Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01 (57 page)

 
          
From
directly on the stern the Old Dog’s radar signature was miniscule. When Elliott
and Ormack hauled the bomber into forty degrees of bank, however, that radar
signature bloomed several times its original size . . . it was like seeing a
book edge-on, then turning it so the whole cover could be seen. There was no
mistaking it for ground clutter now.

 
          
The
right AA-7 missile was distracted by the chaff, but that distraction added up
to scarcely seven feet. The missile passed directly over the center of the Old
Dog’s fuselage and just in front of the leading edge of the right wing. When
the seeker head snapped over to try to follow the steering signal, its
eighty-nine-pound warhead detonated.

 
          
Dave
Luger felt nothing. It was simply as if his entire right side instrument
console, his computer keyboard and parts of his radar had freed themselves from
their secured places on the aircraft and ended up in his lap and in his face
all at once. The concussion would have knocked him clear out of his seat and
across the
Megafortress'
tiny
offensive compartment, but his shoulder and lap belts held him securely in his
seat and subjected his upper body to the entire force of the blast that
penetrated the fibersteel skin.

 
          
He
felt hands across his shoulders and chest, but still no pain. He fought to
focus his eyes and finally gave up on that. Air sucked out of his chest, debris
from everywhere flew around him.

 
          
“Dave.
” McLanahan reached across the
narrow aisle between their two downward ejection seats and propped Luger upright,
straining against the weight of the two-G turn that Elliott and Ormack were
still executing. “Dave’s hit!’’

 
          
“Yer
crazy, radar,’’ Luger muttered, but as McLanahan moved him upright his head
dropped against the headrest on his ejection seat and rocked uncontrollably as
the pilots fought for control of the crippled bomber.

 
          
Luger
could feel his head jolted from side to side but was unable to convince his
neck muscles to do anything about it... “I’m fine, I’m fine,’’ he said. “Hey,
my scope is out.. .”

           
“Out” was a considerable
understatement—it was as if a giant metal-eating monster had bitten off half
the million-dollar cathode-ray tube. McLanahan reached down and locked Luger’s
inertial reel on his ejection seat, which helped his partner stay upright in
the seat. “How are the computers, Patrick?’’

 
          
“Screw
the computers for now,’’ McLanahan replied, unstrapping himself.

 
          
“Stay
strapped in, Pat—”

 
          
“Just
shut up
for a second, Dave,’’
McLanahan said quietly. He reached for the first aid kit secured to the
bulkhead behind his seat, glancing at the computer displays as he opened it...
they were still working, no faults or interruptions.

 
          
“The
computers are fine, Dave.’’ He braced himself against the sliding nav’s table
and examined his partner. “Oh, God ...”

 
          
“I’m
fine, I told you,’’ Luger mumbled again. McLanahan held up a large gauze square
from the first aid kid but was unsure about what to do first. He had never seen
bone before, clean, white bone, except on a T-bone steak . . . the thought made
him gag, but he forced the thought away . . .

 
          
“Put
a bandage on whatever’s wrong there, Pat,” Luger said, “and let’s get back to
work.” Luger raised a finger to wipe moisture out of his right eye. When he
looked at it his entire hand was covered in glistening red blood.

 
          
“Ohhh
. . .”

 
          
“Sit
still,” was all McLanahan could say as he covered the right side of Luger’s
face with a thick pad of gauze and taped it secure. Luger sat through it all as
if he were getting a haircut.

 
          
McLanahan
checked Luger’s neck and chest, brushing away fragments of glass and
fibersteel. The flight jacket and flightsuit had protected Luger’s upper body,
it seemed.

 
          
“I’m
all right,” Luger said, his voice now muffled slightly through the gauze. “I
twisted my leg a little, that’s all, forget it. . . but turn the heat up, will
ya? It’s gettin’ cold in here . . .”

 
          
“Let
me take a—”

 
          
“I
said forget it.”

 
          
But
McLanahan had already ducked under the table to investigate. He stayed out of
view for a few moments, came up to retrieve the first aid kit, then emerged
again a few moments later.

 
          
Luger
had felt nothing but a few tugs on his right leg. “See? I told you, mom.”

 
          
McLanahan
returned to his seat, his body jerking from side to side from the turbulence as
the Old Dog crested another ridgeline in the mountains of the
Kamchatka
. He stared silently down at his worktable.

 
          
“All
done playing Florence Nightingale?” Luger said as he reached down to his right
thigh, touched, felt nothing. But when he brought his hand up he found it
covered with sticky, darkening blood.

 
          
He
finally met McLanahan’s eyes. “Strong like a bull.” He readjusted his headset,
lowered the microphone to his lips. “Nav’s up and okay,” he said over the
interphone.

 
          
General
Elliott began, “David . . . ?”

 
          
“Lost
my radar, sir,” Luger said, forcing iron back into his voice. He tried to punch
up a systems-diagnostic routine on his terminal but only a few buttons were
left on his keyboard. He strained across the worktable to use McLanahan’s
terminal. “Looks like we’re still talking to the
Scorpion
missiles through our controls but I’ve no search video.
All the terrain-following computers look okay, all the weapons controls are out
but that’s a moot point now ...”

 
          
“All
right,” Elliott said, trying to steady his voice. “Crew we’ve lost cabin
pressurization. Wendy, Angelina, can you see that guy out there?”

 
          
“I’ve
got his search radar shut down,” Wendy replied. “I lost him right after he
launched . . .” It was, of course, no longer just “a launch”—the Russian had hit
one of their own, hurt him . . .

 
          
“Wendy,
I’m okay,” Luger said quickly, as though sensing her thoughts. “You . . . you
ladies nail him ...”

 
          
“My
scope’s clear,” Angelina said. “We’ll get him.”

 
          
“Sure
. . . they’ve taken their best shot and they couldn’t flame us. Sure . . .”

 
 
          
*
 
*
 
*

 
          
Yuri
Papendreyov angrily switched frequencies on his attack radar. The heavy jamming
from the American B-52 attacker had begun precisely when he hit the
missile-launch button on his control stick. The missile left the rail with a
good steady TRACK indication but he lost it soon afterward. He saw no primary
or secondary explosions, saw no crash indications and the jamming was
continuing harder than ever. So he had to assume his AA-7s had missed, and that
he had to start all over again—but this time closer to the mountains, at least
three hundred meters above the bomber with no radar and with three thousand
kilograms less fuel.

 
          
He
leveled off at the minimal sector altitude, throttled back to ninety percent
and began a slow roll to the left to try to reacquire the B-52. The
auto-frequency shift mode of his attack radar, which randomly changed
frequencies to try to defeat the B-52
^,
s jamming, was all but
useless. The shift was too little, too late, and it always seemed to shift
right into a jammed band. Yuri changed the frequency all the way to the lower
end of the scale and swept the area for the bomber.

 
          
Who
would have believed it? he thought. A B-52 in the middle of restricted Soviet
airspace. A lone B-52, at that. No escort, no wave of cruise missiles preceding
it, no mutual defenses, no B-l, no FB-111 raid like the one on Libya and Syria
two years before.
One B-52
.

 
          
Well,
why not, Yuri said to himself as he began to search another twenty-degree
quadrant. The plan was working very damn well so far. The B-52 had obviously
flown several thousand kilometers, drove right up the Kamchatka,
and
dropped a bomb on just about the
most important piece of land in the Soviet Union next to Red Square itself.

 
          
There
... at the very bottom of his
radar . . . just before another wave of interference flooded his scope, a cross
with a circle around it appeared, then disappeared. Hostile radar emissions.
The B-52
^,
s own radar, the one that obviously was used to steer
whatever weapon they had launched against him, had given them away.

 
          
He
rolled further left on an intercept course. Switching the attack radar to
STANDBY to avoid giving himself away—it was useless, anyway, with the heavy
jamming—he maneuvered to parallel the B-52’s course. The radar emission from
the B-52 was sporadic—they were looking for him, he was sure, but being careful
not to transmit too long. Not careful enough, though. They transmitted on their
radar long enough for him to compute their track.

 
          
He
set the infrared search-and-track seeker to maximum depression and waited for
the supercooled eye of the seeker to find the B-52—there was, he knew, the
possibility of the seeker locking onto a warm building with the angle so low,
but eight jet engines should be brighter than anything else in the sky or on
the ground right now. He was already at the minimum safe altitude for the
sector he was in, and without solid visual contact on the terrain, descending
any lower would be suicide. He increased throttle to ninety-five percent and
waited. Soon, he was sure, the range would decrease to the point where the
seeker would lock-on, and then he’d stay high and pick off the intruder . . .

 
          
When
a few minutes later the infrared seeker locked onto a hot target there was no
mistaking the size or intensity of the target. The infrared seeker had a longer
range than the AA-6 missile, so, he realized, he would need to close in on the
B-52 a bit more.

 
          
Yuri
thought about using the attack radar once more to get a range-only estimate on
the B-52, but that would give him away. If he was in range of a
surveillance-radar site they could give him a range to the B-52, but for some
reason he couldn’t hear the station at Korf or Ossora. Probably too low, too
close to the mountains ... if he couldn’t hear them on the radio they surely
couldn’t see him on radar.

 
          
Yuri’s
track had been fairly constant for the last few moments, meaning that the B-52
was making no evasive maneuvers. He relaxed his grip on his control stick and
throttles . . . maybe they didn’t know he was behind them. The B-52’s tail
radar hadn’t been activated for several minutes. He had to launch before they
spotted him on that tail radar—

 
          
Suddenly
he felt it—a slight shudder through the titanium body of his
Fulcrum
fighter. He scanned his engine
instruments for a malfunction, but already suspected the cause—wake turbulence
from the B-52’s engines, he was closing quickly. He stared as hard as he could
out the canopy of his
Fulcrum
but
couldn’t see it.

 
          
But
that too was unnecessary. A moment later a green light spewed on his
weapon-control panel... his selected AA-6 heat-seeking missiles were tracking
the target.

 
          
He
released the safeties on the launch button on his control stick and—

 
          
A
scratchy, faded message blared on both of his command radios. “For all Ossora
and Korf units, code yellow. Repeat, code yellow. Acknowledge immediately and
comply.”