Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01 (59 page)

 
          
“Fuel
flow?”

 
          
“Pretty
steady,” Ormack said, “but the fuel curve is getting worse. Looks like a major
leak from wing and body tanks. I’ve pumped all the fuel out of the body tanks
but I can’t do anything about the mains .. . I’ve got the minimum in them to
keep the engines going as it is. We’ve had low-pressure lights on for a long
time—”

 
          
“Can
we make it to the ocean?” Elliott asked, scanning his engine instruments and
checking them by moving the throttles. “Put it down on an ice floe or punch out
near the coastline?”

 
          
“Punch
out?” Angelina Pereira said. “You mean
eject?"

 
          
“We’d
have to cross high mountain ridges to get to the coast,” Luger said, warming
his hands on an overhead air vent. “It would be real close.”

 
          
“Now’s
the time to decide,” Elliott said. “Patrick, give me a heading toward the
ocean, away from any active Russian fighter bases. Crew, prepare for—”

 
          
“Hold
on,” McLanahan broke in. “General, what does WXO near an airfield mean?”

 
          
“WXO?
Warm-weather operations only. They close the place during winter because it’s
too expensive and too difficult to maintain. Why?”

           
“I found one,” McLanahan said,
putting a finger on his high-altitude navigation chart and checking the
satellite navigation system’s present- position counters. “Straight ahead,
fifteen minutes.”

           
“Fifteen minutes?” Ormack said.
“You’re crazy. That’s in
Russia
.”

           
“They got a long runway at the very
least,” McLanahan said. “Maybe they’ll have gas and oil for the number two engine.
If it’s abandoned or vacant we could—”

           
“They’re not abandoned,” Elliott
said. “At least
our
Alaskan warm-weather
bases aren’t. We usually have caretakers, mostly locals, that look after the
place. Maybe some minimal security, National Guard or Reserve deployments.”

 
          
Ormack
stared at Elliott. “General, you’re not seriously considering . . . You’re both
crazy. Maybe you ought to go back on oxygen.” He looked hard at Elliott,
expecting him to turn and shrug off McLanahan’s notion. Some last-minute humor
. . .

 
          
“General
. .

           
“We’re armed . . .”

           
“We’ve got your automatic and two
lousy thirty-eight revolvers in the survival kits,” Ormack said. “They’re more
of a hazard to us than they’d be to anyone else. They could have been stowed on
this plane for years.”

           
“We could do the refueling ...”
Elliott said, talking more to himself than anyone else.

           
“I’ve done that, lots of times,”
McLanahan put in, excitement rising in his voice. Luger was staring at
McLanahan pretty much the way Ormack was looking at Elliott—in disbelief.
“Global Shield missions. Remember, Dave? Simulated post-strike recovery at an
emergency airfield. Keep the number two nacelle running, pump gas into the
right outboard, right external, or right drop tank, then transfer gas to the
rest of the plane. I once hand-pumped ten thousand pounds of—”

 
          
“The
Russians aren’t going to just let us take their gas,” Luger said. “It’s crazy.”

           
“We’d end up captured,” Angelina
said. “I’d rather take my chances in the mountains than be captured by them—especially
after this mission.”

 
          
“No,
you don’t want to go down in the mountains,” Elliott said. “Even if you come
out of the ejection unhurt your chances are at best fifty-fifty even with the
global survival kits we’ve got. And we can’t ditch the Old Dog. She wouldn’t
withstand the impact.”

 
          
“I
still think those odds are better than landing at a Russian airfield—”

           
“Do you, John?” Elliott said. “How
long do you think we could survive out there in those mountains?”

           
“If we made it to the coast we’d
have a chance.”

 
          
Elliott
ignored that, asked his navigators for the distance to the coastline.

 
          
“One
hundred miles is the closest,” Luger said. “But we cross two ranges, each about
nine or ten thousand feet, and we’re within radar range of Trebleski airfield
the whole way. After we cross the mountains we can cut away from Trebleski to
the northeast.”

 
          
“We
can stay near the mountains,” Wendy offered. “Get as much distance as possible
from Trebeski and hide in the ground clutter.”

 
          
“Can
we go around Trebleski at all?”

 
          
“Not
on the coastal side of the mountains,” Luger told him, rubbing his one
uncovered eye, “unless we turn around.”

 
          
“So
it’s unlikely we’d make it to the coast,” Elliott said. “And that means we get
out over the mountains in the dead of winter, hundreds of miles from any kind
of friendly forces. We could try to evade but I wouldn’t give us much of a
chance of making it to the coast, much less into
Alaska
.”

 
          
“General,
are you saying that landing at a Russian military airfield, abandoned or not,
is a better option?” Ormack said. “We’d be surrendering. We’d be handing
ourselves and this plane over to them. And I sure as hell wouldn’t give us a
snowball’s chance in hell of making it out of a Soviet prison alive.”

 
          
Elliott
kept silent for a long moment, then: “Distance to that airfield, Patrick.”

 
          
McLanahan
already had the geographic coordinates of the field typed into his navigation
computer. “
Anadyr
is eighty miles, five degrees left.”

 
          
“Any
radar circles around it?”

 
          
“Yes,”
McLanahan said, studying his civil-aviation chart. “Can’t tell what they are
but they’ve got something there.”

 
          
“Wendy,
any activity?”

 
          
Wendy
Tork had been carefully studying her threat displays ever since McLanahan had
first made his wild suggestion. “Clear scope ever since Ossora airfield.”

 
          
“I’ve
got no terrain on my scope for a hundred miles,” McLanahan said, tuning his
ten-inch radar scope in one-hundred-nautical-mile range. “If there were any
threat signals they’re not being blocked by terrain. I can’t make out the base,
though.”

 
          
“Okay,”
Elliott said, “you’ve all heard the arguments. There’s no guarantee that we’ll
get gas, oil or anything but our asses in a sling if we land at
Anadyr
. On the other hand it’s possible that we
could land this beast and walk away from it uninjured, steal a truck and have a
better than even chance of evading toward the Bering Strait, where our chances
of getting rescued significantly increase. If you’re a wild dreamer like
Patrick you’ll actually believe there’s an outside chance of pumping this
aircraft full of gas, restarting the number two engine and running it enough to
lift off again,
and,
maybe, making it
back to Alaska.”

 
          
“Crazy,”
Ormack muttered. “If the base is occupied we won’t have any chance of taking
off again—we’d flame out long before liftoff. If we can’t find gas we’re stuck
three hundred miles from friendly territory on a Russian military base. The
Russians would get the Old Dog and we’d be stuck trying to evade all the way
back to
Alaska
. Fat chance.”

 
          
“Well,
I can’t have this crew bail out over the mountains,” Elliott said. “Chances of
surviving the ejection itself are low. If we did survive we’d be faced with a
three-hundred-mile trek across
Siberia
with the Red Army chasing us. I say we take our chances on solid ground, in one
piece. At least we’ll be alive to fight or run.”

 
          
“I’m
for it,” Luger said. “Hell, that base will be the last place on this earth
they’d look for us, except downtown
Moscow
.”

 
          
“All
right, General,” Wendy said, closing her eyes in a silent prayer, “let’s try to
land it.”

 
          
Angelina
shrugged. “Check. I don’t know if I could eject myself out of this damn thing
anyway.”

 
          
“I’m
giving a crash course, anyway,” McLanahan told her. “You may still have to do
it. General, I’m clearing off to go upstairs. Dave, watch my scope for me.”

 
          
Ormack
agreed they really didn’t have much choice, pulled out the emergency landing
checklists as McLanahan went upstairs and knelt between Wendy and Angelina. He
plugged his headset into the defense instructor’s station and told the two
women to switch their interphones to the “private” position, which allowed them
to talk without bothering the rest of the crew.

 
          
“How
are you warriors doing?”

 
          
Angelina
nodded but looked almost as bad as Luger. Because of the damage to the
downstairs crew compartment McLanahan had been forced to transfer most of the
available heat downstairs to keep Luger from going back into shock. Even with
Wendy’s borrowed jacket and thermal top, without the protection the rest of the
crew had, Angelina was losing to the cold. Her lips were purple, her eyelids
drooped as if she were struggling to stay awake. Her hands, in stiff, metallic
firefighting gloves, were shoved deep inside her jacket for warmth.

 
          
Bomber
defense was almost out of the question, McLanahan thought. It would be
difficult if not impossible for Angelina to try to operate her equipment under
these conditions. Landing was absolutely the only option.

 
          
“Hang
in, Angie,” he said.

 
          
“I’ll
be all right . . .”

 
          
McLanahan
turned to Wendy. “How you doing?”

 
          
“Holding
up. I could use a drink.”

 
          
“
Champagne
when we get home ... okay, you were taught
this months ago, but let’s go over it again. If we get attacked while trying to
land, or if the pilots can’t land this thing, we’ve got no choice but to eject.
Listen carefully, watch the warning light and don’t panic—but don’t hesitate
eighter. There’s a simple three-step system for using upward seats—just
remember, ready, aim, fire.

 
          
“The
ready is to pull the safety pin out of the handle on your armrests, trip the
handle release lever and rotate the handle upward. Grab the front of the
handle, not the middle or inside. There’s no hurry, do it smooth and easy. This
equipment is old and it needs some care. The aim is like align. You shove your
fannies deep into the back of your seat, press your back into the seat and push
your head back into the headrest. After that lower your chin to your chest.
Think about a nice straight spine the whole time. Put your feet flat on the
deck, knees together. Put your elbows inside the armrests and brace your arms
against the back. The fire is easy—grab both triggers inside the ejection
handle and squeeze. Next thing you know, you’ll be on the ground.”

 
          
“What
happens if it doesn’t fire?” Angelina asked between shivers. “Can you go over
the emergency ejection sequence?”

 
          
“Don’t
worry about it. If necessary I’ll pop your manual catapult initiator pull-out
pins for you.”

 
          
“You?”
Wendy said, looking up at McLanahan. “How?”