Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01

by Flight of the Old Dog (v1. 1)

  “Tailed! Me? Why would anybody tail me?”

  Jenkins let out a half laugh, half snort in the car’s darkness. “Shee-it,” he said, chuckling humorlessly again, “liyou don’t know, Captain, it must be bad news.”

  And, at that, the hairs rose on the back of McLanahan’s neck. Jenkins’ words echoed through his head as the lights of the airport grew larger and brighter.

  If you don't know, Captain, it must be bad news.

  Jenkins’ monotone voice finally penetrated McLanahan’s reverie as the car bypassed the main terminal and headed for a row of hangars adjacent to the taxiways, away from the jet parking ramp. The car’s driver had already doused the headlights.

  “Your bag will catch up with you, Captain, don’t worry,” he was saying. “Remember now—walk away from the car about ten steps then just stop and . . . wait. ” McLanahan had to smile at Jenkins’ emphasis on the word ‘wait,’ but apparently Jenkins didn’t notice. “Someone will meet you and tell you what to do.”

  The car pulled to a stop in the middle of a deserted parking ramp, far from the brilliantly lit terminal. The door on McLanahan’s side was opened by some dark figure outside. He noticed no interior courtesy lights illuminated—someone had punched holes in the plastic lenses with a knife.

  “Sorry for the mixups, Sergeant Jenkins,” McLanahan said in a low voice in keeping with the hushed, tense atmosphere.

  “No problem, sir,” Jenkins said. His walkie-talkie crackled, and he spoke a few words into it. Then, he added, “Good luck,” and pulled the door closed. The car moved off and was soon lost in the darkness.

  “I don’t need luck,” McLanahan said to himself, looking around in the gloom. “What I need is out of here.”

  The ramp was completely dark—even the small blue taxiway lights leading from the runway were turned off. McLanahan put the terminal on his right side and stepped forward ten paces, as carefully as if he was following a pirate’s treasure map. Somehow, he could feel people all around him, lots of eyes watching him, talking about him, but he couldn’t see a thing. He could make out a large, seemingly deserted hangar behind him, its huge front bay door open like a dark cave entrance. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he spotted a few light single-engined Cessnas tied down to his left. The parking ramp was breezy and beginning to grow cold.

  He made a motion to pull down his jacket sleeve and check his watch, but he suppressed that urge. This time, he was just going to stand and wait. Checking the time would only make him that much more impatient. He zipped his jacket up all the way, shoved his hands in his pockets, and stood watching the runway.

  McLanahan guessed that about fifteen minutes had passed since Jenkins dropped him off. His eyes were fully adjusted to the dark now. There were small birds everywhere, jumping and peeping nervously around him. An occasional rabbit scampered down the asphalt, stopping every now and then to test the air and sniff for danger. Once McLanahan thought he heard the static of a walkie-talkie nearby, but he saw no one. He watched every plane that landed—there were only two—expecting it to pull up in front of him any minute, but they never did.

  Another ten minutes passed—or was it another fifteen or twenty? The sky was beginning to clear, and the temperature was taking a noticeable dip. Whoever he was supposed to meet out here was going to find a frozen navigator Popsicle because McLanahan was determined not to screw it up again, even if it meant catching pneumonia. He stamped the cold from his sneakers a few times, then removed his hands from the pockets of his light nylon windbreaker and blew warm air on them.

  Let’s get on with it, boys, McLanahan said to himself. He blew on his palms once again, cursing the air nipping at his uncovered ears, and slapped two chilly palms together irritably.

  He never heard the slap. At that exact instant, in the dark hangar directly behind him, a high-pitched whine erupted.

  McLanahan jumped an easy six inches and spun quickly toward the noise. As he turned, he was blinded by the glare of a set of four landing and taxi lights aimed directly at him. He had completely misjudged the distance. The lights were less than fifty yards away.

  The whine became a low, bellowing roar, and a twin-engined jet taxied rapidly from within the dark hangar, the blinding lights focused directly on the lone figure on the ramp. It seemed to leap out at him, like a tiger springing through a hoop at a circus. McLanahan could not have moved if he had wanted to.

  The jet sped up beside him, the wingtip fuel tanks passing a mere five feet from where he stood anchored on the ramp. A curved airstair door was flung open, and a lone man with an Air Force-looking uniform grabbed McLanahan’s upper arm with a tight grip and half-guided, half- dragged him to the doorway of the screaming jet.

  He was guided with a push onto a hard airliner seat, and a seat belt was quickly yanked around him. The belt was snapped tight around his waist, and McLanahan felt a prickle of panic. They weren’t concerned for his safety at all—they wanted him to stay put.

  He watched as the man who had pulled him aboard placed a headset over his head and thrust his face forward. He ordered, “I.D. card. Quickly.”

  McLanahan was startled by the sudden command, and impulsively reached into his right back pocket where the card always was. It wasn’t there. He squirmed around and felt for the card in his left back pocket. Not there, either.

  “Quickly!” the man said again. He pulled a boom mike near his lips and spoke a few clipped words into it. McLanahan glanced at a pair of wildlooking, dark eyes, then turned away as he furiously patted his pockets. Glancing toward the front of the jet, he saw the copilot leaning to his left into the narrow aisle between him and the pilot. The copilot wore a camouflaged helmet and a green flight suit. With a start, McLanahan noticed the copilot half-concealing a stubby, short-barrelled Uzi submachine gun behind the cockpit curtain.

  “Oh, shit,” McLanahan said. His hands flew over his pockets, finally finding the card in his left front pocket. He fished it out and held it up to the man pinning him in the seat, nearly clipping a piece of the man’s nose off in the process.

  The man snapped on a tiny red-beamed flashlight, examined the card, then swept the tiny beam of light across McLanahan’s dumbfounded face. The man’s hard features softened a bit, washing clear with an immense sense of relief.

  He pulled the mike closer to his lips and leapt to his feet. “Let’s roll, pilot,” he shouted, dropping the card in McLanahan’s lap. The Uzi peeking behind the curtain disappeared. The man with the headset scurried back and hauled up the airstair door and dogged it closed. A few short moments later, the jet was screaming skyward.

  The guard wearily dropped into a seat across from McLanahan and took a moment or two to take a few deep breaths.

  “Sorry about all that, Captain,” the man said after the plane was safely on its way. “When you disappeared from the airport terminal, we got a little nervous. We may have overreacted a bit. I’m sorry if we got a little rough.”

  “I’m the one who should be apologizing, I think,” McLanahan said, slowly recovering from his shock. “I’ve handled this whole thing pretty irresponsibly. Are you Major Miller, the one I was finally supposed to contact?”

  The man laughed and nodded toward the epaulets on his shoulders.

  “No, Captain. I’m First Lieutenant Harold Briggs. I work for the project coordinator. We are Major Miller.”

  “We?”

  “Major Miller was a code name for you, ” Briggs explained. “Whenever you or someone from your unit mentioned Major Miller, my section was notified. I’m in charge of getting you to the project coordinator.”

  “The project coordinator? Who is he?”

  “You’ll find that out soon,” Briggs replied. “We’re on our way, finally, to meet him. Meanwhile, if you need anything, just let me know. Call me Hal, please. I’ll be working with you for the entire duration of the project.”

  “The project?”

  “Yes, sir,” Briggs said, smiling. “I can’t tell you about th
at. You’ll have to see the project coordinator for that. But, I am your aide from now on.”

  “Aide, huh?” McLanahan said. “Well, I don’t know if I can handle that.” He extended a hand. “Call me Patrick and can the ‘sir’ stuff, okay?”

  “You got it.” They shook hands, and Briggs stowed his headset in an overhead rack and flicked on a light. Hal Briggs was very, very young, with short-cropped black hair on top of a lean, thin face and dark brown eyes. He wore lieutenant epaulets on his blue fatigues, a pair of Army paratrooper’s wings, and an Air Force Security Police badge over his left breast pocket. McLanahan noticed he wore a green webbed infantry belt over his blue Air Force trousers, but he couldn’t see the weapon holstered there.

  “Sergeant Jenkins said something about me being tailed,” McLanahan said as Briggs opened a small refrigerator near his seat and pulled out a couple of beers.

  “Yeah,” Briggs said, popping open his can and handing the other to McLanahan. Briggs tipped his can to McLanahan and took a long swallow.

  “Call it youthful exuberance. When you showed up at the terminal, then suddenly disappeared, I got . . . nervous. I called Sergeant Jenkins, who was my backup out there from Fairchild, and I sounded the alarm. Boy, those OSI guys can move out. ”

  “You’re not OSI?”

  “No.” Briggs smiled. “Anyway, Jenkins had a search organized in no time. We were more or less in control of the tactical environment, as we say in the game, at the airport. When you moved to the base, we lost control. Hell, we ... I painted a half-dozen different scenarios about what happened to you. All bad.”

  “Whoa, whoa!” McLanahan held up a tired hand. “Happened to me? I don’t get it. What are you guys so afraid of? What can happen to me? And why me in the first place?”

  Briggs drained his beer and reached for another.

  “Pat, you are very, very hot property right now,” he said, watching McLanahan’s wide-eyed expression from behind the upturned beer can. “If we lost you, if something happened to you, if you didn’t arrive at the project headquarters by tomorrow noon ...” He finished the beer in a few long, furious gulps, then said, “the vibrations would be felt all the way . . . to the top.”

  “Hal,” McLanahan said, his mouth suddenly very dry, “that’s not an explanation.” For the second time, the hairs on the back of his neck were catching a breeze from somewhere. “The top? Top of what?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He reached for the refrigerator door, then stopped, reconsidering, and sat back in his chair and looked at McLanahan. “Listen, there’s very little I can tell you. But I do know this. I was authorized to make that fucking little airpatch out there look like Entebbe. I was authorized, Patrick. Authorized to do any damned thing . . .”

  It was at that moment that McLanahan noticed the Uzi strapped to Briggs’ waist.

  8 Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada

  It was late in the evening when Harold Briggs escorted McLanahan from his small, musty billeting room to another building a few hundred yards away. McLanahan realized that all his movements—from the time he landed on that long, long jet flight from Spokane till now—were intended to keep his location a secret.

  Why Briggs and the others were trying to keep his location a secret from him, he couldn’t figure—but they had only partially succeeded. Although he had been taken from the jetport to his room at night through the back door, and although they had apparently tried to erase all traces of his location, he stumbled across the words “NELLIS AUX 5” engraved on the side of a desk in his room. The Learjet they had picked him up with at Spokane, he knew, had a range of about a thousand miles at the speed their pilot was flying—the pilot had kept the engines at full bore the whole way. And if that hadn’t been enough, the dry, cold evening and the roar of high-performance jets—not airliners, but military fighters—screaming in the distance gave it away.

  Well, so what? He was at Nellis or one of the myriad of airfields, stations, training camps, or ranges in the vicinity. He hoped more answers were on the way when, after an entire day of nothing to do, Briggs knocked on his door and told him they were going to meet the project coordinator . . .

  McLanahan and Briggs now sat alone in a small briefing room. They had been sitting in the same room for twenty minutes.

  McLanahan was about to turn to Briggs and ask how much longer it would be when the door opened and in stepped . . .

  “General Elliott!” McLanahan said. He sprang so quickly to his feet that he felt as though he had left some part of himself back in the chair.

  “At ease, Patrick,” General Elliott said, smiling. He took McLanahan’s hand and shook it. “Welcome to my nightmare.”

  McLanahan was too stunned to clasp hands. Elliott recognized this and steered him to his chair again.

  Elliott wore a flightsuit with three subdued stars on each shoulder and subdued Strategic Air Command insignia on the arms and front. The squadron patch read “3 ACCS,” the Airborne Command and Control Squadron from SAC Headquarters. He also wore a .45 automatic pistol strapped to his waist, and carried a large chart-carrying case and three Thermos bottles.

  Elliott flipped his wooden chair around and sat down on it with a tired thud. He studied McLanahan’s still-surprised face. “Relax, Patrick. You’ll have your explanation in a moment.”

  McLanahan blinked at the words. Was his mouth hanging open or something? He took a deep breath and wiped moisture from his palms.

  “Coffee?” Elliott asked, extending separate Thermoses to McLanahan and Briggs. “Actually, Hal, there’s coke in yours. I know you’d prefer a beer but ...”

  Briggs nodded and smiled. “I understand, sir.”

  “All right,” Elliott said, “here we go. This entire conversation is top secret. It is restricted to just us. No one else at all. I have no assistant, aides, or staffers that need to know what’s been discussed. I don’t have to ask if the room’s secure, because it’s my room and my compound and I know it’s secure. That’s the way this project is being run.

  “By the way, Hal, you’re in on this because I want you to realize all that’s happening from here on in. I think you’ll be able to operate better when you’ve got the complete picture. Patrick, Hal here has been on my security staff for a year now. He was assigned to security units for the Pentagon and at SAC until I grabbed him. Now he works for you. He’ll make sure that foul-ups like the one we had at Spokane don’t happen again.”

  McLanahan tried to keep his face from reddening but failed.

  “This job is very simple, Patrick,” Elliott began. “We run a highly classified research and development center here at Dreamland. I’m sure that’s little surprise to you; during all the Red Flag sorties you’ve flown I’m sure you’ve heard speculation about Dreamland, wondered why you’d get your butt kicked so hard for overflying it. Well, that’s why. Most every new design for a fighter, bomber, or missile built in the past ten years probably had its first tryout here at Dreamland.”

  He paused for a moment, taking a sip of coffee. “We’ve got another plane that we’d like to test-fly. We’d like you to run it through its paces. Test out the avionics, make some practice bomb runs, wring out the aircraft as much as you can. Much of the equipment you’ll be testing will eventually be installed in selected B-l aircraft.”

  McLanahan looked puzzled. “That’s it?”

  “You’ll be plenty busy, I assure you, Patrick” the general said. “We’re on a very tight schedule. We could be... well, let’s just say our data might be needed at any time. The more information we have to pass on, the better.”

  McLanahan shrugged his shoulders. “Sounds fine to me,” he said. “But you sure went through some very strange gyrations to get me here. I’ve got a feeling I still don’t know the entire story.”

  “I hate to sound overly cryptic, Patrick,” Elliott said, smiling, “but you know all you’re supposed to know right now. You may figure out more as the project progresses. But I must remind you—you
r location, your duties, everything you see and do, is classified top secret. No one outside this room—I don’t care how high their clearance or rank—is to know what goes on here. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” McLanahan said. “One question, though.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why me?”

  Elliott smiled, finished his coffee, and stood. “Simple. You’re the best. I can’t pass up a guy who’s won as many Bomb Comp trophies as you.” McLanahan wasn’t satisfied with Elliott’s answer but nodded anyway. “Want to see her?” Elliott asked.

  McLanahan looked puzzled. “See what?”

  “The ship,” Elliott said. “Your ship. The Old Dog.”

  “Old Dog?” McLanahan rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Good recruiting technique, General. I’m supposed to get excited about a plane called the Old Dog?”

  “You will,” he said.

  “Is this thing for real?” Briggs asked. McLanahan would have posed a similar question had he been able to speak; instead, he stood dumbstruck, staring at the massive form of the Megafortress.

  They did a walkaround inspection of the airplane. General Elliott let them walk at their own pace, answering all their questions.

  “It can’t be the same airplane,” McLanahan said finally, running his fingers across the slippery skin. “This can’t be a B-52.”

  “A wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Elliott said. “I assure you.”

  Briggs entered the bomb bay and McLanahan followed him in a moment later.

  “Expecting trouble, General?” McLanahan remarked. He examined the missiles. “Scorpions! Eight ... no, ten of them! On a B-52! They’ve just come out with these things. They’re not even modified for the F-15 yet. And you’ve got twelve more on the wings. I don’t believe it.”

  Briggs read the lower missiles on the rotary launcher. “HARM. What’s HARM?”

  “Anti-radiation missiles,” McLanahan said. “Homes in on and attacks radar-guided antiaircraft gun and missile sites.” He looked at Elliott, and the young man’s gaze caused the general’s smile to fade a bit. “Trouble and a half, I’d say.”