Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (68 page)

           
The history buff was right now
seated at the base of the triangular conference table, facing the triangle’s
apex and a bank of large video monitors along the wall. Seated beside him,
Patrick recognized, was the deputy chief of staff. General Tom “Turbo” Muskoka.
and the deputy chief of staff for operations, Lieutenant-General Wayne “Wombat"
Falke. They were all three seated before computer terminals, making notes and
reading e-mail messages and computer reports, Muskoka and Falke looked angrily
at McLanahan as he was led over to them; Hayes did not look at him, but was
studying the monitors and talking on the telephone.

 
          
As
were most televisions in every military installation Patrick had ever visited
in the last ten years, one of the large monitors on the wall was tuned to CNN.
The "Breaking News” logo was all over the screen. It looked like a
videotape archive of w reckage from a plane crash: then he gulped as he saw the
caption “Near Moscow, Russian Federation." Patrick McLanahan had to
struggle not to look at the big screen as he stood at attention before the
conference table and the three Air Staff generals.

 
          
Hayes
barked something into the phone, practically threw the receiver on its cradle,
took a gulp of coffee, and then glanced at Patrick. “We found your Vampire,
General,” he growled. He hit the
enter
button on his computer terminal
with an angry slab to issue his directives, then motioned toward the screen. “Stand
at ease. Take a look. Recognize anything?”

 
          
“Yes,
sir. That’s Vampire One.”

 
          
“How
do you know for sure?”

 
          
Patrick
went over to the large-screen monitor and hit the digital replay button—most
televisions now had the capability ofdigitally recording the last two hours of
a broadcast—until he came to the shot he'd seen when he’d first come in, “I saw
the shot of the tail section. Our planes don’t have a very tall vertical
stabilizer, and Vampire One didn’t have a horizontal stabilizer—it used
adaptive wing technology for pitch control.”

 
          
“What’s
that?” General Falke asked.

 
          
“We
found that we don’t need to use conventional flight control surfaces on planes
anymore, sir—all we need to do is change the nature of the air flowing over any
surface of an aircraft,” Patrick explained. “We use liny hydraulic devices to
bend the aircraft skin, all controlled by air data computers. A change too
small to be seen by the naked eye can make any surface create lift or drag.
We’re experimenting with the possibility of building a B-l bomber with twice
the speed and efficiency with wings half the normal size—we can turn the entire
fuselage into a wing. We can make a brick fly like a paper airplane with this
technology.” The three generals looked apprehensively at McLanahan.

 
          
“The
Russians could’ve sawed off sections of the tail to make it look like one of
yours,” General Muskoka mumbled.

 
          
“How
would they know what it looked like, sir—and why would they bother?” Patrick
asked. He scrolled through the images. “Here’s definite proof, sir: a LADAR
array. The Vampire used six of these laser radars for targeting, terrain
following, aircraft warning, missile tracking, intercepts, station keeping, surveillance,
everything. It could see fifty miles in any direction, even into space. The
design of that array was one of our most closely guarded secrets.”

 
          
“And
now the Russians have it—and they’re trotting out their prize for everyone to
see,” Muskoka said acidly. “If your Captain Dewey had followed orders,
McLanahan, this never would’ve happened.”

 
          
“If
given the opportunity to do so, sir, I’d authorize her to do it again,” Patrick
said.

 
          
“That
attitude, mister, is why you’re here today!” Muskoka snapped. “That’s how come
you
almost got shot down, why your friend Terrill Samson entered charges against
you, and that’s why your career is going to come to an abrupt, unfortunate end.
You don’t seem to grasp what’s going on here.”

 
          
“Permission
to speak freely, sir?”

 
          
“I
advise you to keep your mouth shut, General,” Muskoka said.

 
          
“Same
here,” General Hayes said. “But speak your mind if you want.”

 
          
“Major
Deverill and Captain Dewey did an outstanding job rescuing Madcap Magician and
Siren,” Patrick said. “Siren had valuable information on Russian activities
that are right now threatening to disrupt all of
Europe
. We got definite proof that the
experimental Russian fighter-bomber from the Metyor Aerospace plant at
Zhukovsky bombed that Albanian village—”

 
          
“The
ends do not justify the means. Patrick;” Hayes said. “I would’ve thought after
seventeen years in the Air Force and twelve years watching Brad Elliott get
slapped down by
Washington
, you’d understand that. Unfortunately, you’re going to find out the hard
way.”

 
          
“My
God, look at that,” Falke breathed. Patrick looked. CNN was now showing actual
civilian satellite photos of Elliott Air Force Base. The resolution showed a
lot of detail—he could easily count the aboveground hangars and buildings, and
he could see the mobile control tower that was out only for a launch, which
meant the photo had been taken just before or just after a rare daytime flight
test. The captions identified the image as the top-secret Air Force research
base north of
Las Vegas
that was the home base of the B-1 bomber that the Russians had shot
down. Other amateur photos taken by “UFO- hunters” that sneaked out to
Dreamland—some several years old—showed ground-level details of some of the
larger buildings; superimposed graphics showed where the runway in
Groom
Lake
was located. They were pretty darn
accurate, Patrick thought, except the real runway was much longer and wider,

 
          
“How
in hell did they know the plane came from Dreamland?” Falke asked.

 
          
“Because
the President told them, sir,” Patrick replied.

 
          
“What?"

           
“He’s right,” General Hayes said.
“The President told Russian president Sen’kov everything when he called them
asking that our guys not get shot down.” He looked at his staff officers, then
at Patrick, and added, “But it was supposed to be kept secret. That was the
deal—we don’t tell what we knew about the Metyor-179, and they don’t tell about
our Vampires overflying
Russia
.”

 
          
“That’s
what the CIC gets for making a deal like that with the Russians,” Muskoka said
bitterly. “So what do we recommend to the JCS and SecDef?”

           
“First, we’ll need a list of all the
classified subsystems on that plane,” Hayes said. “What else will the Russians
find out about along with LADAR?”

 
          
“I
can brief you on all the subsystems of the Vampire—I’ve worked on it for
several years,” Patrick said. Hayes just glared at him. He knew he was the best
choice to get the information for them quickly, but he also did not want to
have to rely on a man they were possibly about to court-martial.

 
          
“What
about destroying the wreckage?” Falke suggested. “Have a special ops team go in
and destroy the classified gear?”

 
          
“It
may not be necessary, sir,” Patrick said. “The best the Russians or anyone else
will be able to do is reverse-engineer the basic design. If the Russians tried
to put a current through any component after a crash, the firmware is designed
to dump fake computer code and viruses into the detection-and-analysis machines
they use. If the computers they use are networked— and the systems are designed
to wait until they encounter a networked computer—the viruses will spread
through the entire network in milliseconds. We may want to consider sending in
a team to make the Russians
think
we want to destroy the equipment—have
the team get intercepted just before they go in and pull them out, make the
Russians think they stopped us. But it may not be worth risking a team
penetrating a Russian intelligence laboratory for real.”

 
          
Hayes
looked at McLanahan closely, studying him. He appeared as if he was impressed
and disappointed all at the same time. “Good point—and good planning on your
part, General,” he said.

 
          
“The
question remains, sir—what about the Russian stealth bomber?” McLanahan asked.

 
          
“What
about it?” Muskoka asked.

 
          
“It’s
still out there, and it’s a major threat,” McLanahan maintained. “We’ve proven
that it committed that attack on that factory in
Albania
, we’ve put it in the exact vicinity of the
NATO AWACS plane that was shot down over
Macedonia
, and we have credible evidence that it was
involved in the raid on Albanian and Macedonian border forces that started the
war. If the President made a deal not to reveal the existence of the stealth
bomber, the Russians broke that agreement. We should not only spill the beans
about the Russian stealth bomber, but we should be going after it.”

 
          
“
‘Go after it,’ ” Muskoka breathed. 'That seems to be your answer for
everything, McLanahan—just ‘go after it.’ Bomb the crap out of everything in
sight.”

 
          
“How
do you propose we ‘go after it’?” Hayes asked.

 
          
“We
have to find a way to draw it into a fight,”

 
          
“How
do we do that? Bomb a Russian air base hoping to hit it? Bomb
Moscow
until Sen'kov coughs it up to us?”

 
          
“President
Sen'kov may not know anything about the plane,” Patrick said. “We know the
plane was activated shortly after the death of Colonel Kazakov in Kosovo. We
know that Kazakov’s son Pavel owns the factory that makes the plane. The
stealth fighter was in storage until Kazakov came to see Fursenko at Zhukovsky.
After that, the plane was launched and hasn't been seen since—and at the same
time, all these attacks in the Balkans have taken place.”

 
          
“I’m
not following you, McLanahan,” Hayes said. “What makes you think the Russian
government doesn't know about the stealth fighter?”

 
          
“They
could know about it, but not be in control of it,” Patrick said. “The stealth
fighter at Metyor was never delivered to the Russian or Soviet air force. The
only pilots ever to fly it worked for Metyor, not the air force.”

 
          
“Or
this could be some elaborate fantasy of yours,” Muskoka said. “I don't believe
anyone—not the Russians, not Kazakov, no one—would be crazy enough to fly a
stealth bomber all over eastern Europe and attack military and civilian targets
without proper authorization from the highest levels in government. The
political and military consequences would be enormous. He'd be playing with
fire.”

 
          
Patrick
looked directly at General Muskoka and said with a slight—Hayes would have said
“evil”—grin: “I did it, sir.” Muskoka looked angry enough to bite through the
conference table. “And look what’s happening to you, McLanahan— you're about to
be shit-canned.”

           
“Sir, do you think a gangster like
Pavel Kazakov is worried about being ‘shit-canned’?”

           
“I think you'd better worry about
yourself
McLanahan,” Muskoka said.

 
          
‘That’s
enough,” General Hayes said, after seeing that neither Muskoka nor McLanahan
were going to back down from this argument. He stood and stepped away from the
conference table toward the door to his office, motioning for Patrick to follow
him. He then stepped toward him and in a low voice said, “You and your teams
have done some good work. McLanahan, good stuff.”