Why did I do it? he wondered again. It was insane, getting involved with her. It was the worst mistake you could make in this business, thinking with the wrong part of your anatomy. Getting laid had taken priority over keeping his job.
He had to find a way out.
Twenty miles from the ship, passing 5,000 feet, he called, “Runner 401, Platform.”
“Roger, switch to final controller.”
On the final control frequency he could no longer hear Spam and her ongoing dispute with the marshal controller. She was still ten miles behind him. That was fine with him. He’d heard enough of her bitching.
A half mile from the carrier, he picked up the glimmer of the deck lighting and the amber meatball. DeLancey flew a steady pass to the deck, snagging the two wire.
Following the lighted wands of the taxi director, DeLancey parked his jet forward of the carrier’s island superstructure. He shut down the engines, but left the battery switch on while he listened to the UHF radio.
Just then, he saw the dark silhouette of a Hornet flash past the port side of the ship. A second later, he heard the roar of twin afterburners — Whooom! A jet was being waved off from its pass at the deck.
Spam, he realized. Getting another wave off by the LSO. This was going to be interesting.
On his UHF radio display he selected the channel on which the LSO was working Spam’s jet. Then he heard rapping on his Plexiglas canopy. Ruiz, the plane captain who maintained DeLancey’s jet, was standing on the boarding ladder.
DeLancey raised the canopy. “There’s something wrong with the radio,” he yelled over the din of deck noise. “It dumped the loaded frequencies. I have to reprogram it.”
“Never mind, sir,” Ruiz yelled back. “I’ll do that.”
DeLancey shook his head. “No, I remember the frequencies. I can do it.” He closed the canopy and busied himself punching numbers into the UHF display. Ruiz shrugged and stepped back down the boarding ladder.
On the radio DeLancey could hear Pearly Gates using his sweetest sugar talk: “— not enough power, then you came on with too much. Go easy with it next time, Spam.”
“You go easy!” Spam snapped back. “I was doing okay until you started giving me all those power calls.”
Listening to the radio exchange, DeLancey began to have an idea. There was a way. Maybe, just maybe, he had found a way out of his predicament.
“You tell me,” Boyce barked, “why the hell is that pilot still wearing wings?”
Maxwell didn’t reply. They both knew it was a rhetorical question. And they both knew why Boyce was asking the question in a loud voice. The skipper of the Reagan, Captain Stickney, had just stormed into CATCC.
The room was flooded in an eerie, red-lighted glow. Flickering consoles were arrayed along each bulkhead. Controllers sat hunched over their displays, directing the Reagan’s jets through the night sky.
Stickney was wearing his old battered Navy flight jacket. “We’re running out of sea room on this heading,” he said. “We’re bearing down on Kharj Island and a cluster of Iranian oil platforms. You’ve got five minutes to get her down or she bingoes.”
Boyce nodded. “Yes, sir. We’ve got the tanker hawking her on the downwind.”
Stickney didn’t look happy. He turned to leave, then said over his shoulder, “Why is that pilot still wearing wings?”
Spam tried to concentrate. Down in the ready room, she knew all the other pilots — the men — were glued to the PLAT, cackling and making bets and having a good old time watching the alien trying to get aboard. Bolter, bingo, or barbecue?
She was on final approach, a quarter mile from the ship. Close enough to see the ball clearly. It was a little low, and that was fine with her. It made for a better pass, she believed, if you kept it on the low side all the way in. It gave you a better shot at the wires.
“Don’t go low,” she heard Pearly say. “A lii — tttlle powerrrrr….”
She responded with a jab of the throttles.
The ball was coming up, almost in the middle…
“Eeeeasssy with it.” The LSO’s voice sounded different, she thought.
Then, the same voice, “Don’t go high!”
It didn’t sound like Pearly. CAG must have assigned another LSO to take over.
She snatched the throttles back again.
She heard a garbled transmission. The new voice again: “Don’t go high. Right for line up.”
Obeying, she dipped the right wing, swinging the jet’s nose slightly to the right.
And dropping lower.
Much lower. The ball was descending to the bottom of the lens.
More garbled transmissions. She didn’t understand. What was he saying?
The red wave-off lights were flashing.
The ball was flashing red at the bottom of the lens. She saw the gray mass of carrier looming out of the darkness ahead.
She saw the ramp.
Spam jammed the throttles forward. Seeing the blunt end of the deck swell in front of her, her mind froze.
“Power! Wave Off! Wave Off! Burner!” Pearly Gates was yelling — screaming — into his radio.
It was as if she didn’t hear him. The jet was descending like a rock toward the blunt ramp of the carrier. Suddenly Pearly knew what would happen next.
His only escape was the survival net that hung out over the water beneath the platform. He took one last glance at the approaching jet, then dropped his handset. With a running leap he hurled himself over the side of the platform. Astonished, the two other LSOs dropped their notebooks and leaped behind him.
In the next instant, the F/A-18 struck the ramp.
KABLOOOM! The jet broke in half, and the internal fuel tanks exploded.
A torrent of flaming jet fuel swept over the aft flight deck, engulfing the LSO platform.
The aft portion of the fighter, tailhook still attached, slid up the deck and snagged the number one arresting wire. The tail of the jet lurched to an abrupt stop, burning fiercely.
The forward half of the Hornet was wrapped in flame. As if in slow motion, it tumbled end over end down the angled deck. At the end of the angled deck, it pitched into empty space and disappeared in the blackness of the Gulf.
A sheet of flame covered the ramp of the landing area. Trapped in the arresting wires, the aft fuselage was a bright orange fireball. The LSO platform and its electronic console were ablaze.
Klaxon horns blared. The air boss’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers: “Fire! Fire! Fire on the flight deck aft and amidships. Away all support teams. This is not a drill!”
It was a scene of horrific beauty. Whipped by the thirty-knot wind over the deck, the flames cascaded into the sky, lighting up the flight deck. Behind the ship, the surface of the sea shimmered in an orange glow.
Firefighters in asbestos suits moved like mechanical toys over the illuminated deck. Hoses gushed streams of white foam onto the blaze.
Alone, DeLancey watched from the cockpit of his parked Hornet. All the deck crewmen had run to join the fire fighting team. DeLancey allowed himself a smile of satisfaction.
Chapter Twenty
The Cave Dwellers
Pearly Gates was a mess. Both eyebrows were singed away, and his left arm was bandaged. His ankle was sprained from having the other LSOs land on top of him in the net.
He was taking Spam Parker’s death hard. The worst thing that could happen to an LSO was to lose a pilot he was controlling. He kept shaking his head. “I tried to help her. She wouldn’t respond. She wouldn’t answer my calls.”