The Intruders by Stephen Coonts

room was a shambles and the operator went to the hospital
with critical injuries.
    As a result of this little story, Johnny Arbogast developed a habit of
running his eyes over the anchor dampeners after each arrestment.
Tonight, after setting the engine to receive an A-6, he saw something
that he had never before seen. As the anchor dampeners stroked back
into battery after the last engagement, the steel cable on one of them
had kinked about six inches out from the connecting socket that held the
bitter end of the cable to the dampener piston.
    A kink, like a kink in a garden hose.
    Johnny Arbogast stared, not quite sure his eyes could be believed.
    Yep, a kink.
    If this engine takes a hit, that cable could break, right there at the
kink!
    Johnny fumbled with the mouthpiece of the sound-powered phone unit
hanging on his chest. He pushed the talk button and blurted, “Three’s
foul. Three’s not ready.”
    “What?” This from the deck-edge operator, who had already told the
arresting gear officer that all the engines were set. And he had
delivered this message over a half minute ago, maybe even a minute.
    “Three’s not ready,” Johnny Arbogast howled into his mouthpiece. “Foul
deck!”
    And then Johnny did what any sensible man would have done: he tore off
the sound-powered headset and ran for his life.
    Up on the fantail catwalk the deck-edge operator shouted at the
arresting gear officer, “Three’s not ready.”
    The gear officer was still standing on the starboard foul line on the
flight deck and he didn’t hear what the operator said. He eyed the A-6
in the groove and bent toward the sailor, who was also looking over his
shoulder at the approaching plane, now almost at the ramp.
    “Foul deck,” the sailor roared above the swelling whine of the engines
of the approaching plane.
    The gear officer’s reaction was automatic. He released the trigger on
the pistol grip he held in his hand and shouted, “What the hell is
wrong?”
    Across the landing area on the LSO’s platform the green “ready deck”
light went out and the red “foul deck” light came on.
    Hugh Skidmore was looking intently at the A-6 Intruder almost at the
ramp when he saw the red light on the edge of his peripheral vision. He
was faced with an instant discision.
    He had no way of knowing why the deck was foulhe only knew that it was.
A plane may have rolled into the landing area, a man may have wandered
into the unsafe zone … any one of a hundred things could have gone
wrong and all one hundred were bad.
    So Hugh Skidmore squeezed the red button on the pistol grip he held in
his hand, triggering a bank of flashing red lights mounted above the
meatball. At the same time he roared into his radio-telephone,
“Wave-off, wave-off.”
    The flashing wave-off lights and the radio message imprinted themselves
on Jake Grafton’s brain at the same time.
    His reaction was automatic. The throttles went full forward as he
thumbed in the speed brakes and the control stick came aft.
    Unfortunately jet engines do not provide instantaneous power as piston
engines do: the revs can build only as fast as the burners can handle
the increasing fuel flow, which is metered through a fuel control unit
to prevent flooding the engine and flaming it out. And power builds
with revs, Tonight the back stick and the gradually increasing engine
power flattened the A-6’s descent, then stopped it … four feet above
the deck.
    The howling warplane crossed the third wire with its nose well up,
boards in, engines winding to full screech, but with its tailhook
dangling.
    From his vantage point near the fantail the arresting gear officer
watched in horror as the tailhook kissed the top of the third wire, then
snagged the fourth. The plane continued forward for a heartbeat, then
seemed to stop in midair.
    It was a lopsided contest. An 18-ton airplane was trying to pull a
95,000-ton ship. The ship won. The airplane fell straight down.
    As he took the wave-off, Jake