recovery.
“Okay, Viper Two-oh-one,” the voice said after a moment. “You’ve got a
bunch of holes topside, just aft of the canopy. Looks like your forward
fuselage fuel tanks and the starboard engine bay were holed big-time. That’s
the bad news. Good news is there’s not much damage visible on your underside.
Your tailhook appears undamaged. Same for your wheel-well doors.”
“Eagle One-one-oh, can you get a visual on my RIO? What’s his condition,
over?”
“Rog, we see him. Head’s down, no response that we can see. Looks like
he’s out.” The voice left unspoken the possibility that John-Boy was dead.
“There’s some damage to the canopy. Looks like a round or a fragment hit it,
starboard side aft. Can’t tell if your RIO was in the way or not.”
“Okay, One-one-oh. Thanks.”
“Anytime, Viper Two-oh-one. We’ll see you on deck.”
And then he was alone once more.
The memory stole up on Coyote, sharp and unexpected, a scene from the
last time he’d been home, of him standing hand in hand with Julie, his wife,
on a huge and weathered boulder at Great Falls. The vista of boulders, woods,
and spectacular, crag-leaping waterfalls on the Potomac a few miles northwest
of Washington, D.C., had all the intensity of a waking dream. Almost, he
could sense Julie’s warmth and smell the fresh-grass scent of her hair as she
pressed close to him, inside the circle of his arm. The yearning made him
tremble.
Julie …
Suddenly, he wanted her very much. The memory was replaced by another:
their last night together before he’d left for the Jefferson. He was there,
in the bedroom of their home in the officers’ housing at Norfolk, as she rode
his hips in the half-light of the early, early morning, her sides slick with
sweat as he held her, the air heavy with the mingled odors of their
lovemaking.
He missed his wife so badly his breath caught in his throat. And their
daughter, Julie Marie …
Angrily, he pulled his oxygen mask aside and swallowed several hard gulps
of the cockpit’s air. What would happen to them if he bought the farm in
these next few moments? After years of Navy flying, suddenly nothing else
seemed to matter but the knowledge that he loved his family with a depth and
passion he’d never before been able to more than dimly sense. He tried to
read his cockpit instruments. It was as though his helmet visor was fogged
and obscuring his view, though the visor was up. For some reason he couldn’t
see, couldn’t focus …
“Icewall One, this is the Boss.” The voice of Commander Jack Monroe,
Jefferson’s Air Boss, crackled in Coyote’s headset and snapped him back to the
here and now. The Air Boss was the god of Pri-Fly, or Primary Flight Control
as it was more usually called, the control tower of a seagoing airport. The
Boss was lord of an aerial domain extending for twenty miles around the
carrier. Damn. Coyote’s hands were shaking as he refastened his mask across
his face. “Yeah, Boss.” The dryness in his throat was worse. “Icewall
copies.”
“Icewall, you are cleared for trap. We have erected the barricade. Do
you copy, over?”
“Roger that. Barricade up.” The barricade was a net stretched across
the flight deck in front of the island, designed to snag crippled aircraft
that, for one reason or another, could not use their arrestor gear. Coming
down on a flight deck with the barricade erected was, for Navy aviators, an
unnatural act. No pilot likes to see an obstacle stretched across the runway
in front of him, and the shock of impact was worse than the sharp snatch-yank
of an arrested landing. “Two-oh-one, charlie now.” That was the command to
begin his approach. Gently, Coyote brought the Tomcat into a turn, following
a precisely regulated path that led past and astern of the Jefferson.
Normally, he would have slowed the Tomcat until it spread its
variable-geometry wings to full spread, but Coyote had already been
deliberately keeping his airspeed under three hundred knots and the wings
spread. With one crippled engine he needed all the additional lift he could
get. Aviators referred to the F14’s wings-extended position as “goose mode”