Now McCoy handed the radio and Fresnel lens pickle to the nearest LSO. He began running toward the fantail. Jake Grafton followed.
The dim light made seeing difficult. The deck was really moving here, 550 feet aft of the ship’s center of gravity. The ship was like a giant seesaw. Keeping your knees bent helped absorb the thrusts of the deck.
McCoy took a flashlight from his hip pocket and played it on the ramp, the sloping end of the flight deck. The ramp dropped away at about a thirty-degree angle, went down ten or twelve feet, then ended. That was the back end of the ship. The flashlight beam stopped three feet right of the centerline stripe, at a deep dent.
“Hook strike,” Jake shouted.
“No, that’s where his main mount hit.” Real scanned with the flashlight and stopped at another dent, the twin of the first. “There’s where the other wheel hit. His hook hit below the ramp.” Then McCoy turned and ran for the LSO platform, with Jake following.
Back on the LSO platform McCoy told the sailor wearing the sound-powered phones, “His hook hit the back end of the ship and disintegrated. He doesn’t have a hook now. Tell Air Ops.”
Without a hook, the plane could be trapped aboard only with the barricade, a huge nylon net that was rigged across the landing area like a giant badminton net. Or it could be sent to an airfield in Japan.
Air Ops elected to send the crippled plane to Japan.
McCoy got back to the business of waving airplanes. He had the Vigilante on the ball, with an A-6 and EA-6B behind him, then the E-2 Hawkeye and KA-6 tanker to follow.
This time the Vigie pilot drifted right of centerline and corrected back toward the left. He leveled his wings momentarily, so McCoy let him keep coming. Then, passing in close, the left wing dropped. The Vigilante slewed toward the LSOs’ platform as McCoy screamed “Wave-off’ and dived to the right.
Jake had his eyes on the approaching plane, but McCoy was taking everyone on the platform with him. Jake was almost to the edge when the RA-5 swept overhead in burner, his hook almost close enough to touch. Instinctively Jake ducked.
That was close! Too close. Now Jake realized that he and McCoy were the only two people still on the platform. He looked down to his right. Two hands reached up out of the darkness and grabbed the edge by Jake’s foot. Everyone else went into the net.
They clambered back up, one by one. The talker picked up his sound-powered headset where he had dropped it and put it back on.
McCoy leaned toward the talker. “Tell Air Ops that I recommend he send the Vigie to the beach for fuel and a turnaround. Give that guy some time to calm down.”
And that is what Air Ops did.
The last plane was still two miles out when a sailor brought a lump of metal to the platform and gave it to McCoy. “We found this down on the fantail. There’s a lot of metal shards down there but this was the biggest piece. I think it’s a piece of hook point.”
McCoy examined it by flashlight, then passed it to Jake.
It was a piece of the A-7’s hook point, all right. About a pound of it. The point must have shattered against the structure of the ship and the remnants rained down on the fantail.
When the last plane was aboard, Jake followed McCoy down the ladder to the catwalk, then down another flight into the ship.
“That was exciting,” Jake Grafton told the LSO.
“You dumb ass. You should have gone into the net.”
“Well, I didn’t think—”
“That Vige about got us. No shit.”
“Hell of a recovery.”
“That’s no lie. Did you hear about the A-7 that had the ramp strike?”
“No.”
“The talker told me. The guy had a total hydraulic failure on the way to the beach and ejected. He’s in the water right now.”
“You’re kidding.”
“The rebound of the hook shank probably severed his hydraulic lines. He’s swimming for it. Just another great Navy night.”
The pilot of the RA-5C Vigilante who had so much trouble with lineup on this recovery landed in Japan and refueled. He returned to the ship for the last recovery of the evening and flew a fair pass into a three-wire.
The A-7 pilot with the hydraulic failure wasn’t rescued until ten o’clock the next morning. He spent the night in his life raft, buffeted by heavy seas, overturned four times, though each time he regained the safety of the raft. He swallowed a lot of seawater and did a lot of vomiting. He vomited and retched until blood came up. Still retching when the helicopter deposited him back on the carrier, he had to be sedated and given an IV to rehydrate him. He was also suffering from a serious case of hypothermia. But he was alive, with no bones broken. His shipmates trooped to sick bay in a steady procession to welcome him back to the company of living men.
13
The Soviet intelligence ship Reduktor joined the task group during the night and fell in line astern. At dawn she was two miles behind the carrier wallowing heavily. When the sun came up she held her position even though the task group raised its speed to twelve knots. When the sea state eased somewhat the Soviet ship rode steadier.
Jake came up on deck for the first launch of the day only to find that the AGI was dropping steadily astern. Her captain knew the drill. The carrier had been running steadily downwind, but to launch she would turn into the wind, toward the AGI. So now the Soviet ship was slowing to one or two knots, just enough to maintain steerageway.
At the brief the air intelligence officers showed the flight crews file photos of this Okean-class intelligence collector. She was a small converted trawler. Had she not been festooned with a dazzling array of radio antennas that rose from her superstructure and masts, one would assume her crew was still looking for fish.
So there they were. Russians. In Reduktor’s compartments they were busy with their reel-to-reel tape drives — probably all made in Japan — recording every word, peep or chirp on every radio frequency that the U.S. Navy had ever been known to use. Doubtlessly they monitored other frequencies occasionally as well, just in case. These tapes would be examined by experts who would construct from them detailed analyses of how the U.S. Navy operated and what its capabilities were. Encrypted transmissions would be turned over to specialists who would try to break the codes.
In short, the crew of Reduktor were spies. They were going about their business in a lawful manner, however, in plain sight upon the high seas, so there was nothing anyone in the U.S. Navy could do about it. In fact, the American captains and watch officers had to make sure that their ships didn’t accidentally collide with the Soviet ship.
There was one other possibility, not very probable, but possible. Reduktor might be a beacon ship marking the position of the American task group for Soviet forces. Just in case, American experts aboard the U.S. ships monitored, recorded and analyzed every transmission that Reduktor made.
Anticipating the coming of a Soviet AGI, the U.S. task group had already reduced its own radio transmissions as much as possible. During the day the aircrews from Columbia operated “zip-lip,” speaking on the radio only when required. Specialists from the Communications Security Group — COMSEGRU— had visited every ready room to brief the crews.
This morning Jake Grafton spent a moment watching the old trawler, then went on with his preflight. He would, he suspected, see a lot of that ship in the next few months.