Patrick McLanahan #02 - Sky Masters by Dale Brown

Author:Dale Brown [Brown, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thrillers, China, Air pilots; Military, Technological, McLanahan; Patrick (Fictitious character), Espionage
ISBN: 9780399137051
Publisher: Donald I. Fine/Putnam, 1991.
Published: 1991-07-17T04:00:00+00:00

satellite is far out." Blanchard looked at her younger deputy and rolled her eyes. Fruntz, Blanchard thought, was another "techie" who believed that, whatever the newest technology was, it had to be better than any of the "older" technology, even if the older technology was only a few years old. Blanchard had been in the reconnaissance business for twelve years, mostly as pilot or copilot flying EC- and RC- 135 aircraft for the Strategic Air Command-this was only her second tour as recce section commander-and she had been dismayed at the new emphasis on space-based reconnaissance systems, or "gadgets" as she called them. Even the latest high-tech satellites had serious limitations that only well-equipped planes like the RC- 135 or the newer EC-18s could overcome. Blanchard had flown or seen just about every one of the sixty different iterations of the C- 135 special mission I reconnaissance/intelligence-gathering aircraft. The RC-135X, nicknamed

"Rivet Joint, " was the latest and best of the older RCseries aircraft; the newer series was designated EC- 18 and was a hundred times more cosmic than even the RC- models. Rivet Joint had been designed to map out precise locations of coastal enemy air-defense sites for targeting by Short-Range Attack Missiles or cruise missiles that armored long-range bomber aircraft. By combining sensitive radiation sensors with powerful radar and infrared images, one Rivet Joint aircraft could update three thousand miles of coastal air-defense sites in one day.

Blanchard used to fly reconnaissance missions in conjunction with SR-7 1

Blackbird spy planes-the SR-7 1 would fly "Radar four reports surface contact, " one of the radar operators suddenly called out. "Slow velocity... now showing ten knots, heading westbound."

"There's something that NIRTSat thing didn't find, " Blanchard snickered. "No matter how gee-whiz that satellite is, thirty.minute-old data is still thirty.minute-old data-and it's garbage to us." She turned to the radar operator and said, "I need a designation on that last contact, Radar. Get on it."

"Signal two shows primary search radar on that surface contact, "

another operator called out. "Showing C-band, three-seventy PRF . . .

calling it a Rice Screen air-search radar... "Radar four has an ISAR

probable on that return, calling it a EF4-class destroyer... now picking up escorts, probably as many as four, within ten miles of EF4." The ISAR, or Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar, mounted in the two prominent fairings on the underside of the RC- 135's fuselage, could paint a nearly three.dimensional picture of a ship and, by combining it with a computer data base of thousands of such radar images, could usually match the radar image with a ship in its computer memory. The larger the ship, the more accurate the match, and a destroyer-class vessel was a very large radar return. "Jeez, they got some pretty fancy firepower out here, " Blanchard said. "A destroyer-class boat this far south."

She turned to the forward part of the aircraft. "Comm, code and send immediately to Andersen and Offutt on separate channels the position of that last contact. It's the biggest gun the Chinese have this far south-I want to make sure everybody knows about it.

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