Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01

by Flight of the Old Dog (v1. 1)

  “Bottom line—Luger to the rescue!” Dave said. “You were a psychic, partner. You needed a nav right from the beginning.”

  McLanahan flipped his interphone switch. “Want an update on the situation down here, General?”

  “I’m afraid to guess. Well, if we don’t have a satellite communications channel or IFF mission squawk, we certainly don’t have a GPS code. No GPS, no reliable gyro. What else?”

  “How about no charts and no target and fixpoint descriptions?”

  The interphone clicked dead for a moment. Then: “Well, do the best you can.”

  “You bet,” McLanahan said. “We’re deaf, dumb, blind, and lost, but we’ll do the best we can.”

  16 Washington, D.C.

  “All right. Let’s have it,” the President said, wearily.

  General Curtis nodded and continued, pointing to a map of the California coast that was projected on the rear-wall-screen in the White House Situation Room. “Yes, sir.” He pointed to the Dreamland area. “As you know, an attack was staged on the project base. Approximately a dozen individuals were involved.”

  “Good lord, things are going to hell already.” He turned to Jack Pledge- man, his press secretary. “What about the press?”

  “They know about it, of course,” Pledgeman told him. “The Air Force comment was standard ‘no comment.’ It’s no secret in southern Nevada that Dreamland is a highly classified research area. Speculation runs rampant, of course, but the press has no inkling of the projects we’re conducting there. I’m sure they don’t know about the Old Dog or the runway at Groom Lake. The biggest problem, in my estimation, will be the casualties. Eight military and three civilians.”

  “Put a clamp on that, too,” the President said. “I’ll write a letter to the families regarding the sensitivity of the project they were working on and the importance of secrecy. The families must know that their family members were involved in highly classified work for the government. They’ll be notified of what happened in due time. Clear, Wilbur?”

  “Yes, sir,” Curtis replied.

  “This is not a formerly classified project,” the President emphasized. “We keep a clamp on things right now. Control of this project starts right here.” He turned again to Curtis. “General, what’s the status of the Old Dog test team?”

  All eyes turned to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Colonel Anderson, the chief operational designer of the Old Dog, was killed in the attack . .

  The President’s shoulders slumped.

  “Lewis Campos, the civilian designer of the Scorpion defensive armament interface and the airmine tail defense system, was also killed.” “Well, who the hell is flying that B-52?” Secretary of Defense Thomas Preston asked.

  “The aircraft commander is now Lieutenant-General Bradley Elliott, the Old Dog project director.”

  “Elliott?” the President said. “How did he get on board?”

  “General Elliott was there when the attack started,” Curtis told him. “When Colonel Anderson was killed he got on board and he and Lieutenant Colonel John Ormack, the crew copilot, taxied the bomber out of the hangar and launched it.”

  Curtis checked his notes: “General Elliott’s aide, Lieutenant Harold Briggs, reported that Elliott was wounded in the right leg during the attack. All of the other members of the test team are aboard. He also reported that the bomber suffered damage taxiing out of the hangar—lost four feet of the left wingtip and one external fuel tank.”

  “Are we in contact with the plane?” the President asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Curtis said. “So far, only nonsecure UHF contact. They launched without any classified coding documents. What we are trying to do right now is code a message to the crew to get them to set a three-digit address code into their satellite transceiver. Once we’re hooked up that way, we can transmit instructions.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “They’re orbiting one hundred and twenty miles off the coast of Big Sur at high altitude, as far off the jet airways as possible. Elliott is obviously trying to hide his plane as best he can.”

  “Why is he still in the air?” asked Thomas Preston. “It’s loaded down with weaponry, modified to the hilt—it should be back on the ground immediately.”

  “I believe General Elliott feels that in broad daylight there’s nowhere the plane can land without attracting attention. The Dreamland runway is usable but the hangar was destroyed and there are newspeople all over the place.”

  “Any alternate landing sites for the plane?” the President asked. “There are several possibilities,” Curtis said, “and the Old Dog still has eight hours of fuel. Two airfields on the Red Flag restricted area are prime sites, although they’re not nearly as secure as Dreamland. A few possibilities in Seattle, Washington, and Alaska.”

  The President leaned back in his chair. “We can’t send the Old Dog instructions without risking eavesdropping or discovery. Meanwhile, we have two other fully armed bombers on their way to Russia ... If Elliott isn’t in danger, then he can wait until tonight and land the plane somewhere where it can be concealed. Preferably back in Dreamland or Southern Nevada.” The President closed his eyes and said to his press secretary: “Jack. Ideas on how to call this?”

  “We’ll call it a terrorist attack on a deactivated Air Force research facility. The base was being dismantled by military and civilian workers, a shadowy terrorist group with ties to Qaddafi struck the facility, believing it still to be active.”

  “We may never know the real truth about where the attackers came from or how they managed to slip through the base defenses,” Curtis said. “We’ve established that they were flying an American-made cargo plane, but so far the wreckage has yielded few clues as to its ownership. All of the bodies have been shipped to DIA labs in Washington for dental and fingerprint analysis and examination of personal effects, but whoever the hell organized the attack was damn careful to cover his tracks. There were Caucasian as well as Orientals, and all of them wore American-made clothes. Except for a piece of metal we found, that appears to have come from a Soviet-made bazooka, there’s really nothing to suggest, let alone prove, Soviet involvement ...”

  “Who else would want to attack that base?” Preston asked.

  “I’ve asked myself the same question, Mr. Secretary, but so far the evidence against the Russians is almost entirely circumstantial—”

  The President cut him off. “We’ll go with the terrorist story for now and revise it if we have to.” He turned again to his press secretary. “Jack, don’t forget those letters to the families. I want them on my desk A.S.A.P.”

  “Half-hour, Mr. President,” Pledgeman said, and left the room.

  From behind closed eyes the President asked, “Anything else, gentlemen?” No reply. “Any Soviet reaction?”

  “Nothing, Mr. President,” Marshall Brent said. “Probably waiting for us to accuse them. I’ll be meeting with Karmarov shortly.”

  The President turned to General Curtis. “Status of the B-ls, General?”

  “Dead on time, sir. They’ll be getting their first refueling over Canada right about now.”

  The President was silent for a moment. Curtis was positive the President was going to cancel the B-l sorties when he finally said: “I’ll be upstairs in my office. Keep me advised of their progress every half hour. I’ll monitor the mission from there.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “And get Elliott and his . . . his Old Dog on the ground. Have them keep their plane hidden as best as possible. They can wait for a night landing, but that’s all. I’ve got three planes too many flying already.”

  “We’ll send the Old Dog up to Seattle, sir,” Curtis offered as he headed for the door. “They’ve got the room and the right people to disarm it—”

  “Disarm it?” the President said. Everyone in the Situation Room froze. “Disarm it? What the hell is it armed with, General?”

  “Sir, General Elliott’s plane, if you re
member, was a test-bed experimental aircraft. It... it probably has all of the weaponry the Excaliburs have—the air-to-air missiles, the—”

  “They don’t have any nuclear weapons on board, do they, General?” Tom Preston, the Secretary of Defense, said. “No one authorized—”

  “No, sir,” Curtis said quickly. He turned to the President. “General Elliott’s B-52 was conducting tests on the Striker TV-guided glide bomb. He is probably carrying one of them.”

  “Well, make damn sure that plane is disarmed as soon as it lands,” the President said. “We don’t need another screw-up.”

  The President didn’t wait for Curtis’ muted “Yes, sir,” but stormed past the Marine guards and headed for the elevator.

  Curtis waited until the others had left, then headed for the Situation Room communications center, where communications experts were working out a transmission routine for the Satellite Communications code, SATCOM. Once Elliott had the code and had set it into his SAT- COM receiver aboard the Old Dog, Curtis could talk to the crew. But first he had to figure out how to give the code to the crew without compromising the code itself.

  He walked into the communications center. “Well?”

  “Transmitting now, General,” the chief of the center reported. “It’ll be picked up by the SAC Emergency Action Network in a few minutes, and it’ll continue until ordered to stop.”

  “Good. You know that the crew has no decoding documents, no secrets.”

  “Yes, sir. They shouldn’t need any. We have direct voice backup routines being put together if necessary.”

  Curtis nodded. “Word from the Excaliburs?”

  “Ops normal message three minutes ago from both birds,” the chief said. “Still hadn’t finished refueling.”

  Curtis accepted the full printout of the Excalibur crew’s messages and put it in his briefcase. He sighed, louder than he intended.

  “Keep me informed.” And wondered what next could go wrong.

  “Genesis, this is Los Angeles Center.”

  General Elliott put down the can of water Dave Luger had found in a rations container downstairs and readjusted his microphone. “Go ahead, Los Angeles.”

  “Your emergency flight plan has been received,” the controller said. “Your call sign is now Dog Zero-One Fox. You are cleared to orbit as required. Acknowledge.”

  Elliott looked quizzically at Ormack. “Strange call sign,” Elliott said. “Dog Zero-One Fox acknowledges, center,” Elliott replied over the radio. “Any other messages, Los Angeles?”

  “Negative, Zero-One,” the controller replied. “Radar service terminated, cleared to contact oceanic flight following.”

  “Zero-One Fox, thank you.” Elliott picked up the olive-drab can of water from the crew survival kit and took a sip as he stared out of the cockpit windows.

  “Well,” Elliott said, “we’re cleared—but to where? How? For how long?”

  “They’ll try to contact us—somehow,” Ormack said. “We’re monitoring all the SAC Command Post frequencies, SATCOM, all the emergency frequencies, and the SAC Emergency Action Alpha monitor periods on high-frequency radio. Maybe they haven’t decided what to do yet.” “Well, I’ve decided,” Elliott said, rubbing at the pain spreading in his right calf. “We’ve got to land this beast tonight. If they don’t tell us where, we’ll pick the place. Tonapah, Indian Springs—wherever we need to go.” Over the ship’s interphone, he said, “Crew, we’ve received notification from Center that our call sign is now Dog Zero-One Fox.”

  McLanahan said: “Any word on what we’re supposed to do?”

  “Not yet,” Elliott said. “Just keep monitoring your assigned frequencies. We should hear something soon.”

  “Can someone take HF for a while?” Luger said. “The static is driving me nuts.”

  “I’ll take it,” McLanahan said, reached across and took the high- altitude general aviation chart that Luger was using to copy the high- frequency radio messages on. He glanced at his watch. “Three more minutes until Alpha monitor.” He switched his interphone panel waver switch to the HF setting and winced as he turned the switch on. He fumbled for the volume knob. “Sorry I volunteered. You got three-eleven, remember. Here’s the log I made up.”

  Luger looked over the mountain of radio messages on the UHF alternate SAC command post frequency. “Just routine messages,” he said. “What are we looking for?”

  “Anything,” McLanahan said. “A clue. Something unusual.”

  “Can’t they just say, ‘Hey you guys, set A-B-C in the SATCOM’?”

  “Then everyone who hears the message sets it in their printers. It’s not secure anymore.”

  “Or, ‘Hey, Dog, land at Tonopah’? Oh, never mind. Same reason.”

  “Real smart boy,” McLanahan said. “Alpha monitor period.” He shut off all the radio switches except HF and pressed the headset pads closer to his head to hear better the Strategic Air Command emergency action message broadcasts. Alpha monitor was the primary time period for worldwide Strategic Air Command messages over the high-frequency radio spectrum.

  “How’s the fuel look, John?” Elliott asked Ormack.

  “Still about seven hours at this throttle setting,” Ormack said, checking his homemade flight plan filled out on the back of a piece of cardboard. “We can still fly across the country twice if we need to.”

  “My butt won’t hang in there that long,” Elliott said.

  “How about your leg?”

  “Still smarts,” Elliott said, gently touching his calf.

  Ormack reached into a flight publications holder behind his seat and pulled out the North America IFR supplement. “I’ve got the frequency for McClellan Global Command Control,” he told Elliott. “I’ll give them a call, tell them we’re exiting the ADIZ.” Over the interphone he asked, “Anyone using the HF?”

  “The Muck’s copying a message,” Luger replied. He glanced over at McLanahan, who was intently listening to the static-charged radio message, occasionally tapping a pencil on the characters he was transcribing.

  “Let me know when he’s finished,” Ormack said. “Any problem with keeping up with our position?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’ll need some more endurance figures in a minute. I’ll probably need an ETA to a fix somewhere when I call McClellan.”

  “Ask and ye shall receive,” Luger said, and looked over again at McLanahan, who had just switched his interphone knobs to their normal positions.

  “HF is yours, Colonel,” Luger said. “Nav clearing off to the sextant. Hey, Muck, I gotta take a sun shot. You wanna do the honors or count me down?”

  “I’ve done the last three shots on the sextant,” he said. “Gimme the watch.” As Luger got up to head to the upper deck to take the sextant positions, McLanahan grabbed his arm. “Anything unusual about any of these HF messages you copied, Dave?” He tapped his pencil on the long lines of numbers and letters, together with the time of transmission and the call sign of the command post that made the transmission.

  “No, the usual number of characters, no special order or anything. Of course, we can’t decode the messages.”

  “Something in the messages . . . Dave, did the message say ‘fox’ or ‘foxtrot’?”

  “What? Oh, the phonetic spelling for the ‘Fs,’ you mean?” He thought for a moment. “Yeah, you’re right. ‘Fox’! Not ‘foxtrot’! But it’s the same thing, right?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” McLanahan pulled the mike closer. “Angelina? Any luck?”

  Angelina made an obscene gesture at the row of buttons on the SATCOM printer, which were used to set the address enable codes into the printer-receiver. “My finger’s getting numb setting codes.”

  “I think I might have something,” McLanahan said. “We just got HF traffic. They’re using ‘fox’ in their messages instead of ‘foxtrot.’ It’s the same as that strange suffix on our call sign.”

  “ ‘Fox’? Sure, why not? I’ve tried dozens of other codes.” In th
e gunner’s compartment, Angelina set the address enable switch on the SATCOM printer to DISENABLE. She then set the address code windows to ‘F-O-X’ and changed the address switch to ENABLE. “Nothing,” she said.

  “Try those characters backwards,” McLanahan told her. “That has to be the key.”

  Angelina entered ‘X-O-F’ into the printer address code and switched the receiver to ‘ENABLE.’ Instantly, the SATCOM printer rumbled to life. “It worked!”

  “Great,” Elliott said. “Read out any messages you get as soon as possible.”

  “Just a stream message with our call sign in it so far,” Angelina said. “I’ll get an acknowledgment message out right away.” She unstowed the SATCOM keyboard and began to type out an acknowledgment message. Fifteen minutes later she keyed the mike again.

  “Message, General,” she announced.

  “Go ahead.”

  “It reads, ‘Orbit at SHARK intersection for recovery at Boeing Auxiliary Eleven at zero-eight-hundred hours Zulu. Insure weapons safe for recovery. JCS.’ That’s it. I got the codes for the satellite navigation system, too. I’ll pass down the GPS code to the nav in a minute.”

  “Well, that’s it,” Elliott said. “We’ll have this beast down on the tarmac in a few hours.” He turned to Ormack. “Sure was nice getting behind these controls again, John. I’m just sorry about the circumstances.”

  Elliott stared out the windowscreen and watched the Old Dog’s nose as it veered into the sun. The pain continued to throb in his right leg as he thought about the two Excaliburs headed toward Russia.

  17 Over the Arctic Ocean North of Barrow, Alaska

  “Disconnect, seven-seven.”

  The boom operator hit a trigger on his control stick, and the nozzle of the KC-10 Extender's refueling boom popped out of the receptacle, a small white cloud of JP-4 jet fuel vapor streaming away in the slipstream of the B-1B Excalibur below. The boomer pulled on the stick, and the boom moved quickly away from the black shape hovering below his panoramic window beneath his toes. He hit another switch, and the boom motored up and automatically stowed itself under the modified McDon- nell-Douglas DC-lO’s tail.