“Hi, Paully,” Pacino said heavily. “Admiral Donner is kicking off the blockade. It looks like we’re carrying the ball on the first play.” Pacino described the basics of the operation and directed White to get some messages out to the Cheyenne and the Pasadena.
“Cheyenne’s here, Pasadena’s here. They’ve both been lurking off the major shipping channels. I’ll have to move Pasadena but that still puts her here when the operation goes down.”
Pacino tried to stay focused, but the way this blockade was happening was foreign to him. One thing that never showed up on a submariner’s report card was “works well with others.” In spite of all the exercises favoring joint-operations, there was something about the Silent Service that developed independence. Having the operation managed by someone who barely understood submarines was damn frustrating.
The room reverberated with the earsplitting roar of a catapult launch of an F-14, the engines of the fighter roaring in full afterburners as it cleared the deck. The sooner this operation was over, the better, Pacino thought.
There was still light left, the sun just going down into the sea, as Comdr. Joe Galvin waited on the deck of the Ronald Reagan.
He was the last of the four F-14 pilots to get to the catapult. The other three for this mission had just been launched. He had watched them sail down the cats, float uncertainly over the sea for a second before deciding to fly up and away from the carrier. That moment when the deck ended and the sky began was always the worst, with the exception of crashing back down on the carrier’s deck.
His turn was coming up. He went through the prelaunch checklist, rotating his control surfaces, checking his switch lineup, radio comm circuits, cabin oxygen, hydraulics, health of the engines. The deck officer put up the aft blast shield and signaled for Galvin to throttle up. Galvin applied his brakes and brought the throttle keys to the forward stops, hearing and feeling the turbines spool up to full thrust, the roaring power of them electric. He could never experience that sound and that feel without an excitement almost sexual. The turbines were steady at full thrust, temperatures and pressures normal, fuel flow in limits. Galvin took the keys to the right, passing the full thrust detents, and took the throttles all the way to the firewall. Aft, the diffusers at the jet engines’ exhaust were clamping down, the gas velocity out the nozzles increasing while raw jet fuel was injected into the hot exhaust, reigniting and doubling the engines’ thrust. Full afterburners. The roar of the jets grew louder, the engines now half-jet, half-rocket, the F-14 trembling on the deck of the windward-bound aircraft carrier, the carrier’s own speed at forty knots designed to help him keep flying once he cleared the deck. The deck officer and catapult officer were waiting on him. He looked up from his panel and gave the deck officer a salute.
In return, a gesture to the pilot and a signal to the cat operator, the deck officer leaned forward, his legs far apart, until he crouched forward, while taking his orange wand and swinging it through a giant overhead arc as if throwing a tomahawk in slow motion. His wand came all the way down to the deck, then came back up pointing forward, the gesture graceful and exhilarating, a combination statement of “good luck up there, sir,” and “hit the catapult, cat operator.” The catapult kicked in, the highpressure steam driving a trolley that pulled on Galvin’s nose-wheel. Galvin was thrown far back in his seat from the acceleration, the world around him dissolving into a blurred tunnel of gray and blue. In an instant the jet was shot like a bullet off the deck, the catapult trolley disconnecting, the acceleration gone, the jet hanging in space trying to fly but almost hesitating as if confused, the jets still shrieking on full afterburners, the ocean waiting below to swallow him up, but finally the aircraft won and the ocean lost, the jet accelerating again, Galvin swinging the wings to a port roll as he turned out of the carrier’s path. Beneath him the USS Reagan sailed on, majestically plowing through the sea, her stern kicking up a wake that trailed her for five miles.
Galvin climbed to 8000 feet in slow spirals, catching up with his flight of F14s, then falling into formation as the flight leader, taking the jets to the northwest, diving down low as they approached the Japanese coastline. The mission profile called for them to fly in the grass, taking the shortcut over the island itself to get to the Sea of Japan on the other side. Galvin wondered if they would be met by Firestar fighters. The land came closer, the F-14s now at MacH 1.8, the wings swept back, altitude eighty feet, the supersonic jets kicking up a huge rooster tail wake. The Japanese were about to see the US Navy in action, Galvin thought.
Soon they were feet-dry over Japanese soil, the ridges and valleys flying at him as they sailed in at treetop level, the occasional rice paddy and collection of houses flashing by, their inhabitants standing outside, children pointing up at them. Now the coastline approached, the west coast of Honshu Island, and again they were feet-wet over the Sea of Japan.
Another twenty minutes of flying low over the sea and the ship, the target, was in sight. The supertanker was huge, as long as the Reagan, so full of oil that its waterline was almost all the way up to the gunwales, its bow wave plying back far into the twilight. There was just enough light to make out the name on the bow — the block letters spelling PETERSBURG. For the first time during the mission Galvin broke radio silence and spoke into the microphone, his radio selected to the bridge-to-bridge VHF frequency.
“VLCC Petersburg, this is the flight leader of the US Navy aircraft formation circling your bridge. I say again, this is the flight leader of the US Navy aircraft formation circling your bridge. Do you read me, over?”
Comdr. Gregory Keebes wore a blue poopysuit that was faded and old, the pants legs too high over his black socks and faded canvas loafers. He had a crewcut and sported horn-rimmed black glasses. He stood now leaning on the railing of the periscope stand and replaced the phone in its cradle. The radio chief had just told him the orders that had come in.
“Officer of the Deck,” Keebes called, “man battlestations.”
“Man battlestations, aye, sir.”
The O.O.D was Lt. Frank Becker, former right tackle for Navy’s varsity squad, a hulking youth with a good head, though in Keebes’s opinion something of a whiner. “Chief of the Watch, man battlestations.”
“Man battlestations, aye, sir.” The COW, a young slick-haired, wire-rimmed-glasses-wearing youth in a blue poopysuit, reached for a coiled microphone and clicked it on. His voice poured from the circuit-one speakers throughout the ship. “MAN BATTLESTATIONS.”