Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01

by Flight of the Old Dog (v1. 1)

  “Ah . . .” Ormack rubbed his eyes, stared straight ahead into the inky blackness all around them. “I’m sorry, I guess I’m just beat.” He took a deep breath and tried to rub a kink out of his left shoulder. “I guess I’ve been on the edge ever since—”

  He glanced over at Elliott. The General was slumped forward in his seat, his hands looped over the control yoke, his head awkwardly dangling to one side.

  “General. ” He reached across and shook Elliott’s right shoulder. No response.

  “Pereira. Get up here.” Angelina looked forward around her seat and saw Elliott’s limp body. She began to unfasten the buckles around her chest and crotch.

  “What happened?”

  “The general. He’s out cold, Pat.” Ormack disengaged the low-level autopilot and started a slow climb, leveling off at five thousand feet, reengaged the autopilot, unfastened his straps and leaned across to help Elliott.

  Not until he was far enough over to Elliott to unfasten his chest straps did he smell it—the thick, cloying stench of dried blood. The overpowering scent forced his eyes down to Elliott’s right leg. The general’s fatigue pants from the knee down oozed a crusty red film. His boots stuck to the floor when Ormack tried to move the leg. The general’s face made pale look healthy.

  Ormack shouted the general’s name, began to breathe again when he saw Elliott’s eyes flutter open. Eyes that looked at the instrument panel and somehow found the radar altimeter indicator . . . “We’re . . . we’re too high, John . . .”

  “Never mind that, General,” Angelina crawled forward with some web straps cut from her walkaround oxygen bottle harness. “Lie back,” she said, and turned to Ormack. “We’re going to have to tie a tourniquet around that leg.”

  Ormack nodded. “General, lie still. We’re going to lift your leg up so we can tie this around your knee.”

  “Won’t hurt a bit, Angelina,” Elliott said, smiling weakly at his gunnery specialist. “I haven’t felt anything in this damn leg for three hours.”

  Ormack and Pereira carefully pulled Elliott’s leg up and across the throttle quadrant. Angelina then wrapped the web strap around Elliott’s leg beneath the knee and pulled it tight as she could. When she had finished Elliott’s leg looked less than half its normal diameter.

  “I should have been more realistic about the leg—”

  “Don’t apologize,” Angelina said. “Sometime the pain just takes over, no matter how hard you try to fight it.”

  “You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

  “I’m no spring chicken either, General. I know there’s some things you can’t do a damn thing about.”

  The two looked at each other a moment, then Elliott struggled back into his seat. By the time he refastened his harness buckle, he was near total exhaustion.

  Abruptly Ormack ordered Angelina back to her seat as he took a firm grip on the yoke and pushed the Old Dog down once again.

  “On the double. We’re under attack.”

  Angelina half-crawled, half-ran back down the narrow aisle to her seat and began strapping herself in. Wendy was studying her video-threat display. Every few moments she glanced at the counter-measures receiver set, waiting for the computer positively to identify the new signals and plot their direction from the Megafortress.

  As Angelina plugged in her headset she heard Wendy report: “Golf- band search only.”

  “Position?”

  “No clock position yet.”

  “High terrain, ten miles,” from Luger. “Slight climb to clear it.”

  “Take fifteen degrees right,” McLanahan directed, leaning over in his seat and studying Luger’s tiny five-inch display. “Looks clear in that direction at this altitude. We can’t afford to do any more climbs.” Ormack turned the control yoke in a ten-degree-bank turn to the right.

  “Clear of terrain for twenty miles,” Luger said. “We can turn back to track at this altitude in five miles.”

  “Tork?”

  “Signal strength increasing slightly but not as fast as I thought. Rough guess would be the MiG-25s or 31s out of Ossora Airfield. Probably converging on our tail at high altitude.”

  “It’ll be the Foxbat-Es,” Angelina said. “The 31s are their front-line fighters. They’ll send the 25s with external tanks out to find us—or draw us out—then report our position and let the Foxhounds have us—”

  “Wendy,” McLanahan broke in, “can you tell if they find us?”

  “I should be able to see a change in their—” She stopped abruptly, staring at the large video screen. The signals rapidly began to change. “Missile alert. One of the signals just went to tracking mode.”

  “But I thought you said—”

  “They’re too far away,” Wendy said. “They can't be locked on. Their signal isn’t strong enough.” Confused by the sudden threat signals and the responding increase in thrust as Ormack pushed up the power, Wendy hurriedly rechecked her receivers and indicators. All self-tested normal.

  “I don’t understand ...” A red MISSILE LAUNCH indicator blinked on her panel. At the same time a repeater warning light blinked on the front instrument panel in the cockpit.

  “Missile launch, ” Ormack announced. “Clear for evasive maneuvers?” “Clear left and right, ten miles,” Luger called out.

  “C’mon, Tork, get with it,” Ormack said. “Which way?”

  “It can’t be, they’re . . . they’re bluffing, wait . .

  “Pereira.” Ormack was over the edge. “Find those damn fighters.” Before Wendy could answer, Angelina had turned her tail Scorpion tracking radar to RADIATE. Since there was no azimuth information from Wendy’s receiver Angelina began a complete rear-hemisphere sweep behind the Megafortress.

  “Nothing,” Angelina reported after several sweeps. “No targets for thirty miles.”

  “They’re bluffing,” Wendy repeated, sounding surer of herself now. She reached across the defensive compartment and grabbed Angelina’s denim jacket. Angelina was still searching her rectangular scope for the fighters.

  “They wanted us to turn on our radars,” Wendy said. “They couldn’t find us down here so they’re faking a lock-on. Stop. ”

  “Angelina, shut down,” McLanahan said. “If you haven’t seen them by now, shut down.” Angelina put her radar to STANDBY.

  “Damn ...” Wendy whispered as she studied the video threat receiver. “Back to search radar . . . signal strength increasing—”

  An inverted “V” airplane symbol appeared at the bottom of Wendy’s countermeasure receiver scope. “Fighter at six o’clock!” A second “V” appeared. “Second fighter, both at six o’clock.”

  With Ormack having already throttled to military power, the roar of the eight turbofan engines was deafening . . . the sound was amplified as it vibrated off the mountains barely three hundred feet beneath them.

  “He’s still at extreme detection range,” Wendy reported. “He can’t shoot at us down here.”

  “Scorpions are ready,” Angelina said.

  “How far until the computer can start driving the autopilot?” Ormack asked.

  “Still a hundred miles,” McLanahan told him.

  “We might not make it that long—”

  “VHF transmissions,” Wendy called out.

  “Shut them down,” Ormack told her. “They’ll report our position.” But Wendy was already adjusting her jammers, matching the frequency marker of the jammers with the wavy oscilioscope-like radio transmissions.

  “Narrow-scan tracking signals,” she said. “Sweeping around us . . . his computer can’t find us so it looks like he’s searching manually ...”

  “High terrain, twelve o’clock, seven miles,” Luger reported.

  “Pretty deep canyon on all sides,” McLanahan added quickly. “Better climb over this one. Slow climb.”

  Ormack slowly pulled back on the yoke and began a gentle two hundred foot-per-minute climb.

  “Clearing terrain on either side,” Luger said.
“Five degrees left.”

  Ormack nudged the Old Dog to the left. “Looks like we’ll be clear of terrain for thirty miles after this last ridge. Level off. This is a good altitude, ridge crossing in ten seconds.”

  “Signal strength decreasing,” Wendy said. “He’s still trying manual track but he’s falling behind.”

  “Coming up on the ridge . . .”

  “Looks like the fighter behind us lost us . . .”

  “Cresting the ridge now . . .”

  In the dim cockpit Ormack could just make out the snow-covered ridge line they had just crossed, the mountains dropping off sharply to a white- covered valley below. “Hey,” he said, “it looks pretty flat out—”

  A thunderous explosion echoed just outside Elliott’s canopy. Ormack caught a glimpse of two dark streaks against the hazy stars. The shock wave hit the Old Dog’s nose like a giant invisible hand.

  “We nearly had a mid-air with two of them,” Ormack said, and pushed the Old Dog’s nose down to the snow-covered plain below, watching the radar altimeter and the canopy windows. He leveled the aircraft at two hundred feet. “Terrain-following autopilot reengaged, slaved to the radar altimeter. Set to two hundred feet.”

  “Clear of terrain for thirty miles,” Luger reported.

  “The two fighters are turning,” Wendy said. “Infrared tracker has one of them . . . going high . . . stabilizing—”

  A large red MLD light blinked rapidly on Ormack’s threat repeater lights.

  “Missile launch detection, infrared missile launch,” Wendy broke in. “Break right . . .”

  Ormach lurched the Old Dog into a furious dodge to the right, steered the huge bomber past the maximum thirty degrees of bank. The autopilot, slaved to the now failed radar altimeter, immediately commanded a two-G max climb. That climb command, with the Old Dog now in a forty degree bank to the right, increased the G load on the bomber and tightened the turn.

  Simultaneously with the “break” call, Wendy popped two high-intensity flares from the Megafortress' left ejectors. The flares were shot a hundred yards from the bomber and burned hotter and moved slower than the Old Dog. They lowered themselves slowly to the snow-packed ground with tiny streamers as the Megafortress turned hard in the opposite direction.

  The fury of the turn shook up Elliott, but he had the presence of mind to watch the altimeters before reaching for the ejection trigger in each armrest. He was scanning the engine instruments, making sure the roar echoing in his confused head was coming from all eight turbofans. Out of the front cockpit window he spotted two fiery streaks of light flashing past the windscreen and exploding in the valley below.

  “Engine instruments okay, John,” Elliott reported to Ormack who looked in amazement at the man, barely able to support his head upright, scanning the eight rows of instruments crowded on the forward panel.

  “Fighters passing overhead,” Wendy said, her report confirmed by the roar of turbojets in full afterburner skimming over the jet-black bomber. “But coming around for another pass.”

  “Like hell,” McLanahan said, pressed the RADIATE button on his attack radar and slaved the azimuth-elevation controls to Wendy’s threat receiver. The attack-radar’s antenna immediately swung to the azimuth of the fighter and began a height-finding scan of the sky.

  The radar reflection of the attacking fighter only a few miles away showed clear as a mountain on McLanahan’s radar. He typed “TRACK 1” on his keyboard and a small circle cursor centered itself on the return. The LED azimuth and elevation readouts flickered as the antennas raced to keep up with the retreating fighter.

  “Locked on, Angelina,” McLanahan said. “Take over.”

  Angelina was ready. With pilot consent already given, she pressed the COMMIT button on the forward Scorpion missile pylons. In one-twenty- fifth of a second the fire-control computer selected a missile on the right pylon, gave it the initial elevation, azimuth and distance computations from the attack radar and ejected the air-to-air missile from the pylon down into the Old Dog’s slipstream.

  The advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile’s gyros stabilized the ten-foot-long missile in the slipstream as if it were a sprinter feeling for a footing in the starting blocks. In the next three-hundredths of a second static ports on the missile’s body sensed the slipstream around it and armed the Scorpion's one-hundred-pound-high explosive warhead. The same sensor set the Scorpion’s large thirty-G rear fin to the proper angle, took one last look-around self-test, and fired its solid propellant motor.

  Elliott and Ormack saw a blinding flash of light race a few hundred yards ahead of the Old Dog, then suddenly change direction up and over their heads. An instant later a huge fireball erupted just behind Elliott’s side window, illuminating the entire upstairs crew compartment of the Old Dog with a red-yellow glare.

  “A hit,” Elliott said, shielding his eyes from the glare.

  “I’ve got the second low-altitude fighter,” Angelina said, confirming the fire-control computer’s radar lock on the target. She held the safety levers of the Stinger airmine rockets down and fired twice.

  “Second fighter decelerating,” Angelina reported. “Sitting stable off our left rear quarter ... slowing ... we got him. I think we FODed him out.”

  “What?” Wendy asked.

  “FODed him out. He sucked in an engineful of scrap metal.” Upstairs Wendy signaled a gloved okay to Angelina as the gunnery expert watched the range gate of the fighter rapidly increase as it fell behind. Wendy noted that her infrared tail-warning seeker had locked itself onto the disabled fighter, but she ignored the indication—Angelina had already tagged that one.

  The Soviet pilot aboard the Mikoyan-Gureyvich E-266M “Foxbat-E” interceptor was preparing to abandon his aircraft. He was watching two hydraulic system failure-warning lights and two engine overspeed-warning lights, aware that although the flash of light was far behind him he had flown through a cloud of something ... he could almost hear the flak rattling around in his engine’s turbines, tearing through the hydraulic lines, ripping the compressor blades apart. The intruder, whatever it was, was invisible through the glare of the warning lights on his canopy.

  But he did notice one more set of lights—the lock-on indication of two of his K-13A Atoll missiles tracking the intruder. Seconds before power drained from his interceptor, the pilot selected every last one of his remaining missiles, and with his other hand on his ejection ring, pressed the missile-launch trigger.

  Ormack was checking his switches and asking General Elliott crosscockpit how he was feeling. McLanahan had just put his attack radar to STANDBY and was leaning over to help Luger with terrain calls. Angelina had completed a quick scan of the rear hemisphere of the Old Dog before putting her radar to STANDBY. Wendy was readjusting a twisted parachute harness strap, trying to unwind a bit from her first real fighter engagement.

  But the supercooled eye of the infrared seeker mounted on top of the short curved V-tail of the Old Dog wasn’t relaxing. It was tracking the dimming heat signature of the fighter far behind them when it noticed the sudden increase in the heat-signature of the target as two heat-seeking missiles streaked toward the Old Dog’s eight Pratt and Whitney TF33 turbofan engines. The increase quickly surpassed the delta-pK thermal threshold programmed into it months earlier by Wendy herself, and an MLD indicator flashed at both Tork’s and Ormack’s position. Simultaneously with the warning light, the decoy system ejected one bundle of chaff and one phosphorous flare from both left and right ejectors.

  The automatic response to the infrared missile attack would have been successful—had anyone noticed the MLD warning indicators and initiated evasive action. The warning tone sounded in everyone’s headsets at the same time the light illuminated, but both Ormack and Tork had to be watching for the target on the threat display and expecting the attack to escape the heat-seeking missiles. By the time Wendy noticed the blinking red Missile Launch Detection light, the Atoll missiles had accelerated to nearly Mach 2 and had closed
the short distance between them in the blink of an eye.

  Even so, the automatic system had its saving effect. The flares, shot two hundred yards away from the bomber’s belly, caught the Atoll missiles’ attention, providing a momentary distraction. But at less than a mile away the missiles could not ignore the huge globes of heat emanating from the Old Dog’s turbofan engines.

  One missile locked momentarily onto the right flare, then back onto the right engines. The sudden swing of the IR seeker head from one hot target to another—a sign that the seeker had picked up a decoy—triggered a proximity detonation signal to the sixty-pound warheads—the missile exploded less than twenty yards from the Old Dog’s V-tail vertical stabilizer, blowing off the top nine feet of the Old Dog’s right stabilator tail and leaving a short jagged stub of metal where the stabilator used to be.

  The other missile took a sideways glance at the decoy flare and swung a few precious feet to the left toward the flare, but it wasn’t enough to divert it. Driven by a solid propellant engine just approaching full thrust, it plunged into the exhaust port of the number one engine and detonated. That explosion immediately turned the number one engine into a blob of molten metal and blew what remained of the already damaged left wingtip into a shower of fire.

  The Old Dog, pushed by an exploding missile on one side and pulled by one lost engine, skidded violently to the left. Ormack was able to keep the bomber a few knots above the stall only because all eight engines were already at maximum thrust. Stomping on the right rudder, he turned the control wheel full to the right. The lights flickered in the crew compartment and the interphone began to squeal.

  “We’re hit,” Ormack reported, and pushed the right rudder hard all the way to the floor. The Old Dog slowly, slowly began to straighten its sideways slide. As it did, Ormack scanned the caution lights and engine instruments, but it was Elliott who noticed the engine instruments while Ormack fought for aircraft control.