Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01 (12 page)

 
          
“I
have made no admission that such is the case,” Brent said. “But I can tell you
that many options are being considered.”

 
          
He
looked directly into Karmarov’s eyes and paused, as if to lend emphasis to what
he was about to say. “The laser is a menace, Dmitri,” Brent said. His voice
sounded as if it came from the bottom of a deep well. “Find some way to
reassure the leaders of my government that their fears about a laser at
Kavaznya are groundless. Make some sort of presentation about the research you
conduct there, or at least describe the facility in a bit more detail. But put
the saber-rattlers to rest ...”

 
          
“I
can guarantee little,” Karmarov said.

 
          
“We
must not fail, Dmitri,” Brent replied. He got up and took Karmarov’s hand in
his. “The future—our children’s future—may depend on it.” Slowly, Brent
released his grip on Karmarov’s hand. He gave the Ambassador a curt nod and
made his way out of the room.

 
          
Karmarov
watched him leave, then sat down in one of the plush leather chairs. He did not
move for a full two minutes. Finally, he rang for Asserni.

 
          
“Do
they know? Asserni asked.

 
          
“They
suspect. How could they not suspect?” Karmarov reached down to the table and
gripped his snifter with both hands. “What the hell are they doing over there,
Asserni? Are they trying to destroy the arms agreement? What do they want the
Americans to do?”

 
          
Asserni
did not reply. Karmarov stared into the brandy for a long time.

 
          
“I
want the secure line to the Kremlin open all morning,” he finally ordered.

 
          
“Of
course, Comrade Ambassador.”

 
          
He
drained the liqueur and winced—both at the bite of the spirits and from the
threats that were now bombarding him from both sides.

 
          
“What
are
they doing? What?”

 
          
P
atrick McLanahan was in trouble.

           
His partner, Dave Luger, had been
severely injured by flying glass and metal after his five-inch radar scope
exploded from a near-hit by a Soviet SA-4 surface-to-air missile. Their
aircraft had just been jumped by a small squadron of four MIG-25s. Climbing out
of the low-level bomb run area in broad daylight, the B-52 was a sitting duck
for the advanced Soviet interceptors.

 
          
Luger,
lounging in his ejection seat, watched his partner switch the bomb-nav radar
scope from off-center present position mode to stationkeeping, bringing the
radar antenna up to level with the aircraft’s longitudinal axis. The display
was now configured from attack mode to scanning mode, with a maximum of five
miles range with range marks displayed every half mile. He was trying to save
their lives.

 
          
“Anything
I can do for you, Pat?” Luger asked nonchalantly.

 
          
“Watch
for the damn fighters,” McLanahan said.

 
          
“Can’t
do that, buddy,” Luger said. “I’ve got serious injuries over here, remember?”

 
          
As
if to emphasize his point, he lolled lifelessly across the aisle, his parachute
harness barely keeping him in his ejection seat. He stared up at the overhead
circuit breaker panel of the B-52 Ejection and Egress Trainer, his arms flung
out awkwardly. McLanahan muttered something about how stupid he looked.

 
          
“When
did they add
that
into the scenario?”
McLanahan asked.

 
          
“I
don’t know,” Luger said. “I like it, though.”

 
          
“You’re
havin’ too much of a fucking good time,” McLanahan said.

 
          
“I
like watchin’ you work your butt off, partner.”

 
          
“Too
bad your injuries haven’t affected your mouth.” McLanahan flipped switches on
the instrument panel in front of him and looked over at his partner. “Get
strapped in like you’re supposed to. Can you still reach your ejection trigger
ring, or are your hands blown off too?”

 
          
Luger
went through the charade of inspecting his hands. “Nope, they look fine.” As he
reached for his parachute harness straps, he noticed a faint ripple of light in
the upper left-hand corner of the radar navigator’s ten-inch radar scope.

 
          
“
Ten o’clock
,” Luger said, pointing at the scope.
“Interference patterns. Could be . . .”

 
          
“No
cheating now, Luger,” the instructor, Paul White, interrupted from the control
console outside the trainer. “You’re blind, remember? Are you ready for the
finale?”

 
          
“They’ve
got this place
bugged
, ” Luger said,
hurriedly pulling on the parachute.

 
          
“You’d
be dead meat right now if those fighters launched a missile, Dave,” White said.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to unstrap yourself like that during the real
thing?”

 
          
“Only
if there aren’t any instructors around,” Luger said. White did not share in the
joke, and Luger quieted up and finished strapping himself into his seat.

 
          
“Pilot,”
McLanahan said, acting as if he was talking to the pilot, “I’m picking up a
bogey at
ten o’clock
,
five miles. Moving rapidly to
eleven o’clock
.”

 
          
“Roger,”
White said acting now as the pilot. Then, switching roles to the crew
electronic warfare officer, he shouted, “Pilot, break left now.”
Simultaneously, he turned a large black knob on the console in front of him,
putting the trainer into a sharp left turn. The compartment in which McLanahan
and Luger were sitting was mounted on
four ten
-foot hydraulic legs, enabling it to move in
any direction at the instructor’s command.

 
          
“Bogey
at
one o’clock
,
three and a half miles,” McLanahan reported. The interference pattern on his
radar scope, the telltale sign of the enemy fighter’s radar transmissions
intermingling with the B-52’s radar, disappeared and then hardened into a solid
white dot on the upper-right corner of the ten-inch scope. By the time the
radar sweep picked up the dot again, it had moved considerably. “Beginning to
go off my scope rapidly at
three o’clock
, three miles. Guns, you should be able to
pick him up.”

 
          
“Pilot,”
White said, now as the crew gunner, “my fire-control system is broken. All gun
barrels are jammed. No radar contact.” White switched back to the E.W. “Pilot,
the fighter’s radar has gone down. Last contact was
five o’clock
, two miles. Expecting a cannon attack or
infrared missile attack. Continue evasive maneuvers.” White swung the control
knob to the right, and the real-motion simulator responded by slamming both
crewmembers into their seats. “Dispensing chaff and flares. Continue evasive
maneuvers.”

 
          
A
long pause. The gyro compass and altimeter were both spinning madly as White,
striving for maximum realism in his trainer, jerked the “plane” around as
quickly as he could without locking up the hydraulically operated moving
trainer. Then he leveled the trainer out and said, “Crew, this is the copilot.
We’ve taken a missile hit on number four nacelle. Generators seven and eight
are off-line. Pilot, seven and eight engine fire T-handles, pulled.”

 
          
White
studied a hidden closed-circuit TV picture of the inside of the egress
trainer—another modification he hadn’t told the trainees about. Both McLanahan
and Luger were sitting bolt-upright in their seats, heads shoved back, work
tables stowed, their hands gripping the ejection trigger rings between their
legs. They were fighting to remain upright in the oscillating box. White
twisted the controls, and the wildly-bucking box on its hydraulic legs slowly
came back to normal. Both navigators were still tense, waiting for the order to
eject.

 
          
Not
yet, boys, White said to himself. He turned and signaled the technicians
assisting him to get ready, then clicked on his interphone.

 
          
“Okay,
gents,” White said. “Fun’s over. I was just checking out my new full-motion
range. What do you think?”

 
          
“I’ll
tell you,” McLanahan said, “after I puke on your shirt.” “Thanks,” White said.
“Okay. You’re level at ten thousand feet. Plenty of time to get ready for
ejection, right, Luger?”

           
“No sir,” Luger answered. “Last I
remember before you blew my radar scope up—and that was a nifty addition to
your little chamber of horrors here, by the way—the terrain was mountainous.
Some peaks went up to six or seven thousand feet. Maybe more.”

 
          
“Very
good,” White said. “Pressure altitude is secondary—it’s feet
aboveground
you need to worry about.
You’re still flying over mountains. What else do you have to worry about,
McLanahan?”

 
          
“The
only damn thing I’m going to worry about,” McLanahan said, “is how far upwind I
can get of that one-point-one megaton bomb I just dropped.”

 
          
“You
guys are sharp, real sharp,” White said, beaming. “I guess that’s why you
picked up eight trophies at Bomb Comp. All right, now, you only dropped your
bomb ten minutes ago. We were balls-to-the-wall after bomb release, so we
escaped the blast effects, but the fallout is still spreading. So if you were
the pilot, Luger, what would you do?”

 
          
“Well,
we only lost two engines,” Luger said after thinking for a few moments. “I’d
try to keep this Strato-Pig flying as long as I could toward the coast until
she wouldn’t stay up any more, then start punchin’ people out.”

 
          
“Even
with a squadron of MIGs on your tail?” White prompted.

 
          
“Well,
shit,
” McLanahan said. “Our day has
already gone to hell. Maybe they’ll blow us up, or maybe they’ll miss, or maybe
they’ll go home when they see our right wing on fire. Who knows? I’m bettin’
that, even if they hit us again, we’ll still have a couple of seconds to get
out before the damn plane falls out of the sky. Our goose is cooked either
way.”

 
          
“Okay,
Patrick,” White said. “Don’t get all worked up. This trainer is here primarily
to give you practice in using your downward ejection seat, true, but / want you
guys to get more out of it. Some guys will punch out as soon as they hear the
word ‘fire.’ Others will wait for an order. Some guys will freeze. Some guys
will never punch out—they think they’re safer in the plane, or that they can
ditch it or crash land it. I want you guys to think about what to do. That’s
all. Ejecting is a traumatic and dangerous thing to do—and I should know,
because I’ve done it three times. I’ve seen too many guys die unnecessarily
because they don’t
think
first.
Okay?”

 
          
“Okay,”
McLanahan said.

 
          
“Well,
then,” White said, “I, uh . . . listen, I have to use the little boy’s room.
I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll just talk about the ejection sequence
and finish early. Okay?”

 
          
“Sure,”
McLanahan replied.

 
          
“Good.
Don’t go away.”

 
          
The
interphone clicked dead. Luger turned a puzzled glance toward McLanahan. “Leave
early? That’s a first.”

 
          
“I
smell a rat,” McLanahan said.

 
          
“Big
deal,” Luger said. He placed a hand near the yellow ejection trigger ring, now
unstowed on the front of his ejection seat between his legs. “I’ve punched out
of this thing a dozen—”

 
          
Luger
never finished that sentence.

 
          
The
trainer suddenly swerved and heeled sharply to the right. Almost immediately
afterward, it pitched down so suddenly that both navigators’ helmets bumped
against their work tables.

 
          
The
red ABANDON light between the two navigators’ seats snapped on. Luger reached
for the ejection ring with his free hand, but the cabin rolled over to the left
so hard that it appeared it was completely flopped on its side. Not only did
Luger’s left hand never find the ring, but his right hand was flung away from
it.

 
          
Swearing
softly to himself, McLanahan flicked a small lever on the front left corner of
his ejection seat. With his right hand, he grabbed the side of his seat and
straightened himself up. The shoulder harness inertial reel took up the slack,
anchoring McLanahan’s back upright in the seat.

 
          
His
partner, caught completely unawares, was almost bent in half when the cabin
swung over to the left. Straining, McLanahan reached across the narrow aisle
and locked Luger’s shoulder harness. Luger, propelled by rage that surely could
be heard outside on the instructor’s control panel, hauled himself upright in
his seat.

 
          
“C’mon,
boys,” Major White said, gleefully watching the two navigators struggle on his
closed-circuit TV. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure his safety
observers and technicians were in place. “Time’s a-wastin’ ...”

 
          
The
lights in the compartment had gone out. The cabin was lit only by the eerie red
glow of the ABANDON light, but a few seconds later that too blinked out. The
normally quiet hum of the trainer had been replaced by super-amplified sounds
of explosions, screeching metal, hissing gas, and more explosions. Smoke began to
fill the compartment. White had really laid on the realism this time, McLanahan
thought to himself—the smoke began to sting his eyes. The cabin pitched over
again, rolling slowly to the right and tipping downward.