Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01 (48 page)

 
          
“So
what do we do?”

 
          
Jacobs
shook his head. “We do nothing. Nothing we
can
do. That guy, whoever he is, is all on his own.”

 
          
“Four
minutes to coast-in,” Dave Luger announced.

           
Elliott jerked himself out of his
reverie. He hadn’t been sleeping—he couldn’t really remember the last time he
had—but he had been in some sort of daydream ever since descending to low
level. Now his eyes were locked onto the dim glow of the small Russian town
they were approaching.

 
          
The
tiny town, too small to have a name on Luger’s general-purpose navigation
chart, appeared as a scattering of lights off* in the distance. Just one small
blob of lights, with a small string of lights trailing away— probably a lighted
path down to the docks for the fishermen, or the main road in and out of town.

 
          
It
wasn’t the first Russian town he’d seen, but this one seemed different.
Innocent. Peaceful.
Moscow
, the last time he was there as an Embassy adviser back in the
seventies, was menacing. Even during the newlywed years of detente, he felt its
choking, suffocating presence. Here, over the cold rough pioneer-like badlands
of eastern
Siberia
, it
seemed
different...

 
          
Elliott
unconsciously gripped the yoke tighter. The sight of the long SST nose of the
Old Dog reminded him where he was, what they were doing. He readjusted his
microphone.

 
          
“Wendy?”

 
          
“Nothing,
General,” Wendy replied, nervously anticipating his query. “Random, low-power
VHF.” Her voice was a clipped monotone.

 
          
“Distance
to the coastal mountains, Dave?”

           
“General, I don’t know for sure. My
enroute chart doesn’t show any detail of the
Kamchatka
peninsula. I’ll need a few radar sweeps to
range them out.”

 
          
Elliott
considered that. He couldn’t wait to get within the safety of the mountains,
but still . . . “All right—authorized. But no more than a few seconds.”

 
          
“Better
let me take a look,” McLanahan said, readjusting his attack radar controls. “I
can look out eighty miles in full-scan, Dave’s limited to thirty in a small
cone.”

 
          
“Do
it,” Elliott told him. “Dave, can you draw a picture of the terrain? Give
yourself a little topographic map?”

 
          
Luger
blocked out a section of his high-altitude chart and measured out a rough
eighty-mile-range radar-scope diagram, then loosened his parachute and ejection
seat straps and leaned over as far as possible to look at McLanahan’s ten-inch
display.

 
          
“Ready.”

 
          
“Here
we go.” McLanahan finished reconfiguring and pretuning his scope, then pressed
the RADIATE button. The radar image of the eastern shore of the
Kamchatka
peninsula appeared—the first radar picture,
McLanahan thought, from an American bomber about to make an attack on an
installation of the
Soviet
Union
. Don’t dwell
on it, he told himself . . . “Gently rising terrain in the next forty miles.”

 
          
Luger
was furiously shadow-graphing the scope presentation on his chart. “Navigation
looks good—we’re about thirty miles from the coast on radar, our heading looks
good to avoid overflying that town. It should pass about two miles to our left.
High terrain starts in about thirty-seven miles, but so far nothing is above
us. Some high stuff* at sixty miles but still no big shadows.”

 
          
“Which
means,” Ormack said, “that five thousand feet might be a safe altitude for us.”

 
          
“Got
all you need, Dave?” McLanahan asked.

 
          
Luger
shook his head as he added some detail of some long-range peaks to his
bastardized terrain chart. “Few more seconds . . .’’he muttered.

 
          
McLanahan
nodded and continued studying the scope. “That town looks pretty big,” he said
over interphone as he studied the display, adjusting the video and receiver
gain controls to eliminate the terrain returns, then turned to his partner.
“Done with the long range, Dave?” Luger nodded. “I’m checking that town in
thirty-mile range. It looks funny.” He moved the range selector to thirty-mile
range. The small town was now magnified in good detail at the top of his scope.

 
          
“Make
it quick,” Elliott warned.

 
          
“Funny?”
Ormack asked. “How funny?”

           
“Funny as in bad news Real bad
news,” McLanahan said. He stared at the magnified scene for a few more sweeps,
then quickly put his radar scope to STANDBY.

 
          
“General,
we gotta turn. Now. At least twenty degrees right.”

 
          
Why
. . . ?”

 
          
“Ships,
” McLanahan said. “One dock full
of big mother ships . . .”

 
          
“Search
radar at
twelve o’clock
,”
Wendy suddenly called out.

 
          
Elliott
shoved the eight throttles forward and banked the
Megafortress
hard to the right.

 
          
“Give
me COLA on the clearance-plane setting, John,” Elliott ordered. Ormack reached
across and turned the clearance plane knob down to its lowest setting.
COLA—Computer-generated Lowest Altitude. Now the terrain-avoidance computer
would select the lowest altitude possible for the
Megafortress
based on a small error factor of the radar altimeter
or terrain-avoidance computer, plus aircraft bank angle and terrain elevation.

 
          
The
computer, starting at a COLA altitude of about a hundred feet, would then
evaluate itself and readjust its minimum COLA altitude, continuously striving
for the lowest possible altitude. Since the Old Dog’s terrain-avoidance
computer was slaved only to the radar altimeter, the new lowest altitude would
equate to the highest error tolerance of the radar altimeter—a scant thirty
feet—plus a few feet for the normal rolling oscillations of any autopilot.

 
          
The
huge bomber plunged its nose toward the inky blackness of the Russian Pacific,
then slowly back to level as it quickly reached its commanded altitude. Now,
nearly four hundred thousand pounds of man and machine, guided by a single thin
radar beam from the bomber’s belly, were skimming only a few dozen yards from
the surface of the water at over four hundred miles an hour.

 
          
“Still
only search radar,” Wendy reported, leaning forward intently toward her TV-like
threat display. “High power but still scan mode. They’re ...” A chill worked
its way up McLanahan’s spine even before Wendy finished her analysis of the new
signals being transmitted.

 
          
“New
signal coming up,” Wendy said suddenly. “Narrow-scan search . . . height-finder
coming up . . . they’ve got us, General. They’ve found us, surface-to-air
missile signals coming up . . .”

 
          
Jeff
Hampton’s voice sounded strained and excited as the President picked up the
telephone near his chair.

 
          
“Say
that again, Jeff?” the President said, rubbing interrupted fitful sleep from
his eyes. He massaged a knotted muscle in his neck and forced himself to
concentrate.

 
          
“An
Air Defense alert was called about fifteen minutes ago over the
Kamchatka
peninsula,”
Hampton
repeated, gulping for air. “In
Russia
.”

 
          
“I
know where the goddamned
Kamchatka
peninsula is, Jeff. Go on.”

 
          
“An
unidentified aircraft, presumed to be American, disappeared off their radar.
Real close-in. Violated airspace. It... it had a call sign similar to ... to
the one General Elliott was using.”

 
          
“Elliott?
Brad Elliott? My God!”

 
          
“Not
confirmed sir, but—”

 
          
“I’ll
be right down. Alert General Curtis. Have him meet me in the Situation Room on
the double.”

 
          
The
President hurried out of the parlor, quickly dressed and went downstairs.

 
          
Brad Elliott, you old devil. .. You got in.
You son of a bitch—you made it in.

 
          
Wendy
could only focus on the video threat-display. Millions of watts of energy,
directed along specific frequency and power ranges, were at her command, yet
she stared transfixed at two erratic waves along one line of the threat
display. Her hands were flat on her thighs, palms down, despite the Old Dog’s
steep bank turn which usually made her grab onto her ejection seat armrests.

 
          
The
audio pickup of the two radars was hypnotizing. The first radar emitted a
scratchy bleeping sound, like a seal’s bark. It had begun as an intermittent
signal but was now coming over twice as fast—India-band narrow-scan search
radar, aimed directly at them. The second radar gave off a higher-pitched
squeal, like a rusty hinge. It signaled the presence of a Golf-band
height-finder, supplying altitude information to a surface-to- air missile’s
guidance computer.

 
          
The
computer-controlled threat analyzer apparently couldn’t make up its mind—it was
switching its analysis symbol from “2” to “3,” indicating SA-2 or SA-3
strategic missiles, which were usually designed for high- altitude penetrators.
Some SA-2 systems on ships or in remote deployment areas carried nuclear
warheads. The missiles . . . they called them “telephone poles” in
Vietnam
. . . were barely capable against
low-altitude penetrators—but the Old Dog was well within the missile’s lethal
range.

 
          
“All
radars in standby,” Luger announced, double-checking both his and McLanahan’s
controls. He blinked in surprise at his pressure altimeter—it read minus sixty
feet. He checked the radar altimeter readout on McLanahan’s video screen and
saw that it was pegged at a hundred feet. One hundred feet! If the COLA
computer didn’t compensate properly, at this altitude with only twenty degrees
of bank they’d drag a wingtip in the water.

 
          
With
an unsteady hand he reset the Kollsmann window on his pressure altimeter until
it read a hundred feet. He could almost see the water skimming below him at
over six hundred feet a second. He could do nothing else but monitor the
instruments, watch and wait.

 
          
“Wendy?”

 
          
“Yes?”

 
          
“Wendy,”
McLanahan shouted over the intercom. “Wendy. Answer me.”

 
          
“Patrick,
I . . .” She closed her eyes, focusing on his voice. She opened her eyes, took
a deep breath, became aware again of the threat analyzer in front of her.

 
          
“Steady
tracking and surveillance signals,” she reported, her voice stronger. “Tracking
us, but no guidance or uplink.”

 
          
Elliott
watched the tiny blob of lights in the distance. Suddenly he saw a small shaft
of light flare brightly, erupting from the outskirts of the town.

 
          
“Missile
launch! SA-2!” from Wendy.

 
          
“Fve
got it, I can see it,” Elliott said.