“We’ve got needles! Fly up and right!” Chu said with relief.
“Yep,” Toth said. “They know we’re here.”
Toth was on Hanna’s port quarter as the ship pitched in heavy seas. With her bow buried, another plume of spray lifted over the flight deck, and with the stern up a sudden froth appeared on the waterline under the LSO platform aft, formed by the carrier’s turning screws broaching the surface. He had never seen that before.
“Did you see that?” Chu exclaimed.
In the back, a nervous Battistini keyed her ICS. “What, sir?”
Toth jumped in to change the subject. “I see a clear deck! Chewy, we’re gonna roll out to intercept the final bearing at about a mile and a half. When I see the lens, I’m gonna begin my turn to final. Taking us down to six-hundred.”
Chu rogered him, and conducted another landing checklist. Battistini surveyed the bombs in the cargo bay which she had triple-checked secure. She cinched down her harness and waited for the ball call from the cockpit.
On the LSO platform, Mullet heard the bell signaling the severe position of the ramp as it rose above the horizon. He saw the C-2 through a deep 90 position and figured the pilot could see the lens. He picked up the manually operated visual landing system handle; as the deck he was standing on bucked in three dimensions, with this system he had to show the pilot where Mullet perceived him to be on glideslope. Crusher stood behind Mullet in backup, with a pickle-switch and radio handset. Other squadron LSOs and two enlisted phone-talkers were also on the platform, hunched against the windscreen to avoid the sleet and high winds.
“We’ve got forty-eight knots of wind, Mullet!” Crusher shouted. “The good news is they’re out of acceptable limits starboard!”
“Roger, forty-eight and out-of-limits. I’m sure the Captain will have them down the angled deck any minute now. I’m showing him slightly low out there.”
“Roger,” Crusher concurred. “Hope he’s up the right freq.”
With a shout over the high winds on the open platform, the phone-talker relayed the arresting gear status. “Gear set, Greyhound, sir. Clear deck!”
“Roger, gear set Greyhound, clear deck!” Mullet repeated back.
“Ship’s turning for winds,” Crusher shouted behind him as the others maintained sight on the E-2 and Olive’s Rhino, now holding overhead.
A relieved Toth saw the low ball the LSO was showing him as he worked the C-2 on-speed. “They see us! Never been so happy to be low. We’ve got a ball, Battistini!”
“Thank you, sir. Everyone is doing great back here,” the stressed out loadmaster answered. Toth smiled at the irony of her words. At least he wasn’t sitting in the back of a C-2 among twelve experimental live bombs waiting to commence a pitching deck trap hundreds of miles from anywhere. Chu and Toth were now up hot mike, and Chu did another checklist.
“Power lever lock-set. Gear-three down and locked. Flaps-set. Max rudder-twenty. Hook-down. Harness-locked. Crew… get ready to trap, Battistini. All set.” Chu said.
“Roger, all set,” Toth replied, and then added, “Turnin’ in…. Doesn’t look like much of a wake. We’re about a mile here… Needles coming up on glideslope. Still left of course and correcting.”
“Looks like at least forty knots of wind down there. Ship’s turning away!” Chu said.
Toth saw it and added power as he wrapped up the COD in a steep left bank so not to overshoot the centerline of a turning Hancock on the only chance they would get today. “Altitude?” he asked.
“Three-eighty,” Chu answered. Toth then muttered a running commentary as they started their pass with sleet bouncing off the windscreen.
“Roger, three-eighty…. Inside a mile…. Little overshoot, comin’ back to the left. Centered ball. Feeling high and steep.”
Toth exhaled to relieve his tension. Chu glanced at him for a moment before returning his scan outside and to the wallowing gray slab where hundreds of unseen eyes were watching them.
On the platform, with eyes padlocked on the C-2 as sleet cascaded down the deck, Mullet pressed the cut light switch and sang out. “Cut lights! Roger, ball!”
Crusher responded. “Ship appears steady, and we’ve got forty-nine knots down the angle. Clear deck!”
They felt it in their stomachs when the deck fell below them. The COD now looked high, and, with the fuzzy horizon, it wasn’t easy for Mullet to determine. Crusher helped.
“Deck’s down. He’s on…. drifting left. Deck’s comin’ back up.”
Shit, Mullet thought. If the C-2—and the deck — didn’t steady out in the next few seconds, he’d get on the radio to help as CAG had said, but if the deck was way up or way down in close he’d have no choice but to wave him off. Too dangerous to take him with the carrier’s heaving ramp in his chin and little clearance, and also too dangerous to take him with the deck down and have him fly into what would be a steel wall.
One of the LSOs behind him spoke up. “We’re going into some stuff up ahead!”
With the C-2 in the groove, Mullet could not afford to glance over his shoulder and see for himself. “What does it look like?” Mullet shouted back.
“Kansas!”
CHAPTER 21
Jerry Zavitz was in a hurt locker.
He was flying in sleet and at emergency fuel for a 400-mile bingo — to Adak freakin’ Alaska—at night. Unable to radiate anything or to talk to anyone, he had to fly through convective weather with probable embedded thunder and known icing. To his left was a carrier with water breaking over its bow and a C-2 loaded with over three tons of high explosive in the groove. Ahead of the carrier was a wall of purple. And who knew how thick it was or what was in it. A white hot lightning bolt ahead of the ship answered that question, and Zavitz had to work to minimize the distance between him and Toth so he could get aboard before the ship entered the weather. For him to generate enough interval between the aircraft to have a chance was, at this point, more art than science.
“Where’d the damn Rhino go?” Smith asked as he looked around Zavitz at the ship.
“Dunno. Do we have Hanna’s land/launch freq. punched in?”
“Yeah, and if we could talk to them, we could see if they are up.” Smith deadpanned.
In back, Jackie Dove came up on the intercom.
“Visual on the Rhino. Above us to our right,” she said as she strained to see Olive’s jet out her small porthole.
“Hawking us, I hope,” Smith said, grateful that the Super Hornet was configured as a tanker.
“The COD’s in the groove now. I’m rolling out here to take some more interval,” Zavitz said. While they flew their airplane, both pilots watched with interest as the C-2 approached the ship.
On the platform, Mullet sensed the Greyhound balloon up and lifted the handle to show him a “high.” Toth saw the yellow ball move further above the green datum lights, and he pulled power to correct. His entire being concentrated on the lens, the centerline, and the indexer light in his cockpit. His wingspan of almost 90 feet made lineup a critical component to any carrier approach, and the sleet pelting the C-2 windscreen caused him to note that sheets of it lashed the flight deck.