Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (65 page)

           
They carried no wallets, at least
not the same ones they carried normally. Into a specially prepared nylon
“sortie” wallet they placed their military identification cards, some cash,
credit cards, and traveler’s checks—these were many times more valuable than
the “blood chits” used to buy assistance during earlier wars. During the
intelligence briefing before a mission, they would receive “pointee-talkee”
native language cards and small escape-and-evasion maps of the area, which both
went into the sortie wallet.

           
Just about every pocket in a flight
suit contained something, usually personal survival items devised after years
of experience. In his ankle pockets, Patrick carried fireproof Nomex flying
gloves, extra pencils, and a large plastic Ziplok bag containing a hip flask
filled with water and a small vial with water purification tablets. Cobb took a
small Bible, a flask of some unidentifiable liquid, and included an unusual
multipurpose tool that fit neatly inside his sortie wallet. They packed up
their charts, flight manuals, and other documents in a Nomex flying bag, picked
up a lightweight nylon flying jacket—which had its own assortment of survival
articles in its pockets—and departed.

           
While they were up on the
upper-floor “catwalk” in the hangar, they had a good opportunity to look at the
EB-52C escort bomber that was in the hangar with their B-2. Unlike the B-2,
where there was little activity, the technicians and munitions maintenance
crews were swarming around the Megafortress like worker bees in a hive.

           
It had to be the weirdest plane—and
the most deadly looking plane—either of them had ever seen. The long, sleek,
pointed nose was canted down in taxi position, with the aerodynamically raked
windscreens looking Oriental and menacing. The dorsal SAR synthetic aperture
radar radome, which ran from just aft of the crew compartment and ended in a
neat fairing that blended back into the fuselage and the diagonal stabilators
near the aft end, made the Megafortress seem broad-shouldered and evil, like
some warlock’s hunchbacked assistant. The pointed aerodynamic tip tanks, two on
each wingtip, looked like twin stilettos challenging all comers, like lowered
lances held by charging knights on horseback. Short low-drag pylons mounted
between the inboard engine nacelles and the ebony fuselage on each side held
six AIM-120 Scorpion air-to-air missiles, their red ground- safety streamers
still visible.

           
Faired under the wings were sensor
pods that contained laser target designators, infrared scanners, telescopic
cameras for long-range air-target identification, and millimeter- wave radars
to scan for large metallic objects hidden by trees or fog that normally could
not be picked up by other sensors, such as tanks and armored vehicles. This was
one of the older Megafortress escort bombers—it still had the older,
conventional metal wings that drooped so far down that the wingtips were only a
few feet above the ground and had to be supported by “pogo” wheels. The new
Megafortress wings were made of composite materials and wouldn’t sag one inch,
even fully loaded with fuel and weapons.

           
Other weapons were just being uploaded,
and Henry Cobb, who had had little experience with the Megafortress project,
could only shake his head in amazement. The forward section of the bomb bay
contained two four-round clip-in racks that held AGM-136 TACIT RAINBOW
antiradar cruise missiles. The aft bomb bay contained a Common Strategy Rotary
Launcher filled with smooth, oblong-bodied missiles—eight TV-guided AGM-84E SLAMs,
or Standoff Land Attack Missiles.

           
“Looks like the Megafortresses are
getting loaded for bear,” Cobb remarked. They could also see the loading
procedures for the Stinger airmine rockets in the tail launcher.

           
Watching this Megafortress getting
ready for combat made McLanahan feel strange—a crashing wave of
deja vu
was descending on him. The
hangar in a remote location, the weapons loaded and ready, the plane fueled and
ready to go—it was horribly like the last time he had taken a B-52 into combat
all those years ago.

           
But that wasn’t his bird now. He had
a new one, a bigger, darker, more lethal one—the B-2 Black Knight, modified
like the EB-52 to be a strategic escort bomber. All of the B-2’s weapons were
internal, and the sophisticated sensors were buried within the wing leading
edges or in the sensor bay in the nose under the crew compartment. The
reconnaissance pods were gone, to be replaced by rotary launchers that would
carry much more lethal warloads than cameras and radars.

           
The B-2’s ground crew had just
arrived for the pre-takeoff inspection, and since the two crewmen were awake at
least an hour before they intended, they had time to look over their Black
Knight before reporting to the briefing room. They found little changed. The
maintenance crews were going through a normal pre-flight as if the plane were
going on another training sortie—they were less than four hours from takeoff
and no weapons had been uploaded yet. “Where are the missiles?” Cobb asked
McLanahan. “I thought we were loading up on Harpoons or SLAMs for this run.”

           
“Won’t know what we’ll be doing for
at least another two hours yet,” Patrick replied. “We don’t know yet if we’re going
after ships, or radars, or ground targets—it could be anything. Once the Joint
Battle Staff decides, it’ll take them just a few minutes to snap those
launchers and bomb racks in and do a ground check. They can probably do it
while other planes are launching.”

           
They completed a casual walkaround
inspection, chatting with the maintenance crews along the way. It was apparent
that each and every one of them was just as apprehensive, just as nervous, just
as concerned for what was happening on Andersen Air Force Base and in the rest
of the Pacific as Cobb and McLanahan.

           
One of the munitions maintenance men
stopped inspecting a SLAM missile seeker head when McLanahan greeted him.
“Think we’ll be flying tonight, sir?” the man asked. The “we” was not just a
demonstrative—ground crews were just as emotionally and professionally tied to
their aircraft as the flight crews. When McLanahan’s B-2 rolled down the
runway, a hundred other minds and hearts were right in there with him.

           
“Wish I could tell you, Paul,”
Patrick said. “They tell us to be ready, that’s all.”

           
The man stepped closer to McLanahan,
as if afraid to ask the question that had obviously been nagging at his
consciousness: “Are you scared, sir?” he asked in a low voice.

           
Patrick looked back at the man with
a touch of astonishment at the question. Before he could reply, however, some
other technician had pulled the man away. “That’s McLanahan, you butthead. He’s
the best there is,” Patrick heard the second tech tell him. “He’s too good to
get scared.” None of the other crew chiefs dared to speak with the two
aviators.

           
Cobb and McLanahan finished their
inspection, checked in with the security guard, who inspected their bags before
allowing them to leave, and then the two B-2 crew members stepped out of the
hangar into the twilight.

           
Unlike the controlled, calm tension
inside hangar 509, outside it was sheer bedlam. The ramp space in front of the
hangars was the only clear space as far as either man could see—the rest of the
base was filled with aircraft of every possible description, and the access
roads and taxiways were clogged with maintenance and support vehicles.

           
The north ramp to their far right
was choked full of cargo aircraft—C-141 Starlifters, C-5 Galaxys, and C-130 Hercules
planes, all surrounded by cargo-handling equipment offloading their precious
pallets of spare parts, personnel, weapons, and other supplies. Like a line of
ants along a crack in a sidewalk, there was a steady stream of forklift trucks,
tractor-trailers, flatbed trucks, and “mules” carrying supplies from the
aircraft to the inspection and distribution warehouses. Every few minutes,
another cargo plane would arrive on one of the Andersen AFB’s twin parallel
runways, taxi off to a waiting area, then be met by a “Follow-Me” truck which
would direct it to another parking spot. Empty cargo planes that had crews with
duty day hours remaining went to a refueling pit on the south side of the base
and were immediately marshaled to the end of the runway for takeoff; planes
that were not due to take off until later were directed to waiting areas along
the northeast side of the base, at the edge of the steep cliffs of Pati Point.

           
West of the north ramp, near the
north end of the east runway, were the parking spots for the aerial refueling
tankers. These were perhaps the most important aircraft on
Guam
. The KC-135 Stratotanker, KC-10 Extender,
and KC-130 Hercules tankers provided the only means for most of the Air Battle
Force’s aircraft to conduct strike operations from
Guam
—indeed, most of the aircraft there could
not have arrived without the tankers supplying them fuel. Tankers were airborne
almost continually in support of flight operations, and several tankers were on
“strip alert” status to respond to emergency requests of fuel. The tankers also
acted as cargo aircraft themselves—one KC-10 tanker could deploy all of the
support personnel, equipment, and spare parts for six F-l6 fighters from Hawaii
to Guam,
and
refuel those six planes,
all on the same trip.

           
Directly ahead of the hangars were
the parking spots for the air-defense fighters. Only half of the Air Battle
Force’s twenty F-l5s and fifteen F-l6s were parked there, because the rest were
either flying escort missions with the “ferret” bombers or were on air-defense
alert on the south parking apron. Four F-l5s and six F-l6s were fueled, armed,
and ready to respond should the Chinese attempt an air raid on Andersen
Air
Force Base itself. The complement
included four F-23 Advance Tactical Fighters, deployed for the first time out
of the fifty states. A few of the F-l4s stranded from the stricken aircraft
carrier USS
Ranger
were also parked
there.

           
Each fighter carried relatively few
weapons, only two radar-guided and two heat-seeking missiles total: the most prominent
store on each fighter was the huge seven-hundred-gallon centerline fuel tank.
When flying from
Guam
, where alternate landing bases were
hundreds of miles apart, fuel was a very precious commodity. The incredible
offensive power of these fighters was severely limited by fuel availability—if
one aerial refueling tanker failed to launch or could not transfer fuel, it
could take dozens of fighters out of the battle.

           
Cobb and McLanahan waited near a
group of soldiers until a civilian contractor-hired “Guam Bomb” jeepney bus,
its body rusting and its broken leaf springs squeaking with every movement,
trundled by, then stepped on board— the bus was so full it looked as if the fat
native Chamorro driver had to sit sideways to let riders on. The sea of men and
machines on
Guam
was simply amazing—it seemed every patch of
sandy lawn, every square foot of concrete or asphalt, every empty space was
occupied by a vehicle or aircraft. Lines were everywhere—lines to the chow
hall, lines to maintenance or radio trucks, lines in front of water trucks.
Traffic crisscrossed the streets and access roads, ignoring security-police
whistles and traffic guards—being a pedestrian on the flight line was a
definite health risk. The cloying, stupefying smells of burning jet fuel,
hydraulic fluid, sweat, mildew—and, yes, fear—were everywhere. The noise was
deafening and inescapable—even with earplugs or ear protectors, the screams of
jet engines, auxiliary power carts, honking horns, yelling men and women, and
public address speakers could not be reduced. The bus had no windows, so those
without ear protectors stuck fingers in their ears to blot out the din of the
parking ramp.

           
McLanahan had never felt so
insignificant. He had participated in lots of aircraft generation exercises, when
his unit’s fleet of bombers and tankers was fueled and armed in preparation for
a strategic war, but this was at least twenty times greater in magnitude than
he had ever seen before. Even during Air Battle Force generation exercises at
Ellsworth Air Force Base—which, even in these few days since arriving on Guam,
seemed a billion miles away and years ago—things seemed to go in a smooth,
orderly fashion: here, it was like some kind of controlled riot, or like the
world’s largest exhibition hall with thousands of participants milling around
from building to aircraft and back again.

           
Parked south of the air-defense
fighters and on the other side of base operations were the support aircraft.
They had one E-3C Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System radar plane, one
EC-135L radio relay plane, and one RC- 135X reconnaissance plane parked there;
an E-3 and another EC-135 were already airborne, participating in intelligence
and “ferret” flights near the Philippines—obviously Masters’ NIRTSats were
still down. There were also three EF-111A Raven electronic countermeasure
aircraft, two Navy EA-6 electronic warfare aircraft, another U-2R spy plane
like the one that was shot down near the
Philippines
, and a Navy E-2 Hawkeye radar plane from
the
Ranger.
A few small “liaison”
jets and supply helicopters were parked in front of base operations—these were
fast transport jets that flitted all across the
Mariana Islands
, carrying urgent supplies or staff officers
from base to base. On the other side of the support planes was the “Christmas
tree” parking area for the alert fighters and tankers, situated so they could
quickly and easily take off in case of emergency.