Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01

by Flight of the Old Dog (v1. 1)

  “I see him, he's right behind us—”

  An explosion rocked the bomber—like a wrecking ball had crashed into the Old Dog’s midsection. McLanahan felt as if he were riding an elevator that had just dropped twenty floors in an instant. The Old Dog seemed to hover in midair, its six working engines straining against the impact of a Soviet A A-8 missile slamming into its fuselage.

  Yuri Papendreyov, flying slightly high and to the right of his quarry, clenched a fist and allowed a smile. One of his heat-seeking missiles had missed, but the second had hit the American bomber in the mid-body, just forward of the wing’s leading edge. Clouds of smoke erupted from the hole he’d created. The bomber’s tail sank down, the nose shot up.

  Yet somehow it was still flying. Well, those Americans might lead charmed lives, but their luck had run out. He still had two AA-8 heat-seekers and five hundred rounds of ammunition, and the bomber was badly crippled.

  In his tight right-hand turn to set up for another attack, he checked his navigation instruments and saw he was only forty kilometers from Anadyr . . .

  There was no greater prize than the B-52, he told himself, no greater victory ... He widened his right turn and smiled broadly, seeing his destiny unfolding.

  Choking and coughing from the thick clouds of black smoke, Wendy aimed a fire extinguisher out the open aft bulkhead door leading to the bomb bay catwalk and squeezed the trigger. She was bleeding from a gash in her forehead sustained when she was thrown against the forward instrument panel after the missile hit. A moment later Angelina was beside her, carrying the firefighting mask and another extinguisher bottle. While Wendy put on the mask and plugged it into the instructor-nav’s oxygen panel, Angelina moved as far as she could toward the fire on the catwalk and fired her extinguisher.

  The flames had intensified the instant Wendy had opened the bulkhead door, but the blast of air racing from the breaks in the cockpit through the open door sucked the smoke and flames aft and gave her a clear and effective shot at the fire in the electronic countermeasures transformers and control boxes.

  Wendy dropped back into the radar nav’s seat, her forehead dripping blood, her arms and legs throbbing. She pulled off the firefighting mask, gasped over the interphone: “Fire’s out, Patrick. Big hole in the fuselage and fire in the ECM boxes, but it looked like it missed the landing gear.’’

  “We’re blind up here,’’ Ormack said. “We can’t see him, we can’t see when he shoots at us . . .’’

  McLanahan had already put the computer-controlled clearance plane setting to COLA so the Old Dog would seek its own lowest possible altitude. But because of the reduction in thrust and the severe damage, the terrain-climbing capability of the Old Dog was reduced. And as the terrain became more rugged, the altitude slowly crept higher, exposing the bomber more and more to the Soviet fighter.

  “All right, everyone, check your areas for damage,’’ McLanahan said, his grip on the control wheel so tight his hands began to cramp.

  “We’ve got a leak in the aft fuel tank,” Ormack said, blowing on his hands and scanning the fuel panel. “I’m opening valve twenty-eight, closing twenty-nine. Also pumping all fuel out of the aft body tank before it leaks out—”

  A sudden motion out of the left-cockpit windscreen drew his attention outside. “Patrick, look ...”

  McLanahan spun around to a sight that made him go rigid . . . The gray MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter was directly beside the Old Dog, just ahead of the cockpit, slightly above them and no more than a hundred feet away. McLanahan could clearly see the pilot’s right shoulder and head out his bubble canopy, along with a sleek air-to-air missile on its wing hardpoint.

  The MiG was amazingly small and compact, resembling a twin-tailed American F-16 fighter. The Russian pilot apparently had little trouble flying beside the B-52, even at its low altitude, perfectly matching each of the Old Dog’s computer-commanded altitude adjustments.

  “Angelina, he’s on our left side, ten o’clock, about a hundred feet. Can we get him with the Scorpions on our right pylon?”

  “He’s too close. The missile wouldn’t have time to lock on.”

  The MiG pilot glanced over at McLanahan, rocked his Fulcrum s wings up and down three times. He stopped, then made one last rock to the right.

  “Why is he doing that . . . ?”

  Ormack’s jaw tightened. “It’s the interception signal. He wants us to follow him.”

  “Follow him?” McLanahan said, stomach tightening. “No way, we can t—

  “Patrick, we’ve got nowhere to run. He can knock us out of the sky anytime—”

  The MiG rocked up its left wing once more, very emphatically, as if underscoring Ormack’s words. To back up his message the MiG pilot fired a one-second burst from his belly guns, the bright phosphorous-tipped tracer shells knifing off into the twilight like deadly shooting stars.

  “If we don’t follow he comes back around and tags us,” Ormack said. “We’ve got no chance—”

  “We can still fight,” McLanahan said. “As long as we got missiles we can’t give up.”

  Ormack grabbed his arm. “If we try to run he’ll just come around again and shoot us down.” He lowered his voice. “You did a great job, Pat, but it’s over. It’s—”

  McLanahan shrugged his arm free. The MiG had dropped back a few feet, his bubble-canopy now directly beside the Old Dog’s narrow, slanted cockpit. The Russian pilot pointed down three times.

  McLanahan turned and looked directly at the MiG pilot, flying in unison with the fighter at a distance of fifty feet. To Ormack’s surprise, he nodded to the Russian, and the MiG pilot pointed to McLanahan’s right, indicating a right turn.

  Ormack looked away, not wanting to see what he had insisted was necessary for their survival. The pain he felt was from more than his blood-soaked shoulder.

  McLanahan nodded one more time to the MiG pilot. “Stand by to turn, crew,” he said, gripping the wheel tight.

  Yuri Papendreyov was flushed with pride. He had done it. The American was surrendering. Of course, he could hardly do anything else—with its mangled left wingtip, the destroyed far left engine, the B-52 was flying slower and slower, without the extreme dives and climbs Yuri had seen before as it hugged the ground. Yuri also noted the small-caliber bullet holes all over the B-52’s left side from the nose to the wings, and figured the AA-8 missile he’d shot into their fuselage had been the final blow.

  The B-52 began its very slow right turn, and Yuri had just begun applying pressure on his control stick to follow—suddenly the entire right side of the canopy was filled with the dark, menacing form of the American bomber . . . Instead of turning right toward Anadyr the insane pilot had turned left—directly into Yuri’s MiG-29.

  Yuri yanked his control stick hard to the left, rolling up into ninety, one hundred degrees of bank. A moment later his world exploded in a crunch of metal as the two aircraft, traveling almost twelve kilometers a minute, collided. With both aircraft in a hard left turn, the top of the B-52 had plowed into the bottom of Yuri’s fighter.

  Somehow Yuri managed to continue his hard turn, standing his MiG on its left wingtip and pulling back on the stick to increase the roll rate. The B-52 seemed to be turning right with him, even pushing him on, dragging him to the earth. The fighter was now at ninety-degrees bank, and the terrifying crushing and grinding sounds underneath him continued. Yuri could see rocks and trees out of the top of his canopy. His controls refused to respond . . .

  He ignited his twin afterburners, and like a snapping rubberband his MiG was flung away from the B-52. In the process Yuri found himself inverted, then in a wild tumble. The roar of the B-52 was everywhere, he expected another impact any moment . . .

  But the spin slowed and he managed to level his wings. He was barely at twenty meters. Rocks and trees were all around him—he was staring up at a huge ridge line encrusted with jagged snow-covered boulders. But his airspeed at last began to build and he felt the ground rushing away beneath him.<
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  Quickly he checked around for the B-52 .. . nothing. Gone. Shaking his head, Yuri started a slow right turn to check behind him . . .

  Numb from the midair collision he had contrived, McLanahan watched transfixed as the gray MiG continued its spin down, heading for the rocks, reaching the point where McLanahan thought the pilot could never recover.

  But he did. He must have been close enough to the rocks to get one in his boot, but his spin stopped and the MiG sped away from the earth, gaining breathtaking speed in seconds, and now McLanahan was fighting for control of his own plane. The stall-warning buzzer sounded, and the Old Dog seemed to be floating straight down instead of flying forward.

  “Get the nose down, we're in a stall," Ormack was yelling at him. McLanahan shoved the yoke forward, fighting the initial-stall buffet that shook the entire hundred-ton bomber.

  The buzzer stopped. McLanahan found he had control, leveled the nose until the airspeed came up, but he had to force himself to stop looking at the rugged ground that whizzed so close to the Old Dog’s groaning wings.

  “There he is, here he comes . . .” Ormack shouted, pointing straight ahead.

  He was coming, all right. Directly in front of them. “Angie,” McLanahan called over the interphone. “Pylon missile . . . fire. ”

  The MiG was in a thirty-degree right bank directly off* the Old Dog’s nose at a range of perhaps three to four miles when the missile left the right pylon rail. It ignited in a bright plume of fire, sped away toward the wide bubble canopy of the MiG.

  But the Scorpion that left the Old Dog’s rail was an unguided bullet, not a sophisticated air-to-air missile. Without radar tracking and uplink from the Old Dog to guide it, the Scorpion relied on either an infrared signature or an anti-radar jamming signal to home in on. It had neither. The MiG had kept its radar and jammers off*, presenting no heat signature at all so long as it was in its right turn.

  The Scorpion streaked forward, passing a hundred feet in front of the MiG. Ten seconds after it automatically armed its warhead after launch, the Scorpion’s computer asked itself if it was tracking a target. The reply was no, and the Scorpion harmlessly detonated its warhead almost two miles past the MiG-29.

  Papendreyov saw the American bomber and the missile at the same time. There was no time to turn, to dive, or accelerate—not even time for him to close his eyes and brace for the impact—

  And then, just as quickly, the missile was gone. Yuri watched for a second missile—a B-52 bomber launching missiles?—but there was none.

  He continued his wide right-climbing turn, keeping a close watch on the B-52, which now was a serious adversary, not just a helpless whale resigned to its fate.

  He watched it far below him, making a left turn, heading east. With his own speed regained, it looked to Papendreyov as if the B-52 was almost hanging suspended in midair. Not dead, but an inviting target.

  He maneuvered behind it, stalking it, closing slowly for the kill. Noting the tail cannon sweeping back and forth in a rectangular pattern, he rolled out high and to the right of the bomber. The cannon continued its erratic box-pattern sweep, occasionally seeming to be altogether out of control and useless . . . yes, it could launch missiles, but it had no way of guiding them.

  Yuri armed his GSh-23 cannon and maneuvered behind and slightly above the B-52, slowly closing the distance. He no longer considered trying to force the bomber to land—his gun's cameras would record his victory over the intruder.

  He edged closer to the bomber, then began his strafing run . . .

  “We lost him.” Ormack was searching his side cockpit windows.

  “He’s out there,” McLanahan said, reengaging the terrain-avoidance autopilot. “He can find us easy. We’ve got to find him before he gets a shot off . . .”

  Angelina watched her rocket-turret-position indicators as they oscillated in random sputters and jerks. The radar was locking onto ghosts, starting and stopping, breaking lock. Frustrated, she turned the radar to STANDBY, waited a few moments, then turned it back to TRANSMIT . . .

  A large bright blip appeared on the upper left corner of her radarscope. She waited for it to disappear, just like all the rest of the electronic ghosts, but this one stayed.

  She stomped her foot on the interphone button. “Bandit five o’clock high, break right!”

  McLanahan swung the control yoke hard right.

  Ormack’s head banged against the right cockpit window but he pulled himself upright and scanned as far behind the bomber as he could . . . “Pereira, five o’clock, one and a half miles, twenty degrees high and cornin’ down. Nail him.”

  Yuri had the shot lined up perfectly, a textbook gun-pass. He had just squeezed the trigger on his control stick, squeezed olf a hundred precious rounds, before realizing that the B-52 wasn’t in his sights. It had moved. He tried to rudder-drag his sight around to the right but it wasn’t enough and he was forced to yank off power and roll with the B-52 to reacquire it.

  He was almost aligned again when a sharp white flash popped off his left side not a hundred meters away. He yanked his MiG into a hard right turn and accelerated away, saw another white flash and a cloud of sparkling shards of metal exploding above him. The B-52 was shooting at him, and that was no machine-gun round—the intruder had tail-firing rockets . . .

  Yuri expertly rolled out of his turn, perpendicular to the bomber’s flight path and out of range of the strange flak missiles.

  A blinking warning light caught his attention. He was now on emergency fuel—less than ten minutes time left and with no reserve. He didn’t even have the time to set up another gun pass. He rearmed his last two remaining AA-8 missiles, rechecked his infrared spotting scope and checked the location of the bomber.

  Time for one last pass, and it had to be perfect. At least his AA-8s had to have greater range than those tiny missiles. He would roll back in directly behind the B-52 and fire at maximum range when the AA-8s locked onto the bomber’s engine-exhaust.

  He made a diving left-turn, staying about twelve kilometers behind the bomber. His infrared target-spotting scope with its large supercooled eye locked onto the B-52 immediately and sent aiming information to the AA-8 missiles. The B-52 was making no evasive maneuvers. Slowly, the distance decreased.

  The American bomber, Yuri noted, had maneuvered itself onto a flat plateau just above Anadyr Airbase, heading east toward the Bering Strait. It had nowhere to hide, nowhere to evade. Yuri hoped it wouldn’t smash into Anadyr. On the other hand, what better place to deposit the evidence of his victory? His vindication?

  The range continued to decrease. Yuri could see the B-52’s tail now, and the missile-firing cannon, still pointing up and to the right, jammed in position. Yuri put his finger on the launch trigger, ready . . .

  A high-pitched beep sounded in his helmet—the AA-8’s seeker heads had locked onto the B-52. Yuri checked his target once more, waited a few more seconds to close the distance—fired. The green LOCK light stayed on STEADY as the two Mach-two missiles streaked from their rails . . .

  Ormack searched the skies from the cockpit window. “I can’t see him, I lost him.”

  “Angie, can you see him?”

  “No, my radar’s jammed. I can’t see anything.”

  The plateau dropped away into a wide frozen plain, Anadyr Airbase centered within the snow-covered valley. McLanahan did not wait for the terrain-avoidance system to take the Old Dog down. He grabbed onto the yoke and pushed the Old Dog’s nose down, then shoved all six operating engine-throttles to full power.

  The Old Dog had only dropped about a hundred feet down into the valley when McLanahan suddenly realized the implications of what he was doing and used every ounce of strength left to pull back on the control column.

  “Patrick, what the hell are you doing?” Ormack shouted.

  “He’s behind us,” McLanahan told him. “He’s gotta be behind us. If we dive into that valley we’re dead meat.”

  Shattered fibersteel from the Old D
og’s damaged fuselage screamed in protest but somehow stayed together. The stall-warning horn blared, but McLanahan still held the yoke back, forcing the Old Dog’s nose skyward at a drastic angle.

  The AA-8 missiles, only a few hundred meters from impact, lost their lock-on to the engine’s hot exhaust when the Old Dog nosed upward. The missiles then immediately reacquired a warm heat-source and readjusted to a target—the base-operations building and the vehicles parked near it at Anadyr Airbase, which was now manned by several squads of the Anadyr constabulary. Surrounded by a meter of unplowed snow in all directions, the halftracks and jeeps were the hottest objects for miles.

  Chief Constable Vjarelskiy, who had run from the hangar area to the flightline to watch the chase unfolding in the skies above Anadyr Airbase, now watched in horror as the two missiles screamed directly at him.

  Before he could shout a warning, the missiles hit—one plowing into the wooden base operations building, the other finding an unoccupied truck with its hood open because of an overheated radiator. The twin explosions scattered troops in all directions.

  Properly enraged, Vjarelskiy pulled his nine-millimeter pistol from his holster and raised it toward the American B-52, then stopped, realizing how absurd he must look.

  Yuri had expected the American bomber to try to duck into the valley. Well, it would do him no good—actually it would improve the intruder’s heat-signature.

  What he never expected was a climb . . . the B-52 had appeared out of nowhere from behind the ridge, streaking skyward, its nose pointed straight up in the air.

  No missile, not even the new AA-8s, could follow that. Yuri flicked on his cannon and managed a half-second burst, but his overtake speed was too great and he was forced to climb over the B-52.

  The huge black bomber had disappeared beneath him. Yuri could only keep his throttles at max afterburner, try to loop around and align himself once more for another cannon pass before his fuel ran out . . .