Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01

by Flight of the Old Dog (v1. 1)

  He thought once, very briefly, about his wife and family, safe and warm in his Kiev apartment while he chased over thousands of kilometers of Siberia looking for an intruder that might have already crashed. He also thought about consequences . . . His expertise, his zeal might get him through the inquiry that followed his unauthorized chase for the B-52, the old Squadron Commander might give him a year’s worth of runway snow removal duty or a demotion. An Air Defense Emergency could forgive a lot of things, he told himself. Anyway, he didn’t believe he’d actually face a firing squad or exile.

  But only one thing could guarantee him a satisfactory return to his family—a promotion, a full pardon. As Anadyr Airfield popped into view, still thirty-six kilometers away, he knew that the only thing that would earn him that result was gun-camera film of the B-52 going down in flames after being shot apart by his GSh-23 twin-barrel guns or by one of his newer A A-8 heat-seeking missiles.

  Yes. The B-52 had to be destroyed.

  The Old Dog seemed more like a hospital ship than a strategic bomber as it taxied down the narrow, snow-covered taxiways of Anadyr Airbase.

  In command as it limped down the taxiway was Patrick McLanahan. As the most experienced and now physically able crewman, he had taken the pilot’s left seat. Icy wind blasted his face from the dozens of holes on the left side of the cockpit and from a completely blown-out glass panel just behind his ejection seat. He was trying to do too much at once—but most important was to keep the Old Dog roughly in the center of the taxiway.

  Ormack, blood all over his left shoulder, barely strong enough to move a switch, had taken his copilot’s seat again. He continued to read the pre-takeoff checklists and give McLanahan a running last-minute lecture on how to accomplish a takeoff.

  Angelina remained at her gunner’s position, checking and rechecking her equipment. She had two Scorpion missiles on the right external pylon, three Scorpions on the bomb-bay launcher, two HARM anti-radar missiles on the interior launcher and twenty Stinger air-mine rockets in the tail cannon—and no way in the world to guide any of them . . . the target-acquisition radar-scope had been damaged in the attack at the airbase. The Old Dog might be still an adversary to be considered, its Scorpions and HARMs could be self-guided to their targets—but their effectiveness was greatly reduced.

  Wendy was back in her electronic warfare officer’s seat beside Angelina. Using computer-displayed instructions she had restarted the ring-laser gyro and satellite navigation system in the freezing cold navigator’s station below. There was little else downstairs—McLanahan’s ten-inch radar scope had been destroyed by the Russian machine gun attack. The attack had also destroyed or damaged most of Wendy’s electronic-warfare gear.

  While she had been in the lower compartment she had looked over Dave Luger’s notes and doodles, even picked up his headphone . . . wanting to offer it to him when he emerged from the aft bulkhead door, smiling and laughing and gabbing with his impossible Texas accent ... she imagined she heard a knock on the belly hatch, and there he would be . . . except, of course, he would not. Face it . . .

  He was gone.

  She had given Luger’s coat to General Elliott, who was strapped into an emergency crash web chair on the upper deck between the cockpit and the defense crew’s station, caught between a severe fever and the onset of deep shock.

  Ormack continued with the checklists as they scrolled onto the computer monitor. “Flight instruments checked, pilot and copilot.’’

  “Mine are gone,’’ McLanahan said. “Adjust your ADI. I can hardly see it but it’s the only reliable one we have.’’ He watched as Ormack adjusted the artificial horizon. “That’s it. Standby altimeters are good. Standby turn-and-slip indicators are good.”

  “Electrical panel.” Ormack strained to read the tiny gauges. “One and two are zero. All the rest are okay.” He advanced the computerized checklist. “Crosswing crab.”

  “Zeroed. Next.”

  “Pitot heat.”

  It took McLanahan a moment, interrupted with a few small turns to stay on hard pavement, to find the switch. “On.”

  “Stability augmentation system.”

  “On.”

  “Stabilizer trim.”

  “That’s this big wheel here, right?” McLanahan asked. “We don’t have time to compute the right setting so I’m setting it to one-half unit nose up. Set. Next.”

  “Airbrake lever.”

  “Off.”

  “Flaps.”

  “One hundred percent down, lever down.”

  “Fuel panel. I think I have it set up right,” Ormack said, wincing from a stab of pain that shot through the area around his neck. “Check it for me. We’ve got minimum fuel in the main tanks because of the damage, so those pumps right. . . there should be on, and those . . . there should be to OPEN. Checked. Next.”

  “Starter switches.”

  “Okay, we’re almost ready to go.” Using the rudder pedals, McLanahan nudged the Old Dog around a tight corner and turned onto the end of the Russian runway, then stepped on the tops of the pedals to engage the brakes.

  “Angelina, Wendy, ready to go back there?”

  “Ready,” Angelina said over the interphone.

  “Ready,” Wendy said. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks.” McLanahan gripped the control yoke. “I’m gonna need it.”

  “All right,” Ormack said, “we’re going to start the number two engine. Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  McLanahan moved the number-four engine-throttle to ninety percent. “Go!” Ormack moved the starter to START. Slowly, the RPMs on the number two engine began to increase. McLanahan pointed to a yellow light on the forward panel.

  “What’s that?” Ormack said over the interphone. “I can’t see ...” “A low oil-pressure light,” McLanahan told him over the roar of the engines. “We’ve got to hope it’ll give us enough thrust for takeoff before it seizes ...”

  There was a tremendous bang on the left engine as the Old Dog bucked and rumbled so that no one could read the instruments.

  “That’s the bad gas,” McLanahan said, “it should work okay, though . . .” Anxious moments later the RPMs on the number-two engine went to idle settings, and McLanahan pulled the power back on the number- four engine.

  “Okay, starter on number two is in FLIGHT position, generator on number two is on,” Ormack said. “Takeoff data.”

  McLanahan gave it over the interphone. “We roll until just before we run out of runway, then I pull back on the stick. If we fly, we fly. If we don’t, we eject. Next.”

  “Arming lever safety pins.”

  “All right, everyone,” McLanahan told them, “get your seats ready for ejection. And don’t hesitate. If you see the red bailout warning light, eject. Immediately.”

  “Couldn’t have made a better takeoff briefing myself, McLanahan,” Ormack said, trying to smile. “Takeoff checklist. Steering ratio selector lever.”

  McLanahan took a deep breath and tried not to think of Luger. Concentrate, he told himself. Get the job done. Everybody was counting on him . . . including himself. He moved a lever on the center console. “TAKEOFF LAND. Set.”

  “Air conditioning master switch.”

  “RAM.”

  “Throttles.”

  “Here we go.” McLanahan took hold of the seven active throttles and moved them slowly forward to full military power. Because of the dead number-one engine the Old Dog slid to the left on the snow-covered runway. McLanahan stomped on the right stabilator pedal to correct, then, realizing the dual rudders had been destroyed, slowly pulled back the number-eight engine throttle until he was able to straighten out the Old Dog along the runway, then slowly pushed it back almost to full power.

  “Good.” Ormack strained to be heard over the roar of the engine. “No stabilators ... do whatever you need to do to keep her on the runway.” He put his hands on the yoke but could not help. “Keep an eye on the distance-remaining markers if you can . . . they’ll be
labeled in hundreds of meters. Lift off with about a thousand meters remaining—”

  “I can’t see them,” McLanahan shouted. “They’re going by too damn fast—wait . . . sixteen, fifteen, fourteen . . .” The wild rumbling and vibrations made it tough to refocus his eyes on the instruments.

  When McLanahan swung the control yoke to the right to correct the violent left skid, it seemed the Old Dog was sliding sideways down the runway. He scanned the instruments. A caution light was lit but he couldn’t make out which one.

  “Hold it steady, Patrick—”

  “I can’t, it’s skidding too hard—”

  “Easy . . . you can do it. Easy ...”

  McLanahan realized with a surge of fear that the one-thousand-meter sign had just whizzed by. At the nine-hundred meter he pulled back on the control yoke, wrestled it back, back, back until it was touching his chest. Still the Old Dog’s nose refused to leave the ground.

  “C'mon, baby, lift off, dammit.”

  “Add some nose-up trim,” Ormack yelled. “The big wheel by your knee. Gently. Keep the back pressure in but get ready to release it when the nose comes up.”

  “It’s not lifting off. . .” The shaking, the turbulence almost made him lose his grip on the wheel . . . Now he could see the end of the runway, a tall wall of drifting snow and ice . . .

  “Four . . . three . . . two ... oh God, there’s a snow drift out there, we’re not—”

  With its nose still pointing downward the Old Dog left the ground less than three feet above the peak of ice at the end of the runway. Buoyed then by “ground effect,” the swirl of air generated by the wings that bounced off the ground and back up at the plane, the Old Dog skittered only twenty feet above the snowy surface, the air pounding on the bomber’s huge wings adding to the turbulence.

  Like a blessing, the pounding began to decrease, and as the airspeed slowly increased, the Old Dog’s nose lifted skyward, McLanahan at times swinging the control yoke all the way to its limit to control the swaying as the huge bomber lifted into the Siberian sky.

  Carefully now, McLanahan, reached down to the gear-control lever and moved it up, also checking the main-gear indicator-lights. “Gear up, Colonel, keep an eye on the—”

  He was interrupted by a blur of motion outside the cockpit window. Ormack spotted it first but was too shocked to speak. All he could do was point as the light gray MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter flew just ahead and above the Old Dog, then banked erratically to the left and out of sight, its twin afterburners lighting up the sky.

  It was impossible.

  Yuri Papendreyov had been busy with landing checklists, configuring his MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter for the penetration and descent into Anadyr and following the navigation beacon and instrument-land-system beam. He had been taught not to rely on visual cues for landing until very close to the runway, especially during long winter twilight conditions.

  The young fighter pilot was less than two miles from touchdown when he finally had his Fulcrum configured and ready. It was then that he studied the runway. Since the first pass was going to be a visual inspection and flyover, he was moving almost twice as fast as usual. The landing gear was up, but he had flaps and leading-edge slats deployed to make the relatively slow, low-altitude pass safer. He was flying his advanced fighter at a high angle-of-attack, which meant keeping the fighter’s nose higher than normal during the pass.

  In the dusky conditions Papendreyov didn’t see the massive billows of smoke rising from the airfield and the sudden huge, black shape against the white snow-covered runway. When he did look out the cockpit windscreen, the huge ebony aircraft had left the runway, blending in with the rugged terrain and dark horizon.

  Yuri made his pass, looking right toward the tower, the base-operation building and aircraft-parking ramp. All empty. He was thinking he might be forced to pump his own gas, when he shifted his attention forward. His windscreen was filled with dark smoke. He jammed the throttles forward, igniting the twin Turmansky afterburners as a wave of turbulence shook his Fulcrum fighter.

  And then, he saw it. He was close enough to touch it, close enough to see the pilot straining to lift his aircraft skyward.

  The American B-52—lifting off from Anadyr! Yuri reacted instinctively, flicked the arming switch to his GSh-23 twin twenty-three-millimeter nose cannon, and fired.

  The shots went wide as another giant wave of turbulence from the B-52 swatted at his Fulcrum fighter, and Yuri was forced to roll hard left to keep from plowing into the bomber’s tail. As he passed to its left, he noticed with satisfaction that the huge gun on its tail did not follow him . . .

  Marveling at his good fortune, he continued his left turn, retracting flaps and slats and selecting two AA-8 heat-seeking missiles ... The initial shock of seeing the elusive American bomber here, of all the possible places to find him, dissolved back into the hard concentration of the hunt.

  He had searched eleven thousand square kilometers, risked everything to hunt it down.

  Now he had found it.

  The radar altimeter showed only a few hundred feet above the ground, but he couldn’t wait . . . McLanahan reached down and began to raise the flaps.

  “Flaps coming up, Colonel. SST nose retracting. I don’t believe it, but a Russian fighter just went past us ... do you see him?’’

  Ormack looked out the right cockpit windows. “No.”

  “Keep watching for him.” McLanahan watched the flap-indicator as the huge wing high-lift panels rose out of the slipstream. With the flaps retracting, the Old Dog’s lift began to erode and she began to sink. McLanahan took the number-eight throttle and jammed it to full military thrust, then fought the control yoke like it was a bucking horse as the differential thrust threatened to flip the bomber over and send it crashing to the mountain below. Using what was left of the lateral trim controls, he struggled to keep the bomber level . . .

  “Flaps up,” he called out. Suddenly a blinking yellow light on the upper-eyebrow instrument panel caught his attention—the number two engine. Its oil pressure had dropped below the minimum. He pulled the number-two throttle to CUTOFF, shutting down the engine before the lack of oil pressure caused it to seize and explode. Now, because of the two missing engines on the left side, McLanahan again had no choice but to decrease power on the number-eight engine—without full rudder he couldn’t hold the nose straight with such a difference in thrust.

  “Number two engine shut down,” he said over the interphone. “Number eight pulled back to compensate. Angelina, try to get your system working—”

  “I’ve tried, the pylon, bomb bay and Stinger airmine missiles are working but I’ve no radar guidance. I can release the missiles but I can’t guide them.”

  McLanahan leveled the Old Dog at about a thousand feet, pressed the PAGE ADVANCE button on the computerized checklist calling up the automatic terrain-avoidance procedures. “We’re going into auto-terrain- avoidance, everybody. Wendy, go downstairs and try to reload terrain data into the avoidance computers.”

  Behind the cockpit in the defense section Wendy Tork quickly unbuckled her parachute harness straps, gingerly climbed out of the electronic- warfare officer’s ejection seat, grabbed onto the “firepole” above the ladder, half-slid half-climbed downstairs, then plugged her headset into the radar navigator’s station below.

  “Patrick, I’m downstairs,” she radioed to the cockpit. “Now what?”

  “Okay, good ... hit the checklist button and enter TA on the keyboard. The terrain-avoidance checklist will come up. Page ahead to the data-reload section. That has the steps.”

  The computerized checklist readout, and the unpopular Colonel Anderson’s insistence that everyone know about everyone else’s duties aboard the Old Dog, now paid off. Wendy moved the terrain-data cartridge reader lever from LOCK to READ. “Reloading terrain data, Patrick.” McLanahan had quickly read the terrain-avoidance checklist as it scrolled onto Ormack’s computer screen. He activated the autopilot, and the computer-drawn terr
ain-trace zipped across his video monitor. He found the auto-terrain-avoidance switch and threw it, setting the clearance altitude to two hundred feet.

  And the crippled Old Dog began to respond.

  As Yuri’s Fulcrum fighter rolled out behind the B-52, the huge bomber nosed over and Yuri was positive the American intruder was going to crash. But at the last possible moment the plane somehow leveled off, skimming so close to the earth the rocks and jagged peaks seemed to be scraping the bomber’s black belly as they rushed underneath in a blur . . .

  McLanahan kept the engines screaming at full throttle. Using the number eight engine’s throttle, he made a hard left turn, searching out his cockpit window.

  Ormack, gripping the glare-shield for support in the tight turn, called to McLanahan that “we need to head east, we’re heading the wrong way—’’

  “We also need to get back in the mountains,’’ McLanahan said. He rolled the wings level on a southwesterly heading back down the Korak- skoje Mountains, aiming the Old Dog toward a low row of rugged, snow- covered peaks. “If we get over the water with that fighter on our tail he’ll nail us for sure.’’

  “But our fuel—’’

  “We should have enough, but there’s no alternative . . . Angelina, can you steer your rocket turret at all?’’

  She activated the double handgrips on the Stinger airmine rocket turret. “The radar’s working. I can move my controls. But I don’t know if the cannon is moving, I’ve lost all my position indicators.’’

  “Will the rockets still detonate?’’

  “Yes, I can set the detonation range manually, or they’ll detonate themselves just before their propellant runs out.”

  “Okay, if we spot the fighter we’ll call out its position. Set the airmines for different ranges and—”