Read Online Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06 by Fatal Terrain (v1.1) - Free Book Online Page B

reply—she let her AMRAAMs do the talking. The JTIDS datalink showed
Mills launching her first AIM-120, followed by her second AMRAAM five seconds
later. The cruise missile made its usual left break—Mauer was close enough now
to see that it was ejecting chaff decoys, trying to get the radar-guided
missile to lock onto the tinsel-like chaff! But Mauer anticipated that left
break, and at the exact right moment, Mauer launched his last Sidewinder, then
began a right turning climb to clear the area. The Sidewinder would get a good,
solid look at the missile’s entire profile, and it couldn’t miss.
                 But
as he turned, he looked to the west and saw three bright explosions and another
cloud of smoke—the airfield was hit, this time with some kind of binary weapon,
a fuel-air explosive or a chemical weapon. No one was going to be landing or
taking off from that airfield for a long, long time.
                 Mauer
got visual contact on Mills’s F-22 high and heading in the opposite direction.
Just as he began his climbing left turn to join up, he heard Mills report,
“Splash one bandit—but I think he got the Patriot site and the airfield first.”
                 Good
job, Scottie, Mauer told himself angrily—the F-22 Lightning, the best fighter
ever to leave the ground, beat out by a robot plane. Shit, shit, shit!
                 He
saw Mills wag her F-22’s tail back and forth, clearing him into right fingertip
formation. Might as well let Andrea lead for a while until he got his composure
back, he was too angry right now to make any decisions as flight lead.
                 Just
then, Mauer’s heads-down display blinked—another inbound bandit had been
detected by the AWACS. Mills rocked her wings up and down, the signal to move
out to combat spread formation to get set up for the intercept, then started a
thirty-degree bank turn to the left toward the new bandit. She was the only one
with missiles now, Mauer thought forlornly, so he slid out to wide-line-abreast
formation and got ready to back up his leader on this intercept. He was backup
now, he thought, just backup. The bad guys were three for fucking three. . . .
                 “Three
for three, General,” Patrick McLanahan said matter-of- factly. “The Wolverine
autonomously located four preprogrammed targets, attacked three, reattacked
one, and was on its way to nail the fourth one before the F-22s got it. Pretty
good hunting, I’d say.”
                 “Unbelievable,”
Samson finally muttered. “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Even in the EB-52B
Megafortress bombers wide cockpit, Lieutenant General Terrill Samson’s big
frame barely seemed to fit—his shoulders were slightly slumped, his knees high
up on the instrument panel. Terrill “Earthmover” Samson, a former B-52 and B-1B
bomber pilot and wing commander, was commander of U.S. Air Force’s Eighth Air
Force, in charge of training and equipping all of the Air Force’s heavy and
medium bomber units. The Air Force general was in the modified B-52 s left
seat, piloting the experimental bomber. Copiloting the EB-52 Megafortress was
Air Force Colonel Kelvin Carter, a veteran bomber pilot and a former EB-52 test
pilot at HAWC, the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center . Retired Air Force Colonel Patrick
McLanahan was seated behind and to the right of Samson in the aft section of
the upper crew compartment in the OSO, or offensive systems officer’s, console,
and to McLanahan’s left in the DSO’s, or defensive systems officers, seat was
Dr. Jon Masters, president of a small high-tech satellite and weapons
contractor from Arkansas.
                 The
EB-52B Megafortress was a radically modified B-52 bomber, changed so
extensively from tip to tail that now its size was the only sure point of
comparison. It had a long, pointed, streamlined nose that smoothly melded into
sharply raked cockpit windows