The Intruders (21 page)

This was the first cruise beyond America’s offshore waters for many of
these young men. More than a few sniffed the wet sea wind and thought
they could detect a spicy, foreign flavor that they had never whiffed
before in the nitrogenoxygen mixture they had spent their lives inhaling
back in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Even the homesick and lovelorn
admitted this was one hell of a fine adventure. If the folks at home
could only see this . . .

So steaming one behind the other, the gray ships transited the strait
while the young men on deck soaked up impressions that would remain with
them for as long as they lived.

Those men standing on the carrier’s fantail saw something else: two
thousand yards astern the thin sail of a nuclearpowered attack submarine
made a modest bow wave. How long she had been there, running on the
surface, no one on the flight deck was sure, but there she was. Those
with binoculars could just make out a small American flag fluttering
from the periscope.

Once through the strait, the ship went to flight quarters and the
tourists cleared the flight deck. Except for the few pilots who had
launched in the interception of the Russian Bears, most of the aviators
had not flown for nine days. This meant that they needed a day catapult
shot and trap they could legally fly at night. With this requirement in
the staff had laid on a series of surface surveillance missions in the
Sea of Japan. These missions would also show the flag, would once again
put carrier-borne warplanes over the merchantmen and warships that plied
these waters just in case anyone had become bored listening to American
ambassador By the time the carrier hurled her first planes down the
catapults, the submarine had quietly slipped back into the depths.

Jake was not scheduled to fly today. He was, however, on the flight
schedule-two watches in Pried-Fly and one after dark in the carrier air
traffic control center, CATCC, pronounced cat-see. During these watches
he was the squadron representative, to be called upon by the powers that
be to offer expert advice on the A-6 should such advice become
necessary. There was an A-6 NATOPS manual in each compartment for him
to refer to, and before each watch he found it and checked it to make
sure it was all there. Then he stood with observers from the other
squadrons with the book in his hand, watching and listening.

In addition to ensuring the air boss and Air Ops officer had instant
access to knowledgeable people, these watches were a learning experience
for the observers. Here they could observe how the aircraft were
controlled, why problems arose, and watch those problems being solved.
In CATCC they could also watch the air wing commander, known as CAG, and
their own skippers as they sat beside the Air Ops officer on his throne
and answered queries and offered advice. Air Ops often conferred with
the skipper of the ship via squawk box. Every facet of night carrier
operations was closely scrutinized and heavily supervised. While the
junior officer aloft in the night sweated in his cockpit, he was
certainly not alone. Not as long as his radio worked.

During the day the seas became rougher and the velocity of the wind
increased. By sunset the overcast was low and getting lower. Below the
clouds visibility was decreasing. A warm front was coming into the
area.

Jake watched the first night recovery on the ready room PLAT monitor as
he did paperwork. The deck was moving and there were three bolters. The
second night recovery Jake spent in CATCC with the NATOPS book in his
hand. It was raining outside. Two pilots were waved off and four
boltered, one of them twice. One of the tankers was sour and a flailex
developed when the spare tanker slid on the wet catapult track during
hook-up and had to be pushed back with a flight deck tractor. While
this mess kept the deck foul, the LsOs waved Off three planes into the
already-full bolter pattern.

When the last plane was abOard-the recovery took thirty-eight
minutes-Jake headed for his stateroom to work on a training report.

He was still at it half an hour later when the Real McCoy came in, threw
his flight deck helmet and LSO logbook onto his desk and flopped into
his bunk. “Aye yei yei! What a night! They’re using those sticks to
kill rats in the cockpits and the weather is getting worse.”

“You were on the platform?” Jake meant the LSO’s platform on the edge of
the flight deck.

“YeP. I’m wavin’ ‘cm. Another great Navy night, I can tell you. A
real Chinese fire drill. Three miles visibility under a thousand-foot
overcast, solid clag up to twenty-one grand, ten-foot swells-why didn’t
I have the sense to join the Air Farce? The boys in blue would have
closed up shop and gone to the club three hours ago.”The next war,” Jake
muttered.

“Next war, Air Force,” McCoy agreed. “So, wanna stand on the platform
with me for the next act?”

Jake regarded his half-finished report with disgust, got out of his
chair and stretched. “Why not? I’ve listened to you Wavers preach and
moan for so long that I could probably do it myself.”

McCoy snorted. “That’ll be the day!”

Jake did a clumsy tap dance for several seconds, then struck a pose. “He
looked good going by me.”

McCoy groaned and closed his eyes. He was a selfproclaimed master of
the short catnap, so Jake timed it.

Sixty-five seconds after the LSO closed his eyes he was snoring gently.

They came out of the skin of the ship by climbing a short ladder to the
catwalk that surrounded the flight deck, yet was about four feet below
flight deck level.

The noise of twenty jet engines at idle on the flight deck was piercing,
even through their ear protectors. Raindrops swirling in the strong
wind displaced by the ship’s structure came from every direction,
seemingly almost at once, even up through the gridwork at their feet.
The wind blew with strength, an ominous presence, coming from total
darkness, blackness so complete that for a second or two Jake felt as if
he had lost his vision. This dark universe of wind and water was
permeated by the acrid stench of jet exhaust, which burned his nose and
made his eyes water.

Gradually his eyes became accustomed to the red glow of the flight deck
lights and he could see things-the outline of the catwalk, the rails,
the round swelling shapes of the life raft canisters suspended outboard
of the catwalk railing, and in the midst of that void beyond the rail,
several fixed lights. The escorts. Above his head were tails of
airplanes.

He and McCoy crouched low as they proceeded aft toward the LSO platform
to avoid those invisible rivers of hot exhaust that might be flowing
just above their heads. Might be. The only sure way to find one was to
walk into it.

Somewhere aloft in the night sky, high above the ship, were airplanes.
With men in them. Men sitting strapped to ejection seats, studying
dials and gauges, riding the turbulence, watching fuel gauges march
mercilessly toward zero.

Jake and the Real McCoy climbed a ladder to the LSOs’ platform as the
first of the planes on deck rode a catapult into the night sky. Both
men watched the plane’s lights as it climbed straight ahead of the ship.
There-they were getting fuzzy …

And then they were gone, swallowed up by the night.

“Six or seven hundred feet, a couple of miles viz. nat’s it,” McCoy
roared into Jake’s ear.

The petty officer who assisted the LSOs was already on the platform
getting out the radio handsets, plugging in cords, checking the PLAT
monitor, domung his sound-powered headset and checking in with the
enlisted talkers in Pried-Fly and Air Ops.

The platform was not large, maybe six feet by six feet, a wooden grid
that jutted from the port side of the flight deck.

To protect the signal officers from wind and et blast, a pie ice of
black canvas stretched on a steel frame was rigged on the forward edge
of the platform, like a wall. So the platform was an open stage facing
aft, toward the glide slope.

Under the edges of the platform, aft and on the seaward side, hung a
safety net to catch anyone who inadvertently fell off the platform. Or
jumped. Because if a pilot lost it on the glide slope in close and
veered toward the platform, going into the net was the only way for the
LSOs to save their lives.

Jake Grafton glanced down into the blackness. And saw nothing. “Relax,
shipmate,” McCoy told him. “The net’s there. Honest Injun.”

The platform was just aft of the first wire, about four hundred feet
away from the ship’s center of gravity, so it was moving. Up and down,
up and down.

As McCoy checked the lights on the Fresnel lens, which was several
hundred feet forward of the platform, Jake watched. McCoy triggered the
wave-off lights, the cut lights, adjusted the intensity of the lens. The
lights seemed to behave appropriately and soon he was satisfied.

The Fresnel lens was, in Jake’s mind, one of the engineering triumphs
that made carrier aviation in the jet age possible. In the earliest
days, aboard the old Langley, pilots made approaches to the deck without
help. One windy day one of the senior officers grabbed a couple signal
flags and rushed to the fantail to signal to a young aviator who was
having trouble with his approach. This innovation was so successful
that an officer was soon stationed there to assist all the aviators with
signal flags, or paddles. This officer helped the pilot with glide
slope and lineup, and since the carriers all had straight decks, gave
the vital engine “cut” signal that required the aviator to pull his
throttle to idle and flare.

When angled decks and jets with higher landing speeds came along, it
became obvious that a new system was required. As usual, the British
were the innovators. They rigged a mirror on one side of the deck and
directed a high intensity light at it. The light was reflected up the
glide slope.

By rigging a set of reference lights midway up on each side Of the
mirror, a datum was established. A pilot making his approach would see
the light reflected on the mirror-the ball-rise above the datum lights
when he was above glide slope, or high, and descend below it when he was
low. The landing signal officer was retained to assist the pilot with
radio calls, and to give mandatory wave-offs if an approach became
unsafe.

The Fresnel lens was the mirror idea carried one step further. The
light source was now contained within five boxes, stacked one on top of
the other. The datum lights were beside the middle, or third, box. Due
to the way the lens on each light was designed, a horizontally wide but
vertically narrow beam of light was directed up the glide slope by each
box.

Crossing the fantail, the beam from the middle box, the “centered ball,”
was a mere eighteen inches in height.

This was the challenge: a pilot must fly his jet airplane through
turbulent air into an eighteen-inch-thick window in the sky. At night,
with the deck moving as the ship rode a seaway, hitting this window
became extraordinarily difficult, without argument the most difficult
challenge in aviation.

That anyone other than highly skilled, experienced test pi lots could do
it on a regular basis was a tribute to the training the Navy gave its
aviators, and was the reason those who didn’t measure up were ruthlessly
weeded out.

You could do it or you couldn’t-there was no in between.

And yet, no one could do it consistently every time. The task was too
difficult, the skills involved too perishable. So night after night, in
fair weather and foul, they practiced, like they were doing on this
miserable night in the Sea of Japan, eighty miles west of Honshu.

As Jake Grafton stood on the platform staring into the darkness as the
wind swirled rain over him, he was glad that tonight was not his night.
It felt so good to be here, not up there sweating bullets as the plane
bounced around, trying to keep the needles steady, watching the fuel,
knowing that you were going to have to fly that instrument approach to
the ball, then thread the needle to get safely back aboard.

To return to the world of the living, to friends, to food, to letters
from loved ones, to a bunk to sleep in, to a world with a past and a
future. There in that cockpit when you were flying the ball there was
only the present, only the airplane, only the stick in your right hand
and the throttles in your left and the rudder beneath your feet. There
was only the now, this moment for which you had lived your whole life,
this instant during which you called upon everything within you to do
this thing.

Oh, yes. He was glad.

Other LSOs were climbing to the platform now, so Jake moved as far back
as he could to stay out of the way. All these specialists were here to
observe, to see another dozen landings, to polish their skiffs, to
learn. This was normal.

The platform was packed with LSOs on every recovery.

The last airplane to be launched was upon the catapult at full power
when the lights of the first plane on the glide slope appeared out of
the gloomy darkness astern. In seconds the catapult fired and the deck
became unnaturally silent.

The Real was already three feet out onto the deck holding the radio
headset against his ear with his left hand while he held the Fresnel
lens control handle in his right over his head, a signal to his
colleagues that he was aware the deck was foul. Jake leaned sideways
and looked forward around the edge of the canvas screen. The waist
catapult crewmen were working furiously to put the protector plate over
Cat Three’s shuttle and clear the launching gear from the flight deck.
Until they were out of the Ian area, would remain foul.

“Come on, people,” the air boss roared over the flight deck loudspeaker.
He seemed to believe that his troops worked best when properly
stimulated. In any event, he didn’t hesitate to stimulate them. “We’ve
got a Phantom in the groove. Let’s clear the deck.”