Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01 (52 page)

 
          
“High
terrain, thirty miles,” Luger reported.

 
          
“Any
way around it?” Ormack asked.

 
          
“Solid
ridge line. No other way.”

 
          
Ormack
cursed and nudged the Old Dog skyward. They were almost back at their
pre-established five thousand foot safe-clearance altitude before Luger finally
reported clear of terrain.

 
          
“Goddamn,”
Ormack said, “over four thousand feet above the ground—”

 
          
“But
we may belly-flop that ridge line when we cross it,” McLanahan reminded him.
“We should be able to engage the auto terrain-following computer any second—”

 
          
“Airborne
interceptors at
twelve o’clock
,”
Wendy interrupted. “At extreme detection range but closing rapidly. Multiple
indications.”

 
          
“And
we’re stuck up here,” Ormack said. “No other way around it. Pereira, McLanahan,
engage at long range. We’ll have to blast our way out of here.”

 
          
No
one offered any alternative. McLanahan reactivated his
Scorpion
attack radar and tuned it immediately to fifty-mile range.
Slaved to Wendy Tork’s threat receiver, the radar immediately pinpointed the
aggressors ahead.

 
          
“Locked
onto one,” McLanahan called out. Just as he designated the first target he heard
the
whoosh
of a
Scorpion
missile leaving the left pylon.

           
“Locked onto a second one—”

 
          
'Tighter at
six o'clock
high,
” from Angelina. Instantly she activated her own radar and locked onto
the fighter. A moment later she gave a look of surprise and reached for the
airmine triggers. “Range decreasing rapidly,” she said. “He’s diving at us . .
.”

 
          
“Radar’s
gone down,” Wendy said. “And we don’t have an infrared scanner to pick up—”

 
          
“It’s
an IR attack,” Angelina announced. “Pilot, break right.”

 
          
Ormack
threw the Old Dog into a hard-banking turn to the right. The bomber, already
without several thousand pounds of thrust from the number one engine, rumbled
in protest, hovering just above a stall. Wendy punched out two flares from the
left ejector while Angelina tried to locate the attacker on her radar.

 
          
“I
got him, I got him on radar,” she said, hit the green TRACK button, watched the
circle cursor surround the fighter’s radar reflection and squeezed the
Stinger
airmine rocket triggers.

 
          
But
the attacking fighter had the advantage. Following a vector to the intruder
from his low-patrol mates—both of whom he had lost contact with soon
afterward—he had spotted the intruder on radar long enough to point his
MiG-25’s infrared search-and-track seeker at the penetrator. Once the seeker
had locked onto the target, he had no need for the look-down radar and turned
it off. His AA-7 missile immediately locked onto the two engines on the left
inboard nacelle of the Old Dog, and he hit the launch button just as he noticed
a short burst of flame from below him.

 
          
Angelina’s
right break had been perfectly timed. The AA-7 missile’s IR seeker lost the
engines in the break and locked onto the flares, but the change was too quick
and the proximity and decoy-detection fuse exploded the missile.

 
          
Saved
from destruction, the Old Dog was nonetheless naked . . . the missile’s
high-explosive detonation, together with the one-thousand-de- gree-Fahrenheit
parachute-equipped flares and the low wide burst of an airmine rocket, perfectly
outlined the Old Dog against the snow-covered mountains.

 
          
The
MiG pilot attacking from above and behind the
Megafortress
had watched his missile streak toward the target. Then
suddenly he saw a dark silhouette of incredible size. He blinked, not able to
believe it as the outline of the massive aircraft materialized below him. A
low-altitude warning horn sounded in his helmet, and he managed to pull out of
his dive only a few hundred feet above the ground and force his fighter
skyward.

 
          
Although
the long sleek nose confused him, there was no misidentifying the rest of the
plane. An American B-52 bomber. He had always thought that if he was called on
to defend Kavaznya against attack, it would be against an FB-111, a B-l or even
the American Navy’s F-18 or F-14. Never, never an aging dinosaur like the B-52.

 
          
Straining
to keep the antediluvian bomber in view as he pulled on his control stick and
crawled for altitude, he frantically keyed his microphone.

 
          
“Aspana.
Danger. American B-52 bomber.
Paftariti.
American B-52 visually
identified.”

 
          
Another
warning beep sounded in his helmet. He recognized the stallwarning buzzer,
applied maximum afterburner and leveled off to wait for his airspeed to
increase. He repeated his warning over the radio, including the bomber’s
direction and estimated speed.

 
          
Could
the B-52 possibly have destroyed the other fighters? The MiG pilot had seen
what he thought were gunblasts from the puny .50 caliber guns in the tail, but
none of the pilots at Ossora would be stupid enough to fly that close to the
intruder. . . .

 
          
Angelina
had to haul herself upright by the armrests of her ejection seat to regain her
balance. The sudden turn and the abrupt roll-out had her head spinning and she
fought to refocus her eyes on her scope. When she did she was surprised to see
the target still locked within her circle cursor. She grasped the triggers and
fired twice at the almost stationary fighter.

 
          
The
last thing the MiG pilot saw was the glass around him seeming to melt like
cellophane. His canopy disintegrated as twenty pounds of metal chips from both
Stinger
rockets sheared through the
plastic-laminated canopy, shredding everything in its path. His fighter flew on
for several minutes, its pilot sightless and bleeding, before crashing into the
low mountains.

 
          
“Angelina!
Twelve
o’clock
high!
Another MiG coming in fast ...”

 
          
Bathed
in the bright sunburst of the descending flares, the MiG-25 attacking from the
nose had a solid visual contact on the intruder. The Old Dog was approaching a
high ridge line, very close to the ridge but well above the snow-covered valley
behind, and the attacking MiG was well above the bomber, which was perfectly
highlighted. The Russian pilot had to strain, but even after the flare plunged
the sky back into darkness the bomber was still visible.

 
          
He
refocused his eyes on the heads-up display for a few seconds, rapidly checking
his instruments to see if he could establish a more reliable shot on the bomber
below him. The infrared seeker had not locked on—that would have been difficult
unless he was behind the B-52. His tracking radar was randomly locking onto
hundreds of targets all over the scope— completely jammed. Useless. A B-52, he
knew, carried more jamming power than ten MiG-25s combined. He shut the radar
off, banked hard to the left and began to dive at the bomber, fighting to keep
it in sight as he approached the ridge . . .

 
          
“He’s
closing fast,” McLanahan called out. “Ten miles.”

 
          
Angelina
had to take a few precious seconds to select a
Scorpion
missile and align it with McLanahan’s steering signals,
then launched the Mach three missile within six seconds of McLanahan’s second
warning. Still, in that time the MiG had halved the distance between them.

 
          
The
MiG’s warning receivers immediately detected the missile launch and the pilot
quickly switched hands on the stick, activated the forward deception jammers
with his right hand, switched hands again and hit the chaff-dispenser on his
control stick.

 
          
A
B-52 launching an air-to-air missile! It was worse than he ever imagined. He
could easily see the fiery plume behind the missile below him, pointed his
fighter directly at the missile, showing the missile only his smallest radar
profile.

 
          
The
glare from the missile spoiled his night vision some, but the bomber was still
in sight. The MiG pilot saw a slight shift in the shape of the missile’s
plume—instead of a round dot, it was a bit more oblong. He smiled and relaxed
his grip on the control stick. The American missile had locked onto one of the
false targets his jammers had created. Instantly he released another bundle of
chaff and pulled right and up on his stick. The missile’s egg-shaped ball of
fire became a long, orange line as it harmlessly passed underneath his MiG.

 
          
The
pilot, who had his eyes squinted against the explosion he had feared as he
watched the missile streak past, now opened his eyes—the huge B-52 was centered
in his gunsights.

 
          
Even
so he felt he was a heartbeat too late—he should have been firing his cannon
before the B-52 entered his sights. He shoved the stick down now to lead the
target more, but the snow-covered ridge line popped into view ahead of the
bomber. He had only an instant left. His finger closed on the trigger and held
it until trees began to show on the edge of the ridge, then released the
trigger and hauled back on the stick with all his strength . . .

 
          
“The
missile missed,” Ormack answered as he watched the
Scorpion
disappear into the night.

 
          
“Break right,
” McLanahan told him,
watching the radar target grow to horrifying size.

           
The split-second the Soviet pilot
had wasted realizing he was too late for a real kill had saved the Old Dog’s
life. Twenty-millimeter shells plowed into the leading edge of the Old Dog’s
left wing where Elliott’s cockpit windows had been an instant before. The
shells ripped into the left
Scorpion
missile pylon, destroying half of the remaining missiles. The explosions would
have ripped the wing apart, but one ricocheting shell fired a jettison squib in
the pylon and the entire burning pylon exploded into space. The pylon missed
the remaining fragments of the Old Dog’s V-tail and the
Stinger
airmine rocket cannon.

 
          
The
MiG’s strafing track continued through the wing and fuselage, piercing the
number-two main center wing and forward body-fuel tanks, but the shells created
no deadly spark and dissipated most of their heat in the fibersteel skin of the
Megafortress.

 
          
Elliott
could see sparks flying from the hardpoint where the
Scorpion
pylon used to be. “Angelina, the left missile pylon’s
hit.’’

 
          
McLanahan
glanced up and checked the selective jettison board on his weapons-monitoring
panel. “We lost the whole damned pylon,’’ he called out, deselecting jettison
power from the pylon circuitry.

 
          
Angelina
immediately reached to her overhead circuit breaker panel and pulled a group of
circuit breakers. “Pylon deactivated.”

 
          
“That
left wing must be getting awful light.” McLanahan tried for a bit of grim
humor.

 
          
It
was wasted on Wendy, who called out, “Fighter at
six o’clock
.”

 
          
“Here
he comes again.”

 
          
“I
see him,’’ Angelina said as she steered the circle-cursor on the radar return
and hit the TRACK button, then began aligning a weapons-bay
Scorpion
for launch.

 
          
The
Soviet pilot saw the missile lock-on indication on his threat receiver and
immediately activated his own electronic countermeasures.