Stephen Coonts - Combat

Realization descended on Vespa’s brain, draining downward in a chilling cascade that coagulated into a hard, insistent lump in her stomach.

She spoke to the windblown smoke and drifting shards. “Oh, Michael. What did you do?”

Peters and Delight were on the bridge, digesting three versions of what had happened to the renegade Sukhoi. Delight, still in his flight suit and torso harness, was coming off an adrenaline high following his kill.

“I still think Ozzie gunned the sumbitch and ejected.”

“Zack, radar saw the plots merge. And we have a secondhand report from the Coast Guard reporting a midair collision.” Peters slumped against the bulkhead, arms folded. Staring at the deck, he intoned, “They’re searching, but …”

“ … but Ozzie’s probably dead.”

Peters nodded.

“TA-4 on downwind, Captain!” Odegaard lowered his binoculars and pointed to port.

With gear and flaps down, Scooter Vespa broke at “the ninety” while Robo Robbins, Psycho Thaler, and Mr. Wei watched from the LSO platform.

Vespa rolled wings level a mile and a quarter from the ramp, making minute adjustments to keep on glide slope. Robbins, with the phone in one hand and the “pickle switch” held aloft in the other, waited for her call.

“Skyhawk ball,” she said. “State point six.”

Robbins and Thaler silently regarded one another. With six hundred pounds of fuel, she would have only two chances at the deck. “Lookin’ good, Liz. Keep it comin’,” Robbins called.

Thaler had the binoculars on the TA-4, serving as Robbins’s watcher. “Hook!” He turned to look at Robbins. “No hook!”

Robbins made a conscious effort to keep his voice calm. “Liz, drop your hook.”

Vespa chided herself for missing the crucial item. Damn it — I’ve never done that before! She reached down for the hook-shaped handle, missed twice, and had to look in the cockpit. When she returned her gaze to the mirror, the ball was a diameter high and she was angry with herself almost to the point of tears.

“Waveoff, Liz. Take it around!”

Vespa knew that she could recover and probably catch a four wire, but obedience to the LSO’s command was too deeply ingrained. She shoved up the power and ignored the usual procedure. Instead, she wrapped into a hard left turn, leaving gear and flaps down, rejoining the circuit slightly downwind of the ninety.

Thaler leaned into Robbins’s shoulder. “I think she could’ve made it, Rob.”

“I know. But she’s gotta be shook about Ozzie, and this way there’s less doubt in her mind.”

As a landing signal officer, Robbins also was a working psychologist. He knew how frustrated and anxious the pilot must be, especially with a passenger aboard. He keyed the phone. “Don’t worry, Scooter. We’ll catch you this time.”

Vespa scanned the instruments once more, pointedly ignoring the fuel gauge. Over the hot mike, she said, “Mr. Hu, brace yourself for possible ejection. If I miss this pass I’ll climb straight ahead and give you as much notice as I can.”

“Yes, miss.” His tone sounded neutral.

As Vespa rolled out of her oblong-shaped 360-degree turn, the ball was half a diameter low. She called “Skyhawk ball,” omitting her fuel state, and added throttle to intersect the glide slope. She barely heard Robbins’s “Power” call.

As the ball rose slightly she led it with pitch and power, stabilizing her airspeed at 122 knots to compensate for the light fuel load. Santa Cruz ’s 328-foot-wide deck was irrelevant to her now. What mattered was the eighty-foot-wide landing area with the lifesaving arresting wires, though Vespa aimed within three feet of centerline.

For the next ten seconds Elizabeth Vespa’s attention was riveted on the glowing amber meatball. From the the backseat, Hu appreciated the fact that it remained nailed in the middle of the datum. He heard Robbins’s only additional transmission. “Good pass, hold what you got.”

Papa Four impacted the deck at eleven feet per second sink rate, the landing gear oleos compressing under pressure as the tailhook snagged the third steel cable. As Vespa added power in event of a bolter, the TA-4J was dragged to a stop.

Mr. Wei Chinglao broke all decorum and hugged Robo Robbins. Psycho Thaler pounded both of them on the back, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

Robbins turned to his writer. “Papa Four, low-state recovery, rails pass. Underfunckinglined OK-3!” As a group, they turned and ran up the the deck to the parking area.

Vespa sat in the front seat, listening to the J52 unspool with its vacuumcleaner whine. She wanted time to absorb what had happened to Ostrewski, and what she had just done. Hu already had descended the ladder, standing with his camcorder, intending to record his pilot’s triumph. He was immediately joined by a crowd of plane handlers, ordies, and the LSO contingent, plus Peters and Delight from the bridge.

Liz dropped her helmet over the side, where the plane captain caught it. She beaned a smile she did not quite feel, blew a kiss at Hu’s camera, then pinched her torso harness restraints and eased out of the cockpit. She backed down the ladder but had not reached the bottom before she felt eager hands plucking her up and away. She was afloat on a raucous sea of male faces, borne shoulder high toward the island. For the tiniest instant she thought back to her high-school senior prom and the condescending look of triumph that Christine LaMont had shot her as the tiara was set on the queen’s head. Take that, Christine.

The men grasping Vespa’s legs and thighs allowed her slide off their shoulders. She alit in front of Peters, who grasped her in a crushing hug. When he pulled back he exclaimed, “I am so proud of you.”

She blinked back what was rising inside her and managed to keep her voice calm. “Ozzie?”

Peters wanted to avoid her eyes. Instead, he focused on her face and shook his head. “No word, Liz. I think he’s gone.”

“Scooter.”

Liz turned at the sound of her call sign. Delight stood by her left shoulder, and she leaned into him. “Oh, Zack.” She wrapped her arms around his neck. He patted her back, exactly the way he had reassured his grandchild after a bicycle spill twenty years ago.

“Did you see it?” He knew what she meant.

“No, hon. I was …” He cleared his throat. “I was in the pattern about that time. But …”

“But my God, Zack. He died for me!” Her eyes were clear and dry, but she choked on her words. “He died for me …”

Delight grasped her by both shoulders. “Listen to me, Liz. Listen to me!” They both were aware of the crowd melting away. The deckhands recognized that this was a moment between friends who had shared something exceptional. “If he was still here, he’d be just as proud of you as … we are.” Delight allowed her to grasp that sentiment. “Liz, you just sank a ship and got a gun kill on the same mission. Do you realize nobody’s done that in about fifty-five years?”

She allowed herself a grim smile. “You got a kill, too.”

Delight looked at Peters. “Hook and I both flew a couple hundred missions in Vietnam and never got close to what happened today. But, hell, my mom could have hosed that gomer from six o’clock.”

Vespa realized that she had instructed the dead Chinese pilot. “Do we know who was in that airplane?”

“No,” Peters replied. “But we’ll find out fairly soon.”

Delight shook his head, marveling at the pilot he had chased. “I’ll bet the ranch that my guy was Deng. I don’t think anybody else in the class could’ve flown that way.”