Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (13 page)

           
Rather than risk discovery of the
highly classified and politically explosive mission, McLanahan had been
strongly encouraged to remain at HAWC and, in effect, accept an American
high-tech version of the Gulag Archipelago. The upside was that it was a chance
to work with the newest aircraft and weapons in the world. McLanahan had
happily accepted the position even though it was obvious to all that he had
little choice. The Old Dog mission, one of the more deadly events that
ultimately drove the
Soviet
Union
to
glasnost,
had to be buried forever—one
way or another.

           
Many successful, career-minded men
might have resented the isolation, lack of recognition, and de facto
imprisonment. Not Patrick McLanahan. Because he was not an engineer and had
very little technical training, his job description for his first years at HAWC
consisted mainly of answering phones, acting as aide and secretary for General
Elliott and General Ormack, and rewriting tech orders and checklists. But he
educated himself in the hard sciences, visited the labs and test centers to
talk with engineers, begged and pleaded for every minute of flying time he
could, and, more important, performed each given assignment as if it were the
free world’s most vital research project. Whether it was programming checklists
into a cockpit computer terminal or managing the unit’s coffee fund and snack
bar, Patrick McLanahan did his work efficiently and professionally.

           
Things began to change very quickly.
The Air Force promoted him to Major two years below the zone. He was given an
executive officer, then a clerk, then an assistant, a staff, and finally his
own office complex, complete with flight-test crews and dedicated maintenance
shops. The projects began to change. Instead of being in charge of
documentation and records, he was heading more concept teams, then more
contractor-MAJCOM liaison jobs, then more subsystem projects, and finally
full-weapon systems. Before the ink was dry on his promotion papers to Major,
he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.

           
His “exile” was occasionally broken,
and the young “fast- burner” was frequently “loaned” with assignments with
other research, development, and government agencies, including Border Security
Force, Special Operations, and the Aerospace Defense Command. Very soon,
McLanahan had become a fixture in any new project dealing with aviation or
aerospace. He was now one of the most highly respected program managers in the
Department of Defense.

           
The mission of the High Technology
Aerospace Weapons Center had changed as well. With budget cutbacks and greater
downsizing in all strategic bombardment units, some place had to be designated
to keep all these inactive aircraft until they might be needed again. Although
most were sent to the “boneyard,” the Air Force Aerospace Maintenance and
Restoration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, to be
stored for spare parts or for scrap, a few were secretly sent to Dreamland, in
the desert of central Nevada, for research and special missions.

           
The place was the Strategic Air
Reserve Group, commanded by General Elliott. SARG took the work of the High
Technology Aerospace Weapons Center one step further—it created an operational
unit out of exotic research experiments. Whereas the Old Dog became an
operational mission completely by accident, now other “Old Dogs” were being
created and held in reserve until needed. The new Old Dogs collected over the
years now included six B-52 bombers; two B-l bombers—both original A-models;
six F-111G fighter-bombers, which were formerly SAC FB-111A strategic bombers;
and the newest arrival, McLanahan’s B-2 Black Knight bomber.

           
“The other task you’ve got is ASIS,”
Ormack continued. “Air Force is finally considering putting a pilot-trained
navigator-bombardier on board the B-2 instead of the current navigator-trained
‘mission commander’ layout. The cockpit is designed for two pilots; you have to
redesign it for a weapons system officer and defensive systems operator, but
retain the dual pilot control capability. You’ve got a few months, no more than
four, to get ASIS ready for full-scale production and retrofit, including
engineering blueprints and work plan.”

           
He smiled mischievously and added,
“The B-2 pilot ‘union’ is not too happy about this, as you might expect. They
think ASIS is a bunch of crap, that the B-2 is automated enough to not need a
navigator, and the B-2 should keep its two pilots. I think our experience with
the Old Dog proved otherwise.”

           
McLanahan laughed. “That’s an
understatement. Now, what’s ASIS stand for?”

           
“Depends on who you ask,” Ormack
said dryly. “Officially Attack Systems Integration Station. The flight test
pilots and B-2 cadre call it something else—in honor of all navigators, of
course.”

           
“What’s that?”

           
“Additional shit /aside.”

           
McLanahan laughed again. “Figures.”
Slamming navigators was common fare in this fighter pilot’s
Mecca
in southern
Nevada
. Still awestruck, he walked toward the huge
bat-winged bomber sitting inside the brilliantly lit hangar.

           
The Black Knight was designed
specifically to attack multiple, heavily defended, and mobile targets around
the world with high probability of damage and high probability of survival. To
fly nearly five thousand miles unrefueled, the B-2 had to be huge—it had the
same wingspan as a B-52 and almost the same fuel capacity, able to carry more
than its own weight in jet fuel.

           
In the past, building a bomber of
that size meant it was a sitting duck for enemy defenses—a
quarter-to-half-million pounds of steel flying around made a very easy target
for enemy acquisition and weapons-guidance radars. The B-52, first designed in
the 1940s when it was designed to fly at extremely high altitudes, eventually
had to rely on flying at treetop level, electronic jammers and decoys, and
plain old circumnavigation of enemy threats to evade attack. The B-58 Hustler
bomber relied on flat-out supersonic speed. The FB-111 and B-l strategic
bombers utilized speed, a cleaner “stealthier” design, advanced electronic
countermeasures, and terrain-following radar to help themselves penetrate stiff
defenses. But, with rapid advances in fighter technology, surface-to-air
missiles, and early warning and tracking radars, even the sleek, deadly B-l
would soon be vulnerable to attack.

           
The black monster before Patrick
McLanahan was the latest answer. The B-2 was still a quarter-million-pound
bomber, but most of its larger structural surfaces were made of nonmetallic
composites that reduced or reflected enemy radar energy; reflected energy is
dispersed in specific narrow beam paths, or lobes, which greatly decreases the
strength of the reflected energy. It had no vertical flight-control surfaces
that could act as a radar reflector—viewed on edge, it appeared to be nothing
more than a dark sliver, like a slender tadpole. Each wing was made of two huge
pieces of composite material, joined like a plastic model—that meant there were
no structural ribs to break, no rivets attaching the skin to a skeleton,
producing an aircraft that was as strong at the wingtips as it was at the
fuselage.

           
Its four turbofan engines were
buried within V-shaped wings, which eliminated telltale heat emissions, and
engine components were cooled with jet fuel itself to further reduce heat
emissions. Its state-of-the-art navigation systems, attack radars, and sensors
were so advanced that the B-2 could strike targets several miles before the
bomber could be detected by enemy acquisition radars.

           
The cost of the Black Knight bomber
program was staggering—a half billion dollars per plane and nearly eighty
billion dollars for an entire fleet, including research, development, and
basing. A planned total purchase of one hundred and thirty-two B-2s in five
years quickly went away, replaced with an extended procurement deal that would
bring only seventy-five bombers on-line over ten years. Even that reduced
production rate had been compromised—by April of 1992 there were only twelve
fully operational B-2s in the inventory, including the initial three airframes
used for testing and evaluation and nine more that had been purchased in 1991.
The 1992 and 1993 budgets had carried only “life- support” funding for the
B-2—just enough money to keep the program alive while retaining the ability to
quickly gear up production if the need arose. Because there would only be
seventy-five B-2s active by the turn of the century, the B-52—slated for
replacement by the Black Knight—would still be in the active strategic nuclear
penetrator arsenal well into the twenty-first century.

           
But the B-2, despite charges of
being a “billion-dollar boondoggle” and obsolete before becoming operational,
was now a reality and had proven itself ready to go to war in extensive flight
testing. The first Black Knight bomber squadron—the 393rd Bomb Squadron
“Tigers”—the same unit that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during
World War II—had been activated at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri a few
months earlier, and when that happened, it had rendered billions of dollars’
worth of the enemy’s military air-defense hardware instantly obsolete.

           
“Got time for a walkaround, sir?”
McLanahan asked.

           
“You bet,” the young Air Force
General replied. Ormack let Patrick drink in the sight of the magnificent black
bomber before him as Patrick stepped toward it for a walkaround
“get-acquainted” inspection.

           
The B-2 had no fuselage as on more
conventional airplanes; it was as if someone had sawed off the wings of a B-52,
stuck them together, and put wheels on it. For someone like McLanahan, who was
accustomed to seeing the huge, drooping wings of the mighty B-52, it was
amazing to notice that the B-2s, which were just as long and easily twice as
wide, did not droop one inch—the composite structures were pound-for-pound
stronger than steel. The skin was perfectly smooth, with none of the stress
wrinkles of the B-52, and it had no antennae attached to the hull that might
act as a radar reflector. The plane’s “flying wing” design had no vertical
flight control surfaces that would create a radar reflector; instead, it
achieved stability by a series of split flaps/ailerons on the wing’s trailing
edges, called “flaper- ons,” which would deflect in pairs or singularly in
response to a triple-redundant laser optic flight computer’s commands. The
unique flaperon flight-control system, plus a thrust ejector system that
directed engine exhaust across the flaperons to increase responsiveness, gave
the huge bomber the roll response of a small fighter. To prevent any radar
image “blooming” when the flaperons were deflected in flight—even the small
flaperon deflection caused by a 5-degree turn would increase the radar image
size several times— the trailing edge of the B-2’s wings were staggered in a
zigzag pattern, which prevented any reflected energy from returning directly
back to the enemy’s radar receiver.

           
Patrick ducked under the pointed
nose on his way back to the double side-by-side bomb bays, the natural part of
such an aircraft that would attract any SAC bombardier. The lower part of the
nose section on either side of the nose gear had large rectangular windows
protected by thick pads. “Are these the laser and IR windows?” Patrick asked
Ormack.

           
“You got it, Patrick,” Ormack
replied. “Miniature laser spotters/target designators and infrared detectors,
slaved to the navigation system. The emitter windows and the cockpit windows
are coated with an ultrathin material that allows radar energy to pass through
the windows but not reflect back outwards, much like a one-way mirror. This
reduces the radar reflectivity caused by energy bouncing off the crew members
or equipment inside the plane itself. If allowed to reflect back, the radar
return from the pilots’ helmets alone can effectively double the B-2’s radar
signature.”

           
“Where’s the navigation radar? Is
there one on the B-2?”

           
“You bet. The Black Knight has an
AN/APQ-181 multimode radar mounted along the wing leading edges, with
ground-mapping, terrain-following, targeting, surveillance, and rendezvous
modes—we can even add air-to-air capability to the system ...”

           
“Air-to-air on a B-2 bomber?”
McLanahan whistled. “You’re kidding, right?”

           
“Not after what we did on the B-52
Old Dog,” Ormack replied. “After our work in Dreamland putting antiair missiles
on a B-52,1 don’t think there’ll ever be another combat aircraft that can’t do
a dozen different jobs, and that includes heavy bombers carrying air-to-air
weapons. It makes sense—if you can take sixteen to twenty weapons of
any
kind into battle with you, you have
the advantage. Besides, the B-2 is no slouch of a hot jet any way you look at
it—the B-2 bomber has one-one hundredth the radar cross-section of an F-l 5
Eagle Fighter, one-twentieth the RCS of an F-23 Wildcat fighter—which means it
could engage targets before the other guy even
knows
the B-2 is out there—and at high altitude it has the same
roll rate and can pull as many Gs as an F-4 Phantom.”