Dale Brown
Wings of Fire
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to all the folks I met and spoke with at the Air Force Research Laboratory Directed Energy Directorate and Airborne Laser Special Projects Office, Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Special thanks to my old friend Colonel Ellen Pawlikowski, ABL SPO commander, for inviting me to visit her incredible staff and facilities; Lieutenant Colonel Joel Olsen, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Neice, Major Steve Smiley, Captain Carey Johnson, Captain Barrett McCann, Captain Dave Edwards, Captain Lynn Anderson, and Tim Foley, ABL SPO; and Rich Garcia, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Alley, Captain Eric Moomey, Conrad Dziewalski, Dr. Bob Fugate, Mike Connor, and Dr. Kip Kendrick of the Directed Energy Directorate.
Special thanks to Ken Englade, I SPO public affairs, for all his hard work in setting up a great tour of all the facilities at Kirtland.
Thanks to David and Cheryl Duffield, Susan Bailey, Dean and Meredith Meiling, Sandy Scarcella, and Ed Bolecky for their extraordinary generosity.
Thanks to Robert Gottlieb, Neil Nyren, and Suzanne Tarantino for their help and support.
As always, To Diane for her love and support.
To the memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and to the men and women who have answered the call to arms in the war on terror.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to realworld persons, places, events, or organizations is coincidental.
Your comments are welcome! Please visit www.megafortress.com on the World Wide Web to leave your comments and to learn about upcoming works, projects, appearances, or events. I read every comment.
REAL-WORLD NEWS EXCERPTS
WAITING ON CAIRO
— STRATFOR Intelligence Update, www. stratfor.com. 13 October 2000
— Within the Arab world, the Egyptians occupy a unique position, the very reason that they have been propelled to the center of the situation. Although it wields one of the largest Arab militaries, Cairo is also the largest Arab state to continue ties with Israel; even Morocco has called its diplomatic representative home for consultation..
… Arab nations-even those that have signed peace agreements with Israel-are under intense pressure to join together and take a unified stand against Israel…
U.S. AID FUELING THE DEVELOPMENT MODERN EGYPT
The Washington Post, December 26, 2000
— Egypt, a preoccupation of U.S. foreign policy for the last quarter-century, has been the second-largest recipient of American foreign aid during that period. The $52 billion program, so far, has rebuilt mosques, constructed new schools, promoted family planning and transferred high-tech weapons like F-16 warplanes and M1-A1 tanks at a $2-billion-a-year clip…
CONSEQUENCES A NEW U.S. DEFENSE STRATEGY
STRATFOR Global Intelligence Update, www.stratfor.com. I March 2001
— In Washington, an internal Pentagon review of American defense strategy is likely to call for a dramatic reduction in U.S. troops deployed overseas… Such a historic shift would reduce the vulnerability of U.S. forces to attack and lower the profile of a seemingly imperial military presence. Over the long term, however, such a strategy may force allies and adversaries alike to build new regional alliances or adopt independent, antagonistic defense strategies…
LIBYA: GAINING LEVERAGE IN CENTRAL AFRICA
STRATFOR, 5 June 2001
— Chad and Libya reportedly deployed several hundred troops, attack helicopters and other military equipment to the Central African Republic on May 30, the BBC reported…. The unsuccessful uprising has opened the door for Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi to send Libyan troops into central Africa and closer to Chad's southern oil fields…
AIR FORCE TURNS 747 INTO HOLSTER FOR GIANT LASER
— The Washington Post, July 22, 2001
— USAF plans to shoot down a Scud-type missile with a giant laser fired from a modified 747 within two years. That test would be to prove the feasibility of destroying an attacking missile in the "boost" phase shortly after launch.
3 STUDIES FOCUS ON CUTTING OVERSEAS DEPLOYMENTS
The Washington Times, July 25, 2001
— Secretary Rumsfeld ordered three Pentagon reviews of foreign troop engagements in order to determine how best to reduce the type of oyerseas deployments that mushroomed during the Clinton era.
PROLOGUE
"This has got to be the most insane idea in the history of aviation," retired Navy commander John "Bud" Franken muttered. "Let it go and let's get this over with."
Retired Air Force brigadier general Patrick McLanahan smiled, then fastened his oxygen visor in place with a snap. "That's the spirit, AC," he said happily. "It only seems insane because no one's ever done it before."
"Yeah, right. Just unzip your pants over there and let's go home."
"Here it comes," Patrick said. He hit a small stud on his computer trackball and spoke: "Deploy array." The computer acknowledged the command, and the attack was under way:
Far behind them, in a fairing between their aircraft's twin V-tails, a small oblong cylinder detached itself from its mounting and began to trail behind the aircraft on a thin carbon-fiber-reinforced fiber-optic cable. The tiny object, soon trailing several hundred feet behind the AL-52, was an ALE-50-towed electronic countermeasures decpy. Just three feet long and six inches in diameter, it was invisible to the Libyan air defense radars that surrounded them at that moment.
The aircraft was a modified B-52 Stratofortress bomber not a U.S. Air Force warplane, but an experimental aircraft modified by Patrick's company, Sky Masters Inc., called an AL-52 Dragon. The warplane he was sitting in was so advanced that even Patrick, who had been involved in its development both in and out of the Air Force for years, was truly amazed. What he was really sitting in, he realized with a mixture of awe and glee, was… the future. "Star Wars" was no longer a Reagan-era pipe dream or the name of a hugely successful science-fiction motion picture series-it was right here, right now. The AL-52 Dragon combined the absolute state-of-the-art in laser technology, high-speed computers, miniaturization, stealth systems, and systems integration to produce the world's first true twenty-first century weapon system, using technology that had never been deployed on an aircraft before.
The airframe itself was based on the EB-52 Megafortress modification of the B-52H Stratofortress bomber, with stealthy composite fibersteel skin and frame, four powerful turbofan engines replacing the original eight turbofans, a Vtail stabilator replacing the big cruciform tail, and an advanced self-protection suite, including radar and infrared jammers, towed arrays, decoys, and Stinger aerial land mines. The original six-person crew had been replaced by enough state-of-the-art computers and artificial intelligence systems that now only two crew members, an aircraft commander and a mission commander, were required to be on board-and, in an extreme emergency, either could bring the plane home alone.
The Megafortress was designed as a stealthy flying battleship, able to penetrate heavily defended targets deep behind enemy lines and employ every air-launched weapon in the American arsenal-and a few that had been dreamed up just for it-with great precision. The Dragon variant of the Megafortress battleship retained the conventional attack capabilities-it could carry up to twelve thousand pounds of ordnance on wing hardpoints, including cruise missiles, air-to-air missiles, and even antisatellite and antimissile weapons. Patrick knew all about the devastating warfighting capabilities of the EB-52 Megafortress-he had spent more than fifteen years of his life working on it. Sky Masters Inc. still flew several versions of the EB-52 for flight test and research purposes, still hoping that the Air Force would someday take the roughly one hundred B-52H Stratofortress bombers in flyable storage out of mothballs and have the company convert them to either EB-52 Megafortresses or AL-52 Dragons.