CHAPTER 3
1426 hours, 23 March
.$;•** Wave off! Wave off!” The words shrilled in Tombstone’s ~fy helmet just seconds from the deck. To port, the bull’s-eye of tf tfce Fresnel lens lit up red as the LSO triggered the pickle ^(twitch te held in one hand. c, The warning caught Tombstone completely by surprise.
•-|:’, Until that moment he’d been squarely in the groove, with only
•if- tlte slightest of corrections necessary to keep the Tomcat I^EISating gently toward the three wire stretched across the deck ?^i«|;ftont of him.
I*: ^Tombstone’s left hand was resting on the F-I4’s throttles, ^ffiiteady to provide small adjustments to power and set to engage %’^p afterburners the instant his wheels touched the deck … a ||; standard precaution in case his tail hook missed the arrester
•ijpctibtes and he needed to get airborne again in a hurry. Now he “fesltoved the throttles to full power and brought the Tomcat’s up. The wings were already extended to provide maxi-lift at low speed. As the Tomcat’s twin engines blazed afterburner, the plane accelerated, passing over the carrier’s jff and straight down the flight deck, twenty feet above the gray steel.
“He caught a blurred image of motion below him, of men , heads down, of a pale gray aircraft with engine pods beneath each wing lumbering into his path. r’-tf–;. Tombstone thumbed off the spoilers and eased back on the ^ Jtick, willing the Tomcat to miss the sharp, skyward thrust of ||Jflie other plane’s tail. Acting on instinct alone, he brought the
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Keith Dougkss
ARMAGEDDON MODE
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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.
“Wbeee-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 man 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 atone 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.
1S30 hours, 23 March FtagPtt
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 Sj the CBG’s flank to the south, while Biddle continued searching ‘Mi for the lost sub contact to the north. The group’s Aegis cruiser, ‘!si 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 ;*