The Edge of Honor (29 page)

“My baby, she” talk among the rest of the wardroom wives.

Just this once, darling’, her inner voice warned.

Damn sure better be just this once. The man was both attracted and attractive, and he was totally different from Brian. She was used to men being attracted; God had made her that way. But the contrast between her loving, gentle, patriotic, straight-arrow husband who was a zillion miles away and this exotic-looking man with dark eyes whose name made grown Marines scuttle into the bushes and who was right here, well, that was a flame, and dinner with Autrey was the act of a moth.

In her mind, she knew she was in control, but she was pretty sure—not positive, but pretty sure—that there were some depths in her psyche that she had never really plumbed. Long as you know what you’re doing, Maddy.

Of course I do. I’ve been manipulating men since I went to college. Just make damn sure this one isn’t manipulating you and that all this is as harmless as you’re making it. Oh, hell’s feathers, it’s just dinner.

This is 1969, for God’s sake.

Brian found that the next two weeks passed quickly as the ship settled into the routine of the PIRAZ station.

With Benedetti off the watch bill in Combat, Brian’s days and nights tended to blur together, with his consciousness of the time of day determined by the relentless demands of the six hours on, six hours off watch schedule.

Austin had done him a favor by giving him Garuda Barry as his right-hand man, but he had also given him the tougher of the two watch rotations.

The night rotation was a killer.

Austin stood from 1745 until almost midnight, after which he could go to sleep until 0545, during his natural sleep time. Brian, on the other hand, stood watch from noon until nearly 1800. After dinner, he had to meet with his departmental officers to catch up on their day. He would tend to paperwork until about 2100 and then grab a few hours of sleep before rising groggily at 2300 to prepare for the watch from midnight to six in the morning.

Mindful of the special fitness report, Brian had figured he had to cover fully the watches and his department head job. Relieved for breakfast, he would then force himself to attend to the daily routine of his department straight through the morning until it was time to take the watch again at noon.

After a few days of getting only two to three hours of sleep a day, he began to bump into things, and the exec had taken him aside.

“Look, Brian, you can’t keep this up. As long as Vince is off the evaluator watch bill, you come off the midwatch in the morning, eat breakfast, do not drink coffee, and hit your tree until ten-thirty. Get up, clean up, attend to Weapons Department business for half an hour, and then get lunch and take your afternoon watch. Same deal at night.

You get chow and then hit your tree, early, like by nineteen hundred, and you sleep until twenty-three hundred.”

“Yes, sir, but what about the day-to-day stuff? There’s a hell of a lot of paperwork, maintenance supervision, training, and all the people problems to attend to.”

“You delegate. With the exception of Fox Hudson, all your other officers and CPOs are in three sections, four on, eight off. So they do it. They can come see you in Combat when you’re on watch and there’s nothing much going on. Just use your judgment.”

“Yes, sir.” He hesitated, then asked, “How long will this six-and-six stuff last, XO?”

“I’m going to talk to the CO this week about putting Vince back on. But, as you know, we’ve still got probs down there.”

And well he did know. There had been two more instances of losing the load, one of which had done some damage to one of the missile fire-control radars. The radar could not now be used until the logistics system flew in a repair part. One of the ship’s two freshwater evaporators had gone down as well, putting the whole crew on water rationing until a brine-pump motor could be overhauled down on the carrier. Brian had seen almost nothing of the chief engineer, who apparently spent most of his waking hours down in the main holes trying to keep a lid on things.

Brian was getting used to the routine of the Red Crown station, though, and learning daily more and more about the intricate combat systems. The bombing campaign against the North was being prosecuted at low levels in deference to resumption of the peace talks in Paris. The carrier operations against North Vietnam focused on reconnaissance missions, with strikes coming only as direct response to missile batteries and concentrations of triple-A that fired on the recce birds, rather than as sustained attacks against military and infrastructure targets throughout North Vietnam. The rest of the two carriers’ strike aircraft were busy in South Vietnam, where units of the North Vietnamese main-force armies were gathering along the perimeter of Marine positions in thedmz.

While the midnight-to-six watches were relatively dead, the afternoon watches were just the opposite. The fall weather patterns clobbered the North with fog and mists, which usually did not burn off until early afternoon, leaving a short window every day for the reconnaissance runs.

Brian had learned the composition of the recce runs, which normally consisted of one or two specially equipped reconnaissance aircraft. The recce birds were escorted by sections of fighter-bombers called Iron Hand, whose mission was to roll in on any sites that tried to bring down the low-flying, unarmed recce birds.

The Iron Hands were supplemented by the Wild Weasels, also Phantoms, which were configured as electronic jammers and anti-SAM radar strike aircraft. The Weasels would actively provoke the North Vietnamese missile gunners into turning on their radars by flying directly at known or suspected missile sites. When the Communists obliged, the Weasels would release Shrike antiradiation missileSS, which would fly straight down the tracking beams to obliterate the SAM position. Offshore, there would usually be one or two Navy A-6 Intruders, specially configured as jammers against the enemy search radars, to prevent the air-defense system from initiating the deadly sequence of search, acquisition, and handoff of American planes to the SAM radars. Two Jolly Green Giant SAR helos would lift off out of Da Nang to the southwest and position themselves under the missile envelope of the south SAR ship in case an in-country rescue was called. The BARCAP F-4s would be augmented from two aircraft to four on the off chance that the Communists would send up some Migs to make a run on the recce birds.

Brian realized that the marshaling of all these air assets out over the Gulf clearly telegraphed a warning to the Communists that something was coming, but that suited CTF 77 just fine. The more missile sites, radars, triple-A positions and associated infrastructure taken out during the “peaceful” recce runs meant that much less opposition when and if full-scale bombing resumed.

Hood’s Combat truly came alive whenever there were air operations into the North. All the AICs came up to watch over the shoulders of the two on-duty controllers assigned to do the strike-following function. Strike following meant keeping track of what went in over the beach and what came out, ensuring that all the good guys did come out and that none of the bad guys tried to blend in with the returning flights. The SAR helos would be launched, Big Mother and Clementine together, and positioned along the preplanned exit corridors. Hood would close in to the western edges of her station box, primarily to move her missile envelope over more of the area where the action would take place.

The typical recce run took about forty minutes to launch, rendezvous, and form up and about five minutes to execute once the recce birds made their run in over the coast. In the two weeks since first assuming station, Hood had participated in sixteen recce runs, during which two recce aircraft had been brought down over North Vietnam and two more had been hit but had made it out over the Gulf to the capable hands of Big Mother.

Completion of the recce run usually brought a flurry of helo ops as the log helo from the carrier arrived in the late afternoon, usually just about the time that the Big Mother and Clementine birds needed to get back aboard for fuel, causing a helo traffic jam and hours of deck time for the flight-deck crew and the firefighters. Garuda had been right: Brian came to hate helos.

The Admiral had also run a surprise Alfa-strike feint one night, which had shown Brian the true complexity of the Red Crown air-control function. The carriers had recovered a recce run at sundown and Hood had finally put all the helos to bed or sent them off to their home carrier.

Austin had relieved Brian at 1745 and told him to come back up to CIC at around 2000. Brian had seen the captain and the Ops officer discussing a top-secret message earlier in the afternoon, but Austin declined to elaborate.

After dinner and a meeting with off-watch Weapons Department officers, Brian had climbed wearily back to CIC. This was his designated sleep time, so he found himself thinking this had better be worth it. Coming into CIC, he found almost the full general quarters team crowding around the consoles in D and D. The captain and the exec were watching over Fox Hudson’s shoulder at the SWIC console, and the senior air controllers were manning both air-control consoles. Garuda Barry was nursing a cup of coffee and a cigarette over in weapons control, where the FCSC console had been commandeered by yet another air controller. Brian gravitated to Garuda.

“So what’s going down, Garuda?”

“CTF Seventy-seven is gonna run a feint, remind the Commies that there’s more than recce birds out here in the Gulf.”

“What exactly is a feint?”

“They activate both bird farms down on Yankee station instead of just one, and they launch about thirty, forty fighter-bombers, A-Sixes, F-Fours, the Jolly Greens SAR

helos from Da Nang, a full suite of support tracks, and generally create an aluminum overcast over the Gulf with all kinds of electronic and radio noise. See these tracks down here, coming off the carriers? Each one of those symbols represents two aircraft.”

Brian could see literally dozens of tracks clustered around the link symbols representing the carriers, which were 120 miles away. The tracks were clustered in a confused swarm that slowly sorted itself out into formations that began to head north and west, toward North Vietnam.

Garuda pointed out some other tracks that appeared to be orbiting off the coast of Hainan Island, a Red Chinese stronghold that formed the outer margins of the Gulf of Tonkin.

“These guys here are the special tracks—like Navy P Threes called Deepsea. They’re filled with ELINT gear.

When an Alfa-strike heads in, the North Vietnamese usually light off all their radars, SAM, search, gunfire control—the works. The Deepsea guys tape it all and take cross-bearings. That’s how we know where the SAM and triple-A sites are, for when our guys go in for real.”

“So there’s more than a game of chicken going on here,” said Brian.

“Yes, sir, lots more. The aviators, they need to practice this shit, because making a full-blown strike is complicated enough even before the enemy takes defensive action. Plus, being aviators, they forget everything they’ve ever learned after a day or so on the carrier.”

Brian grinned. “And what’s our role?”

“We have two roles: The first is PIRAZ. We make sure that the same number of airplanes come out as went in.

If we’re short, we’ll need to execute a rescue. If we’re over, it means some Migs are trying to tag along with the formations as they go back to the bird farms. Especially at night.”

“Jesus. Have they ever done that?”

“Nope, but the Japanese did it during World War Two.

And lemme tell you, the last thing you need in the landing pattern is an enemy fighter-bomber when everybody’s low on fuel and trying to get back aboard the boat at night. Fuck things up pretty good, one ever got through.

But that’s our job. They use to call it Tomcat; now it’spiraz.”

“And the second thing?”

“The second thing is strike-flight following. The fighter-bombers go in country, go feet-dry, they’re under control of the strike leader, usually a CAG or squadron commander who hangs back and directs his guys into the targets. Or, if it’s a really big gaggle, like this one’s gonna be, the E-Two does it. He’s right here, out in the middle of the Gulf where he can look in country with his radar.

Our controllers set up their scopes so they can track individual strike cells—those’re small groups of bombers —in over the beach and back out again. Our guys listen but don’t talk on the strike circuits. A pilot gets hit, or gets disoriented, or anything else goes wrong, Red Crown has him under positive track and can come up on the air and give him a vector to get out of trouble, or a vector to get to his target. Sorta a mother hen function, to help the E-Two controllers.”

“I had no idea that carrier attacks were so controlled.”

“Yeah, you see the movies, you think it’s just Helldivers rolling in out of the clouds. But it’s complex as hell, and you see, we’ve got three controllers set up to work.

Tonight, we’ll just watch, maybe exchange tracks with the E-Two. But when it’s for real, it’s sweat-pump city up here.”

Brian watched with Garuda as the screen filled with bright amber symbols representing three dozen attack aircraft now sixty miles out from Red Crown station and headed toward the North Vietnamese coast. Even though it was a feint and the attackers would sheer off at the last minute, he felt a thrill of excitement watching the strike form up into three distinct columns of aircraft, with another dozen support and cover aircraft assembling along the coast. The electronic warfare module kept up a steady stream of reports as the Communist radars came on the air and the air-defense networks were activated ashore.

Over in D and D, Austin stood behind the SWIC chair, fielding reports and forwarding them to the admiral’s battle staff via the Air Force Green net. The captain and the exec watched intently. Around Combat, every watch stander was focused on his scope, the hum of operational data interchange flowing from console to console and module to module.

Fox Hudson’s hands were a blur as his fingers flew over the keyboards while he switched back and forth from intercom to air control to the strike circuit, correlating what he was hearing on the airborne circuits to what his radars were painting on the SWIC scope. As the cluster of symbols swarmed invisibly and silently overhead at thirty thousand feet, Brian wondered whether he would ever achieve that degree of proficiency in the system. Then the bitch box spoke.