Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01 (67 page)

 
          
Wendy
dropped back into the radar nav’s seat, her forehead dripping blood, her arms
and legs throbbing. She pulled off the firefighting mask, gasped over the
interphone: “Fire’s out, Patrick. Big hole in the fuselage and fire in the ECM
boxes, but it looked like it missed the landing gear.’’

 
          
“We’re
blind up here,’’ Ormack said. “We can’t see him, we can’t see when he shoots at
us . . .’’

 
          
McLanahan
had already put the computer-controlled clearance plane setting to COLA so the
Old Dog would seek its own lowest possible altitude. But because of the
reduction in thrust and the severe damage, the terrain-climbing capability of
the Old Dog was reduced. And as the terrain became more rugged, the altitude
slowly crept higher, exposing the bomber more and more to the Soviet fighter.

 
          
“All
right, everyone, check your areas for damage,’’ McLanahan said, his grip on the
control wheel so tight his hands began to cramp.

 
          
“We’ve
got a leak in the aft fuel tank,” Ormack said, blowing on his hands and
scanning the fuel panel. “I’m opening valve twenty-eight, closing twenty-nine.
Also pumping all fuel out of the aft body tank before it leaks out—”

           
A sudden motion out of the
left-cockpit windscreen drew his attention outside. “Patrick,
look
...”

 
          
McLanahan
spun around to a sight that made him go rigid . . . The gray MiG-29
Fulcrum
fighter was directly beside the
Old Dog, just ahead of the cockpit, slightly above them and no more than a hundred
feet away. McLanahan could clearly see the pilot’s right shoulder and head out
his bubble canopy, along with a sleek air-to-air missile on its wing hardpoint.

 
          
The
MiG was amazingly small and compact, resembling a twin-tailed American F-16
fighter. The Russian pilot apparently had little trouble flying beside the
B-52, even at its low altitude, perfectly matching each of the Old Dog’s
computer-commanded altitude adjustments.

 
          
“Angelina,
he’s on our left side,
ten o’clock
, about a hundred feet. Can we get him with
the
Scorpions
on our right pylon?”

 
          
“He’s
too close. The missile wouldn’t have time to lock on.”

 
          
The
MiG pilot glanced over at McLanahan, rocked his
Fulcrum \s
wings up and down three times. He stopped, then made one
last rock to the right.

 
          
“Why
is he doing that . . . ?”

 
          
Ormack’s
jaw tightened. “It’s the interception signal. He wants us to follow him.”

 
          
“Follow
him?” McLanahan said, stomach tightening. “No way, we can t—

 
          
“Patrick,
we’ve got nowhere to run. He can knock us out of the sky anytime—”

 
          
The
MiG rocked up its left wing once more, very emphatically, as if underscoring
Ormack’s words. To back up his message the MiG pilot fired a one-second burst
from his belly guns, the bright phosphorous-tipped tracer shells knifing off into
the twilight like deadly shooting stars.

 
          
“If
we don’t follow he comes back around and tags us,” Ormack said. “We’ve got no
chance—”

 
          
“We
can still fight,” McLanahan said. “As long as we got missiles we can’t give
up.”

 
          
Ormack
grabbed his arm. “If we try to run he’ll just come around again and shoot us
down.” He lowered his voice. “You did a great job, Pat, but it’s over. It’s—”

 
          
McLanahan
shrugged his arm free. The MiG had dropped back a few feet, his bubble-canopy
now directly beside the Old Dog’s narrow, slanted cockpit. The Russian pilot
pointed down three times.

 
          
McLanahan
turned and looked directly at the MiG pilot, flying in unison with the fighter
at a distance of fifty feet. To Ormack’s surprise, he nodded to the Russian,
and the MiG pilot pointed to McLanahan’s right, indicating a right turn.

           
Ormack looked away, not wanting to
see what he had insisted was necessary for their survival. The pain he felt was
from more than his blood-soaked shoulder.

 
          
McLanahan
nodded one more time to the MiG pilot. “Stand by to turn, crew,” he said,
gripping the wheel tight.

 
          
Yuri
Papendreyov was flushed with pride. He had done it. The American was
surrendering. Of course, he could hardly do anything else—with its mangled left
wingtip, the destroyed far left engine, the B-52 was flying slower and slower,
without the extreme dives and climbs Yuri had seen before as it hugged the
ground. Yuri also noted the small-caliber bullet holes all over the B-52’s left
side from the nose to the wings, and figured the AA-8 missile he’d shot into
their fuselage had been the final blow.

 
          
The
B-52 began its very slow right turn, and Yuri had just begun applying pressure
on his control stick to follow—suddenly the entire right side of the canopy was
filled with the dark, menacing form of the American bomber . . . Instead of
turning right toward
Anadyr
the insane pilot had turned
left
—directly
into
Yuri’s MiG-29.

 
          
Yuri
yanked his control stick hard to the left, rolling up into ninety, one hundred
degrees of bank. A moment later his world exploded in a crunch of metal as the
two aircraft, traveling almost twelve kilometers a minute, collided. With both
aircraft in a hard left turn, the top of the B-52 had plowed into the bottom of
Yuri’s fighter.

 
          
Somehow
Yuri managed to continue his hard turn, standing his MiG on its left wingtip
and pulling back on the stick to increase the roll rate. The B-52 seemed to be
turning right with him, even pushing him on, dragging him to the earth. The
fighter was now at ninety-degrees bank, and the terrifying crushing and
grinding sounds underneath him continued. Yuri could see rocks and trees out of
the
top
of his canopy. His controls
refused to respond . . .

 
          
He
ignited his twin afterburners, and like a snapping rubberband his MiG was flung
away from the B-52. In the process Yuri found himself inverted, then in a wild
tumble. The roar of the B-52 was everywhere, he expected another impact any
moment . . .

 
          
But
the spin slowed and he managed to level his wings. He was barely at twenty
meters. Rocks and trees were all around him—he was staring
up
at a huge ridge line encrusted with jagged snow-covered
boulders. But his airspeed at last began to build and he felt the ground
rushing away beneath him.

 
          
Quickly
he checked around for the B-52 .. .
nothing.
Gone.
Shaking his head, Yuri started a slow right turn to check behind him
. . .

 
 
          
Numb
from the midair collision he had contrived, McLanahan watched transfixed as the
gray MiG continued its spin down, heading for the rocks, reaching the point
where McLanahan thought the pilot could never recover.

 
          
But
he did. He must have been close enough to the rocks to get one in his boot, but
his spin stopped and the MiG sped away from the earth, gaining breathtaking
speed in seconds, and now McLanahan was fighting for control of his own plane.
The stall-warning buzzer sounded, and the Old Dog seemed to be floating
straight
down
instead of flying
forward.

 
          
“Get the nose down, we're in a stall,"
Ormack was yelling at him. McLanahan shoved the yoke forward, fighting the
initial-stall buffet that shook the entire hundred-ton bomber.

 
          
The
buzzer stopped. McLanahan found he had control, leveled the nose until the
airspeed came up, but he had to force himself to stop looking at the rugged
ground that whizzed so close to the Old Dog’s groaning wings.

 
          
“There
he is, here he comes . . .” Ormack shouted, pointing straight ahead.

 
          
He
was coming, all right. Directly in front of them. “Angie,” McLanahan called
over the interphone. “Pylon missile . . .
fire.
”

 
          
The
MiG was in a thirty-degree right bank directly off* the Old Dog’s nose at a
range of perhaps three to four miles when the missile left the right pylon
rail. It ignited in a bright plume of fire, sped away toward the wide bubble
canopy of the MiG.

 
          
But
the
Scorpion
that left the Old Dog’s
rail was an unguided bullet, not a sophisticated air-to-air missile. Without
radar tracking and uplink from the Old Dog to guide it, the
Scorpion
relied on either an infrared
signature or an anti-radar jamming signal to home in on. It had neither. The
MiG had kept its radar and jammers off*, presenting no heat signature at all so
long as it was in its right turn.

 
          
The
Scorpion
streaked forward, passing a
hundred feet in front of the MiG. Ten seconds after it automatically armed its
warhead after launch, the
Scorpion
’s
computer asked itself if it was tracking a target. The reply was no, and the
Scorpion
harmlessly detonated its
warhead almost two miles past the MiG-29.

 
          
Papendreyov
saw the American bomber and the missile at the same time. There was no time to
turn, to dive, or accelerate—not even time for him to close his eyes and brace
for the impact—

 
          
And
then, just as quickly, the missile was gone. Yuri watched for a second
missile—a B-52 bomber launching
missiles
?—but
there was none.

 
          
He
continued his wide right-climbing turn, keeping a close watch on the B-52,
which now was a serious adversary, not just a helpless whale resigned to its
fate.

 
          
He
watched it far below him, making a left turn, heading east. With his own speed
regained, it looked to Papendreyov as if the B-52 was almost hanging suspended
in midair. Not dead, but an inviting target.

 
          
He
maneuvered behind it, stalking it, closing slowly for the kill. Noting the tail
cannon sweeping back and forth in a rectangular pattern, he rolled out high and
to the right of the bomber. The cannon continued its erratic box-pattern sweep,
occasionally seeming to be altogether out of control and useless . . . yes, it
could launch missiles, but it had no way of guiding them.

 
          
Yuri
armed his GSh-23 cannon and maneuvered behind and slightly above the B-52,
slowly closing the distance. He no longer considered trying to force the bomber
to land—his gun's cameras would record his victory over the intruder.

 
          
He
edged closer to the bomber, then began his strafing run . . .

 
          
“We
lost him.” Ormack was searching his side cockpit windows.

 
          
“He’s
out there,” McLanahan said, reengaging the terrain-avoidance autopilot. “He can
find us easy. We’ve got to find him before he gets a shot off . . .”

 
          
Angelina
watched her rocket-turret-position indicators as they oscillated in random
sputters and jerks. The radar was locking onto ghosts, starting and stopping,
breaking lock. Frustrated, she turned the radar to STANDBY, waited a few
moments, then turned it back to TRANSMIT . . .

 
          
A
large bright blip appeared on the upper left corner of her radarscope. She
waited for it to disappear, just like all the rest of the electronic ghosts,
but this one stayed.

 
          
She
stomped her foot on the interphone button. “Bandit
five o’clock
high, break right!”