Patrick McLanahan Collection #1

by Dale Brown

  Gryzlov lit another cigarette, then stubbed it out angrily after taking only one puff. “And that attack on Engels Air Base by those American robot planes—that was the last straw!” he fumed. “McLanahan actually dared to mount a preemptive attack against an active Russian air base! That is completely unacceptable! And the spineless American president, Thorn, actually had the audacity to deny he authorized the attack, and at the same time he rewards McLanahan by allowing him to keep his stars! He should be in prison—or dangling at the end of a noose—for what he did!

  “The Americans want only one thing—complete domination over the entire planet,” Gryzlov said. “Well, I will not allow that to happen. I am going to show how weak and defenseless the United States really is….”

  3

  Air Intelligence Agency,

  Lackland Air Force Base, Texas

  The next day

  We haven’t been successful yet in locating the exact origin of those three Backfire bombers that attacked Bukhara,” Patrick McLanahan reported. He was doing the daily morning briefing of the battle staff at Air Intelligence Agency headquarters. Seated beside him was Colonel Trevor Griffin. “The Russians are keeping their entire fleet of long-range bombers out of sight. However, we have recent imagery that might give us some clues.”

  Griffin hit the slide button. “On this orbit we’re examining six bases in particular, all active or former Russian long-range-bomber bases in the south and far east: Omsk, Novosibirsk, Bratsk, Aginskoye, Blagoveshchensk, and Vladivostok,” Patrick said. “Vladivostok is the only base known to be operating the Tupolev-95 Bear bomber, primarily in a maritime-reconnaissance role. The last known inventory of Bears at Vladivostok is eighteen, but in the past couple days we’ve counted as many as thirty-nine. And as you can see, they’re not the Tupolev-142M or -MR maritime-reconnaissance planes. You can tell in these photos that the planes highlighted have no magnetic-anomaly devices on their vertical tail fins, and they have the large ‘Clam Pipe’ bombing radar under the nose. Only six of the thirty-nine Bears at Vladivostok have MAD stingers—the rest are strategic bombers.

  “We did not see any planes at the other five bases,” Patrick went on as Griffin changed slides, “nor did we expect to see any—but, for inactive or closed bases, the five other bases showed a lot of activity. For instance, in Aginskoye, we see twelve brand-new and very large bombersize hangars built. At one time Aginskoye was one of the former Soviet Union’s main strategic-bomber bases in the south, housing dozens of Blinder, Backfire, and Bear bombers. But when the bomber forces were cut, Aginskoye was all but deserted, virtually overnight. Not anymore.

  “Here was the most interesting feature of this particular shot. Notice the southeast end of Aginskoye’s runway. This base always had a long runway, over ten thousand feet long, but it was only stressed to handle aircraft as large as the Bear bomber, which is around four hundred thousand pounds max takeoff weight. At most bases this means a reinforced-concrete runway of approximately four feet in depth. Let’s zoom in on the end of the runway.” Griffin entered commands into the keyboard, and the digital satellite image zoomed to a very high magnification, losing only a little of its original definition.

  “You’ll see some soldiers or guards climbing down the riprap supporting the edge of the runway. Note how high aboveground they are. We estimate about eight feet. That means this runway has been reinforced even more, perhaps double its original structure. The only plausible reason for reinforcing a runway like this is obviously to handle larger aircraft.

  “There are only two aircraft in the Russian military’s aircraft inventory larger than the Bear bomber—the Antonov-124 Condor heavy-lift transport, the largest aircraft in the world, and the Tupolev-160 Blackjack bomber. These hangars, gentlemen, don’t fit the Condor—they’re way too short in height and length. However, each hangar is dimensioned to fit two Tupolev-160 Blackjack bombers perfectly. I believe what we have here are accommodations for as many as twenty-four Blackjack bombers.”

  “But aren’t there only forty Blackjack bombers in the entire Russian arsenal?” General Zoltrane asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Patrick replied. “Engels and Blagoveshchensk were the two known Blackjack-bomber bases in Russia. The last verified inventory of Blackjacks at Engels had their full complement—twenty-eight planes, most transferred from Belarus. Two were recently verified destroyed, and two more damaged. That’s at least twenty-four survivors. Blagoveshchensk had its full complement as well—twelve bombers, transferred from Ukraine and refurbished.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, McLanahan,” Major General Gary Houser said. “Those hangars at Aginskoye could be housing anything—other transports, supplies, even oil-pipeline equipment or derricks. You’re seeing a big building and assuming there’s a couple Blackjack bombers in it.”

  “The reinforced runway adds to my suspicions, sir,” Patrick responded. “Although it’s true that Aginskoye’s runway could have been reinforced to handle Condor transports, and the hangars could be storage buildings, their dimensions still leave room for doubt. It could be a coincidence, or they could be bomber hangars. The only way to verify it is to check it visually. We’re going to need some eyes on the ground to look it over.

  “Aginskoye is about a hundred miles from the Mongolian border, about two hundred miles’ driving distance by the most direct route, or nine hundred miles from the Sea of Japan.”

  Gary Houser turned away without further comments; no one else had anything to add.

  “Colonel Griffin has some suggestions to make in a moment; I have one more item to present,” Patrick said. “We were able to launch a second constellation over Russia, shortly after launching the first over southern Russia,” he went on.

  This time Houser made an expression of pure disgust, not trying to hide it at all.

  “The targets were higher-latitude military bases on the Russian Pacific coast, as well as bases farther in the southwest and in former Soviet republics.” Griffin changed PowerPoint slides. “Here is the former bomber base at Magadan. This base has always been the Russian equivalent of their far east tanker task force, but the number of Ilyushin-76 and Tupolev-16 tankers there is astounding—well over forty planes are now based there. The imagery also gave us a good look at the submarine base at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka, which also has seen an increase in the number of Tupolev-95 strategic bombers in recent days. All in all, we’ve seen a three hundred percent increase in the number of strategic bombers and tankers in the Russian far east theater.

  “One more observation was made in these latest images: up here, in the provincial capital of Yakutsk. Yakutsk is the largest northern city east of the Urals and the center of the Siberian oil and natural-gas industry. Air service is the life blood of this city, and we’d be accustomed to a lot of air traffic year-round. The orbit of the second string of satellites didn’t cover Yakutsk as well as we’d like, but we were able to get some pretty good oblique pictures—yet even in these shots, it’s obvious that air traffic into Yakutsk has more than tripled since official counts were made about a year ago.

  “Now, this could be a result of higher oil prices making Siberian crude more valuable, and hence a push to develop the Siberian fields, but this rate of increase has been surprising to all of our analysts,” Patrick summarized. “We’ve seen an overall increase in all types of air traffic, but most notably in military cargo and resupply flights. It’s hard to categorize accurately because Aeroflot does as many civil and government flights as it does military, but we regard the increase in air traffic into Yakutsk as significant. And since it coincides with the increases in military activity in other far east locations, we can conclude that the buildups in strategic air assets in the far east theater and the buildups in Yakutsk are related and not just coincidental. We feel that the Russians are engaged in some sort of massive high-tech buildup of strategic air-attack assets, including supersonic and subsonic bombers and air-refueling tankers. The recent attack by Backfire bombers in Turk
menistan could have been a test of some of these assets.

  “Most notably we feel that the Russians are building up Tupolev-22M Backfire bombers and Tupolev-160 Blackjack bombers, in violation of Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty rules. The reason for this is obvious—conventional thinking has it that these aircraft are not threats to North America; the Backfires supposedly had insufficient range, and there were only six Blackjacks in the entire Russian arsenal with intercontinental range. The Nine-sixty-sixth feels that these conclusions are no longer valid. We feel that there may be as many as twenty to sixty Backfire bombers with intercontinental range and cruise-missile capability, and between twenty and perhaps thirty Blackjack bombers also with intercontinental range and cruise-missile capability, including nuclear-tipped weapons.

  “We don’t know precisely what these forces will beusedfor,” Patrick concluded, “but our guess is that these forces pose a significant threat to our Asian allies—and a direct and credible threat to the United States as well. We feel that these bombers, with the massive number of tankers in the theater as well, could easily reach targets all across North America, primarily above forty degrees north longitude and west of ninety-five degrees west longitude—only one-fourth of the United States, but within striking distance of fifty percent of our land-based bombers, fifty percent of our ballistic-missile submarines not presently at sea, and one hundred percent of our land-based intercontinental missiles.”

  The battle-staff conference room rumbled with low murmurs and sounds of utter disbelief—but the loudest voice came from the head of the table. “Say again? What did you just say, McLanahan?” Houser asked incredulously. Before Patrick could answer, he went on, “You have got to be shitting me, General McLanahan! You’re telling me that you think the Russians are assembling a force of strategic bombers and intend to attack the United States of America?”

  “It may sound unbelievable, sir, but—”

  “It doesn’t sound unbelievable, McLanahan—it sounds completely asinine!” Houser retorted. “You ought to know better than most of the people in this room that the Russians haven’t had a credible long-range-bomber force in over thirty years.”

  “The Bear bombers are relics, McLanahan,” interjected Major General Ralph Nowland, the deputy commander of the Air Intelligence Agency. Nowland had been in AIA longer than almost anyone else and had convinced everyone else that he was the expert on any possible subject concerning the Russian military. “We’ve never received any credible evidence that the Russians are modernizing the Tupolev-22M Backfire as an intercontinental strike platform—the Russians have been yanking Backfires in favor of continued development of the MiG-29S and Sukhoi-35 fighter-bombers. And for good reason: The Fulcrum and Flankers have more capability, are far less costly to maintain and deploy, and have similar range and combat performance. As for the Blackjacks, there’s no evidence whatsoever in any documentation or imagery that proves they’ve been reactivated and their air-refueling capacity restored enough to give them true intercontinental capability. That’s an unsubstantiated rumor only.”

  “And you haven’t given us one shred of evidence or even any plausible conjecture that the bomber that struck Bukhara is some sort of supersecret refurbished Backfire,” Houser said. “No one has been able to recover the missile that went off course—the Russians are all over the impact area, so it’s unlikely we’ll ever get a look at it. We have scoured the intercepts and technical literature coming out of every lab and every aircraft-manufacturing bureau in Russia, and there’s not one mention of any programs to upgrade the Backfire fleet. If it exists, it’s under a level of secrecy and compartmentalization that hasn’t been seen in Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union.” He shook his head. “So let’s get down to the bottom line, General: You still don’t know where those Backfires came from, is that it?”

  “Sir, my guess is that the bombers came from Bratsk,” Patrick responded.

  “And how did you deduce that?”

  “By the number of nonmilitary flights coming in and out of Bratsk,” Patrick said. “The Russians have made a big deal out of hiding all their Backfire bombers from satellite view of every base, but the number of Aeroflot flights going into Bratsk has increased almost threefold since the raid on Bukhara. The number of government and civil flights going into Bratsk has increased from an average of twenty per day to an average of sixty-three per day since the raid. Bratsk is a major city on the Trans-Siberian Railway and is a major oil-transshipment point, but its air traffic has remained fairly constant for the past few years—except for the past few days, when all of a sudden its civil air traffic spiked.”

  “That’s it?” Nowland asked. “That’s all the evidence you have? No sign of Backfire bombers being loaded…no bombs, no men and equipment on the field, no signs of increased military activity? Just a few more planes per day taking off and landing there?”

  “Sir, these additional flights going into a base that hasn’t seen much activity in years could be significant,” Patrick said. “It simply raises more questions—and it warrants a look around with HUMINT resources.”

  “More spy missions inside Russia, is that it?” Houser asked derisively. “McLanahan, you have a lot to learn about the Air Intelligence Agency. We’re not the CIA, and we’re not a bunch of James Bonds ready to get an assignment to spy on the bad guys. We collect information necessary to build war plans and to defend Air Force assets. We collect information from other intelligence sources, including HUMINT data from other government agencies. The Air Force is not in the business of sending out spies, and sure as hell not inside Russia in peacetime.”

  “Sir, Colonel Griffin has drawn up a plan that would help us verify our theories on the numbers and capabilities of Russia’s Backfires and other long-range aviation forces,” Patrick said. “We can send operatives in to three suspected Russian bases—Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Bratsk, launched from Kazakhstan—and verify the existence of modified Backfire bombers. Our other priority is a covert intelligence-gathering mission to Yakutsk, launched from the Sea of Okhotsk.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said, McLanahan?” Houser said. “It’s out of the question.”

  “Sir, I think we’ve exhausted all of our signal and overhead-imagery data resources, and all we have to show for it are more unanswered questions,” Patrick said. “The only way to discard or verify any of our data is to get guys on the ground to go in and take a look.”

  “General Houser, I’ve led Air Force and CIA teams all over the world collecting intel for the Air Force, and I’ve assisted the Intelligence Support Agency on several missions as well,” Trevor Griffin added. “These missions would not be easy, but they’re doable, and in a very short time frame. At least it’s worth a check to find out if any other agencies have field operatives in those areas. If so, we can combine forces and—”

  Gary Houser held up a hand, closing his eyes and shaking his head to emphasize his weariness of this argument. “I understand the reason you feel you need to send operatives in, Colonel, but what I’m telling you is that in the current political climate, the national command authority is not likely to approve an operation like this,” Houser said. “Placing eight recon satellites over the heart of Russia rattled nerves and created enough animosity to last an entire generation—exactly the thing we’re trying to avoid here. Sending in ground operatives after sending those satellites over the same area would invite disaster as well as heighten tensions even more. You know that the Russians will be on guard for such a move. Anyone not passing the most rigorous security screening will be detained on the spot. Or did you think your operatives would just be able to hide in barns and ditches while they make their way to their objectives?”

  “Sir, I can have the Nine-sixty-sixth work up a plan of action and brief you and the staff on it in two days,” Griffin said. “We have the latest threat assessment, force deployments, topographical and cultural photos of all the target areas. Our staff is already working up ingress and egress options
, lining up aircraft and vehicles, mapping out refueling drop points and—”

  “I know what goes into planning these types of operations, Colonel,” Houser said. “You can have your staff do all the planning they care to do—just be sure you don’t make one move off the planning charts without my express permission. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Before we leave this subject, General McLanahan, I want to know about these two satellite constellations you got all this information from,” Houser went on pointedly. “I don’t recall authorizing them, and I don’t recall Strategic Command’s briefing the staff that they were going to launch such a mission. Perhaps you could enlighten us? Whose are they, and who authorized their insertion?”

  All eyes were on him, but Patrick didn’t shrink from any of their gazes, especially Gary Houser’s. “Yes, sir,” he replied. “When my request for overhead-imagery support was denied by Eighth Air Force, in my capacity as Nine-sixty-sixth Information Warfare Wing commander, I requested support from the Air Battle Force commander, Brigadier General Luger, at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base. I knew that the Air Battle Force had on-demand satellite-reconnaissance assets available. General Luger sent my request to Air Combat Command, who sent it on to the Air Force chief of staff, who sent it on to the joint staff operations office and to the National Security Council liaison office. The mission was approved by the NSC and promptly executed.”