deck crewmen were beginning to break the Tomcat down, removing the
chains and chocks that secured the thirty-ton aircraft to its place on
the flight deck.
A plane director in a Mickey Mouse helmet and a stained, yellow jersey
moved past the starboard wing, hands raised, signaling like a cop at a
busy intersection. Every man in the deck crew wore a color-coded jersey
that identified his section: yellow for plane directors, blue for
aircraft handlers, green for maintenance personnel and for the
hook-and-cat men, brown for plane captains, purple for fuel handlers,
red for firefighters and ordnance men, white for safety monitors,
black-and-white checks for inspectors and troubleshooters.
“Here we go,” Coyote said. “Gold Eagle Two-oh-one, rolling.”
Guided by the Yellow Shirt, the Tomcat rolled smoothly across the flight
deck, nosing up behind the vertical wall of a jet-blast deflector raised
from the deck. Forward of the JBD, another Tomcat had just screamed off
the bow and into the sky, and steam was swirling past the deck like
low-flying clouds.
The JBD dropped into its recess in the deck, and Coyote guided the
Tomcat forward, aligning it with precision along the rail-straight slash
of the starboard bow catapult.
From her vantage point high up off the steel deck, Cat had a glorious
view of the sea and sky around her. It was minutes before dawn, which
came at 0640 hours at this latitude and this time of year. The sky was
completely clear save for a rim of purple clouds along the horizon. Aft
and to port the sky was still a deep, midnight blue; ahead and to
starboard, toward the east, it had already lightened to a dazzling blend
of cerulean and gold, and the tops of the clouds were catching the first
orange touch of the hidden sun. A dazzlingly bright star–actually the
planet Venus–gleamed like a beacon low in the southeast. In every
direction, the sea was a deep, deep blue-green shadowed to
near-invisibility by the last remnants of night.
With a thunderous, shuddering roar, the engines of Tomcat 206 on the
catapult to her left rose to a shrieking crescendo, the aircraft
trembling against that twin-mouthed fury. The launch officer performed
his ballet of movement, swinging his arm up to point off the carrier’s
bow, then dropping to touch the deck. At the signal, the catapult
officer in his enclosed cockpit on the deck off to one side pressed his
button. Tomcat 206, Lieutenant Bruce “Mustang” Davis at the stick,
whooshed down the catapult and off the bow, its engines glowing like
twin orange eyes in the twilight. Steam fumed from the catapult track
as deck crewmen dashed from their standby positions, preparing to
receive the next Tomcat in line.
Other crewmen, meanwhile, were making the final preparations on 201.
Red-shirted ordies yanked the safing wires from the F-14’s armament
stores: four AIM-54C Phoenix missiles, two AIM-9M Sidewinders, and two
of the new AMRAAM radar-guided missiles that were only now slowly coming
into service as a replacement for the old, less-than-satisfactory
Sparrow. One of them held a handful of wires up so that Coyote and Cat
could verify that all of the weapons were now ready to fire. A Purple
Shirt, a “Grape” in the lexicon of carrier deck crews, held up a
signboard with the numerals 65000. That was the weight in pounds of the
Tomcat, its stores, and its fuel. A cross-check with Coyote was
necessary to verify the figure, so that the launch crews could set their
catapult to fire with the proper strength. Green-shirted hook-and-cat
men crawled beneath the aircraft, attaching the catapult shuttle and
making certain all was ready for launch.
“Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Amen” sounded over her headset, a murmured
litany. Coyote was running through the old naval aviator’s ritual,
“wiping” the Tomcat’s rudder and ailerons by moving his stick forward
and back, left and right, then moving the rudder pedals with his feet.
“Harness set?” Coyote asked her.
“Ready to go,” she said. Could he hear her heart hammering through the
ICS? Her mouth was dry, her palms inside her flight gloves were wet.
She heard the Air Boss speaking to Coyote over the radio, giving him
clearance. A light shining from the island and visible over her right