Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (45 page)

 
          
“We
will need the reserves, sir,” army commander, Brigadier General Mohammed
Sohrabi, said.

 
          
“Then
order a full reserve mobilization,” Buzhazi said. “Use the Basij to fill in as
necessary, but I want the sea lanes full of Iranian patrol vessels
immediately—not six or twelve months from now— shadowing every tanker and every
cargo ship that moves through the strait. And I want full air patrols as
well—around-the-clock, low-altitude, sustained combat air patrols. I want our
forces to be visible to anyone within two hundred kilometers of our shores.
Test the GCC and American air forces. How do the Americans put it? Play ‘Red
Rover’ with them, probe their weaknesses.”

 
          
“I
may have found one, sir,” air forces commander Brigadier General Mansour
Sattari interjected. “We
saw
the
American’s stealth bomber last night.”

 
          
“You
what?”
Buzhazi dismissed his other
staff members, and sat down with Sattari, his handpicked man, hopefully soon to
be his chief of staff when he became President. “How was this done?”

 
          
“Sir,
stealth works because of two things: the stealth aircraft absorbs some radar
energy and redirects the rest into thin lobes that point in directions other
than back at the transmitter—the net result is that the transmitting radar
antenna gets very little of its signal returned, so it fails to correlate the
data and form a radar return,” Sattari explained. “The energy absorbed by the
skin of the plane and other systems—the so-called cloaking device these
aircraft are rumored to employ—is relatively small, perhaps ten to twenty
percent. The rest of the energy is still out there, but it is simply not
returned to the radar system that it should.”

 
          
“Get
on with it, Mansour.”

 
          
“Sir,
the problem is not that we cannot receive the signals, or that the signals are
not strong enough—the problem is that the antenna that must receive the signal
is in the
wrong place.
If it were
possible to move the receiving antenna and synchronize it with the transmitting
antenna, or use several different antennas so synchronized, the redirected
radar energy would be detected and the plane would appear on radar.

 
          
“For
very brief moments, this occurred last night. Purely by chance, we had two
radar facilities in perfect synchronization, an A-10 Mainstay radar plane over
the strait and a radar facility at Bandar Abbas; both stations were
electronically linked with each other, sharing radar data. When the radar
aircraft transmitted, the ground station received, and the stealth bomber
appeared on Bandar Abbas’s radar screen. It was lost a second later, not enough
time to track it or even reacquire it, but it
did appear.
”

 
          
“So
if we synchronize two radars deliberately,” Buzhazi said, “or even more than
two, we could spot the aircraft long enough to track it.”

 
          
“Yes,
very possible,” Sattari said. “I have my best engineers on the problem right
now. I assumed that you wanted to protect the
Khomeini
carrier group as best as possible, so I am setting up the
system using the
Khomeinis
long-range
radar as the master, with Chah Bahar’s long-range radar and with an A-10
Mainstay radar planes radar as the slaves. We must precisely match their
frequencies and timing so that when the master transmits, the slaves receive,
and vice versa. The slaves then report their findings back to the master by
datalink, which assembles the data and puts it together into an image. The best
part, sir,” Sattari went on, smiling a satisfied, evil smile, “is that the
stealth aircraft
may not even know it is
being tracked
/”

 
          
“How
is that possible, Mansour?”

 
          
“Because
we will be vectoring fighters in on the aircraft using long-range search radars
only,” Sattari explained. “The stealth aircraft believes it is invulnerable to
these radars. The radar of the fighters that will have the honor of shooting
down the stealth bomber will not be locked on to the aircraft until very close
in, and they may be able to lock a heat-seeking missile on long before the
stealth bomber s crew suspects that we see them! ”

 
          
“Excellent,
Mansour,
excellent
,” Buzhazi said
excitedly. “You will receive a promotion to deputy chief of staff if this
works. Implement the system immediately. Then see to it that we have massive
fighter formations in the air. If the Americans launch four fighters, I want
eight
to counter them.”

 
          
“Sir,
it may be unwise to begin such a mobilization so suddenly. It will inflame the
entire world against us!” Sattari protested.

 
          
“The
world, and especially the Americans and the Gulf Cooperative Council, will soon
learn how dangerous it is to provoke us!” Buzhazi said. “I want the
Strait of Hormuz
sealed tight, and I want the
Khomeini
battle group to spearhead it,
supported by fighters and bombers from Chah Bahar. The
Persian Gulf
will be ours now!”

Andersen Air Force Base, Yigo,
Guam

24 APRIL 1997
,
1838 HOURS LOCAL

 
          
The
dream was so real, he could feel it, hear it as clearly as if he were there
with the doomed plane—the screams of the KC-10 cockpit crew as their tanker
began spiraling in its death dive into the Gulf of Oman; the horrible crushing
impact as the plane hit the water at terminal velocity; the feel of the cold
sea, as hard and unyielding as rock, as it crushed their bodies, then dissolved
them into the brine. They were shouting,
screaming
his name, cursing it, cursing him, cursing his parents, cursing his stupidity.
. . .

 
          
Dammit,
he
had killed them, Patrick McLanahan
thought. He
never
should have
requested that tanker to come anywhere near
Iran
after the attacks on Bandar Abbas, the
Khomeini
carrier group, and Chah Bahar.
He
knew
the Iranian air force would
be on high alert,
knew
they’d be
patrolling the skies looking for revenge.... He could feel the ocean swallow
them up, feel the salt water carry them out, away from help, away from home. ..
.

 
          
It
was salt water, yes, but not from the
Gulf
of
Oman
—they were tears. Patrick found himself
crying in his sleep, mourning the loss of the KC-10 Extender crew. But as he
awoke, he found they were not only his own tears, but from ...

 
          
“Wendy!”
Patrick exclaimed. “My God, it’s
you
.”
He embraced his wife warmly, and they held each other tightly for several long
moments. The bandages were off her neck now, and a bit of hypoallergenic makeup
covered the wounds. Her hair was longer, tied in a complex-looking weave on the
back of her head.

 
          
“I
came in and I saw you crying in your sleep,” Wendy said to her husband. “It
hurt me so much to see you like that. I didn’t want to wake you, but I didn’t
want you to be in such pain.”

 
          
“Wendy,
what are you doing here?”

 
          
“When
you radioed NSA to tell them you got a tanker and that you were going to land
on Guam, Jon Masters loaded up his DC-10 launch aircraft, chartered about a
half dozen other cargo planes himself, and we hurried out here,” Wendy said.
“He’s got every NIRT- Sat and PACER SKY satellite, every ALARM booster, every
Disruptor-class weapon in his inventory out here, and he’s after blood for what
the Iranians did to the
Valley Mistress
and its crew.”

 
          
“You’re
with Sky Masters now?”

 
          
“I
signed up shortly after you left with General Freeman,” Wendy said. “I’m his
new vice president in charge of development. Jon got us a condo in
San Diego
, a car, a plane to take us to his plant in
Tonopah, the works.”

 
          
“The
tavern ... ?”

 
          
“I
leased it out to that development group,” Wendy replied. “I’m sorry I didn’t
ask you first, Patrick, but we both know you weren’t happy there. This way you
still keep ownership of the place, we have a little positive cash flow coming
in, and you’re free to save the world instead of busing tables. You can have it
back next year, or you can sell it to the group at any time. I hope you don’t
mind, but...”

 
          
Patrick
took her hand, squeezed it reassuringly, then kissed her fingers. “You did the
right thing, Wendy,” Patrick said. “You’re right: I wasn’t happy there. But I
didn’t have the courage to say so.” His eyes drifted away for a moment, staring
at some scene replaying in his mind’s eye.

 
          
But
Wendy took his face in her hands and said sternly,
“Stop
that right now, Mr. McLanahan. I know what you’re doing: you’re
imagining those KC-10 crew members dying after being shot down.”

 
          
“You
heard about that?”

 
          
“Not
officially. . . but yes, Jon Masters monitors everything,” Wendy said. “We
heard what you did with his Disruptors over Bandar Abbas, over the
Khomeini
carrier group. But we found out
that you weren’t tasked to go in and launch ‘screamers’ against Chah Bahar. Hal
Briggs put that rescue mission together himself, then called you,
in the blind,
asking for your help.
Patrick, that strike was a complete success! I heard Briggs found many of the
survivors, got them out. Why are you so unhappy?”

 
          
“Wendy,
that KC-10 crew, they’d still be alive if I hadn’t told them to come get us all
the way into the Gulf of Oman,” Patrick said. “I wanted to get a refueling so I
could continue back to Whiteman instead of having to abort to Diego, so I
practically
ordered
those guys to
come in and get me. They died because of my stupidity.”

 
          
“Those
guys died doing something they loved to do,” Wendy said. “If you hadn’t asked
them to come get you, they would’ve come in anyway. They accepted the risks
because they wanted to fight, wanted to make a difference, wanted to be part of
this operation as much as you did. It’s a shitty job and a shitty way to
die—you said so yourself. You know about it as much or better than anyone. But
I know you, Patrick: the second you step onto that ramp, you’ll want to be back
up there. Wait until you see the stuff Masters brought with him—you won’t be
able to wait to shoot a few of those things off.”

 
          
Sure
enough, his eyes began to glisten with anticipation as she mentioned Jon
Masters and his new missiles. He started to sit up in bed, but Wendy placed a
hand against his chest and pushed him back down.

 
          
“If
you get up, if you go out there, you do it with no regrets,” Wendy said. “You
can’t have it both ways. The things you will say and do once you go out there
will set other lives, other futures in motion, do you understand, Patrick? It
will cut some of those futures off, and it will affect them all—some good, some
bad. If you say yes to the next mission, you put other lives in jeopardy again.
Can you live with that?”

 
          
“I
want revenge, Wendy,” Patrick said, sitting up in bed, his eyes blazing into
hers. “I want to make the Iranians pay for what they did to the
Valley Mistress
, what they did to that
KC-10 crew. Is that okay with you?”

 
          
“What
you’ll get is more killing, Patrick,” Wendy said. “It won’t stop until someone
calls for peace instead of war. You’re a war maker, not a peacemaker, Patrick.
Is that okay with
you?”

 
          
“You’re
damned right it’s okay with me!”

 
          
“Then
stop giving me that thousand-yard stare,” Wendy said angrily. “Stop crying in
your sleep mourning other warriors who only want what
you
yourself want! If you’re going to go out there and kill, do it
well and get it over with and come home and be a husband and father. Don’t feel
guilty because you’re doing something you believe in. Do it and let’s go home—
together
.”