three hundred, and headed toward the coast of Vietnam. Jefferson turned into
the wind, generating thirty-five knots of wind across the deck, and set flight
quarters.
Inside Hornet 401, Major Frederick Hammersmith, call sign Thor, cycled
his stick forward, back, and then side to side, testing his aircraft control
surfaces. He watched the Yellow Shirt and nodded when he got a thumbs-up. He
shoved the throttle forward, coming to full military power. The Hornet
vibrated eagerly as he went to afterburners.
Thor returned the Yellow Shirt’s salute and settled the small of his back
against what passed for a lumbar support pad in his seat. Two seconds later,
the steam-driven catapult screamed forward, accelerated the Hornet to 130
knots in just under four seconds, and threw it off the forward end of the
carrier.
The Hornet dropped sickeningly. Thor felt the usual second of sheer
terror, wondering whether he had enough airspeed to fly. Of all the things
that could go wrong in carrier aviation, a “soft cat” was his personal
nightmare.
With gas and a combat load of weapons, a Hornet weighed 49,244 pounds.
In order to loft it into the air, the steam piston below the flight deck had
to be charged to the correct pressure. Too little, and the fighter would
simply dribble off the bow of the ship, unable to claw its way into the air.
Too much, and the catapult might snap his wheel strut off, and the rest of the
aircraft would do a final impersonation of a NASCAR stock car crash, probably
sweeping the handler and several other technicians off the flight deck as
well.
Marine F/A-18 squadrons had been deploying off of carriers for several
years now, as more and more often amphibious ships were married up with
carrier battle groups for those strange conflicts the Pentagon insisted on
calling “military operations other than war” or MOOTW. The strange acronym
was pronounced “moot-wah.” Monitoring the precarious political situation
around the Spratly Island fell into that nebulous mission.
Seconds after the cat shot, Thor felt the Hornet grab air and steady up.
As his speed increased, he hauled back on the stick to gain altitude.
Leveling off at five thousand feet, he waited for his wingman to join him.
Thirty seconds later, Hornet 307 snuggled up to him on the right. James
“Killer” Colburne waved. Thor clicked his radio once and pointed left, to the
west. Killer nodded and followed 401 into a gentle turn.
Thor waited until they were steady on course and then made his next call.
“Redcrown, Jigsaw One checking in.”
“Roger, Jigsaw One, we hold you, flight of two,” the Operations
Specialist on the Aegis cruiser said. The brief exchange told Thor and his
wingman that their IFF transmitters were working, and the Aegis would be able
to distinguish them from enemy aircraft if necessary.
Thor clicked his mike once in response and then settled down for a
routine CAP mission. Whatever had tried to shoot at the Viking the previous
day would find that shooting at a Hornet–and a Marine one, at that–was a
whole different ball game. Especially one that carried a few cluster bombs
snugged up on the center pylon.
1120 local (Zulu -7)
TFCC
Vincennes, Tombstone noted, was meticulously locked into the center of
her screen position. After the initial flurry of maneuvers, she settled in
fifteen thousand yards dead ahead of the carrier. Tombstone doubted that life
was very pleasant for the officers and crew of the Aegis cruiser.
1210 local (Zulu -7)
Hornet 401
An hour later, Thor was shifting uneasily in his ejection seat. “Jeez,
my back’s already aching,” he complained to Killer over tactical. “Twenty
minutes to get out here, and forty minutes of clockwise circling. Just for
the fun of it, I’m going to go the other direction for a while.”
“That’s what we get for being disciplined. If we were in the Navy, we’d
be able to have some fun out here.”
“Yeah, but we’re not. Thank God for that, anyway. Still, the colonel’s
obsessed with neat little circles in the sky. It’s getting to be a pain. Man
flies a jet, he oughta be able to have some fun with it.”