by Dale Brown
Force did. It was hard for the Air Force to sell the B-2 as a
conventional weapons platform-that is, until Elliott spoke up. He wants
to turn this B-2 into another Megafortress-a flying battleship. The man
managed to convince the powers-that-be to let him use one for advanced
testing. "Of course we need a senior project officer with bomber
experience, experience on EB-series strategic-escort concepts, and
someone with a warped imagination and a real bulldogtype attitude.
Naturally, we thought of you." McLanahan was speechless, which made
Ormack smile even more. Ormack was an Air Force Academy graduate, medium
height, rapidly graying brown hair, lean and wiry, and although he was a
command pilot with several thousand hours' flying time in dozens of
different aircraft, he was more at home in a laboratory, flight
simulator, or in front of a computer console. All of the young men he
worked with were either quiet, studious engineers-everyone called them
"geeks" or "computer weenies"-or they were flashy, cocky, swaggering
test pilots full of attitude because they had been chosen above 99.99
percent of the rest of the free world's aviators to work at HAWC.
McLanahan was neither. He wasn't an Academy grad, not an engineer, not a
test pilot. What McLanahan was was a six-foot blond with an air of
understated strength and power; a hardworking, intelligent,
well-organized, efficient aviator. The eldest son of Irish immigrants,
McLanahan had been born in New York but raised in Sacramento where he
attended Air Force ROTC at Cal State and received his commission in
1973. After navigator training at Mather AFB in Sacramento he was
assigned to the B-52s of the 320th Bomb Wing there. After uprating to
radar navigator, he was again assigned to Mather Air Force Base. Along
the way, McLanahan became the best radar bombardier in the United
States, a fact demonstrated by long lines of trophies he'd received in
annual navigation and bombing exercises in his six years as a B-52 crew
member. His prowess with the forty-year-old bomber, lovingly nicknamed
the BUFF (for Big Ugly Fat Fucker) or StratoPig, had attracted the
attention of HAWC's commanding officer, Air Force Lieutenant General
Brad Elliott, who had brought him to the desert test ranges of Nevada to
develop a "Megafortress, " a highly modified B-52 used to flight-test
high-tech weapons and stealth hardware. Through an unlikely but
terrifying chain of events, McLanahan had taken the Megafortress,
idiomatically nicknamed the Old Dog, and its ragtag engineer crew into
the Soviet Union to destroy a renegade ground-based antisatellite laser
site. Rather than risk discovery of the highly classified and
politically explosive mission, McLanahan had been strongly encouraged to
remain at HAWC and, in effect, accept an American high-tech version of
the Gulag Archipelago. The upside was that it was a chance to work with
the newest aircraft and weapons in the world. McLanahan had happily
accepted the position even though it was obvious to all that he had
little choice. The Old Dog mission, one of the more deadly events that
ultimately drove the Soviet Union to glasnost, had to be buried
forever-one way or another. Many successful, career-minded men might
have resented the isolation, lack of recognition, and de facto
imprisonment. Not Patrick McLanahan. Because he was not an engineer
and had very little technical training, his job description for his
first years at HAWC consisted mainly of answering phones, acting as aide
and secretary for General Elliott and General Ormack, and rewriting tech
orders and checklists. But he educated himself in the hard sciences,
visited the labs and test centers to talk with engineers, begged and
pleaded for every minute of flying time he could, and, more important,
performed each given assignment as if it were the free world's most
vital research project. Whether it was programming checklists into a
cockpit computer terminal or managing the unit's coffee fund and snack
bar, Patrick McLanahan did his work efficiently and professionally.
Things began to change very quickly. The Air Force promoted him to
Major two years below the zone. He was given an executive officer, then
a clerk, than an assistant, a staff, and finally his own office complex,
complete with flight-test crews and dedicated maintenance shops. The
projects began to change. Instead of being in charge of documentation
and records, he was heading more concept teams, then more
contractor-MAJCOM liaison jobs, then more subsystem projects, and
finally full-weapon systems. Before the ink was dry on his promotion
papers to Major, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. His "exile" was
occasionally broken, and the young "fastburner" was frequently "loaned"
with assignments with other research, development, and government
agencies, including Border Security Force, Special Operations, and the
Aerospace Defense Command. Very soon, McLanahan had become a fixture in
any new project dealing with aviation or aerospace. He was now one of
the most highly respected program managers in the Department of Defense.
The mission of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center had changed
as well. With budget cutbacks and greater downsizing in all strategic
bombardment units, some place had to be designated to keep all these
inactive aircraft until they might be needed again. Although most were
sent to the "boneyard, " the Air Force Aerospace Maintenance and
Restoration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona,
to be stored for spare parts or for scrap, a few were secretly sent to
Dreamland, in the desert of central Nevada, for research and special
missions. The place was the Strategic Air Reserve Group, commanded by
General Elliott. SARG took the work of the High Technology Aerospace
Weapons Center one step furtherlt created an operational unit out of
exotic research experiments. Whereas the Old Dog became an operational
mission completely by accident, now other "Old Dogs" were being created
and held in reserve until needed. The new Old Dogs collected over the
years now included six B-52 bombers; two B-1 bombers-both original
A-models; six F-111G fighter-bombers, which were formerly SAC FB-1 11A
strategic bombers; and the newest arrival, McLanahan's B-2 Black Knight
bomber. "The other task you've got is ASIS, " Ormack continued. "Air
Force is finally considering putting a pilot-trained navigatorbombardier
on board the B-2 instead of the current navigatortrained 'mission
commander' layout. The cockpit is designed for two pilots; you have to
redesign it for a weapons system officer and defensive systems operator,
but retain the dual pilot control capability. You've got a few months,
no more than four, to get ASIS ready for full-scale production and
retrofit, including engineering blueprints and work plan." He smiled
mischievously and added, "The B-2 pilot 'union' is not too happy about
this, as you might expect. They think ASIS is a bunch of crap, that the
B-2 is automated enough to not need a navigator, and the B-2 sho
uld keep
its two pilots. I think our experience with the Old Dog proved
otherwise." McLanahan laughed. "That's an understatement. Now, what's
ASIS stand for?"
"Depends on who you ask, " Ormack said dryly. "Officially Attack Systems
Integration Station. The flight test pilots and B-2 cadre call it
something else-in honor of all navigators, of course. "What's that?"
'Additional shit inside." McLanahan laughed again. "Figures." Slamming
navigators was common fare in this fighter pilot's Mecca in southern
Nevada. Still awestruck, he walked toward the huge batwinged bomber
sitting inside the brilliantly lit hangar. The Black Knight was designed
specifically to attack multiple, heavily defended, and mobile targets
around the world with high probability of damage and high probability of
survival. To fly nearly five thousand miles unrefueled, the B-2 had to
be huge-it had the same wingspan as a B-52 and almost the same fuel
capacity, able to carry more than its own weight in jet fuel. In the
past, building a bomber of that size meant it was a sitting duck for
enemy defenses-a quarter-to-half-million pounds of steel flying around
made a very easy target for enemy acquisition and weapons-guidance
radars. The B-52, first designed in the 1 940s when it was designed to
fly at extremely high altitudes, eventually had to rely on flying at
treetop level, electronic jammers and decoys, and plain old
circumnavigation of enemy threats to evade attack. The B-58 Hustler
bomber relied on flat-out supersonic speed. The FB111 and B- 1
strategic bombers utilized speed, a cleaner "stealthier" design,
advanced electronic countermeasures, and terrain-following radar to help
themselves penetrate stiff defenses. But, with rapid advances in
fighter technology, surface-to-air missiles, and early warning and
tracking radars, even the sleek, deadly B-1 would soon be vulnerable to
attack. The black monster before Patrick McLanahan was the latest
answer. The B-2 was still a quarter-million-pound bomber, but most of
its larger structural surfaces were made of nonmetallic composites that
reduced or reflected enemy radar energy; reflected energy is dispersed
in specific narrow beam paths, or lobes, which greatly decreases the
strength of the reflected energy. It had no vertical flight-control
surfaces that could act as a radar reflector-viewed on edge, it appeared
to be nothing more than a dark sliver, like a slender tadpole. Each
wing was made of two huge pieces of composite material, joined like a
plastic model-that meant there were no structural ribs to break, no
rivets attaching the skin to a skeleton, producing an aircraft that was
as strong at the wingtips as it was at the fuselage. Its four turbofan
engines were buried within V-shaped wings, which eliminated telltale
heat emissions, and engine components were cooled with jet fuel itself
to further reduce heat emissions. Its state-of-the-art navigation
systems, attack radars, and sensors were so advanced that the B-2 could
strike targets several miles before the bomber could be detected by
enemy acquisition radars. The cost of the Black Knight bomber program
was staggering-a half billion dollars per plane and nearly eighty
billion dollars for an entire fleet, including research, development,
and basing. A planned total purchase of one hundred and thirty-two B-2s
in five years quickly went away, replaced with an extended procurement
deal that would bring only seventy-five bombers on-line over ten years.
Even that reduced production rate had been compromised-by April of 1992
there were only twelve fully operational B-2 in the inventory, including
the initial three airframes used for testing and evaluation and nine
more that had been purchased in 1991. The 1992 and 1993 budgets had
carried only "life-support" funding for the B-2-just enough money to
keep the program alive while retaining the ability to quickly gear up
production if the need arose. Because there would only be seventy-five
B-2s active by the turn of the century, the B-52-slated for replacement
by the Black Knight-would still be in the active strategic nuclear
penetrator arsenal well into the twenty-first century. But the B-2,
despite charges of being a "billion-dollar boon SK operational, was now
a reality and had proven itself ready to go to war in extensive flight
testing. The first Black Knight bomber squadronthe 393rd Bomb Squadron
"Tigers"the same unit that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
during World War Il-had been activated at Whiteman Air Force Base in
Missouri a few months earlier, and when that happened, it had rendered
billions of dollars' worth of the enemy's military airdefense hardware
instantly obsolete. "Got time for a walkaround, sir?" McLanahan asked.
"You bet, " the young Air Force General replied. Ormack let Patrick
drink in the sight of the magnificent black bomber before him as Patrick
stepped toward it for a walkaround "getacquainted" inspection. The B-2
had no fuselage as on more conventional airplanes; it was as if someone
had sawed off the wings of a B-52, stuck them together, and put wheels
on it. For someone like McLanahan, who was accustomed to seeing the
huge, drooping wings of the mighty B-52, it was amazing to notice that
the B-2s, which were just as long and easily twice as wide, did not
droop one inch-the composite structures were pound-forpound stronger
than steel. The skin was perfectly smooth, with none of the stress
wrinkles of the B-52, and it had no antennae attached to the hull that
might act as a radar reflector. The plane's "flying wing" design had no
vertical flight control surfaces that would create a radar reflector;
instead, it achieved stability by a series of split flaps / ailerons on
the wing's trailing edges, called "flaperons, " which would deflect in
pairs or singularly in response to a triple-redundant laser optic flight
computer's commands. The unique flaperon flight-control system, plus a
thrust ejector system that directed engine exhaust across the flaperons
to increase responsiveness, gave the huge bomber the roll response of a
small fighter. To prevent any radar image "blooming" when the flaperons
were deflected in flight-even the small flaperon deflection caused by
aS-degree turn would increase the radar image size several times-the
trailing edge of the B-2's wings were staggered in a zigzag pattern,
which prevented any reflected energy from returning directly back to the
enemy's radar receiver. Patrick ducked under the pointed nose on his way
back to the double side-by-side bomb bays, the natural part of such an
aircraft that would attract any SAC bombardier. The lower part of the
nose section on either side of the nose gear had large rectangular
windows protected by thick pads. "Are these the laser and IR windows?"
Patrick asked Ormack. "You got it, Patrick, " Ormack replied. "Miniature
laser spotters / target designators and infrared detectors, slaved to
the navigation system. The emitter windows and the cockpit windows are
coated with an ultrathin material that allows radar en
ergy to pass
through the windows but not reflect back outwards, much like a one-way
mirror. This reduces the radar reflectivity caused by energy bouncing
off the crew members or equipment inside the plane itself. If allowed
to reflect back, the radar return from the pilots' helmets alone can
effectively double the B-2's radar signature."
"Where's the navigation radar? Is there one on the B-2?"
"You bet. The Black Knight has an AN/APQ-181 multimode radar mounted
along the wing leading edges, with ground-mapping, terrain-following,
targeting, surveillance, and rendezvous modes-we can even add air-to-air
capability to the system. "Air-to-air on a B-2 bomber?" McLanahan
whistled. "You're kidding, right?"
"Not after what we did on the B-52 Old Dog, " Ormack replied. "After our
work in Dreamland putting antiair missiles on a B-52, I don't think
there'll ever be another combat aircraft that can't do a dozen different
jobs, and that includes heavy bombers carrying air-to-air weapons. It
makes sense-if you can take sixteen to twenty weapons of any kind into
battle with you, you have the advantage. Besides, the B-2 is no slouch
of a hot jet any way you look at it-the B-2 bomber has one-one hundredth
the radar cross-section of an F-15 Eagle Fighter, one-twentieth the RCS
of an F-23 Wildcat fighter-which means it could engage targets before
the other guy even knows the B-2 is out there-and at high altitude it
has the same roll rate and can pull as many Gs as an F-4 Phantom." The
underside of the B-2 was like a huge dark thunder cloud-it seemed to
stretch out forever, sucking up every particle of light. Patrick was
surprised by what he found-two cavernous weapon bays. "It's a hell a
lot bigger than I thought, General, " he said. "Each bomb bay carries
one Common Strategic Rotary Launcher filled with eight SRAM short-range
attack missiles, " Ormack replied. "Sixteen SRAM missiles-it packs
quite a wallop. Putting B61 or B83 gravity nuclear bombs on board is
still possible as well, although using standoff-type weapons instead of
gravity bombs makes the B-2 a much greater threat. The Black Knight can
only carry four cruise missiles, so there are no plans to include
AGM-129A cruise missiles although we modified the weapon-delivery
