Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01

by Flight of the Old Dog (v1. 1)

Suddenly a blinding flash erupted from just beyond Ormack’s right cockpit window. Ormack, who was staring out the front windscreen, with the cockpit lights turned down so the pilots could start visually picking out terrain, caught the flash’s full intensity.

  “I’m blind . . .”

  “Easy, John,” Elliott said, took a firm grip on the yoke and trimmed it for level flight about five hundred feet above ground.

  “We just had a missile explode off our right wing,” Elliott said over the interphone. “The co-pilot got flashblinded. But the engines look okay . . .”

  “Three minutes to go,” Luger said, flicked his radar into TRANSMIT and took a fast range, azimuth and terrain check before the scope went blank again. “Four degrees right. Clear of terrain, General. You can descend, slowly.”

  “The radar altimeter should be good for terrain clearance now that we’re clear of the mountains,” McLanahan said.

  “How can they still be shooting at us?” Luger said, puzzled. “If Kavaz- nya’s radar blotted out our radar—they should’ve taken out the figher’s radars too.”

  “Infrared search-and-track system,” Wendy told him. “They use an airborne IR tracker for azimuth and elevation data and the Kavaznya radar for range data. They can take shots at us all night like that.”

  “Well, we’re running out of time, Dave,” McLanahan said. He punched in range, elevation and azimuth data into the Striker glide-bomb’s initial vector catalog. “We’ll launch the bomb at maximum range—twelve miles, ninety seconds to go. I’ve set the initial steering data for twelve miles at twelve o’clock. Give me a countdown to the two minute point.”

  “Roger,” Luger said.

  “Amplitude shift in the Kavaznya radar signal,” Wendy suddenly announced. “Looks like . . . looks like a target-tracking mode. The laser . . . it’s locked onto us . . .”

  McLanahan reacted as if he had been rehearsing the action, although he never had. In one fluid motion he moved the Weapons Monitor and Release Switch from the Striker's forward center position to forward left, the weapon-rack position of one of the weapon decoys; moved the bay door control switch to MANUAL, hit the DOOR OPEN switch and reached down to his left knee and hit the recessed black button on the manual release “pickle’, switch.

  “Bay doors are open,” Elliott announced as a large yellow BOMB DOORS OPEN light flared on the forward instrument panel. A moment later a similar light marked WEAPON RELEASE flicked on—then off.

  “What the hell?”

  “The decoys,” McLanahan told Elliott. “We can’t jam the laser’s radar, but the decoys should draw it away long enough for us to get within range.”

  A moment later Elliott flinched as an object resembling a huge blue- orange meteor burst to life and flew diagonally away from the Old Dog. The mass of fire spit tiny, blinding balls of light from its flaming body, and streams of gleaming tinsel—radar-decoy chaff—poured from behind the drone. The glare from the decoy was almost blinding, but Elliott squinted anyway and watched the decoy fly earthward, jinking left and right as it burned away.

  The next instant McLanahan moved the weapon-select switch to forward right and punched out the second decoy. Elliott noticed the WEAPON RELEASE button light once again; then, as the second decoy ignited and flew away to the right, Elliott’s gaze was drawn to the right cockpit window.

  The launch of the second decoy, and Elliott’s attempt to spot it, saved the general’s eyesight—and the life of the crew.

  Although the tiny Quail decoy—an improved version of an old bomber defensive drone used on SAC bombers for years—was many times smaller than its parent B-52 bomber, its design made its radar, infrared and radiation signature more than ten-times larger than the Old Dog. Its refrigerator-size body had dozens of radar-reflecting nodules surrounding it, and even the design of the wings and tail, as well as the fifty pounds of chaff-bundles it ejected in regular intervals, enhanced its radar reflectivity. Its shape alone made it a more appealing target than the quarter- million pound bomber.

  But there was much more packed into the tiny drone. It automatically broadcast a wide spectrum of radio transmissions to attract anti-radiation and home-on-jam missiles. To heat-seeking missiles and infrared trackers the phosphorus flares and burning jelly oozing along its surface made it appear as hot as a nuclear reactor.

  The Kavaznya radar, even with its solid nuclear-powered lock-on, was drawn off its intended target. The first Quail bloomed like an electromagnetic stain across the target-tracking radar scope of the Russian laser weapons officer. The tracking computer quickly locked onto the larger return, and the target officer did not override the shift. There was nothing, he thought, bigger than a B-52 so close to the complex. He insured the new target lock-on, searching and not finding any malfunctions and signaled clear for laser firing. Just as Elliott’s attention was drawn to the right cockpit window to watch the launch of the second Quail decoy, a thick beam of red-orange light split the darkness and lit up the interior of the Old Dog like a thousand spotlights turned up full-blast. The very atmosphere around the huge B-52 Megafortress seemed humid, almost tropical.

  The vaporized air around the laser blast created a tiny vacuum around itself, sucking thousands of cubic acres of air into the shaft of light. The turbulence and lower-density, superheated air caused the Old Dog to sink, and only Elliott’s fast reactions and the screaming thrust of the seven remaining turbofan engines kept the Old Dog from crashing into the rugged Kamchatkan shoreline.

  The tiny Quail decoy was not merely destroyed by the laser blast—it was vaporized. There was no time, no fuel remaining, even to form a secondary explosion or a puff of smoke. The tiny drone simply ceased to exist.

  Elliott felt as if he had been violently sunburned. He pulled on the yoke, fighting to arrest the sudden descent and gale-force turbulence. The MASTER CAUTION light snapped on, as did other warning lights, but Elliott had his hands full trying to control the bucking mountain of metal beneath him.

  Dave Luger was thrown against his right instrument panel as the Old Dog swung sharply left into the vacuum, his outburst lost in the groaning metal of the Megafortress and the protesting roar of its engines. Still, he and the Old Dog made out better than some others. A MiG-29 had just closed into ideal IR missile-firing range and had not heard the call to clear the area when the laser beam sliced through the subzero Siberian air.

  The gale-force wind-blast created by the mini-nuclear explosion within the krypton-fluoride laser beam, which had thrown the four-hundred- thousand-pound B-52 bomber around the sky like a paper airplane, reached up and swatted the thirty-thousand-pound Fulcrum fighter into the ground like an insect. The pilot of a second Russian fighter was too busy fighting for control of his own machine to notice.

  “What the hell was that?” Angelina said. All of her equipment went blank—the airmine rocket system, the Scorpion missile system, her radar, all of it. She glanced at Wendy Tork alongside her, switching her equipment into STANDBY in an attempt to reset it.

  “The laser,” Elliott said. “They shot the laser at us. Two generators dropped off the line.” He scanned the instruments quickly. “Engines appear okay. John, can you get the number two and three generators back on-line?”

  “I can try,” Ormack said. He wiped his eyes and felt carefully along his right generator panel for the proper switches . . . The power interruption had blanked out everything in the downstairs navigator’s compartment, but Ormack’s practiced fingers were able to reset the generators and get them back on-line. Trouble was, the only things that reactivated after power was applied were the downstairs lights.

  “Dave, how much time?” McLanahan asked.

  Luger was fumbling around his workdesk with a tiny battery flashlight, shining the weak beam on the few pieces of equipment on the right side. “We have to get out of here,” he said. “We have to go back . . .”

  “Easy, man, easy,” McLanahan shook his partner’s shoulders. Luger finally stopped his flailing and stared at McL
anahan. “It’s over, Pat.”

  “No it’s not. Now give me a time to the twelve-mile point, dammit.” McLanahan was just about to push Luger out of the way and check himself, but Luger finally relaxed enough to check his ship’s clock.

  “Two minutes ten seconds.”

  “All right. Switch all your stuff to STANDBY. It’ll come back up by launch time. If it doesn’t we’ll slick the bomb, fly over that laser and drop it like a regular bomb.” He rechecked the DCU-239 weapon-arming panel. “We might have another problem.”

  “Such as?” from Elliott.

  “The generator-fluctuation knocked out DC power to the arming panel,” McLanahan told him. “I’ve got no weapon indications at all.”

  “It should still be good—”

  “I don’t know what the bomb will do,” McLanahan said quietly. Everyone on board heard the muted statement, even over the roar of the turbofans.

  “You mean it won’t explode?” Wendy said. “We’ve come all this way, and it won’t work?”

  “I mean I don’t know its status. It may or may not be armed, it may be armed but be a dud ... I just don’t know.”

  “All this way ... all this sacrifice ... for nothing?”

  “One minute to launch point,” Luger said.

  “I’ll try to rearm the weapon,” McLanahan said, and began to run the pre-arming checklists again. “Nothing,” he muttered finally. “Battery power . . . recycling . . . sensor power . . . nothing. I’ve still got uplink power, so the thing will fly, but I still don’t know what it will do.”

  The crew of the Old Dog grew very quiet.

  “I’ve got my threat receivers back,” Wendy announced. “Signal from Kavaznya . . . beginning to shift again.”

  “All the decoys are gone,” McLanahan said. “I launched them just before the laser fired—”

  “Power won’t be back on the anti-radiation missiles for two minutes,” Angela said. “That was our last hope.”

  “Angelina . . . preparation for ejection checklist,” Elliott ordered, face tight.

  Luger looked at McLanahan, who stared straight ahead, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  “Wendy, try to give us some warning before the laser fires,” Elliott told her.

  Wendy clicked her microphone in response, said nothing. She could barely see the subtle frequency shifts through the interference, and even if she did spot the radar lock-on she knew they wouldn’t be able to eject before the laser beam blew them into atoms.

  “I’ll trim it for a slight climb,” Elliott said. “Maybe this beast will stall right over their heads, the sonsofbitches. Crew, our mission was to destroy that laser complex. I’ll give the command to eject, wait until everyone is out, then crash the plane into the complex. Prepare for—”

  ‘Wait, ” McLanahan said. “You can’t do that. We’ll still drop the damn bomb—”

  “You said it wouldn’t explode.”

  “I said I don’t know its status. My job is to drop it on the target. Your job, sir; is to get us out of here.”

  “We can’t risk it. If the bomb doesn’t go off we’ve failed and we’ll take the heat for nothing—”

  “We can’t just quit . . .”

  “McLanahan, this is an order. Prepare for ejection. ”

  Luger began to tighten the straps of his parachute harness. He zipped his jacket up all the way, looked over at his partner. “Pat, you’d better—” “How much time, Dave?”

  “Pat ...”

  “Dave, how much time?”

  “Thirty seconds. But—”

  “Close enough.” McLanahan hit the AUTOFIX button on his control keyboard, which entered a present-position update into the Striker glide- bomb’s computer. He then opened the bay doors with the mechanical handles on the overhead panel and pulled a yellow-painted handle next to it marked SPECIAL WEAPONS ALTERNATE RELEASE.

  “Bomb away, General, now please get us out of here.”

  Elliott had been adjusting his straps when he saw the BOMB DOORS OPEN and WEAPON RELEASE lights snap on. “We’re too far, we won’t have time to—”

  “We’re not bombing that laser with this plane,’’ McLanahan challenged. “Break left, get us out of here ...”

  After that everything seemed to happen in slow motion. It was like watching a slide show, the frames clicking off one by one, the sound turned off. . .

  Elliott stood the Old Dog on its left wingtip, whipping it to forty-five degrees of bank. The stall-warning horn blared but no one paid attention to it, if they could hear it. The general could feel the Old Dog slipping sideways—which was downward at forty-five degrees of bank—as it changed heading in its rudderless turn. Remarkably, it didn’t hit the frozen ground . . .

  Wendy released her grip on her ejection seat’s triggers, held her finger on the CHAFF SALVO button, ejecting fifty bundles of chaff in one massive cloud just as the Old Dog began its turn. She would have kept ejecting chaff if the force of the turn hadn’t pushed her finger off the button . . .

  Ormack, unable to help out in any other way, tried by “seat-of-the- pants” to hold in enough back-pressure on the yoke to keep the turn going without forcing the Megafortress into a stall. To his surprise, he found that his and Elliott’s efforts were in almost total coordination . . .

  In spite of the hard break McLanahan managed to stay focused on the flight path of the Striker glide-bomb as it dropped from the Old Dog’s bomb bay, saw the Striker's TV monitor flare to life as the glide-bomb cleared the weapons bay.

  McLanahan’s hand-entered DR position was almost perfect. The center of the Kavaznya laser complex was dead in the center of the low-light TV screen. When a message printed out on the monitor stating that a visual low-light sensor lock-on was available, he pressed the LOCK switch to insure that the bomb would make it to the target. Even if the Old Dog didn’t survive the bomb would now fly itself to the target . . .

  “Radar switching to target-tracking mode,” from Wendy.

  “Prepare for ejection, crew,” from Elliott. “Blinking light coming on.” He reached down to the center console and flicked on the ejection-warning switch. The large red light between the two navigators began to blink furiously.

  “Steady light is the order to eject—”

  “No. Continue the break. If you do a complete one-eighty, do another one to the right. Don’t give up now—”

  “If they let go with that laser there won’t be time to eject—”

  “You’ll be murdering this crew if you order us to eject,” McLanahan said.

  “But the bomb . . .”

  McLanahan now acted on his own. He switched to the infrared display—the picture was near simulator-perfect. He could make out the “warm” town above the “hot” laser complex, and the “cold” Bering Sea beyond. He shifted the tracking handle slightly to the left, centering the aiming reticle onto the hottest infrared return in the complex. The Striker's steering uplink system was working perfectly. The strap-on mini-rocket engine had not yet fired—it was flying over a thousand feet higher than programmed, and the extra altitude meant a longer unassisted gliding ability.

  The infrared orange laser site slowly began to enlarge as it got closer— the Striker was locked onto a huge power substation. McLanahan was just about to switch to narrow field-of-view and begin precise aiming when he noticed another “hot” object in the upper left corner of the infrared display, far above the main reactor complex in the valley.

  He had only moments to study it before it went out of view, but he could make out a huge complex . . . only the base was “hot,” four-fifths of the structure was “cold.” Just before it went out of view he switched back to low-light visual display.

  In this visual mode there was no mistaking it. The dome, large as a stadium, was clearly visible, with a large rectangular slot open and pointing directly at the Old Dog. McLanahan remembered back to Elliott’s first briefing on the Kavaznya site, when he passed around early reconnaissance photographs of the complex.r />
  The mirror building.

  McLanahan’s reaction was instantaneous. He moved the tracking handle left and aft all the way to the stops to get the dome back on the screen.

  Luger was watching his own monitor in shock. “Pat . . . what are you—?”

  “The mirror,” McLanahan said. “It’s the mirror building . .

  “But the substation . . .”

  McLanahan said nothing as he watched while a yellow SRB IGNITE appeared on the screen, indicating that the glide-bomb’s strap-on rocket booster had fired in response to new steering commands. The substation slowly moved out of view.

  “The substation ...” Luger said again.

  “I’m gonna punch a hole in the mirror building. Even if the bomb doesn’t go off it should do enough damage to put this place out of commission.”

  The visual scene began to grow darker as the rugged hills above the Kavaznya complex and the town rushed just below the visual display. McLanahan had to hold the tracking handle full-back as the rocky ridgelines grew closer and closer.

  Luger yelled, “It's going to crash. ”

  But a moment later the last rock-covered ridgeline disappeared from view and the huge mirror-housing dome filled the TV monitor. McLanahan pushed the tracking handle down and centered the aiming reticle on the top of the dome’s pedestal. Both navigators watched in fascination as the dome rushed forward right into the TV screen.

  The six-inch glass eye of the Striker somehow stayed intact through the one-inch-thick fiberglas panels of the dome, so the two navigators were able to eavesdrop on the Striker's exact impact point—the steel girders and counterbalances supporting the massive mirror.

  The robot eye passed precisely through two support arms, and the bomb came to rest on the very base of the mirror support-structure. Instantly Russian technicians and security guards could be seen running around the weapon.

  “It didn’t go off,” Luger said. “It’s a dud, it didn’t go off—”

  “Radar locked onto us,” Wendy broke through. “Solid lock-on, they’ve got us . . .”

  McLanahan had tuned out the hubub of noise inside the Old Dog and was staring, transfixed, at the Striker's TV screen. More soldiers surrounded the Striker as it lay inside the mirror building.