The Intruders (12 page)

He glanced at his BN, Flap Le Beau, who had his head pressed against the
radar hood. He was using both hands to twiddle knobs and flip switches,
but he never took his eyes from the radar. Excellent. He knew the
location and function of every knob, button and switch without looking.

When the going got tough there would be no time to look, no time to
fumble for this or that, no time to think.

The colonel’s BN, Allen Bartow, was similarly engaged.

From his vantage point twenty feet out from the colonel’s wingtip, Jake
could see every move Bartow made in the cockpit, could see him pull his
head aft a few inches and eye the computer readouts on the panel just to
the right the radar screen, could see him glance down occasionally,
referring to the notes on his kneeboard.

He had gotten to know Bartow fairly well the last few days. A major
with twelve years in the Corps, Bartow was addicted to French novels. He
read them in French. Just now he was working his way through everything
that Georges Simenon had ever written. He had books stacked everywhere
in his stateroom and earned one in his flight suit, which he pulled out
whenever he had a few minutes to kill.

“I’m retiring as soon as I get my twenty years in,” he told Jake. “On
that very day. Then I’m going to get a doctorate in French literature
and spend the rest of my life teaching.”

“Sounds dull,” Jake said, grinning, just to needle him.

To his surprise Bartow had considered that remark seriously. “Maybe.
Academic life won’t be like the Corps, like LIFE in a squadron. Yet we
all have to give this up sooner or later. I enjoy it now, but when it’s
over I have something else I’ll enjoy just as much. Something
different. So now I’ve got the flying and the guys and the anticipation
of that something else. I’m a pretty rich man And he Jake’s grin.
returned Bartow was rich, Jake reflected ruefully as he watched the
bombardier sitting hunched over his scope. Richer than Jake, anyway.
All Jake had was the flying and the camarade The. He didn’t even have
Callie-he had screwed that up.

Le Beau-he apparently didn’t want anything else. Or did be?

“You got a gal waiting for you?” Jake asked his bombardier without
taking his eyes off the lead plane.

“You can fly this thing and think about women too?”

“I always have time to think about women, You got one stashed
somewhere?”

“Dozens.”

“A special one?”

“Naw. The ones I want to get serious about don’t want me after they’ve
had a good look. I’m just tempered, polished steel, a military
instrument. How we doing on fuel, anyway?”

Jake glanced at the gauges. He punched the buttons to get a reading on
his remaining wing fuel, then finally said, “We’re okay.”

“Uniph. We’re only fifty miles out.” Le Beau went back to the radar.
“Don’t embarrass me. Try to get some decent hits.”

The bombs hanging under the wings were little blue twenty-five-pound
practice bombs. Each one contained a small pyrotechnic cartridge in the
nose that would produce a puff of smoke when the bomb struck, allowing
the hit to be spotted. Each A-6 carried a dozen of these things on
their bomb racks.

The planned drill was for the pilot of each plane to drop the first
half-dozen manually, using the visual bomb sight A la World War II, then
the second six using the aircrafts electronic system. Jake carefully
set the optical sight to the proper mil setting for a forty-degree dive
with a six-thousand-foot release.

Releasing six thousand feet above the target, the slant range was about
nine thousand feet. To drop a bomb nine thousand -feet from a target
and hit it was difficult, of course nearly impossible when you
considered the fact that the wind would affect the bomb’s trajectory
throughout its fall.

Yet that was the dive bomber’s artHitting the target was the payoff.
Five thousand men at sea for months, the treasure spent On ships, Planes
and fueL the blood spilled in training, all to set up that moment when
the bomb struck the target. If the pilot could get it there.

Colonel Haldane expected his pilots to do their damnedest. Last night
he taped a poster to the ready room bulkhead with the names of an his
pilots on it. The poster was just as large, just as prominent as the
One On the bulkhead that recorded each pilot’s landing grades. You had
to be able to get aboard ship safely to be a carrier pilot, but you
weren’t much use in combat unless you could hit the target when the
Chips were down. Haldane said as much. He went further.

“in this squadron, after the upcoming Hawaiian ops period, the , pilots
who are going to lead sections and flights are the pilots with the best
bombing Scores- I guarantee Wul your bombing scores will appear on your
fitness report. I expect each and every one of you to earn your pay on
the bombing range-,, First Lieutenant Doug Harrison couldn’t resist.
“HeY, skipper. You can fly on my wing-” ,If you can out-bomb me, I
will,” Haldane shot back igh Harrison was number four today, flying on
Jake’s wing. You had to admire Harrison, for his chutzpah if nothing
else. Haldane had spent years in Vietnam dive-bombing under fire and
Harrison was just a year out of flight schoolNo fool, Harrison well knew
how good the experienced professionals were and risked ignominy anyway.
Although The was less vocal about it, Jake Grafton took a backseat to no
one when it came to pride in his own flying skills. He had seen his
share of flak and dropped his share of bombs. His name would be at the
top of that ready room poster if it were humanly possible to get it
there.

Major Bartow pumped his fist at Jake, who scooted farther away from the
lead plane. Number two, Captain Harry Digman, came under the lead, his
canopy just a few feet below Haldane’s exhausts, and surfaced where Jake
had been. Now the formation was in right echelon.

Colonel Haldane did the talking on the radio. Cleared into the target
area as a flight of F-4s were leaving, he led his echelon down in a
gentle, sweeping left turn to 15,000 feet, then straightened out for the
run up the bearing line.

Over the target he broke to the left. Ten seconds later the second
plane broke, and Jake ten seconds after that.

Around they came, now strung out, each pilot verifying his clearance
from other airplanes, then concentrating on the target and flying his
own plane.

The first essential for a successful run is to get to the proper roll-in
point. This is that location in space from which you can roll in and
arrive on the proper run-in heading at the preselected dive angle, today
forty degrees. Practice targets, with run-in lines bulldozed into the
earth and marks gouged out as reference points, help the pilots develop
a feel for that correct, perfect place to roll in.

And “roll in” describes the maneuver. Today Jake approached the bearing
line obliquely, at about forty-five degrees off, waiting, watching the
target get nearer and nearer as he ran the trim to one degree nose-down,
the 500-knot setting, while he held the plane level with back stick.

NOW!

He slaps the stick sideways and in a heartbeat has the A-6 past the
vertical, in 135 degrees of bank. Now the stick comes sharply back and
the O’s smash them into their seats as the pilot pulls the nose of the
aircraft to just below the target while he adjusts the throttles. Since
he is carrying low-drag practice bombs today, Jake sets the throttles at
about eighty percent RPM.

G off, stick right to roll her hard to the upright position.

Flap flips on the master armament switch and makes the radio call: “War
Ace Three’s in hot.”

If the pilot has rolled in properly, the plane is now in a forty-degree
dive, the pipper in the bombsight below the target and tracking toward
it. This is where Jake finds it now, although just a little too far
right. He corrects this instantly by forcing the stick to the left,
then jerking the wings back level. This is no Place to try to be smooth
-it is erative that he quickly get the plane into the proper dive unp
with the pipper tracking so that he will have as many seconds as
possible to solve the drift problem. Jake flies his dives with both
hands on the stick, muscling the plane to the position he wants.

A glance at the airspeed–over 400 and increasing-now the altimeter.
Flap is calling the altitudes: “Fourteen … thirteen … forty-one
degrees … twelve …”

The wind is drifting the pipper leftward. Jake rolls right and forces
the pipper back to the right. He wants the pipper to the right of the
bearing line and drifting left toward it, yet at the moment of release
it must still be slightly right of the bull’s-eye. The bomb will
continue to drift during its fall.

And he is steep. He must release with the pipper just a smidgen short
of the target to compensate for that.

Ten … nine … eight Coming down with the pipper tracking toward the
bull’s eye, today a painted white spot in the middle of a white circle,
he glances at the 0-meter. Steady on one. He releases his death grip
on the stick so that he can feel the effect of the trim. Coming toward
neutral, which means he is getting toward 500 knots true airspeed, 465
indicated. The briefest glance at the airspeed indicator-445 and
increasing …

And since the target is several hundred feet above sea level and he has
synchronized the movement of the pepper with the descent, he releases
the bomb two hundred feet above six thousand feet with the pipper at a
five o’clock position on the bull.

And pulls.

Wings level and throttles forward to the stops, pull until the G-meter
needle hits four, then hold it there. He reaches for the master arm
switch with his right hand-his arm weighs a ton with all this G on–and
toggles it off.

Flap again on the radio: “War Ace Three’s off safe.”

With his nose passing the horizon Jake Grafton relaxes the G and scans
the sky for the airplane in front Of himTherel And farther around, the
skipper. Okay. Nose on up and let her soar, converting that diving
airspeed back into altitude.

The spotters on the ground are calling the hits. The skipper’s first
one was seventy-five feet at seven O’clock. His wingman gets a called
score of a hundred-ten feet at twelve.

Jake gets a score of fifty feet at five.

“Overcompensated for the wind,” he mutters to Flap, who has no comment.

Now they are back at 15,000 feet and he pulls the throttles back, steers
a little wider as he makes his turn. He glimpses the flashing wings of
the plane ahead as it rolls into its dive.

“War Ace Four, your hit seventy-five feet at nine o’clock.”

“Harrison’s holding his own with the colonel,” Jake tells Flap, and
chuckles.

He checks the drift of the puffs of smoke from the practice bombs. He
eyes the clouds, glances behind to see where Harrison is, checks his
fuel, checks the annunciator panel for warning lights, then eyes the
target to see where he should go to get to the roll-in.

Master Arm switch on, roll and pull!

“Don’t you just love this shit?” Flap says between altitude calls on
their second dive.

“Bull’s-eye,” the target spotter says as Jake soars upward after
release, and he reaches over and slaps Flap on the thigh.

“With a spoon, Flapjack!” He slams the stick sideways and the aircraft
spins on its longitudinal axis. He stops it after precisely 360 degrees
of roll.

“Okay, okay, you’re the best in the west,” Flap says. “Just keep
popping them in there.”

After their sixth dive, it was Flap’s turn. He had the radar and
computer ready. This time as Jake rolled he had to point the fixed
reticle of the bombsight exactly at the target.

Then he squeezed the commit trigger on the stick and began to fly the
steering commands on the vertical display indicator, the VDI, in the
center of the instrument panel in front of him.

Squeezing the commit trigger told the computer where the target was and
told the radar to track it. While Flap monitored the velocities the
computer was getting from the inertial, the computer Providing steering
commands, windcompensated of course, to guide Jake to the proper release
point, which was that point in space where the bomb could be released to
fall upon the target.

Jake concentrated upon the steering commands and followed them as
precisely as he could. When the computer gave him a pull-up command he
laid on the G while concentrating fiercely on keeping the wings level.
The computer released the weapon and he kept the nose coming up.

“Seventy-five feet at six O’clOck-” He went around to do it again.

,you know,,, he said to Flap, “it’s like they invented a machine to hit
a baseball.”

,Just follow steering, Babe Ruth. This gizmo is smarter than you are.”

,yeah, but I’m an artiste!”

“We ain’t dodging flak today, Jake.”

This was the eternal war-the pilot wanted to drop them all visually and
the bombardier wanted to use the system every time. Both men knew the
system was better and they both knew lake would never admit it. Today
at this practice target the pilot had ideal conditions: a stationary
target with a known elevation, a plowed run-in fine, visual cues on the
ground, no flak, the luxury of repeated runs that allowed him to
property dope the wind. The system of this A-6E was a first-time,
every-time sure thingBut a machine is hard to love.

The four A-6s rendezvoused off target and Harrison, the number-four man,
slid under the other three checking them for hung bombs. Then Jake
checked Harrison. Harrison and number two each had one little blue bomb
still hanging on the racks.

skipper led them up to 20,000 feet and Flap dialed The in the ship’s
TACAN, a radio navigation aid. The mileage readout refused to lock-they
were still too far out–but Flap soon had the ship on radar. One
hundred thirty-two miles.