The Intruders (9 page)

The second cat shot, into a sky as black as the ace of spades, went
well. Jake leveled at 1,200 feet and turned downwind, as directed by
the controller. He held 250 knots until the controller told him to
dirty up, which he did at the same time he told Jake to turn base. So
Grafton was turning as he changed configuration-slowing, retrimming and
trying to maintain a precise altitude, all at the same time. He lost a
hundred feet, a fact that Flap instantly commented upon.

Jake said nothing, merely kept flying his plane, This is the big
leagues. Gotta do it all here and do it well. Flap has a right to
comment.

A short, tight pattern left him still searching for a good steady start
when he hit the glide slope. The secret to a good pass is a good start,
and Jake didn’t have it. He wasn’t carrying enough power and that
caused a settle. By the time he was back up to a centered ball he was
fast, which he was working off when he hit the burble. He added power.
Not quite enough. The ball was a tad low when the wheels hit the deck.

“A fair two-wire,” he told Flap as they rolled out.

Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (Equipment) Third Class Johnny Arbogast
enjoyed his work. He operated the numberthree arresting gear engine,
the one that got the most traps and therefore required the most
maintenance. Still, Johnny Arbogast loved that engine.

During a slow, rainy day in port this past spring, the gear chief had
worked out how much energy an engine absorbed while trapping an F-4
Phantom. The figure was nine million foot-pounds, as Johnny recalled.
Nine million of anything is a lot, but man! ‘nose planes make this
engine sing.

Any way you cut it, an arresting gear engine was one hell of a fine
piece of machinery. And Johnny Arbogast was the guy who ran Columbia’s
number three, which was pretty dam good, he thought, for a plumber’s kid
from Cotulla, Texas, who had had to struggle for everything he ever got.

The engine consisted of a giant hydraulic piston inside a steel cylinder
about thirty inches in diameter that was arranged parallel with the
ship’s beam. Almost fifty feet in length, the cylinder containing the
piston sat inside a large steel frame. Around the piston were reeved
two twelve-hundred-foot strands of arresting gear cable, one-and-five
eighths-inch-thick wire rope made of woven steel threads.

These two cables ran repeatedly around sheaves at the head and foot of
the main piston and squeezed it as the aircraft pulled out the flight
deck pennant above Johnny’s head. It was the metering of the fluid
squeezed by the piston from the cylinder-pure ethylene glycol, or
antifreeze-through an adjustable orifice that controlled the rate at
which the aircraft was arrested. Johnny set the size of this orifice
for each arrestment as ordered by the talker in Pried-Fly.

To maintain proper tension on the engine cable as the aircraft on the
flight deck was pulling it out, two anchor dampeners that held the
bitter ends of each cable stroked simultaneously. These fifty-foot-long
pistons inside cylinders about twelve inches in diameter pulled slack
cable off the back, or idle, side of the engine, thereby keeping the
wire taut throughout the system.

When he first reported aboard Columbia, the arresting gear chief had
impressed Johnny with a story about an anchor dampener that sheared its
restraining nut during an arrestment. The suddenly free dampener, as
big as a telephone pole, was forcibly whipped through the aluminum
bulkhead of the engine room into the 0-3-level passageway, where it cut
a sailor on his way to chow sloppily in halt The running cable whipped
the dampener like a scythe. It sliced through a dozen officers’
stateroom bulkheads as if they were so much tissue paper. When the
dampener had accomplished a 180-degree turn, it reentered the engine
room and skewered the engine like a mighty spear, exploding sheaves and
showering the room, and the operator, with sharp, molten-hot metal
fragments. All this took place in about a second and a half.
Fortunately the plane on the flight deck was successfully arrested
before the now unanchored cable could run completely off the engine, but
the engine room was a shambles and the operator went to the hospital
with critical injuries.

As a result of this little story, Johnny Arbogast developed a habit of
running his eyes over the anchor dampeners after each arrestment.
Tonight, after setting the engine to receive an A-6, he saw something
that he had never before seen. As the anchor dampeners stroked back
into battery after the last engagement, the steel cable on one of them
had kinked about six inches out from the connecting socket that held the
bitter end of the cable to the dampener piston.

A kink, like a kink in a garden hose.

Johnny Arbogast stared, not quite sure his eyes could be believed.

Yep, a kink.

If this engine takes a hit, that cable could break, right there at the
kink!

Johnny fumbled with the mouthpiece of the sound-powered phone unit
hanging on his chest. He pushed the talk button and blurted, “Three’s
foul. Three’s not ready.”

“What?” This from the deck-edge operator, who had already told the
arresting gear officer that all the engines were set. And he had
delivered this message over a half minute ago, maybe even a minute.

“Three’s not ready,” Johnny Arbogast howled into his mouthpiece. “Foul
deck!”

And then Johnny did what any sensible man would have done: he tore off
the sound-powered headset and ran for his life.

Up on the fantail catwalk the deck-edge operator shouted at the
arresting gear officer, “Three’s not ready.”

The gear officer was still standing on the starboard foul line on the
flight deck and he didn’t hear what the operator said. He eyed the A-6
in the groove and bent toward the sailor, who was also looking over his
shoulder at the approaching plane, now almost at the ramp.

“Foul deck,” the sailor roared above the swelling whine of the engines
of the approaching plane.

The gear officer’s reaction was automatic. He released the trigger on
the pistol grip he held in his hand and shouted, “What the hell is
wrong?”

Across the landing area on the LSO’s platform the green “ready deck”
light went out and the red “foul deck” light came on.

Hugh Skidmore was looking intently at the A-6 Intruder almost at the
ramp when he saw the red light on the edge of his peripheral vision. He
was faced with an instant discision.

He had no way of knowing why the deck was foulhe only knew that it was.
A plane may have rolled into the landing area, a man may have wandered
into the unsafe zone … any one of a hundred things could have gone
wrong and all one hundred were bad.

So Hugh Skidmore squeezed the red button on the pistol grip he held in
his hand, triggering a bank of flashing red lights mounted above the
meatball. At the same time he roared into his radio-telephone,
“Wave-off, wave-off.”

The flashing wave-off lights and the radio message imprinted themselves
on Jake Grafton’s brain at the same time.

His reaction was automatic. The throttles went full forward as he
thumbed in the speed brakes and the control stick came aft.

Unfortunately jet engines do not provide instantaneous power as piston
engines do: the revs can build only as fast as the burners can handle
the increasing fuel flow, which is metered through a fuel control unit
to prevent flooding the engine and flaming it out. And power builds
with revs, Tonight the back stick and the gradually increasing engine
power flattened the A-6’s descent, then stopped it … four feet above
the deck.

The howling warplane crossed the third wire with its nose well up,
boards in, engines winding to full screech, but with its tailhook
dangling.

From his vantage point near the fantail the arresting gear officer
watched in horror as the tailhook kissed the top of the third wire, then
snagged the fourth. The plane continued forward for a heartbeat, then
seemed to stop in midair.

It was a lopsided contest. An 18-ton airplane was trying to pull a
95,000-ton ship. The ship won. The airplane fell straight down.

As he took the wave-off, Jake Grafton instinctively knew that it had
come too late. The ship was right there, filling the windscreen. He
kept the angle-of-attack on the optimum indications centered doughnut-by
feeding in back stick while he tried to bend the throttles over the
stops.

Somehow he found the ICS switch with his left thumb and shouted to Flap,
“Hook up!” but the aircraft was already decelerating. The
angle-of-attack indexer showed slow and his eye flicked to the AOA gauge
on the panel, just in time to see the needle sweep counterclockwise to
the peg as the G threw him forward into his harness straps.

Then they fell the four feet to the deck.

The impact snapped his head forward viciously and slammed him downward
into the seat, stunning him.

He got his head up and tried to focus his eyes as cold fear enveloped
him. Are we stopped? Or going off the angled deck? Dazed, scared
clear through and unable to see his instruments, he instinctively placed
the stick in the eightdegree-nose-up position and kept the engines at
full power.

The air boss exploded over the radio: “Jesus Christ, Paddies, why’d you
wave him off in close?”

On the LSO platform Hugh Skidmore was having trouble finding the
transmit button on his radio. He fumbled for it as he stared forward at
the A-6 straining futilely against the fourth wire with its engines
still at full power. Miraculously the airplane seemed to be all in one
piece. Here a hundred yards behind those two jet exhausts without the
protection of a sound-suppression helmet the noise was awesome, a
thunder that numbed the ears and vibrated the soul.

Unwilling to wait for Skidmore’s response, the air boss now roared over
the radio at Jake Grafton: “We got you, son. Kill those engines! You
aren’t going anywhere now.”

Long seconds ticked by before the pilot complied. When he did, finally,
the air boss remembered Skidmore:

“El Ss Ok if you ever, ever, wave off another airplane in close on this
fucking boat I will personally come down there and throw your silly ass
into the goddamn wake. Do you read me, you mindless bastard?”

Skidmore found his voice. “The deck went foul, Boss.”

“We’ll cut up the corpse later. Wave off the guy in the groove so we
can get this squashed A-6 out of the gear and clean the shit out of the
cockpit.”

The plane in the groove was still a half mile out, but Skidmore
obediently triggered the wave-off lights. As he did so he heard the
engines of the A-6 in the gear die as the pilot secured the fuel flow.

Already the arresting gear officer had his troops on deck stripping the
pennant from number-three engine. The rest of the recovery would be
accomplished with only three engines on line.

Skidmore turned to the Real McCoy. “I guess I screwed the pooch on that
one.”

McCoy was still looking at the A-6 up forward. The yellow shirts were
hooking a tow tractor to the nose wheel. He turned his gaze on
Skidmore, who was looking into his face.

He had to say something. “Looks like the boss is safetywired to the
pissed-off position.”

Skidmore nodded toward the stern. “I thought he could make it. I
didn’t think he was that close.”

“Well .. .”

“Oh, hell.”

Jake Grafton stood rubbing his neck in Flight Deck Control, the room in
the base of the carrier’s island superstructure where the aircraft
handler directs the movement of every plane on the ship. Flap Le Beau
stood beside him.

Someone was talking to the handler on the squawk box, apparently someone
in Air Ops. The handler listened awhile, then leaned toward Jake and
said, “You need two more traps. The in-flight engagement was your
fourth.”

“Yeah.”

“If you’re feeling up to it, we’ll give you another plane and send you
out for your last two. Or you can wait until we get to Hawaii and we’ll
do the whole night bit again. It’s up to you. How do you feel?”

Jake used a sleeve to swab the sweat from his forehead and eyes. “What
about tomorrow night?” he asked.

“The captain won’t hold the ship in here against this coast just to qual
one pilot. We have to transit to Hawaii.”

Jake nodded. That made sense. He flexed his shoulders and pivoted his
head slowly.

The fear was gone. Okay, panic. But it was gone. He was still feeling
the adrenaline aftershock, which was normal.

“I’m okay,” he told the handler, who turned to relay the message into
the squawk box.

Flap pulled at Jake’s sleeve. “You don’t have to do this tonight.
There’s no war on. It doesn’t matter a whit whether you get qualled
tonight or a week from now in Hawaii.”

Jake stared. The flippant, kiss-my-ass cool dude he had flown with all
day was gone. The man there now was serious and in total control, with
sharp, intelligent eyes. This must be the Flap Le Beau that was the
legend.

“I can hack it. Are you okay?”

“I am if you are.”

“I am. I gave you a load of shit today just to see if you could handle
a little pressure. You can. You don’t have anything to prove to
anybody.”

Jake shook his head from side to side. “I have to go now so the next
time I’ll know I can.”

A trace of a smile crossed Le Beau’s face. He nodded, just the tiniest
dip of the head, and turned toward the handler.

“What plane do they want us to aviate, Handler-man? Ask the grunts in
Ready Four and have them send up the book.”Please, sir!”

“Of course, sir. Did I leave the please out? What’s come over me? I
must still be all shook up. You know, we came within two inches of
being chocolate and vanilla pudding out there. If we’d fell another two
inches you’d be cleaning us up with spoons. I’m gonna write a thank-you
letter to Jesus.