Well, such questions were pointless anyway. Tombstone kept his eyes on his instrument displays, especially his VDI where the ILS needles were guiding him through the night toward Jefferson’s deck. The carrier was completely invisible in the darkness, an unseen speck of life somewhere ahead in that black ocean. Of all maneuvers performed by Navy aviators, traps on a carrier’s steel deck at night were unquestionably the most disliked, the most feared. According to the flight surgeons keeping records of such things, a night trap tended to elevate heartbeat, respiration, and blood pressure more than a dogfight.
Tombstone, though, was past caring. The dogfight had left him drained, his reactions as automatic as the navigational guidance information from his Instrument Landing System. They had rendezvoused with a tanker for air-to-air refueling after the battle, and he’d gone through the motions like a machine, had not even remembered the problems he’d had in a similar maneuver . . . had it only been yesterday?
“Two-oh-one,” Lieutenant Commander Ted “Burner” Craig, Viper Squadron’s LSO, called. “We have you at three miles out, altitude one-four-double-oh. Looking good.”
“Rog.”
ARMAGEDDON MODE 95
“Hey, Skipper?” Dixie said over the ICS. “You see the bird farm yet? I can’t see diddly in this soup.”
“No sweat,” Tombstone replied. “We’re almost in.”
But he couldn’t see the ship either. During the past hour, a thick layer of clouds had moved in from the northeast, as though the Indian subcontinent itself were conspiring to drive the American ships and planes from her shores. The wind was picking up as well. He imagined that Jefferson would be a bit lively with a fresh breeze blowing across her flight deck.
And then the Tomcat dropped through the cloud deck and Tombstone saw the carrier’s lights. Perspective during a night trap was always a curious and stomach-twisting thing. The flight deck’s center line was lit up, and a vertical strip of lights hanging off Jefferson’& roundoff provided a clue to the vessel’s three-dimensional orientation. From the sky, the lights seemed no brighter than the stars overhead.
“Two-oh-one,” sounded in his ears. “Call the ball.”
It was time to stop flying the needles and bring his ship in. Tombstone glanced at the meatball, saw that he was a little low, and corrected automatically. “Tomcat Two-oh-one, ball,” he said. “Four point two.”
The F-14 slid down out of the sky, the nearly black mass of the carrier deck expanding to meet it. At the last moment, Tombstone saw the green cut lights go on by the ball, the nighttime signal that he was clear to land. There was a momentary illusion that he was flying into a hole outlined by lights . . . that the deck was winging up into a vertical wall dead ahead. Then the Tomcat slammed into the deck at one hundred thirty knots, the arrester hook snagging the number-three wire in a perfect night trap as Tombstone first rammed the throttles forward, then brought them back to idle.
“That’s an OK,” Tombstone heard the LSO say over the net. “Two-oh-one down.”
Ahead of the Tomcat, deck crewmen moved in nearly total darkness, their hand signals revealed by colored light wands eerily visible suspended against the black. Carefully, Tombstone followed a pair of wagging yellow wands across the flight deck.
“Commander Magruder, this is the Boss,” Dick Wheeler’s voice said over the radio. “CAG wants a word with you as
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Keith Douglass
soon as you unstrap your turkey.” Turkey was popular carrier slang for the Tomcat.
“Copy that,” Tombstone replied. He glanced up toward the rounded, glassed-in protrusion from high up on the island, Pri-Fly, where the Air Boss reigned supreme.
There was no sense asking the man further questions, for he’d be concentrating already on Batman’s 216 bird, due in forty seconds behind Tombstone’s. He was expecting to be debriefed, certainly. Aviators were always grilled after a combat engagement. But this sounded like something more.
Perhaps, Tombstone thought, the real fight was still to come.
CHAPTER 9
2258 hours, 24 March
CAG’s office, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
“Off the line!” The words struck Tombstone like a smash to the solar plexus. “God, CAG! You’re putting me in hack! What did I do?”