We’ll make it! The bombs were released in a quick series of thumps, and he rolled hard right away from the rising tracers and pulled as the Rockeye canisters flashed open to disperse their bomblets.
“Weapons away,” Jake told the ship.
“Roger.”
In about twenty seconds the antiaircraft fire ceased abruptly. Jake eased the nose down and slid below the clouds. The pilot turned the aircraft slightly and looked back. Gleaming through the darkness was a smear of yellow light. Fire!
“Where’s the coast?” Jake asked the BN.
“Twenty miles east.”
The pilot checked his heading. “Get the FLIR humming. We’ll turn back at eight miles and make another low pass to see what we hit.”
The yellow glow of the fire was the only light visible in the dark universe under the clouds when they turned back inbound. Now a brilliant flash split the night, a fireball that grew and blossomed on the water ahead, then faded almost as suddenly as it appeared. Jake turned away to avoid the debris that he knew would be in the air.
“He blew up,” Reed breathed, amazement in his voice.
“Tell the ship,” Jake Grafton said, and pulled the throttles back to a cruise setting.
At ten miles inbound to the ship Jake Grafton coupled the autopilot to the Automatic Carrier Landing System, the ACLS. He felt the throttles move slightly in response and kept his fingertips lightly on top of them. Now the computer aboard the ship would tell the plane’s autopilot where the plane was in relation to the glideslope and centerline, and the autopilot would fly the plane down, all the way to the deck.
Jake stared at the crosshairs display on the ADI in front of him and watched the horizontal line representing the glideslope descend toward the center of the display. As it reached the center the throttles moved aft and the plane transitioned to a 600-foot-per-minute rate of descent. They were exactly on speed, the angle-of-attack needle frozen in the three-o’clock position. The plane was still in clouds, yet it was rock-steady, descending nicely.
“You’re on glidepath, on centerline,” the approach controller said, confirming what the instruments were telling the pilot.
As far as Jake was concerned, these coupled ACLS approaches, known as Mode One, were the greatest thing to happen to naval aviation since the invention of the tailhook. He had been making these automatic approaches at night all the way to touchdown for the last month, since his night vision had begun to noticeably deteriorate. And my eyes have probably been going downhill for years, he told himself bitterly, and I just haven’t noticed.
He was feeling rather pleased with himself until, at one mile from the ship, under the clouds, the crosshairs disappeared from the ADI and the autopilot dropped off the line.
The angle-of-attack needle rose slightly, so Jake added a smidgen of power and stared into the darkness for the meatball and the deck centerline lights. They were very dim and far away.
He had to see the meatball, the yellow light between the two green reference, or datum, lights of the optical landing system. This visual aid defined the proper glideslope. And he had to see the landing area centerline lights and the red drop lights extending vertically down the fantail of the ship. These lights gave him his proper lineup. “Oh fuck!”
“Three-quarters of a mile. Call the ball.”
Reed made the call. “Five Zero Two, Intruder ball, five point zero.”
“How’m I doing?” Jake asked the BN.
“You’re high.”
Jake made the correction. The lights were still too dim. He fought the controls.
When he glanced away from the angle-of-attack indexer lights on the cockpit glare-shield, he had trouble focusing on the meatball on the left side of the landing area. Then when he looked back at the indexer, it was fuzzy unless he stared at it. So he missed the twitching of the meatball as he approached the ship’s ramp, and by the time he saw movement, the ball had shot off the top of the lens system and he touched down too far down the deck to catch a wire. The Intruder’s wheels hit and he slammed on the power and continued on off the angle as the landing signal officer, the LSO, shouted “Bolter Bolter Bolter,” over the radio.
The next pass was better, but he boltered again. He couldn’t adequately compensate for the twitches of the ball when he just didn’t see them.
He caught the four wire on his third approach, mainly because he assumed he was high and reduced power hoping it was so.
They debriefed in the Strike Operations office, surrounded by Air Intelligence officers, the strike ops staff, and a half-dozen senior officers from the A-6 squadron. The crowd was happy, laughing. They had met the enemy and “taught ’em not to fuck with the U.S. Navy,” in Reed’s words. Reed was the happiest of the lot. Jake Grafton sat in a chair and watched Reed explain every detail of the bomb run to the A-6 skipper, John Majeska, whom his peers knew as “Bull.”
“That tracer was so bright you could read a newspaper in the cockpit,” Reed proclaimed. “And the CAG didn’t even blink. Man, that system was humming! Those fucking A-rabs had better stay perched on their camel humps or they’re all going to sleep with Davy Jones.”
When Bull Majeska turned to Grafton and asked quietly how Reed had really performed, Jake smiled and winked. “He did okay. Let him crow. They were trying to kill him.”
One of the strike ops assistants answered the ringing phone. “CAG, the admiral wants to see you in his stateroom when you’re finished here.”
“Thanks.” Jake gathered his helmet bag and shook Reed’s hand.
“Uh, sir,” Reed said softly. “About that subject we were discussing earlier. Uh, maybe I could come see you tomorrow?”
“Sure, Mad Dog.”
As Jake went out the door the crowd was rigging up the videotape monitor to watch the tape from the aircraft that recorded the radar and IR displays, the computer readouts, and the cockpit conversations. Maybe they could learn more about the sunken boat.
“So how did it go?” Cowboy Parker asked. The two men were in the admiral’s cabin. Jake sat beside the desk watching Parker shave at the little sink.
“They must have been packing a boatload of explosives. It was one big blast. Either the Rockeyes or the fire set the stuff off, or they blew it up themselves. They were on a suicide mission.” Jake took a deep breath. “Good thing for us that someone got trigger-happy.”
“That lot would have been pretty spectacular going off against the side of a ship.” Parker rinsed his razor and attacked his chin. He eyed Jake in the mirror. “Damn good thing for us that someone got shook when you turned on your lights and headed right at them.”
“Hmmm. Even I was surprised when I did that.” Jake chewed on a fingernail. “We don’t have any evidence except our word that it was a terrorist boat. They may announce that the U.S. Navy just offed some poor fishermen, all good Moslems on a sailing pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope. And if those guys had succeeded in damaging an American ship, well …”
“You boltered twice tonight.” Cowboy was examining his face in the mirror, trying to find if he’d missed a spot.
“Yeah. I couldn’t see jack.” Jake stared at his toes.
“Mode One didn’t work, huh?”
“Quit on me at a mile.” Jake sighed. “I’m going to ground myself at night and send a message asking to be relieved. The good part is that this little incident will improve morale on this tub. Everyone can see what we’re up against and they’ll keep their noses firmly on the grindstone.”
“Quitting smoking hasn’t helped the eyes?”