He stood straight and, looking out to sea, took several deep breaths. He should have popped the question to Callie — should have asked her to marry him. And he should have resigned from the Navy.
He shouldn’t even be here! On the boat again! He had done his share, dropped his share of bombs, killed his share of gomers.
For God’s sake — another cruise — with a bunch of jack-off jarheads!
He took his hand off the strut and stood staring at the plane, his face twisted into a frown. Primer splotches everywhere, dirt, stains from hydraulic leaks…And it was a fairly new plane, less than a year old!
Camparelli would have come screaming unglued if they had sent a plane like this to his squadron. Screaming-meemy fucking unglued!
Somehow the thought of Commander Camparelli, Jake’s last skipper in Vietnam, storming and ranting amused Jake Grafton.
“Looks like a piece of shit, don’t it?”
Bosun Muldowski was standing there staring at the plane with his arms crossed.
“Yeah, Bosun, but I ain’t looking to buy it. I’m just flying it this morning.”
“Sure didn’t expect to find you aviatin’ for the jugheads, Mr. Grafton.”
“Life’s pretty weird sometimes.”
The bosun nodded sagely. “Heard about that shithead that went through the window at Sea-Tac.”
Jake nodded and rubbed his hand through his hair. “Well, I guess I lost it for a little bit. I’m not the smartest guy you ever met.”
“Smart enough. Thanks.”
With that, the bosun walked forward, up the deck, leaving the pilot staring at his back.
“Hey, my man! Is this mean green killing machine safe to fly?” Flap. He came around the nose of the plane and lowered the BN’s boarding ladder.
“We’ll find out, won’t we?”
“It’s an embarrassing question to have to ask, I know, yet the dynamics of the moment and the precarious state of my existence here in space and time impel me to ponder my karma and your competence. No offense, but I am growing attached to my ass and don’t want to part with it. What I’m getting at, Ace, is are you man enough to handle the program?”
The pilot slapped the fuselage. “This relic from the Mongolian Air Force is going off the pointy end of this boat in about fifteen minutes with your manly physique in it. That’s the only fact I have access to. Will your ass stay attached? Will sweet, innocent Suzy Kiss-me succumb to the blandishments of the evil pervert, Mortimer Fuck-butt? Stay tuned to this channel and find out right after these words from our sponsors.” He turned his back on Flap Le Beau.
“I have no doubt this thing will go off this scow, but can you get it back aboard all in one piece?”
Jake Grafton shouted back over his shoulder: “We’ll fly together or die together, Le Beau. None of that macho male bonding crap for hairy studs like us.”
The bosun — he didn’t have to say that. And it was a beautiful day, the sun glinting on the swells, the high, open sky, the gentle motion of the ship…
The plane would feel good in his hands, would do just as he willed it. She would respond so sweetly to the throttles and stick, would come down the groove into the wires so slick and honest…
As the sea wind played with his hair the pilot found himself feeling better.
4
Wings spread and locked, flaps and slats to takeoff, Roger the weight-board — it all came back without conscious thought as Jake followed the taxi director’s hand signals and moved the warplane toward the port bow catapult, Cat Two. Flap didn’t help — he didn’t say or do anything after getting the inertial aligned and flipping the radar switch to standby. He merely sat and watched Jake.
“Takeoff checklist,” Jake prompted.
“I thought you said you could fly this thing, Ace.”
Jake ran through the items on his own as he eased the plane the last few feet into the catapult shuttle and the hold-back bar dropped into place.
The yellow-shirt taxi director gave him the “release brakes” signal with one hand and with the other made a sweeping motion below his waist. This was the signal to the catapult operator to ease the shuttle forward with a hydraulic piston, taking all the slack out of the nose-wheel tow-launching mechanism. Jake felt the thunk as he released the brakes and pushed both throttles forward to the stops.
The engines came up nicely. RPM, exhaust gas temperatures, fuel flow — the tapes ran up the dials as the engines wound up.
The Intruder vibrated like a living thing as the engines sucked in rivers of air and slammed it out the exhausts.
“You ready?” Jake asked the bombardier as he wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the catapult grip while he braced the heel of the hand against the throttles.
“Onward and upward, Ace.”
The taxi director was pointing to the catapult officer, who was ten feet farther up the deck. The shooter was twirling his fingers and looking at Jake, waiting.
Oil pressure both engines — fine. Hydraulics — okay. Jake waggled the stick and checked the movement of the stabilator in his left-side rearview mirror on the canopy rail. Then he saluted the cat officer with his right hand. The shooter returned it and glanced up the cat track toward the bow as Jake put his head back into the headrest and placed his right hand behind the stick.
Now the cat officer lunged forward and touched the deck with his right hand.
One heartbeat, two, then the catapult fired. The acceleration was vicious.
Yeeeaaaah! and it was over, in about two and a half seconds. The edge of the bow swept under the nose and the plane was over the glittering sea.
Jake let the trim rotate the nose to eight degrees nose up as he reached for the gear handle. He slapped it up and swept his eyes across the instrument panel, taking in the attitude reference on the vertical display indicator — the VDI, the altimeter— eighty feet and going up, the rate of climb — positive, the airspeed—150 knots and accelerating, all warning lights out. He took in all these bits of information without conscious thought, just noted them somewhere in his subconscious, and put it all together as the airplane accelerated and climbed away from the ship.
With the gear up and locked, he raised the flaps and slats. Here they came. Still accelerating, he stopped the climb at five hundred feet and ran the nose trim down. Two hundred and fifty knots, 300, 350…still accelerating…
To his amusement he saw that Flap Le Beau was sitting upright in his ejection seat with his hands folded on his lap, just inches from the alternate ejection handle between his legs.
At 400 knots Jake eased the throttles back. Five miles coming up on the DME…and the pilot pulled the nose up steeply and dropped the left wing as he eased the throttles forward again. The plane leaped away from the ocean in a climbing turn. Jake scanned the sky looking for the plane that had preceded him on the cat by two minutes.
He had four thousand pounds of fuel — no, only three thousand now — to burn off before they called him down for his first landing, in about fifteen minutes.
Better make it last, Jake. Don’t squander it. He pulled the throttles back and coasted up to five thousand feet, where he leveled indicating 250 knots in a gentle turn that would allow him to orbit the ship on the five-mile circle.
Flap sighed audibly over the intercom, the ICS, then said, “Acceptable launch, Grafton. Acceptable. You obviously have done this once or twice and haven’t forgotten how. This pleases me. I get a warm fuzzy.”
There the major was, almost on the other side of the ship, level at this altitude and turning on the five-mile arc. Jake steepened his turn to cut across above the ship and rendezvous.