Gordon Kent - Night Trap

“He’s on top of us,” Alan said.

Christine bucked savagely. He felt a slap at his left elbow, and a star-edged hole appeared in the windscreen.

They knew Christine had been hit by the 20-millimeter. They felt the rounds go into her and waited for disaster; at two hundred feet, any glitch and they were dead.

Rafe tightened his turn and dumped more speed. Christine was such a peculiar bird, he muttered, that he swore she flew better with the damage. “Nice shooting, Tex,” Rafe murmured, and he eased off on the speed again and Christine was almost standing still in the air.

The last chaff pod emptied with a clunk. Another round hit Christine’s wing and she started to leak fuel and pull to the right. The airspeed indicator registered 165. Rafe tilted the wings savagely and suddenly tightened his turn. His crew could not see the death’s-head grin that clutched his face, an expression of vengeance and anguished hope and a desperate anxiety that came from seeing the whitecaps, not so much below his window as next to it. He was muttering a fat-grape pilot’s prayer: Follow me, you mother, follow me, down and around and down and—

A brief, violent flare lit the rearview mirror.

The silence of the cockpit seemed so profound to Alan that the whistle of air through the hole in the canopy was somehow outside it. He saw Christine’s interior with unearthly clarity—Craw’s silhouette, the screens, the gleam of his thermos.

Then he knew they had levelled off and were starting to climb.

The radar cuts from the A-5’s gun were gone.

Abruptly, Rafe punched his fist into the air over his head and gave a whoop. “Gotcha!”

Then, calmly, into the mike, he drawled, “Guardian, this is Gatoraid 2, splash one bandit, over,” and he laughed. And laughed. “We got him. I mean, we fucking got him! ” He couldn’t seem to stop laughing.

Later, when he would tell this story to explain his Air Medal, he would lay his hand flat on the table and he would say, “You want to know how low I was? I was so low—I was so low that they had to scrape barnacles off Christine at the next maintenance check.” And he would pause, and smile, and a little of this same delighted laughter would burble out. “And you wanta know how low that A-5 Fantan was? On the bottom, ba-bee! ”

“That was beautiful!” Narc crowed. There was no fawning in his voice. “Fucking beautiful.”

“What happened?” Senior Chief Craw asked. “Tomcat get him?”

“Rafe fuckin’ dumped him in the water,” Narc said. Rafe had managed to stop laughing. “He just went lower and slower till the raghead stalled.”

Rafe chuckled—not the release of tension any more, just amusement. “We got a kill,” he murmured. “An S-3 got a kill!”

They all began to laugh. More, and louder, and then Alan was pounding on Craw’s shoulder, and he realized what they had done. Rafe’s flying, yes, but also his knowledge and Craw and Narc.

Christine climbed the night, bullet holes whistling, content that she had killed again.

Strike Common was a tangle of voices. Southern Iran was covered in a net of radar cuts, AAA, and SAM radars coming on and off. The IADS had done well for the first few minutes; Alan had missed the climax, when their AAA and SAMs came online; but the HARMs and the jamming were beating them now. He saw no more hostile aircraft; their leaker had been a loony or a lone night patrol.

Millions of dollars were spent in seconds as he heard HARM shots called on Common and watched radar sites go off the air. Most of the strike package was still over the target, but some A-6s had already turned for home, and Alan found one only twenty miles southeast of them. He hooked it and found that it was limping along at only a thousand feet.

“What’s happening out there?” Rafe asked. He and Narc had assessed their damage and decided they could still give gas. That they were there, flying, doing routine, seemed an anticlimax; yet, astonishing as the attack and their survival had been, it was for the routine that they were there.

“We got one wounded bird coming in,” Alan said, “eighteen miles out and wrong IFF but he’s low and slow and on his radial. Try and raise him on Common. Maybe needs gas to land.”

Narc got the Hawkeye on comm. Alan’s guess was confirmed: northern strike lead in a wounded bird, thought he could land it, needed gas at a low altitude. Rafe nodded; after going almost underwater to down the Fantan, he figured he could give gas while taxiing, and Christine’s fuel leak didn’t worry him. They rogered up and turned southeast, headed to intercept.

Alan was entranced with the electronic images of the raid, rapt, watching the Iranian IADS fall apart. The target EW sites and their protective SAMs went down under the strike packages and did not come back up as the strike came off target. There was a two-hundred-mile gap in the IADS. If they could get a plane that far, Alan thought, the Bahrainis could bomb Tehran now.

“Hey, Spy, get the FLIR online. I want to know how bad off this guy is. He doesn’t have radio.”

The FLIR is an infrared camera for watching surface targets, particularly surfaced submarines, at night. Bored S-3 crews on training hops use it to watch junior fighter jocks make fools of themselves trying to get their fuel probes into the basket at the end of the refueling hose. Now, Alan switched to it from the raid with regret. He couldn’t watch the strike and FLIR at the same time; they both came up on the same screen.

Air-to-air refueling is an art at the best of times. Pilots try to perfect the technique against the day they really need the gas. Good aircrews practice no-comms refueling, using signals passed by flashlight and by aircraft lights. Yet, it is hard enough to maneuver a high-speed aircraft so that the attached fuel probe locks into the much slower tanker’s basket; with the plane damaged, the pilot injured, it becomes torture.

Rafe made a good rendezvous with the wounded aircraft, an A-6 with a gash up the starboard side that went right through the cockpit.

Narc said, “He’ll need about five thousand,” and started to work the refueling computer. “Spy, have I got a basket out there?”

Alan got the basket dead center in the FLIR. “Bigger than life.” He was still thinking of the raid. The urgency of the A-5 attack on them, the abrupt release, had left him unfocused.

He did not hear the change in Narc’s voice as he cut the lights and said, “Oh, shit.” Then, “He’s hit bad. Losing power.” His tone was odd, but Alan did not register it. Only later would he learn that both men in the front end had seen the injured aircraft’s side number and knew who it was.

Rafe growled, “Soon as he’s in the basket, we’ll descend a little, give him some more airspeed, start a slowwww turn toward the boat. We’ll get him home.”

Poor sonofabitch , he was thinking. He meant Alan, not the wounded pilot.

Alan saw an infrared image of the A-6 pull into his field of view and realized that it was missing part of its canopy. The shock of it pulled him from his apathy, and he thought, This guy is hurt bad , and he began to function again. He was so intent then trying to figure out if the BN was still in the cockpit that seconds passed before he caught the glow of the pilot’s helmet, the head bent far forward.

Volleyball net. A-6 .

Dad .

The wounded bird plowed forward toward the basket but lost altitude. The probe missed, and the basket banged the A-6 windscreen. Invisible to Alan in the dark, Craw flipped on the camera attached to the FLIR.

Alan, cold, said, “He’s losing it. He can’t hold his altitude.” The A-6’s movements had a dreamlike quality now, too slow, silent, eerily altered by the FLIR’s infrared. It seemed impossible that he was watching his father try to save himself. It seemed impossible that they were not back on the carrier, the mission over. Where was routine?