Along the way, McLanahan became the best radar bombardier in the United States, a fact demonstrated by long lines of trophies he’d received in annual navigation and bombing exercises in his six years as a B-52 crew member. His prowess with the forty-year-old bomber, lovingly nicknamed the BUFF (for Big Ugly Fat Fucker) or StratoPig, had attracted the attention of HAWC’s commanding officer, Air Force Lieutenant General Brad Elliott, who had brought him to the desert test ranges of Nevada to develop a “Megafortress,” a highly modified B-52 used to flight-test high-tech weapons and stealth hardware. Through an unlikely but terrifying chain of events, McLanahan had taken the Megafortress, idiomatically nicknamed the Old Dog, and its ragtag engineer crew into the Soviet Union to destroy a renegade ground-based antisatellite laser site.
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-1 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-1 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-1 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.