Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02

by Day of the Cheetah (v1. 1)

  DreamStar had moved only a hundred feet farther from the gate when he “saw” the first M113 armored vehicle approach.

  It was moving fast, nearly forty miles an hour, past the burning piles of debris scattered around in front of the now-abandoned Hangar Five less than a hundred yards away. He hit the brakes just as the superconducting radar detected the Mii3’s twenty- millimeter cannon open fire.

  * * *

  “Hal, what’s your situation?” General Elliott called over the security net.

  Hal Briggs grabbed a handhold on the Mug’s door for support as he keyed his microphone: “We’re approaching the plane from the left. It’s now about three hundred feet in front of us, facing down the throat toward the gate. I’d swear the thing backed up or somethin’ . . . Over.”

  Elliott, now in a staff car with McLanahan at the wheel, was racing down taxiway delta toward the hangar area, careening over ditches and weaving through gates to get back to the ramp. McLanahan looked at Elliott. “Did he say DreamStar ^ was backing up?” Elliott had no answer. “Hal,” Patrick said, “what’s DreamStar’s range to the gate?”

  “Hard to tell until we get closer, but I’d say less than three hundred yards.”

  Elliott looked at Patrick. “Is it enough . . . ?”

  McLanahan didn’t dare take his eyes off the road, floored the gas pedal and gripped the wheel tighter. “Cool morning, half a fuel load, a little headwind . . . it’s enough.”

  “God damn. Who the hell’s flying it?” Even then, Elliott could not believe that James, one of only three men alive who could possibly fly DreamStar, was in the cockpit. “How the hell did he get in there?” Elliott pressed the mike switch hard enough to turn his finger white. “Shoot out the tires, Hal. If the plane moves, shoot to kill. If DreamStar moves ahead, destroy it.”

  * * *

  Eight hundred twelve point seven feet. Now.

  Keeping the brakes on hard, James commanded the throttles to full power, let them stabilize for a few seconds, then pushed them to max afterburner. He allowed another halfsecond for the computer to perform a single full-power engine-trim adjustment, then opened the dorsal engine louvers. DreamStar’s aft end pitched down and the nose shot up at a steep angle. He set the flex wings and canards for high lift and max performance climb-out . . . then released the brakes.

  DreamStar had not rolled more than a hundred feet forward when he realized he was not going to make it. He knew it even before the performance computer, receiving data from radar on range to the obstacle, reported a collision warning and recommended an immediate takeoff abort. Maraklov overrode the recommendation with the thought: this is how I’ll die? Not after a dogfight trying to steal and save DreamStar. Dying in a fireball crashing into the security gate, trying something that I knew had no chance from the beginning . . .

  Five hundred feet to go. All wheels still firmly on the ground, airspeed hardly registering. Maraklov could feel the absence of lift on his wings, the absence of the familiar twist that the composite flex wings underwent during the takeoff acceleration. Countering the wingtip twist was a simple computer-controlled correction, as simple as swallowing, as simple as—

  He cut short his gloomy predictions. The wingtip twist ... DreamStar automatically neutralized the twist in the wingtips because the twisted wing created vortices under the wing and fuselage, which created turbulence, which increased drag and lengthened takeoff roll distances. But the turbulence under the fuselage created something else—ground effect.

  And the power of ground eflFect would be to cushion the plane a few feet oflF the ground, just below flying speed but still airborne. If that was true . . .

  Four hundred feet left . . .

  Maraklov overrode the order to counteract the wingtip twist. In response, the tips of DreamStar’s wings curved even more, creating two hundred percent more lift as well as two virtual tornados of wind that swirled counterclockwise from the wingtips down and under the wings and across the fuselage. He felt the vortices slam into the fuselage and fought for control. DreamStar felt sluggish, unresponsive, out of pilot control.

  Ninety knots. Three hundred feet remaining . . .

  A loud creak from the left wingtip, and a “CONFIGURATION” warning flashed in Maraklov’s conscious mind. He ignored it. The wingtips were now being buffeted by winds nearing hurricane force, while the rest of the wing was wallowing in relatively calm winds nowhere close to takeoff speed. Maraklov stiffened the wings by twisting the inner surfaces, allowing the power being generated in the wingtips to flow to the lazy parts of the wing. The aircraft rumbled in protest. He was receiving “CONFIGURATION” and “COLLISION” warnings, and had to struggle not only to ignore the warnings but to prevent ANTARES from taking command and aborting the takeoff. DreamStar’s artificial brain was programmed for self-preservation at all costs, not self-destruction.

  One hundred knots, two hundred feet remaining ... DreamStar’s nose gear popped off the runway, held aloft by the large canards and by the force of the upwardly directed thrust from the dorsal louvers. DreamStar was in takeoff attitude but she was still far, far from lift-off speed.

  One hundred fifty feet... one chance left—he commanded the landing gear up.

  One hundred feet, one hundred ten knots. An ANTARES- generated warning from the flight-configuration computer flashed in Maraklov’s mind, warning him that the landing gear safety switch still showed pressure on the gear struts—DreamStar was still on the ground. Instantly he overrode the warning, commanded gear up, then closed his eyes and waited for DreamStar’s tail to hit the runway.

  Seventy-five feet, one hundred fifteen knots—liftoff speed for this takeoff configuration. The tail did not hit the runway.

  Zero feet left... With the tall, bulky landing gear retracted, DreamStar accelerated to one hundred thirty knots, and was able to use the extra airspeed to lift its nose even higher, clawing for every last bit of altitude. A shower of sparks erupted from the top of the steel gate as DreamStar scraped past the reinforced barbed wire, tearing apart the two ventral rudders that had automatically deployed in DreamStar’s slow- flight mode—Maraklov did not think to retract those low- speed rudders in time. DreamStar shuddered as the rudders ripped off her belly, but she did not stall or hit the ground.

  DreamStar was airborne.

  * * *

  McLanahan and Elliott had just reached the hangar area as DreamStar lifted over the gate, the aircraft flying so slowly and at such a steep climb that it seemed almost suspended in midair, an apparition at the end of a shaft of fire. It also appeared to be falling slightly, but this was mostly an illusion; DreamStar’s nose dipped slightly to build up valuable airspeed, and it began to accelerate as it crossed the deserted runways and climbed slowly into the dawn.

  McLanahan slammed on the brakes in time to avoid an M113 combat vehicle that continued to fire heavy caliber rounds into the sky until DreamStar was completely out of sight. A few moments later Hal Briggs climbed out of the ACV, head tightly bandaged and carrying an M-16A2 rifle, and moved over to McLanahan’s sedan. After Elliott opened a door for him, he nearly collapsed in the backseat.

  “Sorry,” Briggs gasped, painfully hauling himself upright. “Couldn’t . . . couldn’t stop him.” Before Elliott could speak, Briggs had pulled out a walkie-talkie. “Red Man, this is Hotel. Notify the four-seventy-fourth tactical fighter wing at Nellis. XF-34A fighter aircraft stolen from this location. Aircraft is armed with air-to-air missiles and must be considered hostile. Orders from Alpha are to search and destroy.”

  “Copy, Hotel.”

  “Break. All Dreamland security units, this is Hotel. XF-34A aircraft is airborne, last seen heading southwest out of Dreamland at slow speed. The aircraft has been hijacked by unknown persons. It is equipped with air-to-air missiles only. Air defense units have authorization to engage and destroy at will; report detection or engagement to Red Man, Nellis and Las Vegas Air

  Traffic Control Center ASAP. Repeat: all units, engage and destro
y at will. Hotel out.” He dropped the walkie-talkie into his lap as if it weighed a hundred pounds.

  “Take us over to Hangar Five, Patrick,” Elliott said. He turned to Briggs, gently lifting up the bandages to check his wound. “Cancel that. Take us to the infirmary.”

  “I’m all right,” Briggs said, gingerly touching the top of his hairless head and checking his hastily applied bandages. “The guys on the ACV fixed me up.”

  At least for the moment, Elliott didn’t want Briggs in the hospital any more than Briggs wanted to be there. As McLanahan headed for the hangars he asked, “What the hell happened, Hal?”

  Briggs wiped stinging sweat from his wounds and burns. “It all happened so fast, General. The Foxtrot guard posts didn’t look right. I had them report in. Whoever was in Five Foxtrot’s Commando, it wasn’t Jacinto. I headed over to check it out when I got hit by the fifty cal. I barely made it to Rover Nine when flash grenades start popping. Before I knew it DreamStar was out in the throat. I’ve never seen anything like that takeoff, whoever did it. It was like he levitated right over the gate. I didn’t think he’d make it . . .”

  They drove up to the entrance of Hangar Five. Rover Seven, the second M113 armored combat vehicle, was positioned in front, with guards covering both the front and back. Rover Seven was also aiming a huge spotlight inside the hangar. “Seven, this is Hotel. Is the hangar secure?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Roger. Sergeant Macynski, follow me in. The rest cover us.” Briggs got out of the sedan, flipped off the safety lever on his M-16 and ran over to the M113. He met up with Macynski, outlined a brief tactical plan to the NCO, then approached the hangar door at a dead run. They scanned the interior of the hangar, quickly sweeping their rifle muzzles around the hangar while sighting through them, ready to fire at any sound or movement. Nothing. Briggs ordered the M113 in closer to secure the hangar, then headed back to the sedan.

  In the backseat he said into the walkie-talkie, “Red Man, this is Hotel. I want an investigation unit in Hangar Five and one on the Commando ACV on the ramp gate on the double. Break. Rover Nine, secure the V-100 that crashed into the gate. Recover any bodies from the wreckage for the investigation unit. I want an I.D. on the occupants ASAP.”

  “Roger, Hotel,” the security controller replied. “Hotel, be advised, Lance One and Lance Two F-16Fs airborne from Nellis at five past the hour. Two F-14 units from China Lake also report airborne. CATTLECAR is their controller. You can meet them on channel one-one.”

  “Roger, Red Man. Get all Dreamland air defense units on channel eleven and help coordinate an intercept with CATTLE- CAR. The last thing we need is for our guys to take shots at those F-14S or -16s.”

  “Switching all units to eleven, sir,” the security controller said. “Simultaneous voice and data.” Briggs switched his walkie-talkie over as well.

  “CATTLECAR, this is Hotel on channel one-one. Over.”

  “Hotel, this is CATTLECAR,” the radar controller replied. “HAWC anti-air units are reporting in now, sir. All assets should be on-line in sixty seconds.”

  “Any airborne radar platforms up?”

  “Not yet, sir. Nellis’ 767 AWACS is not an alert bird. I’ve requested the tac fighter unit to recall the crew, but that may take some time.”

  “We’ll lose him without an AWACS up there to dig him out of the terrain,” McLanahan said. “Ground radar won’t pick him up if he stays low.”

  “Hotel, this is CATTLECAR. Radar contact on your hostile. I’m directing all HAWC anti-air artillery units to engage. Any further instructions?”

  Briggs stopped and looked at Elliott. The general inwardly flinched but did not hesitate. “If they’ve got him, destroy him.”

  Briggs nodded and raised his walkie-talkie. “CATTLECAR, message confirmed through Alpha. Engage at will and shoot to kill. Out.”

  * * *

  Maraklov was no more than two hundred feet above ground when ANTARES began to report the emitters all around him. As Maraklov scanned outside the cockpit, visual images were supplanted by ANTARES-generated images of catalogued terrain features around which multicolored arcs or bands undulated, disappeared and reappeared in kaleidoscopic waves. The colored bands were beams of radar energy—search radars, tracking radars, and data-links—all searching for him.

  Most of the waves of color were above him, like curtains of fire stretching across a ceiling, but a few seemed to slice right through DreamStar. Maraklov had to avoid those bands. The green bands were search radars, not deadly in themselves, but they would give away his position to the searchers. The other bands of energy were yellow—tracking radars that would pinpoint his location and would begin to feed targeting information to surface-to-air or air-to-air missiles. If the yellow bands turned red, it meant that a missile had been launched. If he was inside the red band, he was within the missile’s lethal envelope and would probably die within seconds unless the missile could be outmaneuvered—DreamStar carried no jammers, no decoys. Maraklov had to outrun, outmaneuver or kill his attackers, or it was over for him.

  He was finally free of the dry bed of the Groom Lake area, heading south and almost into Papoose Canyon northwest of Emigrant Valley, when a single finger of green light snapped out between a narrow gap between two rocky buttes and hit DreamStar broadside. One of the search radars had found him. The band immediately turned to yellow, but one of the buttes blocked the energy and the band turned green once again as the beam continued its three hundred and sixty degree sweep. But they now knew where he was—and were closing in on him. Maraklov dodged further away from the butte, hoping to stay in the butte’s radar shadow as long as possible.

  It wasn’t working. The terrain was forcing him to climb, but the beam of green energy above him wasn’t rising with him. He had no time to react. The green beam of energy, completing a full revolution every six seconds, hit him once again as DreamStar crested a rocky ridge line. This time, it turned yellow and stayed on him. DreamStar’s threat-warning receiver immediately reported the contact, and after a few seconds analysis concluded that a British-made Rapier surface-to- air-missile was locked on.

  The computer suggested a heading, altitude and airspeed to escape the Rapier missile’s lethal radius, and Maraklov ordered the evasive maneuver just as the band of energy went from yellow to red—the Rapier had gone from search to missile- uplink in seconds. The missile was in the air. There was no time and no room to move. DreamStar was bracketed by hills and mountains.

  Sensing Maraklov’s confusion, ANTARES canceled the first suggested maneuver, immediately deployed the canards into their high-lift configuration and ordered a hard, tight Immel- mann—a fast inverted half-loop—directly back into the short rocky butte they had just passed. ANTARES also activated the superconducting radar, which showed the butte only three- quarters of a mile directly ahead. They would impact in less than four seconds . . .

  A flash of light erupted off the right wing, and suddenly DreamStar banked hard right, pulling nine G’s in the tight turn. The Rapier missile had missed by only a few short feet. Maraklov tried to search the sky for another missile, but the hard nine-G turn had blurred and tunneled his vision. Another explosion off to his right—there had, indeed, been a second Rapier missile launched at him, but that one had exploded on the butte not three hundred yards behind him.

  As his ejection-seat back began to recline automatically, which would help blood to flow back into his brain while ANTARES completed evasive maneuvers, Maraklov watched as the colored bands surrounding him switched back to green. The older Rapier missile systems surrounding Dreamland carried only two missiles on each launch platform, and the system had switched back to search mode while the Rapier crew reloaded.

  Maraklov watched, fascinated, as ANTARES automatically increased power to full thrust, and began to use short bursts of its multi-directional radar to scan the terrain around DreamStar and fly as close to earth as possible. His ejection seat slowly returned to its upright position as the
G-forces subsided, and he actually could relax ... he would be long gone from the range of that Rapier site by the time it was reloaded—

  A warning beep sounded in the upper-center part of his cockpit, and with it a blue-triangle icon appeared, with a long green triangle protruding from the front end. Answering his mental query, ANTARES reported what it was: an F-16 Falcon fighter, sweeping the skies below with its new APG-91 look- down radar. Although pushing age twenty-five, the F-16 had undergone so many modifications that it could hardly be considered the same aircraft as twenty-five years earlier. Not originally designed for look-down, shoot-down, low-altitude engagements, it now sported a multi-purpose “cranked arrow” effect, with huge delta wings, and was capable of attacking air or ground targets at any altitude. Its new capability was in evidence as its green triangle swept down from the sky and in moments DreamStar had once again been discovered.

  Maraklov commanded an immediate hard bank and searched for terrain to hide in. He knew the F-16s rarely worked alone; only one would activate its radar, while one or two others would take vectors from the leader and close in on their prey, activating their attack radars at the last possible moment . . .

  Another mental command ... and Maraklov’s heart sank. At its present low altitude, DreamStar was gulping fuel. He could not afford to get into a situation where he’d have to waste time and fuel dodging missiles from the F-i6s, let alone any sort of protracted aerial battle with them. Reinforcements were surely on their way—very likely F-15S from the Air Force Reserve base at Davis-Monthan in Tucson. Maraklov’s options were running out. There was only one real choice left to him.

  Run like hell.

  At a single request, Maraklov discovered the single best altitude to use to clear all terrain within five hundred miles—six thousand five hundred feet. He ordered the computer to maintain that altitude and set best-speed power settings for the engines. As fuel was burned off and gross weight decreased, the computer would pick the best speed versus drag settings of engine power, trim, and wing configuration to achieve the fastest possible speed. He could afford no more power changes, climbs, descents, terrain avoidance or defense maneuvers. His only option was to stay at zero Q—where the sum of all aerodynamic forces on his aircraft remained zero, the highest possible cruise efficiency—and run for the border.