Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01

by Flight of the Old Dog (v1. 1)

  He had left the hastily written note and last will and testament unsigned; there was no longer time even for that. No matter. His career was over the minute he stepped foot on the flightline. His life—period—would have been over as he taxied onto the main runway except that on account of the air emergency declared over the entire eastern air-defense region the air traffic controllers allowed him to take off without a fully verified flight plan. In an emergency, better to have the fighters airborne first, question their procedures later. Papendreyov had known this, of course, and was airborne again within thirty minutes of landing from his first sortie.

  It had only been an hour and a half since he had broken off the attack with the American B-52. The B-52, obviously wounded, was flying slow —at the most, he figured, it had only gone some seven hundred fifty kilometers from Ossora Airfield since he had fired his last missiles. His MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter could chase after it easily at three times the B-52’s speed with fuel from the drop tank only, then spend two, three hours searching for the intruder.

  Papendreyov gave his call sign to Ossora Intercept Control, which questioned him briefly about his absent flight-tasking code but quickly gave him vectors to the bomber’s last known position, nearly five hundred kilometers ahead. The young Fulcrum pilot kept the throttles at max afterburner and began a ten-degree climb at seven hundred kilometers per hour. Within minutes he was at twenty thousand meters, screaming northeast at seventeen hundred kilometers per hour, almost twice the speed of sound.

  Quickly he was handed off to Korf Intercept Control, which had few updates on the bomber’s position, but Papendreyov made his own estimate where the American B-52 would be. The fuel in his centerline drop tank having exhausted itself less than ten minutes after his takeoff, he made another calculation, then jettisoned the tank, not having the luxury of considering who or what might be underneath ... he was high over the mountains, but they were still sparsely populated. He continued at maximum afterburner for five more minutes, then pulled his throttles to cruise power and set his autopilot.

  He had fifty thousand liters of fuel remaining to find the American, and he was wasting two thousand liters per hour just hoping to catch up. But Papendreyov wasn’t worried. He knew, thanks to his subtle course corrections, that the nose of his Fulcrum was pointed right at the American’s heart.

  “We aren’t going to make it,’’ Ormack felt obliged to report. “We’ve got thirty minutes of fuel tops.”

  General Bradley Elliott double-checked the autopilot and flight control annunciators while Ormack went over his fuel calculations. They had been flying for well over an hour at ten thousand feet, forced to that altitude by the damage to the pressurized crew compartment.

  “Fuel flow?”

  “Pretty steady,” Ormack said, “but the fuel curve is getting worse. Looks like a major leak from wing and body tanks. I’ve pumped all the fuel out of the body tanks but I can’t do anything about the mains .. . I’ve got the minimum in them to keep the engines going as it is. We’ve had low-pressure lights on for a long time—”

  “Can we make it to the ocean?” Elliott asked, scanning his engine instruments and checking them by moving the throttles. “Put it down on an ice floe or punch out near the coastline?”

  “Punch out?” Angelina Pereira said. “You mean eject?"

  “We’d have to cross high mountain ridges to get to the coast,” Luger said, warming his hands on an overhead air vent. “It would be real close.”

  “Now’s the time to decide,” Elliott said. “Patrick, give me a heading toward the ocean, away from any active Russian fighter bases. Crew, prepare for—”

  “Hold on,” McLanahan broke in. “General, what does WXO near an airfield mean?”

  “WXO? Warm-weather operations only. They close the place during winter because it’s too expensive and too difficult to maintain. Why?”

  “I found one,” McLanahan said, putting a finger on his high-altitude navigation chart and checking the satellite navigation system’s present- position counters. “Straight ahead, fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes?” Ormack said. “You’re crazy. That’s in Russia.”

  “They got a long runway at the very least,” McLanahan said. “Maybe they’ll have gas and oil for the number two engine. If it’s abandoned or vacant we could—”

  “They’re not abandoned,” Elliott said. “At least our Alaskan warm-weather bases aren’t. We usually have caretakers, mostly locals, that look after the place. Maybe some minimal security, National Guard or Reserve deployments.”

  Ormack stared at Elliott. “General, you’re not seriously considering . . . You’re both crazy. Maybe you ought to go back on oxygen.” He looked hard at Elliott, expecting him to turn and shrug off McLanahan’s notion. Some last-minute humor . . .

  “General . .

  “We’re armed . . .”

  “We’ve got your automatic and two lousy thirty-eight revolvers in the survival kits,” Ormack said. “They’re more of a hazard to us than they’d be to anyone else. They could have been stowed on this plane for years.”

  “We could do the refueling ...” Elliott said, talking more to himself than anyone else.

  “I’ve done that, lots of times,” McLanahan put in, excitement rising in his voice. Luger was staring at McLanahan pretty much the way Ormack was looking at Elliott—in disbelief. “Global Shield missions. Remember, Dave? Simulated post-strike recovery at an emergency airfield. Keep the number two nacelle running, pump gas into the right outboard, right external, or right drop tank, then transfer gas to the rest of the plane. I once hand-pumped ten thousand pounds of—”

  “The Russians aren’t going to just let us take their gas,” Luger said. “It’s crazy.”

  “We’d end up captured,” Angelina said. “I’d rather take my chances in the mountains than be captured by them—especially after this mission.”

  “No, you don’t want to go down in the mountains,” Elliott said. “Even if you come out of the ejection unhurt your chances are at best fifty-fifty even with the global survival kits we’ve got. And we can’t ditch the Old Dog. She wouldn’t withstand the impact.”

  “I still think those odds are better than landing at a Russian airfield—”

  “Do you, John?” Elliott said. “How long do you think we could survive out there in those mountains?”

  “If we made it to the coast we’d have a chance.”

  Elliott ignored that, asked his navigators for the distance to the coastline.

  “One hundred miles is the closest,” Luger said. “But we cross two ranges, each about nine or ten thousand feet, and we’re within radar range of Trebleski airfield the whole way. After we cross the mountains we can cut away from Trebleski to the northeast.”

  “We can stay near the mountains,” Wendy offered. “Get as much distance as possible from Trebeski and hide in the ground clutter.”

  “Can we go around Trebleski at all?”

  “Not on the coastal side of the mountains,” Luger told him, rubbing his one uncovered eye, “unless we turn around.”

  “So it’s unlikely we’d make it to the coast,” Elliott said. “And that means we get out over the mountains in the dead of winter, hundreds of miles from any kind of friendly forces. We could try to evade but I wouldn’t give us much of a chance of making it to the coast, much less into Alaska.”

  “General, are you saying that landing at a Russian military airfield, abandoned or not, is a better option?” Ormack said. “We’d be surrendering. We’d be handing ourselves and this plane over to them. And I sure as hell wouldn’t give us a snowball’s chance in hell of making it out of a Soviet prison alive.”

  Elliott kept silent for a long moment, then: “Distance to that airfield, Patrick.”

  McLanahan already had the geographic coordinates of the field typed into his navigation computer. “Anadyr is eighty miles, five degrees left.”

  “Any radar circles around it?”

  “Ye
s,” McLanahan said, studying his civil-aviation chart. “Can’t tell what they are but they’ve got something there.”

  “Wendy, any activity?”

  Wendy Tork had been carefully studying her threat displays ever since McLanahan had first made his wild suggestion. “Clear scope ever since Ossora airfield.”

  “I’ve got no terrain on my scope for a hundred miles,” McLanahan said, tuning his ten-inch radar scope in one-hundred-nautical-mile range. “If there were any threat signals they’re not being blocked by terrain. I can’t make out the base, though.”

  “Okay,” Elliott said, “you’ve all heard the arguments. There’s no guarantee that we’ll get gas, oil or anything but our asses in a sling if we land at Anadyr. On the other hand it’s possible that we could land this beast and walk away from it uninjured, steal a truck and have a better than even chance of evading toward the Bering Strait, where our chances of getting rescued significantly increase. If you’re a wild dreamer like Patrick you’ll actually believe there’s an outside chance of pumping this aircraft full of gas, restarting the number two engine and running it enough to lift off again, and, maybe, making it back to Alaska.”

  “Crazy,” Ormack muttered. “If the base is occupied we won’t have any chance of taking off again—we’d flame out long before liftoff. If we can’t find gas we’re stuck three hundred miles from friendly territory on a Russian military base. The Russians would get the Old Dog and we’d be stuck trying to evade all the way back to Alaska. Fat chance.”

  “Well, I can’t have this crew bail out over the mountains,” Elliott said. “Chances of surviving the ejection itself are low. If we did survive we’d be faced with a three-hundred-mile trek across Siberia with the Red Army chasing us. I say we take our chances on solid ground, in one piece. At least we’ll be alive to fight or run.”

  “I’m for it,” Luger said. “Hell, that base will be the last place on this earth they’d look for us, except downtown Moscow.”

  “All right, General,” Wendy said, closing her eyes in a silent prayer, “let’s try to land it.”

  Angelina shrugged. “Check. I don’t know if I could eject myself out of this damn thing anyway.”

  “I’m giving a crash course, anyway,” McLanahan told her. “You may still have to do it. General, I’m clearing off to go upstairs. Dave, watch my scope for me.”

  Ormack agreed they really didn’t have much choice, pulled out the emergency landing checklists as McLanahan went upstairs and knelt between Wendy and Angelina. He plugged his headset into the defense instructor’s station and told the two women to switch their interphones to the “private” position, which allowed them to talk without bothering the rest of the crew.

  “How are you warriors doing?”

  Angelina nodded but looked almost as bad as Luger. Because of the damage to the downstairs crew compartment McLanahan had been forced to transfer most of the available heat downstairs to keep Luger from going back into shock. Even with Wendy’s borrowed jacket and thermal top, without the protection the rest of the crew had, Angelina was losing to the cold. Her lips were purple, her eyelids drooped as if she were struggling to stay awake. Her hands, in stiff, metallic firefighting gloves, were shoved deep inside her jacket for warmth.

  Bomber defense was almost out of the question, McLanahan thought. It would be difficult if not impossible for Angelina to try to operate her equipment under these conditions. Landing was absolutely the only option.

  “Hang in, Angie,” he said.

  “I’ll be all right . . .”

  McLanahan turned to Wendy. “How you doing?”

  “Holding up. I could use a drink.”

  “Champagne when we get home ... okay, you were taught this months ago, but let’s go over it again. If we get attacked while trying to land, or if the pilots can’t land this thing, we’ve got no choice but to eject. Listen carefully, watch the warning light and don’t panic—but don’t hesitate eighter. There’s a simple three-step system for using upward seats—just remember, ready, aim, fire.

  “The ready is to pull the safety pin out of the handle on your armrests, trip the handle release lever and rotate the handle upward. Grab the front of the handle, not the middle or inside. There’s no hurry, do it smooth and easy. This equipment is old and it needs some care. The aim is like align. You shove your fannies deep into the back of your seat, press your back into the seat and push your head back into the headrest. After that lower your chin to your chest. Think about a nice straight spine the whole time. Put your feet flat on the deck, knees together. Put your elbows inside the armrests and brace your arms against the back. The fire is easy—grab both triggers inside the ejection handle and squeeze. Next thing you know, you’ll be on the ground.”

  “What happens if it doesn’t fire?” Angelina asked between shivers. “Can you go over the emergency ejection sequence?”

  “Don’t worry about it. If necessary I’ll pop your manual catapult initiator pull-out pins for you.”

  “You?” Wendy said, looking up at McLanahan. “How?”

  “The chances of navigators surviving a downward ejection at less than two thousand feet is fifty percent. If we go below one thousand feet . . . never mind what the book says . . . our chances are about zero.”

  “But—”

  “Dave doesn’t have an ejection seat,” McLanahan told them. “After the decision was made to get a second navigator I requested that another ejection seat be installed. But there was so much pressure to complete the testing that it somehow got overlooked.” He tried a smile and flunked. “I’ll make sure the cross-hairs are on the runway so that the bombing computers help the pilots land the Dog, get Dave strapped in, then come back upstairs and strap in right here. I’ll see to it that you two get out if it’s necessary to eject—”

  “Patrick, you can’t—”

  “Can and will. End of discussion—”

  “Pat, we’re fifty miles from Anadyr,” Luger reported. He waited a few moments. “Pat?”

  Wendy was shaking her head. He figured he should say something else but the words wouldn’t come. He groped for the interphone wafer switch. “What?”

  “Fifty miles,” Luger said. “You okay?”

  “Great.”

  “Strap in,” Elliott called back. “Everyone back on watch.”

  McLanahan made his way slowly down the ladder, leaned over Luger’s shoulder. Luger was now in the left-hand radar navigator’s ejection seat, studying the ten-inch radar scope.

  “See it yet, buddy?” McLanahan asked. Luger had switched the radar scope to fifty-mile terrain-mapping display and was adjusting the video and receiver gain controls near his left knee, tuning the terrain returns on the scope in and out to search for the runway.

  “Nope,” he said, moving his uncovered left eye closer to the scope. “Nothing under the crosshairs. I get a blank scope when I tune out terrain.”

  “Assume the computers are bad. You should be able to break out a runway within thirty miles. Just keep tuning.” He stopped down, checked Luger’s straps and harnesses. “All snug?”

  “I still don’t want to do this,” Luger said.

  “It’s my fault you’re even on this plane,” McLanahan said quickly. “It’s my fault you got hurt. At least I want you to have a chance to get out of it if something goes wrong.”

  “Thanks, buddy, but I’d like to think my so-called professionalism helped get me a ticket on this ride. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Well, almost anything.”

  “Check. I’ll buy you a beer back at my place,” McLanahan said. “Or a vodka. I guess that would be more appropriate.”

  McLanahan thumped his long-time partner on the back, grabbed Luger’s tactical chart and made his way upstairs, where he strapped himself into a spare parachute and fastened his seatbelt.

  “Forty miles,” Luger announced. “Clear of terrain for fifty miles.”

  “We’ll have enough gas for one low approach,” Ormack said. “We’ve got
fuel low-pressure lights on all four mains. One pass clean, then a left turn into a visual overhead for landing.”

  “Crew, listen up,” Elliott said. “If we pick up ground fire we’ll break out of the pattern and climb out as fast as we can. We’ll level off at fifteen thousand and go straight ahead until we flame out. Jump out on my command, but if you see the red light don’t wait for my command. After you land use your survival radios on the discrete channel and we’ll try to locate everyone and form up.”

  “Thirty miles,” Luger reported. “High terrain at two o’clock. Shouldn’t be a factor. Looks reasonably clear for a left-hand traffic pattern.”

  “We’re setting up on a sort of extended base leg, Luger,” Ormack said. “That airfield will be moving off to your left.”

  “Rog.”

  “Descent and penetration checklist, crew,” Ormack called out. “We’ve got twenty thousand pounds of fuel, nav. Approach speed and emergency landing data?”

  Luger called up the landing data on a computer terminal in the downstairs compartment. “Two engines out on one side—approach speed is less than minimum maneuvering speed, so min maneuvering speed takes precedence,” Luger read. “Min maneuvering speed is one-twenty-eight with full flaps, plus twenty-five with less than full rudder authority. One hundred and fifty-eight knots. Go-around EPR setting, three point zero, military power on symmetric engines only. Touchdown speed one-forty- eight. Brake energy limited one-fifty to the bottom of the danger zone, one-thirty to the bottom of the caution zone. Max drag chute speed one-thirty-five.”

  “There may not be a go-around,” Ormack said, checking the fuel gauges. He continued the lengthy series of checklists, letting the Old Dog’s on-board computer display each checklist on Ormack’s display in the cockpit. It seemed the Old Dog was one huge emergency procedure. Ormack reviewed checklists for fuel leaks on landing, double engine-out, engine fire, drag chute failure, hydraulic failure, overrunning the runway, landing on ice and snow, strange field procedures, ejection and emergency aircraft evacuation. When he finished, Luger announced that they were less than twenty miles from the Anadyr Far East Fighter-Inceptor Airbase.