Flight of the Old Dog, page 36
The vaporized air around the laser blast created a tiny vacuum around itself, sucking thousands of cubic acres of air into the shaft of light. The turbulence and lower-density, superheated air caused the Old Dog to sink, and only Elliott’s fast reactions and the screaming thrust of the seven remaining turbofan engines kept the Old Dog from crashing into the rugged Kamchatkan shoreline.
The tiny Quail decoy was not merely destroyed by the laser blast—it was vaporized. There was no time, no fuel remaining, even to form a secondary explosion or a puff of smoke. The tiny drone simply ceased to exist.
Elliott felt as if he had been violently sunburned. He pulled on the yoke, fighting to arrest the sudden descent and gale-force turbulence. The MASTER CAUTION light snapped on, as did other warning lights, but Elliott had his hands full trying to control the bucking mountain of metal beneath him.
Dave Luger was thrown against his right instrument panel as the Old Dog swung sharply left into the vacuum, his outburst lost in the groaning metal of the Megafortress and the protesting roar of its engines. Still, he and the Old Dog made out better than some others. A MiG-29 had just closed into ideal IR missile-firing range and had not heard the call to clear the area when the laser beam sliced through the subzero Siberian air.
The gale-force wind-blast created by the mini-nuclear explosion within the krypton-fluoride laser beam, which had thrown the four-hundred-thousand-pound B-52 bomber around the sky like a paper airplane, reached up and swatted the thirty-thousand-pound Fulcrum fighter into the ground like an insect. The pilot of a second Russian fighter was too busy fighting for control of his own machine to notice.
“What the hell was that?” Angelina said. All of her equipment went blank—the airmine rocket system, the Scorpion missile system, her radar, all of it. She glanced at Wendy Tork alongside her, switching her equipment into STANDBY in an attempt to reset it.
“The laser,” Elliott said. “They shot the laser at us. Two generators dropped off the line.” He scanned the instruments quickly. “Engines appear okay. John, can you get the number two and three generators back on-line?”
“I can try,” Ormack said. He wiped his eyes and felt carefully along his right generator panel for the proper switches … The power interruption had blanked out everything in the downstairs navigator’s compartment, but Ormack’s practiced fingers were able to reset the generators and get them back on-line. Trouble was, the only things that reactivated after power was applied were the downstairs lights.
“Dave, how much time?” McLanahan asked.
Luger was fumbling around his workdesk with a tiny battery flashlight, shining the weak beam on the few pieces of equipment on the right side. “We have to get out of here,” he said. “We have to go back …”
“Easy, man, easy,” McLanahan shook his partner’s shoulders. Luger finally stopped his flailing and stared at McLanahan. “It’s over, Pat.”
“No it’s not. Now give me a time to the twelve-mile point, dammit.” McLanahan was just about to push Luger out of the way and check himself, but Luger finally relaxed enough to check his ship’s clock.
“Two minutes ten seconds.”
“All right. Switch all your stuff to STANDBY. It’ll come back up by launch time. If it doesn’t we’ll slick the bomb, fly over that laser and drop it like a regular bomb.” He rechecked the DCU-239 weapon-arming panel. “We might have another problem.”
“Such as?” from Elliott.
“The generator fluctuation knocked out DC power to the arming panel,” McLanahan told him. “I’ve got no weapon indications at all. “
“It should still be good—”
“I don’t know what the bomb will do,” McLanahan said quietly. Everyone on board heard the muted statement, even over the roar of the turbofans.
“You mean it won’t explode?” Wendy said. “We’ve come all this way, and it won’t work?”
“I mean I don’t know its status. It may or may not be armed, it may be armed but be a dud … I just don’t know.”
“All this way … all this sacrifice … for nothing?”
“One minute to launch point,” Luger said.
“I’ll try to rearm the weapon,” McLanahan said, and began to run the prearming checklists again. “Nothing,” he muttered finally. “Battery power … recycling … sensor power … nothing. I’ve still got uplink power, so the thing will fly, but I still don’t know what it will do.”
The crew of the Old Dog grew very quiet.
“I’ve got my threat receivers back,” Wendy announced. “Signal from Kavaznya … beginning to shift again.”
“All the decoys are gone,” McLanahan said. “I launched them just before the laser fired—”
“Power won’t be back on the anti-radiation missiles for two minutes,” Angela said. “That was our last hope.”
“Angelina … preparation for ejection checklist,” Elliott ordered, face tight.
Luger looked at McLanahan, who stared straight ahead, clenching and unclenching his fists.
“Wendy, try to give us some warning before the laser fires,” Elliott told her.
Wendy clicked her microphone in response, said nothing. She could barely see the subtle frequency shifts through the interference, and even if she did spot the radar lock-on she knew they wouldn’t be able to eject before the laser beam blew them into atoms.
“I’ll trim it for a slight climb,” Elliott said. “Maybe this beast will stall right over their heads, the sonsofbitches. Crew, our mission was to destroy that laser complex. I’ll give the command to eject, wait until everyone is out, then crash the plane into the complex. Prepare for—”
“Wait,” McLanahan said. “You can’t do that. We’ll still drop the damn bomb—”
“You said it wouldn’t explode.”
“I said I don’t know its status. My job is to drop it on the target. Your job, sir, is to get us out of here.”
“We can’t risk it. If the bomb doesn’t go off we’ve failed and we’ll take the heat for nothing—”
“We can’t just quit …”
“McLanahan, this is an order. Prepare for ejection.”
Luger began to tighten the straps of his parachute harness. He zipped his jacket up all the way, looked over at his partner. “Pat, you’d better—”
“How much time, Dave?”
“Pat…”
“Dave, how much time?”
“Thirty seconds. But—”
“Close enough.” McLanahan hit the AUTOFIX button on his control keyboard, which entered a present-position update into the Striker glide-bomb’s computer. He then opened the bay doors with the mechanical handles on the overhead panel and pulled a yellow-painted handle next to it marked SPECIAL WEAPONS ALTERNATE RELEASE.
“Bomb away, General, now please get us out of here.”
Elliott had been adjusting his straps when he saw the BOMB DOORS OPEN and WEAPON RELEASE lights snap on. “We’re too far, we won’t have time to—”
“We’re not bombing that laser with this plane,” McLanahan challenged. “Break left, get us out of here …”
After that everything seemed to happen in slow motion. It was like watching a slide show, the frames clicking off one by one, the sound turned off …
Elliott stood the Old Dog on its left wingtip, whipping it to forty-five degrees of bank. The stall-warning horn blared but no one paid attention to it, if they could hear it. The general could feel the Old Dog slipping sideways—which was downward at forty-five degrees of bank—as it changed heading in its rudderless turn. Remarkably, it didn’t hit the frozen ground …
Wendy released her grip on her ejection seat’s triggers, held her finger on the CHAFF SALVO button, ejecting fifty bundles of chaff in one massive cloud just as the Old Dog began its turn. She would have kept ejecting chaff if the force of the turn hadn’t pushed her finger off the button …
Ormack, unable to help out in any other way, tried by “seat-of-the-pants” to hold in enough back-pressure on the yoke to keep the turn going without forcing the Megafortress into a stall. To his surprise, he found that his and Elliott’s efforts were in almost total coordination …
In spite of the hard break McLanahan managed to stay focused on the flight path of the Striker glide-bomb as it dropped from the Old Dog’s bomb bay, saw the Striker’s TV monitor flare to life as the glide-bomb cleared the weapons bay.
McLanahan’s hand-entered DR position was almost perfect. The center of the Kavaznya laser complex was dead in the center of the low-light TV screen. When a message printed out on the monitor stating that a visual low-light sensor lock-on was available, he pressed the LOCK switch to insure that the bomb would make it to the target. Even if the Old Dog didn’t survive the bomb would now fly itself to the target …
“Radar switching to target-tracking mode,” from Wendy.
“Prepare for ejection, crew,” from Elliott. “Blinking light coming on.” He reached down to the center console and flicked on the ejection-warning switch. The large red light between the two navigators began to blink furiously.
“Steady light is the order to eject—”
“No. Continue the break. If you do a complete one-eighty, do another one to the right. Don’t give up now—”
“If they let go with that laser there won’t be time to eject—”
“You’ll be murdering this crew if you order us to eject,” McLanahan said.
“But the bomb …”
McLanahan now acted on his own. He switched to the infrared display—the picture was near simulator-perfect. He could make out the “warm” town above the “hot” laser complex, and the “cold” Bering Sea beyond. He shifted the tracking handle slightly to the left, centering the aiming reticle onto the hottest infrared return in the complex. The Striker’s steering uplink system was working perfectly. The strap-on mini-rocket engine had not yet fired—it was flying over a thousand feet higher than programmed, and the extra altitude meant a longer unassisted gliding ability.
The infrared orange laser site slowly began to enlarge as it got closer—the Striker was locked onto a huge power substation. McLanahan was just about to switch to narrow field-of-view and begin precise aiming when he noticed another “hot” object in the upper left corner of the infrared display, far above the main reactor complex in the valley.
He had only moments to study it before it went out of view, but he could make out a huge complex … only the base was “hot,” four-fifths of the structure was “cold.” Just before it went out of view he switched back to low-light visual display.
In this visual mode there was no mistaking it. The dome, large as a stadium, was clearly visible, with a large rectangular slot open and pointing directly at the Old Dog. McLanahan remembered back to Elliott’s first briefing on the Kavaznya site, when he passed around early reconnaissance photographs of the complex.
The mirror building.
McLanahan’s reaction was instantaneous. He moved the tracking handle left and aft all the way to the stops to get the dome back on the screen.
Luger was watching his own monitor in shock. “Pat . . what are you—?”
“The mirror,” McLanahan said. “It’s the mirror building . . “
“But the substation …”
McLanahan said nothing as he watched while a yellow SRB IGNITE appeared on the screen, indicating that the glide-bomb’s strap-on rocket booster had fired in response to new steering commands. The substation slowly moved out of view.
“The substation …” Luger said again.
“I’m gonna punch a hole in the mirror building. Even if the bomb doesn’t go off it should do enough damage to put this place out of commission.”
The visual scene began to grow darker as the rugged hills above the Kavaznya complex and the town rushed just below the visual display. McLanahan had to hold the tracking handle full-back as the rocky ridgelines grew closer and closer.
Luger yelled, “It’s going to crash.”
But a moment later the last rock-covered ridgeline disappeared from view and the huge mirror-housing dome filled the TV monitor. McLanahan pushed the tracking handle down and centered the aiming reticle on the top of the dome’s pedestal. Both navigators watched in fascination as the dome rushed forward right into the TV screen.
The six-inch glass eye of the Striker somehow stayed intact through the one-inch-thick fiberglass panels of the dome, so the two navigators were able to eavesdrop on the Striker’s exact impact point—the steel girders and counterbalances supporting the massive mirror.
The robot eye passed precisely through two support arms, and the bomb came to rest on the very base of the mirror support-structure. Instantly Russian technicians and security guards could be seen running around the weapon.
“It didn’t go off,” Luger said. “It’s a dud, it didn’t go off—
“Radar locked onto us,” Wendy broke through. “Solid lock-on, they’ve got us …”
McLanahan had tuned out the hubbub of noise inside the Old Dog and was staring, transfixed, at the Striker’s TV screen. More soldiers surrounded the Striker as it lay inside the mirror building.
“Crew, eject light coming on … get ready …”
Ormack was rigid in his seat, his ejection levers raised, his control column stowed, ready for ejection. Elliott had just reached down to the center console and was about to flick the eject signal from WARNING to EJECT when something exploded off the Old Dog’s right wing and a ball of flame hundreds of feet in diameter arched skyward, lighting up the entire coastline, the blast easily heard over the roar of the engines.
“What was that?” Ormack shouted, holding onto his seat as the shock wave rolled over the Megafortress. “The reactor?”
“We got the mirror building, Patrick got the mirror. The thing went off. It wasn’t a dud.” Luger reported, voice rising.
“The radar’s down,” Wendy said, “no tracking signals from Kavaznya.”
Elliott began to pick out the ridgelines looming toward them, and slowly lifted the Old Dog’s nose above the ridgelines, desperately trying to trade some slowly building airspeed for life-saving altitude. He noticed that most of the lights in the town above the laser complex were out … “The explosion must have knocked out power to the area. Check your equipment …”
McLanahan quickly scanned his instruments. “Computers are back on-line.” He quickly synchronized the navigation satellites to his computers, and the green NAV light snapped on. Moments later the terrain data was reloaded from the “game” cartridges. “Terrain computers back up.” he told Elliott who reengaged the pitch autopilot to the terrain-data computers, selected COLA on the terrain clearance–plane selector and watched as the long pointed nose again faithfully dipped earthward.
“Jesus,” Ormack said. “We actually did it.”
“Threat receivers and all jammers back up,” Wendy reported.
“My radar’s back up,” Angelina said, as though back from the dead.
“Station check, crew,” Elliott ordered, switched the ejection warning light off, pulled the firefighter’s oxygen mask to his face and breathed deeply. “The ride’s not over yet,” he reminded them after his hit of oxygen. “Those fighters will be after us any minute.”
McLanahan lay awkwardly in his seat, supported by his parachute harness straps that he never had time to tighten. “True, General, but there’s no denying that it’s Miller time.”
“You’re cleared to the potty, radar,” Elliott said, helping Ormack put on the oxygen mask. “That’s all. After that get back on watch. We’re coming up on Ossora. Kavaznya may be down, but I repeat, four squadrons of MiGs will be after our butts.”
McLanahan looked down at the warm stain between his legs. “It seems I don’t need the john.”
Dave Luger managed an exhausted chuckle. “Sorry for falling apart back there, partner. You can count on me from here on out—”
“Search radar at two o’clock. It’s Ossora Airfield,” Wendy announced suddenly.
The two navs exchanged looks. “Back to work,” McLanahan said, switching his attack radar to target-tracking mode.
OVER THE SKIES OF KAVAZNYA
“Radar contact is lost. Element Seven,” Yuri Papendreyov heard the Soviet radar controller say over his command radio. “Report your position immediately.” As if in reply. a large red LOW ALTITUDE WARNING light came onto the control panel of Papendreyov’s advanced MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter.
He muttered unhappily to no one in particular and started a shallow climb away from the inky blackness around him. Suddenly the earth was his enemy, as much an enemy as the American warplane he was chasing. He held his heading steady and switched on his pulse-Doppler attack radar and nose infrared sensor pod.
He had been receiving steering signals from the radar site at Kavaznya to the attacking American B-52 bomber, signals that fed a stream of missile-launch data to his missile fire control system and provided range and bearing data to intercept the B-52. With the Kavaznya radar operating he didn’t need his Fulcrum’s radar for hunting, a big advantage of the advanced Russian interceptor. Nothing could jam the Kavaznya radar. and without the Fulcrum’s onboard radar acting like a locating beacon the fighter could sneak up behind the American B-52 without being detected.
All that was gone now. Somehow the Kavaznya radar was off and he was forced to use his own narrow-beamed radar to search thousands of square miles of sky for the bomber, diverting his attention away from flying his Fulcrum and avoiding the rugged Kamchatka mountains.
The young PVO Strany interceptor pilot activated his command radio and reported in a tight voice, “Element Seven has lost vectors to intruder—
