Cheetah …
“I saw it, I saw it,” McLanahan sang out.
“Me too, third hangar from the right, open doors. Hot damn, there it is; they couldn’t have positioned it any better for us.”
“You gotta get back over there before they close those hangar doors.”
But J.C. was already pulling on the control stick. “Check, boss. Hang on.”
McLanahan caught his handlebars just as J.C. yanked Cheetah into a hard right turn. He twisted in his seat so he could search in the direction of the turn for interceptors or obstructions. “Clear right,” he called out. “I can see a circular barricade at the south end of the runway … looks like it might be a triple-A gun emplacement.”
“I saw it,” J.C. said, “but we’re a good two miles out of range. I’m goin’ for the hangar.” J.C. completed his turn and leveled off barely a dozen feet above the east side of the runway. A Soviet helicopter and a small high-wing airplane blocked their path, but J.C. kept Cheetah coming down and flew between the two parked aircraft on the ramp. The hangar was the only thing in front of them now, with the cavernous doors looking like huge gaping jaws ready to devour them.
Cheetah. There was no mistaking it — the huge F-15 fighter with the big unmistakable foreplanes, the thundering twin engines, twin tails to match, broad wings. It was continuing its tight turn at an impossibly low altitude, barely above treetop level. In a few seconds it would turn perpendicular to the runway heading right for the main part of the base …
Maraklov looked down the flight line toward the hangars. What he saw made him break out in a run. Men and equipment were pouring out of the hangar where DreamStar was parked — and they were leaving the hangar doors wide open.
“How bad do you want DreamStar, Colonel?”
McLanahan took his eyes off the recon pod control panel and glanced at the forward cockpit in surprise. “What?”
Cheetah was aimed directly for the center of the open doors, and they were skimming the runway and parking ramp with less than two thousand feet to go to the hangar. J.C. said, “I got Cheetah on hard autopilot, Patrick. You punch us out, and bye-bye DreamStar.”
“You mean crash Cheetah into that hangar?”
One thousand feet to go. “Now’s the chance, friend. You start evening up for Wendy, Old Dog right here, right now. It’ll look like an accident during an authorized mission …”
Five hundred feet to go. The hangar doors towered above them. They could see men lying on the ramp, soldiers shooting in their direction, trucks and service vehicles taking off in all directions. They could see access doors open on DreamStar, tools lying on the hangar floor, even puddles of fluid. The camera pod was whirring away, broadcasting its information to HAWC headquarters.
Their immediate mission was finished. The Russians had DreamStar, no question about it — they apparently were in the process of dismantling it, in preparation for sending it back to Russia. Cheetah was a preproduction aircraft — the Air Force was in the process of building thousands of them. They would not be sacrificing anything important, and would be keeping one-ofa-kind DreamStar out of the hands of the Russians …
Maraklov yelled at the guards to close the. doors but it was too late. Cheetah was on top of him before he could run twenty steps, and the quiet, deadly hiss of the shock wave approaching him made him dive for the tarmac …
Incredible … Cheetah was going to hit. DreamStar was going to be destroyed …
“Standing by for ejection … Powell told his commander. It was now or never …
“No.”
Less than one hundred feet from the hangar door J. C. Powell yanked Cheetah on its tail and threw in full afterburner. It cleared the hangar roof by only a few feet — Powell and McLanahan could feel the unearthly rumble of metal beneath their feet as the sonic wave pounded the tin roof. J.C. kept the climb in for a few more seconds, then rolled inverted, pulled the nose to the horizon, rolled upright and leveled off.
“Get us out of here, sir, “ J.C. said.
“Right turn heading zero-one-zero,” McLanahan said evenly. “Keep it on the deck. Ten minutes to the Honduras border.”
They flew on in silence until McLanahan reported that they were crossing the border. There were some MiG-29 pursuers detected, but they were far behind them by the time they had reported in to Tegucigalpa Air Defense Control, and an entire flight of six Honduran F-16 fighters was scrambled to turn them away. J.C. ordered the voice-recognition computer to activate the IFF identification radios, then started a shallow climb at best-range power and turned northward toward home.
The roar of Cheetah’s twin engines didn’t subside in Maraklov’s head for several minutes, until it was gradually replaced by the sound of sirens wailing up and down the flight line. Slowly he rose to his feet and surveyed the scene around him.
To his surprise, everything seemed relatively intact — Cheetah had not been carrying a bomb on its centerline station, as Maraklov had thought, or else some major malfunction had kept it from releasing. But from the quick glimpse he got, it looked more like a camera pod than a bomb. Cheetah, it seemed, had come to take pictures. Well, they definitely got what they wanted. They had caught everyone off guard, with DreamStar unprotected and vulnerable.
It had to be J. C. Powell flying Cheetah. Several pilots at Dreamland were checked out on Cheetah, but only Powell would be crazy enough to fly it so close to the ground and so close to the hangar. Any other pilot would have been happy with a hundred, even fifty feet above ground. Not Powell.
For a moment it appeared that whoever was flying Cheetah was going to kamikaze himself right into DreamStar’s hangar. Cheetah and DreamStar gone together? Maybe not such a bad ending. But how different was his situation as it was? With DreamStar gone and out of his control, his career was surely at an end. There was no good future for him in the Soviet Union — he would be like a tiger, caged for the rest of his life, hunted by the U.S. and distrusted or worse at “home.” He would never be closer to Brazil or Paraguay than he was right now.
And DreamStar was still safe — though for how long, now that the Americans knew where it was? No choice but to play out this hand and see how the cards fell. Somehow the photographic attack on Sebaco gave him some hope — maybe, just maybe, DreamStar would fly again. And with the right man at the controls.
It wasn’t until they had completed their final air-refueling over the Gulf that J.C. felt confident enough to approach the subject:
“We could have had them, boss,” he said. “You could have done it.”
McLanahan had said nothing the entire flight, except the curt, monotone checklist of responses required of him. But this time he spoke up. “I know that.”
“The ACES seat would have blown us clear of the impact. We could have made it out.”
“Maybe.”
“Why didn’t you punch us out?”
“I don’t know why. Maybe I thought it wasn’t my job to waste Cheetah. Maybe I think we still have a chance to get DreamStar back. Maybe I thought it was a dumb idea all on its own. We are still alive; we haven’t been captured by the Russians, Cheetah is in one piece, and we’ve accomplished our mission. So if you can stand it, let’s leave it at that.”
Sebaco Airbase, Nicaragua
“Where were your air-defense forces, General?” Maraklov said to General Tret’yak as the commander of the KGB airbase came over to the hangar.