantom was famous. No one knew who he was, except that he had to be a Hornet pilot. For a couple of years now the Phantom had been leaving photographs of his handiwork stuck on the walls and bulletin boards of the various strike fighter bases.
This visit had the usual result: one of those rolling Navy inquisitions that nearly equaled the Tailhook investigation.
It started one day when a photo appeared on the wall in the Fallon BOQ bar. No one knew who put it up. Certainly no one knew anything about who took the photograph. Everyone who walked past it the first time had the same reaction: “Holy shit, that’s an. . . F/A-18. . .”
That’s what it was—on an 11”X14” blow-up, not of great quality, but pretty good considering the cloud of dust through which it was taken. You could see the photographer’s feet. He appeared to be sitting in the bed of a pickup truck. At the bottom of the blown-up photograph you could see the truck’s tail gate, which looked dented and rusty. You knew that from so little detail it was probably impossible to identify what kind of truck it was and, more importantly, whose pickup had been used for the photo shoot.
About fifty yards behind the pickup, nose on through the trail of desert dust, hauling ass up the dirt road toward the truck at what appeared to be about ten feet above the road, was a thirty-eight million dollar U. S. Navy fighter.
It was just so blatantly illegal—you had to admire the perpetrator for his sheer ballsiness. Flathatting!
Flathatting was the Navy’s term for unauthorized buzzing. If an aviator yielded to the temptation to go screeching over his girl friend’s house, or the old man’s farm, or a section of Nevada dirt road, he was guilty of flathatting. And it would cost him his wings.
Unless he was the Phantom Flathatter. The Phantom had been getting away with it for long enough now that he had achieved almost mythical status. The Phantom not only did it—he stuck up photos proving it! Pilots at bars around the country speculated about his identity. Some thought there had to be more than one Phantom, based on the sheer volume of his work.
He, they—whoever—had obviously gone to a great deal of trouble to coordinate the stunt, getting someone to drive the pickup, someone to shoot the picture, then flying his jet at weed-top level down a dirt road, up the back end of the pickup truck.
The photograph didn’t stay on the wall long. By the next morning it had come down and was on its way to the office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air, who, of course, wanted a full investigation into who the hell was flathatting out there over the desert in his goddamn F/A-18s.
It quickly became clear to everyone that they were wasting their time. No one knew anything. No one knew anyone who knew anything. No one wanted to know anything. Photo? Pickup truck?
The Phantom could have been any of a hundred or so pilots who visited Fallon for strike training. The fleet squadrons from both the Pacific and Atlantic fighter wings all paid annual visits to “Strike U.” And it was an old tradition for pilots to chip in and buy beat up old pickups just for knocking around the desert roads.
So the Phantom went unpunished. Again. And that was fine with most of the pilots who passed through Fallon. The caper had a sort of Robin Hoodish theme to it. He made them laugh. It was nice to think that in today’s uptight, shrinking, Fine Mesh Navy, there might still be outlaws.
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They finally got a break. Two whole days, over a weekend. “Go,” the instructors told them. “Get the hell out of town. Go to Reno or Tahoe, and unwind, gamble, get drunk, see a show, go skiing. Do something that’s fun. Do whatever gets your mind off strike training.”
The nuggets needed no urging. By now they were hollow-eyed zombies, having spent every day out there on the desert skimming the sagebrush, every night poring over tables and charts and manuals in the mission planning room. Each had lost at least five pounds. They had seen enough of the sagebrush and the rattlesnakes and the hard dry desert of the Fallon weapons range.
By nine o’clock Saturday morning, in a convoy of Hertz compacts, they were on the road to Tahoe. The whole detachment from Cecil—instructors and students—had pooled funds and reserved a big condo at a place called Lakeland Village in Tahoe that served as their administrative headquarters and crash pad. The nuggets stashed their bags and hit the main strip in town like kids let loose from detention.
Burner, Road, and Chip Van Doren headed straight for the casinos to play some blackjack and craps, knock back a few beers, ogle some showgirls. Shrike, Angie Morales, and the twins found a place that rented ski gear. They heard that Heavenly Valley, the big ski complex that towered over Lake Tahoe, had spring snow, and you still could get in a half day of decent skiing.
J. J. Quinn, as usual, felt like a senior citizen at a kindergarten party. Even among the instructors, who were closer to his age, he was out of place. Between instructors and students—even graying students like J. J. Quinn—there was still that invisible thin curtain.
So J. J. hung out with his classmates, adolescents though they were. He trailed along with Burner and Chip and Road, poking into the casinos, having a beer at every place they stopped, pretending to care what the odds were against beating the house at craps. What J. J. really cared about was getting home. He missed his wife, Dorothy, and his kids, who were back in Jacksonville. He wished he was home, his feet propped up in front of his fireplace. He’d be sipping a brandy, listening to some Brubeck and maybe reading a little detective fiction, something from Wambaugh or Elmore Leonard. That was more to his taste than prowling these neon sidewalks with a bunch of kids on a weekend binge.
Sunday came. With the sun descending on the western rim of the Sierras, the Hertz rental convoy headed back to Fallon. There were some bruises among the skiers. The slopes had turned out to be downright dangerous this late in the season. The soft spring snow had transformed to mean summer slush. They’d taken some lumps and spills and, in Russ McCormack’s case, one spectacular cartwheeling bone-rattling crash. No one broke anything, due mainly to the inherent toughne
ss of young bones.
There were some mountain-sized hangovers. The casino-hoppers, including tag-along J. J. Quinn, had worked the tables and ogled the showgirls and slammed down beers until nearly four A. M. J. J., who hated hangovers, looked like a cadaver. His head throbbed and his stomach roiled and he swore he would never drink again. At least never with these goddamn kids.
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They had reason to be glad they’d had a break. It was time for LAT—Low Altitude Training—the real adrenaline-pumper of strike phase. LAT meant getting your jet down low to the weeds, navigating across vast expanses of unfriendly terrain.
Things happened fast at four hundred twenty knots. Especially at only a hundred feet above the craggy surface of the Sierra Nevadas. Any distraction, mistake, lapse of attention and—bloom!—you became one with the earth.
It was an exhilarating, nerve-wracking exercise. LAT was fundamental to the strike fighter business. It was also the most dangerous activity in tactical aviation, and thus had to be practiced until it became second nature. Down at weed top level was one of the strike fighter’s principal places of business. It was where he lived—and fought—while making his way to a target.
They entered the dangerous new world carefully, like a bather settling into a hot tub. The first hop was flown at five hundred feet, which afforded a comfortable margin of safety. At five hundred feet you could see what was coming—towers, buildings, wires. You could see them in time to turn or climb and miss them.
Down at a hundred feet, it was like peering into a cone. What you saw was immediately ahead and beneath your nose. The view on either side was a greenish brown blur. At that speed and altitude, with only a two degree nose downward nudge, you were three and one half seconds from becoming molten protoplasm.
Your only real defense from unseen objects like towers and power lines was by being exactly where you intended, which meant following the course line you had plotted on your navigation chart. The Hornet was equipped with an inertial reference platform—a space age navigation device run with laser gyros that, when programmed with accurate information, knew where it was on the surface of the planet. The F/A-18’s instrument display included a moving map that was continually updated with information from the inertial reference platform. The map display showed the pilot his course line—the “yellow brick road”—and his actual progress along the road.
The hazards of low altitude navigation were many. There were man made objects like microwave towers, power lines. There were birds of all kind, especially big birds like hawks, eagles, and buzzards, who by their own arrogant nature weren’t inclined to yield right of way to other airborne creatures. Ramming a bird the size of a buzzard at over four hundred knots could bring down your twenty ton strike fighter as surely as a radar-guided missile.
The most insidious danger of low level navigation, however, was the pilot’s own fallible perceptions. Sometimes, for no obvious reason, pilots just flew into the ground. The reason was usually the same: In the high speed environment close to the surface, the human neural system could be fooled. Gently rising terrain could go unnoticed for a critical few seconds. Depth perception became useless over snow, slick water, shadowed ground. Two feet looked like twenty feet. Or two hundred feet.
Thus another course rule at Fallon: No low level nav hops until two hours after sunrise. None during the two hours before sunset. Those were rules like so many others in strike fighter training: They were written in blood.
To nuggets on their first trip to Fallon, the danger of low altitude tactics was largely academic. They all knew the numbers. They had been required to study the tables that showed TTIs (Time to Impact) from each hundred feet of altitude. They knew that a zero-G nudge—a gentle pushover—from a hundred feet had a TTI of 2.5 seconds. In less than three seconds you were one with the earth. They knew that a descent angle of five degrees meant you had to pull up no later than 250 feet above the ground. They knew the rule of three seconds maximum to have your eyes inside the cockpit, then you had to go back out. Three in, then out. Check your chart, check the ground. Keep checking.
They knew all that. It was simple. Chart to ground. Keep checking. It was academic. Don’t become one with the earth.
Then one day during their second week at Fallon, it stopped being academic.
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Burner had downed a couple of beers with the guy at the club the night before. Standing there at the bar, still wearing their flight suits, Burner and the guy had talked about the Marine Corps, about flying Hornets out there in the high desert, about not hitting the ground.
And then he did it. His name was Blowser. He was a pilot in an El Toro-based Marine squadron, VMFA-251. They were there at Fallon’s Strike Warfare Center for refresher training.
The next day he went out to the high desert and hit the ground.
The circumstances were classic, right out of the LAT manual: the eastern slope of the Sierras in the late afternoon, snow covered terrain, flat light, depth perception nil. The F/A-18 was on a low altitude training flight, using radar and inertial nav, following one of the canned training routes that began down in the desert flats at Fallon and climbing up the Sierra divide, heading southward along the ridge line, then back down over the desert. As required by the course rules, a second F/A-18 was flying chase, above and behind the low flying Hornet.
It was early spring. A bright sheen of snow still covered the upper slopes. The high overcast filtered the afternoon sun, lending a dull, dimensionless cast to the terrain. The pilot was down low, skimming the ground, following the winding course up a mountain slope, moving at 420 knots. At 9600 feet above sea level, as he rolled the jet into a steep bank to turn the corner, he clipped a ridge.
The sleek F/A-18 strike fighter disintegrated into a fireball. The flaming wreckage caromed on up the snow-covered slope, scattering its pieces for over a mile.
The mood that night at Ruthie’s was subdued. The nuggets drank their beer and exchanged chatter about nothing in particular, avoiding the subject that was on all their minds. They were all working hard at not noticing the cluster of Marines at the far end of the bar, the pilots from the squadron that had just lost the jet. And a squadron mate.
The same question preyed on each nugget’s mind: What did that guy do out there? What was he thinking about? What mistake caused him to plant his jet up there 9600 feet above sea level?
Sure, they knew, at least in an academic sense, the reason for all the rules and dictums about low altitude tactics. But until today, that’s what it had been—academic. Now the hard truth was sinking in. This job really was dangerous. Hell, man, this stuff could get you killed!
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SHRIKE
Shrike Hopkins didn’t like the way the day was shaping up. On her way to the squadron that morning she could see the wind sock out by the runway. It was snapping around like a pennant on a speed boat. This was going to be one hell of a windy day.
That was Fallon’s biggest limitation: the wind. The Fallon air station had only one long strip, Runway 31-13, running northwest-southeast. Most of the time the single runway was perfectly suitable for the tactical jets that used the base. But sometimes a galeforce wind would kick up out there on the desert and come howling across Fallon’s single runway.
Which always meant trouble. Fighters like the F/A-18 Hornet and the F-14 Tomcat had crosswind limitations. They couldn’t take off or land in a crosswind—a wind blowing perpendicular to the runway—greater than thirty knots. If they were already airborne, and a crosswind came up that exceeded their limit, the procedure was to lower the jet’s arresting hook—the same one used for carrier landings—and make an arrested landing.
Every naval air station, including Fallon, was equipped with an arresting wire. It was a cable stretched across the runway and connected to an apparatus called a “water squeeze,” which acted like a giant brake. In an emergency, jets could land with their hooks down and come to a quick stop, just like on an aircraft carrier. The
landing jet’s tailhook engaged the cable, which dragged it to a halt in less than a thousand feet.
Shrike made her way across the parking lot toward the squadron ready room. The wind was gusting. It snatched at her long blonde hair, stinging her face. Yes, thought Shrike, this is shaping up to be an interesting day.
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The damned landing gear!
It was indicating UNSAFE. Shrike had just taken off from Fallon, headed for the weapons range. Now she was staring at the red light in her landing gear handle. She had tried to raise the landing gear handle to retract the wheels of the jet—and something wasn’t right. The goddamned gear hadn’t come up or, at least, it wasn’t indicating that it had come up.
Great, she thought. Here she was with bombs on her jet, and she was supposed to join her flight and go bombing. And her gear was not safe. It might be up, down, or hung up somewhere in between. What to do?
What she did, she realized several seconds later, was precisely the wrong thing to do. She cycled the landing gear. She put the gear handle down. All three wheels locked into the “down” position.
Then she raised the gear handle again.
Unsafe again! The damned red light was glowing again in the clear plastic landing gear handle.
Something was definitely not right. And now another nagging thought had already entered into her brain: I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have cycled the gear.
It was an axiom in jets: You didn’t mess with landing gear problems. If the gear showed an irregularity, like an UNSAFE indication when you raise it, you never cycled the thing in order to get the wheels up. That was because if the landing gear had a broken actuator or linkage mechanism, cycling the gear could jam it irretrievably. You might never get all the wheels down. In the F/A-18 Hornet, that meant you had to eject. Once you got the wheels down, indicating safe, you left them down.
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