say so.
Say again? Okay … roger that. Bring her on in. Soft and smooth …
just like you were sticking your best girl …”
Bayerly’s Tomcat pulled into its final break three quarters of a mile
behind the Jefferson. Even at that distance, Tombstone caught the signs
of nervousness, the slight flutter to the wings as Bayerly
overcompensated, corrected, then corrected too far. He was fighting his
Tomcat, wrestling it toward the trap.
Not good …
“You’re lined up fine.” Roberts’s voice was a soothing balm. “Still a
bit high. Slack off some. More …”
“Shit!” someone behind them snapped. “He’s still too high!”
Roberts grimaced, shaking his head. Tombstone saw the same thing, felt
the same worry; Bayerly was still afraid of the deck after his first two
close calls. He was going to bolter again.
“Wave off!” Roberts pressed the pickle switch. “Wave off!”
1529 hours, 14 January
Tomcat 101
Bayerly saw the red wave-off signal and bit off an obscenity. What
happened next passed too quickly for the luxury of decision or reason.
He had to get down on deck, had to land before his already shaken nerve
went completely and he made a fool of himself in front of every man in
the squadron, in front of the wing, in front of Magruder.
The thought of death didn’t even enter into the equation. With a savage
yank on the throttles, he cut back the engines until they were barely
idling, and brought the nose up … up … He heard Di Di Roberts
shouting at him, but he was already committed. His F-14 plummeted.
The tactic, known as “diving for the deck,” was not an approved
technique for carrier landing. Screw that, Bayerly thought. Any port
in a storm …
As the deck rushed up to meet him, he throttled up. His tailhook
snagged the number-four wire just as his landing gear slammed into the
deck with a jolt that slammed Bayerly’s tailbone and elicited a yelp of
surprise or pain out of Stratton. He cut back the engine, then sat
there, unable for a moment to move. The sheer shock and … not joy,
precisely, but surprise of being down and in one piece were
overwhelming.
He pulled his oxygen mask away from his face and ran his hand over his
eyes. His glove came away slick with sweat. But he was down!
1705 hours, 14 January
CAG’s office, 0-3 Deck, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Commander Marusko leaned back in the chair with a squeak of casters.
Tombstone and Made It stood at attention side by side, facing him across
his cluttered desk. He ran one hand across his balding scalp and burned
the two of them with his blackest scowl.
“So, are you hotdogs going to tell me what the hell that was all about
up there, or just stand there looking at me shit-faced?”
Both of the aviators avoided his eyes, focusing on some point behind his
shoulder. They’d changed out of their flight suits and wore their
khakis.
The office was small and cramped, as were most such spaces on board the
Jefferson. This one reflected the man who occupied it: framed
commendations and degrees adorned the bulkheads … those not taken up
by book shelves or filing cabinets. A plastic model of an F/A-18
perched on a shelf above the IBM Selectric on its typing stand. Books
on engineering and flight avionics were interspersed with quarterly
fitness reports. A color photograph of an attractive woman and a pretty
teenaged girl rested atop a ship’s library copy of Moby Dick.
The title CAG–commander Air Group–was a holdover from the days when a
carrier fielded an air group rather than an air wing; Navy tradition
being what it was, the older term was still in use, like the word “head”
in a Navy where the enlisted men no longer went to the “head” of the
ship to relieve themselves.
More and more, the carrier Navy was coming to use the concept known as
“SuperCAG,” where the wing commander acted strictly as an administrator
and never, as in Vietnam days, actually flew. That, Marusko had long
since decided, was his real problem. He still found time to get in his