decreasing rapidly. Briggs was trying to get the Jeep restarted. He gave it a few seconds, then jumped out and started pushing.
Ormack brought the throttles back to idle, which seemed to make no difference.
'We gotta slow down.'
As if in reply, three mortar shells exploded in front of the bomber.
Briggs tripped and sprawled in the sand. Another explosion created a huge waterspout of sand off the right wing, and Briggs and his Jeep were lost in the rolling cloud.
The explosions rocked the bomber as if it were caught in a typhoon.
Ormack checked the airspeed. 'Seventy knots. If we hit the brakes at this speed, they'll explode. We can't stop in time anyway. Briggs Briggs had managed to get the Jeep cleared off the runway behind the fence. He ran over and hauled on the right side of the gate. The heavy wide fence slowly opened. Briggs sprinted through the sandstorm and pulled on the left gate. A securing pole was dragging in the sand, and Briggs had to throw his entire skinny body against the fence to move it.
'It's stuck,' Ormack said.
'This is going to be a real short flight if he doesn't open that gate,' McLanahan said.
But the fence wasn't moving. Briggs' legs were pumping, his once spit-shined boots scraping against the sand, but it wasn't helping.
half-open when Briggs slipped and slumped. The fence was to the sand, then rolled to his right to jump back to his feet. As he did he saw the Old Dog.
The aircraft looked like a gigantic pterodactyl coming toward him. And the pencil nose of the bomber, tilted down for takeoff, was aimed right at his heart.
Briggs jumped up, his eyes on the monster with wings speeding toward him, and body-tackled the fence. The fence jumped a few feet, but Briggs kept on going, his legs didn't stop pumping until the blast of the eight turbofan jet engines swept him off his feet and into the fence.
'He did it,' McLanahan said.
'We aren't out of it yet. 'Ormack slowly throttled up to full power, then reached down and hit the flap switch. 'After the fence we got three miles of concrete left. It'll take another minute to get the flaps down, another minute to accelerate this pig to rotate speed. We run out of hard surface in less than a minute.
McLanahan finally found the flap indicator. 'It's not moving… ' 'It probably jammed during one of those explosions,' Ormack said, holding tight to the wheel.'it might take them longer to come down-or the flap motors will burn out. One or the other.
The indicator moved to ten percent. Twenty percent. A pause-then a longer pause. Thirty percent. The bomber began to.rattle.
'Forty percent. 'McLanahan scanned the instruments, then looked out the window. Through the dim morning light he saw the glitter of steel on the horizon. He stared harder. Perched directly in front of them was a large, boxy aircraft, with some men scattered around it.
'What the hell is that?' Ormack was staring into the distance.
'It's an airplane on the concrete,' McLanahan said 'They're blocking our path. 'He glanced down at the flap' indicator again. Still forty percent.
'The flaps stopped.'
'We can't do it. We need the whole dry lake now. 'Ormack reached down and shut off the flap switch, freezing them at forty percent down.
'Can we rotate with the flaps stopped?'
'We'll run out of time before we hit that plane. We'll have to stop.
.. pull the 'chute-' 'Wait. 'McLanahan searched the control panel near his le it arm, finding a switch marked 'DEFENSE CONSENT.'He flipped the switch from SAFE to CONSENT 'Angelina. 'He arched around in his seat. 'Angelina. Turn on the missiles. The forward missiles.'
'What?'
'The Scorpions. Turn 'em on.
Pereira scrambled forward, clutching onto the pilot's seat.
'Turn them on?We can't. They need to align, lock onto a target-' 'I don't need them to align. 'McLanahan looked out the sloped windows.
Angelina followed his gaze, finally spotting the aircraft sitting on the runway. They could now see the attackers trying to level a bazooka at them. 'Do it,' McLanahan ordered.
Angelina hurried back to her station. To McLanahan, the wait was excruciating. He glanced backward a few times, but as the plane rushed forward he focused on the camouflaged attackers. There were four of them-two firing rifles from behind the plane, two others loading the bazooka. 'Angelina 'Ready,' she called behind him.%, 'Fire.'
McLanahan threw his arms up in front of his face as he said it.
IT He never saw the results-but then, no human could see the advanced AMRAAM air-to-air missile as it fired off the left pylon at Mach two.
The missile leapt forward on a stream of fire. The primary solid-fuel engine had just barely reached full impulse burn when it plowed into the plane less than a half mile in front of the Old Dog.
What McLanahan did see was a blinding flash of light and massive black cloud of smoke and dust. A split second later.
the needlelike nose of the Old Dog plunged through the chaos Nothing happened-no crunch of metal, no explosion of the windscreen in front of him. A moment later the cockpit windows cleared, revealing a barrier infinitely larger than the plane they had just blown away-the seven thousand feet of granite called Groom Mountain.
' Go for it,' McLanahan called out to Ormack.
Far behind the Megafortress, Hal Briggs had been pinned to the fence, his face mashed into the chain link by the force of the jet blast. He heard an explosion a few moments later, expecting the crash, the sound of exploding fuel, waiting for the fireball to engulf him. It didn't happen. It was an eternity until he could clear the stinging sand out of his face and eyes and look toward the horizon.
What he saw was the Old Dog lifting off through a cloud of y and black dust over the morning Nevada desert. A lurr of burning metal lay se gra runway, with smoking bodies flung hundreds of feet away several yards from the sand-covered The Old Dog hovered perhaps fifty feet above the desert floor, nearly obscured by the cloud of dust. He could barely see the huge wheels retract into the huge body rocket into the clear morning air.then the aircraft rose like 'Jesus H. Christ,' Briggs muttered, sitting in a three-foot drift of sand and tumbleweeds. 'They did it. They did it.
Ormack flipped a switch on the overhead console beneath the cabin altitude indicator. Slowly the long, black needle moved upward and snapped into position. Half the windscreen was now obscured by the long SST nose, the windoi blending in with its sleek lines.
'Watch the instruments,' Ormack said cross-cockpit. E spite the noise inside the bomber, he and McLanahan were s' talking loud enough to be heard without the interphone. 'Ge coming up. I hope someone got all the ground locks.
reached across and moved the gear lever up. The red light the handle snapped on, 'Instruments are okay,' McLanahan said. He found the gear and icators on the front panel beside the gear level. One by one, the little wheel depictions on the indicators changed to crosshatch and then to the word UP, and the bumping and screeching of tires stowing in the wheel wells could be heard.
'Right tip gear up… forward mains up… aft mains up…
the left tip gear is still showing crosshatch.'
Ormack cross-checked the indicator with the TIP GEAR NOT IN TRAIL caution light-it was showing unsafe too. 'It might be hanging there, or it could be part-way up. We probably ripped out the whole left wingtip. 'He did some experimental turns left and right. 'Steering feels okay. The spoilers seem like they're still working. 'He glanced down and double-checked that he had shut off the fuel valves from the left externals. 'We can try emergency retraction later.'
He ran a hand over his sweating face and scanned instru ents, left and right, as the Megafortress cleared the snowcovered Groom Mountain ridge line. 'Looks like we lost all the eighteen thousand pounds in the left external A
