Authors: Patrick Robinson
The East Coast of the U.S. was absolutely powerless in the face of such a threat. General Rashood had thought out and prepared his attack with immense skill, giving the U.S. population no option but to pack up and run, taking only what little they could carry.
Unless Adm. George Gillmore and his men could find that submarine.
1700, Monday, October 5
Atlantic Ocean, 29.48N 13.35W.
O
PERATION HIGH TIDE
was one of the most complex and large cross-decking operations in recent memory. The
Harry S. Truman
stood a half-mile off the port bow of the
Ronald Reagan
, and it was pouring like the devil, a gusting sou’wester that swept sheets of rain across the carriers’ flight decks.
On paper, the preparations looked simple: to transfer fifty Sikorsky Seahawk helicopters from the deck of the
Truman
onto the deck of the
Ronald Reagan
. Trouble was, the deck of the
Reagan
was already full with the bigger part of its eighty-four embarked aircraft, most of them being flown by four of the most famous fighter squadrons in the United States Air Force.
The new F-14D Tomcat fighter bombers were controlled by the fabled fliers of the VF-2 Bounty Hunters. Three large groups of F/A 18C Hornets were flown by the VMFA 323 Death Rattlers, the VFA-151 Vigilantes, and the VFA-137 Kestrels. In addition,
there were the Prowlers and the Vikings, but these were parked carefully away from the main runways.
And then there were the mighty E-2C Group II Hawkeyes, the biggest and most expensive aircraft on any carrier. The early-warning radar and control aircraft, the quarterback of the squadron, first to get in the air, and always parked right below the island, wings folded, ready to head for the stern catapult. No U.S. carrier would leave port without at least three onboard.
Aside from the Prowlers, Vikings, and Hawkeyes, the rest were ready for takeoff from the rainswept deck of their longtime home—the 100,000-ton Nimitz-class carrier, the
Ronald Reagan
.
Over on the just-arrived
Harry S. Truman,
fifty Sikorsky Seahawk helicopters, the latest in modern submarine hunting, were lined up alongside the main runway, blades folded, with six just preparing to leave. The U.S. Navy had three hundred of these hovering state-of-the-art ASW specialists, but not one of them had ever been under more steel-edged orders than those received in the Norfolk yards last week.
Admiral Gillmore had left it to the carrier COs to carry out the aircraft exchange, and both Captains had decided on six at a time as the safest method, especially in this weather.
The helicopter maintenance crews were ferried across separately in a Sikorsky CH-53D Sea Stallion assault and support helicopter, transported from Norfolk especially for this phase of the operation. The Sea Stallion was designed to carry thirty-eight Marines, but today, it was to move back and forth between the carriers, laden with spare parts for the Seahawks plus the Navy experts who knew how to fit them. They would also be ferrying the fixed-wing maintenance crews that were returning to the U.S. with the Tomcats and Hornets.
And now the Seahawks were ready. The
Truman
’s flight-deck controller signaled them away, and one by one their screaming rotors bore them almost vertically into the sky, banking out over the port side of the carrier to form a long convoy that made a wide, slow circular route toward the
Reagan
.
With six airborne, there was now an open deck for the first of the
Reagan
’s Tomcats to land. And over on the Battle Group’s flagship there was intense activity. The red light on the island signaled…
Four minutes to launch
.
The first Tomcat was in position at the head of the runway, the visual checks completed. Two minutes later, the light flicked to amber, and a crewman moved forwards to the catapult and attached it to the launch bar. The light turned green, Lt. Jack Snyder, the “shooter,” raised his right hand and pointed it directly at the pilot. Then he raised his left hand and pointed two fingers…
Go to full power
…
Then he extended his palm straight out…
Hit the afterburners
…Immediately, the pilot saluted, and leaned slightly forward, tensing for the impact of the catapult shot.
Lieutenant Snyder, still staring directly at the cockpit, saluted, then bent his knees, extended two fingers on his left hand, then touched the deck. He gestured:
FORWARD!
And a crewman, kneeling on the narrow catwalk next to the fighter jet, hit the button on catapult one, and ducked low, as the stupendous force of the hydraulic mechanism hurled the jet on its way.
Engines howling, flat-out, it left a blast of hot air in its wake. And, as always, every heart on that deck, every heart in the island control centers, stopped dead. For just a couple of seconds, no one was breathing, as the Tomcat hurtled towards the bow, up the ramp, and out over the water, climbing away, dead ahead, ready to start its 25-mile circle to the flight deck of the
Harry S. Truman
, which would bear it home to the United States.
Five more times, the flight-deck crew of the
Ronald Reagan
sent the Tomcats away, up into the lashing rain, before the flight controller, in his fluorescent waterproof yellow gear, signaled that the Seahawks were on their way in.
Back on the
Truman
, the flight-deck crew anticipated the first of the F-14 Tomcats, which had broken off from the stack of six and circled at 8,000 feet, 20 miles out, heading their way.
It was a 22-ton brute of an aircraft that didn’t just glide in, flaring
out elegantly just above a mile-long runway like a big passenger jet, but came bucking in, lurching along in all weathers, at 160 knots, damn near out of gas, and then slamming down onto the deck, the pilot praying for the arresting wire to grab and hold.
If it missed, he would have approximately one-twentieth of a second to ram the throttles wide open and thunder off the flight deck…before $40 million worth of aircraft would hurtle over the side and punch a hole in the ocean’s choppy surface. And there was always the possibility of an outright catastrophe—the hook missing, the pilot’s reaction a shade slow, and the aircraft slewing around, piling into forty others, all within yards of millions of gallons of jet fuel.
However many times a pilot had done it, the exercise of landing a fighter bomber on the heaving deck of a carrier would remain a life-or-death test of nerve and skill.
Right now, on the rain-lashed stern of the
Harry S. Truman
, the Landing Signals Officer, tall, lanky Texan Eugene “Geeno” Espineli, was in contact with the incoming Tomcat’s pilot, Lt. J. R. Crowell from West Virginia. Geeno’s binoculars were focused as well as they could be in this weather, trying to track the aircraft’s incoming path.
Ensign Junior Grade Taylor Cobb, the Arresting Gear Officer, was calling the shots, bellowing down the phone, above the howl of the wind, to the hydraulics team working below. He was out on the stern in his bright yellow waterproofs, earphones on, his eyes scanning the deck, checking for even the slightest speck of litter, which could suck into the Tomcat’s engine and blow it right out. He was checking for the fourth or fifth time for a broken arrester wire, which could lash back and kill a dozen people, not to mention the absolute certainty of sending the aircraft straight over the bow.
“STAND BY FOR THE TOMCAT…TWO MINUTES!”
The massive hydraulic piston was set to withstand the controlled collision between fighter jet and deck. And now everyone could see J. R. Crowell fighting to hold the Tomcat steady, 2 degrees above the horizontal against the driving rain and unpredictable gusts.
The
Truman
was pitching through 3 degrees in the long swells, dead into the wind, at 18 knots. She was rising and falling one and a half degrees on either side of the horizontal, which put the bow and stern through 60 feet every 30 seconds—conditions to challenge the deftness and fortitude of any pilot.
“
GROOVE!
” bawled Ensign Cobb, code for “
She’s close, stand by…”
Then, 20 seconds later,
“SHORT!”
—the critical command, everyone away from the machinery.
Out on the deck, all LSOs edged towards the big padded pit into which they would jump if young JR misjudged and piled into the stern. They could see the aircraft now, screaming in through the rain, engines howling.
“
RAMP!
” bellowed Ensign Cobb. And with every eye upon it, JR slammed the Tomcat down on the landing surface, and the flight-deck crew breathed again as the cable grabbed the hook, then rose up from the deck into a
V
. One second later, the Tomcat stopped dead in its tracks, almost invisible in the swirling mist of rain and spray in its wake.
The deck crews came out of the starting blocks like Olympic sprinters, racing towards the aircraft to haul it into its designated parking spot. And out there on the stern, Ensign Cobb, the rain beating off his hood, had already made contact with the second incoming Tomcat…“
Okay one-zero-eight…wind gusting at 38…Check your approach line…Looking good from here…flaps down…hook down…Gotcha visual…You’re all set…C’mon in…”
One by one, they repeated the procedure. Then six more Seahawks took off in the failing light. Then six more Tomcats blasted off the deck of the
Reagan
and headed for the stack 20 miles astern of the
Truman
. Six at a time. Then the Hornets, six more groups, all going through the same death-defying combat procedures, slamming the jets down on the deck, the aces of the Death Rattler squadron, the Vigilantes, and the Kestrels.
These unsung heroes of the U.S. Navy displayed the lunatic, rarefied skills of their profession almost always in private, out
here in the Atlantic, away from the celebrity-obsessed society they were trying to protect.
It took six hours to complete the transfer of the aircraft, and it was almost midnight when the final Hornet made its landing. By now, the rain had stopped, and the weary flight-deck crews were heading for their bunks. The fighter pilots were going home with the
Truman
and their aircraft.
The Seahawk crews, now safely on board the
Ronald Reagan
, were mostly asleep. Their task, their ceaseless, intensive mission, to find the
Barracuda
, would begin at first light on Tuesday morning, October 6. And there would be little rest until the submarine was detected. If it would be.
Another twenty-four-hour-a-day operation had been taking place simultaneously, 2,700 miles away to the west in the concrete canyons of New York City.
Ten times more vulnerable than Washington, D.C., New York would take the full might of the tidal wave head-on, straight off the ocean. And although the great towers of Wall Street would probably be the most resolute barrier the tidal wave would hit, they could not possibly stop a force that would probably have swept the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge clean off its foundations seven miles earlier, planted the Coney Island fairground on top of Brooklyn Heights, and dumped the Statue of Liberty into the bottom of upper New York Harbor.
Whether the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan would still be standing after the opening surge was a subject currently being assessed by a team of eighteen scientists working everywhere, from basements to the city’s skies. Opinion ranged high and the only thing they could agree on was that none of them thought more than a half-dozen buildings at best could survive in any shape whatsoever.
Midtown, with its close, tight grid of towers, stretching high into the sky, was an even worse prospect. The breakwater of Wall Street would have reduced the first two waves significantly, but
nonetheless, like a house of cards, Midtown would fall. Several of the scientists believed that if two or three high-rises crumbled before the onslaught of the ocean, they would cause a chain reaction and bring down others until the city was leveled.
The most dangerous part was the two wide rivers that flowed past, east and west of Manhattan—the Hudson and the East River. The tsunami would have lost none of its power when it rampaged up these ship-going seaways, and both rivers could rise, initially, by around 100 feet, with millions of tons of ocean water crashing through the city’s cross streets. The tides of east and west would probably collide somewhere in the middle, around Park Avenue, moments before the main surge smashed with mind-blowing force into the old Pan-American building, somewhere around the 15th floor.
New York City was no place to be these two weeks. And the same went for Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The flatlands of New Jersey were even more exposed, and places like Bayonne, Jersey City, Hoboken, and Union City were utterly defenseless. So was Newark, with its flat, wide sea-level airport, right where the Passaic River widens into Newark Bay. That was tsunami country, with a vengeance.
New York City’s evacuation operation had begun the previous Wednesday, but the city’s biggest problem wasn’t so much historic documents, books, and artifacts. It was people. New York City received more visitors every day than the combined permanent population of Washington, D.C., and its environs. In addition to its eight million residents, who lived and worked in the crowded urban sprawl of New York and its greater area, 800,000 visitors took in the sights below the world’s most famous skyline every day.
It was a colorful, vibrant melee of races, religions, and nationalities, a voliatile mix in a time of crisis. Immigrants from the Far East, India, and Mexico had been pouring in for years, and most of them had few contacts outside their ethnic neighborhoods. Now they had no way of moving themselves, their families, and their few
possessions out of the city to higher ground. A couple of days after the President’s TV address, Tammany Hall had accepted the responsibility of evacuating two million residents of New York City, providing food and shelter for those who had nothing and those who would most likely have nothing to go back to.
The exodus from New York had already begun, and thus far there had been monumental problems, due to the sheer volume of people who had to be moved westward. Most of them were terrified, panicked, and shocked. Rumors coursed wildly; crowds were alternately lining up for cars and gas masks or hitting the highway in a rush, sitting for hours on congested roads. Everyone was up in arms, and the Army and National Guard could just barely control the mobbed streets, anxiety and fear flaring on every corner, spreading slowly across the city, simmering. Hundreds of National Guardsmen were drafted in from all over New York State to prevent the breaking out of riots.