Ian Slater - World in Flames

In another three minutes, Commander Harris in flight deck control was watching the last of the Salt Lake City’s air umbrella, an E-C Hawkeye long-range warning aircraft, its rotodome stem retracting, the dome sitting on the plane’s fuselage like a huge white pancake, wings already folding up and back as the plane was being hauled by a mule, a flat yellow tractor, to the port elevator as fast as the crosswind would allow so that it could be moved out of harm’s way in the hangar deck below.

“Soon as that baby’s in the dungeon,” instructed Harris, “let me know.”

“Yes, sir,” replied a tired assistant one deck below in air traffic control, which was part of the combat information center. “Sir — LSO says we may have a foul deck.”

“Chri—” Harris began, checked himself, and asked, “How long’s two oh three got fuel for?”

“Twenty-four minutes, sir.”

The flight deck commander called the LSO. What he needed to know was whether the LSO had any idea of what the debris on the deck might be. And where?

“Can’t tell you, Phil,” came the LSO’s reply. “Might be nothing, but thought I saw something drop off when the last Hawkeye came in.”

“It was a clean trap, wasn’t it?” the FDC asked the LSO.

“Yeah — clean trap. But I thought I saw something after she hit. Could have been thrown up in her wash.”

“Okay. We’d better check it out.”

“Looked like it was near three cat.” He meant the white line that marked the waist catapult run.

“Thanks, Pete,” answered the worried FDC. If it was an obstacle near the waist catapult line, it could be a dislodged nut, fuel tank flap — or anything from the scores of deck vehicles used to push and pull the planes into position. A nut sucked into either one of the Tomcat’s intakes could mean a multimillion-dollar engine gone, or a seabird that had been hit and knocked to the steel-grooved deck could become an instant lubricant the moment the twenty-five-ton aircraft, its nose wheel not fully extended, landed, sending the Tomcat sliding an inch or two out of alignment — which, at over a hundred miles an hour, could wipe out the aircraft and anyone nearby. The FDC lifted the phone for the air boss six decks above him, depressed the other phone atop his right shoulder, and requested a search party for the area around the four arrestor wires. They simply didn’t have time for a full-fledged “walk-down” to make sure the deck was sterile.

Within a minute, the chief petty officer and the sixteen-man search party team were scouring the deck, and it was Seaman First Class Sic. Elmer Ventral, who’d been on the Salt Lake less than a year, who spotted the oil rag caught in the corner of one of the four-feet-diameter circular steel mountings that houses the one-and-a-half-inch-thick cable to which the number one arrestor wire was attached. Whenever the wire hooked an aircraft, the big cable took the strain.

“All right,” said the chief petty officer, whose job it would be to report to flight deck control. “Let’s get inside before we all freeze our butts off.”

Young Ventral, two days away from his twenty-first birthday, married little more than fourteen months and already a father, felt good about having found the oil rag. It couldn’t really have caused that much damage — unless it got sucked in by an air intake — but the air boss was a fanatic about a sterile deck, and Ventral knew it would stand him in good stead.

The CPO who had to tell the FDC wasn’t so lucky.

“Jesus Christ!” Harris bellowed. “What was that doing there?”

“Somebody must have dropped it, sir.”

“I know somebody dropped it, Chief. And I want his ass. You read me?”

“Yes, sir,” said the CPO, but he knew the task would be hopeless. So did the FDC. They were both feeling bad about it, both having worked with the air boss long enough to know that when any single player screwed up, the team screwed up. FDC called PRIFLY and told the air boss what had fouled his deck.

“A rag!” said the air boss, his voice rising like a tenor going for the high C as he walked, or rather stalked, behind the grease pencil status board and stared down into the bluish light that washed the flight deck. “We’ve got a man to come down and some joker’s dropped a fuckin’ rag?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Listen, Phil, I want his ass.”

“Yes, sir.”

The moment he put the phone down, the air boss turned to PRIFLY’s mini boss. “Get Lieutenant Ronson up here pronto.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ronson was the chief of the Salt Lake City’s TV station. The air boss knew there was no chance of finding out who exactly dropped the rag, but he was going to make it item one — cut right into the movie and play it on every shift for the next forty-eight hours. They’d be so goddamned sick of that oil rag—

Meantime he had a plane to get down and, glancing at the real-time PRIFLY clock, saw he had seventeen minutes.

“We going to get this barricade up in time?”

It was more an order than a question, but the mini boss complied. “They’re working on it, sir. They think they’ll make it.”

The air boss picked up his binoculars, looking down at the barricade, a series of tough, hydraulically anchored nylon ribbons forming a vertical netting that stood twenty-four feet high, strung across the flight deck and which he hoped would catch the Tomcat if, due to the necessarily high “up” angle the pilot would have to have on the nose, the Tomcat missed the three wire.

“You done one of these before, Henry?” the air boss asked his assistant.

“No, sir.”

“What time we got, Henry?”

“Sixteen minutes, sir,” replied the mini boss, wondering whether his superior had ever handled a barricade engagement himself.

“Weather report, sir,” interjected a seaman, handing him the printout. “Wind’s dying, but more fog.”

“Great,” said the air boss sardonically. “Just what we fucking need. Be lucky if he can see the meatball. We got rescue and fire all set, Henry?”

“All set, sir.”

“Anyone loses a goddamned oil rag in future and the whole shift pays. Beer ration cut to one can — or zilch.” He shifted his binoculars to look down at the port side of the barricade being laid out, its nylon ribbons flapping furiously in the cross wind. “How much time we got, Henry?”

“Fourteen minutes, sir,” said the mini boss, the other spotter trying to keep visual contact with Shirer’s blinking red light along with the radar blip. The mini boss looked teed off— couldn’t the air boss read a goddamned clock? Everyone was getting too tense.

Five decks below, TV technicians were plugging into the flight deck camera feed. With the crew of over five thousand below decks run ragged by the day-in, day-out dangerous task of keeping planes constantly airborne, the Tomcat’s final approach might as well entertain as instruct. In the dungeon, above the noise of the mules pushing and pulling planes about and scores of technicians swarming over parked planes, many of the aircraft looking as if they’d been roughly cannibalized for spare parts, some green jackets checking Tomcat avionic “slip-in, pull-out” circuit boards in the black boxes started making book on whether Shirer would make it or not. More navy pilots had been lost in accidents than had been shot down.

Up on the flight deck in the wait room, S1c. Elmer Ventral, whose job it was to race out to release the hook immediately after a plane caught the wire, was being ribbed by the rest of the work crew, who’d awarded him the “ROFOR”—royal order of the fucking oil rag.

Unbeknownst to Ventral, the CPO in charge of the shift Ventral was part of, following carrier tradition, had called down to one of the bakeries aboard to have them bake a cake for Ventral’s birthday — and to decorate it with something that looked like an oil rag.