Ormack yanked the control stick hard right, all the way to the stops. Roll-control jets pushed the right wing down and pulled the left wing up, and nose and tail thrusters counteracted the adverse left yaw, which increased the roll rate even more. At fifty degrees of bank the B-52’s right wingtip was no more than two hundred feet above ground. Ormack pulled back on the stick, letting the Old Dog’s twin-tails pull the nose around even faster.
At the same time, Wendy released five rocket-powered decoys from the left ejector racks under the tail. The rockets spewed a huge globe of radar-reflecting tinsel a hundred yards from the B-52, followed by the blinding hot glare of phosphorous flares. Simultaneously Wendy activated her electronic jammers, present to the frequency of both DreamStar’s track- while-scan phased-array radars and the Scorpion missile’s seeker-radar, and pumped over a hundred thousand watts of energy across that frequency band.
The B-52’s decoys flew past the missile’s active radar seeker undetected—it had a solid lock on the B-52 itself. The seeker radar was blinded by the intense jamming, but in a millisecond it switched to the most accurate and reliable of its four backup modes: track on jam. The missile homed in on the center lobe of the jamming energy from the B-52, following the energy beam the way a hungry bat follows the echo of its hunting screech, straight to its prey. The missile flew under the B-52’s tail, past the ECM emitter and under the fuselage to the right wing, impacting on the number-three engine pod.
The right wing, made of composite materials far stronger than any metal, held fast, but the number five and six engines disintegrated in a cloud of flying metal and a huge fireball. The fireball lifted the right wing fifty feet into the air, then dropped it, stalling it out. The left four engines pulled the Old Dog around in a clockwise spin. None of its huge wings was generating lift now; the plane was being held aloft only by its forward momentum, like a chewed-up Frisbee tossed awkwardly into the air.
Engine-compressor blades from the number-five engine acted like huge, powerful swords, chopping through the crew compartment. Jeffrey Khan and Linda Evanston, sitting on the right side of the plane, were pierced by hundreds of shards of white-hot metal. Wendy Tork, thrown sideways by the blast, was hit by several pieces of metal.
Ormack pulled the control stick to the left and stomped hard on the left rudder pedal. Fibersteel screamed in protest. The flat spin slowed almost to a stop, but so did the Megafortress’ airspeed. Ormack knew he had pulled the plane out of its spin, but the sudden negative G’s told him that the Old Dog was never going to fly. Wendelstat was screaming, clawing at his lap belt, face distorted. Blood was coming from places all over his body, his helmeted head tattered from the impact of flying metal.
Ormack reached over to the center console, finding that the centrifugal forces were gone—it felt as if he was riding a gentle elevator down to the first floor. Lowering his head caused the cockpit to tilt violently, but he fought off the sudden vertigo and flipped the EJECT warning switch to EJECT.
Downward ejection for the two navigators in a B-52 bomber was a crap shoot in the best of circumstances, and Major Edward Frost knew it. Driven by years of experience, it took him only a few seconds to get his hands on the ejection ring, get his back straight, chin down, knees and legs braced, elbows tucked in. He pulled his ejection handle the instant he saw the red EJECT warning light illuminate. But even then it was too late. The zero-point-two-second drogue-parachute ripped Frost’s ejection seat free, automatically pulling the zero-second ripcord, but his main parachute barely had time to deploy fully from its backpack before Frost hit the earth.
Angelina Pereira had pushed Wendy back upright in her seat when she saw the bright red EJECT light. Still holding Wendy in her seat with her left hand, she carefully rotated Wendy’s right ejection lever up and pulled the trigger. The fingers of her left hand broke as Wendy’s armrest smashed into them, but she didn’t notice the pain as she watched the seat blast skyward. Then she slammed herself back into her own seat, raised her arming levers, and pulled both triggers.
Her seat malfunctioned. Nothing happened. She reseated her triggers and activated the backup ballistic actuators, but by then it was too late . . .
Ormack heard the loud pops and surges of air as ejection seats left the plane—at least someone might make it out alive, he thought. Wendelstat had finally collapsed. There was nothing to do for him—no time to haul him downstairs for manual bailout. But Khan had a chance. He yanked up on Khan’s left ejection lever and hit the trigger, watching as his long-time copilot and friend blew clear of the crippled bomber. Ormack now rotated his own arming levers and pulled the ejection triggers . . .
Khan had promptly been grabbed by the Old Dog’s exhaust and blown several hundred yards back, away from the impact area, but Ormack had spent precious time rescuing Khan. He was a hundred feet above ground, his chute filling with wind and inflating rapidly, when the Old Dog slammed into the Amargosa Desert valley floor. Directly over the aircraft, face down, in position to watch the end of the B-52 Megafortress Plus, Ormack was engulfed by the two-mile wide fireball that blossomed over the desert, consumed by the flames of his beloved aircraft.
His last thought was that somebody had to get that son of a bitch James . . .
CHAPTER4
Over the B-52 crash site, Amargosa, Nevada
Wednesday, 17 June 1996, 0712 PDT (1012 EDT)
IT RESEMBLED the aftermath of a fire bombing. Even from five hundred feet in the air, everything within sight was black—the rocky hills surrounding the crash site had been blackened by fires and debris. Huge craters in the earth contained burning sections of the mighty B-52 Megafortress Plus, the heat of the fireball hot enough to melt even the B-52’s thick carbon and fiberglass skeletal pieces. A mile away the centerwing junction-box and forward fuselage, the piece that joined the wings to the fuselage and the largest section of the B-52 still intact, was burning, so hot and so smoky that firefighters could not get within two hundred yards of it. Debris was scattered in a ten-square-mile area of devastation, and thick black smoke obscured half the sky.
The helicopter crossed perpendicular to the axis of impact, paralleling route 95 near the evacuated town of Amargosa. A large building, a restaurant-and-truck stop complex, was burning fiercely—one fire truck was spraying surrounding fuel pumps with water to prevent any massive explosions. Several hundred feet from the edge of the area a knot of police cars and an ambulance had pulled off the highway and encircled several dark objects lying in the charred sand.
“That’s it,’’ McLanahan shouted, not bothering to use the helicopter’s interphone. “Set it down there.”
The chopper pilot nodded, spoke briefly on the radio, then turned to Brad Elliott. “Sir, I can’t touch down—I’ve got wheels instead of skids. I’d sink up to the fuselage in that mess—”
“Then hover and drop me off,” McLanahan shouted.
“The medevac helicopter is only a few seconds from—”
“I don’t give a damn, take me down there. Now.” Elliott nodded to the pilot, and the chopper pilot reluctantly circled the area once, then set the helicopter in a gentle hover, wheels up, only a few inches from the ground. McLanahan leaped out the side door and ran through the burning debris and gasoline- fired desert to the patrol cars.
It was obvious that Wendy Tork McLanahan had been under her parachute only a few seconds before hitting ground; the ejection seat was just a few yards away. Wendy was lying on her side, seemingly buried in the dirt and blackened sand, her half-burned parachute trailing behind her. Her flight suit, gloves, face and hair were black from the heat and falling debris—from the air she had looked like another burnt piece of the dead B-52 bomber. Her helmet and one boot were nowhere to be seen—they were usually lost during ejection unless secured uncomfortably tight during the mission. Her left leg was twisted underneath her body, her left shoulder, half buried in the dirt, appeared to be broken or at least separated.
Two Nevada State Troopers were maneuvering
a spine board into place when McLanahan ran over to them. He dropped to his knees in front of her.
“You from the base?” one of the troopers asked McLanahan. Their voices were muffled by surgical masks.
“Yes . . .”
“What the hell hit out here? A nuke?”
“An aircraft.”
They had dug a trench behind Wendy’s back and were moving the board along her back. Patrick carefully swept bits and pieces of metal off Wendy’s face. A few stuck fast, and pain shot through his own body, as if he was feeling the pain for her, with her.
“Get with it,” one of the troopers yelled, “grab those straps and pass them over.” They routed several thick straps under
Wendy’s body, and Patrick carefully passed them back through the brackets on the other side of the board. They tightened the straps until Wendy’s back was tight against the board. Several wider straps were secured over her forehead and chin, a cervical collar placed around her neck, her head immobilized on the board as well. The troopers began working to free and immobilize her legs as the medevac helicopter touched down a few yards away.
“Let the paramedics in there, pal,” the troopers told Patrick, pulling him up and away from Wendy. Three paramedics rushed over. In moments they had oxygen, a respirator and electronic vital-sign monitors in operation. They finished securing thick plastic splints on her legs, placed her on a gurney and carried her to the helicopter. Patrick ran over with the gurney but was pushed away.
“No room. We’ve got more injured to pick up from the truck stop.” The doors closed, the helicopter jumped skyward and was quickly out of sight.
Patrick’s legs felt ready to buckle . . . one survivor out of a crew of seven. He’d seen the entire crew alive and well not an hour earlier. Wendy ... his last thought of her was the thumbs- up she’d given him before heading out to the crew bus. Piece of cake, she had said.
Another aircraft appeared out of the smoke-obscured sky, not another helicopter. Resembling a remodeled C-130 transport, the CV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor transport swooped down out of the sky barely a hundred feet above the ground. Suddenly, with a roar of turboprop engines, the engine pods on the wingtips began to tilt upward until the blades were horizontal. The aircraft then began a soft helicopter-like vertical descent, landing only yards from Patrick.
The rear cargo doors on the Osprey popped out, disgorging a dozen heavily armed security troops in full combat gear and backpacks, along with an M113 armored combat vehicle. The M113 rolled off toward route 95, and the guards began to station themselves a hundred yards apart along the perimeter of the Megafortress’ impact area.
“Patrick ...” He turned at the sound of his name. Hal Briggs was standing over him, Uzi submachine gun in hand. He was wearing a Kevlar helmet with a one-piece communications headset in place. Now he dropped down beside Patrick and moved his face closer to his so they could talk over the roar of the Osprey’s rotor-props. “You okay?”
“Wendy . .
“I heard, I’m glad she made it out,” Briggs shouted. “They’re taking her downtown to the burn unit. . . she’ll be okay, they think.”
“Unbelievable ... it was James,” Patrick muttered. “Stole DreamStar, shot down Old Dog ...”
“We gotta get you out of here. I’m securing the crash site. The general is assembling an investigation unit. He wants you to help him set it up.”
“Investigation unit? What about DreamStar? James is getting away with DreamStar—”
“He’s heading south, right into the F-15 interceptor unit out of Tucson. They’ve got a squadron ready to shoot his ass down. Now let’s get going.”
He helped McLanahan to his feet and led him to the open cargo ramp at the rear of the Osprey. He was strapped in beside Briggs at the flight-engineer’s station.
“Headquarters building,” Briggs radioed to the pilot. “Helipad one should be big enough for the Osprey—”
“No,” Patrick said. “I want to go to the hangar ramp. Right now.”
“General Elliott is waiting—”
“I’m not going to supervise a bunch of guys crawling around in the mud, putting little flags on chunks of metal and body parts. We know what happened to the Megafortress—James shot her down, he killed six people, he damn near killed my wife ... I want to go to the hangar ramp right now. That’s an order.”
Briggs shook off his immediate surprise at Patrick calling Wendy his wife. He pushed his boom microphone away from his lips and bent closer to Patrick. “You know me better than that. I take orders from Elliott, and sometimes not from him. It’s how I do my job. Tell me what you want and convince me it’s better than what the man with the four stars wants.”
“Hal, believe me, DreamStar will blow right past the F-15S out of Davis-Monthan.”
“Eight jockeys in Eagle Squadron won’t buy that.”
“Listen, I’ve flown against DreamStar for a year. If DreamStar has any more weapons on board, a whole air wing of F-15S won’t be able to bring him down. Even if he doesn’t, James has the skill and the hardware to evade them. Those pilots have never seen DreamStar in action. If the F-15S can’t bring him down before he enters Mexican airspace, he’ll lose them.”
“So what are you going to—?” Briggs cut himself off. It wasn’t hard to figure out what McLanahan wanted to do— “you’re gonna take Cheetah . . . ?”
“It’s the only fighter that can take on DreamStar head-to- head. And J. C. Powell is the only pilot that can do it. I want Powell and Sergeant Butler to meet me at Hangar Four with a fuel truck. If he can, I want Butler to get MMS out there with missiles or at least some twenty-millimeter cannon shells.” “And then what? Chase him down? He’s got a huge lead on you, you won’t stand a chance—”
“He’s only got two hour’s worth of fuel on board, maybe less,” Patrick said. “He’s got to land it somewhere.”
“How the hell are you supposed to know where?”
“Those air defense units will be tracking him. They’ll be able to pinpoint his location, even three or four hundred miles into Mexico. If he tries to land we’ll know about it. And unless he’s removed or deactivated then, Cheetah has telemetry and tracking equipment on board that can direct us toward him. But we need to act now, Hal. If we wait he could get clean away. The Mexicans aren’t going to be much help. They don’t exactly love us anymore.”
Briggs paused. McLanahan was obviously beside himself over the crash, and about Wendy—did he say his wife?—but what he was saying did make sense. If Dreamland’s security forces couldn’t stop DreamStar, there seemed little chance that a squadron of Air Force reservists from Arizona could do it.
Hal looked at Patrick. “You said your wife?”
“We were married two days ago. We were going to tell everybody tonight.” They were both silent for a moment, then Patrick asked: “How about it, Hal?”
Briggs thought about it a few moments longer, then nodded. “Hey, you’re a colonel, Colonel.” He reached over to the flight-engineer’s console, flicked a switch on the communications panel, dialed in channel eight—the discrete channel for the flight-line maintenance section. “I was told to deliver you a message from the general and assist you in complying with those orders. You can do anything you want. Talk on the radio, tell Butler to do something. Look here, this radio was even on Butler’s frequency, you can plug in and talk to him any time you want.”
Briggs swiveled his microphone back and hit the interphone button. “Pilot, looks like I might have miscalculated. This Osprey is too big to land on the Headquarters helipad.”
“No, Major,” the pilot radioed back. “It’s plenty big enough. I can—”
“I don’t think we can chance it. Some pretty strong gusts kicking up out there.”
“It’s clear and calm, Major Briggs.”
“Better not chance it. Drop us off at the hangar ramp.” The pilot shrugged, keyed his radio button to request different landing instructions.
McLanahan clicked on the ra
dio. “Delta, this is Charlie on channel eight. How copy?”
A few moments later Sergeant Ray Butler replied: “This is Delta mobile, sir. Go ahead.”
McLanahan glanced at the navigation readout on the flight engineer’s console. “I’m fifteen minutes from touchdown on the hangar ramp, Ray. Meet me at Hangar Four. Repeat, Hangar Four in fifteen mike. Urgent. Over.”
“Fifteen mike at Hangar Four. Copy that,” Butler replied. “Does this have to do with our recent fireworks here, sir?”
“It does, Delta. You may want to see that the ramp is clear in front of Hangar Four. Over.”
“I understand, Charlie. I’ll be ready. Delta out.”
Twelve minutes later the Osprey set down in the center of the hangar ramp and carefully taxied over to Hangar Four. McLanahan disembarked the cargo ramp and found an army of maintenance trucks surrounding the hangar. Cheetah had already been rolled out of the hangar and a fuel line had been hooked up to its single-point refueling receptacle on the leftside service panel.
Sergeant Butler trotted up to a surprised McLanahan with a sheaf of papers on a clipboard and a pen. “You must’ve forgotten to sign all these requests for maintenance support, sir,” he said with a straight face. “You made this request last week—don’t know how we missed getting all this signed off.” McLanahan nodded—obviously Butler wanted the same thing he did, but he was still going to make sure his paperwork was straight. “You wanted gas, long-range fuel tanks, five hundred rounds uploaded with the M61B2 cannon, two AIM-gR infrared short-range missiles and four AIM-120 medium-range active radar missiles. I got everything? Oh, you also wanted that video camera taken off, didn’t you? Good. Sign here.”
McLanahan signed all the blocks. “Thank you, sir,” Butler said. “Sorry about the paperwork shuffle, sir. My mistake. Won’t happen again ... I trust you’ll take care of any problems General Elliott might have with my . . . procedures.”
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