Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 (11 page)

 
          
“Vladimir,
the KGB has been well supported by this government. I have given you my
support. I did so even when the Politburo believed I had made a wrong decision
in appointing you to head the KGB. I believed the KGB needed a strong young
leader for the future, and I chose you. I know that you look to something
greater than merely the head of the world’s largest intelligence
organization—perhaps minister of defense or even General Secretary. Your
ambitions are your own affair. But do not accuse me, Vladimir. I do what is in
the best interest of our country and this government,
including
the KGB.”

 
          
Kalinin
saw the understated power in those blue
eyes. After eight years in power, he was still considered by many to be the
most influential man on the world scene. With
glasnost
now an important part of Soviet life, the General
Secretary was much more visible in the eyes of the world.
Kalinin
realized confrontations at this time were
pointless and even dangerous.

 
          
But
the man was getting older. Older and more cautious. Nearly every decision
involved weighing how it would look in the eyes of the world.
Kalinin
didn’t much care about the eyes of the
world—he cared about
Russia
, her security, based on her strength. The
Soviet Union
was not just another member of the world
community—she was, or should be, its leader.

 
          
The
General Secretary studied the younger man’s eyes for a moment before moving
toward the door. Cherkov, once the General Secretary’s mentor and now his
submissive guard-dog, followed him out.

 
          
The
General Secretary might be, as some said, a visionary, Kalinin thought, but
right now he was being dangerously short-sighted. Forget him this time,
Kalinin
told himself. This was a KGB project—it
would remain a KGB project.

 
          
And
if there was any way for this strange new American technology to advance his
own position in the government, then let it happen.

 
          
Air
Force High Technology Advanced
Weapons
Center
(HAWC)

 
          
Wednesday, 10 June 1996
,
0430 PDT (0730 EDT)

           
Air FORCE Lieutenant Colonel
Patrick S. McLanahan watched Captain Kenneth Francis James preparing to mount
his “steed.” James’ tall, powerfully built frame was covered—a better term
might have been “encased”—in a stiff* flight suit made of nylon and metallic
thread. James had to carry around a small portable air conditioning unit to
stay comfortable, and the suit was so stiff* that James had to be hoisted into
his steed on a hydraulic lift. A small army of “squires”—military and civilian
scientists and technicians, led by Doctor Alan Carmichael, the chief project
engineer and Patrick’s civilian counterpart—followed James on his lift up
toward his incredible steed.

           
Both McLanahan’s and James’ aircraft
were in a large open- ended hangar, used more to shield the two fighters from
the ultra-magnified eyes of Soviet reconnaissance satellites than to protect
against the weather. It was only four-thirty in the morning, but the
temperature was already starting to climb; it was going to be a scorcher in the
high
Nevada
desert test-site north of
Las Vegas
known as Dreamland.

 
          
But
Patrick wasn’t thinking about the heat. His eyes were on the sleek lines of the
jet fighter before him.

 
          
DreamStar
. . .

           
As McLanahan stood gazing at the
fighter the senior noncommissioned officer of the DreamStar project, Air Force
Master Sergeant Ray Butler, moved alongside him.

 
          
“I
know how you feel, sir,”
Butler
said in his deep, gravely voice, running a hand across his shaved head.
“I get a shiver every time I see her.”

 
          
She
was a child of the first X-29 advanced technology demonstator aircraft built in
the early and mid-1980s. Long, low, sleek and deadly, DreamStar was the only
fighter aircraft anywhere with forward-swept wings, which spread gracefully
from nearly abeam the cockpit back all the way to the tail. The forward-swept
wings allowed air to stick to the aircraft’s control surfaces better, making it
possible for the aircraft to make faster and wilder maneuvers than ever thought
possible. She was so agile and so fast that it took three independent highspeed
computers to control her.

 
          
“Chief,”
Patrick said as they began a walkaround inspection of the fighter, “there’s no
question she’s one sexy piece of hardware. Very sexy.”

 
          
Butler
nodded. “Couldn’t put it better myself.”

 
          
The
cockpit seemed suspended in mid-air on the long, pointed forward fuselage high
above the polished concrete floor of the satellite-bluff hangar. Beside the
cockpit on each side of the fuselage were two auxiliary fins, canards, integral
parts of the DreamStar’s advanced flight controls. When horizontal, the canards
provided extra lift and allowed the fighter to fly at previously unbelievable
flight attitudes; when moved nearly to the vertical, the canards let the
fighter move in any direction without changing its flight path. DreamStar could
climb or descend without moving its nose up or down, turn without banking, dart
sideways in, literally, the blink of an eye.

 
          
The
one large engine inlet for the single afterburning jet engine was beneath the
fuselage, mounted so that a smooth flow of air could still be assured even at
radical flight attitudes and fast changes in direction. DreamStar had two sets
of rudders, one pair on top and one on the bottom, which extended and retracted
into the fuselage as needed; the lower stabilizers were to assure directional
control at very high angles-of-attack (when the nose would be pointed high
above the flight path of the aircraft) and low speed when the upper stabilizers
would be ineffective.

 
          
Even
at rest she seemed energetic, ready to leap effortlessly into the sky at any
moment. “She looks like a great big cat ready to pounce,” Patrick said
half-aloud.

 
          
They
continued their walkaround aft. DreamStar’s engine exhausts were not the
typical round nozzles on other fighters. She used oblong vectored-thrust
nozzles that could divert the engine exhaust in many different directions.
Louvers on the top and bottoms of the nozzles could change the direction of
thrust instantaneously, giving DreamStar even greater maneuverability. The
vectored thrust from the engines could also act as added boost to shorten
takeoff rolls, or as thrust-reversers during dogfights or on landing to bleed
off energy.

 
          
She
was one hell of a bird, all right, and Patrick McLanahan figured he had the
best job in the world—turning her into the world’s newest and deadliest
combat-ready weapon. Patrick “Mac” McLananan, an ex-Strategic Air Command B-52
radar navigator-bombadier—especially remembered for his role on the Flight of
the Old Dog that knocked out a Soviet laser installation—was the project
officer in charge of development of the DreamStar advanced technology fighter.
Once perfected, the XF-34A DreamStar fighter would be the nation’s new
air-superiority fighter.

 
          
Walking
around the engine exhausts they noticed a crew chief running over to activate
an external-power cart. “Looks like they’re ready for power,”
Butler
said. “I’d better go see how they’re doing.
Have a good flight, Colonel.”

 
          
Patrick
returned his salute and headed toward the plane he would be flying that
morning. If the two aircraft were humans, the second jet fighter, Cheetah,
would be DreamStar’s older, less intelligent cousin. A by-product of the
revolutionary SMTD, Short Takeoff and Landing and Maneuverability Demonstrator
projects of the last decade, Cheetah was a line F-15E two-set jet
fighter-bomber, heavily modified and enhanced after years of research and
development in the fields of high- performance flight and advanced avionics. It
had come to Dreamland, this top-secret aircraft and weapons research center
northwest of
Las Vegas
, seven years earlier. It had been at Dreamland for less than a day
before then Lieutenant General Bradley Elliott, the director of HAWC, had had
her taken apart for the first time. The changes to the airframe had been so
extensive that it had been given a code-name Cheetah instead of keeping its
original nickname, Eagle.

 
          
Hard
to believe, McLanahan thought, that such a machine like Cheetah could be
outdated in so short a time.

 
          
The
remarkable enhancements built into DreamStar had been tested years earlier on
Cheetah, so Cheetah shared DreamStar’s huge moveable forward canards,
vectored-thrust engines and computer-commanded flight controls. But even
Cheetah was starting to show its twenty years of age. Modifications to every
component of the fifty-seven-thousand-pound aircraft meant lots of riveted access
panels scarred across its fuselage, performance-robbing patches that layers of
paint could barely hide. With an eleven-hundred-pound remote- control camera
mounted just behind her aft cockpit, her once impressive top speed of Mach two
was now a forgotten statistic—she’d have a tough time, Patrick thought, of
reaching Mach one without afterburners. DreamStar could easily cruise at one
point five Mach without ‘burners.

 
          
Where
all of the high-tech components had made DreamStar the fighter of the future,
those same enhancements had taken a severe performance penalty on Cheetah. But
there was still one man who could make Cheetah dance in the sky like a
brand-new bird. Patrick found that extraordinary young pilot asleep under
Cheetah’s nose, using the nosewheel as a headrest.

 
          
“J.C.”

 
          
“Yo,”
came a sleepy reply.

 
          
Patrick
went up the crew-boarding ladder, retrieved a set of ear noise protectors from
the cockpit. “On your feet. Time to go aviating.”

 
          
For
J. C. Powell that bit of Air Force jargon was raw meat to a starving wolf—he
was up, on his feet and skipping up the crew entry ladder like a kid.

 
          
“Say
the word, Colonel.”

 
          
“I’m
stopping by to see how our boy is doing in DreamStar,” McLanahan said, putting
on the ear protectors to block out the noise of the external power cart.
“Should be fifteen minutes to engine start. Get Cheetah ready to fly.”

 
          
“You
got it, boss.”

 
          
In
another life, Captain Roland Q. Powell, the only son of a very wealthy
Virginia
family, all five feet five and one hundred
twenty pounds of him, must have been a barnstormer; before that he might have
ridden barrels over
Niagara Falls
. “Plain reckless” would have been the wrong term to describe his
flying, but “reckless abandon” was close. He was totally at home in airplanes,
always pushing his machine to the limit but staying in control at all times. He
never flew slow if he could fly fast, never made a turn at thirty degrees’ bank
when he could do sixty or ninety, never flew up high when he could fly down in
the trees. He earned the nickname “J.C.” from his Undergraduate Pilot Training
instructors who would mutter “Jesus Christ” (usually followed by “help me” or
“save me”) when they found out they had been scheduled to fly with Roland
Powell.

 
          
He
became an FAIP, first assignment instructor pilot, out of Undergraduate Pilot
Training, but the Air Force didn’t want an entire Air Force filled with J. C.
Powells, so he was assigned to Edwards Air Force Base. Flight test was the
perfect place to stick Roland Powell. He knew all there was to know about
aerodynamics but would still agree to do anything the engineers asked of him,
no matter how dangerous or impossible it seemed. As a result Powell got the hot
planes. Every jet builder wanted to see what magic J. C. Powell could conjure
up with his airframe. He was soon enticed to Dreamland by General Elliott with
the promise of flying the hottest fighter of them all—Cheetah. Powell’s
expertise both as a pilot and as an engineer helped speed up the development of
DreamStar, but he chose to stay with Cheetah. From then on, he had been her
only pilot.

 
          
But
J. C. Powell had had his time in the spotlight. Now, it was Kenneth Francis
James’ turn.

 
          
When
he got to DreamStar again, Patrick climbed up the ladder on the hydraulic lift
and watched as James was lowered into the cockpit. His special flight suit was
preformed into a sitting position, making James look like a plastic doll. Once
James was lowered into place, Patrick moved toward him as close as possible
without interfering with the small army of experts attending to the pilot’s
seat configuration.

 
          
“Feeling
okay, Ken?”

 
          
James
nodded. “Snug, but okay.”

 
          
Patrick
watched as James was set into his specially molded ejection seat, strapped into
place, and had his oxygen, environmental and electronic leads connected. The
image of a medieval knight being readied for combat flashed in Patrick’s head,
topped off when they placed James’ helmet on his head and clipped it into a
clavicle ring on his shoulders. The helmet was essentially a holder for a
variety of superconducting sensors and terminals that covered the inner
surface. Once the helmet was locked into place, the flight suit became one
gigantic electronic circuit, one big superconducting transistor. It became the
data-transmission circuit between James and the amazing aircraft he was
strapped into.

 
          
“Self-test
in progress,”
Carmichael
said. The computer, a diagnostic self-test
device as well as an electroencephalograph to monitor the human side of the
system, checked each of the thousands of sensors, circuits and transmitters
within the suit and their connections through the interface to DreamStar. But
Carmichael chose not to let the computer do
his
work, even though he was the one who had designed the interface; the scientist
manually ran through the complex maze of readouts, checking for any sign of
malfunction or abnormal readings.