The external power cables and air hoses dropped off the service port by remote control, and before he could rush to the side of the cockpit to see if Maraklov needed anything, DreamStar was moving forward — ready to fly.
Orlov didn’t hesitate. He reached up to the remote-control trigger device, pressed the button, then threw the device away in the hangar and sprinted for the V-100 armored car.
He reached the car just as columns of fire lit up the gloomy early morning sky. Orlov hadn’t counted on how bright those magnesium mortar shells were — he had, though, tightly closed his eyes just as he heard the loud puffs when the mortar rounds were launched. Lovyyev, inside the V-100, had neglected to shield his eyes, and Orlov found him rubbing and blinking furiously.
“Move; get out of the way!” Orlov ordered. Lovyyev followed Orlov’s grasp and tumbled into the clear area under the gun turret as Orlov scrambled into the stiff driver’s seat, put the V-100 into gear and hit the gas pedal.
“Can you operate the machine gun?” Orlov called to Lovyyev and checked his assistant as he hauled himself into the gun-turret brace. Lovyyev was still trying to blink away the flashblindness, his face red and puffed, but Lovyyev, longer on courage than brains, was the kind who would say he was okay if both arms were blown away. All Orlov could do was drive. Either Lovyyev was up to the task of holding off the response forces, or they would die.
“Just don’t shoot behind you,” Orlov told him. “Maraklov and his fighter are right behind us. Shoot at anything else that moves. Don’t waste a single shot. Our only hope is—”
Orlov’s voice was drowned out by a rhythmic hammering sound on the hull of the armored car. He thought it was from Lovyyev’s gun until he realized that the sound came from outside. He was about to warn Lovyyev to take cover when the young KGB agent’s body, minus his handsome blond head, slumped into the bottom of the gun turret. Orlov stomped hard on the gas pedal. Never leave a pretty corpse for the enemy.
Dreamland’s security forces had reacted much faster than Orlov had anticipated. Now the last obstacle lay ahead — the long movable steel gate that enclosed the fence surrounding the research hangars. Orlov had to work fast. Once fully closed, huge steel pilings would be lowered into place and the gate would be unmovable.
Driving with one hand on the wheel, gas pedal to the floor, Orlov reached up and swung the fifty-caliber machine gun back facing forward, then fumbled with the remote trigger mechanism, finally clipping it into place on the rifle’s trigger. He was less than a hundred yards from the gate. Firing in short bursts, he swung the wheel back and forth, pointing the gun’s fire at anything that moved near the gate.
To his surprise, the gate was already fully closed. Time had almost run out. Two soldiers were low-crawling along the gate, trying to reach the locking mechanism.
Orlov swung the V-100 toward them, trying to rake the fence with fire to pin them down, but the Americans refused to stop. Orlov caged the fifty-caliber forward and headed for the lock mechanism, spraying the area with bullets. But that lasted for only a few seconds — the shell-feeder on the machine gun jammed.
It was too late. One guard was dead but the other threw the handle on the locking mechanism and dropped the steel post into place.
One chance left. Keeping the throttle full open Orlov aimed the Commando right at the gate opening. If the lock could be broken and the gate dislodged from the piling he could use the V-100 to push the gate far enough open for tle XF-34A to get through.
Under a hailstorm of bullets from all sides, Orlov’s V-100 plowed into the gate’s locking mechanism at well over sixty miles an hour — the four-ton armored car had built up enough force to demolish a house. But it was still not enough to snap the five-inch steel post securing the gate. Instead, the force of the impact snapped the motor mounts off the armored car, and the heavy armored plating in the car’s nose acted like a giant piston, driving the engine and transmission into Gekky Orlov’s body. The bones in his body were pulverized like dry twigs under a steam roller. The V-100 exploded, starting a fire in the electric and hydraulic lock systems and killing the second security guard. But the gate held fast.
And DreamStar was trapped.
A quick mental command, and DreamStar’s attack-radar flashed on, then off, at precisely two hundred and twenty yards from where Kenneth Francis James, Andrei Ivanschichin Maraklov, had stopped his fighter short of the burning gate ahead. Six hundred and sixty feet, then over a twelve-foot-high obstacle. Another mental command: DreamStar’s computers sampled the external air temperature, inertial winds, pressure altitude, relative humidity, aircraft gross weight, engine-trim-and-performance variables, then computed takeoff data at max performance best angle of climb over the obstacle.
Not good enough. DreamStar reported that it needed at least one thousand feet to clear the obstacle.
James’ reaction was instantaneous. He brought DreamStar’s turbofan engine to full power, moved the vectored thrust-nozzles to full reverse and released the brakes. DreamStar began to move backward toward the taxiway throat leading to the ramp in front of the hangars — back toward the melee he had just escaped from. At the same time he activated DreamStar’s radar system, which scanned in every direction around the fighter.
DreamStar had moved only a hundred feet farther from the gate when he “saw” the first M113 armored vehicle approach. It was moving fast, nearly forty miles an hour, past the burning piles of debris scattered around in front of the now-abandoned Hangar Five less than a hundred yards away. He hit the brakes just as the superconducting radar detected the M113’s twenty-millimeter cannon open fire.
“Hal, what’s your situation?” General Elliott called over the security net.
Hal Briggs grabbed a handhold on the M113’s door for support as he keyed his microphone: “We’re approaching the plane from the left. It’s now about three hundred feet in front of us, facing down the throat toward the gate. I’d swear the thing backed up or somethin’ … Over.”
Elliott, now in a staff car with McLanahan at the wheel, was racing down taxiway delta toward the hangar area, careening over ditches and weaving through gates to get back to the ramp. McLanahan looked at Elliott. “Did he say DreamStar was backing up?” Elliott had no answer. “Hal,” Patrick said, “what’s DreamStar’s range to the gate?”
“Hard to tell until we get closer, but I’d say less than three hundred yards.”
Elliott looked at Patrick. “Is it enough …?”
McLanahan didn’t dare take his eyes off the road, floored the gas pedal and gripped the wheel tighter. “Cool morning, half a fuel load, a little headwind … it’s enough.”
“God damn. Who the hell’s flying it?” Even then, Elliott could not believe that James, one of only three men alive who could possibly fly DreamStar, was in the cockpit. “How the hell did he get in there?” Elliott pressed the mike switch hard enough to turn his finger white. “Shoot out the tires, Hal. If the plane moves, shoot to kill. If DreamStar moves ahead, destroy it.”
Eight hundred twelve point seven feet. Now.
Keeping the brakes on hard, James commanded the throttles to full power, let them stabilize for a few seconds, then pushed them to max afterburner. He allowed another half-second for the computer to perform a single full-power engine-trim adjustment, then opened the dorsal engine louvers. DreamStar’s aft end pitched dowry, and the nose shot up at a steep angle. He set the flex wings and canards for high lift and max performance climb-out. … then released the brakes.