Wednesday
1244 EDT
Virginia Capes Operating Area
He clutched his
helmet under one arm, surveying the controlled chaos of the flight deck with
fresh eyes. This was what he’d come
here to do; everything he’d done, everything he’d accomplished over the last
decade or more, had been leading up to this.
“Try
not to dump us in the drink, all right, Rabb?” One of the veteran RIOs of the
squadron would be riding in his backseat for this first ‘cat/trap’. He tossed a grin over his shoulder as they
approached their aircraft.
“No
sweat, sir – I just hope my consummate skill won’t ruin you for all other
pilots.”
The
lieutenant commander scoffed. “Get your
ass strapped in and let’s do this thing.”
He
climbed up and swung himself into the cockpit, reading the checklist on his
kneeboard with as much concentration as he could summon. Around him, dozens of crewmen were readying
planes, running the catapult, supervising the deck; all doing their jobs so
that a bunch of guys like him could do their job.
As
the canopy locked into place over his head and the signalman cleared him to
taxi to the waiting catapult, one simple thought echoed:
Don’t
let me screw this up.
“Ready for this, Admiral?” The young man grinned at him from across the locker room, and
Harm returned it, zipping up his flight suit.
Flying alongside a kid young enough to be his son was disconcerting
stuff, but he’d get over it. It was the
way of the world, after all.
“I’m always ready to fly, Lieutenant. I’m just not sure I’m ready to make this the
last time.”
“I know what you mean, sir.”
Harm shook his head with a small smile. “No, you don’t. And if you’re lucky, you won’t have to learn for a good long
while.”
He’d had precious few opportunities to fly over the
past few years; he’d kept current, but the Navy tended to get nervous about
letting its flag officers fly single-seat aircraft. They wouldn’t dare try to stop him from taking his fini flight,
though.
He’d said goodbye to flying fighters once
before. That time, however, he’d had no
prior knowledge that his world was about to change. This time it had been marked on the calendar in glaring red
letters for weeks, but it was just as inevitable.
They made their way up to the flight deck, and the
baby-faced lieutenant who’d be flying his wing chatted along the way. “We’re actually going to have a change of
aircraft, sir, just so you know. The one
you were originally slated to fly had to go to the hangar for maintenance.”
“What was the problem?”
“I’m not sure, sir.
The plane captain could tell you.
Castleman! Got a sec?”
A maintainer jogged over to them as they stepped out
onto the flight deck. “Sirs?”
“What was the squawk on 1176?”
“Flight controls, sir. We did the preflight checks, and the system kept kicking back an
‘input disagree.’ Probably a gyro
issue.”
The term triggered a spark in a corner of Harm’s
mind. The rate gyros were the
aircraft’s method of attitude control; they tracked its motion in the pitch,
yaw, and roll directions. They were a
redundant system, such that if one gyro failed, the other two would overrule
its input. A problem with more than one
gyro, though, might be just the kind of thing that could cause a significant
control failure.
Like, for instance, the kind of failure that might
cause a jet to roll itself into the ocean.
After a moment of consideration, he deliberately put
the Marshall case out of his mind. This
was his last chance to walk across that deck and climb into a waiting bird of
prey, poised to take to the sky. After
today, the term ‘naval aviator,’ and the sense of identity associated with it,
would be committed to his past.
“Control, Jumpers 1 and 2 requesting taxi.”
“Jumpers 1and 2 cleared to taxi. Have a good flight, Admiral.”
They flew for about an hour, doing simulated
engagements and midair refuelings.
After all these years, the sensations were like a second skin to him,
enough so that it was tough to keep in mind the permanence of this last
flight. When he lined up that final
approach, though, and the perfect three-wire trap slammed him back into his
seat, it all came rushing in with smothering clarity, and he blinked a bit of
moisture out of his eyes.
Rank had no privilege when it came to celebrating a
fini flight, of course. As soon as he climbed down from the Hornet and removed
his helmet, he was assaulted by the deck crew, armed with water guns and
hoses. As the throng of people
surrounded him, whooping and clapping him on the back, he spotted two visitors
standing alongside the Seahawk’s captain, a safe distance away from the
commotion.
With a wide grin, he shook some of the water from his
hair and motioned them over. Mac took
firm hold of Ben’s hand and guided him across the deck to greet his father.
“That was so cool, Dad!” The boy shouted over the deck noise, beaming. “When you hit that wire, it was like, bam!
It was, like, a million miles an hour!”
Mac had stepped back to snap a couple of pictures,
and Harm suddenly realized that there was one last thing he had to do, one last
chance to keep an unspoken promise to his own father. “C’mere,” he said to Ben, leading him over to the aircraft and
helping him climb the ladder to the cockpit.
Ben settled into the seat, surveyed the controls in
front of him, and turned back toward his father with an expression of pure
awe. “Wow,” he breathed.
Harm heard a soft click and looked down at Mac, who
lowered the camera with shining eyes.
If there was any way to quell the conflict he felt at leaving this life
and bring it all full circle at the same time, he needed only to leave it to
her to find it.
2124 EDT
Rabb Residence
Washington, D.C.
Mac glanced up as her husband stepped into their
bedroom. “Ben asleep?”
“Went out like a light. I think we wore him out with the helicopter ride out to the
carrier.” Harm took a seat on the bed
next to her.
“You should have seen his face when I told him where
we were going. It hadn’t occurred to
him before that the ships Dad flies from aren’t usually tied to a dock.”
He nodded toward the open file in her lap. “You still looking for Marshall’s smoking
gun?”
“Yeah.” She
rubbed her eyes wearily. “I might be
running out of rabbits to pull out of my hat, though. I’m concentrating on the possibility of an avionics overheat
because of the ECS problems the jet had previously had. But I keep running into one rather large
roadblock. If there was an overheat
condition, it should have triggered the detector, and Marshall swears he didn’t
get any cockpit alarms.”
“It is
unlikely that there were failures in both the ECS and the overheat detection
loop at the same time.” Harm got up and
began to unbutton his shirt. “I had a
thought today while I was heading out to go fly. Have you looked into the operation of the rate gyros at all?”
“Flight controls give me a headache.” Mac offered a smile. “In all seriousness, I did get the basic
system description from Kara. There is
a condition in which a gyro can be reset to give a zero output, which would
give the flight computer inaccurate information. But that’s why there are three of the damned things – to prevent
one bad output from causing a hazard.”
Stripped down to his boxers now, he wandered into the
bathroom to retrieve his toothbrush.
“What if all three gyros gave a zero output?” he called back.
“They’re on separate circuits so that power can’t be
interrupted to more than one at once.”
“Right, but they’re all in the same equipment bay, so
presumably they could all overheat at once.”
“And that just brings us back to the no-warning
roadblock.”
Harm sighed and continued brushing his teeth. As he did, a more detailed scenario began to
take shape in his mind. Rinsing his
mouth quickly, he headed back out into the bedroom. “What if it happened on the deck between flights? If they were doing a maintenance run and
didn’t have anyone monitoring the overheat detectors?”
Mac considered the possibility. “If it were just a transient condition, a
quick temperature spike that caused the gyros to shut down to avoid burning
themselves out—”
“—it’s possible that the warning light was only on
for a few seconds, and no one would have had a chance to notice.”
“Could be.”
She closed the folder and put it on the bedside table. “Still just a theory, though. I don’t know if there’s enough physical
evidence to tell us much about the gyros.”
“That’s what tomorrow is for.” Harm eased across the bed and reached up to
finger a few strands of her dark hair.
“Did I mention that Ben is asleep?”
Mac lifted an eyebrow and leaned closer. “Do tell.”
He pressed a row of kisses down her neck and across
her shoulder, easing the strap of her nightgown down as he went. “Very—” kiss
“—very—” kiss “—asleep.”
“I like the way you choose your targets of
opportunity, sailor.”
Thursday
1352 EDT
JAG Headquarters
Falls Church, VA
He closed the
car door and looked up at the brick edifice that stretched out in front of
him. Around him, a few officers greeted
each other as they headed into the building to begin the day. They offered pleasant smiles when they
caught his gaze, and he did his best to return them despite a vague gnawing
sensation in the pit of his stomach.
This
wasn’t what he’d signed up for – not by a long shot. He’d had another path all laid out for him from the start, but
he’d screwed it up, and now this was what remained. The best of a field of diminishing options.
It
was an office building, for God’s sake.
He hadn’t joined the Navy to work in a damned office.
But
there were worse things in life, and there were worse things that weren’t life
at all – at that, his gut twisted, remembering Mace’s goofy grin – so he owed
it to just about everyone he knew to suck it up and give this a try.
The
yeoman at the front desk directed him to the admiral’s office, where he waited
tensely in an anteroom until he heard a voice boom through the door. “Enter!”
He
stepped into the expansive office and came to attention in front of the
desk. “Lieutenant Rabb reporting as
ordered, sir.”
“At
ease.” To his surprise, the admiral
stood up and extended his hand. “I’m
Admiral Brovo. You’ll be working for
me.”
“Yes,
sir.”
Brovo
took his seat and leaned forward on the desk.
“I’m going to get straight to the point, Lieutenant. I’ve read your records, and I see you’re not
wearing your wings. That’s your
business and I don’t care how you handle it.
I also suspect you don’t really want to be here. I don’t care about that, either. What I do care about is you doing your
job. Am I being clear?”
“Perfectly,
sir.”
“Good. Petty Officer Kent will direct you to your
office, and Commander Lindsey will show you the ropes. You’ve got approximately two minutes to
settle in, because there’s a case waiting on your desk. You’ll be defending a master chief accused
of disobeying a direct order. Watch out
for the prosecutor, Lieutenant Pike.
She’s a j.g., but she’s been known to go to town on the unprepared.”
“Aye,
sir.”
The
admiral gave the slightest hint of a smile.
“Welcome to JAG, Rabb.”
There was a knock at the office door, and Harm called
“Enter” without a second thought.
Everyone else was announced by Gardner; only his wife could bypass her.
Mac closed the door behind her and looked around the
office. “It looks so empty.”
“Tell me about it.
I thought you were going to be over at NAVAIR today.”
“I was. I
found something interesting in the maintenance records on Marshall’s jet. Take a look.” She set a stack of paper down in front of him. “This is from the Seahawk’s shipwide maintenance
database. Lieutenant Marshall told me
that environmental systems don’t age well, and you can see on here that a lot
of aircraft have had work done on the system.
The database is broken down by aircraft tail number, date, and part
number of the item replaced.”
Harm scanned the list of part numbers, where two
specific numbers were repeated throughout the record. Mac had highlighted them in different colors. “What do the two numbers signify?”
“One is the environmental sensor controller for the
F/A-18C/D – the original Hornet. The
other is the controller for the F/A-18E/F – the Super Hornet.”
He looked up, brows knit. “They’re not the same?”
“Almost none of the parts are common between the two
aircraft types, Harm. The fact that
they outwardly look the same and have the same name was really an end-run by
the Navy to convince Congress that it would be a more cost-effective program
than a ‘new’ design.”
“You’ve been listening to Kara again, haven’t you?”
“Bet your ass, but my point is that people think the
Hornet and the Super Hornet are more alike than they actually are. For instance, the Super Hornet’s avionics
are more complicated and require more cooling air than the original Hornet.”
Harm met his wife’s gaze, comprehension suddenly
dawning, and was met by a fractional nod.
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” She
pointed to a database entry marked with a star. “This is Lieutenant Marshall’s aircraft. Look what part number they installed when
they replaced the ECS controller.”
“The wrong damn one.” He shook his head, disbelieving.
“The two boxes look the same and operate almost
identically. It’s just that this one
thought it only had to cool down the instrumentation of an original Hornet,
when in fact it needed to be working hard enough for a Super Hornet. Hence, the overheat scenario that we were
looking at was almost inevitable.”
“We’re going to have to tell the Seahawk’s
skipper. I’m not sure the maintainers
deserve to be brought up on charges – they’re working on both kinds of jets,
and something as small as a part number doesn’t necessarily rise to the level
of negligence. But it’s up to their
convening authority to make that call.”
Mac was smiling.
“Meanwhile, we also get to tell Lieutenant Marshall that no one will ever
fault him for the mishap again. Do you
want to do the honors, or should I?”
In characteristic fashion, they did it together.
Commercial break …
At a loss as to what to do
with your Friday nights now that JAG is over?
Might I suggest a double dose
of sci-fi snark, followed by one of the most well-crafted shows on TV?
Sci-Fi
Fridays (check it out at Scifi.com) … because flyboys come in other flavors
besides Navy.