Then Chris Palmer was with him, his face a mask of blood from a nasty cut on his scalp up near his hairline, but otherwise intact. Smoke boiled into the cockpit from the aft cabin.
“The ship’s on fire!” Palmer yelled. “We’ve got to get out!”
“Help me with him!”
Together, they dragged Dombrowski out from between the cockpit seats, aft into smoky darkness, and out the right-side door. They hit muddy earth and kept moving; Cole glanced back once and caught a glimpse of the entire engine housing aflame, as black smoke spilled from the downed aircraft’s interior. A few seconds later, the flames reached the fuel tanks and the Black Hawk erupted in a searing yellow-and-orange fireball that roiled into the morning sky.
The two of them dropped to the ground on either side of Dombrowski’s body, gasping for breath. “God, what happened?” Palmer asked.
“We just got shot down, is what happened,” Cole said. He winced as pain lanced through his side. “Damn, I think we just got shot down by the fucking Navy!”
It was a miracle that any of them had survived.
Mason pulled up gently, putting his Tomcat into a terrain-hugging flight across the hills. At the far end of his climb-and-turn when the missile had struck, he’d seen the flash and the smoke. Now he was angling back into the valley for a closer look. “Target Sierra One is down!” he radioed, exultant. “Scratch one Hind!”
“Roger that,” Batman replied. “Good spotting, Dixie!”
But Dixie didn’t respond, not immediately. As he passed low over the valley, he had a clear view of the downed helo. Most of the main cabin directly beneath the engine compartment and the twisted, shattered rotors was gone, crumpled up in a fire-blackened skeleton that was rapidly being consumed by fiercely burning flames. The tail section was more or less intact, however, extending out of the fireball at a jaunty angle. He could just make out the words UNITED STATES ARMY stenciled in yellow on the olive-drab paint.
Nearby, a Russian-made Hip Mi-8 was settling to the ground, and figures were running from the open rear door. Then the F14 was past the valley, and he couldn’t see anymore… couldn’t see if there were survivors, couldn’t see the flames.
“Oh, my God!”
Cat’s words over the ICS said it all. Dixie felt a cold, hard lump in his chest and throat, felt sweat sticking the skin inside his helmet, felt the hammer of his heart beneath his safety harness.
Years of training, years of work, years of battling idiocy and prejudice to get him his one golden chance as a Navy combat aviator.
And it had just ended with a downed U.S. helicopter.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No!”
“Tomcat Two-oh-one, Charlie now.” The voice of Commander William Barnes, Jefferson’s Air Boss, sounded over Batman’s headset, giving the order to commence his final approach to the carrier.
Batman pulled the control stick over, guiding the Tomcat into a 4-G turn toward the carrier deck. He cut back on the throttles and hit the Tomcat’s speed brakes to slow the fighter to below three hundred knots. The computer started to reset the position of the wings to a forward position to compensate for the reduced speed, but Batman overrode the controls without really thinking about it. Most naval aviators liked to come in with the wings in their swept-back position, claiming the computer’s preferred wing setting made the Tomcat look like an oversized goose. Batman’s actions were virtually automatic after years of handling carrier landings, but this morning he was doubly distracted.
He still couldn’t believe that he’d just scored an own goal downing an American helicopter. Damn damn damn! How in hell had that happened?
He forced himself to concentrate on the approach. Batman flicked on the switch to lower the Tomcat’s landing gear as he continued the turn. His HUD display showed his speed falling below 230 knots, and Wayne dropped the wing flaps to further reduce the speed of the aircraft. He scanned his console readouts, noting the rate of descent, 615 feet per minute, and the range to the carrier, just over three-quarters of a mile. His angle-of-bank was twenty degrees as he finished his turn and lined up on the flight deck, making his approach from astern.
Jefferson was making fifteen knots, steering east through relatively calm waters under a clear blue sky. Landing conditions were almost ideal, and for a pilot who had made landings in the most difficult weather conditions ― and, worse yet, at night ― it should have been an easy approach. But Batman Wayne was finding it hard to stay focused, and on something as tricky as a carrier landing that could be deadly. From his vantage point behind and above the carrier, the flight deck seemed an impossibly small target set in the wide blue expanse of the sea.
He could see the ship’s Fresnell landing system mounted on the squat tower on the port side of the carrier, the “meatball” that helped a pilot estimate his glide slope. “Tomcat Two-oh-one, seven point one, ball,” he radioed. Calling the ball was the signal that he had the meatball lined up and was starting his final approach with 7 1 00 pounds of fuel on board.
“Roger ball,” Barnes acknowledged. That passed control of the approach from Pri-Fly to the Landing Signals Officer stationed on a platform just below the Fresnell lens.
“Glide slope’s a little steep, Batman.” The voice of Lieutenant Gene “Lassie” Lassiter, the LSO on duty for the Vipers this morning, was flat and calm. “More power.”
He pushed the throttles forward and pulled the Tomcat’s nose up, cursing under his breath. There was no reason for this to be anything but a routine trap on the flight deck.
No reason beyond the simple fact that he couldn’t get the image of that burning helicopter out of his mind.
“Easy now,” Lassiter said. “Don’t overcompensate now.”
The very best LSOS in the fleet were the ones like Lassiter who could keep calm and unflappable, giving guidance without sounding like world-class nags.
“Ease off, Batman!”
Shit… he had overcompensated. The fighter was coming in too high now.
The red lights on either side of the meatball came on, but he was almost up to the carrier’s roundoff and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it now.
“Wave off! Wave off!”
His landing gear shrieked as they touched the deck, too far forward for the arrestor hook to snag a cable. Batman pushed the throttles forward and pulled up on the stick, cursing aloud this time. The engines thundered, the acceleration pressing him into his seat as the plane lifted clear and headed back into the open sky once again.
“Bolter! Bolter! Bolter!” the LSO called. Batman felt himself flushing behind his oxygen mask. Of all the stupid rookie tricks to pull!
“Take it easy, man,” Malibu said behind him. “Don’t let it get to you.
Just circle around and get your focus back.”
“Shit, Malibu! If you don’t like my flying, you can get out here and walk back to the boat!”
“Chill out, dude,” the RIO responded with a trace of his usual bantering style. “Just stay frosty, right? You can cool off while they bring Dixie down. Nothing to worry about.”
“Yeah. Nothing to worry about.”