“How about the tops?” Mother shouted over the din.
“Don’t know, sir, I was in the goo the whole time.”
Mother nodded his understanding. Turnip descended the ladder, and Mother watched him disappear inside the island, qualified, complete, and free. He figured if new guy Turnip could do this he could, too, but that didn’t quell the overload of anxiety coursing through him.
Once he got the left engine started, Mother saw a yellow shirt impatient to taxi him. He released the parking brake and crept ahead, his ears bombarded by unfamiliar radio transmissions of approach controllers and the LSOs. The Air Boss yelled at someone, and all the while yellow light wand signals flashed everywhere. The scene was worse than he remembered. As he felt the deck roll underneath him, his legs seemed to push the brake pedals through the floor to hold position. They taxied him to the bow as a bull to slaughter, and he waited behind the jet blast deflector, his nose mere feet away from it as a Hornet went into tension ahead of him, the engines at full power giving off waves of hot exhaust and booming sound that caused Mother to bounce in his seat as wave upon wave of unseen energy beat on his jet — and on his fears.
The Hornet roared down the track and transformed into pulsing strobe lights and two dull glows from the engine nozzles as it climbed away into the blackest night he had ever seen. At the moment it became airborne, the jet blast deflector lowered, and Mother sensed all eyes on him. Two seemingly disembodied wands signaled him forward and signaled him again to spread his wings, then to turn, then turn again. A cloud of catapult steam cascaded down the track and enveloped him, making it impossible to see anything but the dim wands, still moving, still directing. The scene was a vertigo-inducing living hell, and his open mouth gulped oxygen through his mask. The yellow shirt motioned to him, and motioned again.
What is that? he thought.
Mother’s headset crackled with an order from the Boss. “On Cat One, drop your launch bar!” Mother reached down, found the damn switch and extended it as the yellow shirt directed him forward… slow… slow… stop. Sailors scrambled under his jet while a dozen others stood around and watched the scene from the relative safety of the shot line. To his left a blinding white cone of light shot forward, a Hornet off the angle on a bolter, in burner, with another terrified pilot concentrating on his instruments.
Mother was alone with his breathing, afraid as he had never been before. Fourteen years ago he didn’t know any better. Now, after 14 years of suppressing and avoiding, he did, and only the greater fear of getting out of the cockpit kept him in it.
Mother saw his director position himself then extend his arms. With a combination of dread and courage, Mother shoved the throttles to military as he shivered and panted in fear, waiting to be shot into the void he could no longer evade. He watched the deck edge lights a football field away, the only thing outside the cockpit he could see. His body trembled in a state just short of panic as he felt the deck rise and fall over a cold, black, and unforgiving ocean.
CHAPTER 12
After two days and nights at sea in the SOCAL operating area, and with the pilots of Air Wing Fifteen carrier qualified, Hancock steadied up on a base course of 304 degrees and increased speed to 27 knots.
In the six days since the attack on Cape Esperance, Admiral Clark had sortied everything seaworthy out of Pearl Harbor and San Diego, including Hancock’s sister carrier Sam Nunn. In a ruse to confuse snoopers, the two carriers rendezvoused west of the Channel Islands and spent the day and night weaving back and forth on a westerly heading. The Russian AGI intelligence collector vessel, or any untracked foreign submarines off the California coast, would have a tough time following the fast carriers, and soon the AGI could not tell them apart. Hancock slipped away while Sam Nunn set a course for Hawaii and slowed while showing her lights and radiating her emitters. The much slower AGI took the bait, and Hanna sprinted free into the Pacific. After a day, Sam Nunn returned to San Diego to load the rest of her stores before she too headed west.
Bombers from Texas, Louisiana, South Dakota and Missouri deployed to Alaska and Guam not only to take a forward station for tasking but also to serve as a show of force to the Chinese. Tankers from New Jersey, Kansas and California, plus fighters from Idaho, North Carolina, Arizona, Virginia, Utah and Alaska joined the charge west. Behind them were hundreds of transport, reconnaissance, electronic warfare and maritime patrol aircraft with thousands of airmen technicians and support personnel and equipment. These diverse aircraft set up a defensive perimeter and numerous offensive step-off points at bases from Japan to Australia.
However, the heavy lift of offensive firepower, men, and material would be borne by the Navy and Military Sealift Command support vessels, from prepositioning transports to underway replenishment oilers. Submarines and cruisers, along with carrier-based aircraft using in-flight refueling, could strike at targets hundreds and hundreds of miles away. Marines embarked in amphibious lift ships coordinated with forward deployed airpower could secure small beachheads and islands, establish perimeters, evacuate citizens, and take down outposts or civilian vessels. In this American way of war, forward deployed forces held and harassed before the full juggernaut of American military might could be brought to bear, in this case a journey of over 7,000 miles across the largest geographic feature on earth. And when their journey was complete, they would meet and do battle with the modern military of the most populous nation on earth.
On Capitol Hill, in the newsrooms of New York and Washington, even in the Pentagon, people asked one another one question: Are we really going to do this?
The tragic scale of the Cape Esperance attack and the subsequent Chinese arrest and detention of half the crew of John Adams incensed Americans who expected action from their leaders. As the dead were identified and the grieving families interviewed, the wall-to-wall network news coverage of war clouds in the Pacific and defiant rhetoric from both Washington and Beijing served to galvanize the population for war, a war the American people would have little understanding of in an area of the world fewer could identify.
Americans of the left, sympathetic to China and full of national self-loathing, questioned the rush to war and saw it as a Pentagon ploy. What was our ship doing in Chinese waters anyway? they cried in an effort to blame blood-thirsty generals and the defense industry executives who supplied them. They blamed the Pentagon alone for the loss of hundreds aboard the ship, or blamed the sailors for enlisting and serving the hated military in the first place, placing themselves in danger. What did they expect?
Still other Americans, fed up with the hardships of world leadership and uninterested in world geopolitics, saw the whole thing as contrived at best. They viewed the incident as fake news, foisted on a gullible public by a media, and a government, with a history of manipulation. In the service of this divided and/or ignorant society, Flip Wilson and tens of thousands of others increased the risk to their lives with each passing mile.
One task of the Chief of Naval Operations was to explain to Congress how the Navy conducted business, and the reason for the type of patrol Cape Esperance was conducting when the Chinese attacked it without warning. Admiral Roger Moraski sat in the back of his staff car with his aide, going over the latest ship dispositions. Cactus Clark already had two carriers and over fifty combatants moving west across the Pacific at best speed. Soon, Sam Nunn would join them, and the lone carrier in the Persian Gulf, USS Les Aspin, was moving out into the Indian Ocean and east toward Malacca. Most of them would be in positions to engage in a week’s time.