Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (75 page)

           
“Ma’lesh,
ma'lesh,”
Zuwayy said. He returned to his chair and collapsed into it. “You
and Juma take care of it. I’ll be okay in a few hours.” Fazani was thankful
Zuwayy didn’t put up a fight about that, and he headed for the door. But just
before he left, Zuwayy shouted behind him, “Wait, Tahir! Did you say you were
going to take him to the interrogation center?”

 
          
“Na'am.”

           
“Did you search him first?”

 
          
“Of
course. We found disguises, fake travel documents, a gun .. .”

 
          
“What
about a radio?”

 
          
“We
found a radio too.”

 
          
“A
small one? A very small one?”

 
          
Now
Fazani was getting anxious. He turned back toward Zuwayy. “Well... yes, it was
small,” he asked. “Palmsized, smaller than anything I’ve ever—”

 
          
“No,
you idiot, I mean
small
, like a tack
or brad!”

 
          
“What
are you talking about, Jadallah?”

 
          
“The
woman, the other McLanahan—she had some kind of transceiver implanted in her
arm!” Zuwayy shouted. “If this one has one too . . .”

 
          
“Then
they know exactly where he is,” Fazani muttered. “God ... he
was
doing a probe, and he’s led his
forces right to us!”

 
          
“Get
that transceiver off of him—I don’t care if you have to cut all his limbs off!”
Zuwayy shouted. “And then evacuate this entire facility
right
—!”

 
          
And
at that moment, the first explosion shook the Presidential Palace like an
earthquake.

 
          
Sirens
and alarms sounded everywhere. Zuwayy was immediately escorted—dragged might be
more accurate— through one of the myriad of escape tunnels that led from the
Presidential Palace to the Ginayna, the maze of rooms, prisons, and military
barracks under the city of
Tripoli
. He ran virtually headlong into Tahir Fazani and Juma Mahmud Hijazi,
also running for their lives.

 
          
“Unidentified
aircraft detected all around the city,” Fazani said to Zuwayy. “It looks like a
massive attack— perhaps the entire Egyptian air force!”

 
          
“Get
to a phone and commence the rocket attack on Salimah,” Zuwayy shouted. “I want
Salimah destroyed!
Now!”

           
“Forget about Salimah,” Hijazi said.
“Let’s just get out of here and regroup at one of the alternate command
centers.”

          
 
“I will tell the world that the Americans are
conducting a preemptive, unprovoked attack on the kingdom,” Zuwayy shouted. “I
must make a television broadcast to the entire nation immediately! And I want
the attack on Salimah started right
now.
I’m going to evacuate and flee the country before everything is destroyed!”

 
          
Hijazi
looked at Fazani—and they made a silent agreement. “Good idea, Jadallah,”
Hijazi said carefully. “Tahir will call in the rocket attack. But. . . before
the Americans freeze all our assets and destroy our communications, I should
transfer cash from the treasury to our personal accounts. I can do that from
the command center. I just need your account numbers and passwords.”

 
          
“I
can do that myself after I get out—”

 
          
“There’s
no time, Jadallah! You can’t use a cell phone to call the banks, and if the
Americans take down all the communications facilities, we’ll be stuck. If I get
your account numbers and pass codes, I can transfer funds right now.” Zuwayy
hesitated. Another explosion shook the walls and sent dust sprinkling down on
their heads. “For God’s sake, Jadallah, we’re running out of time! Their next
action will be to cut off all communications!” Hijazi handed him a pen and a
pad of paper. “Hurry, Jadallah! It could be our only chance.”

 
          
To
the two henchmen’s immense relief, Zuwayy scribbled something down on the pad,
then handed it back to Hijazi. Hijazi tried to read his writing—it was all
numbers. “What is this, Jadallah?” he asked.

 
          
“The
combination to my safe upstairs in my bedroom,” Zuwayy replied. “Do you think
I’ve memorized all those bank account numbers and passwords? The numbers are
locked in the safe.”

 
          
“And
you didn’t think of taking it with you before you ran off, Jadallah?” Hijazi
asked incredulously.

           
“Go get it,” Fazani told him. “I’ll
call in the rocket attack. Jadallah, get going—we’ll be right behind you.”
Zuwayy needed no more prompting to get out. Hijazi gulped fearfully but
returned the way they had come.

 
         
There
were only two words that could describe the performance of the Russian missiles
that were loaded onto the lead EB-52 Megafortress—and those words were “dead
weight.”

 
          
“Another
alignment failure message, dammit!” Kenneth “KK” Kowalski, the mission
commander aboard the lead EB-52 Megafortress, cursed. “That’s the fifth
failure!” He was trying to fire one of the Kh-15 inertially guided missiles
from the aft bomb bay; but like one of the Kh-27 antiradar missiles and three
of the other Kh-15 missiles he tried to launch, this latest one failed as well.
“I’ll power it down and bring it back up and see if it’ll realign.”

 
          
“Good
thing the Libyans can’t seem to shoot straight,” the aircraft commander,
Randall “Fangs” Harper, commented. “Otherwise we’d be Swiss cheese by now.”
They had successfully fired two Kh-27 missiles at Libyan surface-to-air missile
sites; one site was apparently destroyed, and the other shut down before the
missile hit and never came back on the air again. Out of six attempts to launch
Kh-15 attack missiles from the aft bomb bay, only two were successful, and of
the four unsuccessful launches, they had to emergency-jettison two of them
because their internal chemical batteries had overheated and threatened to blow
the missiles—and the Megafortress— up with them. They had to stay at high altitude,
above thirty thousand feet, to stay out of range of antiaircraft artillery and
short-range antiaircraft missiles—the Libyans even still used searchlights to
try and find the bombers.

 
          
Their
mission was pretty much a bust, thanks to the unreliable Russian standoff
weapons—except for the FlightHawk unmanned combat aircraft. Although they were
not armed, they still had enough gadgetry and magic in them to affect the
outcome of this mission.

           
“Coming up on the release point,
sixty seconds ... now,” Kowalski announced. “Both birds are in the green and
ready”

 
          
“It’s
about time something we’re carrying works,” Harper mused.

 
          
At
the planned launch point, Kowalski launched both FlightHawks within two minutes
of each other. Their thirty-minute flights would take them on a zigzag track
within ten miles either side of an ingress corridor they had planned for the
second EB-52 Megafortress. The cruise missiles descended to fifteen thousand
feet aboveground, powering up their turbofan engines and unfolding their wings
as they fell from altitude.

 
          
The
NightHawks were small and stealthy enough that they were almost invisible to
Libyan search radars. At irregular intervals along their flight, however, they
would suddenly begin sending out bursts of radar and radio energy and deploying
small radar reflectors that would instantly make them appear on radar as if
they were the size of Boeing 747s. When the Libyan air defense radars popped
on, the RightHawks would instantly plot their position and type of system,
transmit the enemy threat locations to the Megafortresses, then deactivate the
reflectors and emissions to virtually disappear from radar. In just a few
minutes, the RightHawks had flushed out almost a dozen new antiaircraft
threats. The tactic worked great...

 
          
.
.. until both NightHawks were shot down within seconds of each other, one by
random, sweeping bursts of antiaircraft artillery fire, the other by a MiG-23
fighter with a radar-guided missile that had just showed up over the capital on
air defense patrol.

 
          
“Zero,
this is Fangs,” Harper radioed. “Be advised, we’ve got bandits in the area.” He
stole a glance at Kowalski’s supercockpit display, which showed the entire
battlefield area, along with their wingman and the inbound infantrymen, in a
“God’s-eye” view. “Closest one is at your
twelve o’clock
, twenty miles, high. He got one of our
’Hawks.”

 
          
“Copy,
Fangs,” George “Zero” Tanaka, the aircraft commander of the second Megafortress
battleship, replied. “We’ve got him. What’s your status?”

           
“We’ve got a bellyful of duds now,”
Kowalski replied. “I’m going to try inflight-aligning them to see if we can’t
lob a few more in, but I have a feeling we’re done for the day. We’ll stand by
at waypoint
Lima
in case you need any assistance.”

 
          
“Roger,”
Tanaka said. To his mission commander, Greg “Gonzo” Wickland, he said, “Better
check those Russian antiradar missiles—they’re likely to dud on us too.”

           
“They’re looking pretty good right
now,” Wickland responded. He had reluctantly agreed to go with Tanaka on this
mission—the possibility that his friend and mentor, Wendy Tork McLanahan, might
still be alive down there in the heart of
Libya
changed his mind about being afraid of
dying during a secret mission in the EB-52. “Our first launch point is a pop-up
target at
two o’clock
,
twenty-eight miles, an SA-10 SAM site. I’ll start the—”

 
          
But
as Wickland watched the supercockpit display, he saw the icon representing the
Libyan MiG-23 fighter turn toward them, and the green cone that represented his
radar beam sweep in their direction. “Shit, that MiG is heading our way,”
Wickland interrupted himself. “Step it down to five hundred feet and
accelerate.”

 
          
“Set
clearance plane five hundred, hard ride, and set four-eight-zero knots true,”
Tanaka ordered the flight control computer. He carefully monitored the aircraft
as the throttles advanced themselves and the terrain-following computer reset
the height above ground the autopilot would continue to fly the bomber.

 
          
“He’s
still coming around,” Wickland said. The radar cone had changed from green to
yellow—now the fighter had an azimuth-only lock-on. “He’s got us. Deploy towed
array.” Behind them, one of the tiny towed array antennas unreeled itself in
the bomber’s slipstream. “He’s still up pretty high. Give me thirty left—let’s
see if he follows us.” Sure enough, the fighter turned left with the
Megafortress, but his range did not increase. Every now and then the radar cone
depiction on the supercockpit display flashed red—that meant the fighter’s
radar switched into range mode, the last measurement needed before missile
launch—but it never stayed on very long. “He’s hanging out there at eleven
miles, matching our airspeed, and just hitting us with his ranging radar long
enough to keep up,” Wickland said. “He’s not letting our trackbreakers get a
chance to wipe out his picture.”

 
          
“Waiting
for instructions?” Tanaka asked.

 
          
“Give
me forty right, nice shallow bank,” Wickland said. “Let’s see how aggressive he
is.”

 
         
“But
I have a target! I have another unknown aircraft at my
twelve o’clock
, seventeen kilometers, very low!” the pilot
of the Libyan MiG-23 shouted.

 
          
“Hibr
flight, you are ordered to return
to patrol altitude and proceed north to intercept inbound aircraft!” the ground
radar controller shouted again. “And you do not have permission to open fire!”