Dale Brown - Flight Of The Old Dog

by Flight Of The Old Dog [lit]

  But the scope was blank and had been for several minutes, and Wendy Tork in the electronic warfare section had reported no airborne interceptor radar signals. McLanahan could feel a j cold, prickly sensation on his neck. The mountains were too damn close.

  He glanced at his chart. Some of the highest mountain ranges in southern Nevada were right off the nose, and he felt uncomfortable not monitoring their position by radar, even though the automatic terrain-avoidance system had proved its reliability.

  Well, damn the fighters, McLanahan thought to himself. If the aircraft hits a mountain, the fighters won't matter.

  "He punched a button, thinking about the twenty-first century equipment guiding their two-hundred-ton bomber. The blank track-while-scan radar scope changed into a mapping display of the terrain within thirty miles of the Old Dog. Guided by a ring of satellites and by a tiny "game-cartridge" of terrain elevations, the Old Dog was automatically diving and climbing, attempting to hug the ground as close as possible.

  The satellites, orbiting in geosynchronous orbits twenty-three thousand miles above the Earth, told them exactly where they were; the Inertial Navigation System, INS, told them where they were going; and the computer, ROM, Reading Only Memory, terrain-data cartridge told them how high the terrain was.

  A computer fed all this to the autopilot, which told the Old Dog-what a damn stupid name, McLanahan thought-when to climb or dive, and the autopilot would climb or dive in time to keep the plane within a few feet of the selected clearance plane setting. Simple.

  Except it wasn't working. His terrain-mapping scope was almost blank, but for a completely different reason. A five-mile-long ridge loomed ahead, its tree-lined crest still seven hundred feet above the Old Dog's altitude. The ridge cast a dark shadow behind it, as if the radar beam was a headlight being blocked by an oncoming brick wall.

  McLanahan knew that if the shadow behind the ridge got larger instead of smaller they'd eventually plow into the ridge.

  At over seven hundred feet per second, the two-hundred-ton bomber would smear itself right up and over the ridge and scatter pieces of itself for tens of miles beyond. The radar altimeter readout on the video display was flashing, warning that the aircraft was below the desired terrain clearance altitude.

  McLanahan glanced at the flight instruments. The vertical velocity indicator was showing a climb, but it didn't seem like a very steep one. The ridge was now only three miles away, and the shadow beyond blotted out all else right to the edge of the scope.

  "High terrain, three miles," McLanahan reported over the interphone.

  "I've lost TTG signals, navigator," Campos radioed to McLanahan.

  He quickly glanced at the annotations he had placed on the chart the night before. "Elevation eight thousand feet," McLanahan asked. "Blank scope. Not painting over it. Also a blinking radar altimeter."

  The terrain-avoidance computer was not designed tofollow the contours of the surrounding hills and valleys as it would in the B-1 Excalibur or the FB-111 - The B-52 didn't have enough power. The terrain-avoidance system anticipated the terrain ahead of the aircrafts flight path and chose a safe altitude to clear it, as close to the pilot-selected clearance plane setting as possible. Approaching a ridge, the altitude should not be less won than the selected altitude-it should be more. Much more. And the Old Dog should be climbing a lot faster...

  "Pilot, climb!"McLanahan ordered. The plane suddenly jumped, nearly tripling its former climb rate, and the throttles were jammed to full military thrust. The airspeed, however, bled off rapidly as the Old Dog traded altitude for airspeed, crawling skyward.

  The radar scope was blank. The ridge was less than one mile off the nose... eight seconds before impact...

  The radar altimeter indicated less than a hundred feet as the Old Dog ballooned over the ridge, at near minimum low-level safe airspeed. The automatic flight control system immediately commanded nose-down as the ridge line dropped behind them, but McLanahan didn't start to breathe again until they had regained the two hundred knots lost in the emergency climb and were safely clear of terrain.

  "Clear of terrain for fifteen miles," McLanahan reported.

  "Ground position freeze," Colonel Anderson said over the interphone.

  The digital readouts and radar images froze on the screen. McLanahan sat back in the Old Dog's ejection seat, wiping sweat from his forehead and palms, and took a gulp of Tab.

  "What the hell was all that, McLanahan?"Anderson shouted over the interphone. McLanahan backed the volume of the interphone panel down a notch in the anticipation of yet another yelling match. Harold Briggs, sitting in the newly installed navigator's seat beside McLanahan, slid off his headset.

  "What was what, sir?"

  "All those calls, goddammit!Terrain this, terrain that.

  That's not your job."

  "What do you mean, it's not my job. My first responsibility is to keep the plane out of the dirt.

  Harold Briggs made an obscene gesture directed at Anderson. He felt fairly safe doing so, because Anderson and Ormack were in a B-52 simulator some two hundred miles away and were tied electronically into the computer simulation aboard the Old Dog. At the same time, Wendy Tork was at a research computer terminal twenty miles from Anderson, participating in the same exercise, and Campos and Pereira were sitting at a fire control test bench elsewhere at Dream land, also linked to the computer controlling the test. Briggs and McLanahan were inside the Old Dog itself, still in its hangar at Groom Lake, watching and responding to the computer-generated battle scenario.

  "There's a multimillion dollar computer that can do that faster, easier, and better than you ever can, McLanahan," Anderson asked. "Why do you need to call out terrain elevation when if I wanted that useless piece of information I can just call it up on the screen?And I can see the damned radar altimeter blinking. I don't want you garbaging up the radios with all that stuff."

  "I was calling to your attention, sir, " McLanahan said over the voice/data link, "the fact that we were fifty feet lower than the goddamned set clearance when we still had seven hundred feet to climb.

  If the system was working right, we should have started the climb three miles earlier to cross that ridge line at two hundred feet. As it was, we barely had enough airspeed to cross the ridge at a hundred feet, and then we ballooned over it another thousand feet and almost hit initial buffet to a stall. The radar altimeter should never be blinking, and sure as hell not so close to a mountain. "Anderson had no reply to that, but someone else chimed in: "Excuse me, Captain," Campos interjected, his voice sounding hollow and metallic over the secure voice-data transmission line, "but please understand the situation here.

  Right now you have two attackers off the nose, just within radar range.

  You must spend less time in mapping mode and much, much more time in TTG mode. The Scorpions can be launched off threat detection signals from the receiver unit, but without range, elevation and tracking data the chances of a hit at long range are slim. We're relying on using the main radar to guide the Scorpions.

  "Besides," Lieutenant Colonel Ormack added from Ed wards, "this is only a practice run. The elevation data in this simulation isn't plotted as accurately as the operational cartridge. There's bound to be some belly-scrapers. We're trying to nail down procedures, McLanahan-and until we get to the target area, your procedure is to help guide the defensive missiles. Let the computers keep us out of the dirt."

  McLanahan rubbed his eyes and took a long, deep breath.

  "This is such bullshit," he said to Briggs.

  "Hang in there, buddy. You're really running this show, and they all know it.

  "Like hell," McLanahan asked. "I'm a passenger. Extraneous material.

  "You mean 'dead weight,"' Briggs said.

  "Thanks for the clarification."

  "Okay," Anderson radioed over to the widely separated crew. "We'll back up five minutes and do the leg over again.

  This time, McLanahan, find the damn fighters before the
y find us.

  McLanahan called up the prerecorded flight plan and waypoint readouts and watched as the present position coordinates slowly scrolled back to the beginning of the low-level navigation leg.

  "You want to see what a collision with the ground looks like, Hal?"

  McLanahan asked. "Just keep watching the scope."

  "I saw," a voice behind them said. McLanahan whirled around to see General Elliott sitting in the back of the navigator's compartment, taking notes and listening to the interphone conversations from the instructor nav's station.

  "Hello, General Nightmare," McLanahan asked. "How are we doing?I think we suck big-time."

  "Patrick," the general said, "I don't want to undermine Anderson's authority-he's a great pilot and a genuine asset to the project-but follow your own instincts, your own training.

  Everyone but you is trusting all this gadgetry with their lives because they don't know any better. Both Anderson and Ormack could see the terrain warning signals in the cockpit and they both ignored them.

  Keep an eye out for the terrain and for fighters as you see fit."

  The general paused, looking around the tiny compartment measuring his words, then said, "I've watched your work, Patrick. You seem to know when the fighters are near before the warning receivers do. You switch in TTG mode before Wendy tells you there are fighters, and you switch into mapping mode and call terrain just in time to avoid a mountain.

  "Well, thanks for the encouragement, General," McLanahan asked. "My sixth sense or whatever the hell it is tells me to bail out of this project before Colonel Disaster plows us into downtown Las Vegas.

  "You'll be doing it some other time, Patrick," the general asked. "Or maybe not at all. "Elliott flipped the interphone switch. "Colonel Anderson, this is General Elliott. The rest of today's session is canceled. I need to speak to everyone back at the mission center as soon as possible."

  "Yes, sir," Anderson asked. "Colonel Ormack and myself will be back in two hours. I expect everyone in the mission center when we arrive."

  Everyone else acknowledged Anderson's instructions, and the data/voice link went dead.

  "What's up, General?"Briggs asked. He looked worried and pale in the dim red lights of the downstairs compartment.

  McLanahan, for some reason, was suddenly very calm, serene.

  General Elliott seemed to notice the change, and he frowned a bit before continuing.

  "You've been shelved, Patrick," Elliott asked. "I've been informed that the Old Dog project has been ordered to stand down.

  "That means... " "Unfortunately, it doesn't mean going home," Elliott said.

  I've managed to get your temporary duty extended here at Dreamland. I can't do the same for the civilians, unfortunately, so it's going to be real quiet around here. But-well, let's call it a slowdown. They don't have the same all-fired need for the Old Dog's data as before.

  We'll keep busy, I assure you."

  McLanahan looked skeptical. "Sorry, my friend," Elliott said, "can't explain it better than that. Let's go and get a cold one while Anderson and the others zoom back."

  "I heard that," Briggs said happily.

  "I meant McLanahan," Elliott said. The three climbed out of the Old Dog's fibersteel belly. Outside, an army of workmen were surrounding the Old Dog with engine inlet covers and defueling equipment, and weapons dollies were being pushed over to the Megafortress.

  Elliott stood and watched for a moment as the workmen completed the task of plugging up and taking apart the Old Dog. He then led the group quickly out of the building.

  FIFTY MILEs EAST OF KAvAzNYA, iNTRE NORTH Nam A lone figure huddled against a steel mast on the wildlyheaving deck of a hundred-foot fishing vessel bobbing in the rough North Pacific seas.

  The man, wearing layers of fur-lined jackets under his oilskins, braced himself and tried to chop ice from a large winch bolted onto the mast.

  His mitten-clad hands were covered with freezing rain and ice; only the thick leather thong on the handle kept the rubber mallet he was using from spinning off into the icy sea.

  A wall of water crashed against the gunwale and showered the deck.

  Bits of instantly frozen water penetrated the face mask he wore and cut into his cheeks. He no longer worried about slipping on the pitching deck, unless his boots somehow came off-he was anchored by a quarter-inch of ice to the steel deck.

  A deep howl penetrated the roar of the wind and waves around him. He took a better grip on the winch with his mittened right hand and reluctantly turned his eyes seaward.

  The sting of the wind shot a rod of pain deep into his eyeballs.

  He squinted against the icy gusts and searched the horizon, trying to follow the howl, which was rising in intensity.

  There it was. It descended out of the racing clouds and horizontal sheets of frozen rain like a giant bird of prey. It leveled off, seemingly only a few scant feet above the icy foaming waters, and flew directly at the fishing vessel.

  The man let the mallet drop on its thong, reached into a pocket of the oilskin, and withdrew a small walkie-talkie. He turned his face away from the wind and the oncoming predator, bent down a bit, lifted his ski mask and keyed the microphone.

  "Bridge, Marceaux. Here comes that Bear, full on the port beam. "The man heard a feeble voice come over the radio, but couldn't understand it. No matter. They heard him. He couldn't stand another few seconds with his face uncovered anyway. He dropped the radio back into his pocket, made sure the pocket cover Velcroed closed, and turned to watch the plane.

  It was a Russian "Bear" bomber, one of several that had been dogging the fishing vessel in the past few days. This one had the guts---or the poor judgment-to drop below the scuzzy cloud cover and risk direct visual identification of the vessel.

  It was truly an imposing sight, especially the turboprop engines. Two massive, ungainly engines hung underneath each huge wing. Each engine had two large four-bladed propellers, an unusual sight on so large an aircraft. The propellers made the aircraft unusually quiet-its low whine did not get louder as it approached. Even in the poor visibility, the large red stars under the wings could easily be seen.

  This Bear had two radomes on the underside of its fuselage, marking it as a highly odified Bear-F maritime reconnaissance aircraft. Its other notable modification was the addition of two pylons, one on each wing and each loaded with six AS-12 air-to-sea antiship missiles, direct copies of the U.S. Navy's Harpoon antiship missiles.

  The bomber didn't need that many, the seaman named Marceaux thought.

  Just one could send this old tub to the bottom.

  The Bear flew right over the U.S.S. Lawrence's bow-a violation of international maritime law and a direct warning to the ship. Its size made it look much closer, but Marceaux estimated the bomber was at one thousand feet above the ship, the internationally legislated minimum.

  Despite the relatively quiet turboprops, the roar of the bomber passing overhead cut through the howl of the storm. It seemed to drive the storm before it, adding to its fury.

  " Cochon, " Marceaux said, but the curse was lost in the roar of the Bear's engine. A moment later the bomber lumbered skyward and disappeared again into the scuz. Marceaux waited until he was sure the Bear was gone for good, then slowly and carefully made his way along the icy deck toward the midships hatch and the welcoming warmth below.

  of Sheets ice dropped off Marceaux's oilskin as he unbuttoned the jacket and stowed it in a locker in the crew's bunkroom. As he peeled off the fur jackets, the ship's chief petty officer passed by and tapped him on the shoulder.

  "Intel," he asked. "Before anything else."

  -Zut!I'm freezin', Chief," Marceaux asked. "I've been up there for "Intel, " the CPO said behind him. "On the goddamned double."

  Marceaux reluctantly bypassed the galley and the scent of hot coffee and made his way to the ship's hold.

  The Intelligence section of the disguised fishing vessel Lawrence was formerly the fish processing hold. Indeed,
the front one-fifth of the area still held some fish-slicing and freezing equipment-all inoperable, in place for disguise purposes only. The Intel section was now a mass of electronic sensors, radios, maps, computers, and humorless men.

  The chief of the Intel section, Commander Markham, passed Marceaux in the doorway. He carried a steaming cup of coffee.

  "Well, Marceaux?"it was obvious to Markham that Marceaux's attention was elsewhere. He passed the cold seaman the cup of coffee.

  Marceaux drained half of it in one gulp, his breath exhaling as long wisps of steam.

  "Now. Fill me in, then fill out a hostile contact log."

  "Merci, Commander," Marceaux asked. "Bear-F, maritime antiship configuration, no numbers that I could make out. Two radomes, one forward, one aft. Observation blisters in the middle and aft, but I couldn't tell if they were manned. K-7 camera door open on the belly.