It was too late. Shrike had jumped the gun. Now she had to confess.
She called Fallon tower and told them that she had a problem and needed to go into a “Delta” pattern—a holding pattern over the airfield. Then she did what she wished she had done after the first indication of a problem: She called the operations duty officer.
“You did what?” the duty officer asked on the radio.
“I cycled the gear,” she said. “It didn’t fix the problem.”
She could almost hear the ODO groaning. She could see his face reddening, the brow furrowing. “Stand by,” he said. “Let’s get the book out.”
While Shrike orbited overhead Fallon, the ODO plunged into the F/A-18 operating handbook, called the NATOPS manual (Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization).
The LANDING GEAR UNSAFE/FAILS TO EXTEND procedure contained sixteen separate items. At the top of the procedure was a big WARNING box. It said DO NOT CYCLE THE LANDING GEAR.
So much for that step. The ODO read the rest of the procedure to Shrike over the radio. They came to the item about the landing gear circuit breaker.
“Okay,” said the ODO, “it says here to check it in. Go ahead and make sure the sucker is pushed in.”
She did. It was.
“Swell. Fantastic. Now let’s finish the rest of the procedure. And leave the handle where it is now, understand? Don’t screw around with it any more.”
“Okay.” The ODO sounded sarcastic. Shrike made herself keep her mouth shut.
“And then we’re gonna have Comet join up on you so he can make a visual inspection of the gear. After that you’re gonna take the arresting gear. You have to catch a wire because that’s the procedure with the gear problem, but the fact is, everybody’s gonna be doing it anyway because the crosswind at Fallon is blowing over thirty knots now. Understand?”
“Yes, sir, I understand.”
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Shrike landed back at Fallon and caught the arresting wire with her tailhook. No problem. The gear problem episode was over. No damage done. That should have been the end of the matter, she figured.
She figured wrong.
She knew she had screwed up the procedure for dealing with an unsafe gear. Now she had to hear about it from everybody else— the duty officer, from Comet Haley, who was supposed to have been her flight leader for the bombing mission, and even the other students.
One of the other students, a Navy commander who was going through F/A-18 qualification before becoming executive officer of his own Hornet squadron was in the ready room. “I can’t wait to hear her story about that,” he said. Or words to that effect.
Someone reported the commander’s remark to Shrike, who was already on edge from the gear incident. She stormed into the ready room and confronted the commander. What the hell did he mean by a crack like that? She didn’t have to take that kind of crap from another student! Talking down to her, pulling that commander-lieutenant stuff, implying that she, being a woman, was going to offer some kind of a story. . .
Things got out of hand. Shrike said the commander had no right to badmouth her. He said he was doing no such thing. Shrike said it sounded like verbal assault to her.
Verbal assault? Wait a minute. . . did she really mean that? Wasn’t that dangerously close to. . . sexual harassment?
It was. And she meant it. At least in the heat of the moment.
A silence descended on the ready room. Uh, oh. There it was: The Gender Thing—loose again, jumping out of its dark hiding place like a red-eyed, saliva-dripping junkyard dog.
Comet Haley tried to get the combatants to back off from their firing positions. Eventually Shrike and the commander cooled down. Already they were regretting most of the things that had been said. But of course the things had been said. Now they were out there on the floor, like somebody’s dirty socks. No one was willing to take them back.
A report of the whole messy business—the gear problem and the accusation of harassment—got back to Cecil Field.
Captain Moffit, commanding officer of the F/A-18 RAG, knew better than to ignore the Gender Thing. As a senior officer, he had already seen many of his colleagues caught in the jaws of that junkyard dog. So he did the only prudent thing a commanding officer could do in these post-Tailhook days: He ordered a JAG (Judge Advocate General) investigation of the “verbal assault” allegation.
A JAG investigation was a standard military legal tool. It was a mini-version of a grand jury inquiry into an alleged wrongdoing. The officer appointed to conduct the JAG investigation was a woman, a lieutenant commander. After she interviewed all the officers who had been present in the ready room that day in Fallon, she issued a five page summation of her findings. The whole matter, she concluded, had been overblown. Nothing had been said that could be construed as sexual harrassment. Lieutenant Hopkins, in an emotional state after a harrowing flight, had over-reacted to an innocuous ready room remark.
Which suited everyone, including Shrike, who was already regretting the hornet’s nest that had been stirred. But in all the brouhaha about sexual harassment, the original issue—Shrike’s mishandling of her landing gear emergency—had been somehow obscured. And that, most of the instructors were becoming convinced, had been the real motivation for the “verbal assault” charge: to deflect attention from her grade sheet for that flight.
With the harrassment issue put to rest, the commanding officer redirected everyone’s attention: “She had a gear malfunction. She violated standard operating procedure. She should have gotten an unsatisfactory grade.”
And so she did. For that day’s flight she received a grade of “unsatisfactory.”
Shrike was stunned. Another SOD! That made two. Three SODs, sometimes four—that was the limit. Then you faced a FNAEB.
It was so goddamned unfair! Now she no longer had any doubt. They really were out to get her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SNIPER
Shrike wasn’t the only one having a bad day in the weapons phase at Fallon. It seemed to be a rule: Everyone had to have at least one unbelievably bad day out there on the range. You’d have a sortie when your bombs seemed guided by a computer from hell. The bombs would hit long, short, or so wide of the bulls eye that the target spotters a mile away would be diving for cover whenever they heard your call sign.
But the bad days would pass, like a transient virus. And so it was with the nuggets of 2-95. By the end of the first week at Fallon, they were having mostly good days. They had one more week on the range. Now more bombs were falling on the bulls eye. More low level nav hops were staying on course, check points hit on time, minimum safe altitudes observed. The nugget fighter pilots were feeling good about themselves.
Except for J. J. Quinn. J. J.’s bad days still outnumbered his good ones. He hadn’t gotten a CEP for bomb hits inside a hundred feet. The consensus of the instructors was that J. J. was going to be all right, but it would take a while. J. J. was a plodder. His helicopter pilot’s brain was still plodding at a velocity, everyone figured, somewhere between hover and auto-rotation speed.
Part of J. J.’s problem was confidence. He had none. Or when he did have it, something would happen to knock it out of him. He couldn’t escape the recurring notion that he just didn’t belong here. After all, he was from the wrong community, the dog-soldiering helicopter-flying branch of the Marine Corps. And the wrong generation. Age thirty-five was a hell of a time in life to take up fighter piloting. What was he doing here?
Sometimes J. J. would stand off by himself at the bar in Ruthie’s, observing his youngish classmates. They were kids, cutting up, ribbing each other, making bets on bomb hits and strafing scores. He felt so goddamned old! They were like his kid brothers and sisters—fun to have around, but damn, it would be nice for a change to have some adult company.
Out there on the range, J. J. dreaded hearing the bomb spotter’s report after each run. Of the twelve bombs they normally carried on each sortie, he might get two or three
inside a hundred feet. He could hear just a hint of a sneer in the spotter’s voice: “Hundred-fifty feet, six o’clock. . .”
Hits were called out by their direction from the center of the target, as on the face of a clock. Six o’clock meant the bomb had fallen short, at the bottom of the bulls eye. “Off target, nine o’clock,” called the spotter, meaning J. J.’s bomb had hit so far left of the bulls eye it wasn’t even in the same congressional district.
J. J.’s bad days were coming one after the other. And then one afternoon near the end of his training at Fallon, he had a very bad day. His worst day ever.
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It was mid-morning—the perfect time to be on the weapons range at Fallon. The spring sunshine was washing the desert in a golden hue.
It was a multi-weapons period. Each Hornet was carrying twelve Mark 76 practice bombs as well as a full load of ammo for strafing. Today was their first time on the strafing targets, their chance to fire the awesome M-61 cannon mounted in the nose of the Hornet.
Slab Bacon was the instructor and the flight leader. Slab’s wingman would be Road Ammons. As usual, J. J., being the senior student, was assigned to lead the second section of two fighters. His wingman was Burner Bunsen.
The four Hornets taxied out to the long runway at Fallon and, as briefed, took off in ten second intervals. They rendezvoused in a wide left turn, sliding into a cruise formation, with Road positioned on the leader’s left wing, and the other section—J. J. and Burner—off his right wing. Joined up, the flight banked to the right and headed for the target complex called Bravo Nineteen.
“Low-safe up and ready,” called a voice on the range frequency. The “Low-Safe” was a propeller-driven T-34C trainer, usually flown by an instructor pilot, who orbited the target at two thousand feet. The Low-Safe’s job was to monitor the bombing pattern—watching for too-low pull outs, too-steep dive angles, possible collision courses.
The Low-Safe pilot today was a lieutenant commander from the Air Wing staff. It was his first time on the range.
“Roger, Low-Safe, we have you in sight,” said Slab.
“Roman flight, the range is clear,” called the spotter in the range control tower. “You’re cleared in hot.”
“Roman one-oh-nine, roger, cleared in hot.”
“Hot” meant that the pilot had turned on his master armament switch. His weapon, whether it was a bomb, missile, or gun, was ready to fire.
In they went, Slab first, then J. J., Road and Burner, at eight second intervals, diving at forty-five degrees on the giant dartboard.
Slab dropped his first bomb.
“Fifteen feet, four o’clock,” called the spotter.
Then J. J.
“Two hundred forty nine feet, six o’clock,” the spotter said.
J. J. groaned. Two hundred forty nine feet! It wasn’t even in the ball park. It was like throwing at a dart board and hitting the floor.
Slab offered instruction: “You’re too shallow, J. J. You’re only about thirty degrees. You gotta steepen up.”
Dive bombing amounted to an exercise in applied physics. If you dropped your bomb from too shallow a dive angle, it tended to fall short of the target. The steeper you dived at the target, the less error you would experience in the twelve-to-six-o’clock axis.
“Roger,” said J. J. On his next run he steepened up. But only a little. His bomb hit at one-hundred-fourteen feet. Again at six o’clock.
And so it went. More big misses. Meanwhile Road and Burner were getting hits inside fifty feet. Burner’s last two bombs were bullseyes. Road planted one at ten feet. J. J. finished with a seventy foot hit at nine o’clock.
For J. J., it was turning out to be just another bad day. Then it got worse. It was time to go strafing.
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Gunfighting was always a dangerous business. Whether practiced on the streets of Tombstone or low over the Nevada desert, the basics remained the same: You still had to get close to your enemy, get a fix on him over the barrel of your gun, squeeze a trigger.
It was face-to-face warfare, and you could see at deadly proximity the results of your work. The strafing fighter had to get down close the ground, in his enemy’s home turf, close enough to see the whites of his eyes. The danger was twofold: The fighter doing the shooting was, of course, subject to being shot himself. And while he was shooting it was easy—insidiously easy—to become fixated, obsessed with the intoxicating lovely havoc he was causing there on the ground until. . . oh shit!—there it was right in his face—the earth rising to meet him.
The M61 rotary cannon mounted in the nose of the Hornet was a weapon straight out of a video arcade game. It was a Gatling gun, equipped with six barrels. Six thousand rounds a minute the thing fired, spewing fire and destruction like the wrath of Vulcan. It was mesmerizing, watching the earth erupt and the target banners shred and the scrub brush dissolve like mown grass. You could feel the staccato thrum of the gun through the airframe of the jet.
The strafing targets at Fallon were nylon banners ten feet high and twenty feet wide, erected vertically out on the weapons range. The banners were rigged with acoustic sensors to record each round of ammunition that penetrated the nylon. You dove on the targets at an angle of fifteen degrees downward. At about a thousand feet altitude, as the tiny banners swelled to the size of billboards in your windscreen, with the gunsight symbol in your HUD superimposed over the middle of the target, you squeezed the trigger on the control stick.
Brrraaap! Just once, a short burst to see where you were hitting, checking out the accuracy of the sight and the boresighting of the cannon. The gun only carried 568 rounds of twenty millimeter shells. You could switch the rate of fire from 4000 to 6000 rounds per minute. At the maximum rate, you could get carried away and blow all your ammunition in one run.
So in the Hornet you learned to shoot in short bursts—Brraap! Brrraap!—working the cannon like an artist dabbing paint. As in most forms of weapons delivery, aggressiveness paid off. The closer you flew to the target—the harder you pressed—the more hits you were likely to score. An unintended consequence of too much aggressiveness, of course, was becoming one with the target, a feat that had been accomplished more than once during strafing practice out there in the high desert at Fallon.
The course rules were supposed to prevent things like becoming one with the target. The strafing parameters required the attacking aircraft to roll in at 3000 feet above the ground, diving at precisely fifteen degrees. Five degrees more or less was reason to abort the run. You accelerated from about 350 knots to 480 knots in the dive, and you were allowed to fire the gun in the dive from 1200 feet to 900 feet. No lower. The restrictions were intended to prevent anyone from pressing too hard.
Still, fighter pilots being what they are, sometimes they pressed. And sometimes they had unintended consequences.
It occurred both in training and in combat. You pressed the strafing attack in close, disregarding the 900 foot minimum altitude rule, notching up the speed, pressing it right up to whites-of-their-eyes closeness, squeeze off a burst—Brrraaap!—and just as you pull off the target you feel it—a dreadful impact in the vital organs of your jet: Thunk, thunk, thunk.
Your own bullets. They had ricocheted off the flat hard desert, right back into the belly of your jet. You had just shot yourself down.
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The strafing targets were about five miles north. In the briefing back in the ready room, Slab had gone over the course rules, how you had to positively identify the correct banner before you opened fire with the nose-mounted cannon, how you had to call in “hot” when you armed your master armament switch, with your nose pointed at the ground. This was a no-fooling, real-time exercise with live ammunition. The cannon wouldn’t care who it was shooting at, friend or foe.
Slab and his students had reviewed the map of the Bravo-nineteen complex, paying particular notice to the correct run in line to the target banner. “The long, straight one,” Slab said, pointing to the mile-long dirt roa
d leading right up to the banner. “That’s the correct run in line. Not the zigzag line over there. That’s another road, and it goes toward the spotting tower, where people work.”
Straight lines. Zigzag lines. Roads in the desert. There in the briefing room, looking at the colored, unmoving map, it seemed so simple. Flying out there over the target complex, peering down at the moonscape of furrows and gullies and roads—it was confusing. What run in line?
J. J. was having trouble finding the damned target. Where the hell was it? It was supposed to be squarish, about thirty feet high, broadside to the run-in line. . .
Was that it, over there? A big flat surface. That was it.
J. J. cradled his finger over the trigger, fixing the gunsight reticule squarely on the target. Two thousand feet. . . fifteen hundred. . . Shoot!
Brrrrraaaaaaappp! He was getting hits. It was a glorious sight, J. J. thought, seeing the dirt kick up like that, the pieces flying off the target. . .
“Abort! Abort! Stop firing!”
“Stop, stop, pull up!”
“Don’t fucking shoot!”
Everyone was yelling on the radio. Thirty seconds earlier, when J. J. was making his run in along the wrong line, zigzagging toward the wrong target, no one took notice. Now that he had fired on the wrong target, which happened to be not a target at all but one of the range spotting towers, used by the range controllers to score weapons hits, everybody suddenly noticed. The radio frequency sounded like a tree full of chimpanzees.
Later, when the hysteria abated and the jets had returned to Fallon, several facts emerged. One—the happiest fact—was that no one was hurt. The spotting tower had been unmanned. And after J. J.’s zigzagging sneak attack, it seemed unlikely that they’d ever find volunteers to go back up there.
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