Final Flight (2 page)

Now jake could recognize the target on
his HSD. It was a Soviet Bear bomber, a
huge four-engine turboprop. But at which one was he
looking?

The lead or the wingman? The second plane
might be a mile or so away to the left or right.
Bomber pilots weren’t known for flying tight
formation, not over the distances they covered. These bombers were out of Murmansk. They had flown around the
Scandinavian peninsula, down through the
Iceland-U.k. gap, and then another twenty-five
hundred miles south. After hours on station they would
return to the Soviet Union or fly on to Cuba.

“Scan the camera, Toad.”

In a few seconds Tarkington said, “Got
him. This guy is behind the leader. A little farther
away, so he’s off the lead’s right side.”

“Okay. Go back to the leader.”

As the camera panned sky, the cross hairs on
Jake’s heads-up display, the HUD, also moved.
But squint as he might, the bombers were still to far
away to see. The camera settled in on the first
plane. Jake corrected his heading.

At fifteen miles he could see the leader under the
HUD cross hairs. At eight miles
he came out of burner and pulled the nose up,
allowing the gentle climb to bleed off his airspeed.
Had this been a shooting interception, he would have
launched his missiles long ago.

At five miles he gestured to his wingman,
sweeping his open hand in a chopping motion to the right, then
kissed off the wingman by touching his oxygen mask and
sweeping his hand away, splaying his fingers. The other
pilot gave him a thumbs-up and turned away to the
right. He would join on the second Bear.

Two miles from the bomber jake said, “Burn
‘em, Toad.” The RIO turned his radar
to transmit. Jake knew the bomber crew would
hear the fighter’s radar on their ECM equipment,
which no doubt they had turned up to maximum
sensitivity. At this range the noise should sear their
eardrums. And the crew would know that if this had been a
wartime intercept, they would be dead.

The F-14 climbed rapidly toward the stern
quarter of the bomber, Jake reducing power
to decelerate to equal airspeed. He turned to the
big plane’s heading and joined up just below and behind it.
The bomber was the color of polished aluminum, a
silver gray, with a red star on the tail and under one
wing. Jake could see the gunner in the tail
gun compartment looking out the window. The barrels of the
23-millimeter twin tail guns were pointed aft
and up, at the limit of the gimbals.

They didn’t move, Jake noticed, which was
nice. The two governments had promised each other
that their servicemen wouldn’t point weapons during these
encounters, since the person on the wrong end of the
weapon tended to get nervous and jittery and had a
weapon of his own. But it was a long way from the
diplomatic conference table to the skies over the
Atlantic and Pacific.

Jake turned right and came up alongside the
bomber’s right wing. He could now see into the
copilot’s side of the Bear’s cockpit. The
copilot was staring across the hundred feet of empty
air that separated them.

“Just stay here, CAG,” Toad said. “I’m
getting pictures.” In the rearview mirror
Jake saw Toad focusing a 35-millimeter
camera.

In the cockpit of the Bear a camera was being
pointed this way.

“They’re taking our picture, too,” Jake
said.

“Not to sweat, sir. I have the sign against
the canopy.” Jake knew the sign Toad was
referring to. Printed in block letters on an
eight-by-ten-inch piece of white cardboard was the
word “Hello.” Under it in letters equally large was the
word “Asshole.”

When Toad had six shots of this side of the
bomber, Jake dropped below the plane and Toad
kept snapping. Then they photographed the left
side of the plane and the top, ending up back on the
right side, where Toad finished out the roll. These
pictures would be studied by the Air Intelligence
officers for indications of modifications or new
capabilities.

By the time Toad was finished with the camera, the other
F-14 was joined on Jake’s right wing. Jake
knew the RIO of that plane was busy
photographing his fighter against the bomber. One of
these pictures would probably be released by the
Navy to the wire services in the States.

“Okay, CAG,” Toad said. “Our guy’s
all done. I’ll just flip Ivan the terrible bird
and we can be on our way anytime.”

“You’ve got real class, Tarkington.”

“They expect it, sir. They’d feel cheated if
we didn’t give them the Hawaiian good
luck sign.” Toad solemnly raised a middle
finger aloft as Jake lowered the Tomcat’s nose and
dove away.

THE USS United States and three of her
escorts, two guided missile frigates and a
destroyer, anchored in the roadstead off Tangiers
around noon after completion of the voyage across the
Atlantic. Due to her draft, the carrier
anchored almost two miles from the quay where her
small boats began depositing sailors in
midafternoon. By six that evening almost two thousand men from the four gray warships were ashore.

In twos and threes and fours, sailors in
civilian clothes wandered the streets of the downtown
and the Casbah, snapping photos of the people and the
buildings and each other and crowding the downtown bars,
which were relatively abundant in spite of the fact
that Morocco is a Moslem nation. Fortunately,
downtown Tangiers had been built by the French, a
thirsty lot, and the pragmatic Arabs were willing
to tolerate the sinful behavior of the unbelievers as
long as it was profitable.

In the “international bars” barefoot belly
dancers slithered suggestively. The sailors
didn’t stay long with beer at the
equivalent of four U.s. dollars a glass, but
when they saw the belly dancers they knew they were a
long way from Norfolk, and from Tulsa, Sioux
Falls, and Uniontown and all the other places
they had so recently left behind.

Properly primed, they explored the streets and
loudly enjoyed the respite from shipboard routine.
The more adventurous sought out the prostitutes in the
side streets. Veiled women and swarthy men
watched the parade in silence while their offspring
gouged the foreigners unmercifully for leather purses,
baskets, and other “genuine” souvenirs.

All things considered, the sailors and their money were
welcomed to Tangiers with open arms.

Just before sunset the Air France flight from
Paris touched down at the local airport. One
of the passengers was a reporter photographer from
j’accuse, a small leftist Paris daily.
The French government was considering a port call
request from the U.s. Naval Attache for a
United States visit to Nice in June, so
invitations to a tour of the ship while she was in
Tangiers had been liberally distributed to the Paris
press.

The journalist, a portly gentleman in
his fifties, took a taxi from the airport and
directed the driver to a modest hotel that catered
to French businessmen. He registered at the desk,
accompanied his bags to his rooms, and returned
to the lobby a quarter of an hour later. After an
aperitif in the small hotel bar, he walked two
blocks to a restaurant he apparently knew from
prior visits to Tangiers. There he drank
half a bottle of wine and ate a prodigious
expense-account dinner. He paid his bill with French
francs. He stopped in the hotel bar for a
nightcap.

Within minutes an attractive young woman in an
expensive Paris frock entered and seated herself in a
darkened corner of the room away from the bar. Her
hair looked as if it had been coifed in a French
salon.

She had a trim, modest figure, which her
colorful dress showed to advantage, and the shapely,
muscular legs of a professional dancer or
athlete. She ordered absinthe in unaccented French
and lit a cigarette.

Her gaze met the journalist’s several times but
she offered no encouragement, or at least none which
caught the bartender’s eye. When it became
apparent she was not waiting for an escort, the
reporter took his drink and approached her table.
He seated himself in seconds. The couple talked for
almost twenty minutes and laughed on several
occasions. There were only two other men in the bar,
both of whom were apparently French businessmen; they
discussed sales quotas and prices the entire time
they were there. Around 11:30-the bartender was not sure
of the time-the reporter and the lady left together. The
reporter left French francs on the table
sufficient to cover the price of the drinks and a modest
tip. At midnight the two businessmen departed and the
bartender closed up.

The following morning the press pass was handed to an
American naval officer on the quay as he
assembled a group of thirty journalists, about a
third of whom were women. At ten o’clock the group was
loaded into the captain’s gig and the admiral’s barge
for the ride out to the great ship, which was visible from the
quay. The journalists had a choppy ride in the
invigorating morning air.

As the boats approached the ship the
photographers were invited to the little amidships
quarterdecks, where they snapped pictures of the
carrier and watched the coxswains steer. The
gray hull of the carrier appeared gigantic from a
sea-level perspective, a fifth of a mile long
and rising over six stories from the water. As the
boats neared her she looked less and less a ship
and more and more like a massive cliff of gray stone.

At the officer’s brow the journalists found themselves
under the overhang of the flight deck. Sailors
assisted them from the bobbing boats to a yes-
sircarlyall float, and from there up a ladder
to the ceremonial quarterdeck where they were met
by several junior officers. Several journalists were
struck by how much alike these men, all in their early
to middle-twenties, looked in their spotless white
uniforms. Of various sizes and racial groups,
these half dozen trim, smiling young men still looked as
if they had been punched from the same mold as they
saluted and welcomed the tour group aboard.

The journalists were led down a series of ladders
in groups of five and through mazelike passageways
to a large, formal wardroom deep within the ship.
Spread on tables covered with white cloths were
plates of cookies, a pile of coffee cups and
glasses, and several jugs of an orange
liquid. “It’s Kool-Aid,” one of the young
officers informed a Frenchman after he sipped
the sugary orange stuff and stood looking at the
glass as if he had just ingested a powerful
laxative.

“Good morning.” The speaker was an officer with four
gold stripes and a star on each of his black shoulder
boards. His white shoes, white trousers, white
belt, and short-sleeved white shirt were accented by a
yellow brass belt buckle and, on his left
breast, a rainbow splotch of ribbons topped by a
piece of gold metal. The touches of color
made his uniform look even whiter and emphasized the
tan of his face and neck.

He stood a lean six feet tall. Clear
gray eyes looked past a nose which was just slightly
too large for his face. His thinning hair was cut
short and combed straight back.

“I’m Captain Grafton. I hope you
folks had an enjoyable ride out to see us this
morning.” Although he didn’t speak loudly, his
voice carried across the group and silenced the last of the
private conversations.

“We’re going to give you a tour of the ship this
morning when the cookies are gone. We’ll break you
up into groups of five. Each group will go with one of
these young gentlemen who are standing over there
watching you eat cookies. They had some before you
arrived, so don’t feel sorry for them.”

Several of the journalists chuckled politely.
“Captain, why was this group invited to tour the ship?”
The question was asked by a woman in her late twenties
with a hint of Boston in her voice. She wore a
bright red dress and carried an expensive black
leather purse casually over one shoulder.

“And who are you, ma’am?”

“I’m Judith Farrell from the International
Herald Tribune.”

“Well, we often entertain groups aboard, and
starting this Mediterranean cruise with a tour for you
ladies and gentlemen of the European press seemed
appropriate.”

“Are you saying the invitations had nothing to do with the
American request for a French port visit for this
ship in June?”

The gray eyes locked on the woman. “No. I didn’t say that. I said a tour of the ship for you
folks of the European press seemed appropriate.”

“This ship is nuclear-powered?”

“Yes, it is. You may wish to examine the fact
sheet that Lieutenant Tarkington is handing
out.” An officer immediately entered the crowd and began
distributing printed leaflets.

“What assurances can you give to the people of Europe
in light of the recent revelations about the extent of the
Chernobyl disaster?”

“Assurances about what?” The captain glanced from
face to face.

“That your reactors are safe.” Judith
Farrell replied as she tossed her head to flick
her blond hair back from her eyes.

“The Russians didn’t build these reactors. Americans did. Americans operate them.”

Judith Farrell flushed slightly as her
fellow reporters grinned and nudged each other.
She was inhaling air for a retort when a
well-dressed woman with an Italian accent
spoke up. “May we see the reactors?”

“I’m sorry, but those spaces are off limits
except to naval personnel.”

When he observed several people making notes, the
captain added, “Only those sailors who actually
work in those spaces are admitted. I might add
that, outside of the Soviet Union, you are far more
likely to be struck by lightning than you are
to become a victim of a nuclear accident.”

“Captain” said Judith Farrell, but
Grafton’s voice was covering the crowd: “Now if
you folks will break up into groups of five, these
officers from the air wing will show you around.” Everyone
began talking and moving toward the door.