Sometimes ― not often, but sometimes ― something just plain went wrong with the equipment, and the aircraft was given a nudge instead of a kick. Batman had seen it happen more than once. On one occasion, pilot and RIO had ejected as their Tomcat fell toward the sea. The RIO had survived, but the aviator had been recovered from the sea by helicopter later, dead, his neck broken.
Even in peacetime, flying jets off a carrier was one hairy way to earn your paycheck.
It was always a bit unsettling then to sit and wait in line for your turn at the cat. Batman liked being in control; he was very good at what he did ― which was flying a high-performance Navy fighter ― and he disliked just sitting there, strapped into his ejection seat hoping that somebody else got their figures right and pushed the right sequence of buttons.
He’d been giving a lot of thought to control, lately, especially as it related to his future. Aboard the Jefferson, Batman had a playboy’s rep; when he’d first checked in with the VF-95 Vipers, several years earlier, he’d been something of a hot dog, young, brash, and just a bit too eager to bend or break the regs when it suited him, especially when he was flying.
No more. He’d met a girl two months ago, a wonderful girl… and he was seriously considering giving up the Navy and settling down.
There’d been a time, not so many years back, when Batman would have howled with derision at the thought that he could ever be anything other than a naval aviator. He loved flying, loved it with a passion that put flight at the very core of his entire life. He’d joined the Navy in the first place precisely because, in his opinion, naval aviators were better than any other military pilots; they had to be, to let themselves be hurled off a pitching flight deck at 170 knots… or to trap on the carrier deck after hours in the air, often in the dark and in stormy, wet, or visibility-poor weather.
But after more than ten years in the Navy, he was beginning to look for something more than the heart-pounding slam of acceleration when he pushed the throttles to Zone Five burner.
He was beginning to realize that Sunny Tomlinson might just be that something more.
Ahead, another F-14 waited on Cat Three as the dance on the deck continued, White Shirts completing their safety checks, red-shirted ordnancemen checking the aircraft’s weapons, making certain the arming pins with their red-tagged wires were pulled, making double-certain each of the F-14’s missiles ― Sidewinder, AMRAAM, and Phoenix ― was secure. Then the jet blast deflector, the JBD, slowly rose from the deck into an upright position squarely behind the Tomcat, obscuring it from Batman’s view.
In less than a minute, however, the F-14 ahead thundered off the angled flight deck, its F110-GE 400 engines glowing like twin bright orange eyes as the catstroke hurled it off the waist and into the sky, following the Hornet. In a swirl of steam, the JBD folded back down to the deck, and Batman eased Tomcat 201 forward, guiding it over the slot where green-shirted hookup men ran the catapult shuttle back to the start.
Everywhere on the deck around him, the dance continued, an ant-heap scurrying of rushed but purposeful behavior. Four to five hundred men were working together on the deck, moving in close synchronization, the entire production directed by the Air Boss in his glassed-in aerie high up on the island, in Pri-Fly. Things were moving fast this morning, as if to compensate for the unexpected interruption in flight activities last night. With the survivors of the sunken Victor III’s crew aboard now and with the Jefferson well into her operational area in the eastern end of the Black Sea, the launches and recoveries were going like clockwork, the carrier flexing her airborne muscles.
A Green Shirt standing to the starboard side of the F-14 held up a board reading 62500, providing Batman with verification of the Tomcat’s total weight in pounds ― aircraft, fuel, and weapons. He nodded agreement; the same weight would be fed to the catapult officer in his domed-over hideaway on the deck, letting him know just what settings to call for from the cat crew below. Get it right, guy, Batman thought with a flash of gallows humor. In fact, every man and woman aboard the ship knew his or her job as well as he knew his.
But there were so many things that could go wrong. Not even the instruments were fast enough to keep up with everything that happened during the catstroke; launch was a supreme gesture of blind faith in shipmates and in technology.
A Red Shirt held up a bundle of wires, each with a red tag fixed to one end. There were six of them, representing two AIM-9M Sidewinders and four AMRAAM radar-guided missiles… correct. A clatter of chains beneath Batman’s feet told him the hookup men were securing his nose-wheel to the cat shuttle.
The final checklist run-through proceeded swiftly and with a taut economy of motion. The launch officer held his hand high, circling tightly, and Batman eased his throttles forward to full military power. He checked the motion of his stick, forward, back, left, right… then the rudder pedals, left, right. All clear, all correct. A red light high on the carrier’s island next to Pri-Fly winked over to green.
“Green light,” Malibu called.
“Hang on to your stomach, buddy. Let’s find us some elbow room!”
“Roger that.”
The launch officer, standing to the F-14’s right, was taking a last look around, checking the aircraft, checking to make sure deck personnel were clear. He looked up at Batman and saluted.
Batman returned the salute, a final exchange indicating readiness for launch. The launch officer dropped to his knee, pointing down the deck as the Green and Yellow Shirts nearby crouched low. He touched the deck with his thumb.
An explosion of acceleration slammed Batman back against his seat as the catapult hurled him down the deck. In two seconds he was traveling at 170 miles per hour, past the island, off the angled flight deck, and flashing past the overhanging cliff of Jefferson’s towering gray bows close off his starboard wingtip. The catstroke’s acceleration was so hard it actually seemed as though he slowed down once he was clear of the track and airborne; he felt the aircraft’s controls biting the air ― nothing soft or mushy, no red-light indicators of engine failure or control fault. “Good shot!” sounded in his headphones as the Assistant Air Boss confirmed his launch.
It always took him a second or two to recover mentally from the cat launch, to “get behind the airplane.” Gently, he brought the stick back and started climbing. Blue sky and sunlight shone above and around him with the unearthly, dazzling intensity of flight.
“Whee-ooh!” Malibu exalted from the rear seat. “I think we left the old stomach back there on the deck someplace.”
“Too late to go back for it now, Mal,” Batman told his RIO. “Let’s see if we can find us some mountains.”