Chapter 1
1
Aboard the USS Ticonderoga. The Philippine Sea. Eighty nautical miles from Kikai Island, the Kagoshima Prefecture. 5 December, 1965.
Lieutenant Junior Grade Golan Stiel lay in his bunk and braced against the rail as the aircraft carrier pitched in the rough waters. He had just returned from the flight deck where the temperature was below freezing, and ocean swells were beginning to top forty feet. An alarm blared over his head and pierced the tightly confined quarters. “God loves the Navy,” he said as he hopped off the bunk.
“What was that, Pickle?” Lieutenant Carlton Waters said through the open doorway. To Naval aviators, the term pickle referred to the releasing of bombs. But during an early training flight, Stiel had come back one fuel tank short. He had inadvertently released the tank instead of the weapon. The nickname stuck.
“I said, ‘God loves the Navy.’ That means me. You? Not so much.” Stiel smiled at his wingman. He hurriedly grabbed his flight suit, a one-piece made from fireproof Nomex fabric, and stepped into it, then zipped it up. He picked up his anti-G suit and jammed in one leg followed by the other. The suits were designed to apply pressure to a pilot’s lower extremities to prevent loss of consciousness when under heavy acceleration.
“Hurry up. Flight line in two. The Cold War isn’t going to wait for you,” Waters said as he darted from the stateroom.
Stiel threw on a torso harness and chased it with a survival vest. Once both were properly affixed, he stuffed a .38-caliber pistol into a chest pocket and zipped it tight.
The alarm continued to pulse. A booming voice came over the speakers, reverberating through every compartment on the ship. “General Quarters, General Quarters. All hands, man your battle stations.”
“I hope this is a drill,” Stiel said to himself. But part of him hoped it wasn’t.
The carrier’s primary Cold War mission was to defend against the ultimate doomsday scenario, one in which the Russians would launch a nuclear attack. But with the Vietnam war now in full swing, the carrier had double duties. Stiel had already made fifteen combat runs, expertly placing explosive ordnance onto military targets in North Vietnam. The adrenaline spikes had become almost addictive.
The first several attack missions had been targeted at supply depots, but the last was a munitions dump. Stiel’s Zuni missiles had been right on target that day. He could still picture the secondary explosions in his mind.
But right now, time was not on his side. He stuffed a water-filled baby bottle into a pouch on the leg of the anti-G suit, grabbed his helmet bag and broke into a run. His destination was the hangar deck. Situated one level below the flight deck, the hangar deck served as the primary location where aircraft were stored, repaired, and armed for combat.
With so much gear and supplies strapped to his body, extra ammo, pencil flares, cigarettes, a knit cap, heavy gloves, signaling cloth, hat, and a long jungle knife strapped to his leg, his dash to the hangar deck felt more like a weighed-down slog.
The ship pitched from one side to another in the heavy seas. Under General Quarters conditions, sailors ran in various directions in what looked like disorganized chaos. Yet the response was textbook.
Stiel blew past the ready room and descended a narrow staircase, known onboard Naval vessels as a ladder well. With so many sailors running for their duty stations he called ahead, “Make a hole! Down ladder!” He shuffled past a dozen sailors coming up. He was on the hangar deck and running for his plane seconds later.
When he got to the craft, however, he hesitated. A B43 nuclear bomb was strapped to the underbelly. Oh s**t, Stiel thought.
“Get your ass in gear, JG,” Waters yelled from the cockpit of his A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft.
Stiel slung his helmet bag into the hands of an airman already standing on the wing, waiting for him. He climbed the exterior ladder and jumped into the cockpit of his Skyhawk. The airman, known as the plane captain, handed him his helmet. Stiel snugged it over his head and began adjusting the oxygen mask. The airman leaned in and affixed Stiel’s shoulder and leg straps, then pulled a pair of safety pins from the ejector seat.
Adrenaline pulsed into Stiel’s veins the way it always did in the harried moments before being flung from the deck of the carrier.
The airman said, “Good to go, sir?”
Stiel nodded then his fingers instinctively found several switches. The process of preparing the plane for flight was on.
The airman gave him a thumbs up and shimmied down the ladder.
With so much noise emanating from the flight deck above them, Stiel held his oxygen mask over his mouth and keyed his radio. “Hey, LT, this isn’t a drill, is it?”
“What makes you think this isn’t a drill?” Waters replied. “The carrier’s cruising for Yokosuka, Japan for a little R and R.”
Stiel looked to the side of the hangar and saw them, three sailors known as ordnance men, red-shirts charged with moving, mounting, and arming weapons. But these were no ordinary officers. Known as “the W,” the elite Special Weapons Division was comprised of those trusted to handle nuclear weapons. They were flanked by a detachment of Marine guards who stood in close watch.
Stiel smiled. “What makes me think this isn’t a drill? Well, let’s see. There’s a Mark 43 on my wing for starters.”
“Oh, you noticed that, did you? You got a problem with a tactical nuclear weapon strapped to your balls?”
“And we’re not doing an exterior pre-flight?”
“That’s a negative, Pickle. The island says this is priority. You just better hope that bucket of bolts you’re flying is in good shape. Kick the tires then light the fire. Run your interior pre-check, and do it fast. Ejection seat safety pins out?”
“Affirmative.”
“Fuel level?”
Stiel checked his gauge. Since a fully fueled tank would make the plane too heavy to launch, Skyhawks launched with half-capacity and were refueled in mid-air. His gauge read 2,734 pounds, almost perfect.
He flashed a thumbs-up to Waters.
“The tanker just launched from CAT A,” Waters said. An enormous roaring sound came from overhead as another aircraft launched from the catapult. “That would be a Crusader. There’s another F-8 to launch, but you’re number two on CAT B, right behind it.”
A vehicle called a tug detached itself from the front landing gear. Tugs had the singular responsibility of moving aircraft into various positions on the ship, but once a plane was ready to be backed onto the elevator, planes were moved the old fashioned way, by hand.
A dozen sailors ran into position and began to push. Stiel’s plane rolled backward toward the carrier’s single deck-edge elevator where it would be raised to the level of the flight deck.
Stiel hurried through his interior pre-flight checklist, flipping switches and checking gauges. As the plane was backed onto the open-air elevator platform, the wheels bumped across the leading edge of the elevator.
Stiel glanced over his shoulder at the raging seas behind him. A wave slammed into the side of the massive ship, and freezing, salt-laden mist blasted across the elevator and into the hangar deck. The ship lurched in protest, and Stiel felt the roll tilt him forward. He pulled the canopy actuation handle and lowered the jet’s canopy to the closed position, forming an airtight seal.
Stiel’s wingman came over the radio again. “Island says we’ve got two bogeys inbound. Probably Russian MiG-17 fighter aircraft. They’re moving at subsonic speeds, just below Mach 1. Position is one hundred nautical miles and closing. That’s what they’re launching the Crusaders for. But those MiGs launched from somewhere. If there’s a Russkie carrier group out there, it could get ugly. It’s time to earn your pay.”
“Bogeys?” Stiel said. “Christ, I expected it when we were in the Gulf of Tonkin, but out here? If you ask me, the Cold War ain’t so cold.”
“Did you just say Christ?” Waters said as he laughed into the comm. “Aren’t you Jewish?”
Stiel extended the middle finger on his right hand and used it to salute Waters. He glanced at a small black and white photo affixed to the top of the instrument panel. His sweetheart, Evelyn, a trim brunette dressed only in a two-piece bathing suit, smiled back at him. “See you in the air, LT.”
Several sailors, plane handlers in blue shirts and a safety director in yellow, shielded their faces against the freezing mist. As the plane was pushed back, the safety director eyed the position of the front wheel relative to the painted yellow line on the floor of the elevator. But as the massive wave passed underneath, the ship began to lean in the other direction.
Stiel felt his plane roll backward, toward the edge. With nothing between him and the rolling seas but a thin metal safety bar, he jammed his foot onto the brake pedal. Instead of feeling pressure, however, his foot went straight to the floor.
“s**t! No brakes!” he yelled into the comm.
The plane’s front wheel rolled past the yellow line and the safety director blew his whistle. Men on the hangar deck erupted into motion. Two sailors, known as chock men, one positioned under each wing, threw large wooden chocks behind the landing gear, an attempt to thwart the roll.
Two other safety men blew whistles just as the plane’s wheels bumped over the chocks. Frantic blue-shirts ran onto the elevator and grabbed at the plane. But the elevator platform tilted further and they could not arrest the rearward motion.
Jamming his foot on the brake pedal in repeated succession had no effect. The platform tilted past the critical threshold.
Waters watched from his plane and his eyes flared wide. His best friend was about to fall over the edge. He sat bolt-upright against his shoulder harnesses and his voice boomed into the radio. “Pickle, no!”
Stiel felt a violent jarring accompanied by the sounds of metal on metal as the huge fuel tanks under his wings tore through the safety bar. Blue and yellow-shirts let go and leapt to the side to keep from being pulled overboard.
Stiel’s heart rate exploded as he felt his rear landing gear slide over the edge. It was too late to bail out. The bulk of the plane slid off the platform, hung momentarily by the nose gear, then toppled thirty-nine feet. It landed on its back, slamming canopy-first onto the thrashing water below. Stiel and the plane were upside down.
Inside the cockpit, the impact was jarring. The plane began to sink beneath the surface of the thrashing water. Stiel scrambled to get his bearings. The lights illuminating the instrument panel went black. Out of instinct, Stiel reached for the ejection handle, but being below the surface, realized instantly the canopy would not be able to jettison clear. With the canopy still in place, deploying the ejection seat’s rocket motor would cause flames to erupt inside the cockpit. He would either burn to death or be crushed against the closed canopy.
With lightning speed, he unbuckled his safety harness, pressed the canopy actuation handle forward, and jammed his hands into the canopy. The plane slipped into the dark, watery oblivion. He pushed as hard as he could, but the water pressure holding the canopy closed was too much. What little light he had vaporized into inky blackness.
The plane descended deeper, and Stiel pushed against the canopy. After a few moments, it began to pop and groan under the pressure. The canopy would not budge. Stiel’s mind frantically searched through every emergency training scenario he had gone through, but this was not a contingency anyone had planned for.
Stiel propped a boot against the canopy and pressed with everything he had. A small amount of water began to leak in around the seal. He could feel the plane descend deeper and deeper.
The canopy, however, remained like a rock. The plane rolled end over end into the depths below. Stiel no longer could tell which direction was up. Exhausted and out of options, there was nothing left to do, and Stiel knew it. He unbuckled his oxygen mask then fumbled in the pitch darkness for the photo of Evelyn.
The metallic groaning of water pressure against the canopy intensified, and he held the photo to his lips.
“Goodbye, my sweet Evelyn.”
