Certainly, the Demon that used to live out there at Mach 1 was dead. By the time Puresome hit the tactics phase of advanced training, it was ordained that the student's first hop in the F-11 Tiger would include stroking the afterburner, stuffing the nose over and no-big-dealing through the sound barrier. But the Thing that lived at night around aircraft carriers, the Thing with yellow eyes and long teeth that could curdle the righteous stuff of the most steely-eyed of Naval Aviators, was alive and out there, waiting.
Even Air Force pukes knew about "night noises," mysterious moans and glicking sounds made by one's aircraft that were ominously amplified at night. Patrol pukes knew that night air sucked lift off wings, and that night over the ocean was darker than 40 feet up the gastro-intestinal tract of the largest dinosaur. But carrier aviators knew the Night Thing was all of that, and on any given night could manipulate the vertigos, the sea and both ends of the Boat to make you look bad, or dead, or both.
Back at the University, Puresome's dreams of Wings of Gold were occasionally troubled by sea stories from the fleet that percolated down to his NROTC unit. Night carrier qualifications involved haphazardly hurling an aircraft with a slow-to-spool-up engine at a heaving spot of iron in the ocean, and many who tried were found wanting and sent off in humiliation to be chaplain's assistants in remote corners of the Empire. And there were the dark images of the "know when, then go!" poster of horrific Crusader prangs that seemed to regularly happen at night. But Puresome knew that there were many rungs of the ladder to hack before he had to face that particular malevolence, and he stuffed his nascent awareness of the Thing into a box and put it on a far shelf in the back of his mind. But it growled and quivered and waited its time, never very far away.
By and by, ENS Puresome found himself with Golden Wings, having climbed to the top of the Training Command pile only to start over at the bottom of another pile as a "Firp," a Fleet Replacement Pilot, with Tinker Toy Fleet Readiness Squadron at NAS Oceana. The RAG would teach him all things Scooter and deliver him to his fleet squadron as a fully qualified Frabbing New Guy nugget who didn't know squat, and would be told "Forget all that stuff you learned in the RAG, because this is how we do it in the fleet!"
All the while, Youthly was flying familiarization, formation and low-levels hop learning the fine art of the idiot loop (the over-the-shoulder bomb delivery of the Doomsday Weapon) and other such delights on weapons deployment to MCAS Yuma. Previous classes of Firps progressed to the stage of doing hundreds of passes at the deck in field mirror landing practice, preparatory to the Final Exam of day and night carrier landing qualification. Each simulated carrier landing pass was closely graded by RAG LSOs, and Firps had to pass their cold-eyed scrutiny to earn their trip to the Boat and carrier qualifications. Puresome watched and listened to their progress with studied indifference and real attention, knowing full well that his day was coming.
And so it happened that the class in front of Puresome went to the Boat, and, once there, three Firps had done their day traps and refused to fly their night qualifications. They subsequently had their wings ripped off and their swords broken, and were hustled off to Vladivostok, all very publicly.
"Jerbis Flinderbars!" thought Puresome, "it's alive!" as something dark and evil YOUHAHAHA'ed its way to his mind's center stage.
This frabb-up at the Boat constituted the ultimate Naval Aviation sin—it made people look bad. Therefore, guano ran down hill until a great heap of it landed on the heads of the RAG LSOs responsible for certifying students as ready for the Boat. Naturally, the LSOs passed on their pleasure at this condition to the lucky students of Puresome's class. They would not frabb up, or they would not pass go.
So Youthly flew his fanny off, doing six or seven bounces at Fentress, the auxiliary field set aside for this business, before popping back to hot-pit refuel at Oceana, and returning to Fentress for another go. LSOs snarled and their assistants wrote caustic descriptions of each pass. After a week of two-a-days, there was less yelling, and government-issue ball-point pens didn't burst into flame as often. The students then graduated to two-a-nights. Puresome would emerge from these hops with his flight suit soaked and fuming, calluses on his butt and a real need for half a glass of good scotch whiskey. After nearly 200 simulated carrier landings, the hard-eyed LSOs were as satisfied as they were likely to get, and Puresome got his ticket punched for a trip to NAS Cecil Field and USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVA-42). He listened attentively to instructions in etiquette around the ship, so as not to play the complete Delta Sierra during his ten day and six night traps. No mention was made of the supernatural attraction of thunderstorms to aircraft carriers or possible poltergeist intervention.
The day traps on the FDR were fun. On the second day, four day traps were required before going out for night qualifications, and Puresome felt he handled the substantial sink-hole behind the Boat with plenty of competence.
But hanging around the rest of the day waiting for his turn in the barrel that night caused an intense attack of what athletes call "adrenaline build-up." Naval Aviators call it "the chickenshits." Even watching the antics of the pre-auto throttle RA-5Cs from Vulture's Row failed to divert him much. Somehow, the wild flapping of their huge horizontal stabilizers and their ponderous waveoff performance, much like a leviathan stuck in a tar-pit, seemed to carry with it a certain amount of doom. It did not help to have entirely too much imagination.
All of this made it too easy to imagine that the red lighting in the ready room and the red goggles used for night adaptation had turned everything into some naval version of Dante's Inferno. The trip from the ready room up the escalator was red-lit, as was the flight deck, and the waiting A-4s hulked ominously in the gloom. As Puresome shoe-horned himself and his thoughts into the tiny A-4 cockpit, the Night Thing sensed an opportunity and grinned an evil grin.
Puresome's first frabb-up was conceptual. Even though he had to fly his carrier approaches with his seat in the full up position so as to be able to see over the nose of the Scooter, he figured that since he would be flying actual instruments in the black-assed night, he would take the catapult shot and fly the pattern with the seat full down, the better to see his instruments. It was a bad idea. Not used to the seat position, he was profoundly uncomfortable, and never managed to line up the Tacan needle and the boat on his first trip around the pattern. Cleverly raising his seat to the normal position solved his instrument scan problem, and on the next pattern Puresome found himself staring at the dim, red drop-lights on the blunt end of the boat and following the meatball down the glideslope, more or less as advertised. But as he got in close, he remembered the sink hole that was there during the day and squoze on a little extra power, and was amazed as the ball traveled upward. He sailed over the wires as his tailhook sent out a shower of sparks down the iron deck.
"Bolter! Bolter! Power and go!" hollered the LSO, and Puresome disappeared into the blackness. Something Evil cackled, but only the young pilot heard it. His next pass was identical—Youthly couldn't help himself. He squoze on a little power against the sink hole that had to be there and sailed over the wires, making more sparks in the night.
"Puresome, you're adding too much power in close and are sailing over the top! Easy on the power and just fly the ball, or you'll bolter all night!"
"I will be frabbed if I will!" Puresome snarled into his mask. "I will do this!" He realized that there was no place for wailing, doomed dinosaurs or Dante's gloom, only himself and what he had to do. He fought the Evil Force to a draw and fixed himself on the job, with the result that he flew the Scooter around the pattern and trapped.
After refueling, he launched and banged out five more traps, even though vertigo gave him the sensation of doing aileron rolls down final on the last pass.
"Does that give me a qual?" Puresome squeaked as he taxied out of the arresting gear in the red deck lighting that wasn't nearly as ominous as it used to be. The air boss allowed that it did.
Puresome knew that the Night Thing had not gone away, but was always there, waiting. Before his first night trap in his fleet squadron, he went to bed all afternoon and flew his approach a thousand times in his head. He was ready when he almost lost it when he descended from a pinkie holding pattern in his Tinker Tanker down into the dark. Puresome started thinking about the night trap immediately after the catapult shot on every subsequent night hop, and it was never far from his mind, even while dropping flares and bombs on godless, rat-eating Commies. Sometimes a good LSO with a calm voice could bring you aboard despite the efforts of thunderstorms and supernatural intervention.
The Night Thing may never be far away from Naval Aviators, but Puresome knew that the important thing was that you could kick its ass.