Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01 (55 page)

 
          
“Two
minutes ten seconds.”

 
          
“All
right. Switch all your stuff to STANDBY. It’ll come back up by launch time. If
it doesn’t we’ll slick the bomb, fly over that laser and drop it like a regular
bomb.” He rechecked the DCU-239 weapon-arming panel. “We might have another
problem.”

 
          
“Such
as?” from Elliott.

 
          
“The
generator-fluctuation knocked out DC power to the arming panel,” McLanahan told
him. “I’ve got no weapon indications at all.”

 
          
“It
should still be good—”

 
          
“I
don’t know what the bomb will do,” McLanahan said quietly. Everyone on board
heard the muted statement, even over the roar of the turbofans.

 
          
“You
mean it won’t explode?” Wendy said. “We’ve come all this way, and it won’t
work?”

 
          
“I
mean I don’t know its status. It may or may not be armed, it may be armed but
be a dud ... I just don’t know.”

 
          
“All
this way ... all this sacrifice ... for nothing?”

 
          
“One
minute to launch point,” Luger said.

 
          
“I’ll
try to rearm the weapon,” McLanahan said, and began to run the pre-arming
checklists again. “Nothing,” he muttered finally. “Battery power . . .
recycling . . . sensor power . . . nothing. I’ve still got uplink power, so the
thing will fly, but I still don’t know what it will do.”

 
          
The
crew of the Old Dog grew very quiet.

 
          
“I’ve
got my threat receivers back,” Wendy announced. “Signal from Kavaznya . . .
beginning to shift again.”

 
          
“All
the decoys are gone,” McLanahan said. “I launched them just before the laser
fired—”

 
          
“Power
won’t be back on the anti-radiation missiles for two minutes,” Angela said.
“That was our last hope.”

 
          
“Angelina
. . . preparation for ejection checklist,” Elliott ordered, face tight.

 
          
Luger
looked at McLanahan, who stared straight ahead, clenching and unclenching his
fists.

 
          
“Wendy,
try to give us some warning before the laser fires,” Elliott told her.

 
          
Wendy
clicked her microphone in response, said nothing. She could barely see the
subtle frequency shifts through the interference, and even if she did spot the
radar lock-on she knew they wouldn’t be able to eject before the laser beam
blew them into atoms.

 
          
“I’ll
trim it for a slight climb,” Elliott said. “Maybe this beast will stall right
over their heads, the sonsofbitches. Crew, our mission was to destroy that
laser complex. I’ll give the command to eject, wait until everyone is out, then
crash the plane into the complex. Prepare for—”

 
          
‘
Wait
, ” McLanahan said. “You can’t do
that. We’ll still drop the damn bomb—”

 
          
“You
said it wouldn’t explode.”

 
          
“I
said I don’t know its status. My job is to drop it on the target. Your job,
sir
; is to get us out of here.”

 
          
“We
can’t risk it. If the bomb doesn’t go off we’ve failed and we’ll take the heat
for nothing—”

 
          
“We
can’t just
quit
. . .”

 
          
“McLanahan,
this is an order.
Prepare for ejection.
”

 
          
Luger
began to tighten the straps of his parachute harness. He zipped his jacket up
all the way, looked over at his partner. “Pat, you’d better—” “How much time,
Dave?”

           
“Pat ...”

 
          
“Dave, how much time?”

           
“Thirty seconds. But—”

 
          
“Close
enough.” McLanahan hit the AUTOFIX button on his control keyboard, which
entered a present-position update into the
Striker
glide- bomb’s computer. He then opened the bay doors with the mechanical handles
on the overhead panel and pulled a yellow-painted handle next to it marked
SPECIAL WEAPONS ALTERNATE RELEASE.

 
          
“Bomb
away, General, now please get us out of here.”

 
          
Elliott
had been adjusting his straps when he saw the BOMB DOORS OPEN and WEAPON
RELEASE lights snap on. “We’re too far, we won’t have time to—”

 
          
“We’re
not bombing that laser with
this
plane,’’ McLanahan challenged. “Break left, get us out of here ...”

 
          
After
that everything seemed to happen in slow motion. It was like watching a slide
show, the frames clicking off one by one, the sound turned off. . .

 
          
Elliott
stood the Old Dog on its left wingtip, whipping it to forty-five degrees of
bank. The stall-warning horn blared but no one paid attention to it, if they
could hear it. The general could
feel
the Old Dog slipping sideways—which was
downward
at forty-five degrees of bank—as it changed heading in its rudderless turn.
Remarkably, it didn’t hit the frozen ground . . .

 
          
Wendy
released her grip on her ejection seat’s triggers, held her finger on the CHAFF
SALVO button, ejecting fifty bundles of chaff in one massive cloud just as the
Old Dog began its turn. She would have kept ejecting chaff if the force of the
turn hadn’t pushed her finger off the button . . .

 
          
Ormack,
unable to help out in any other way, tried by “seat-of-the- pants” to hold in
enough back-pressure on the yoke to keep the turn going without forcing the
Megafortress
into a stall. To his
surprise, he found that his and Elliott’s efforts were in almost total
coordination . . .

 
          
In
spite of the hard break McLanahan managed to stay focused on the flight path of
the
Striker
glide-bomb as it dropped
from the Old Dog’s bomb bay, saw the
Striker's
TV monitor flare to life as the glide-bomb cleared the weapons bay.

 
          
McLanahan’s
hand-entered DR position was almost perfect. The center of the Kavaznya laser
complex was dead in the center of the low-light TV screen. When a message
printed out on the monitor stating that a visual low-light sensor lock-on was
available, he pressed the LOCK switch to insure that the bomb would make it to
the target. Even if the Old Dog didn’t survive the bomb would now fly itself to
the target . . .

 
          
“Radar
switching to target-tracking mode,” from Wendy.

 
          
“Prepare
for ejection, crew,” from Elliott. “Blinking light coming on.” He reached down
to the center console and flicked on the ejection-warning switch. The large red
light between the two navigators began to blink furiously.

           
“Steady light is the order to
eject—”

 
          
“No.
Continue the break. If you do a
complete one-eighty, do another one to the right. Don’t give up now—”

 
          
“If
they let go with that laser there won’t be time to eject—”

 
          
“You’ll
be murdering this crew if you order us to eject,” McLanahan said.

 
          
“But
the bomb . . .”

 
          
McLanahan
now acted on his own. He switched to the infrared display—the picture was near
simulator-perfect. He could make out the “warm” town above the “hot” laser
complex, and the “cold”
Bering Sea
beyond. He shifted the tracking handle slightly to the left, centering the
aiming reticle onto the hottest infrared return in the complex. The
Striker's
steering uplink system was
working perfectly. The strap-on mini-rocket engine had not yet fired—it was
flying over a thousand feet higher than programmed, and the extra altitude
meant a longer unassisted gliding ability.

 
          
The
infrared orange laser site slowly began to enlarge as it got closer— the
Striker
was locked onto a huge power
substation. McLanahan was just about to switch to narrow field-of-view and
begin precise aiming when he noticed another “hot” object in the upper left
corner of the infrared display, far above the main reactor complex in the
valley.

 
          
He
had only moments to study it before it went out of view, but he could make out
a huge complex . . . only the base was “hot,” four-fifths of the structure was
“cold.” Just before it went out of view he switched back to low-light visual
display.

 
          
In
this visual mode there was no mistaking it. The dome, large as a stadium, was
clearly visible, with a large rectangular slot open and pointing directly at
the Old Dog. McLanahan remembered back to Elliott’s first briefing on the
Kavaznya site, when he passed around early reconnaissance photographs of the
complex.

 
          
The
mirror building.

 
          
McLanahan’s
reaction was instantaneous. He moved the tracking handle left and aft all the
way to the stops to get the dome back on the screen.

 
          
Luger
was watching his own monitor in shock. “Pat . . . what are you—?”

 
          
“The
mirror,” McLanahan said. “It’s the mirror building . .

 
          
“But
the substation . . .”

 
          
McLanahan
said nothing as he watched while a yellow SRB IGNITE appeared on the screen,
indicating that the glide-bomb’s strap-on rocket booster had fired in response
to new steering commands. The substation slowly moved out of view.

 
          
“The
substation ...” Luger said again.

           
“I’m gonna punch a hole in the
mirror building. Even if the bomb doesn’t go off it should do enough damage to
put this place out of commission.”

 
          
The
visual scene began to grow darker as the rugged hills above the Kavaznya
complex and the town rushed just below the visual display. McLanahan had to
hold the tracking handle full-back as the rocky ridgelines grew closer and
closer.

 
          
Luger yelled, “It's going to crash. ”

           
But a moment later the last
rock-covered ridgeline disappeared from view and the huge mirror-housing dome
filled the TV monitor. McLanahan pushed the tracking handle down and centered
the aiming reticle on the top of the dome’s pedestal. Both navigators watched
in fascination as the dome rushed forward right into the TV screen.

 
          
The
six-inch glass eye of the
Striker
somehow stayed intact through the one-inch-thick fiberglas panels of the dome,
so the two navigators were able to eavesdrop on the
Striker's
exact impact point—the steel girders and counterbalances
supporting the massive mirror.

 
          
The
robot eye passed precisely through two support arms, and the bomb came to rest
on the very base of the mirror support-structure. Instantly Russian technicians
and security guards could be seen running around the weapon.

 
          
“It
didn’t go off,” Luger said. “It’s a dud, it didn’t go off—”

 
          
“Radar
locked onto us,” Wendy broke through. “Solid lock-on, they’ve got us . . .”

 
          
McLanahan
had tuned out the hubub of noise inside the Old Dog and was staring,
transfixed, at the
Striker's
TV
screen. More soldiers surrounded the
Striker
as it lay inside the mirror building.