Now Jake checked the gear handle, armament switches, circuit breakers, and arranged the switches for engine start. He had done all these things so many times that he had to concentrate to make sure he was seeing what was there and not just what he expected to see.
When he had the engines started, Flap fired up the computer while Jake checked the radio and TACAN frequencies.
“Good alignment,” Flap reported and signaled to the plane captain to pull the cable that connected the plane to the ship’s inertial navigation system.
They were ready. Now to sit here warm and reasonably dry and watch the launch.
The E-2 taxied toward Cat Three on the waist. A cloud of water lifted from the deck by the wash of the two turboprops blasted everything. The plane went onto the cat, the JBD rose, then the engines began to moan. Finally the wing-tip lights came on. The Hawkeye accelerated down the catapult and rose steadily into the night. The lights faded quickly, then the goo swallowed them.
“Uh-oh,” Flap said. “Look over there at Real’s plane.”
A crowd of maintenance people had the left engine access door open. Someone was up on the ladder talking to McCoy. In less than a minute a figure left the group and headed for Jake’s plane.
The man on the deck lowered the pilot’s boarding ladder while Jake ran the canopy open. Then he climbed up. The squadron’s senior troubleshooter. “Mr. McCoy can’t get his left generator to come on the line,” he shouted. Jake had to hold his helmet away from his left ear to hear. “You’re going in his place.”
“His tough luck, huh?”
“Right.”
“The breaks of Naval Air…”
“Be careless.” The sergeant reached for Jake’s hand and shook it, then shook Flap’s. He went down the boarding ladder and Flap closed the canopy.
“We’re going,” Jake said on the ICS. “In McCoy’s place.”
“I figured. By God, when they said all-weather attack, they meant all-weather. Have you ever flown before on a night this bad?”
“No.”
“Me either. Just to send a message to the Russians, like the Navy was an FTD florist. Roses are red, violets are blue, you hit our ships and we’ll fuck you. The peacetime military ain’t what it was advertised to be. No way, man.”
The yellow-shirted taxi director was signaling for the blue-shirts to break down the tie-downs. Jake put his feet on the brakes. “Here we go.”
It never gets any easier. In the darkness the rain streaming over the windshield blurred what little light there was and the slick deck and wind made taxiing difficult. Just beyond the bow the abyss gaped at him.
He ran through possible emergencies as he eased the plane toward the cat.
Total electrical failure while taking the cat shot was the emergency he feared the most. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what to do — he did. The doing of it in a cockpit lit only by Flap’s flashlight as adrenaline surged through you like a lightning bolt would be the trick. You had just one chance, in an envelope of opportunity that would be open for only a few seconds. You had to do it right regardless or you would be instantly, totally dead.
“Why do we do this shit?” he muttered at Flap as they taxied toward the cat.
“Because we’re too lazy for honest work and too stupid to steal.”
The truth of the matter was that he feared and loathed night cat shots. And flying at night, especially night instrument flight. There was nothing fun about it, no beauty, no glamour, no appeal to his sense of adventure, no sense that this was a thing worth doing. The needles and gauges were perverse gadgets that demanded his total concentration to make behave. Then the night flight was topped off with a night carrier landing— he once described a night carrier hop as sort of like eating an old tennis shoe for dinner, then choking down a sock for dessert.
Tonight as he ran through the launch procedures and ran the engines up to full power, rancid fear occupied a portion of his attention. A small portion, it is true, but it was there.
He tried to fight it back, to wrestle the beast back into its cage deep in his subconscious, but without success.
Wipe out the cockpit with the controls, check the engine instruments…all okay.
Jumping Jack Bean was the shooter. When Jake turned on his exterior lights, he saluted the cockpit perfunctorily with his right hand while he kept giving the “full power” signal with the wand in his left hand. Jake could see he was looking up the deck, waiting for the bow to reach the bottom of its plunge into a trough between the swells.
Now Bean lunged forward and touched the wand to the deck. The bow must be rising.
The plane shot forward.
Jake’s eyes settled on the attitude instruments.
The forward edge of the flight deck swept under the nose.
Warning lights out, rotate to eight degrees, airspeed okay, gear up.
“Positive rate of climb,” Flap reported, then keyed the radio and reported to Departure Control.
The climb went quickly because the plane was carrying only a two-thousand-pound belly tank and four empty bomb racks. But they had a long way to climb. They finally cleared the clouds at 21,000 feet and found the night sky filled with stars.
An EA-6B Prowler was already there, waiting for them. It was level at 22,000 feet, on the five-mile arc around the ship. Its exterior lights seemed weak, almost lonely as they flickered in the starry night.
The Prowler was a single-purpose aircraft, designed solely to wage electronic war. Grumman had lengthened the basic A-6 airframe enough to accept two side-by-side cockpits, so in addition to the pilot the plane carried three electronic warfare specialists known as ECMOs, or electronic countermeasures officers. Special antennae high on the tail and at various other places on the plane allowed the specialists to detect enemy radar transmissions, which they then jammed or deceived by the use of countermeasures pods that hung on the wing weapons stations. Tonight, in addition to the pods, this Prowler carried a two-thousand-pound fuel tank on its belly station. Although the EA-6B was capable of carrying a couple missiles to defend itself, Jake had never seen one armed.
As expensive as Boeing 747s, these state-of-the-art aircraft had not been allowed to cross into North Vietnam after they joined the fleet, which degraded their effectiveness but ensured that if one were lost, the Communists would not get a peek at the technology. Here, again, America traded airplanes and lives in a meaningless war rather than risk compromising the technological edge it had to have to win a war with the Soviets, a war for national survival.
Jake thought about that now — about trading lives to keep the secrets — as he flew in formation with the Prowler and looked at the telltale outline of helmeted heads in the cockpits looking back at him. Then the Prowler pilot passed Jake the lead, killed his exterior lights, slid aft and crossed under to take up a position on Jake’s right wing.
The Prowler pilot was Commander Reese, the skipper of the squadron. He was about five and a half feet tall, wore a pencil-thin mustache, and delighted in practical jokes. Inevitably, given his stature, he had acquired the nickname of Pee Wee.
Jake retarded the throttles and lowered the nose. In seconds the clouds closed in around the descending planes and blotted out the stars.
“Departure, War Ace Five Oh Two and company headed southeast, descending.”
“Roger, War Ace. Switch to Strike.”
“Switching.”
Flap twirled the radio channelization knob and waited for the Prowler to check in on frequency. Then he called Strike.
Flying in this goo, at night, wasn’t really flying at all. It was like a simulator. The world ended at the windshield. Oh, if you turned your head you could see the fuzzy glow of the wing-tip lights, and if you looked back right you could see your right wing-tip light reflecting off the skin of the Prowler that hung there, but there was no sense of speed or movement. Occasional little turbulence jolts were the only reminder that this box decorated with dim red lights, gauges and switches wasn’t welded to the earth.