of air, then held his breath. Details of the dark gray deck, of sailors
standing to either side of the white guidelines burned themselves into his
consciousness. He could see the barricade stretched like a tennis net across
the deck forward, could see the gangling, Tinkertoy shape of the Tilly, the
wheeled crane, and the crash crews standing ready in case he came down hard.
“You’re low,” the LSO warned in his headset. “Power up. Power up!”
Jefferson’s stern seemed to rise in front of his cockpit like a gray
steel cliff–an illusion, he knew, but terrifying nonetheless. He pushed the
throttle forward, pulling the stick back at the same time, pulling the nose up
…
And then he was out of time. The Tomcat swept in toward the roundoff,
but too low … too low …
“Wave-off! Wave-off!” the LSO was screaming in his ear. Then, “Eject!
Eject! Eject!”
He felt the savage jolt as his main wheels struck the rim of the steel
cliff and snapped off. The full weight of the Tomcat came down on the nose
wheel, which broke away under the impact, slamming the F14’s nose to the deck.
In the same instant, his vision bluffed and shot through with dazzling
sparks, Coyote grabbed the brightly striped eject handle and yanked it, hard.
Nothing happened. Coyote’s scream was lost in the shriek of steel
scraping steel as the Tomcat careened across the deck.
CHAPTER 6
Wednesday, 18 June
1532 hours Zulu (1632 hours Zone)
Vulture’s Row, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Viking Station, the Norwegian Sea
Tombstone had come up to the steel-railed walkway set atop the carrier’s
island, just beneath the clutter of her radio and radar masts and antennas.
Vulture’s Row, as the eyrie was called, was a favorite retreat of his. From
here, he had an unobstructed view of the carrier’s flight deck both fore and
aft.
Moments after the word had been passed to stand down from General
Quarters, Tombstone had come here to watch Coyote’s recovery. The PLAT
monitors in CIC were displaying the scene, of course, but he wanted to be
here, willing his old friend to bring himself and his RIO and his aircraft
down to the safety of Jefferson’s flight deck. He held his breath as he
watched the damaged Tomcat make its approach, growing from a tiny speck in the
sky astern of the carrier, to a Tomcat coming in nose-high, wings wobbling as
Coyote battled the controls. Then the F14’s undercarriage slammed into the
roundoff, the nose wheel strut snapped, and the twenty-ton aircraft was
sliding wildly down the deck toward the barricade. Crewmen on the deck
scrambled for safety as the F14, its left wing dragging on steel, spun
broadside, snapping the arrestor cables one after another as it hurtled toward
a row of A6 Intruders just abaft of the island.
Tombstone willed Coyote to punch out, but the Tomcat continued its slide
across the deck, sparks showering from its undercarriage. It narrowly missed
the Intruders, then slammed into the barricade stretched across its path. The
carrier’s 5-MC, the loudspeaker system on the flight deck, was blaring an
alarm klaxon, as a voice bellowed, “Fire on the deck! Fire on the flight
deck!” And fire was licking from the root of the F14’s wing. As jet fuel
dribbled from ruptured tanks and pooled on the deck, each second threatened to
turn the Tomcat, trapped now in the barricade net like an insect in a spider’s
web, into a roaring inferno.
Tombstone watched, transfixed, as the flight deck fire party, identified
by their red jerseys, closed in on the burning aircraft. Fire extinguishers
shooshed and roared, spraying clouds Of C02 across hot metal, damping the
flames licking now about the cockpit. The Tilly closed in, ungainly, swaying
with its own uneven movements as it edged a basket close to the Tomcat’s
cockpit. A man in a silver flamesuit wielded his fire extinguisher, as
hospital corpsmen clambered onto the wing with a pair of wire-frame Stokes
stretchers. Other crewmen were already at work on the canopy with pry bars.
“Come on,” Tombstone murmured, half aloud. Then louder, “Come on, damn
it! Get them out of there!”
1533 hours Zulu (1633 hours Zone)