After four days of operations in the Sea of Japan, Columbia and her escorts called at Sasebo and stayed for a week. Reduktor was waiting when they came out of port.
The first week of August was spent operating off the southern coast of Korea, then the task group steamed south and spent a week flying in the South China Sea. The Soviet AGI was never far away.
Here, for the first time, the air wing began flying the Alpha strikes that Jake had helped plan with CAG Ops. Jake didn’t get to go on the first one, when Skipper Haldane led the A-6s. Due to his bombing scores, however, he was scheduled to lead the A-6s the next day. He and Flap spent half the night in Strike Planning with the other element leaders making sure they had it right.
CAG Kall sat in a corner and sipped coffee during the entire session. He didn’t say much, yet when he did you listened carefully because he had something to say worth listening to. He also smiled a lot and picked up names easily. After an hour you thought you had known the man all your life. That night in his bunk the thought tripped through Jake Grafton’s mind that he would like to lead the way Chuck Kall did.
Well, tomorrow he would get his chance. Six Intruders were scheduled to fly and the maintenance gunny said he would have them. The target was an abandoned ship on a reef a few miles off the western coast of Luzon, the northernmost of the Philippine Islands. Today’s strike had pretty well pulverized the ship, but there were enough pieces sticking out of the water to make an aiming point. The water was pretty shallow there. To make sure there were no native fishing boats in the target area tomorrow before live bombs rained down, an RA-5C was scheduled to make a prestrike low pass.
Jake had so many things on his mind that he had trouble falling asleep. He took the hop minute by minute, the climb-out, the rendezvous, frequency changes, formation, airplane problems, no-radio procedures, the letdown to roll-in altitude…he drifted off to sleep and dreamed about it.
The morning was perfect, a few puffy low clouds but widely scattered. The brisk trade wind speckled the sea with whitecaps and washed away the haze.
After a quick cup of coffee and check of the weather, Jake met with the element leaders for two hours. Then he went to the ready room for the crew briefs, briefed the A-6’s portion of the mission, read the maintenance logbook on his assigned plane and donned his flight gear. By the time he walked out onto the flight deck with Flap Le Beau he had been working hard for four hours.
The escort ships looked crisp and clean upon a living blue sea. The wind — he inhaled deeply.
He and Flap took the time to inspect the weapons carefully. For today’s mock attack they had live bombs, four Mark-84 two-thousand-pounders. A hit with one of these bombs would break the back of any warship that was cruiser-size or smaller. The multiple ejector racks that normally carried smaller bombs had been downloaded so the one-ton general purpose bombs could be mated to the parent bomb racks. There were two of these on each wing. As usual, the centerline belly station carried a two-thousand-pound drop tank. One of the bombs, the last one to be dropped, had a laser-seeker in the nose. The other three were fused with a mechanical nose fuse and an electrical tail fuse.
The mechanical nose fuse was the most reliable fuse the Navy possessed, which made it the preferred way to fuse bombs. A bare copper wire ran from a solenoid in the parent rack forward across the weapon to the nose, where it went through a machined hole in the fuse housing and then through the little propeller at the very front of the fuse. The wire physically prevented the propeller from turning until the weapon was ejected from the rack. The wire then pulled out of the fuse and stayed on the rack, which freed the propeller. As the bomb fell the wind spun the propeller for a preset number of seconds and armed the fuse. When the nose of the bomb struck its target, the fuse was triggered. After a small delay — one hundredth of a second to allow the weapon to penetrate the target — the fuse detonated the high explosive in the bomb.
If the mechanical fuse was defective, the electric tail fuse would set the bomb off. That fuse was armed by a jolt of electricity in the first two feet of travel as the bomb fell away from the parent rack, then its arming wire, an insulated electrical cable, pulled loose.
The BN’s job on preflight was to check to ensure the ordnancemen had rigged bombs, fuses and arming wires correctly. Since any error here could ruin the mission, Jake Grafton always checked too. Today he and Flap stood side by side as they examined each weapon. Everything was fine.
The bomb with the laser-seeker in the nose was the technology of the future, the technology that had already made unguided free-fall bombs obsolete and would itself be made obsolete by guided missiles. One had to aim a laser-light generator at the target and hold the light on it as the bomb fell. If the bomb was dropped into the proper cone above the target, the seeker would guide it to the reflected spot of laser light by manipulating small canards on the body of the device.
In two or three years the A-6 would have its own laser-light generator in the nose of the aircraft. Now the generators, or “designators,” were hand-held. Today a radar-intercept officer in the backseat of an F-4 orbiting high above the target would aim the designator while Intruders, Corsairs and other Phantoms dropped the bombs. This system worked. Navy and Air Force crews used it with devastating effect on North Vietnamese bridges in the last year of the war.
Due to the cost of the seekers, each plane had only one for today’s training mission. Dropping three unguided weapons in addition to the guided one had an additional benefit — the pilot had to try for a perfect dive to put all four on the target. If one bomb was a bull’s-eye and the other three went awry, he screwed up.
The plane looked good. Strapped in waiting for the engine start, Jake Grafton arranged his charts in the cockpit, then paused for a few seconds to savor the warmth of the sun and the wind playing with his hair. The moment was over too soon. Helmet on, canopy closed, crank engines.
The cat shot was a hoot, an exhilarating ride into a perfect morning. His airplane flew well, all the gear worked as advertised, none of the other A-6s had maintenance problems and all launched normally.
The A-6s rendezvoused at 9,000 feet. When Jake had his gaggle together, he led them upward to 13,000 feet and slowly eased into position on the right of the lead division, today four Corsairs. When all the other divisions were aboard, the strike leader, the C.O. of one of the A-7 squadrons, rolled out on course to the target and initiated a climb to 23,000 feet.
The climb took longer than usual. The bombers were heavily loaded. At ninety-eight percent RPM all Jake could coax out of his plane was 280 knots indicated. He concentrated on flying smoothly so his wingmen would not have to sweat bullets to stay with him.
The six-plane division was broken up into two flights of three. Jake had one wingman on each side. Out farther to the right flew another three-plane flight, but its leader was also flying formation on Grafton. Just before the time came to dive, the man on each leader’s left would cross over, then the two flights would join so that there were six airplanes in right echelon. The plan was for Jake to roll in and the others to follow two seconds apart, so that all six were diving with just enough separation between the planes that each pilot could aim his own bombs. If they did it right, all six would be in the enemy’s threat envelope together and divide the enemy’s antiaircraft fire. And all would leave together. That was the plan, anyway.
Flap had the radar and computer fired up, so Jake was getting steering to the target. He was merely comparing it to the course the strike leader was flying, however.