The Edge of Honor (18 page)

When Long Beach returned in a month and a half, all of it, updated by Hood, would be transferred back.

Informally, the word came on which of the carriers had the most aggressive fighter pilots, what were the best bribes to keep the daily logistics helo happy to ensure a steady flow of replacements and mail, and what kinds of mistakes were likely to provoke the current admiral on Yankee Station into sending hate mail. At a predesignated time, Long Beach had turned off her TACAN beacon and Hood had turned on hers.

The TACAN was one of the PIRAZ ship’s main reasons for being: Since the PIRAZ ship remained within a five mile geographically fixed station in the Gulf of Tonkin, any U. S. or Allied aircraft operating over or around North Vietnam and the Gulf could switch to the Red Crown TACAN frequency and get an instant positional fix. And if the aircraft’s TACAN was not working, he could switch to the Red Crown control frequency, transmit a specified transponder code, and the PIRAZ ship’s powerful air-search radar would find him, fix his position, and give him a steer to his home base.

“We’re baby-sitters,” Austin had said. “They get into trouble, they know we’re here. They navigate all over this part of Southeast Asia using our TACAN, and they know there’s an SAR helo if they have to ditch. There’s some evidence that the Communists use it, too.”

“I had no idea there were so many aircraft operating out here,” Brian had observed, staring at the amber scope with its intricate and glittering digital symbology.

“Nobody does. But when the bombing campaign is active, there can be as many as a hundred aircraft up over North Vietnam or the Gulf, night and day. That’s what all those people back in the detection and tracking module do. It’s Red Crown’s job to sort them out and especially to ensure that a Mig doesn’t slip in with a gaggle of aircraft returning to the carrier, say, after a night strike.”

“Do you think they’d actually try that?”

“No, because I think the carriers are politically off limits. But ask me if they could do it, and I’d have to say yes, or at least they could try. That’s what PIRAZ really stands for: positive identification radar advisory zone.

We positively identify every aircraft within two hundred miles. And that’s why we’re stationed out here in the Gulf between the main North Vietnamese airfields and our carriers to the south. We’re the gatekeepers.”

Brian stood behind the ship’s weapons coordinator console. The SWIC controlled everything that happened in Combat by means of keyboard actions and intercom commands. All of the module supervisors reported to the SWIC: detection and tracking, known as the Cave because it was totally darkened to enhance radarscope contrast, weapons control, surface operations, computer control, antisubmarine control, electronic warfare, and the PIRAZ air controllers. The SWIC could communicate with all of the modules and could access any one of the ship’s thirty-six radio-communications links. He usually had the intercom circuit in one half of his headset and a radio channel in the other ear. The SWIC was a prestigious qualification. It took at least a year to qualify an officer on the SWIC console, and very few officers in the ship could manage the intricate mix of hand-eye coordination in executing computer commands and the concentration required to interpret the symbology while the intercom whispered in one ear and a radio circuit squawked in the other.

Because Brian was new to the PIRAZ station, Austin had assigned Chief Warrant Officer Barry, the ship’s computer officer, and the most qualified SWIC to stand watches with Brian. After only a few hours, Brian had come to appreciate Austin’s choice. The word garuda meant “dragon” in pidgin Chinese, and Barry was the technical dragon of CIC.

An ex-enlisted radarman who had come up through the ranks to chief petty officer and who then had been commissioned as a technical specialist, Barry knew more about Hood’s CIC and supporting combat systems than any other officer or chief in the ship, and he was fiercely proud of his technical knowledge. Barry was thirty-five but looked forty-five; he was a short, rotund man with prematurely gray hair, a round face, steel-rimmed glasses, shaky hands, and a cigarette permanently embedded in his mouth. He had spent his entire career in the Pacific Fleet and his speech was full of WESTPAC slang, acronyms, and pidgin Chinese and Japanese expressions. He had taught himself computer programming and he could restore the NTDS operations program in a flurry of button smashing. He could diagnose an intermittent electrical fault in one of the systems, track it down to a precise pin on a connector, and then repair it quicker than most of the techs. He had given Brian a tour of the symbology on his scope with the patience of someone who knew he would have to do it again several times.

“That’s a quick an’ dirty,” Garuda had said after a twenty-minute point-and-explain drill on the scope for his fledging evaluator. “And that’s a ‘quiet’ scope, ‘cause there isn’t a strike going in. When there’s a strike, it goes times three.”

“Right. Got it all. Piece a cake. I’m qualified to do SWIC now,” Brian had replied, rolling his eyes. Garuda had grinned.

“Trick is,” he had said, “you study one kind of symbol each watch and concentrate on what it does through the watch. After about a month, you’ll be able to read this display like a book. And the other trick is, if you try to learn it, you’ll be ahead of most people who never even try. Then they’ll think you’re an expert.”

From his station at a desk in D and D, Brian could see directly into the surface module, where the surface watch officer and his three radarmen stood their watch, keeping track of all surface contacts within twenty miles of the ship. They used the SPS-10 surface-search radar and plotted contacts on a glass-topped plotting table, feeding information out to the officer of the deck on the bridge.

To the right of surface was the weapons control module, containing two user consoles and the guided-missile system launch-control panels. To his left was the entrance to the Cave, the module in which radarmen converted raw video detected by the ship’s two air-search radars into computer symbology on eight input consoles. The consoles looked like large gray desks with slant tops and round televisions mounted flush into each slant top.

Directly to the right of the SWIC console were the two primary air-controller consoles. One air controller directed a pair of Phantom jets on a continuous barrier station off the coast of North Vietnam. The other controller was the PIRAZ controller, who issued advisory control instructions to the dozens of support aircraft operating over the Gulf.

Taking Garuda’s advice, Brian dedicated his first watch to learning the names of everything he could see from his chair.

Garuda pushed his headset back off his ears for a moment. “Wager Bird goes off-station, everything quiets down a bunch,” he said. “Those staffies down on Yankee Station do love their secure-voice radio.”

“No Wager, no secure voice?”

“Not with the faraway bosses. The Gulf has one secure-voice circuit—Air Force Green. Because it’s secure, Air Force Green has become the virtual command circuit for the Gulf—the admiral, who’s the anti-air warfare commander down the carrier, the PIRAZ ship, the Air Force air control center on Monkey Mountain at Da Nang, and the North and South SAR ships—we’re all up on Green.”

Garuda moved the electronic pointer around the scope.

“The carriers are about a hundred and twenty miles away on Yankee Station—right here. Da Nang is a hundred and forty-five miles, in the land smear, here. The South SAR destroyer station is around sixty miles, there, and North SAR is also about sixty miles away, up off of Haiphong harbor, there. So Green has to be relayed, and that’s what the Wager Bird does. From forty-five thousand feet, most of Southeast Asia is in his line-of-sight range.”

“Seems like an expensive way to talk, having a whole seven-oh-seven dedicated to just one radio circuit.”

“Yes, sir, but it’s real nice when trouble starts to be able to call that bird farm and get some fighters up without having to go through a buncha voice codes on a clear HF circuit.”

“What happens when Wager goes home?”

“We have no secure voice with the carriers between about midnight and dawn. We just hope the bad guys stay in their boxes between those hours.”

“If they don’t?”

“We’d be on our own, Mr. Holcomb. But I been out here on PIRAZ since 1966. We’ve never seen a Mig come feet-wet yet. They know we’d smack their asses, they get within range of our missiles. And we got the barrier combat air patrol, that’s BARCAP in CIC talk.

Two Phantom jets onstation twenty-four hours a day, just itchin’ to bag a Mig. Those guys wanta come out over the Gulf and mix it up, let’s do it to it.”

“I copy that,” chimed in the BARCAP controller from the other side of the SWIC console.

Brian nodded. He was still getting used to the unique status of the ship’s full-time air controllers. Hood had five fully qualified air-intercept controllers, or AICs. An AIC’s job was to take Navy fighters under close control on his radarscope and direct them via UHF radio circuit to a tactical position in space from which they could lock onto an enemy aircraft with their own missile systems and bring it down.

Brian recognized that the AICs in Hood were an elite group. The bonds of trust between the controllers and their fighter pilots had risen to almost mystical levels of human interaction and dependence. The controller sat in front of a radarscope that displayed an area of 250 miles in diameter in three dimensions—direction, distance, and altitude. Because the tactical geometry of a fighter engagement was basically an exercise in spherical trigonometry, where the enemy started out somewhere on the edge of a sphere whose diameter could be a hundred miles, the fighter pilot was obliged to follow almost blindly the controller’s directions on heading, course, speed, altitude, and turns as the controller contracted the sphere on his radarscope to put the enemy aircraft in his fighter’s gun sights. Depending on what kind of missile was going to be used, the controller strove to put his fighters behind and below, or head-to-head, with the enemy aircraft. The crucial difference was that the controller could see and the pilot could not, right up until the final seconds when his target appeared magically right in front of him, allowing the radar-intercept officer in the backseat of the Phantom to take over, lock on, and make the kill.

That the controllers were enlisted and the pilots all officers made the bond even more special, because the pilots unequivocally put their lives in the hands of their controller. AIC training was intense and continuous, and the controllers had to requalify at school or through live control once every three months. They were certified by the FAA and they kept logbooks recording their licenses, training, and recertifications just like their civilian brethren.

They were intensely proud of their skills and they were uniformly aggressive in their desire to bag a Mig, which perfectly reflected the aggressive spirit of fighter pilots throughout the Navy. Bonds of confidence developed over time to the point where pilots would ask for controllers by name if they thought a tough tactical problem was shaping up.

Brian discovered that the AICs, imitating pilots, had all acquired nicknames and deliberately laid-back speech patterns on the radio. There was a great deal of slang in use, much of which was inspired by the recent CB radio craze sweeping the States. Eavesdropping on one of the AIC circuits, Brian noted that both pilots and controllers had adopted a carefully contrived degree of radio cool, behind which lay the very real tensions of life-and-death maneuvers at forty thousand feet and six hundred miles per hour. If an actual intercept situation developed, however, Brian observed that the slang and the CB nonsense disappeared in an instant, to be replaced by the razor sharp commands of standardized fighter-control procedures.

Garuda had explained that there were not enough AICs to go around in the Navy, so they were often cross decked to a ship going out to PIRAZ, did a seven-month cruise, came back to the States for a month or so, and then cross-decked to another PIRAZ-bound ship. Many of them adopted the mannerisms of hired gunslingers, which, in effect, was exactly what they were. They tended to be taciturn about their craft and carried themselves with a staged indifference to their surroundings until they manned up an AIC scope.

Beyond the mechanics of their craft, the AICs held special status in the crew. They were paid more than other E-6s and typically had no other duties except air control. They seemed to adjust their own watches to accommodate their individual physical abilities to focus on the screen, wandering in and out of CIC at will.

Garuda had pointed out another fact: Because the AICs sat at the right hand of the SWIC in D and D and were thus privy to the conversations among the ship’s senior officers, they were the source of the best gossip on the crew’s grape vine.

The AIC on watch was nicknamed Hoodoo. Hoodoo, whose real name was Alonzo Jones, was a tall, very thin black man with an arresting face: deeply hooded and intense eyes, sharply hooked nose, thin lips, and a predatory, almost-cruel expression. He was purportedly into African spiritualism, voodoo, and other occult interests.

He had an astonishingly deep voice, which he used to great effect when controlling. Many of the blacks in the ship were more than a little unsettled by Hoodoo, who combined the expected aloofness of an AIC with an occasional incantation often enough to put the more superstitious off their feed.

“SWIC, I’m gonna tank these BARCAP in about eleven mikes,” Hoodoo announced.

“SWIC, aye, and Red Crown controller, where’s the basketball?”

“Basketball is two-four-zero for eighty miles,” replied the PIRAZ controller. The PIRAZ controller kept everybody from running into one another; as such, he was an advisory controller, not a close-control fighter-directing controller, and therefore something of a lesser being.

“What’s a basketball?” asked Brian. He was little tired of having to ask the

“What’s a” question every time Garuda did something, but Garuda’s patience appeared to be endless.