Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 01 (33 page)

 
          
“I
got an order. From him.” Ormack jerked a thumb toward Elliott. “He owns the six
thousand square miles were sitting on, not to mention this plane. And this
hangar, which they’re about to blow up on top of us. Now listen. Just watch the
gauges—RPMs, fuel flow, EGTs. If anything looks like it’s winding down, yell.
Watch me on the left.” Ormack pushed the throttled forward, and the huge plane
rushed toward the hangar opening.

 
          
“The
door’s down, we won’t make it. Cut it right—”

 
          
Ormack
gripped the wheel, moved the steering ratio lever on the center console from
TAKEOFF
LAND
to TAXI, nudged the right rudder pedal. The
bomber swung gently to the right. Ormack reached down to the center console and
moved the steering ratio lever back to
TAKEOFF
LAND
. “That’s all the room I got.”

 
          
“I
don’t think it’ll make it . . .”

 
          
McLanahan
watched as the hangar door came toward them. Before they reached the opening he
saw Hal Briggs kneeling at the door opening, trying to take cover behind a
fallen steel beam. He saw the wngtip rushing toward him. Letting the Uzi drop
onto its neck strap, Briggs held his hands out and apart as far as he could,
gave McLanahan a thumbs-up, then took off at a dead run outside the hangar.

 
          
“How’re
we looking?”

 
          
“Hal
said four feet.”

 
          
“Four
feet what?”

 
          
His
question was a head-pounding, wrenching scream of metal that thundered from the
left wingtip. The Old Dog veered sharply to the left. A less painful but still
frightening crunch of metal exploded from the right wingtip.

 
          
Ormack
looked at the fuel gauges. “We lost the left tiptank. Maybe both of them.”

           
McLanahan didn’t want to look back.
All he could see were dozens of bodies littering the road ahead of them, a burning
fuel truck and overturned security police trucks. There was still a handful of
cops firing into the wooden barracks outside the fence surrounding the black
hangar.

 
          
“Lucky
this whole dry lake is a runway,” McLanahan said.

 
          
Ormack
nodded. “Just watch the gauges, I hope they can get the fence open—”

 
          
A
Jeep pulled up beside them, sped ahead of the bomber easily— although Ormack
had jammed the Old Dog’s eight throttles up as far as they could go, the
half-million-pound bomber accelerated slowly.

 
          
“It’s
Hal!”

 
          
In
the distance McLanahan could see Briggs’ Jeep speed toward the closed gates. He
could tell brakes were being applied, but the Jeep crashed headlong into the
right side of the gate going at least fifty miles an hour. Intentionally or
not, it did the trick. The right side of the wide gate burst open. The Jeep did
two full donuts in the sand-covered concrete, then came to a stop. Steam poured
out of the radiator. The right side of the gate was half-open, the Jeep was
stalled on the runway-driveway, and the left side of the gate was free but
still closed.

 
          
“C’mon,
buddy,” McLanahan murmured, “you can do it.”

 
          
The
distance between the bomber and the gate was decreasing rapidly. Briggs was
trying to get the Jeep restarted. He gave it a few seconds, then jumped out and
started pushing.

 
          
Ormack
brought the throttles back to idle, which seemed to make no difference.

 
          
“We
gotta slow down.”

 
          
As
if in reply, three mortar shells exploded in front of the bomber. Briggs
tripped and sprawled in the sand. Another explosion crated a huge waterspout of
sand off the right wing, and Briggs and his Jeep were lost in the rolling
cloud.

 
          
The
explosions rocked the bomber as if it were caught in a typhoon. Ormack checked
the airspeed. “Seventy knots. If we hit the brakes at this speed, they’ll
explode. We can’t stop in time anyway. Briggs ...”

 
          
Briggs
had managed to get the Jeep cleared off the runway behind the fence. He ran
over and hauled on the right side of the gate. The heavy wide fence slowly
opened. Briggs sprinted through the sandstorm and pulled on the left gate. A
securing pole was dragging in the sand, and Briggs had to throw his entire
skinny body against the fence to move it.

 
          
“It’s
stuck,” Ormack said.

 
          
“This
is going to be a real short flight if he doesn’t open that gate,” McLanahan
said.

           
But the fence wasn’t moving. Briggs’
legs were pumping, his once spit-shined boots scraping against the sand, but it
wasn’t helping.

 
          
The
fence was half-open when Briggs slipped and slumped to the sand, then rolled to
his right to jump back to his feet. As he did he saw the Old Dog.

 
          
The
aircraft looked like a gigantic pterodactyl coming toward him. And the pencil
nose of the bomber, tilted down for takeoff, was aimed right at his heart.

 
          
Briggs
jumped up, his eyes on the monster with wings speeding toward him, and
body-tackled the fence. The fence jumped a few feet, but Briggs kept on going,
his legs didn’t stop pumping until the blast of eight turbofan jet engines
swept him off his feet and into the fence.

 
          
“He
did
it,” McLanahan said.

 
          
“We
aren’t out of it yet.” Ormack slowly throttled up to full power, then reached
down and hit the flap switch. “After the fence we got three miles of concrete
left. It’ll take another minute to get the flaps down, another minute to
accelerate this pig to rotate speed. We run out of hard surface in less than a
minute.”

 
          
McLanahan
finally found the flap indicator. “It’s not moving . . .”

 
          
“It
probably jammed during one of those explosions,” Ormack said, holding tight to
the wheel. “It might take them longer to come down—or the flap motors will burn
out. One of the other.”

 
          
The
indicator moved to ten percent. Twenty percent. A pause—then a longer pause.
Thirty percent. The bomber began to rattle.

 
          
“Forty
percent.” McLanahan scanned the instruments, then looked out the window.
Through the dim morning light he saw the glitter of steel on the horizon. He
stared harder. Perched directly in front of them was a large, boxy aircraft,
with some men scattered around it.

 
          
“What
the hell is that?” Ormack was staring into the distance.

 
          
“It’s
an airplane on the concrete,” McLanahan said. “They’re blocking our path.” He
glanced down at the flap indicator again. Still forty percent. “The flaps
stopped.”

 
          
“We
can’t do it. We need the whole dry lake now.” Ormack reached down and shut off
the flap switch, freezing them at forty percent down.

 
          
“Can
we rotate with the flaps
stopped?”                                                        
.

 
          
“We’ll
run out of time before we hit that plane. We’ll have to stop . . . pull the
’chute—”

 
          
'Wait.
” McLanahan searched the control
panel near his left arm, finding a switch marked “DEFENSE CONSENT.” He flipped
the switch from SAFE to CONSENT.

 
          
“Angelina.”
He arched around in his seat. “Angelina. Turn on the missiles. The forward
missiles.”

           
“What?”

 
          
“The
Scorpions.
Turn ’em on.”

 
          
Pereira
scrambled forward, clutching onto the
pilot’s ejection seat. “Turn them on? We can’t. They need to align, lock onto a
target—”

 
          
“I
don’t need them to align.” McLanahan looked out the sloped windows. Angelina
followed his gaze, finally spotting the aircraft sitting on the runway. They
could now see the attackers trying to level a bazooka at them.
“Do
it,” McLanahan ordered.

 
          
Angelina
hurried back to her station. To McLanahan, the wait was excruciating. He
glanced backward a few times, but as the plane rushed forward he focused on the
camouflaged attackers. There were four of them—two firing rifles from behind
the plane, two others loading the bazooka.
“Angelina
...”

 
          
“Ready,”
she called behind him.

 
          
“Fire.
” McLanahan threw his arms up in
front of his face as he said it.

 
          
He
never saw the results—but then, no human could see the advanced AMRAAM
air-to-air missile as it fired off the left pylon at Mach two. The missile leapt
forward on a stream of fire. The primary solid-fuel engine had just barely
reached full impulse burn when it plowed into the plane less than a half-mile
in front of the Old Dog.

 
          
What
McLanahan did see was a blinding flash of light and a massive black cloud of
smoke and dust. A split second later, the needlelike nose of the Old Dog
plunged through the chaos.

 
          
Nothing
happened—no crunch of metal, no explosion of the windscreen in front of him. A
moment later the cockpit windows cleared, revealing a barrier infinitely larger
than the plane they had just blown away—the seven-thousand-feet of granite
called
Groom
Mountain
.

 
          
“Go
for it,” McLanahan called out to Ormack.

 
          
Far
behind the
Megafortress
, Hal Briggs
had been pinned to the fence, his face mashed into the chain link by the force
of the jet blast. He heard an explosion a few moments later, expecting the
crash, the sound of exploding fuel, waiting for the fireball to engulf him. It
didn’t happen. It was an eternity until he could clear the stinging sand out of
his face and eyes and look toward the horizon.

 
          
What
he saw was the Old Dog lifting off through a cloud of gray and black dust over
the morning
Nevada
desert. A lump of burning metal lay several yards from the sand-covered
runway, with smoking bodies flung hundreds of feet away.

 
          
The
Old Dog hovered perhaps fifty feet above the high desert floor, nearly obscured
by the cloud of dust. He could barely see the huge wheels retract into the huge
body—and then the aircraft rose like a winged rocket into the clear morning
air.

 
          
“Jesus
H. Christ,” Briggs muttered, sitting in a three-foot drift of sand and
tumbleweeds. “They did it. They
did
it.”

 
          
Ormack
flipped a switch on the overhead console beneath the cabin altitude indicator.
Slowly the long, black needle nose moved upward and snapped into position. Half
the windscreen was now obscured by the long SST nose, the windows blending in
with its sleek lines.

 
          
“Watch
the instruments,” Ormack said cross-cockpit. Despite the noise inside the
bomber, he and McLanahan were still talking loud enough to be heard without the
interphone. “Gear coming up. I hope someone got all the ground locks.” He
reached across and moved the gear lever up. The red light in the handle snapped
on.

 
          
“Instruments
are okay,” McLanahan said. He found the gear indicators on the front panel
beside the gear level. One by one, the little wheel depictions on the
indicators changed to crosshatch and then to the word UP, and the bumping and
screeching of tires stowing in the wheel wells could be heard. “Right tip gear
up . . . forward mains up . . . aft mains up . . . the left tip gear is still
showing crosshatch.”