Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01 (18 page)

 
          
The
car pulled to a stop in the middle of a deserted parking ramp, far from the
brilliantly lit terminal. The door on McLanahan’s side was opened by some dark
figure outside. He noticed no interior courtesy lights illuminated—someone had
punched holes in the plastic lenses with a knife.

 
          
“Sorry
for the mixups, Sergeant Jenkins,” McLanahan said in a low voice in keeping
with the hushed, tense atmosphere.

 
          
“No
problem, sir,” Jenkins said. His walkie-talkie crackled, and he spoke a few
words into it. Then, he added, “Good luck,” and pulled the door closed. The car
moved off and was soon lost in the darkness.

 
          
“I
don’t need luck,” McLanahan said to himself, looking around in the gloom. “What
I need is
out
of here.”

 
          
The
ramp was completely dark—even the small blue taxiway lights leading from the
runway were turned off. McLanahan put the terminal on his right side and
stepped forward ten paces, as carefully as if he was following a pirate’s treasure
map. Somehow, he could
feel
people
all around him, lots of eyes watching him, talking about him, but he couldn’t
see a thing. He could make out a large, seemingly deserted hangar behind him,
its huge front bay door open like a dark cave entrance. As his eyes grew
accustomed to the dark, he spotted a few light single-engined Cessnas tied down
to his left. The parking ramp was breezy and beginning to grow cold.

 
          
He
made a motion to pull down his jacket sleeve and check his watch, but he
suppressed that urge. This time, he was just going to stand and wait. Checking
the time would only make him that much more impatient. He zipped his jacket up
all the way, shoved his hands in his pockets, and stood watching the runway.

 
          
McLanahan
guessed that about fifteen minutes had passed since Jenkins dropped him off.
His eyes were fully adjusted to the dark now. There were small birds
everywhere, jumping and peeping nervously around him. An occasional rabbit
scampered down the asphalt, stopping every now and then to test the air and
sniff for danger. Once McLanahan thought he heard the static of a walkie-talkie
nearby, but he saw no one. He watched every plane that landed—there were only
two—expecting it to pull up in front of him any minute, but they never did.

 
          
Another
ten minutes passed—or was it another fifteen or twenty? The sky was beginning
to clear, and the temperature was taking a noticeable dip. Whoever he was
supposed to meet out here was going to find a frozen navigator Popsicle because
McLanahan was determined not to screw it up again, even if it meant catching
pneumonia. He stamped the cold from his sneakers a few times, then removed his
hands from the pockets of his light nylon windbreaker and blew warm air on
them.

 
          
Let’s
get on with it, boys, McLanahan said to himself. He blew on his palms once
again, cursing the air nipping at his uncovered ears, and slapped two chilly
palms together irritably.

 
          
He
never heard the slap. At that exact instant, in the dark hangar directly behind
him, a high-pitched whine erupted.

 
          
McLanahan
jumped an easy six inches and spun quickly toward the noise. As he turned, he
was blinded by the glare of a set of four landing and taxi lights aimed
directly at him. He had completely misjudged the distance. The lights were less
than fifty yards away.

 
          
The
whine became a low, bellowing roar, and a twin-engined jet taxied rapidly from
within the dark hangar, the blinding lights focused directly on the lone figure
on the ramp. It seemed to leap out at him, like a tiger springing through a
hoop at a circus. McLanahan could not have moved if he had wanted to.

 
          
The
jet sped up beside him, the wingtip fuel tanks passing a mere five feet from
where he stood anchored on the ramp. A curved airstair door was flung open, and
a lone man with an Air Force-looking uniform grabbed McLanahan’s upper arm with
a tight grip and half-guided, half- dragged him to the doorway of the screaming
jet.

 
          
He
was guided with a push onto a hard airliner seat, and a seat belt was quickly
yanked around him. The belt was snapped tight around his waist, and McLanahan
felt a prickle of panic. They weren’t concerned for his safety at all—they
wanted him to stay put.

 
          
He
watched as the man who had pulled him aboard placed a headset over his head and
thrust his face forward. He ordered, “I.D. card. Quickly.”

 
          
McLanahan
was startled by the sudden command, and impulsively reached into his right back
pocket where the card
always
was. It
wasn’t there. He squirmed around and felt for the card in his left back pocket.
Not there, either.

 
          
“Quickly!”
the man said again. He pulled a boom mike near his lips and spoke a few clipped
words into it. McLanahan glanced at a pair of wildlooking, dark eyes, then
turned away as he furiously patted his pockets. Glancing toward the front of
the jet, he saw the copilot leaning to his left into the narrow aisle between
him and the pilot. The copilot wore a camouflaged helmet and a green flight
suit. With a start, McLanahan noticed the copilot half-concealing a stubby,
short-barrelled Uzi submachine gun behind the cockpit curtain.

 
          
“Oh,
shit,” McLanahan said. His hands flew over his pockets, finally finding the
card in his left front pocket. He fished it out and held it up to the man
pinning him in the seat, nearly clipping a piece of the man’s nose off in the
process.

 
          
The
man snapped on a tiny red-beamed flashlight, examined the card, then swept the
tiny beam of light across McLanahan’s dumbfounded face. The man’s hard features
softened a bit, washing clear with an immense sense of relief.

 
          
He
pulled the mike closer to his lips and leapt to his feet. “Let’s roll, pilot,”
he shouted, dropping the card in McLanahan’s lap. The Uzi peeking behind the
curtain disappeared. The man with the headset scurried back and hauled up the
airstair door and dogged it closed. A few short moments later, the jet was
screaming skyward.

 
          
The
guard wearily dropped into a seat across from McLanahan and took a moment or
two to take a few deep breaths.

 
          
“Sorry
about all that, Captain,” the man said after the plane was safely on its way.
“When you disappeared from the airport terminal, we got a little nervous. We
may have overreacted a bit. I’m sorry if we got a little rough.”

 
          
“I’m
the one who should be apologizing, I think,” McLanahan said, slowly recovering
from his shock. “I’ve handled this whole thing pretty irresponsibly. Are you
Major Miller, the one I was finally supposed to contact?”

 
          
The
man laughed and nodded toward the epaulets on his shoulders.

 
          
“No,
Captain. I’m First Lieutenant Harold Briggs. I work for the project
coordinator.
We
are Major Miller.”

 
          
“We?”

           
“Major Miller was a code name for
you,
” Briggs explained. “Whenever you
or someone from your unit mentioned Major Miller, my section was notified. I’m
in charge of getting you to the project coordinator.”

 
          
“The
project coordinator? Who is he?”

 
          
“You’ll
find that out soon,” Briggs replied. “We’re on our way, finally, to meet him.
Meanwhile, if you need anything, just let me know. Call me Hal, please. I’ll be
working with you for the entire duration of the project.”

 
          
“The
project?”

 
          
“Yes,
sir,” Briggs said, smiling. “I can’t tell you about that. You’ll have to see
the project coordinator for that. But, I am your aide from now on.”

 
          
“Aide,
huh?” McLanahan said. “Well, I don’t know if I can handle that.” He extended a
hand. “Call me Patrick and can the ‘sir’ stuff, okay?”

 
          
“You
got it.” They shook hands, and Briggs stowed his headset in an overhead rack
and flicked on a light. Hal Briggs was very, very young, with short-cropped
black hair on top of a lean, thin face and dark brown eyes. He wore lieutenant
epaulets on his blue fatigues, a pair of Army paratrooper’s wings, and an Air
Force Security Police badge over his left breast pocket. McLanahan noticed he
wore a green webbed infantry belt over his blue Air Force trousers, but he
couldn’t see the weapon holstered there.

 
          
“Sergeant
Jenkins said something about me being tailed,” McLanahan said as Briggs opened
a small refrigerator near his seat and pulled out a couple of beers.

 
          
“Yeah,”
Briggs said, popping open his can and handing the other to McLanahan. Briggs
tipped his can to McLanahan and took a long swallow.

 
          
“Call
it youthful exuberance. When you showed up at the terminal, then suddenly
disappeared, I got . . . nervous. I called Sergeant Jenkins, who was my backup
out there from Fairchild, and I sounded the alarm. Boy, those OSI guys can
move out.
”

 
          
“You’re
not OSI?”

 
          
“No.”
Briggs smiled. “Anyway, Jenkins had a search organized in no time. We were more
or less in control of the tactical environment, as we say in the game, at the
airport. When you moved to the base, we lost control. Hell, we ...
I
painted a half-dozen different
scenarios about what happened to you. All bad.”

 
          
“Whoa,
whoa!” McLanahan held up a tired hand. “Happened to me? I don’t get it. What
are you guys so afraid of? What can happen to me? And why
me
in the first place?”

 
          
Briggs
drained his beer and reached for another.

 
          
“Pat,
you are very, very hot property right now,” he said, watching McLanahan’s
wide-eyed expression from behind the upturned beer can. “If we lost you, if
something happened to you, if you didn’t arrive at the project headquarters by
tomorrow noon ...” He finished the beer in a few long, furious gulps, then
said, “the vibrations would be felt all the way . . . to the top.”

 
          
“Hal,”
McLanahan said, his mouth suddenly very dry, “that’s not an explanation.” For
the second time, the hairs on the back of his neck were catching a breeze from
somewhere. “The top?
Top
of
what?”

 
          
“I’m
sorry,” he said. He reached for the refrigerator door, then stopped,
reconsidering, and sat back in his chair and looked at McLanahan. “Listen,
there’s very little I can tell you. But I do know this. I was authorized to
make that fucking little airpatch out there look like
Entebbe
. I was
authorized
,
Patrick. Authorized to do any damned thing . . .”

 
          
It
was at that moment that McLanahan noticed the Uzi strapped to Briggs’ waist.

 
          
It
was late in the evening when Harold Briggs escorted McLanahan from his small,
musty billeting room to another building a few hundred yards away. McLanahan
realized that all his movements—from the time he landed on that long, long jet
flight from
Spokane
till now—were intended to keep his location
a secret.

 
          
Why
Briggs and the others were trying to keep his location a secret from
him,
he couldn’t figure—but they had
only partially succeeded. Although he had been taken from the jetport to his
room at night through the back door, and although they had apparently tried to
erase all traces of his location, he stumbled across the words “NELLIS AUX 5”
engraved on the side of a desk in his room. The Learjet they had picked him up
with at
Spokane
, he knew, had a range of about a thousand
miles at the speed their pilot was flying—the pilot had kept the engines at
full bore the whole way. And if that hadn’t been enough, the dry, cold evening
and the roar of high-performance jets—not airliners, but military
fighters—screaming in the distance gave it away.

 
          
Well,
so what? He was at Nellis or one of the myriad of airfields, stations, training
camps, or ranges in the vicinity. He hoped more answers were on the way when,
after an entire day of nothing to do, Briggs knocked on his door and told him
they were going to meet the project coordinator . . .

 
          
McLanahan
and Briggs now sat alone in a small briefing room. They had been sitting in the
same room for twenty minutes.

 
          
McLanahan
was about to turn to Briggs and ask how much longer it would be when the door
opened and in stepped . . .

 
          
“General
Elliott!” McLanahan said. He sprang so quickly to his feet that he felt as
though he had left some part of himself back in the chair.

           
“At ease, Patrick,” General Elliott
said, smiling. He took McLanahan’s hand and shook it. “Welcome to my
nightmare.”

 
          
McLanahan
was too stunned to clasp hands. Elliott recognized this and steered him to his
chair again.

 
          
Elliott
wore a flightsuit with three subdued stars on each shoulder and subdued
Strategic Air Command insignia on the arms and front. The squadron patch read
“3 ACCS,” the Airborne Command and Control Squadron from SAC Headquarters. He
also wore a .45 automatic pistol strapped to his waist, and carried a large
chart-carrying case and three Thermos bottles.

 
          
Elliott
flipped his wooden chair around and sat down on it with a tired
thud.
He studied McLanahan’s
still-surprised face. “Relax, Patrick. You’ll have your explanation in a
moment.”

 
          
McLanahan
blinked at the words. Was his mouth hanging open or something? He took a deep
breath and wiped moisture from his palms.

 
          
“Coffee?”
Elliott asked, extending separate Thermoses to McLanahan and Briggs. “Actually,
Hal, there’s coke in yours. I know you’d prefer a beer but ...”

 
          
Briggs
nodded and smiled. “I understand, sir.”

 
          
“All
right,” Elliott said, “here we go. This entire conversation is top secret. It
is restricted to just us. No one else at all. I have no assistant, aides, or
staffers that need to know what’s been discussed. I don’t have to ask if the
room’s secure, because it’s my room and my compound and I
know
it’s secure. That’s the way this project is being run.

 
          
“By
the way, Hal, you’re in on this because I want you to realize all that’s
happening from here on in. I think you’ll be able to operate better when you’ve
got the complete picture. Patrick, Hal here has been on my security staff for a
year now. He was assigned to security units for the Pentagon and at SAC until I
grabbed him. Now he works for you. He’ll make sure that foul-ups like the one
we had at
Spokane
don’t happen again.”

 
          
McLanahan
tried to keep his face from reddening but failed.

 
          
“This
job is very simple, Patrick,” Elliott began. “We run a highly classified
research and development center here at Dreamland. I’m sure that’s little
surprise to you; during all the Red Flag sorties you’ve flown I’m sure you’ve
heard speculation about Dreamland, wondered why you’d get your butt kicked so
hard for overflying it. Well, that’s why. Most every new design for a fighter,
bomber, or missile built in the past ten years probably had its first tryout
here at Dreamland.”

 
          
He
paused for a moment, taking a sip of coffee. “We’ve got another plane that we’d
like to test-fly. We’d like you to run it through its paces. Test out the
avionics, make some practice bomb runs, wring out the aircraft as much as you
can. Much of the equipment you’ll be testing will eventually be installed in
selected B-l aircraft.”

 
          
McLanahan
looked puzzled. “That’s it?”

 
          
“You’ll
be plenty busy, I assure you, Patrick” the general said. “We’re on a very tight
schedule. We could be... well, let’s just say our data might be needed at any
time. The more information we have to pass on, the better.”

 
          
McLanahan
shrugged his shoulders. “Sounds fine to me,” he said. “But you sure went
through some very strange gyrations to get me here. I’ve got a feeling I still
don’t know the entire story.”

 
          
“I
hate to sound overly cryptic, Patrick,” Elliott said, smiling, “but you know
all you’re supposed to know right now. You may figure out more as the project
progresses. But I must remind you—your location, your duties, everything you
see and do, is classified top secret. No one outside this room—I don’t care how
high their clearance or rank—is to know what goes on here. Understood?”

 
          
“Yes,
sir,” McLanahan said. “One question, though.”

 
          
“Shoot.”

 
          
“Why
me?”

 
          
Elliott
smiled, finished his coffee, and stood. “Simple. You’re the best. I can’t pass
up a guy who’s won as many Bomb Comp trophies as you.” McLanahan wasn’t
satisfied with Elliott’s answer but nodded anyway. “Want to see her?” Elliott
asked.

           
McLanahan looked puzzled. “See
what?”

 
          
“The
ship,” Elliott said.
“Your
ship. The
Old Dog.”

 
          
“Old
Dog?” McLanahan rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Good recruiting technique,
General. I’m supposed to get excited about a plane called the Old Dog?”

 
          
“You
will,” he said.

 
          
“Is
this thing for
real?”
Briggs asked.
McLanahan would have posed a similar question had he been able to speak;
instead, he stood dumbstruck, staring at the massive form of the
Megafortress.

 
          
They
did a walkaround inspection of the airplane. General Elliott let them walk at
their own pace, answering all their questions.

 
          
“It
can’t be the same airplane,” McLanahan said finally, running his fingers across
the slippery skin. “This can’t be a B-52.”

 
          
“A
wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Elliott said. “I assure you.”

 
          
Briggs
entered the bomb bay and McLanahan followed him in a moment later.

 
          
“Expecting
trouble, General?” McLanahan remarked. He examined the missiles. “
Scorpions!
Eight ... no, ten of them! On
a B-52! They’ve just come out with these things. They’re not even modified for
the F-15 yet. And you’ve got twelve more on the wings. I don’t believe it.”

 
          
Briggs
read the lower missiles on the rotary launcher. “HARM. What’s HARM?”

 
          
“Anti-radiation
missiles,” McLanahan said. “Homes in on and attacks radar-guided antiaircraft
gun and missile sites.” He looked at Elliott, and the young man’s gaze caused
the general’s smile to fade a bit. “Trouble and a half, I’d say.”

 
          
“Nine-tenths
of everything on the
Megafortress
is
geared toward selfdefense and target penetration,” Elliott explained. “That has
been my number-one priority. This is just a test-bed aircraft. Over the past
few years, we’ve just kept on adding refinements to it. Building a better
mousetrap, I guess.” He patted the bomber’s smooth skin. “We’re going to
incorporate the data we get from our test sorties into several other types of
aircraft, notably the B-l.

 
          
“Let’s
go inside,” Elliott said finally. “The technicians are doing a simulated flight
on the avionics right now. It’ll give you a chance to see your new gear operate
downstairs.”

 
          
They
received clearance from the guards surrounding the huge bomber and climbed
inside. Out of instinct, McLanahan immediately climbed into the left seat and
scanned the instrument panel before him—his hand even positioned itself on the
crosshair tracking handle as if drawn there by magnetism. Briggs, standing
behind them near the aft bulkhead door leading to the forward wheel well,
merely stood and gaped at the cramped compartment.

 
          
“Simple,
direct, high-speed, highly accurate navigation equipment,” Elliott said.
“Satellite global navigation, with position accuracy down to twenty feet, time
down to the hundredth of a second, and groundspeed down to the quarter-knot.
Plus an inertial navigation system with a ring- laser gyro with heading
accuracy to the tenth of a degree after twelve un-updated hours.”

 
          
McLanahan
rested his hands near the computer terminal, studied the keyboard and the video
monitor, and then said, “You took the second navigator’s seat out. Where’s he
going to sit?”

 
          
“Second
navigator?” Elliott was genuinely startled. “Patrick, I just explained to you.
This thing has automatic accuracy a navigator only dreams about. You can handle
it yourself. Why do you need someone else?”

 
          
“What
if all this stuff is destroyed? What if it dumps?”

 
          
“Dumps?
Elliott looked insulted. “You can’t dump this stuff. If you turn off all the
power, the ring laser gyro has a half-hour backup battery. Once power is
restored, the gyro realigns in ninety seconds back to original specifications.
And it’ll take one satellite cycle—about ten minutes— for the GPS to find
itself and start navigating again. It doesn’t
dump.
”

           
“Well, sir,’’ McLanahan said, “I
don’t know.’’ He studied the controls on the left side and the small rack of
relays and boxes behind him. “You kept the original radar set, is that right,
sir?”

           
“Yes,” Elliott said, looking
puzzled. “It’s interfaced with the defensive weapons more, with target tracking
modes and—”

 
          
“But
I still have radar crosshairs?” he interrupted. “Fixtaking capability? Wind
runs? Altitude calibrations?”

 
          
“Yes,
yes,” Elliott said impatiently. “You can still update the inertial navigation
set with the radar set, and you can put a memory point wind into the system,
but you don’t need—”

 
          
McLanahan
didn’t let him finish. He simply reached down to the radar controls near his
left knee and, with both hands, pushed three buttons simultaneously.

 
          
The
results were dramatic. Instantly, a relay behind McLanahan’s ejection seat
smoked and sputtered, every circuit breaker of the few remaining above
McLanahan’s head popped, and the entire lower deck compartment went completely
dark.