Flight Of The Old Dog pm-1

by Dale Brown

  "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.

  Gent@v- Keep the back pressure in but get re to release it when the nose comes up."

  "It's not lifting off… " The shaking, the turbule almost maae him lose his grip on the wheel… Now could see the end of the runway, a tall wall of drifting snow 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 ground less than three feet above the peak of ice at the end of the runway. Buoyed then by "ground effect," the swirl of snow generated by the wings that bounced off the ground and back up at the plane, the Old Dog skittered only twenty feet on the snowy surface, the air pounding on the bomber's wings adding to the turbulence.

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

  Carefully now, McLanahan reached down to the gear-control lever and moved it up, also checking the main-gear indicate 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

  Fulcrt, 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 checklist configuring his MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter for the penetration a, 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 ground, but he couldn't wait… McLanahan reached do 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 fl indicator as the huge wing high-lift panels rose out of slipstream. With the flaps retracting, the Old Dog's lift be 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 differen thrust threatened to flip the bomber over and send it crashin the mountain below. Using what was left of the lateral 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 minimum. He pulled the number-two throttle to CUTC 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 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 ainr 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 computer checklist calling up the automatic terrain-avoidance procedures. "We're going into auto-terrain-avoidance, everybody Wendy, go downstairs and try to reload terrain avoidance data into the computers."

  Behind the cockpit in the defense section Wendy quickly unbuckled her parachute harness straps, climbed out of the electronic-warfare officer's ejection seat, grabbed onto the "firepole" above the ladder, half-slid 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 terrain-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.
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  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 Korakskoje 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 position indicators."

  "Will the rockets still detonate?"

  "Yes, I can set the detonation range manually, or the detonate themselves just before their propellant runs out "Okay, if we spot the fighter we'll call out its position.

  the airmines for different ranges and-" "I see him, he's right behind us-" An explosion rocked the bomber-like a wrecking ball crashed into the Old Dog's midsection. McLanahan felt as if he were riding an elevator that had just dropped twenty floors in an instant. The Old Dog seemed to hover in midair, its working engines straining against the impact of a Soviet A-80 missile slamming into its fuselage.

  Yuri Papendreyov, flying slightly high and to the right of his quarry, clenched a fist and allowed a smile. One of his heat seeking missiles had missed, but the second had hit the American bomber in the mid-body, just forward of the wing's leading edge. Clouds of smoke erupted from the hole it created. The bomber's tail sank down, the nose shot up Yet somehow it was still flying. Well, those Americans might lead charmed lives, but their luck had run out. He had two AA-8 heat-seekers and five hundred rounds of ammunition, and the bomber was badly crippled.

  In his tight right-hand turn to set up for another attack, he checked his navigation instruments and saw he was only a few kilometers from Anadyr.

  There was no greater prize than the B-52, he told himself, no greater victory… He widened his right turn and smiled broadly, seeing his destiny unfolding.

  Choking and coughing from the thick clouds of black smoke, Wendy aimed a fire extinguisher out the open aft bulkhead leading to the bomb bay catwalk and squeezed the trigger.

  She was bleeding from a gash in her forehead sustained when she was thrown against the forward instrument panel after the missile hit. A moment later Angelina was beside her, carrying the firefighting mask and another extinguisher bottle. W Wendy put on the mask and plugged it into the instructor's oxygen panel, Angelina moved as far as she could toward the fire on the catwalk and fired her extinguisher.

  The flames had intensified the instant Wendy had opened the bulkhead door, but the blast of air racing from the breaks in the cockpit through the open door sucked the smoke and flames aft and gave her a clear and effective shot at the fire in the electronic countermeasures transformers and control boxes.

  Wendy dropped back into the radar nav's seat, her forehead dripping blood, her arms and legs throbbing. She pulled off the firefighting mask, gasped over the interphone: "Fire's out, Patrick. Big hole in the fuselage and fire in the ECM boxes, but it looked like it missed the landing gear."

  "We're blind up here," Ormack asked. "We can't see him, we can't see when he shoots at us McLanahan had already put the computer-controlled clearance plane setting to COLA so the Old Dog would seek its own lowest possible altitude. But because of the reduction in thrust and the severe damage, the terrain-climbing capability of the jo Old Dog was reduced. And as the terrain became more rugged, the altitude slowly crept higher, exposing the bomber more and more to the Soviet fighter.

  "All right, everyone, check your areas for damage," McLanahan said, his grip on the control wheel so tight his hands began to cramp.

  "We've got a leak in the aft fuel tank," Ormack said, blowing on his hands and scanning the fuel panel. "I'm opening valve twenty-eight, closing twenty-nine. Also pumping all fuel out of the aft body tank before it leaks out-" A sudden motion out of the left-cockpit windscreen drew his attention outside. "Patrick, look…"

  McLanahan spun around to a sight that made him go rigid… The gray MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter was directly beside the Old Dog, just ahead of the cockpit, slightly above them and no more than a hundred feet away.

  McLanahan could clearly see the pilot's right shoulder and head out his bubble canopy, along with a sleek air-to-air missile on its wing hardpoint.

  The MiG was amazingly small and compact, resembling a twin-tailed American F-16 fighter. The Russian pilot apparently had little trouble flying beside the B-52, even at its low altitude, perfectly matching each of the Old Dog's computer commanded altitude adjustments.

  "Angelina.he's on our left side, ten o'clock, about hundred feet.

  Can we get him with the Scorpions on our rig pylon?"

  "He's too close. The missile wouldn't have time to lock on.

  The MiG pilot glanced over at McLanahan, rocked 1

  Fulcrum's wings up and down three times. He stopped, then made one last rock to the right.

  "Why is he doing that…?"

  Ormack's jaw tightened. "It's the interception signal. He wants us to follow him."

  "Follow him?" McLanahan said, stomach tightening."?

  "No way, we can't-" "Patrick, we've got nowhere to run. He can knock us out of the sky anytime-" The MiG rocked up its left wing once more, very emphatically, as if underscoring Ormack's words. To back up the message the MiG pilot fired a one-second burst from his guns, the bright phosphorous-tipped tracer shells knifing into the twilight like deadly shooting stars.

  "If we don't follow he comes back around and tags us Ormack said.

  "We've got no chance-" "We can still fight," McLanahan asked. "As long as we got missiles we can't give up."

  Ormack grabbed his arm. "If we try to run he'll just come around again and shoot us down. "He lowered his voice. "You did a great job, Pat, but it's over. It's-" McLanahan shrugged his arm free. The MiG had dropp back a few feet, his bubble-canopy now directly beside the Old Dog's narrow, slanted cockpit. The Russian pilot pointed down three times.

  McLanahan turned and looked directly at the MiG pilot flying in unison with the fighter at a distance of fifty feet.

  To Ormack's surprise, he nodded to the Russian, and the pilot pointed to McLanahan's right, indicating a right turn. Ormack looked away, not wanting to see what he insisted was necessary for their survival. The pain he felt was from more than his blood-soaked shoulder.

  McLanahan nodded one more time to the MiG pilot. "Stand by to turn, crew," he said, gripping the wheel tight.

  Yuri PapendreYov was flushed with pride. He had done it. The American was surrendering. Of course, he could hardly do anything else.

  group the B AA-8 misile blow.

  its mangled left wingtip, the destroyed bomber was flying slower and slower, without the bombs Yuri had seen before as it hugged the ground the small-caliber bullet holes all over in the nose to the wings, and figured the the final shot into their fuselage had been The B-52 began its very slow right turn, and Yuri had just begun applying pressure on his control stick to follow suddenly the right side of the canopy was filled with the dark, menacing form of the American bomber…

  Instead of turning right toward Anadyr the insane plane had turned into Yuri's MiG-29.

  He yanked is control stick hard to the left, rolling up into a hundred degrees of bank.

  A moment later his world crunch of metal as the two aircraft, traveling kilometers a minute, collided. With both aircraft the top of the B-52 had plowed into the bottom of Yuri's fighter.

  Somehow Yuri managed to continue his hard turn, standing his MiG on its left wingtip and pulling back on the stick to increase the roll rate.

  The B-52 seemed to be turning right with him-even pushing him on, dragging him to the earth. The fighter was now at ninety-degrees bank, and the terrifying crushing and grind
ing sounds underneath him continued.

  Yuri could see rocks and trees out of the top of his canopy. His controls refused to respond…

  He ignited his twin afterburners, and like a snapping rubber band his MiG was flung away from the B-52.In the process Yuri found himself inverted, then in a wild tumble.

  The roar of the B-52 was everywhere, he expected another impact any moment…

  But the spin slowed and he managed to level his wings. He was barely at twenty meters. Rocks and trees were all around him-he was staring up at a huge ridgeline encrusted with jagged snow-covered boulders.

  But his airspeed at last began to build and he felt the ground rushing away beneath him.

  to Quickly he checked around for the B-52… nothing.

  Gone. Shaking his head, Yuri started a slow right turn to check behind him…

  Numb from the midair collision he had contrived, McLanahan watched transfixed as the gray MiG continued its spin down, heading for the rocks, reaching the point where McLanahan thought the pilot could never recover.

  But he did. He must have been close enough to the rocks to get one in his boot, but his spin stopped and the MiG sped away from the earth, gaining breathtaking speed in seconds, and now McLanahan was fighting for control of his own plane.

  The stall-warning buzzer sounded, and the Old Dog seemed to be floating straight down instead of flying forward.

  "Get the nose down, we're in a stall," Ormack was yelling at him.

  McLanahan shoved the yoke forward, fighting the initial-stall buffet that shook the entire hundred-ton bomber.

  The buzzer stopped. McLanahan found he had control, leveled the nose until the airspeed came up, but he had to force himself to stop looking at the rugged ground that whizzed so close to the Old Dog's groaning wings.

  "There he is, here he comes… Ormack shouted, pointing straight ahead.

  He was coming, all right. Directly in front of them.

  "I McLanahan called over the interphone. "Pylon "Angie missile… fire.

  The MiG was in a thirty-degree right bank directly off the Old Dog's nose at a range of perhaps three to four miles when the missile left the right pylon rail. It ignited in a bright plume of fire, sped away toward the wide bubble canopy of the MiG.