Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 (37 page)

 
          
“I
don’t think we can chance it. Some pretty strong gusts kicking up out there.”

 
          
“It’s
clear and calm, Major Briggs.”

 
          
“Better
not chance it. Drop us off at the hangar ramp.” The pilot shrugged, keyed his
radio button to request different landing instructions.

           
McLanahan clicked on the radio.
“Delta, this is Charlie on channel eight. How copy?”

 
          
A
few moments later Sergeant Ray Butler replied: “This is Delta mobile, sir. Go
ahead.”

 
          
McLanahan
glanced at the navigation readout on the flight engineer’s console. “I’m
fifteen minutes from touchdown on the hangar ramp, Ray. Meet me at Hangar Four.
Repeat, Hangar Four in fifteen mike. Urgent. Over.”

 
          
“Fifteen
mike at Hangar Four. Copy that,”
Butler
replied. “Does this have to do with our
recent fireworks here, sir?”

           
“It does, Delta. You may want to
see that the ramp is clear in front of Hangar Four. Over.”

           
“I understand, Charlie. I’ll be
ready. Delta out.”

 
          
Twelve
minutes later the Osprey set down in the center of the hangar ramp and
carefully taxied over to Hangar Four. McLanahan disembarked the cargo ramp and
found an army of maintenance trucks surrounding the hangar. Cheetah had already
been rolled out of the hangar and a fuel line had been hooked up to its
single-point refueling receptacle on the leftside service panel.

 
          
Sergeant
Butler trotted up to a surprised McLanahan with a sheaf of papers on a
clipboard and a pen. “You must’ve forgotten to sign all these requests for
maintenance support, sir,” he said with a straight face. “You made this request
last week
—don’t know how we missed
getting all this signed off.” McLanahan nodded—obviously
Butler
wanted the same thing he did, but he was
still going to make sure his paperwork was straight. “You wanted gas,
long-range fuel tanks, five hundred rounds uploaded with the M61B2 cannon, two
AIM-gR infrared short-range missiles and four AIM-120 medium-range active radar
missiles. I got everything? Oh, you also wanted that video camera taken off,
didn’t you? Good. Sign here.”

 
          
McLanahan
signed all the blocks. “Thank you, sir,”
Butler
said. “Sorry about the paperwork shuffle,
sir. My mistake. Won’t happen again ... I trust you’ll take care of any
problems General Elliott might have with my . . . procedures.”

           
“Nothing wrong with your
procedures, Sergeant.”

           
Butler
allowed a smile. “Have a good flight, and
good hunting. We should be ready to go in twenty minutes, maybe less. Captain
Powell is over there. I’m very sorry about the Megafortress, sir. Well, gotta
go.”
Butler
handed Patrick his flight helmet, saluted
and trotted back to the maintenance supervisor’s truck.

 
          
J.
C. Powell met McLanahan halfway to Cheetah. He slapped his hands together.
“We’re going hunting?”

 
          
“If
I don’t get my ass court-martialed first, yes.”

           
“I heard Ken James stole the plane?
I don’t believe it. I always suspected the guy was a little whacked out but not
this
...”

 
          
“He’s
more than a little whacked out. He’s jumped head-first into the shallow end, or
something a lot worse.”

 
          
“Such
as?”

           
“Something Briggs said a few days
ago . . . that his security problems started when James arrived at Dreamland
about a year and a half ago. Briggs even suspected Wendy, who happened to get
here at the same time.”

 
          
“You
mean, you think Ken James was some kind of damn spy?”

 
          
“It
would answer a lot of questions, wouldn’t it?”

           
“The guy’s an Academy grad, passed
every security screening check I have—probably more. I’m only a ninety-day
wonder and I had to jump through some pretty small hoops—” “I didn’t say I had
it all figured out. Maybe he was turned or recruited after he got here, or he’s
being blackmailed. Maybe I’m all wrong. But one thing’s for sure—if the
F-15S
out of Davis-Monthan don’t get
him, we will. I just hope I get a chance to ask him why the hell he did
it”—Patrick glanced at the AIM-120 missiles being raised into position on
Cheetah’s wings—“before we put one up his tailpipe.”

Over southwest Arizona

Twenty minutes later

 
          
There
were eight other pilots who wanted to put one up Ken James’ tailpipe, but he
wasn’t going to give them the opportunity.

 
          
Ken
James—that name now discarded by DreamStar’s pilot, Andrei Maraklov—could see
waves of radars all around him, but they were all search radars. He was deep
within the
Colorado
River
valley just
south of Parker Dam, following the rugged mountain ridges as closely as he
could to avoid detection. Two longer-range F-16L cranked-arrow fighters were
behind him, their radars probing deep within the valley, but they never got a
solid lock-on and they were staying up high to try to scan as much ground as
possible. With their present tactics they were never going to get a shot at
him.

 
          
But
they were no longer the main threats—they were the pushers, the drivers, there
only to keep DreamStar headed south toward the real danger. Maraklov had caught
bits and pieces of scrambled radio conversations between the F-i6s and another
aircraft. It was not hard to guess which: a Boeing 707 or 767 AWACS radar
plane, stationed, Maraklov reasoned, between Gila Bend and
Yuma
over Sentinel Plain. From there the older
707 AWACS could scan over one hundred twenty thousand cubic miles of airspace,
from
San
Diego
to
El Paso
, and most of the way down the
Gulf of California
into
Mexico
. The radar aboard the improved 767 was even
better. No doubt the AWACS would be accompanied by at least two F-15 fighters
out of Davis-Monthan AFB in
Tucson
for protective escort, plus at least two more F-15S to hunt down
DreamStar.

 
          
The
fuel situation was critical. Less than an hour’s worth of fuel, less than an
hour from the hastily arranged landing site in
Mexico
. Staying at low altitude was badly sucking
up fuel, but he had no choice—the AWACS could have picked him up as far north
as
Las
Vegas
if he was any higher.

 
          
Of
course the maneuvering he did during the B-52 attack pushed him under the fuel
curve. Especially that last maneuver, going from Mach one to one hundred knots
one hundred feet off the ground, thereby putting DreamStar in a virtual hover.
That took care of any reserve he’d had hopes of building up . . .

 
          
Well,
the B-52 Megafortress was dead. They certainly nicknamed it right. It almost
escaped, almost dodged away in time, almost managed to decoy the AIM-120 away.
The Scorpion missile had to switch to home-on-jam guidance to finish the
attack. Ironically the massive jamming power of the B-52 was probably what did
it in—it must have been easy for the Scorpion missile to follow jamming power
like that.

 
          
Who
was on that plane? Ormack—good officer, better pilot, Elliott’s natural
successor for the command of Dreamland. Kahn—a desk jockey. Had no business in
the cockpit. Maraklov didn’t know Frost. He had dated
Evanston
once but that was no more than an
experiment that neither wanted to continue. Besides, navs had no information of
any value to anybody.

 
          
Angelina
Pereira was almost old enough to be his mother, but she liked to use men and
she liked men to use her. No age limits. She was never a target for any
information or recruitment, although the KGB’s standard profiles fitted her.
She probably would have laughed at him, just before shooting him in the balls.
She was an unexpected job bonus, nothing else.

 
          
He
would miss Wendy Tork most of all. Or rather miss never having had a chance to
try to fulfill his fantasies about her . . . take her away from McLanahan ...
Too bad he hadn’t tried to latch onto her sooner. If nothing else she had some
highly useful information on electronic countermeasures research . . .

 
          
He
made a slight altitude and course correction to avoid overflying a group of
white-water rafters less than a hundred feet below. As he banked away to avoid
them he could see several put hands over ears against the noise, but a few
bikini- clad ladies waved. He had made that trip down the Colorado River
several times, spending a weekend shooting the rapids, getting dumped into the
swirling waters, laughing at a roaring campfire with a beer in one hand and a
pretty young lieutenant from Nellis in the other.

 
          
Did
they have rapids in
Russia
? Were the women pretty? Maraklov had
forgotten more than remembered.

 
          
Things
had, people said, changed over the years.
Glasnost
. . . the place was more open. But he doubted it would be to him.

 
          
Andrei
Maraklov might truly be the deepest deep-cover agent ever produced by the KGB,
but that didn’t mean he could go back to the
USSR
and enjoy the gratitude of his country.
Would he ever be promoted to a leadership position in the KGB or the
Mikoyan-Gureyvich Aircraft Design Bureau, the agency that designed and built
the greatest fighter aircraft? No. He had been in the
U.S.
for nine years. Before that he had spent
three years in a school that spoke more English and acted more American than
parts of
San
Francisco
and
Chicago
or
L.A.
They’d have to
reteach
him Russian, for God’s sake. If they ever trusted him after
his return he’d probably be given some know-nothing job or a pension and
watched for the rest of his life. He might be allowed to emigrate, but he’d be
safer from the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency in
Russia
. Which didn’t say much. If they didn’t
trust him they’d pick his mind clean of every scrap of information he had, then
discard him. Either way, would his life be better in his homeland? What he
really felt attached to, more than anything or anyone, was this plane that he
had become part of, that was part of him . . .

 
          
Up
ahead, it seemed like the entire sky had turned green. Search radar—a big one.
There was definitely an AWACS radar plane up there. He was in the radar shadow
right now, but in only a few miles the
Colorado River
valley would flatten out into the
Sonora
Desert
basin, and then he’d be trapped. The last
hundred fifty miles to the border was going to turn into a gauntlet—an unknown
number of F-15 fighters in front of him, waiting for him to emerge from the
valley. He was also going toward Yuma Marine Corps Air Station just ahead on
the border, a base for two squadrons of F/A-18 fighter bombers, and F-16
fighters from Luke AFB in
Phoenix
could join in. So he could be facing six squadrons of fighters from
four military bases on this last hundred-mile leg.

 
          
Then,
he saw it: the AWACS radar plane. DreamStar’s threat receiver pinpointed the
aircraft about a hundred fifty miles away, orbiting over the center of the
Papago Indian Reservation west of Tucson at twenty-five thousand feet. And if
DreamStar could see the AWACS plane, he could see DreamStar. At a quick mental
inquiry, Maraklov had the threat-warning computer analyze the radar
transmissions from the plane and learned it was the older E-3B Sentry AWACS,
almost twenty-five years old but still a formidable radar platform; it was
probably a drug-interdiction aircraft based out of Davis- Monthan AFB.