“We could put out a net,” Cuso suggested, but Crowley shook his head; the idea of using “Badminton”—a big net stretched across the deck — to break the touchdown of a plane so low on gas that it didn’t have enough fuel left for a “go-around,” or was in some other way incapacitated, still ran the risk of the Falcon crashing into McCain’s superstructure — the carrier’s island — before it reached the net.
“No,” said Crowley with an air of finality. “He’ll have to ditch. Have our chopper pick him up.”
Cuso nodded assent, but felt compelled, no doubt because he’d been an aviator himself, to add, “Chipper says the pilot’s shot up pretty bad. Ejection might not be an option.”
“Life’s tough!” Crowley said brusquely. “If he can’t eject, maybe he can ditch — stay afloat long enough for our helo to snatch him.”
Cuso said nothing. They both knew that if the pilot was so badly wounded that he couldn’t reach down to grab the snake — the F-16’s ejection pull loop — then he almost certainly didn’t have the strength required to boss the controls to pancake long enough for the Jolly Green Giant helicopter reach him.
Crowley conveyed his decision to the rescue helo, Chipper Armstrong, and Manowski.
“Thrilling mission, Chip,” came the wry voice from his backseat.
“Well, look at it this way, Eagle,” said Chipper. “Maybe Bizarro is the son of one of those super-rich Taiwanese industrialists, and when he gets home, Daddy’s gonna be so grateful, you and I get a big, fat envelope — reward for fishing Junior out of the chuck.”
“Your oxygen feed must have dropped below twenty, right?”
“Maybe,” Chipper answered, his voice tired but, not surprisingly, no longer as tense as when FITCOMPRON took off. The sight of the carrier, and the focus needed for landing on a “postage stamp,” was always a pick-me-up. The only problem remaining, given that the Taiwanese fighter’s radio was out, was that either Armstrong or Manowski would have to make it clear to Bizarro that he or she wouldn’t be allowed to land on the carrier and would have to eject or ditch. Eagle Evans, however, already had the potential problem solved. Using his navigation highlighter, on the inside of his cockpit he’d drawn a rough, simple diagram of an L-shaped pilot’s seat inclined backward, showing an arrow curving up and out from it, his large drawing clearly visible to the pilot of the shot-up Falcon.
“Outstanding, Eagle,” said Manowski on the far right side of the Falcon. “I can make that out from here. If Bizarro can’t see that, man, he’s blind.”
Chipper brought the Hornet in closer to the Falcon, his thumb gesticulating to Evans’s ad hoc poster, which Chipper now knew would pass into the folklore of the “boat,” along with the sadness of having lost so many good aviators in the miscalculation of the ChiComs’ intentions over Penghu.
“He sees it,” Manowski said, the wingman glimpsing the Falcon’s driver, who, though grimacing in pain, slowly raised his hand from the control stick and pointed a bloodied thumb. “He’s gonna do it,” Chipper advised McCain’s CIC. “He’s gonna eject.”
“Roger that,” came CIC’s recognition. “Put yourselves between him and the boat, just to be sure. Repeat — you and Manowski get between him and the boat.”
McCain’s two Super Hornets did so, Chipper speeding a quarter mile ahead, Manowski neatly executing a sideslip left, over the Falcon and into what had been Chipper’s position. Both Hornets were in a shallow low left turn at three thousand feet toward the McCain, leveling out two miles from the carrier. The three planes, now down to 200 knots, had been given clearance to pass through the carrier battle group’s usual no-fly zone. McCain’s Jolly Green Giant was already aloft, its swimmers checking their gear as the chopper’s pilot, McCain’s CIC, Armstrong, and Manowski verified that everyone was on the same page vis-à-vis the precise GPS spot near which they’d like the pilot to ditch.
“Can Leonardo draw another billboard?” inquired John Cuso, with an unmistakable tone of admiration for RIO Evans’s initiative.
“Can do,” confirmed Eagle, quickly slipping pages out of his knee pad to write out the GPS numbers. The three jets were aft of McCain, beginning a slow, wide U-turn left, the Falcon pilot obediently pulling to the outside so the two Super Hornets were again between it and the carrier, now a mile to the west. Suddenly, the Falcon pilot began pointing down at his digital control panel with such urgency that the four Americans could see he was plainly alarmed.
“He’s out of gas,” proffered Manowski’s RIO, “and too low for him to eject. Damn!”
“I don’t—” began Manowski. Then they saw the pilot’s thumb jabbing down again, this time toward the sea.
“Give him room!” ordered Cuso, who then advised the helo, “Go get him, but keep clear of debris till he’s settled. Chipper, Manowski, stand by to enter glide path.”
The Falcon was trying to go into as shallow a dive as possible toward the sea, but Chipper and Manowski could see there’d be no pancake landing, but a pelican crash — a nosedive that would drive the Falcon into the ocean with such impact, there would be little chance of rescue.
“God, he almost made it,” cut in Evans. “Only a mile out and—”
At a thousand feet the Falcon made an astonishing recovery, the pilot managing to pull it out of the dive. Chipper’s HUD showed it leveling off at three hundred feet at 400 knots. It was Eagle-eyed Evans who, despite the obtuse angle of the Hornets’ aviators to the Falcon, spotted the twin red dime-sized glows, the Falcon going to afterburner, its blip on both Hornets’ radar moving rapidly from 400 knots to 950, breaking hard right, hard left, hard right, from the beginning of what was expected to be its crash landing on the McCain but in fact was a crash dive.
Striking the carrier’s deck, it sent a huge, rolling fireball that engulfed the center island, incinerating three men on Vulture’s Row, colored jackets running for their lives. The flight deck was penetrated by a jagged fourteen-foot-diameter crater, the high explosive bomb that had been built into the Falcon’s radar-gutted nose ripping open the rubberized deck with such force that would-be rescuers were burned and blown violently about the mangled deck or over the side. Many, their clothes afire, were scalded raw before they hit the water, the bleeding mass of wounds immediately attracting the sharks of the strait’s relatively warm waters.
Everyone was stunned by the sheer fury and unbelievable speed of what was the most successful kamikaze attack on an American carrier since World War II.
The two Super Hornets’ pilots, already low on gas, realized there was nowhere to land for either them or the two badly mauled squadrons of Tomcats and Hornets returning from Penghu.
Armstrong and Manowski had six minutes’ fuel remaining. And Admiral Crowley had a monumental problem on his hands. The five hundred feet of the designated launching area of the carrier, from the rearmost of the four arresting wires to the stopping area three hundred feet farther down the deck, at approximately midships, had been shortened to 260 feet because of the huge and still smoldering crater caused by the impact of the suicidal Falcon. Somehow, with Armstrong and Manowski making pattern in the four-by-one-mile oval-shaped fly zone off the carrier’s port side, and the twenty-two returning planes of McCain’s FITCOMPRON only twenty minutes away to the northeast, Crowley, Cuso, and their staff in the carrier’s air traffic control center had to figure out how to bring their pilots and their billion-dollar birds home.