The Intruders (32 page)

He turned for the hatch that led to the flight deck. The first blast of
cool air laden with rain wiped the future from his mind and left only
the present, this moment, this wild, windy night, this airplane that
awaited him under the dim red island floodlights.

His bird was sitting on Elevator Four. The tail was sticking out over
the water, so he checked every step with his flashlight before he moved
his feet. If you tripped over the threeinch-high combing, you would go
straight into the ocean to join that Russian sailor who went in
yesterday. Poor devil his shipmates didn’t even stop to look for him.
How would you like to go to sea in that man’s navy?

Going around the nose he and Flap passed each other.

“What a night,” Flap muttered.

Both men were wearing their helmets. They had the clear visors down to
keep the rain and salt spray out of their eyes.

The wind made the raindrops hurt as they splattered against exposed
flesh.

Jake took his time preffighting the ejection seat. He was tempted to
hurry at this point so he could sit down and the plane captain could
close the canopy, but he was too old a dog. He checked everything
carefully, methodically while he used his left hand to hang tightly to
the airplane. The motion of the ship seemed magnified out here on this
elevator. The fact he was eight or nine feet above the deck perched on
this boarding ladder and buffeted by the wind and rain didn’t help. He
pulled the safety pins, inspected, counted and stowed them, then he sat.

The plane captain climbed the ladder to help him hook up the mask, don
the leg restraints, and snap the four Koch fittings into place. Then
the plane captain went around to help Flap. When both men were
completely strapped in, he closed the canopy.

Now Jake checked the gear handle, armament switches, circuit breakers,
and arranged the switches for engine start.

He had done all these things so many times that he had to concentrate to
make sure he was seeing what was there and not just what he expected to
see.

When he had the engines started, Flap fired up the computer while Jake
checked the radio and TACAN frequencies.

“Good alignment,” Flap reported, and signaled to the plane captain to
pull the cable that connected the plane to the ship’s inertial
navigation system.

They were ready. Now to sit here warm and reasonably dry and watch the
launch.

The E-2 taxied toward Cat Three on the waist. A cloud of water lifted
from the deck by the wash of the two turboprops blasted everything. The
plane went onto the cat, the JBD rose, then the engines began to moan.
Finally the wingtip lights came on. The Hawkeye accelerated down the
catapult and rose steadily into the night. The lights faded quickly,
then the goo swallowed them.

I’Uh-oh,” Flap said. “Look over there at Real’s plane.”

A crowd of maintenance people had the left engine access door open.
Someone was up on the ladder talking to McCoy.

In less than a minute a figure left the group and headed for Jake’s
plane.

The man on the deck lowered the pilot’s boarding ladder while Jake ran
the canopy open. Then he climbed up. The squadron’s senior
troubleshooter. “Mr. McCoy can’t get his left generator to come on the
fine,” he shouted. Jake had to hold his helmet away from his left ear
to hear. “You’re going in his place.”

“Ms tough luck, huh?”

I,R tight.”

“The breaks of Naval Air

“Be careless.” The sergeant reached for Jake’s hand and shook it, then
shook Flap’s. He went down the boarding ladder and Flap closed the
canopy.

“We’re going,” Jake said on the ICS. “In McCoy’s place.”

“I figured. By God, when they said all-weatheT attack, they meant
all-weather. Have you ever flown before on a night this bad?”

“No.”

“Me either. Just to send a message to the Russians, like the Navy was
an FrD florist. Roses are red, violets are blue, you hit our ships and
we’ll fuck you. The peacetime military ain’t what it was advertised to
be. No way, man.”

The yellow-shirted taxi director was signaling for the blueshirts to
break down the fie-downs. Jake put his feet on the brakes. “Here we
go.”

It never gets any easier. In the darkness the rain streaming over the
windshield blurred what little light there was and the slick deck and
wind made taxiing difficult. Just beyond the bow the abyss gaped at
him.

He ran through possible emergencies as he eased the plane toward the
cat.

Total electrical failure while taking the cat shot was the emergency he
feared the most. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what to do-he did. The
doing of it in a cockpit lit only by Flap’s flashlight as adrenaline
surged through you like a lightning bolt would be the trick. You had
just one chance, in an envelope of opportunity that would be open for
only a few seconds. You had to do it right regardless or you would be
instantly, totally dead.

“Why do we do this shit?” he muttered at Flap as they taxied toward the
cat.

“Because we’re too lazy for honest work and too stupid to steal.”

The truth of the matter was that he feared and loathed night cat shots.
And flying at night, especially night instrument flight. There was
nothing fun about it, no beauty, no glamour, no appeal to his sense of
adventure, no sense that this was a thing worth doing. The needles and
gauges were perverse gadgets that demanded his total concentration to
make behave. Then the night flight was topped off with a night carrier
landing-he once described a night carrier hop as sort of like eating an
old tennis shoe for dinner, then choking down a sock for dessert.

Tonight as he ran through the launch procedures and ran the engines up
to full power, rancid fear occupied a portion of his attention. A small
portion, it is true, but it was there.

He tried to fight it back, to wrestle the beast back into its cage deep
in his subconscious, but without success.

. Wipe out the cockpit with the controls, check the engine instruments
… all okay.

Jumping Jack Bean was the shooter. When Jake turned on his exterior
lights, he saluted the cockpit perfunctorily with his right hand while
he kept giving the “full power” signal with the wand in his left hand.
Jake could see he was looking up the deck, waiting for the bow to reach
the bottom of its plunge into a trough between the swells.

Now Bean lunged forward and touched the wand to the deck. The bow must
be rising.

The plane shot forward.

Jake’s eyes settled on the attitude instruments.

The forward edge of the flight deck swept under the nose.

Warning lights out, rotate to eight degrees, airspeed okay, gear up.

“Positive rate of climb,” Flap reported, then keyed the radio and
reported to Departure Control.

The climb went quickly because the plane was carrying only a
two-thousand-pound belly tank and four empty bomb racks. But they had a
long way to climb. They finally cleared the clouds at 21,000 feet and
found the night sky filled with stars.

An EA-6B Prowler was already there, waiting for them.

It was level at 22,000 feet, on the five-mile arc around the ship. Its
exterior lights seemed weak, almost lonely as they flickered in the
starry night.

The Prowler was a single-purpose aircraft, designed solely wage
electronic war. Grumman had lengthened the basic -6 airframe enough to
accept two side-by-side cockpits, so addition to the pilot the plane
carried three electronic warfare specialists known as ECMOs, or
electronic countermeasures officers. Special antennae high on the tail
and at various other places on the plane allowed the specialists to
detect enemy radar transmissions, which they then jammed or deceived by
the use of countermeasures pods that hung on the wing weapons stations.
Tonight, in addition to the pods, this Prowler carried a
two-thousand-pound fuel tank on its belly station. Although the EA-6B
was capable of carrying a couple missiles to defend itself, Jake had
never seen one armed.

As expensive as Boeing 747s, these state-of-the-art aircraft had not
been allowed to cross into North Vietnam after they joined the fleet,
which degraded their effectiveness but ensured that if one were lost,
the Communists would not get a peek at the technology. Here, again,
America traded airplanes and lives in a meaningless war rather than risk
compromising the technological edge it had to have to win a war with the
Soviets, a war for national survival.

Jake thought about that now-about trading lives to keep the secrets-as
he flew in formation with the Prowler and looked at the telltale outline
of helmeted heads in the cockpits looking back at him. Then the Prowler
pilot passed Jake the lead, killed his exterior lights, slid aft and
crossed under to take up a position on Jake’s right wing.

The Prowler pilot was Commander Reese, the skipper of the squadron. He
was about five and a half feet tall, wore a pencil-thin mustache, and
delighted in practical jokes. Inevitably, given his stature, he had
acquired the nickname of Pee Wee.

Jake retarded the throttles and lowered the nose. In seconds the clouds
closed in around the descending planes and blotted out the stars.

“Departure, War Ace Five Oh Two and company headed southeast,
descending.

“Roger, War Ace. Switch to Strike.”

“Switching.

Flap twirled the radio channelization knob and waited for the Prowler to
check in on frequency. Then he called Strike.

Flying in this goo, at night, wasn’t really flying at all. It was like
a simulator. The world ended at the windshield.

Oh, if you turned your head you could see the fuzzy glow of the wing-tip
lights, and if you looked back right you could see your right wing-tip
light reflecting off the skin of the Prowler that hung there, but there
was no sense of speed or movement. Occasional little turbulence jolts
were the only reminder that this box decorated with dim red lights,
gauges and switches wasn’t welded to the earth.

The big plan was for each bomber and its accompanying Prowler to run a
mock attack on the Soviet task group as close to simultaneously as
possible. Jake would approach from the southwest, Colonel Haldane from
the northwest.

The E-2 Hawkeye, the Hummer, would monitor their progress and coordinate
the attack. However, each A-6 BN had to find the task group on radar
before they sank below the radar horizon. Then the bombers would run in
at five hundred feet. In an actual attack they would come in lower,
perhaps as low as two hundred, but not at ght, not In t us weather, for
drill. The risks of flying that close to the sea were too great.

Flap started the video recorder, a device that the A-6A never had. This
device would record everything seen on the radar screen, all the
computer and inertial data, as well as the conversation on the radio and
in the cockpit.

“Recorder’s on,” he told Jake. “Keep it clean.”

This electronic record of the attack could be used for poststrike
analysis, or, as CAG had hinted in the brief, sent to Washington to show
to any bigwigs or congressmen who wanted to know what, exactly, the Navy
had done in response to the collision at sea.

Had the Soviet skipper intended to bump the carrier? Did he tell the
truth to his superiors? These imponderables had of course been weighed
in Washington, and orders had been sent to the other side of the earth.

It was midafternoon in Washington. The city would be humming with the
usual mix of tourists, government workers anxious to begin their
afternoon trek to the suburbs, the latest tunes coming over the radios,
soap operas on television …

Jake wondered about the weather there. Late November.

Was it cold, rainy, overcast?

AB those people in America, finishing up another Monday, and he and Flap
were here, over the Indian Ocean, passing ten thousand feet with a
Prowler on their wing and a Soviet task group somewhere in the night
ahead.

“See it yet?), “No. Stop at eight thousand and hold there.”

As they flew eastward the turbulence increased. Jake had Flap arrange
his rearview mirror so he could keep tabs on the Prowler. Pee Wee Reese
seemed to be hanging in there pretty well. He had to. If he lost sight
of the bomber, he would have to break off. Two planes feeling for each
other in this soup would be a fine way to arrange a midair collision.

“The Commies aren’t where they’re supposed to be,” Flap said finally.

“You sure?”

“All I know is that the radar screen is empty. Rocket scientist that I
am, I deduce the Reds aren’t where the spies said they would be. Or
Columbia’s inertial was all screwed up and this is the wrong ocean. Or
all the Reds have sunk.

Those are the possibilities.”

“Better ask Black Eagle.`

It turned out the E-2 was also looking for the Soviets at the maximum
range of its radar. It soon found them, steaming hard to the northeast,
directly away from Jake and Flap and directly toward the line of
thunderstorms that had just passed over them.

“They know something’s up,” Jake said.

“Terrific. They’re at general quarters expecting us and we’ll have to
go under thunderstorms to get to them, And to think we almost didn’t get
a date for this party.”

“Man, we’re having fun now.”

Flap didn’t reply. He was busy.

T

After a bit he said, “Okay, I got ‘em. Give me a few moments to get a
course and speed and then we’ll go down.”

While he was talking the electronic warfare (EW) panel chirped. A
Soviet search radar was painting them. In addition to the flashing
light on the panel when the beam swept them, Jake heard a baritone chirp
in his headset.

So much for surprise.

The turbulence was getting worse. The bouncing was constant now. Rain
coursed around the windscreen and across the canopy. “Radar is getting
degraded,” Flap muttered.