The Gulf

by David Poyer

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Ready when you are for prestart.”

  “Go.”

  Hayes glanced around the cockpit. He and the pilot sat side by side, separated by a central console at elbow height. Ahead of him, shielded by an overhanging dash, was the main panel. This included an airspeed indicator, radar and barometric altimeters, an artificial horizon and horizontal-situation indicator, fuel gauges, and engine RPM and rotor torque readouts. To the right was the caution panel. When he pressed the test button, seventy-five indicators flashed on and then off. Two inches above his helmet, the overhead was crusted with circuit breakers and switches.

  A whine began above them as Schweinberg started the auxiliary power turbine. AW2 Kane, the SENSO, climbed into the cabin. The sensor operator sat behind the pilots, a battery of sonobuoys against his back and a radar and computer display in his lap. There was a seat for a door gunner/hoist operator, but it would be vacant for this flight, which would be a routine radar patrol.

  Schweinberg unlocked the blades and pressed the radio switch. He looked to the right, into the eyes of the landing signal officer. “LSO, Killer Two One. How you doin’ today?”

  “Good, Chunky,” crackled the voice in his phones.

  “Request clearance to start and engage.”

  “Anytime you want, big boy.”

  “That’s what they all say.” He grinned, then winced. It even hurt to smile.

  Forward of them, the hangar door was sliding down. Behind it was the fire team in their reflective suits, helmets under their arms. He hoped if there was a fire they’d come in fast. He remembered what the old guy, Richards, had said about burning to death.… He moved the engine ignition switch to NORM and fuel selectors to cross-feed, then mashed the START button. Now the engines got JP-5 and spark. They fired with a double bump followed by a climbing whine and the airframe began to vibrate. Engine oil pressure, check; starter light, out.

  Hayes’s voice in his head. “Harnesses and doors locked. Deck clear.”

  “Center the cyclic, collective down.” He wrapped his right glove around the cyclic. Between his knees, like a conventional stick, it accomplished much the same purpose, controlling the helicopter’s attitude. The collective, a horizontal column to the left of his seat, controlled main-rotor pitch and engine fuel flow. Cyclic, collective, rudder pedals; those were the flight controls.

  Kane came up on the ICS. Schweinberg rogered and went over the flight profile and lookout procedures. It wasn’t complicated. In the Gulf, they seldom used the expensive antisubmarine gear. Most of the SENSO’s attention would be on the radar, while the front-seaters would be eyeballing water and sky. When he was done, he hit the radio switch and made sure the guys in CIC were on the right frequency.

  “Getting hot in here,” he heard Hayes mutter.

  “No shit.” The interior was black, and in the tropical sunlight, in suit and gloves and helmet, he knew how a potato felt in a microwave oven. “Ready to engage,” he added, checking pressures again.

  The swept tips of the SH-60’s four blades accelerated swiftly. In five seconds, they were a flicker at the top of the windscreen. He ran RPM up, watching the instruments. A caution light flickered—number one hydraulic pump—then went out. He reached up and pushed the black ball of the power control forward to FLY. The engine changed pitch and their heads nodded to a long-period airframe shudder. The collective was still horizontal, the blades whipping through the wind without biting out lift, and the throttle and torques matched on the indicators.

  “Buck, you ready?”

  Hayes gave him a wordless thumb. Schweinberg saw Hayes had dropped his visor, and he did, too. The glare lessened. He leaned back and glanced out. The ship was ready. He forgot his uneasy gut and the way his heart was thumping in tune with the blades. Click. “LSO, Two One.”

  “LSO, go.”

  “Rotors engaged, request clearance to launch.”

  “Stand by for clearance. Takeoff data to follow. Barometric pressure twenty-nine point thirteen. True wind zero-one-zero at seventeen, relative starboard twenty at twenty. Deck pitch negligible, roll five.”

  Buck gave a thumbs up as he copied. “Roger, we’re ready to lift.”

  “Stand by … beams open, green deck, lift.”

  The LSO tossed them a salute. Chunky hauled up on the collective. The turbines rose in a twinned scream. But 421 stayed glued to the deck, held down by ten tons of weight. Eight. Six. Four …

  Suddenly the thrust of air downward exceeded the weight of airframe, engines, and crew. He went heavy in the seat. The flight deck dropped away, the ship dropped away; the cyclic described a tiny arc astern in his gloved hand. “All clear, Four Two One,” crackled in his ears.

  He came slightly forward on the stick again, maintaining full power. The helicopter shuddered as it transitioned to forward flight. Van Zandt’s masthead flashed past. The altitude needles wound upward. His eyes flicked to the horizon. It widened with every foot they gained in the familiar succession of illusion: became first a disk, then a bowl, at last a separate, gently curved world below. He brought the cyclic an inch back and to the right and gently lowered the collective. The helicopter, climbing more slowly now, banked to starboard. The coast of Oman came into view, dry, flat, tan and yellow, dancing and shimmering madly in the heated air. The sea beneath him was tan-green, the shallows shading to a blue so delicately brilliant it made his heart hurt.

  “After takeoff checklist.” Hayes’s voice in his headphones. Schweinberg nodded, still looking out. As if shaken loose by the vibration, fragments of memory came free and drifted through his mind. “The Michigan State video shows you flinching, Schweinberg. Noles can’t use linebackers who flinch.…”

  “I don’t want that animal in the house anymore, Claude.…”

  Fuck it, he thought savagely. Fuck it all; all that was over. He didn’t need to drink, but it passed the time. He didn’t care that much about bodybuilding, either, though it was good to stay in shape; too many ball players let themselves go to fat. Everything else in his life was just something to do when he couldn’t be where he wanted to be. Which was here. High above the sea, adrift in the sky …

  “ATO, ATACO.”

  It was the voice from the ship, a petty officer in CIC. He took his orders from the TAO, theoretically welding ship and plane into a coordinated tactical whole. Before Hayes could answer, Schweinberg pressed the trigger. “Yo.”

  “Killer Two One, hold you too high and too far east. We need you to scout out ahead of us along our track, one-two-zero.”

  There was a leash in the sky, and he was on it. “Shit,” he muttered.

  “Two One, ATACO, say again your last.”

  “I say again, roger, coming right. I’ll mark on top and head out on the one-two-zero, angels four.”

  “ATACO aye.”

  Leaving the channel open, Schweinberg sang tunelessly: “If I had the wings of an eagle, and the ass of a great buffalo-o-o, I’d climb to the highest church steeple, and shit on the blackshoes below.” Beside him, Buck Hayes grinned. He finished the postlaunch, slammed the book closed, and stuffed it into a pocket. Then he stretched his arms, eased his chin strap, and looked down.

  The chin bubble was transparent, and through it now he saw a distant point of darkness on the sea. It threw a shadow against the wrinkled Gulf, and drew behind it, like a bride’s train, a widening V of wake. Van Zandt, far and small, a tin purgatory for two hundred men. But they, at least, could escape.

  * * *

  They spent the next hour floating along at four thousand feet while Kane monitored the passing traffic on the scope. After a while, the ship asked them to check out a surface contact. Schweinberg rogered and headed toward it at 140 knots. They seemed not to be moving, just hanging like a balloon above the immense curve of sea. A band of dirty brown lay just above the horizon, a thick layer of haze, smoke, and airborne sand. But it was below them, and their sky was the normal blue one seldom saw from sea level in
the Gulf.

  Hayes wiggled his toes. Cramps nibbled at his arches. Part of his mind was on the instruments. Part of it was wondering whether he’d be happy with a desk job, nine to five and an hour for lunch. But then he’d be home every night. Dustin and Jesse were getting to the age they needed a dad. And still a third part was back in Montana. Ghost riders in the sky … not one of the Rambling Hayeses, footloose though they’d been, had ever gotten this far, he thought. Then he remembered that at least one of them must have. The first one. Chained in the guts of a slaver.

  “Two One, ATACO, you see him yet?” crackled the petty officer’s voice.

  Hayes glanced at Schweinberg; he was leaning back, staring out at the horizon. He pressed the foot switch. “No, we don’t have him.”

  “Two One, I still hold you too high. Get down to around four hundred. Maybe you can see it then.”

  “Oh, fuck that,” muttered Schweinberg. “I’m just gettin’ cooled off.”

  Buck glanced at him. But the collective was easing down, as requested. He couldn’t tell whether his HAC had been serious or not.

  Finally, Hayes picked up the wake, a scratch on the sea, like a diamond dragged across blue glass. They edged in gradually, paralleling it. Both pilots stared out the windscreen. Hayes focused the gyrostabilized binoculars. A speedboat, white, no flag. “Not fishermen,” he said.

  “What are they?”

  “I don’t know. Looks like bales on deck.”

  “Druggies?”

  “Could be.”

  They peeled off before they got inside small-arms range. Hayes called it in and asked whether they wanted a positive I.D. After a while, the ship came back and said no, unidentified smuggler was good enough, as long as they stayed clear of Van Zandt.

  Schweinberg turned south again and gradually climbed back to radar altitude. They droned along high above earth and sea. From time to time, Kane came over the intercom with a contact, or the ship vectored them around. But for the most part they just sat and logged time. Neither man minded. It was daylight, and once they met the convoy, they’d fly mostly at night. Besides, being bored was better than most of the alternatives.

  After three hours in the air, Hayes started to get sleepy. He was considering telling Schweinberg he was going to flake out for twenty when the radio crackled again. “ATO, ATACO.”

  “ATO, go.”

  “Heads up, Two One. Be advised you got two bogeys closing from the north.”

  “What kind of bogeys? Fast movers?”

  “Affirm, look like fighters, not sure yet whose—hold on, we just got ESM. F-14s, batch one. Iranians.”

  Hayes felt more awake now. He said, “SENSO, check up to the north of us, ship says—”

  “Yeah. I got ’em too. Range fifteen, our eight o’clock, high.”

  Schweinberg’s grunt: “They closin’?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Two One rolled left. Both pilots narrowed their eyes, concentrating on sky. Hayes clicked from one block of blue to the next, watching not for shape but for movement. “Think it’s Peeps’s thumpers?” he muttered.

  “Could be.”

  “Emitter tag!” shouted Kane. At the same moment, the data link said, “ATO, ESMO, fire-control radar bearing two-nine-zero from you.”

  “There they are. Eleven o’clock, above the horizon.”

  “Padlock ’em!” Schweinberg instantly pushed down collective and cyclic together. He just glimpsed them as the horizon rolled up, two flyspecks on blue immensity.

  Air-combat training over Lake George came back to him. He came left and steepened his dive. Airspeed, 175. The sea filled the windscreen, the airframe shook, the wind screamed by. Eight hundred, five hundred. The altimeter unwound downward faster and faster. The vertical-speed indicator passed 3,500 feet per minute.

  “Christ, Chunky, how low you going?”

  “Till I run out of air.” Nobody going eight hundred knots liked to point his nose into the water. “You still got ’em? What’re they doing?”

  “They see us. One’s inbound. The other guy’s hanging back, high orbit.”

  High orbit; waiting for the leader to complete his pass. That was good. Helicopter evasive tactics were predicated on one jet. Once they both mixed it up, though, he wasn’t really sure what he’d do.

  Now Chunky concentrated on the oncoming fighter. On a head-to-head pass, there were maybe three seconds when the jet pilot could see you and was in range. He had to lead you slightly to let the missile seeker lock on before he fired. So you had to keep him guessing wrong as to which way you were turning, keep him out of phase with you.

  Now, watching the jet, he suddenly slammed the cyclic to the right. Yes, Christ, the left wing came down!

  “Don’t let him acquire!” shouted Hayes. “Passing two hundred.”

  Schweinberg’s whole attention was on the fighter. It was closing at an alarming rate. Its right wing came down and he jerked the stick right. Two One skidded around as the horizon went momentarily vertical. Normally, you banked no more than forty-five degrees, but limits were out the window now. He was trying to stay alive.

  The airframe began shaking violently. Hayes glanced sideways, and found himself looking straight down on the waves. His skin tried to inchworm up his neck. “Christ, Chunky! You can’t bank like this at one-seventy-five, air’s hot, you’re gonna blade stall!”

  “Death—but first, cheech!” howled Schweinberg. The shaking intensified till their teeth buzzed and their vision blurred, but he kept the stick hard right.

  The fighter’s nose came up suddenly and it flashed over them, so close they could hear its engines over the scream of their own. “SENSO! Padlock left on number one, call position!”

  Hayes shouted, “Number two, ten o’clock, high high!”

  “Altitude, altitude!” shouted Kane. Schweinberg flinched. If a rotor tip hit the water, they were fucked. He was startled to see they were no more than sixty feet off the deck, so low their tip vortices sliced into the water, leaving a path on the sea. He pulled out of the bank and brought the cyclic back slowly, keeping the tail rotor clear of the waves.

  “Fuck me, I wish I’d took the fucking gunner along.”

  “He couldn’t shoot down an F-14, Chunky.”

  “It’d improve my morale. Shit. Shit!”

  “Number one’s opening to starboard,” reported Kane.

  “Keep your eye on him,” muttered Schweinberg. The drill was that once he was past, you watched him, then turned inside him. Jet jocks thought they were hot squat; they always figured they could get around you onto your six. But a Seahawk could outturn a jet all day long. If he tried to get smart and hauled ass straight up, you skated around underneath him. Then when he rolled in, he found himself looking past you at a water impact—a bad position for a jet at low altitude.

  Two attackers, though, made it a lot harder. The wingman was coming in now. Kane was watching the leader. If he tried for their tail, Schweinberg would have to break off number two. But he couldn’t face in two directions at once. Once they got coordinated, 421 was dead meat.

  Schweinberg had reasoned to this conclusion in less than a second. Meanwhile, the second fighter had dropped and was rapidly growing larger. Shaking his head to fling sweat out of his eyes, he hunched at the stick like a poker player over a hot hand. Couldn’t make your play too soon or he’d outguess you, had to time it just right.… If the Iranian fired a missile, he’d have maybe two-tenths of a second to get a flare off and bank. The sky was big, but not big enough when your combined closing rate was a thousand miles an hour.

  “Break left!” shouted Hayes. The F-14’s wing dipped and Schweinberg slammed the stick to port so hard his eyes went dim.

  “Hundred twenty knots, torque’s too high, two hundred feet and dropping.”

  Was that a flash? “Flares!” he screamed. Hayes pickled the button and the fuselage jolted. The data link hummed and then they heard, “Lieutenant Schweinberg, this is Captain Shaker. Understand you are b
eing—”

  “Get off the circuit! Where you got him, where you got him?” screamed Schweinberg.

  “Number two’s inbound again, on our eight—”

  “ATO, ATACO, we’re picking up another fire-control radar, bearing two-seven-zero from you.”

  “I got the fucker, shut up, I’m trying to get out of this fuckin’ nutcracker!”

  “Number one’s on our six!”

  “Shit!” They were wise to him now, boxing him. In a minute, they’d come in simultaneously, from ninety degrees apart, and he’d be shit out of luck. Shaker tried to interrupt again; no one answered him. “What’s two doin’ now?” Schweinberg said, almost breaking his neck as he craned around the sky.

  “Turning inbound, two o’clock. Hey. Chunky.”

  “What?”

  “Oil rig.” Hayes pointed off to a straddled spider five or six miles away. Schweinberg hadn’t noticed it before, but took his meaning instantly. He whipped around so hard the low rotor RPM light flickered and poured on power. They roared along forty feet off the deck, flat out at 165 knots. The fighters wobbled, undecided or coordinating, then steadied.

  He got to the rig just before the lead F-14 and ducked immediately behind it. His rotor arc was still visible, but he didn’t care. With his maneuverability, he could keep the structure between him and them forever, and there was no way they could fire through the mass of beams and derricks.

  The Iranian pilots realized it, too, and broke off. He allowed Two One to drift out from behind its makeshift shield as they joined up, dwindled to specks again, then finally disappeared to the southward.

  “ATO, ATACO, hold two bogeys opening your posit.”

  Hayes rogered, his voice high. Schweinberg pried the fingers of his left hand off the collective and groped behind the seat. At last he grunted, “Kane, you got a canteen back there?”

  “Hold on.” It came forward. He uncorked it and gulped greedily, his eyes still mincing the sky. Then held it out. “Buck?”