Dale Brown - Flight Of The Old Dog

by Flight Of The Old Dog [lit]

  "Every pound of gas is critical now," Elliott asked. "Patric' can we cut off any points on your flight plan'?Cut this corner a bit?"

  "Risky," McLanahan said, studying his chart. "We can head for the next point on the flight plan. It'll save us about five minutes or so, but it'll put us closer to a small town on the coastline. I wanted to avoid this town by at least ten miles, we cut the corner, we almost overfly it.""Ten minutes worth of fuel is a drop in the bucket," high altitude, bucket," Ormack asked. "Down here "Is that town defended?"

  Elliott asked. "Any airfield there?Naval docks?"

  "I don't know," McLanahan asked. "There's no detail like that on the charts I'm using."

  "We'll have to risk it," Elliott asked. "The faster we get bac over land, the better I'll feel. Call up the next point, Patrick McLanahan punched up the new destination number on his keyboard, verified the coordinates with his penciled notes in the margin of his makeshift chart and displayed the destination. The pilot's heading bug shifted thirty degrees more to the right The Old Dog banked right in response.

  "Landfall in six minutes," Luger said.

  "Stay on watch, everyone," Elliott asked. "Stay on watch.

  "They're launching the whole goddamned Russian Eastern Defense Command," Beech said. He was sitting in dire command of the intelligence section; Markham and Capt. Jacobs, captain of the Lawrence, were on the bridge.

  "The son of a bitch couldn't have picked a worse place this side of the Caspian Sea to disappear off Russian radar Markham told Jacobs.

  "Directly between Petropavlovsk and seven nuclear submarines in the pens to the south, z Kavaznya to the north.

  "But how did he go off their radar?"Jacobs asked, studying the slides Markham's group had prepared of the situation. "I thought a mosquito couldn't get through their radar coverage."

  "We're not sure, Captain.

  More than likely, the guy crashed or ditched. Right from the beginning it sounded like the guy was having navigation problems."

  "Navigation problems don't make planes ditch," Jacobs asked. "If he had a catastrophic emergency, enough to cause navigation or flight control problems, why the hell didn't he declare an emergency?The Russians would've helped him I've seen them do it before. "I don't know, sir.

  He may have panicked. "Markham got up and pointed at the chart.

  "Radar coverage is sort of skimpy around here, too," he said, as much to himself as to Jacobs.

  "Petropavlovsk radar coverage doesn't quite extend this far north, but Beringa's radar does cover this entire gap."

  Jacobs was about to say something but was interrupted by Beech on the intercom.

  a "Captain, message from PVO Strany, Far East Command headquarters, to all units. In the clear. Uncoded."

  "I'm surprised they didn't read part of it in English," Jacobs said.

  "What are they saying?"

  "Air Defense Emergency declared for the area. General orders for deploying searching fighters in the area. Complete closing of Soviet airspace."

  "Send it, Markham asked. "Direct CINCPAC via JCS.

  Priority One.

  "Yes, sir."

  Jacobs studied the chart closer, finally picked up a pair of dividers lying on the console near his seat.

  "We use two hundred and fifty nautical miles for Center radars, right?"

  Yes, sir," Markham asked. "Standard line-of-sight-ranging.

  A bit more, depending on altitude.

  "But you don't have a big circle around Beringa," Jacobs noted, measuring the lines around the islands that composed the Russian members of the Aleutian chain.

  "They don't have a Center radar," Markham said, his excitement rising.

  .

  "They have shorter-range, low-altitude I capable radar. Approach control radar."

  Jacobs measured a two hundred and fifty mile circle from Petropavlovsk.

  The circle barely intersected the radar circle from Beringa.

  "They overlap "But there's a gap," Markham said, pointing at the chart.

  "They overlap, but there's still incomplete coverage. If you avoid this circle-" ,-he's out of range. "Jacobs stabbed the chart excitedly and looked at Markham. "And Petropavlovsk won't see him if- "If he's low level. Below five or six thousand feet, he gets lost in the background radar clutter, even over water.

  "Wait a minute. "Jacobs held up a hand. "You said this guy was a tanker.

  "He had a tanker call sign," Markham said, checking his notes.

  "Lantern four-five Fox. Out of Elmendorf. But he had no flight plan, and Elmendorf reports no four-five Fox."

  "So he's not a tanker. Then what?"

  "A low-altitude penetrator?"Markham muttered.

  "A bomber?"he knew exactly where to go. Exactly. How else "It seems would he know about the gaps in radar coverage?"spotted by that recon jet."

  Markham nodded. "But... he surpris "Got his fingers caught in the cookie jar, maybe?"

  Markham shook his head. "Spotted by a recon plane, he... he turns around before they figure out he's headed inland-" Jacobs said.

  wizard Kavaznya "And he's disappeared again, going in the back way."

  "Goddamn," Jacobs muttered. "Why me?Why now') sir," Markham reminded the captain, "None of our communications on this entire boat are completely secure, second-guessing him. "If we blow the whistle-" "Why the hell doesn't anybody tell us what's going on?

  Well, it's too late now anyway. The whole Far East Command is after him. He won't get far."

  "So what do we do?"

  Jacobs shook his head. "We do nothing. Nothing we can do.

  That guy, whoever he is, is all on his own.

  Elliott jerked himself out of his reverie. He hadn't been "Four minutes to coast-in," Dave Luger announced.

  sleeping-he couldn't really remember the last time he had.dbut he had been in some sort of daydream ever since descending to low level.

  Now his eyes were locked onto the dim glow of the small Russian town they were approaching.

  The tiny town, too small to have a name on Luger's generalpurpose navigation chart, appeared as a scattering of lights off in the distance. Just one small blob of lights, with a small string of lights trailing away-probably a lighted path down to the docks for the fishermen, or the main road in and out of town.

  It wasn't the first Russian town he'd seen, but this one seemed different. Innocent. Peaceful. Moscow, the last time he was there as an Embassy adviser back in the seventies, was enacing. Even during the newlywed years of detente, he felt its choking, suffocating presence.

  Here, over the cold rough pioneer-like badlands of eastern Siberia, it seemed different...

  Elliott unconsciously gripped the yoke tighter. The sight of the long SST nose of the Old Dog reminded him where he was, what they were doing. He readjusted his microphone.

  "Wendy?"

  "Nothing, General," Wendy replied, nervously anticipating his query.

  "Random, low-power VHE" Her voice was a clipped monotone.

  "Distance to the coastal mountains, Dave?"

  "General, I don't know for sure. My enroute chart doesn't show any detail of the Kamchatka peninsula. I'll need a few radar sweeps to range them out."ew Elliott considered that. He couldn't wait to get within the safety of the mountains, but still.- - "All right-authorized But no more than a few seconds."

  "Better let me take a look," McLanahan said, readjusting his attack radar controls. "I can look out eighty miles in fullscan, Dave's limited to thirty in a small cone."

  "Do it," Elliott told him. "Dave, can you draw a picture of the terrain?Give yourself a little topographic map?"

  Luger blocked out a section of his high-altitude chart and measured out a rough eighty-mile-range radar-scope diagram, then loosened his parachute and ejection seat straps and leaned over as far as possible to look at McLanahan's ten-inch display.

  "Ready."

  "Here we go. "McLanahan finished reconfiguring and pretuning his scope, then pressed the RADIATE button. The radar i
mage of the eastern shore of the Kamchatka peninsula appeared-the first radar picture, McLanahan thought, from an American bomber about to make an attack on an installation of the Soviet Union.

  Don't dwell on it, he told himself...

  "Gently rising terrain in the next forty miles."

  -graphing the scope presentation Luger was furiously shadow on his chart. "Navigation looks good-we're about thirty miles from the coast on radar, our heading looks good to avoid overflying that town. It should pass about two miles to our left.

  High terrain starts in about thirty-seven miles, but so far nothing is above us. Some high stuff at sixty miles but still no big shadows." d, "that five thousand feet "Which means," Ormack said might be a safe altitude for us.

  "Got all you need, Dave?"McLanahan asked.

  Luger shook his head as he added some detail of some longrange peaks to his bastardized terrain chart. "Few more seconds he muttered.

  McLanahan nodded and continued studying the scope.

  "That town looks pretty big," he said over interphone as he studied the display, adjusting the video and receiver gain controls to eliminate the terrain returns, then turned to his partner. "Done with the long range, Dave?"Luger nodded.

  "I'm checking that town in thirty-mile range. It looks funny."

  He moved the range selector to thirty-mile range. The small town was now magnified in good detail at the top of his scope.

  "Make it quick," Elliott warned.

  "Funny?"Ormack asked. "How funny?"

  "Funny as in bad news. Real bad news," McLanahan said.

  He stared at the magnified scene for a few more sweeps, then quickly put his radar scope to STANDBY "General, we gotta turn. Now. At least twenty degrees right."

  "Why... T' "Ships," McLanahan asked. "One dock full of big mother ships..."

  "Search radar at twelve o'clock," Wendy sang out.

  ddenly called Elliott shoved the eight throttles forward and banked the Megafortress hard to the right.

  "Give me COLA on the clearance-plane setting, John," Elliott ordered.

  Ormack reached across and turned the clearance plane knob down to its lowest setting. COLA--computer generated Lowest Altitude. Now the terrain-avoidance computer would select the lowest altitude possible for the Alegafortress based on a small error factor of the radar altimeter or terrain-avoidance computer, plus aircraft bank angle and terrain elevation.

  The computer, starting at a COLA altitude of about a hundred feet, would then evaluate itself and readjust its minimum COLA altitude, continuously striving for the lowest Possible altitude. Since the Old Dog's terrain-avoidance computer was slaved only to the radar altimeter, the new lowest altitude would equate to the highest error tolerance of the radar altimeters scant thirty feet-plus a few feet for the normal rolling oscillations of any autopilot.

  The huge bomber plunged its nose toward the inky blackness of the Russian Pacific, then slowly back to level as it quickly reached its commanded altitude. Now.nearly four hundred thousand pounds of man and machine, guided by a single thin radar beam from the bomber's belly, were skimming only a few dozen yards from the surface of the water at over four hundred miles an hour.

  "Still only search radar," Wendy reported, leaning forward intently toward her TV-like threat display. "High power but still scan mode.

  They're A chill worked its way up McLanahan's spine even before Wendy finished her analysis of the new signals being transmitted.

  "New signal coming up," Wendy said suddenly. "Narrowcan search..

  .

  height-finder coming up... they've got us, General. They've found us, surface-to-air missile signals coming up Jeff Hampton's voice sounded strained and excited as the President picked up the telephone near his chair. "Say that again, Jeff?"the President said, rubbing interupted fitful sleep from his eyes. He massaged a knotted muscle in his neck and forced himself to concentrate.

  "An Air Defense alert was called about fifteen minutes ago over the Kamchatka peninsula," Hampton repeated, gulping for air."in Russia."

  "I know where the goddamned Kamchatka peninsula is, Jeff - Go on.

  peared off their "An unidentified aircraft, Presumed to be American, disap radar. Real close-in. Violated airspace.

  It... it had a call sign similar to... to the one General Elliott was using."

  "Elliott?Brad Elliott?My God!"

  "Not confirmed, sir, but-" "I'll be right down. Alert General Curtis.

  Have him meet me in the Situation Room on the double."

  The President hurried out of the parlor, quickly dressed and went downstairs.

  Brad Elliott, you old devil... You got in. You son of a bitch-you made' it in.

  Wendy could only focus on the video threat display. Millions of watts of energy, directed along specific frequency and power ranges, were at her command, yet she stared transfixed at two erratic waves along one line of that threat display. Her hands were flat on her thighs, palms down, despite the Old Dog's steep bank turn which usually made her grab onto her ejection seat armrests.

  The audio pickup of the two radars was hypnotizing. The first radar emitted a scratchy bleeping sound, like a seal's bark.

  It had begun as an intermittent signal but was now coming over twice as fast-India-band narrow- scan search radar, aimed directly at them. The second radar gave off a higher-pitched squeal, like a rusty hinge. It signaled the presence of a Golfband height-finder, supplying altitude information to a surface to-air missile's guidance computer.

  The computer-controlled threat analyzer apparently couldn't make up its mind-it was switching its analysis symbol from "2" to " 3, " indicating S.A-2 or S.A-3 strategic missiles, which were usually designed for high-altitude penetrators. The missiles..... they called them "telephone poles" in Vietnam..... were barely capable against low-altitude penetrators-but the Old Dog was well within the missile's lethal range.

  "All radars in standby," Luger announced, double-checking both his and McLanahan's controls. He blinked in surprise at his pressure altimeter-it read minus sixty feet. He checked the radar altimeter readout on McLanahan's video screen and saw that it was pegged at a hundred feet. One hundred fee0 If the COLA computer didn't compensate property, at this altitude with only twenty degrees of bank they'd drag a wingtip in the water.

  With an unsteady hand he reset the Kollsmann window on his pressure altimeter until it read a hundred feet. He could almost see the water skimming below him at over six hundred "I feet a second. He could do nothing else but monitor the instruments, watch and wait.

  "Wendy?

  "Yes?"

  "Wendy," McLanahan shouted over the intercom.

  "Wendy.

  Answer me."

  "Patrick, I voice. She opened her eyes, took a deep breath, again of the threat analyzer in front of her.

  "Steady tracking and surveillance signals," she reported, her voice stronger. "Tracking us, but no guidance or uplink."

  Elliott watched the tiny blob of lights in the distance.

  Suddenly he saw a small shaft of light flare brightly, erupting from the outskirts of the town.

  "Missile launch!S.A-2!"from Wendy.

  "I've got it, I can see it," Elliott said.

  "I've got the uplink shut down. "Wendy carefully adjusted "J the jammer's frequencies, as if she were adjusting the focus on a microscope. She glanced up at her radar altimeter repeater.

  "How does it look?"

  "It's heading right for us," Ormack said.

  "Make a hard turn into it," Wendy ordered.

  "Into it?That will-" "Do it, General," Wendy said over the interphone. The Old Dog rolled into a steep bank to the left.

  "I can still see it... wait. "Elliott's voice was suddenly less strained. "I can see the whole tail of the missile... it's gone.

  It went behind us "Come back to the right, maximum bank, military thrust," Wendy said. Elliott immediately did it.

  "S.A-2 signal coming back up," Wendy said suddenly. Her hands flew over the High-spee
d Anti-Radiation Missile control panel. "Anti-radar missile one programmed and ready for launch.

  Angelina checked her switches, watching her indicators as a map HARM missile on the aft bomb bay's rotating launcher was pulled into the lower launch position. "Ready."