Commander Dick Wheeler was Jefferson’s Air Boss, a bald, sour-faced man with a football player’s physique and a voice to match. He was already in motion when he saw Viking 704’s tail hook hit the steel deck in a shower of sparks. If his brakes were gone, the pilot would have no choice but to swing back onto the main flight deck … and squarely into the path of incoming Tomcat 201.
It was a disaster in the making. “Fouled deck!” Wheeler barked over the Pri-Fly frequency that connected him with the deck crew and the LSO.
“Fouled deck!”
The Tomcat was already drifting toward the carrier’s roundoff, scant yards from touchdown …
CHAPTER 3
“Wave off! Wave off!” The words shrilled in Tombstone’s helmet just seconds from the deck. To port, the bull’s-eye of the Fresnel lens lit up red as the LSO triggered the pickle switch he held in one hand.
The warning caught Tombstone completely by surprise. Until that moment he’d been squarely in the groove, with only the slightest of corrections necessary to keep the Tomcat floating gently toward the three wire stretched across the deck in front of him.
Tombstone’s left hand was resting on the F-14’s throttles, ready to provide small adjustments to power and set to engage the afterburners the instant his wheels touched the deck … a standard precaution in case his tail hook missed the arrestor cables and he needed to get airborne again in a hurry. Now he shoved the throttles to full power and brought the Tomcat’s nose up. The wings were already extended to provide maximum lift at low speed. As the Tomcat’s twin engines blazed into afterburners the plane accelerated, passing over the carrier’s roundoff and straight down the flight deck, twenty feet above the dark gray steel.
He caught a blurred image of motion below him, of men running, heads down, of a pale gray aircraft with engine pods slung beneath each wing lumbering into his path.
Tombstone thumbed off the spoilers and eased back on the stick, willing the Tomcat to miss the sharp, skyward thrust of the other plane’s tail.
Acting on instinct alone, he brought the F-14’s right wing up, narrowly missing the Viking’s rudder. Afterburners thundering, he flashed past the island, across the waist catapults, and out over the open sea once more.
“Wheee-oh!” Marusko said from the back seat. CAG had not said a word during the final approach and near-collision, but his relief now was heartfelt and enthusiastic. “Goddamn it, Stoney! You didn’t have to do that to impress me!”
Tombstone found he couldn’t reply, didn’t trust himself to speak. He brought the aircraft into a shallow port turn, circling back for another pass. The S-3A Viking’s tail extended about twenty-two feet above the deck. He’d not seen the actual clearance but doubted that his wingtip had missed the sub-hunter by more than a foot or two.
In all the time that Tombstone had been flying Navy jets, he’d been shot at and shot up. He’d engaged in dogfights, ejected from an aircraft suddenly gone dead, and trapped aboard a carrier deck at night with heavy seas running. Never, he thought, had he been closer to buying the farm than that near-miss. If he’d connected with the Viking, at least six men would have died right there: himself, CAG, and the S-3’s crew of four. God alone knew how many deck division people would have been caught in the fireball as plane after plane ignited, turning Jefferson’s waist into an inferno. Deck crashes were always bad. When they involved more than one plane … He took a deep breath. “CAG?” he said. “I think that one just about did it for me.”
There was a long silence. “Wait before you make any decisions, Stoney.
We’ll talk in my office.”
“Sure.” But Tombstone’s mind was already made up.
Admiral Vaughn leaned over the chart table with other members of his flag staff, studying the grease-penciled markings and time notations that plotted the paths of each of the vessels of Carrier Battle Group 14. Currently, Jefferson was cruising eastward at thirty knots, the hub of a circle spanning two hundred miles. The destroyer John A. Winslow was one hundred twenty miles ahead, the DDG Lawrence Kearny following a hundred miles astern. The frigate Gridley patrolled the CBG’s flank to the south, while Biddle continued searching for the lost sub contact to the north. The group’s Aegis cruiser, U.S.S. Vicksburg, lay thirty miles off Jefferson’s port quarter.
One last member of the carrier group prowled far ahead of the Winslow, two hundred meters beneath the surface. The U.S.S. Galveston was one of the Navy’s newest Los Angeles-class attack submarines. The nuclear-powered SSN had joined the task force only five weeks earlier.
Attack subs often worked closely with carrier battle groups, but CBG-14 had been operating without close sub support so far on this cruise. The Sea of Japan had been too shallow for sub operations, while the Thailand crisis had been resolved before Galveston could rendezvous with the Jefferson. Her usefulness in the Gulf of Thailand would have been limited in any case, but the situation here in the Arabian Sea was different. Here they were surrounded by hundreds of miles of open ocean, and under a potential threat from the world’s eighth largest navy.
It was, then, a far-flung empire that Admiral Vaughn surveyed as he studied the lines and cryptic codings on the chart, a battle group spread across an area of ocean the size of his home state of Missouri.
But it was the silent and unresolved hunt of the Biddle that occupied his mind.
“Henry!” he demanded. “Still nothing from Farrel?” Damn the man, he should have had something by now.
“Nothing, sir,” Captain Bersticer replied, joining the admiral at the plot table. “His last message stated that the contact might be lying low, hiding on the bottom.”
Vaughn reached down and traced the line marking the limits of the continental shelf south of Kutch and Kathiawar. “What’s the depth up there … about fifty fathoms?”
“Yes, sir. That’s probably what’s limiting their sonar.”
“You’d think he could find something as big as a goddamned submarine in water three hundred feet deep,” Vaughn muttered. “How about we send Galveston in to help Biddle with the search, hey?”
Bersticer rubbed his dark beard thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Admiral.
It’d take a day for the Gal to get there, and we don’t know the contact is even still in the area.”
“That’s right.” Vaughn looked up, alarmed. “God! It could’ve given Farrel the slip. Hell, that thing could be heading straight for us at this minute, flank speed.”
“Captain Fitzgerald has informed me that he has two Vikings flying in support of Biddle now. If that Foxtrot is up there, Admiral, I’m sure they’ll run him down.”
“He’d goddamned well better!”
A familiar, scratching pain rasped within Vaughn’s stomach. Almost, he reached for the antacid tablets in his shirt pocket, but he held himself back. As he refused to tolerate weakness in his subordinates, he refused to reveal his own weakness to others. Gently, he massaged his stomach.
“I want a full report for transmission to CINCPAC first thing in the morning,” he said. “I don’t like to say this, but I really don’t think this ship is up to the, ah, challenge of this mission. Damn! Did you see the operations reports today? We nearly had a major smashup right on the flight deck!”
“I saw, sir.”
“Brakes on a Viking failed. Probable cause, faulty maintenance. Faulty goddamned maintenance! Someone wasn’t doing his job, that’s sure. And we all came within an ace of getting fried when a Tomcat nearly hit the Viking on final approach!”