Stephen Coonts - Combat

The A-4s dropped their tailhooks and entered the Delta pattern two thousand feet overhead the ship in a descending left-hand carousel. Thaler, Delight’s wingman, crossed his leader’s tail from the left to establish right echelon beside Ostrewski with Vespa outboard.

Delight reached the initial point three miles astern of the carrier, approaching parallel to her starboard side. He looked down from eight hundred feet and felt a rumble of excited satisfaction in his belly. After months of planning and training, there was the former USS Santa Cruz with a ready deck, steaming upwind and eager to receive him. Zack led his little formation ahead of the ship’s white-foamed bow. He checked his airspeed — steady on three hundred knots — and prepared for his break turn.

Ahead of the ship, Delight laid the stick over to port, brought the throttle back to 80 percent, hit the speed brakes, and pulled. His vision went gray at the periphery, but he rolled wings level about a mile and a quarter off the port side, descending through six hundred feet while headed aft.

Delight’s left hand automatically found the gear and flap handles, and he felt his A-4F decelerate through 220 under the additional drag. He shot a glance at the angle-of-attack indicator, cross-checking with airspeed.

As the LSO platform seemed to slide past him, Delight turned left, adding power to maintain 130 knots. Turning his head, he saw the mirror’s meatball halfway up the deck. He crossed the wide white wake, sucked off a bit of throttle, and stabilized his angle of attack with minute adjustments of the stick.

Meatball, angle of attack, lineup , Delight chanted to himself. He knew that a good start and small corrections were the keys to success. He felt as if the A-4 were balanced on a pencil tip, and forced himself to fly smoothly — too much muscle meant overcontrolling that did bad things to landing grades.

“Pure, this is Rob. Come back.” Robbins was avoiding standard LSO phraseology in case somebody was listening.

“Read you, Robo.”

“Lookin’ good, keep it coming.”

Delight liked to fly his approach half a ball high. If he began to settle in close, he could catch it without a fistful of power, and it worked. He added a little power and the meatball stabilized nicely in the center. As his wheels impacted the deck he crammed on full throttle in case of a bolter — and was thrown against his straps as the hook snagged the four wire.

Did it! he exulted. He retarded throttle, tapped his brakes, and raised the hook. Up ahead a yellow-shirted crewman was into his manic arm-waving routine, gesturing Hawk One to the elevator.

Behind Delight, Psycho boltered, shoved up the throttle, and went around. Ozzie snagged the two wire; Liz flew a near-perfect OK-3. Thaler trapped the three wire on his next pass.

The ordies began loading weapons on the hangar deck.

Zack Delight stood at the head of the ready room with the doors closed and guards posted outside. The passageways on either side were blocked with plastic tape, forcing anyone transiting the area to detour around the area.

Delight looked over his bobtailed “squadron” seated in the first row: Ostrewski, Thaler, and Vespa, plus Robbins the LSO. Wei and Hu sat in the second row. On the board behind him was an overhead view of Penang Princess , carefully drawn to scale.

Delight mussed his graying hair and grinned to himself. “Never thought I’d be in a ready room again, wearing Nomex and briefing a strike with live ordnance against a real target.”

“Neither did we,” exclaimed Ozzie. He winked at Liz, who smiled back.

“I never thought I’d brief a strike against a real target at all,” she added.

“Okay, folks. Here we go.” Delight’s face seemingly morphed before his tiny audience, passing in one heartbeat from peace to war. Liz felt a tiny thrill somewhere deep inside her. She realized she was seeing a man she had never met before.

Delight quickly passed through the basics: launch, rendezvous, and the route outbound. Then he addressed communications.

“You have your UHF and VHF frequencies, but we need to run this thing under total EmCom if at all possible. If you do have to transmit, no names or call signs on the radio — no Zack or Pure or Ozzie. We are Papa Flight, for ‘Pure.’ I’m Dash One, Ozzie’s Dash Three and so on. The backseaters are Two Bravo and Four Bravo. The helos are Hotel One and Two.

“If anybody has to abort, keep off the radio. That’s only for no-shit emergencies. Just rock your wings and break off. We’d rather not bring live ordnance back aboard, but if you can’t find a safe place to jettison your bombs, just be damn sure they’re safed. If possible, dog overhead the ship until everybody else is back aboard.” He paused. “Any questions?”

Robbins waved a hand. “Zack, let’s play Oh shit, like we talked before.”

“Right.” Peters looked from Robbins back to the front-row aviators. “Over the past couple of days, Terry and Rob and I discussed some of the things that might go wrong. For instance, suppose the guys on that ship know we’re coming. Maybe they’ll have SAMs or even Triple A. Well, two A-4s will have flare pods and chaff dispensers, and there’s no need to conserve them.”

Ostrewski piped up. “What if the Penang doesn’t show up on time? Or we can’t find her?”

“Well, in that case our part is over. We return to the boat or land at El Toro. You’ll have to recover ashore if you get a hung bomb.”

Robbins spoke again. “You want to discuss SAR at this point?”

“Coming to that, Robo.” Delight leaned on the rostrum, checking his notes. He picked up the paper and extended it to arm’s length, ignoring chuckles from the other pilots. “If anybody has to make a controlled ejection, try to get as close to the carrier as possible. We have two helos aboard, but only one is fully equipped for rescues, so be aware that we need to keep that one nearby as plane guard.”

Thaler waved a pen. “Since the Boorda ’s in the area, what about diverting to land on her?”

Scooter shot a glance at Psycho. “That’s right, I forgot. I have a Pensacola classmate aboard, flying Hornets.” Vespa’s tone told the males that there was probably little love lost between the two women. Ostrewski, who had met slender, blond Lieutenant Commander Jennifer Jensen—“Jen-Jen” the ice princess and admiral’s daughter — knew that Vespa resented her rival’s influence in getting a coveted fleet assignment.

Delight shook his head at Thaler. “Nope, not unless there’s something entirely unexpected. We’d rather you eject and write off a jet rather than show the U.S. Navy what we’re doing.”

With no further questions, Delight turned back to the board. “Now, here’s the crunch. When we positively ID the target, we’ll conduct a dualaxis attack with roll in from about twelve thousand feet. Put 112 mils on your sight, and include that in your precombat check. I recommend that you pickle no lower than forty-five hundred feet. Like we practiced at Gila Bend: a five-G pull gets you level by three thousand feet.

“I’ll take Psycho in from the bow. That’s the best way to attack a ship because it forces you to get steep, and we’ll be making sixty-degree dives. By attacking along the fore and aft axis of the target, we have a better chance of getting hits with shorts and overs.” He jotted pinpoints along the deck of the Princess with his Magic Marker, indicating random hits.

“Ozzie, you and Liz will pull around to the stern. If there’s no opposition, wait until you’ve seen the result of our attack. The fuzes are one-tenth of a second delay, but there’ll still be smoke and probably flames. Otherwise, time your roll-in so you’re down the chute as we’re pulling off.” He scrawled two arrows breaking to port from their attack.