Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (29 page)

 
          
“Tim,”
the Vice President responded in an exasperated tone, exaggerated slightly for
the viewers at home, “it sounds like you’re suggesting that we send American
troops twelve thousand miles from home back to the
Persian Gulf
to threaten
Iran
simply because they are choosing to deploy
weapon systems such as the
Khomeini
carrier group. It seems as if you’re suggesting we do
something
just
because.
I
don’t agree with that view, Tim.

 
          
“I
think the American people out there want us to be ready to act if
America
, her allies, or her vital interests
overseas are threatened. Otherwise, I think
America
wants our military forces to stay home with
their families. We will proceed with extreme caution, and trust that diplomacy
and common sense will win out.”

Aboard the B-2A Spirit stealth
bomber AV-OI 1, over THE
PERSIAN GULF

23 APRIL 1997
,
Ol 13 HRS. LOCAL TIME

 
          
“Lets
go into COMBAT mode,” McLanahan announced. “Give me consent.”

           
Tony “Tiger” Jamieson flipped a
red-guarded switch near his left elbow, checked all the rest of his switch
configurations, then nestled his butt deeper into his seat and tightened up his
lap belt and shoulder straps. “Consent switch up. Clear to engage.”

 
          
McLanahan
pressed a small switch light on the eyebrow panel marked COMBAT, and just that
quickly, the checklist was complete for arming the weapon systems, configuring
the threat warning and defensive systems, and preparing the computers, aircraft
systems, and avionics for combat. Both men checked the MDUs (Mission Display
Units) as the computer reported all of the subsystems’ status, and then
prepared themselves to penetrate enemy territory. It took only thirty seconds
to confirm that the computer had switched all systems into COMBAT mode. “We’re
in COMBAT,” McLanahan announced.

 
          
“Confirmed,”
Jamieson responded—and that was the most he had had to do in the past three
hours.

 
          
There
was one thing that Tony Jamieson hated more than anything else, and that was
sitting idle. As a B-2A Spirit stealth bomber mission commander, he did
anything but—the MC was by far the busiest crewman aboard. Although they still
called the B-2A left- seaters the AC—the “aircraft commander,”—he was no longer
responsible for the success of a mission, as were other aircraft ACs. The AC’s
job was to fly the plane and monitor the systems—in the B-2 A stealth bomber,
it meant to follow the “blue line,” the computer-generated course line on his
lower-center MDU, and to respond to computer-generated WARNINGS, CAUTIONS, and
ALERTS, or WCAs. Any good AC kept up with the mission progress and was ready to
complete the mission from the left seat if something catastrophic happened to
the mission commander; although the B-2A was ultrareliable and redundant and
the AC rarely intervened, he had to be prepared to drop weapons, navigate,
communicate, and operate all of the defensive systems from the left seat if
necessary.

 
          
The
damned problem was, Jamieson wasn’t prepared to do that in Air Vehicle Oil.
This fucking plane had been so heavily modified by the plane’s current MC,
Patrick McLanahan, the now-defunct HAWC, and his Intelligence Support Agency
engineering pukes that he didn’t recognize a thing on the right side of the
plane. From his studies over the past several days, he knew that he could do a
number of things from the left seat, but in the heat of battle he seriously
doubted if he could fly the plane and run a checklist at the same time. All
he’d really done so far on this mission was a preflight, takeoff, two air
refuelings—one east of
Hawaii
, the other north of Diego

 
          
Garcia
in the
Indian Ocean
—airspeed adjustment to make sure they were
on time, and a flip through MDU pages, checking stuff. That, and look out the
window as they chased the sunset.

 
          
Long
flights in the B-2A bomber were comfortable and relatively stress-free, but in
this plane it was even more brainless than in the Block 10 and Block 20 planes
at Whiteman. Navigation was managed by an automatic navigation system run by dual
redundant inertial reference units fed by a Northrop astro-tracker—first
developed for the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane—that could track and lock on to
stars even in daytime for accurate heading data, and a Global Positioning
System satellite navigation system for position and velocity data—the B-2A’s
navigation accuracy could be measured in a few feet, even without using the
radar.

 
          
The
fuel-management system was automatic and completely hands-free. Jamieson
trusted the automatic navigation and flight- control systems enough to take
short catnaps throughout the flight when things were quiet (he would never,
ever
admit he trusted McLanahan well
enough to watch over things). The seats were big and comfortable—unlike most
ACES II ejection seats, which were narrow and hard—and the cockpit was very
quiet. You could take the “brain bucket” off, put electronic noise-canceling
headsets on, and listen to the single-sideband HF radio channels from all over
the world while monitoring the plane and the computers. Station and oxygen
checks every thirty minutes, mission status reports by satellite every hour,
and sit back and wait for the action to start. The GLAS, or Gust Load
Alleviation System—the pointed “beaver tail” on the back of the B-2A’s short
fuselage—smoothed out the occasional turbulence bumps with ease.

 
          
Jamieson
didn’t know if McLanahan ever napped. Whenever a message came in on the
satellite receiver, he was right there to receive it; whenever the computer
alerted them to a significant navigation turn point or mission checkpoint,
McLanahan was always right there to respond. Jamieson used the chemical toilet
mounted behind the mission commander’s seat quite often—-Jamieson had never
subscribed to the “low-residue” diet recommended for long overwater flights and
had brought along two big box lunches filled with fried chicken, bologna
sandwiches, raw vegetable sticks, and fruit juice, plus sticky buns that could
be warmed up in the bomber’s microwave oven in the tiny galley beside the entry
hatch, and plenty of coffee. On the other hand, McLanahan had brought only
Thermos bottles of cold protein drinks, plus coffee and lots of water; even so,
he’d cleared off for relief only twice. Had to be the “B-52 bowels,” Jamieson
decided—since the big B-52s carried only a cramped, uncomfortable, smelly
“honey bucket” instead of a real chemical toilet on board, some crew members
got accustomed to flying very long missions without using it.

 
          
Their
flight path took them over the Pacific and Indian oceans, on a less direct course
far from the normal transoceanic flight routines in order to avoid visual
detection by a passing airliner. Since this was a secret mission, they didn’t
need to give position reports or talk to anyone when crossing international
boundaries. McLanahan activated the radar for a few seconds every time they
passed close to land, but mostly kept it in standby to prevent stray electronic
emissions from giving away their position. They had no anti-collision lights or
transponder beacon codes activated—they were counting on the “big sky” theory
to keep them away from other aircraft.

 
          
They’d
overflown the
Hawaiian
Islands
four hours
after takeoff and received their first refueling about 120 miles west of
Honolulu
. They passed within radar range of
Guam
, overflew the
Philippines
, and shot a two-second radar image each of
Vietnam
,
Malaysia
, and
Thailand
—all without one challenge from any nation’s
air defense systems. They were nothing but ghosts.

 
          
Approaching
the
Maldives
in the northern
Indian Ocean
southwest of
Sri Lanka
, out of radar range of
India
’s potent Soviet-built air defense network,
they refueled from a U.S. Air Force KC-10 Extender tanker. Now, with full tanks
and in long-range cruise mode, the real magic of this incredible warplane was
obvious: they could just as easily fly all the way back to
Hawaii
now if they wanted. The computer listed all
the alternate and emergency airfields available to them with their full
tanks—they ranged as far north as Anchorage, Alaska, as far south as Auckland,
New Zealand, or Cape Town, South Africa, even as far west as London! If they
included civil airfields on the list, runways big enough for a standard Boeing
727, they had their choice of about three hundred airports within max fuel
endurance range.

 
          
That
kind of power really impressed Tony Jamieson, and it was what drove him to the
big bomber game and the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber in particular. The power he
commanded was unlike anything ever believed possible. With only two aerial
refuelings, he could fly halfway around the world—but more impressive, he could
fly over their fleets, their capitals, their cities, their military bases, and
he could unleash devastating weapons on all of them, and those on the ground
would
not know he was ever there,
even after the missiles hit! He knew the U.S.S.
Abraham Lincoln
aircraft carrier battle group was just a few
minutes farther east in the Arabian Sea—they had flown within
sixty miles
of the group—but the
greatest seaborne battle group in the world had had no idea they were nearby.

 
          
Eleven
hours after takeoff, they’d finally come within radar range of the
Arabian Peninsula
. McLanahan knew there was an American E-3C
Airborne Warning and Control System radar plane flying in southeast
Saudi Arabia
, to observe all air and sea activity near
the Iranian aircraft carrier fleet;
Saudi Arabia
also operated a sophisticated
peninsula-wide air defense command-and-control system called Peace Shield
Skywatch, which linked seventeen regional radar sites to a central control
facility in
Riyadh
. But the bomber had overflown
Saudi Arabia
, then southern
Iraq
, and then down along the
Persian Gulf
into southern
Iran
without one squeak of a radar locked onto
them or one challenge on any radio frequency, even though there were lots of
Saudi, Iranian, and American fighter patrols up that night. Less than sixty
miles away was the
Strait
of Hormuz
and the
Iranian military city of
Bandar Abbas
, one of the most heavily defended places on earth. Just 100 miles south
of the strait in the
Gulf
of
Oman
was the huge
Khomeini
aircraft carrier battle group, challenging all those who
tried to enter the
Persian
Gulf
.

 
          
“I
don’t friggin’ believe this,” Jamieson exclaimed. “We’re flying over no-man’s
land here. One missile jock gets lucky, and he bags himself a B-2 A stealth
bomber.” McLanahan made no reply—probably the first indication that night that
he was nervous. The threat indicator on McLanahan’s supercockpit display was
showing massive amounts of threats all around them: numerous SA-10 surface-to-
air missile sites near the larger cities in western Iran; a cluster of mobile
SA-8 missile units and ZSU-23/4 antiaircraft artillery sites in Iraq, all
radiating and searching the skies; and a handful of high- performance MiG-29s
over Iran, not too far away. They were bracketed by long-range search radars,
but not one of them showed any indication of locking a continuous-wave or
height-finder signal on them.

 
          
Tensions
in the region were always high, but since the invasion of
Abu
Musa
Island
and the deployment of the
Khomeini
carrier group, it seemed
everyone had every man and every piece of military hardware they owned out in
the field, ready for battle. “What in hell are we doing up here, McLanahan?
This is nuts ...”

 
          
“There’s
an ISA rescue mission being executed now over Bandar Abbas,” McLanahan said—he
knew that Jamieson
knew
why they were
doing this mission, but he had to get his AC’s mind off the threats surrounding
them and back on the mission right now. “That salvage vessel that got hit by
the Iranians the other day? It was an ISA ship. They took several captives, and
the ISA’s going to get them back.”

 
          
“I
heard it was a civilian vessel,” Jamieson said.

 
          
“It
was civilian, but it was being used by the Intelligence Support Agency to run
surveillance on the
Khomeini
carrier
group.”