Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 (40 page)

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The
official blue sedan screeched to a halt not four feet in front of Cheetah’s
nose gear. General Elliott jumped up from behind the wheel, threw the door open
and stood behind it, drawing a thumb across his throat. He looked mad enough to
hold down Cheetah even if they used full afterburner. At the same time Hal
Briggs got out of the passenger’s side, wearing a set of ear protectors, and
holding aloft his Uzi submachine gun in an obvious warning. Patrick could see
him shrug and shake his head. He had no doubt that Briggs would use that SMG on
Cheetah’s tires.

 
          
“Shut
’em down, J.C.,” Patrick said.

 
          
J.C.
muttered to himself as he touched the voice-interface switch on the stick.
“Engine shutdown, power on.’’

 
          
“Engine shutdown. Brakes set External power
on. Clear to scavenge, ” the computer replied.

           
“Clear to scavenge,” J.C. said. One
by one the engines revved up to eighty percent power for ten seconds, then shut
themselves down. Patrick did not shut down any of his equipment but left it on
standby to have it ready when—or, looking at Elliott’s angry face,
if—
they received takeoff clearance.
Soon the only noise left was the sound of the external power cart. Briggs
holstered his Uzi as Elliott walked over to the crew ladder being put up on
Cheetah’s left side, pushed Sergeant Ray Butler out of the way and painfully
hauled himself up the ladder.

 
          
“Where
the
hell
do you think you’re going?
Have you gone crazy?”

 
          
“You
know where I’m going,” McLanahan said quietly.

 
          
“You
ordered this?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
Elliott
stared at Patrick, then at the external power cart and the screaming its
turbine engine was making. “Shut that damned thing off.”

 
          
“Leave
it on, Sergeant,” Patrick told
Butler
.

 
          
Elliott
jabbed a finger first at Powell, then at McLanahan. “You, I
knew
you were crazy, but Patrick, you’ve
gone round the bend. James steals a jet so you guys want to steal one too? All
even up—?”

 
          
“Don’t
give me that, General. Don’t tell me you don’t understand what I’m trying to
do.”

 
          
“DreamStar
is long gone, Patrick,” Elliott said. “It’s up to Air Defense to force it down
or shoot it down. There’s nothing we can do—”

 
          
“Like
hell, Brad. We’re
gonna
bring down
that sonofabitch.”

 
          
The
change that came over McLanahan was startling but somehow familiar. This was
the McLanahan, “Mac” not Patrick, that he remembered from Bomb Comp and from
the Old Dog mission eight years earlier—cocky, headstrong, defiant. All part of
what had attracted him to the young navigator from the very beginning. The guy
was also a pro. He knew it and everyone else knew it—he didn’t sugarcoat with
politics or bravado or fake expertise. Some of that in his role as a project
commander had been kept under wraps, but the crash of the Old Dog and seeing
Wendy Tork—or rather as Hal had told him just moments ago, Wendy Tork
McLanahan—lying halfdead in the ruins of the Megafortress, had transformed him
back to what he’d always been . . .

 
          
“At
max endurance the whole way he only had enough fuel on board to go as far as
Mexico City
,” McLanahan was saying. “With that max
alpha takeoff he made, plus all that combat maneuvering, his range has to be
much less. I say he’s gotta be on the ground somewhere ...”

 
          
“So
what can you do about it?” Elliott asked. “If he’s on the ground—”

 
          
“Why
steal DreamStar, knowing that he can fly for only a few hundred miles before he
has to abandon it? Unless he’s getting help, unless he planned to fly DreamStar
somewhere where it can be refueled. And the nearest place obviously is
Mexico
, where he was chased.”

 
          
“You
don’t know that. What if he’s just flipped out? What if he just wanted to steal
DreamStar for a damned joy ride? He’s gotten to be so close to that plane, he
thinks he owns it.” “He shoots down the Megafortress for a
joy ride?”
“ANTARES could have attacked the B-52,” Powell broke in.
“It’s possible for ANTARES to press an attack right after an evasive
maneuver—as
part
of an evasive
maneuver. It
could
have happened
without James ever knowing about it—” “Look, all this argument isn’t getting us
any closer to DreamStar,” McLanahan snapped. “Old Dog got shot down—it
happened. James has got DreamStar, that’s a fact. And Cheetah is the jet that
has any chance of bringing him down. We’ve seen what’s happened to the others.
The instruments on Cheetah can locate DreamStar, on the ground or in the air.
If he’s on the ground I can direct our forces in on him. The Mexicans can yell
but I don’t think they’d really try to stop us. If he’s airborne we can engage
him. Either way we need to get our asses in the air. Right now.”

 
          
Elliott
hesitated. McLanahan might be upset but he was also thinking pretty damn
clearly. The question was: what would the Joint Chiefs believe? Would they
agree to let Cheetah, with McLanahan on board, try to chase down DreamStar?
Obviously they had several squadrons of fighters out after him already, and
Cheetah was almost as unique and as classified as DreamStar—too valuable to
risk in a major fur-ball dogfight. Would they decide that everyone at Dreamland
was nuts and close down the place?

 
          
“I
need authorization first,” Elliott said. “I have to call
Washington
—”

 
          
“There
isn’t time for that. Every minute we delay DreamStar slips further away from
us.”

 
          
“You
can authorize Cheetah to launch at any time, sir,” Powell suggested. “Let us
get airborne and headed south. When you get authorization we’ll continue the
pursuit. If we stay on the ground until you get the word we’ll never catch
him.”

 
          
“This
is an unauthorized mission. I don’t own these airframes—the Joint Chiefs and
the Pentagon own them. They’re experimental aircraft,
not
operational interceptors. It’s illegal as hell for me to
authorize you to take off and hunt down DreamStar or any other aircraft. Can’t
you understand that?”

 
          
“Sure,
and now let me try to make you understand, General. I’m just not going to let
any of that stop me from bringing down DreamStar. James is a thief, a killer
and either a spy or a traitor. I have the plane to bring him down. As far as
I’m concerned all the rest is bureaucratic horseshit that can wait until after
DreamStar has been destroyed or recaptured. Now, you can give me authorization
to launch, and you can get permission for us to pursue DreamStar after we take
off. You can play political games if you want. But we’re leaving, sir, with or
without your blessing.”

 
          
Which
brought matters to Hal Briggs. Would he support his commanding officer or his
best friend?

 
          
“Don’t
even think about it, Patrick,” he said. “I can’t let you go against the
general’s orders. Not now ...” But then he turned to Elliott: “Sir, I’m a
member of this organization, and I agree with Colonel McLanahan. Let him take
off and chase down that sonofabitch. It’s the best plan we have.”

 
          
“If
I get authorization . . .”

 
          
Briggs
took a deep breath. “Sir, you’ve never requested authorization for half the
plans you cook up. Building that Old Dog ten years ago was unauthorized—you
took a B-52 air-frame, ripped off the parts and put the thing together in
secret. That whole B-i bomber mission to Kavaznya was unauthorized. Launching
the Old Dog was unauthorized. Continuing the mission was technically
unauthorized, and so was penetrating Soviet airspace and attacking that laser
installation. You did it, sir, because it had to be done and you had the people
and the equipment to do it.”

 
          
“This
is different—”

 
          
“Why?
Because it’s the colonel doin’ the rule-breaking and not you? Let me make a
wild guess here, sir—Colonel McLanahan here is sort of a carbon copy of Bradley
J. Elliott about twenty years ago. He’s ready to go out there and kick some
butt, just like you did more than once in your career. I read your bio,
General. . .” He rushed on, afraid if he stopped he’d lose his nerve. “They
stick a hot-shot ex-test squadron commander out in some abandoned Air Force
test base in No- wheresville,
Nevada
. They tossed you out, right? You pissed
someone off and they stuck you in a hole in the wall in
Nevada
to get you out of the way—”

 
          
“Hal,
I’m trying to be patient but this isn’t getting us anywhere—”

 
          
“But
you wouldn’t roll over and play dead, would you? You turned Nowheresville into
Dreamland. The Pentagon started tossing iffy projects your way. What the hell,
sir, if the projects failed you’d get the blame. You proved them wrong. You
made the projects work—and not always by following the book and getting
authorization—and you got the credit. Pretty soon every new piece of military
hardware went through Dreamland ... Okay, now you’re the man, General, and
you’re lookin’ at the new Bradley James Elliott—Patrick S. McLanahan. He’s
pullin’ the same shit you did twenty years ago.”

 
          
Elliott
knew that was right. He had been drawn to Mac McLanahan from the start, not
just because the guy was the best navigator in the Air Force, but because they
seemed so much alike. He also knew he got a kick out of watching the
transformation of Mac McLanahan—it was almost as if he was watching a videotape
of what had happened with him. It had taken a disaster for Patrick to come
alive, to rise above the bureaucratic morass. Now the real McLanahan had
resurfaced, the one that once treated a bomb run in
Russia
like nothing much more than a late-night
training flight in
Idaho
.

 
          
Elliott
turned to McLanahan. “Mac, smoke that bastard. Whatever it takes, do it.”

 
          
Elliott
barely had time to lower himself off the crew ladder before Cheetah’s left
engine began to spin up to idle power. When Briggs reached up to pull the
ladder off, McLanahan grabbed it.

 
          
“That
was quite a speech, Hal,” he said over the rising whine of the engines.

 
          
“1
got a confession, buddy. I never read the old man’s bio. But I guess I hit
pretty close to home. You hang around the guy long enough, you learn a little
about what goes on behind the brass. Now get outta here and bring us back some
rattlesnake hide.”

Over Ojito Airfield, central
Mexico

Ten minutes later

 
          
DreamStar’s
database on Ojito was accurate, except it failed to account for at least a
year’s worth of unchecked vegetation. Maraklov had set up a computerized
instrument landing system in Ojito, which used the database’s field location,
elevation and information on surrounding terrain to draw a glidescope and
localizer beam into the runway.

 
          
But
Maraklov had to yank DreamStar away from tall strands of dense trees off the
approach end of the runway, and when he reached the airport’s coordinates
themselves he could barely see the runway through the weeds and junk scattered
around. He had no choice but to ignore the low fuel warnings and go
missed-approach on the field; then he adjusted his ILS for the obstructions and
tried again. To use every available inch of pavement he had to drop DreamStar
over a stand of trees at almost a full stall, applying power at the last moment
to avoid crashing.