Top Gun (29 page)

He was over the ship!

Greene pushed forward his throttle to full military power, hearing the Buckeye’s shrill scream as he slammed his bird down,
transforming the silky rush of flight into a roaring, vibrating nightmare. “Trapped!” somebody yelled into his headset as
Greene felt his harness straps bite his shoulders the way his tires were biting the nonskid coating of the deck.

“Power at idle. Feet off the brakes,” Popeye calmly reminded Greene.

Greene didn’t reply. He was flattened against his seatback, willing the plane to stop its forward rush, too busy staring wide-eyed
at the fast-approaching front edge of the angled flight deck—and the
sea!

“P-Popeye! W-We’re going over into the nets!” Greene gasped.

“Nah,” Popeye replied. He was sounding bored. “There, see?”

The trapped bird had rolled forward about three hundred feet before coming to a halt; its forward velocity had stretched the
one-and-a-half-inch-diameter arresting cable as if it were an elastic band. Greene started to relax as the Buckeye came to
a halt, and then began to roll backward a few feet, due to the arresting cable’s rebound.

“Five five five, OK,” the LSO radioed.

Greene smiled. “OK” indicated that Greene had made a perfect landing, trapping the number-three cable.

“Welcome aboard. Air Force,” the LSO signed off.

“Not bad,” Popeye commented. “Welcome to the Navy.”

“Welcome to the Navy,” Greene now murmured out loud, staring blindly at the deck of cards in his hand. Over on the far side
of the rec room, the TV still offered Captain Bly in counterpoint to Gillis’s snoring.

That first time out landing on a carrier had kind of been like Greene’s first time going all the way with a girl: Driving
that initial glide path was scary as hell, but once you’d been through the routine, the rest was just perfecting your technique.

In the weeks after, Greene completed CARQUAL. He progressed to solo VFI landings in his Buckeye, practiced IFS instrument
and night landings in the simulator and then did the real thing with a backseater, and finally soloed at night. Then he went
through the whole training schedule again, this time in the far more grown-up A-4 Skyhawk. The humpbacked, short-tempered
“Scooter” truly made the lovable little Buck seem like a child’s three-wheeler.

In addition, Greene learned how to take off from a carrier flight deck, which was a snap compared to setting down on one.
After all, when you were strapped into a trimmed-for-takeoff bird with a wide-open throttle and then catapulted away, doing
zero to 170 miles per hour in two seconds, you were pretty much just along for the ride.

From Pensacola, Greene moved on to Corpus Christi, Texas, into a Replacement Air Group for a stint familiarizing himself with
the plane he’d be flying during his carrier tour. That was when interservice jealousy on the part of the Navy first reared
its ugly head, and Air Force Captain Robbie Greene, for the first time in his military career, found himself a victim of the
infamous military catch-22 mentality. All along Greene had expected to be destined for the front seat of a carrier based F-4
Phantom: the core jet fighter shared by both the Air Force and Navy. After all, the whole purpose of the Indian Giver project
was to acquaint Greene with Navy air-combat tactics. Unfortunately, each gentleman on the list of naval flight officers available
to crew with Greene in the tandem-seat Phantom made it clear that he was not interested in becoming famous—or infamous—as
the only naval aviator to serve as the backseat “bear” radar intercept officer to an Air Force pilot. Now, any one of those
RIOs in waiting could have been
ordered
to fly with Greene, but everyone involved realized that forcing an RIO into Greene’s backseat would have defeated the whole
purpose of Indian Giver. You needed the spirit of teamwork to excel with the Phantom: why else was the “Double Ugly” a two-man
airplane in the first place? Anything less than wholehearted support from his bear and Greene might just as well go back home
to the Air Force, because he was not going to be in a position to apply himself to learning anything about Navy air-combat
manuevers.

There
was
a single-seat supersonic jet fighter in the Navy’s arsenal: the shit-hot F-8 Crusader. Greene hungered for it. The F-8 was
fast, carried a gun, and Greene had never liked the idea of flying with backseaters in the first place. The problem—enter
catch-22—was that Greene had already been slotted for duty aboard carrier CV-22, the USS
Sea Bear,
and the
Sea Bear
didn’t fly Crusaders, just dual-seat F-4 Phantoms, A-6 Intruders, and single-seat A-7 Corsair lls. The tandem-seat A-6 Intruder
was a subsonic attack-bomber, which made it totally unsuitable for Greene, even if the Navy could have come up with an NFO
to fly with him. The A-7 Corsair was a subsonic version of the F-8 Crusader fighter that Greene had wanted but couldn’t get.
The A-7 was a visual-flight-rules-only operable light attack craft that would have been right at home flying close-support
missions for the infantry back in Korea. It was a totally unsuitable airplane for a fighter-jock participant in Indian Giver
to fly, but the Navy argued that at least it carried a gun, and, at times, a pair of fuselage-mounted Sidewinder heat-seekers—to
be used only for self-defense, of course.

And so, Greene, kicking and screaming, was assigned to an A-7 RAG for six weeks of training in the cuddly, low-level “Mud
Mover” Corsair. Greene continued to complain his head off about the stupidity of the assignment: why not just issue him a
grenade launcher and assign him to the Marines if ground support was what the Navy had in mind for him? His complaints were
duly noted, but nothing happened in response to them. Finally, a kindly CO advised Greene to save his breath. It seemed that
the Air Force and Navy brass were so pleased with how smoothly the “important” Air Force personnel had been integrated into
the Top Gun school at Miramar that nobody was in the least interested in spoiling the interservice love fest by heeding Captain
Greene’s may-day.

When Greene’s RAG time was done, he was airlifted onto the
Sea Bear,
where for the past three months he’d been flying regular cyclic ops in the A-7, puttering around sub-sonically, strafing
towed targets and the like, while high above him the elite, supersonic Phantoms were mixing it up in practice furballs. Talk
about being the ugly duckling!

On the TV, the movie abruptly went off in midscene, followed by static hissing from the speaker and filling the screen.

Gillis snorted awake. He was a sandy-haired, soft-featured man in his twenties, wearing the Navy’s summer-issue uniform of
tan cotton trousers and a short-sleeve, open-neck shirt. Gillis sat up, blinking and yawning, staring at the TV, and then,
accusingly, at Greene.

“Hey,” Gillis said. “I was watching that.”

Greene shrugged. “I didn’t touch it. It just went off.”

The television’s sound and picture returned, but instead of the movie the TV showed a nervous-looking junior officer seated
behind a desk. Behind the officer was the world map divided into a time zones backdrop they used for the daily news broadcasts.

“This is a special bulletin,” announced the TV anchorman, reading from a stack of papers on his desk. “We have been informed
that early this morning an American container ship, the merchantman
Mayaguez,
en route across the Gulf of Thailand, has been fired upon and boarded by Cambodian forces. “

“Holy shit,” Gillis breathed, getting out of his chair to turn up the volume.

The TV anchorman continued: “… President Ford and the National Security Council have met, and the White House has since issued
the following statement. I quote: The President, concerned that the
Mayaguez
has been seized on the high seas, condemns the Cambodians for this act of piracy, and further demands the immediate release
of the ship. Failure to do so will have the utmost serious consequences.’ End of quote.”

The reporter paused. “The
Sea Bear
has been ordered to the Gulf of Thailand concerning this matter. The skipper anticipates that the
Sea Bear
will be operational to the vicinity in approximately forty-eight hours, and has authorized further news bulletins to be broadcast
as they come in.” The newscaster smiled shyly. “Now, back to the movie.”

Greene jumped up to turn down the sound. “What a break!” he said excitedly. “We’re going to see some action!”

“Bullshit.” Gillis shook his head. “No way is it going to come to that. The Commies will back down.” He looked thoughtful.
“I think that diplomacy will resolve the issue.”

“Maybe it will,” Greene said. “On the other hand, the
Sea Bear,
and who knows how many other ships are heading into the area…”

Greene glanced at his watch. It was a little after 1600 hours. The flights would be wrapping up for the afternoon. He headed
for the door, thinking that now was a perfect time to start the ball rolling if he wanted a piece of the possible action to
come.

The man to see was Gil Brody, the carrier’s air boss.

*    *    *

Greene didn’t get to see Brody until late the next day. As the chief officer in charge of supervising all air operations,
Brody ended up spending the rest of Monday and most of Tuesday tied up in meetings with the skipper and the rest of the executive
officers concerning the
Mayaguez
incident. Greene alternately checked in with the air boss’s clerk and cooled his heels waiting, brooding anxiously over his
chance to get a piece of the increasingly likely action as more developments concerning the
Mayaguez
were announced.

Late Monday night it was revealed that at about the same time the
Sea Bear
had been ordered to make full speed toward the Gulf of Thailand, Navy reconnaissance aircraft from out of Subic Bay, the
Philippines, had been ordered to locate the captured American ship and keep it under surveillance. The planes had found the
Mayaguez.
reporting it anchored off the Cambodian mainland, near the port of Kompong Som. The excitement level on board the
Sea Bear
was raised a notch when it became known that the Navy’s unarmed reconnaissance planes had been fired upon by the Cambodian
patrol boats ringing the
Mayaguez.
Fortunately, none of the high-flying planes had been hit.

Tuesday morning it was reported that the Third Marine Division on Okinawa had been alerted. Over a thousand marines were being
flown to Utapao Air Base in Thailand. Later that day, reports came in that the President had ordered armed USAF aircraft from
out of Utapao to protect the Navy’s surveillance craft from the Cambodian gunboats, and that the Cambodians had been warned
that the use of force by the United States was becoming increasingly likely unless the
Mayaguez
and its crew were released.

Clearly, the
Mayaguez
situation’s status had been upgraded from “incident” to “crisis.”

(Two)

“What’s the matter. Air Force?” Gil Brody, the
Sea Bear’s
air officer sarcastically asked Robbie Greene. Brody was a trim, muscular man in his forties, with thick black eyebrows,
dark hair gone silver at the temples, and a salt-and-pepper mustache. On his open-neck shirt collar he wore a naval commander’s
oak leaves.

Brody leaned back in his swivel chair behind his gray metal desk. “You look like a man who’s got his pecker caught in the
catapult.”

It was a little after seven on Tuesday night. The latest on the
Mayaguez
was that USAF warplanes were on the scene and drawing heavy machine-gun fire from the Cambodian patrol boats. So far no airplanes
had been hit. Upon the President’s orders, the Air Force planes had refrained from firing back at the Cambodians.

At seven o’clock, Greene had been notified that the air boss had a few minutes free in which to see him, and so Greene had
come charging into Brody’s office, which was small and windowless, like most everything else on this carrier. A poster taped
to the wall behind Brody’s desk showed a snowcapped mountain in Japan. Surrounding the poster were plaques Brody had won in
various martial arts tournaments. More awards and trophies for placing in various martial-arts competitions filled several
bracket shelves. Brody was known to be a martial-arts fanatic. He’d spent a year studying in Japan, and in his spare time
ran classes on board the
Sea Bear.
Greene, wanting to pursue the martial-arts studies he’d begun at Wright-Patterson AFB, had taken some of Brody’s classes
for a while, but then he’d dropped out.

“Speak up. Air Force!” Brody was demanding. “What’s on your mind?”

Greene didn’t know how to begin. He’d come in here like gangbusters, his heart pounding and his pulse racing, thinking he
was all charged up to make his case. Trouble was, Greene had spent the past sixteen hours rehearsing his piece. Now that he
was actually in Brody’s office, he found himself gone stale, with all of his pretty speeches gone out of his head.

Brody took a pack of Marlboros from out of his shirt pocket and lit one with a banged-up-looking Zippo. “Past day and a half,
I’ve been up to my ass with meetings concerning how we might have to put the hurt on the Cambodians,” he muttered.

Greene nodded. Brody and his people were the supreme traffic cops for all the activity on the carrier’s flight deck. During
aircraft launches and recoveries, it was Brody and his gang who occupied Pri-Fly, or Primary Flight Control, a glassed-in
balcony just beneath the carrier’s bridge. Everyone—CCATC air controllers, LSO officers and staff, catapult crews, deck supervisors,
and aircraft handlers (responsible for maneuvering the airplanes about the crowded deck)—answered to the air boss. From what
Greene had been told, even the carrier’s skipper made it a point to quietly occupy himself with steering his boat when the
air boss was doing his thing.

“Finally, I get a little breather from all those meetings,” Brody muttered. “But then, I find out that
you
got some sort of bone to pick with me.”