Hayes barked something into the phone, practically threw the receiver on its cradle, took a gulp of coffee, and then glanced at Patrick. “We found your Vampire, General,” he growled. He hit the ENTER button on his computer terminal with an angry stab to issue his directives, then motioned toward the screen. “Stand at ease. Take a look. Recognize anything?”
“Yes, sir. That’s Vampire One.”
“How do you know for sure?”
Patrick went over to the large-screen monitor and hit the digital replay button — most televisions now had the capability of digitally recording the last two hours of a broadcast — until he came to the shot he’d seen when he’d first come in. “I saw the shot of the tail section. Our planes don’t have a very tall vertical stabilizer, and Vampire One didn’t have a horizontal stabilizer — it used adaptive wing technology for pitch control.”
“What’s that?” General Falke asked.
“We found that we don’t need to use conventional flight control surfaces on planes anymore, sir — all we need to do is change the nature of the air flowing over any surface of an aircraft,” Patrick explained. “We use tiny hydraulic devices to bend the aircraft skin, all controlled by air data computers. A change too small to be seen by the naked eye can make any surface create lift or drag. We’re experimenting with the possibility of building a B-1 bomber with twice the speed and efficiency with wings half the normal size — we can turn the entire fuselage into a wing. We can make a brick fly like a paper airplane with this technology.” The three generals looked apprehensively at McLanahan.
“The Russians could’ve sawed off sections of the tail to make it look like one of yours,” General Muskoka mumbled.
“How would they know what it looked like, sir — and why would they bother?” Patrick asked. He scrolled through the images. “Here’s definite proof, sir: a LADAR array. The Vampire used six of these laser radars for targeting, terrain following, aircraft warning, missile tracking, intercepts, station keeping, surveillance, everything. It could see fifty miles in any direction, even into space. The design of that array was one of our most closely guarded secrets.”
“And now the Russians have it — and they’re trotting out their prize for everyone to see,” Muskoka said acidly. “If your Captain Dewey had followed orders, McLanahan, this never would’ve happened.”
“If given the opportunity to do so, sir, I’d authorize her to do it again,” Patrick said.
“That attitude, mister, is why you’re here today!” Muskoka snapped. “That’s how come you almost got shot down, why your friend Terrill Samson entered charges against you, and that’s why your career is going to come to an abrupt, unfortunate end. You don’t seem to grasp what’s going on here.”
“Permission to speak freely, sir?”
“I advise you to keep your mouth shut, General,” Muskoka said.
“Same here,” General Hayes said. “But speak your mind if you want.”
“Major Deverill and Captain Dewey did an outstanding job rescuing Madcap Magician and Siren,” Patrick said. “Siren had valuable information on Russian activities that are right now threatening to disrupt all of Europe. We got definite proof that the experimental Russian fighter-bomber from the Metyor Aerospace plant at Zhukovsky bombed that Albanian village—”
“The ends do not justify the means, Patrick,” Hayes said. “I would’ve thought after seventeen years in the Air Force and twelve years watching Brad Elliott get slapped down by Washington, you’d understand that. Unfortunately, you’re going to find out the hard way.”
“My God, look at that,” Falke breathed. Patrick looked. CNN was now showing actual civilian satellite photos of Elliott Air Force Base. The resolution showed a lot of detail — he could easily count the aboveground hangars and buildings, and he could see the mobile control tower that was out only for a launch, which meant the photo had been taken just before or just after a rare daytime flight test. The captions identified the image as the top-secret Air Force research base north of Las Vegas that was the home base of the B-1 bomber that the Russians had shot down. Other amateur photos taken by “UFO hunters” that sneaked out to Dreamland — some several years old — showed ground-level details of some of the larger buildings; superimposed graphics showed where the runway in Groom Lake was located. They were pretty dam accurate, Patrick thought, except the real runway was much longer and wider.
“How in hell did they know the plane came from Dreamland?” Falke asked.
“Because the President told them, sir,” Patrick replied.
“What?”
“He’s right,” General Hayes said. “The President told Russian president Sen’kov everything when he called them asking that our guys not get shot down.” He looked at his staff officers, then at Patrick, and added, “But it was supposed to be kept secret. That was the deal — we don’t tell what we knew about the Metyor-179, and they don’t tell about our Vampires overflying Russia.”
“That’s what the CIC gets for making a deal like that with the Russians,” Muskoka said bitterly. “So what do we recommend to the JCS and SecDef?”
“First, we’ll need a list of all the classified subsystems on that plane,” Hayes said. “What else will the Russians find out about along with LADAR?”
“I can brief you on all the subsystems of the Vampire — I’ve worked on it for several years,” Patrick said. Hayes just glared at him. He knew he was the best choice to get the information for them quickly, but he also did not want to have to rely on a man they were possibly about to court-martial.
“What about destroying the wreckage?” Falke suggested. “Have a special ops team go in and destroy the classified gear?”
“It may not be necessary, sir,” Patrick said. “The best the Russians or anyone else will be able to do is reverse-engineer the basic design. If the Russians tried to put a current through any component after a crash, the firmware is designed to dump fake computer code and viruses into the detection-and-analysis machines they use. If the computers they use are networked — and the systems are designed to wait until they encounter a networked computer — the viruses will spread through the entire network in milliseconds. We may want to consider sending in a team to make the Russians think we want to destroy the equipment — have the team get intercepted just before they go in and pull them out, make the Russians think they stopped us. But it may not be worth risking a team penetrating a Russian intelligence laboratory for real.”
Hayes looked at McLanahan closely, studying him. He appeared as if he was impressed and disappointed all at the same time. “Good point — and good planning on your part, General,” he said.
“The question remains, sir — what about the Russian stealth bomber?” McLanahan asked.
“What about it?” Muskoka asked.
“It’s still out there, and it’s a major threat,” McLanahan maintained. “We’ve proven that it committed that attack on that factory in Albania, we’ve put it in the exact vicinity of the NATO AWACS plane that was shot down over Macedonia, and we have credible evidence that it was involved in the raid on Albanian and Macedonian border forces that started the war. If the President made a deal not to reveal the existence of the stealth bomber, the Russians broke that agreement. We should not only spill the beans about the Russian stealth bomber, but we should be going after it.”
“‘Go after it,’ “ Muskoka breathed. “That seems to be your answer for everything, McLanahan — just ‘go after it.’ Bomb the crap out of everything in sight.”