Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 Read Online Free PDF

instruments and the fuel totalizer as his eyes swept across the
center instrument panel. “We’re cleared in, Henry.” Cobb clicked the mike twice
in response. Cobb never said much during missions—his job was to fly the plane,
which he always did in stony silence.
                Romeo 4808N—that was its official
name, although its unclassified nickname was “Dreamland”—was a piece of
airspace in south-central Nevada designated by the Federal Aviation
Administration and the Department of Defense as a “restricted” area, which
meant all aircraft—civilian, commercial, other military flights, even
diplomatic—were prohibited to fly over it at any altitude without permission
from HAWC. Even FAA Air Traffic Control could not clear aircraft to enter that
airspace unless in extreme emergency, and even then the violating aircraft
could expect to get intercepted by Air Force fighters and the air-traffic
controller responsible could expect a long and serious scrutiny of his actions.
R-4808N was surrounded by four other restricted areas that were meant to act as
a buffer zone to give pilots ample warning time to change course if they
were—accidentally or purposely—straying toward R-4808N.
                If one entered R-4808N without
permission, military aircrew members would at best lose their wings, and
commercial and civilian pilots would lose their licenses—and both would be in
for an intense multiday “debriefing” conducted by teams of military and CIA
interrogators, who would discard most articles of the Bill of Rights to find
out why someone was stupid enough to stray into Dreamland. At worst, one would
come face-to-face with McLanahan and Cobb’s FB-111B racing across the desert
floor at the speed of heat—or nose-to-nose with a BLU-96 fuel-air explosive
bomb or some other strange and certainly far deadlier weapon.
                Several thousand workers, military
and civilian, were shuttled from Las Vegas , Nellis Air Force Base, Beatty, Mercury,
Pahrump, and Tonopah every day to the various research centers there. Most
civilian workers reported to the Department of Energy facilities near Yucca
Flats, where nuclear weapon research was conducted; most military members
traveled forty miles farther northeast to the uncharted aircraft and weapons
facilities northeast of Yucca Flats called Groom Lake . A series of electronic and human
observation posts was set up just south of Groom Lake in Emigrant Valley , where they could observe the BLU-96 HADES
bomb’s destructive power.
                At the northern tip of Pintwater
Ridge, the navigation computer commanded a full 60-degree turn toward the west.
McLanahan clicked on the command channel: “CROWBAR, Vapor Two-One, IP inbound,
unlocking now at T minus sixty seconds. Out.” It took only seconds to configure
the switches for weapon release, and finding the target on radar was a snap—it
was a six-story concrete tower, resembling a fire-department training tower,
surrounded by trucks, a few surplus tanks and armored personnel carriers, and
surrounded by about a hundred mannequins dressed in various combat outfits,
from lightweight fatigues to bulky chemical suits. Obviously, HAWC was not
concerned about evaluating the effects of a HADES bomb on minefields— they had
“softer” targets in mind for the BLU-96. Surrounding ground zero were several
thirty-foot-high wooden blast fences erected every one thousand feet, which
would be used to gauge the effect of the HADES bomb’s shock wave.
                McLanahan could shack this bomb with
one eye—it was hardly a test of either his or Cobb’s skill. This was going to
be a “toss” release, where the bombing computer displayed a CCIP, or
continuously computed impact point, steering cue on Cobb’s heads-up display;
the steering cue was a line that ran from the target at the bottom of the
heads-up display to a release cue cross at the top, with the