Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02

by Day of the Cheetah (v1. 1)

  He opened DreamStar’s canopy and climbed inside. No longer needing the platform, he unlatched and collapsed it, then kicked it away as hard as he could. The ladder rolled across the stub, hit the revetment wall and fortunately did not roll back toward DreamStar’s wings or canards.

  Next he activated DreamStar’s internal battery power and did a fast system self-test to make sure he had all the connections right—the self-test reported fully functional and ready to receive computer commands. The test also reported on any ground safing pins, access panels, or covers out of place. The standby gauges read full tanks, full twenty-millimeter ammunition drum and connectivity with the four remaining air-to- air missiles. DreamStar was ready for engine start as soon as the ANTARES interface was completed.

  Finally, standing on the ejection seat, Maraklov began to put on the flight suit. He had thought it would be impossible to do it without help, but it was turning out to be less of a problem than he’d anticipated. In twenty minutes he had put on and adjusted the sixty-pound suit, then carefully lowered himself into the ejection seat and fastened as many body restraints as he could. The suit was not designed for free range of motion— it resisted any movements that departed from the normal cockpit flight position—but he was soon strapped in tight.

  After a few moments of concentration he had his breathing back to normal, then well below normal as he reentered full alpha-state hypnosis. Still no sign of interference as he closed his eyes to begin the progressively deeper levels of self-hypnosis.

  Soon, DreamStar would be his once more. And he would be DreamStar’s . . .

  * * *

  “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Air Force helicopter TripleEcho Three-Four on GUARD frequency, twenty miles east of Lecus Southeast airport at two thousand feet. We are a United States Air Force military flight. Three on board plus three casualties, seven thousand pounds fuel, heading two-niner- zero degrees magnetic toward Buena Vista airport at one hundred knots. Engine and electrical damage and uncontrollable fuel loss. Requesting search and rescue meet us along southern Honduran border south of Puerto Lempira. Emergency. Please respond. Over.” There was no reply. The pilot repeated the call on both UHF and VHF GUARD emergency frequencies.

  “Nothing from the Nicaraguan military?” McLanahan asked.

  “It’s like they all disappeared off the face of the earth,” the pilot said. “When vve crossed the border into Nicaragua, they were all over us every second. Now they don’t even answer a distress call.’’

  “They might not hear you,” Briggs said, checking the overhead circuit-breaker panels. “Your radio panel looks like it might be damaged.” The pilot kept trying. Briggs moved up beside McLanahan, who was scanning a chart and keeping track of their progress. “Patrick . . . J.C. . . . he’s had it.”

  The chart dropped from his lap. His mouth turned dry as sand. His fingers trembled. “Jesus, no . . .” He shut his eyes. “J.C., J.C., dammit. . .” His only immediate relief was to allow the grief to overflow into blinding rage at Maraklov. That sonofabitch was going to pay, somehow, he was going to pay...

  McLanahan’s anger was disrupted by a hard thump and a low-frequency vibration that began to echo through the helicopter. The pilot tapped him on the shoulder. “Behind your seat, in the survival kit, there’s a hand-held radio.” He was also struggling against a sudden vibration that shook the entire helicopter. “We were briefed to use rescue channel alpha on this mission. See if you can raise anyone with that.” But before Briggs could retrieve the kit the chopper took a steep dive. The pilot had to pull with all his strength on the collective to keep the helicopter airborne.

  “I’m losing it fast,” the pilot said. “I’ve gotta set it down.”

  McLanahan picked up the chart and relocated their position. “Try to make it across the Rio Coco river into Honduras. No way we want to go down in Nicaragua.”

  The pilot shook his head. “I don’t know how far we can go but I’ll try. You two better strap in.” McLanahan stuck the chart in a flight-suit pocket. Briggs grabbed the survival kit, found a seat between the bodies on the chopper’s aft deck and strapped in.

  Somehow the helicopter did manage to stay intact for ten more minutes. McLanahan directed the pilot farther west toward a road leading northeast, and the pilot found it just as a yellow caution light lit up on the front instrument panel. “She’s seizing up,” the pilot said. “We can’t autorotate with all these trees around us. We land now or crash.”

  Following the road as best they could, they glided in over the forests, searching for a clearing. They found a bend in the road, and the pilot headed for it. He had timed it well. The

  Dolphin hit the road, hard, just as the overspeed safety system in the chopper’s transmission automatically uncoupled the rotor.

  “Out!” the pilot yelled, cutting oflF fuel and power and activating the automatic fire-extinguishing system. “Form up oflF the nose. Fast.” The three men dashed from the helicopter and ran a hundred yards away from the chopper, then turned and waited for an explosion or fire. Smoke billowed from the engine and power-train compartment behind the cockpit, but there was no explosion or fire. The three collapsed on the driest spot they could find beside the road, too weak from fear, tension, and worn-oflF adrenaline to stand any longer.

  After a few silent minutes McLanahan unfolded the chart he had stuck in his flight suit and pointed to the bend in the road. “He we are, I think, about three or four miles from this town, Auka. Puerto Lempira is about twenty-five miles by this road. Hal, see if you can raise someone on the survival radio.” Briggs got out the radio, set it to emergency channel alpha and GUARD and began calling for help.

  “I got Puerto Lempira,” Briggs said a few moments later. “Storm Control, this is Air Force helicopter Triple-Echo Three-Four. You are weak and barely readable. We are down zero-three miles south of town of Auka. Requesting pickup for three souls and three fatalities. Over.” He listened for a few moments, made a few responses and orders for priority assistance, signed oflF.

  “Our base says they don’t have another helicopter at Puerto Lempira,” Briggs said. “They’ve called for one from La Cieba. They might be able to get one from private companies but we can expect at least an hour before pickup, maybe ninety minutes. We have to get to Auka, then find a clearing and vector the chopper in. That’s the soonest they can make it.”

  “Too damn long,” McLanahan said. “Maraklov will be oflF in DreamStar before then. We’ve got to get hold of Elliott and tell him to set up the air cordon again.”

  “What about fighters from Puerto Lempira?” Briggs asked. “Don’t you have that F-15E there any more?”

  “They withdrew it to the States when the Russians cut their deal,” We had to take down the whole air cordon out of the Cayman Islands as a sign of good faith. Let’s just secure the chopper and get moving. ”

  As they headed back to the Dolphin, McLanahan asked Briggs if General Elliott wasn’t supposed to be on his way to Puerto Lempira by now.

  “Should be.”

  “You think you can set up a patch with General Elliott through Puerto Lempira? He can get the air cordon put back up around Nicaragua—at least get the AWACS back up there to watch for DreamStar when it heads out.”

  “I can try. Reception is pretty poor from here but at least I can get the ball rolling.” He began another call to Puerto Lempira as they walked. When they got to the Dolphin, McLanahan and the chopper pilot locked up the helicopter while Briggs stayed in as much clearing as he could find to maintain radio contact with the Honduran military base.

  “No good,” Briggs said as McLanahan and the chopper pilot joined him on the road heading toward Auka. “Can’t raise the base any more. We’ll have to wait until we get to Auka and find a telephone, or just get to a clearing where we’ve got a straight shot to Puerto Lempira.”

  McLanahan muttered as they set off on a fast walk. “After everything . . . J.C. . . . Maraklov is still going to get away with DreamStar? And there’s noth
ing we can do to stop him?”

  Over the Caribbean Sea

  Monday, 22 June 1996, 0748 CDT

  “What the hell was that?” General Elliott said into his earset microphone. He was on a C-21B military Learjet enroute from Georgetown in the Cayman Islands to La Cieba, where he would pick up a helicopter from there to Puerto Lempira. The relief he’d felt as he left Grand Cayman to see DreamStar safe and sound in U.S. hands was shattered once again. “Say again that last transmission.”

  “Message received from a Major Briggs, crewmember aboard Air Force helicopter Triple-Echo Three-Four,” the communications man said. “Briggs requested immediate emergency assistance. He said his helicopter was down four miles south of Auka, approximately thirty miles south of Puerto Lempira. He reported three survivors and three fatalities.”

  “Oh, God,” Elliott muttered. Over the radio he said, “When did the rescue chopper depart?”

  “We dispatched your HH-3 from La Cieba immediately after receiving the call,” the operator replied. “ETA to Auka is 0815 local.”

  “From La Cieba? That was the only chopper available?”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  Elliott slammed a fist against the C-2i’s front instrument console, then keyed his mike button. “Control, did Briggs report what happened?”

  “We lost contact shortly afterward, sir,” the operator reported. “He was calling in on a rescue channel, apparently using a hand-held survival radio. I think he’s been trying to call us but we can’t pick him up.”

  Elliott clicked on the C-2i’s interphone and turned to Marine Corps Major Marcia Preston, National Security Adviser Deborah O’Day’s aide and the C-2i’s pilot. “Major, head toward Puerto Lempira airbase instead of La Cieba at best possible speed. We’ll fly near where Briggs went down and try to find out what’s going on.”

  “Yes, General.” The C-21 jet banked left as Preston took up a rough heading to the Honduran airbase, then began calling up the base’s coordinates on the inertial navigation unit and calling La Cieba air traffic control for a change in her flight plan.

  Elliott left his seat and went back to sit with Curtis and O’Day. They had flown from Washington to the Cayman Islands after the deal had, they thought, been set to recover the XF-34, and Elliott had gone along with them in the C-21 for the flight to Honduras. “We’ve got a big problem,” Elliott told them. “My security chief Briggs is on the ground in Honduras with two other survivors and three casualties from our recovery party. No other information. There’s a chopper on the way, but it won’t arrive for another forty-five minutes—”

  “What are we going to do, Brad?” O’Day asked.

  “I want to get in contact with Briggs soonest—he’s on a survival radio and our people at Puerto Lempira lost contact. I’ve told Marcia to head over to where the pickup point will be and we’ll try to contact Briggs ourself.”

  “What the hell do you make of it?” Curtis said.

  “Not enough information to tell, but we’ll act on what you guys like to call worst-case scenario . . . they tried to make the swap for DreamStar, the Russians reneged, shot up our chopper and our people. Major Briggs and whoever’s with him managed to get away across the border but not all the way back to base.”

  “So that means the Russians still have DreamStar,” O’Day said. “And if they reneged on the deal and went so far as to attack our people, they’ll probably be trying to get it out of the country as fast as they can.”

  “And there’s very damned little we can do about it,” Elliott said. “We’ve got no assets close enough to stop them. We’ve still got the AWACS and some of the F-i6s in the Cayman Islands, but we’d have to get a tanker from Puerto Rico or Florida down here to support us—that’ll take a few hours at least. The two F-15E ground-attack fighters we brought to Honduras are on their way back to Arizona. We’ve got some Honduran ground-attack planes, but if the Honduran air force gets into the act we’ll start a war in Central America. The President will never go for it...” Elliott paused for a moment, then: “Cheetah . . .”

  “What?”

  “Cheetah. My modified F-15F fighter. It’s down in Puerto Lempira—Powell and McLanahan flew it back to the States and then back to Honduras. It can do both air-to-air and ground attack.”

  “But you said that McLanahan and Powell went on this mission into Nicaragua. That means—”

  “That means that one or both of them may be dead,” O’Day said. “Can’t anyone else fly it?”

  Elliott rubbed his throbbing right leg—the developing headache he had was starting to rival the pain in his leg. “It’s like asking if anyone can race in the Indianapolis 500. Sure, anyone can drive the cars, and you might even survive the race without killing yourself. But only a very few can really race in it . . . Only a few people can fly Cheetah well enough even to have a chance of getting DreamStar,” Elliott said gloomily. “Most of them, my senior test pilots, are two thousand miles away in Dreamland right now. Two may be lying dead in the jungle in Honduras—Powell and McLanahan. And another turned out to be a goddamned Russian spy—”

  “General Elliott, this is Major Preston,” the pilot said over the cabin intercom. “We’re crossing the coast now, ETA to Puerto Lempira nine minutes. We’ve got clearance to fly near the Nicaraguan border, but we’ll only have enough fuel to loiter about ten minutes before we need to head back to Puerto Lempira for fuel.”

  “Thanks, Major. Take us down to two thousand feet and head south of Puerto Lempira, then ask Storm Control on what frequency they talked to Major Briggs. We’ll scan that frequency plus GUARD and hope he comes back.” Preston gave General Elliott enough time to strap himself in back in the right cockpit seat before descending quickly to five thousand feet and getting on the radio to Puerto Lempira. A few minutes later she had set up the radios on UHF and VHF GUARD and Air Force discrete emergency channel alpha. Elliott put on his earset and keyed the microphone:

  “Air Force helicopter Triple-Echo Three-Four, this is Storm Commander on alpha. How do you read?”

  * * *

  The three crewmen of the mission to bring DreamStar out of Nicaragua reached Auka in less than an hour, but all hope of finding a telephone was quickly squelched—Auka was little more than a group of abandoned old shacks, half flooded and long overgrown by jungle. The road was still wide and paved— it was part of the main coastal highway running through Central America—but there was almost no traffic anywhere except for a few horseback riders and some youngsters herding a small knot of uncooperative goats through the streets. They had no intention of talking to a group of dirty-looking strangers, and as fast as the children appeared, they were gone.

  The road through Auka branched out just on the north side of town off to the west—the fork in the road was on a small cleared-away rise with a shrine to the virgin Mary in the intersection. From that spot they could see for about five miles in any direction before the trees shrouded the horizon. “This looks like the best vantage point,” McLanahan said. “Hal, go ahead and—”

  “Wait,” Briggs said. He held the survival radio up to his ear, then hit the transmit button. “Storm Commander, this is Hal Briggs. I read you loud and clear. Over.” To McLanahan: “It’s General Elliott! He’s coming this way!”

  “All right. ”

  Briggs handed McLanahan the survival radio. “General, Colonel McLanahan.”

  “Patrick, damn good to hear you.” Then he realized—the third survivor must be the chopper pilot . . . “Who did you lose?”

  “J.C., Carmichael and Ray Butler . . .”

  Elliott slumped back in his seat. Powell dead—that was their last hope, the man who could fly Cheetah well enough to take on DreamStar in air-to-air combat. He keyed the microphone: “How did it happen. Were they killed in the crash?”

  “No. They were killed by Andrei Maraklov—Ken James.” “James? He’s supposed to be in Moscow ...”

  “He’s alive and he’s got DreamStar.”

  “But wh
at about the deal? The transfer?”

  “I had the impression that James came out of nowhere, completely unexpected. Even by the local Russian general. He killed the KGB general and two Russian soldiers and who knows who else to get DreamStar. He might be working for himself, or for someone else. General, DreamStar is flyable. We’ve got less than fifteen minutes to put together an attack package and take it out before he gets away.”

  “I see Elliott’s jet,” Briggs shouted, pointing skyward. “General, we’ve got a visual on you. Range about three miles. Come right twenty degrees. There’ll be an east-west road off your right wing. Follow the road until it ends. We’re right at the intersection in the clearing.”

  * * *

  Aboard the C-21 Marcia Preston made the correction and immediately spotted the intersection. “I’ve got it,” she said.

  Elliott turned to her. “Major, can you . . . ?”

  “Tell everyone to hang on. Speed brakes coming out . . .”

  * * *

  The three men watched as the blue-and-white Air Force C-21 made a sudden hard-left bank. They heard the turbine whine decrease to a whisper as the C-21 turned in the opposite direction, paralleling the east-west road out of Auka. McLanahan could hear the loud, angry sound of rumbling air. “It’s slowing down,” he said.

  “Landing gear,” the Dolphin pilot shouted. “He’s gonna land. ”

  The C-21 made the turn to final approach only a few feet above the trees at the edge of the clearing, its nose high in the air, flying just above the stall. As soon as it cleared the last row of trees, the jet dropped almost straight down, touching down precisely and firmly in the center of the asphalt road. The speed brakes stayed up and the flaps were retracted to put as much weight as possible on the main landing-gear brakes. This jet did not have thrust reversers but the short-field approach technique was executed so well by Marcia Preston that they were not needed—with only a few hard taps on the brakes, the C-21 Learjet-35 slowed and came to a stop right at the road intersection. Engines running, the left side airstair door opened and Briggs, McLanahan and the Dolphin pilot climbed on board.