“Too bad Two Oh Seven caught fire.”
“As soon as he slowed to landing speed the gas seeped into the engine bays around the edges of the engine-bay doors. The engines ignited the fuel. From the time the fire first appeared visually, it was a grand total of two and a half seconds before the hydraulic lines burned through. The pilot punched when the nose started down. He pulled back stick and there was nothing there.”
Jake Grafton just nodded.
“This is a man’s game,” Haldane said. He shrugged. “There’s no glamour, no glory, the pay’s mediocre, the hours are terrible and the stakes are human lives. You bet your life and your BN’s every time you strap on an airplane.”
The carrier and her escorts sailed west day after day. Columbia’s airplanes remained on deck in alert status as her five thousand men maintained their machinery, coped with endless paperwork, and drilled. They drilled morning, afternoon, and evening: fire drills, general quarters, nuclear, biological and chemical attack, collision, flooding, engine casualty, and flight deck disasters. The damage control teams were drilled to the point of exhaustion and the fire fighting teams did their thing so many times they lost count.
The only breaks in the routine came in the wee hours of the night when underway replenishments — UNREPS — were conducted. The smaller escorts came alongside the carrier every third day to top their tanks with NSFO — Navy standard fuel oil — from the carrier’s bunkers.
Nowhere was seamanship more on display than during the hours that two or three vastly dissimilar ships steamed side by side through the heavy northern Pacific night seas joined by hoses and cables.
The destroyers and frigates were the most fun to watch, and Jake Grafton was often on the starboard catwalk to look and marvel. The smaller warship would overtake the carrier from astern and slow to equal speed alongside. The huge carrier would be almost rock-steady in the sea, but the small ship would be pitching, rolling, and plunging up and down as she rode the sea’s back. Occasionally the bow would bite so deep into the sea that spray and foam would cascade aft, hiding the forward gun mount from view and dousing everyone topside.
As the captain of the destroyer held his ship in formation, a line would be shot across the seventy-five-foot gap between the ships to be snagged by waiting sailors wearing hard hats and life jackets. This rope would go into sheaves and soon a cable would be pulled across the river of rushing water. When the cable was secured, a hose would go across and soon fuel oil would be pumping. Three hoses were the common rig to minimize the time required to transfer hundreds of tons of fuel. Through it all the captain of the small boy stood on the wing of the bridge where he could see everything and issue the necessary orders to the steersman and engine telegraph operator to hold his ship in formation.
One night a supply ship came alongside. While Jake watched, a frigate joined on the starboard side of the supply ship, which began transferring fuel through hoses and supplies by high-line to both ships at once. Now both the frigate and carrier had to hold formation on the supply ship. To speed the process a CH-46 helicopter belonging to the supply ship lifted pallets of supplies from the stern of the supply ship and deposited them on the carrier’s flight deck, a VERTREP, or vertical replenishment.
Here in the darkness on the western edge of the world’s greatest ocean American power was being nakedly exercised. The extraordinary produce of the world’s most advanced economy was being passed to warships in stupendous quantity: fuel, oil, grease, bombs, bullets, missiles, toilet paper, movies, spare parts, test equipment, paper, medical supplies, canned soft drinks, candy, meat, vegetables, milk, flour, ketchup, sugar, coffee — the list went on and on. The supply ship had a trainload to deliver.
The social organization and hardware necessary to produce, acquire and transport this stupendous quantity of wealth to these powerful warships in the middle of nowhere could be matched by no other nation on earth. The ability to keep fleets supplied anywhere on the earth’s oceans was the key ingredient in American sea power, power that could be projected to anyplace on the planet within a thousand miles of saltwater. For good or ill, these ships made Washington the most important city in the world; these ships made the U.S. Congress the most important forum on earth and the President of the United States the most powerful, influential person alive; these ships enforced a global Pax Americana.
The whole thing was quite extraordinary when one thought about it, and Jake Grafton, attack pilot, history major and farmer’s son, did think about it. He stood under an A-6’s tail on the flight deck catwalk wearing his leather jacket with the collar turned up against the wind and chill, and marveled.
“I hear you’re going to get out,” the Real McCoy said one evening in the stateroom.
“Yeah. At the end of the cruise.” Jake was in the top bunk reading his NATOPS manual.
McCoy had the stock listing pages of the Wall Street Journal spread across the floor, his cruise box, bunk and desk. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his notebook full of charts on his lap. He had fallen into the habit of annotating his charts each evening after the ship received a mail delivery. He leaned back against his locker, stretched out his legs, and sighed.
“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “Getting exiled to the Marines got the wheels spinning. Being ten days behind the markets makes them spin faster. But no.” He shrugged. “Maybe one of these days, but not now.”
Jake put down his book. “What’s keeping you in? I thought you really liked that investment stuff?”
“Yeah, makes a terrific hobby. I think my problem is I’m a compulsive gambler. Stocks are the best game around — the house percentage is next to nothing — just a brokerage fee when you trade. Yet it’s just money. On the other hand, you take flying — that’s the ultimate gamble: your life is the wager. And waving — every pass is a new game, a new challenge. All you have is your wits and skill and the stakes are human lives. There’s nothing like that in civilian life — except maybe trauma medicine. If I got out I’d miss the flying and the waving too much.”
Jake was slightly stunned. He had never before heard flying described as a gamble, a game, like Russian roulette. Oh, he knew the risks, and he did everything in his power to minimize them, yet here was a man for whom the risks were what made it worth doing.
“If I were you,” Jake told the Real, “I wouldn’t make that crack about waving down in the ready rooms.”
“Oh, I don’t. A lot of these guys are too uptight.”
“Yeah.”
“They think the LSO is always gonna save them. And that’s what we want them to think, so they’ll always do what we tell them, when we tell them. If they get the notion in their hard little heads that we might be wrong, they’ll start second-guessing the calls. Can’t have that now, can we?”
“Ummm.”
“But LSOs are human too. Knowing that you can make a mistake, that’s what keeps you giving it everything you’ve got, all the time, every time.”
“What if you screw up, like the CAG LSO did with me? Only somebody dies. How are you going to handle that?”
“I don’t know. That’s the bad thing about it. You do it for the challenge and you know that sooner or later the ax will fall and you’re going to have to live with it. That’s why flying is easier. If you screw up in the cockpit, you’re just dead. There’s a lot to be said for betting your own ass and not someone else’s.”
“Aren’t many things left anymore that don’t affect someone else,” Jake muttered.
“I suppose,” said the Real McCoy, and went back to annotating his stock charts.