Flight of the Old Dog, page 22
Elliott shook debris out of his hair and struggled to clear his eyes and throat of dust and gas. He turned and saw the first impact point on the far corner, the second right beside the bomber, and the gunfire outside the hangar. He did not need to be a general to realize that the next mortar round was going to be right over their heads and that more bodies were going to pile up outside.
“John.” He grabbed Ormack and put his mouth next to his ear. “Get aboard. Start ‘em up.”
“What?”
“The engines. Start ‘em up. Get this thing moving.”
“Moving?”
“Taxi the goddamn plane out of here, they’re going to blow this place apart. Move.” He shoved Ormack toward the hatch. Ormack tumbled to the polished concrete floor, and for a split second Elliott thought he wasn’t going to get up. Then Ormack scrambled up on his hands and knees, found the boarding hatch, and climbed inside.
“Campos, Pereira.” He found the defensive system operator and his assistant stumbling around the bomber’s right wing, bumping into the Scorpion pylon, not sure which way to turn or run. Elliott grabbed them both by the necks, ducked them under the bomber’s belly. “Get aboard.”
Angelina reacted instantly, scrambling up the ladder. Campos, confused, watched as his assistant disappeared inside. He turned to Elliott.
“No, I can’t—”
“Get up there, goddammit.”
“I won’t get into that thing.” Campos used his bony elbows and fists and broke free, bolted toward the open hangar door, ignoring bursts of gunfire erupting all around him. He crashed against the edge of the hangar opening and paused, then turned and took one last look at the black bomber.
“Campos,” Elliott ordered, “take cover …”
Too late. Just as Elliott called out Campos turned and ran outside. As he turned, a third explosion tore into the front of the black hangar, ripping out the entire left side of the building, and Campos disappeared in a blinding flash of light and a screech of burning, shattering metal. The left side of the hangar opening sagged and crashed to the floor.
Elliott could only watch and duck as the hangar opening crashed down and bullets whistled around him. He turned and saw Anderson just getting to his feet at the front of the plane, his head and face bleeding.
Elliott hurried over to help Anderson climb aboard the bomber. He felt a sting on his right calf, reached down and his hand came back covered with blood. He put his right leg down to stop himself and see what was wrong. It refused to support his weight and he sagged helplessly to the floor.
“General,” Anderson said, crawling over to where Elliott lay bleeding, “we’ve got to get out …” One of Anderson’s eyes refused to stay steady, rolling from side to side.
“Get on board,” Elliott ordered. A high-pitched scream issued from the number four engine. Anderson turned and saw exhaust fumes bellowing from the nacelle.
“The engines … they’re starting …”
“Ormack’s on board. Get going.” Elliott noticed a huge gash on Anderson’s head, struggled to push himself off the floor to help Anderson get to the hatch. The scream of the engine changed to a roar, and soon the number five engine sounded.
“Jim … hurry …” Elliott managed to rise to his left leg. As he did a line of six red holes, big as quarters, appeared on Anderson’s gray flightsuit from his collar bone to right thigh. Anderson did not seem to notice. He continued to walk toward the open hatch, then stumbled into the bomber’s sleek black side and crashed to the floor, leaving a red streak on the Old Dog’s polished surface.
Suddenly Hal Briggs was beside Elliott, firing his automatic pistol one-handed at whatever moved outside. Again he dragged the general to his feet, the Uzi smoking in his right fist. “We’ve got to get you on the plane, General.”
“No, I’ve got—”
“Get on that plane.”
“Chocks … got to disconnect the—”
“I’ve done all that. General. Chocks, air, power, pins, streamers. Now get your ass on board.”
Briggs fired at a running figure in the doorway, then hauled the resisting general up into the hatch, where a pair of hands—McLanahan’s—grabbed the general by the lapels of his fatigues and hauled his feet clear of the hatch.
“Briggs,” Elliott yelled. “Get up here, now.”
McLanahan put Elliott’s hands on the ladder, and the general realized what he had and pulled himself painfully up to the upper deck. McLanahan then turned back to the open hatch and extended a hand to Briggs, who was on one knee, firing into the distance.
“Get on board, you jerk,” McLanahan said.
“Not my plane, my friend,” he said as a loud ringing started in McLanahan’s ears. “Adios.”
Briggs was gone, and a second later the hatch snapped shut and the outside latch locked into position.
McLanahan was about to open the hatch, but the Megafortress made an incredible lurch and he was thrown toward the back of the offensive crew compartment.
“We’re movin’,” Luger said in amazement.
“Either that or they just blew half the fucking plane away,” McLanahan said, got back to his feet and went for the ladder to the upper deck.
What McLanahan saw on the upper deck made his guts turn.
Wendy Tork and Angelina Pereira were standing over a dazed and bleeding Bradley Elliott. Pereira had been knocked off her feet by the sudden motion of the bomber and was just regaining her balance, her jeans and blue workshirt covered with blood.
Elliott looked as if he had been wading in red dye. His right leg was covered with dark, clotted blood. Blood was everywhere—on Pereira, on Tork, on Elliott, on the deck, on the circuit breaker panels—everywhere. Wendy was trying to wrap an arm of her flight jacket around the two large openings in Elliott’s calf. Elliott himself was hovering just above consciousness; awake enough to feel the intense pain, groggy enough to be unable to move or help anyone. Sweat poured down his face.
“McLanahan.” Ormack swung around in his seat. “Get up here.”
Ormack was in the copilot’s seat, checking the gauges. McLanahan half-ran, half-crawled up front and knelt between the pilot and copilot’s seats. He stared out through the sleek cockpit windows over the drooping needle nose of the Old Dog.
“We’re moving.”
“Damn right,” Ormack said. “Sit down. Help me.” McLanahan stared at Ormack.
“Well, sit down.” Ormack grabbed McLanahan by the jacket and yanked him forward into the pilot’s seat. He grabbed Anderson’s headset and slapped it over his head.
“We taking off?”
“If we can,” Ormack said.
“We have clearance?”
“I got an order. From him.” Ormack jerked a thumb toward Elliott. “He owns the six thousand square miles we’re sitting on, not to mention this plane. And this hangar, which they’re about to blow up on top of us. Now listen. Just watch the gauges—RPMs, fuel flow, EGTs. If anything looks like it’s winding down, yell. Watch me on the left.” Ormack pushed the throttle forward, and the huge plane rushed toward the hangar opening.
“The door’s down, we won’t make it. Cut it right—”
Ormack gripped the wheel, moved the steering ratio lever on the center console from TAKEOFF LAND to TAXI, nudged the right rudder pedal. The bomber swung gently to the right. Ormack reached down to the center console and moved the steering ratio lever back to TAKEOFF LAND. “That’s all the room I got.”
“I don’t think it’ll make it …”
McLanahan watched as the hangar door came toward them. Before they reached the opening he saw Hal Briggs kneeling at the door opening, trying to take cover behind a fallen steel beam. He saw the wingtip rushing toward him. Letting the Uzi drop onto its neck strap, Briggs held his hands out and apart as far as he could, gave McLanahan a thumbs-up, then took off at a dead run outside the hangar.
“How’re we looking?”
“Hal said four feet.”
“Four feet what?”
His answer was a head-pounding, wrenching scream of metal that thundered from the left wingtip. The Old Dog veered sharply to the left. A less painful but still frightening crunch of metal exploded from the right wingtip.
Ormack looked at the fuel gauges. “We lost the left tiptank. Maybe both of them.”
McLanahan didn’t want to look back. All he could see were dozens of bodies littering the road ahead of them, a burning fuel truck and overturned security police trucks. There was still a handful of cops firing into the wooden barracks outside the fence surrounding the black hangar.
“Lucky this whole dry lake is a runway,” McLanahan said. Ormack nodded. “Just watch the gauges. I hope they can get the fence open—”
A Jeep pulled up beside them, sped ahead of the bomber easily—although Ormack had jammed the Old Dog’s eight throttles up as far as they could go, the half-million-pound bomber accelerated slowly.
“It’s Hal!”
In the distance McLanahan could see Briggs’ Jeep speed toward the closed gates. He could tell brakes were being applied, but the Jeep crashed headlong into the right side of the gate going at least fifty miles an hour. Intentionally or not, it did the trick. The right side of the wide gate burst open. The Jeep did two full donuts in the sand-covered concrete, then came to a stop. Steam poured out of the radiator. The right side of the gate was half-open, the Jeep was stalled on the runway-driveway, and the left side of the gate was free but still closed.
“C’mon, buddy,” McLanahan murmured, “you can do it.”
The distance between the bomber and the gate was decreasing rapidly. Briggs was trying to get the Jeep restarted. He gave it a few seconds, then jumped out and started pushing.
Ormack brought the throttles back to idle, which seemed to make no difference.
“We gotta slow down.”
As if in reply, three mortar shells exploded in front of the bomber. Briggs tripped and sprawled in the sand. Another explosion created a huge waterspout of sand off the right wing, and Briggs and his Jeep were lost in the rolling cloud.
The explosions rocked the bomber as if it were caught in a typhoon. Ormack checked the airspeed. “Seventy knots. If we hit the brakes at this speed, they’ll explode. We can’t stop in time anyway. Briggs …”
Briggs had managed to get the Jeep cleared off the runway behind the fence. He ran over and hauled on the right side of the gate. The heavy wide fence slowly opened. Briggs sprinted through the sandstorm and pulled on the left gate. A securing pole was dragging in the sand, and Briggs had to throw his entire skinny body against the fence to move it.
“It’s stuck,” Ormack said.
“This is going to be a real short flight if he doesn’t open that gate,” McLanahan said.
But the fence wasn’t moving. Briggs’ legs were pumping, his once spit-shined boots scraping against the sand, but it wasn’t helping.
The fence was half-open when Briggs slipped and slumped to the sand, then rolled to his right to jump back to his feet. As he did he saw the Old Dog.
The aircraft looked like a gigantic pterodactyl coming toward him. And the pencil nose of the bomber, tilted down for takeoff, was aimed right at his heart.
Briggs jumped up, his eyes on the monster with wings speeding toward him, and body-tackled the fence. The fence jumped a few feet, but Briggs kept on going, his legs didn’t stop pumping until the blast of the eight turbofan jet engines swept him off his feet and into the fence.
“He did it,” McLanahan said.
“We aren’t out of it yet.” Ormack slowly throttled up to full power, then reached down and hit the flap switch. “After the fence we got three miles of concrete left. It’ll take another minute to get the flaps down, another minute to accelerate this pig to rotate speed. We run out of hard surface in less than a minute.”
McLanahan finally found the flap indicator. “It’s not moving …”
“It probably jammed during one of those explosions,” Ormack said, holding tight to the wheel. “It might take them longer to come down—or the flap motors will burn out. One or the other.”
The indicator moved to ten percent. Twenty percent. A pause—then a longer pause. Thirty percent. The bomber began to, rattle.
“Forty percent.” McLanahan scanned the instruments, then looked out the window. Through the dim morning light he saw the glitter of steel on the horizon. He stared harder. Perched directly in front of them was a large, boxy aircraft, with some men scattered around it.
“What the hell is that?” Ormack was staring into the distance.
“It’s an airplane on the concrete,” McLanahan said. “They’re blocking our path.” He glanced down at the flap indicator again. Still forty percent. “The flaps stopped.”
“We can’t do it. We need the whole dry lake now.- Ormack reached down and shut off the flap switch, freezing them at forty percent down.
“Can we rotate with the flaps stopped?”
“We’ll run out of time before we hit that plane. We’ll have to stop … pull the ‘chute—”
“Wait.” McLanahan searched the control panel near his left arm, finding a switch marked “DEFENSE CONSENT” He flipped the switch from SAFE to CONSENT.
“Angelina.” He arched around in his seat. “Angelina. Turn on the missiles. The forward missiles.”
“What?”
“The Scorpions. Turn ‘em on.”
Pereira scrambled forward, clutching onto the pilot’s seat. “Turn them on? We can’t. They need to align, lock onto a target—”
“I don’t need them to align.” McLanahan looked out the sloped windows. Angelina followed his gaze, finally spotting the aircraft sitting on the runway. They could now see the attackers trying to level a bazooka at them. “Do it,” McLanahan ordered.
Angelina hurried back to her station. To McLanahan, the wait was excruciating. He glanced backward a few times, but as the plane rushed forward he focused on the camouflaged attackers. There were four of them—two firing rifles from behind the plane, two others loading the bazooka. “Angelina …”
“Ready,” she called behind him.
“Fire.” McLanahan threw his arms up in front of his face as he said it.
He never saw the results—but then, no human could see the advanced AMRAAM air-to-air missile as it fired off the left pylon at Mach two. The missile leapt forward on a stream of fire. The primary solid-fuel engine had just barely reached full impulse burn when it plowed into the plane less than a half-mile in front of the Old Dog.
What McLanahan did see was a blinding flash of light and a massive black cloud of smoke and dust. A split second later, the needlelike nose of the Old Dog plunged through the chaos.
Nothing happened—no crunch of metal, no explosion of the windscreen in front of him. A moment later the cockpit windows cleared, revealing a barrier infinitely larger than the plane they had just blown away—the seven thousand feet of granite called Groom Mountain.
“Go for it,” McLanahan called out to Ormack.
Far behind the Megafortress, Hal Briggs had been pinned to the fence, his face mashed into the chain link by the force of the jet blast. He heard an explosion a few moments later, expecting the crash, the sound of exploding fuel, waiting for the fireball to engulf him. It didn’t happen. It was an eternity until he could clear the stinging sand out of his face and eyes and look toward the horizon.
What he saw was the Old Dog lifting off through a cloud of gray and black dust over the morning Nevada desert. A lump of burning metal lay several yards from the sand-covered runway, with smoking bodies flung hundreds of feet away.
The Old Dog hovered perhaps fifty feet above the high desert floor, nearly obscured by the cloud of dust. He could barely see the huge wheels retract into the huge body—and then the aircraft rose like a winged rocket into the clear morning air.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Briggs muttered, sitting in a three-foot drift of sand and tumbleweeds. “They did it. They did it.”
Ormack flipped a switch on the overhead console beneath the cabin altitude indicator. Slowly the long, black needle nose moved upward and snapped into position. Half the windscreen was now obscured by the long SST nose, the windows blending in with its sleek lines.
“Watch the instruments,” Ormack said cross-cockpit. Despite the noise inside the bomber, he and McLanahan were still talking loud enough to be heard without the interphone. “Gear coming up. I hope someone got all the ground locks.” He reached across and moved the gear lever up. The red light in the handle snapped on.
“Instruments are okay,” McLanahan said. He found the gear indicators on the front panel beside the gear level. One by one, the little wheel depictions on the indicators changed to crosshatch and then to the word UP, and the bumping and screeching of tires stowing in the wheel wells could be heard. “Right tip gear up … forward mains up … aft mains up … the left tip gear is still showing crosshatch.”
Ormack cross-checked the indicator with the TIP GEAR NOT IN TRAIL caution light—it was showing unsafe too. “It might be hanging there, or it could be part-way up. We probably ripped out the whole left wingtip.” He did some experimental turns left and right. “Steering feels okay. The spoilers seem like they’re still working.” He glanced down and double-checked that he had shut off the fuel valves from the left externals. “We can try emergency retraction later.”
He ran a hand over his sweating face and scanned instruments, left and right, as the Megafortress cleared the snow-covered Groom Mountain ridge line. “Looks like we lost all the eighteen thousand pounds in the left external A tank—probably lost the whole tank. The left external B is still with us but it’s feeding too fast, faster than the right externals. It’s probably dumping all that fuel overboard.” He shut off the fuel transfer switch to the left external B tank. “That means we’re short about forty thousand pounds.”
He looked over at McLanahan, who was still staring at the mountain ridges sliding under the Old Dog’s sleek black nose. “Pat, check the hydraulics.”
