Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (16 page)

           
“I have a feeling it’ll be soon, my
friend. I’ve been getting calls from half the J-staff, a bunch of calls from
Space Command—you
had
to be the next
caller. Let me guess—you want some air time on some satellites of mine.”

           
“Now how the hell did you know
that?”

           
“Every time I build a new toy, you
want it, that’s how I know it.”

           
“That’s why you’re out there, you
stupid bastard. You’re supposed to be developing toys for us to play with, not
polishing your three stars. Stop whining.”

           
“I’m not, believe me.” Elliott
chuckled. “I assume you want to use the new Masters NIRTSats, the ones that can
downlink radar, infrared, and visual imagery all in one pass in real-time both
to the ground stations and aircraft. Right?”

           
“You’re not telepathic are you?”
Curtis joked. “They tell me you can receive satellite images on your B-2 bomber
as well as your B-52 Megafortress?”

           
“We flight-test PACER SKY at the
Strategic
Warfare
Center
in a couple weeks,” Elliott said, “but
ground tests have gone really well. Let me guess some more: you want pictures
of a certain area, but don’t want to use DSP or LACROSSE satellites because you
don’t want certain superpower countries to know you’re interested. Am I close?”
“Frightfully close,” Curtis said. “We’re watching a Chinese naval buildup in
the
South China Sea
. We think they might be getting ready to
plug away at either the Spratlys or the
Philippines
. If we send a DSP or KH-series bird over
the area, we risk discovery.”

           
“The
Philippines
? You mean the Chinese might try an
invasion?”

           
“Well, let’s hope not,” Curtis said.
“The President is a big fan of President Mikaso’s. We’ve been expecting
something like this for years, ever since we realized there was a good
possibility we were going to get kicked out of the
Philippines
—now it might actually happen. We’ve got our
pants pretty much down around the ankles as far as
Southeast Asia
goes right now. What with the buildup in
the
Persian Gulf
and the closing of a bunch of bases
overseas, we’ve got zilch out there . .

           
“Well, if you need the pictures, you
got ’em,” Elliott said, running his hand across the top of his hair. “We can
transmit the digitized data to J-2, or Jon Masters can set up one of his
terminals right on your desk there—providing you don’t keep stretching your
secretary out over it all the time.” “My secretary is a fifty-year-old Marine
Corps gunnery sergeant that could grind us both down into little nubs, you old
lech.” Curtis laughed. “No, transmit it to J-2 and J-3 out here at the Pentagon
soonest. They’ll give you a call and tell you exactly what they want ...”

           
“I know what you want, sir,” Elliott
said.

           
“Hey, don’t be so sure, big shot,”
Curtis said. “Man, some guys—they get on the fast track, tool around the White
House for a few months, and it goes right to their heads. And stop calling me
sir. You’d have four stars, too, if you’d climb up out of that black hole
you’ve built for yourself out there and join the real world again.”

           
“What? Leave Dreamland and miss the
opportunity for some first-class, four-star abuse? No way.” Elliott gave his
old friend a loud laugh and hung up.

U.S.
Air Force Strategic
Warfare
Center
Ellsworth AFB,
South Dakota

           
“Room, ten-HUT!”

           
Two hundred men and women in olive
drab flight suits moved smartly to their feet as Air Force Brigadier General
Calvin Jarrel and his staff entered the auditorium briefing room. The scene
could have been right out of
Patton
except for the ten-foot-square electronic liquid-crystal screen onstage with
the Strategic Air Command emblem in full color, showing an armored fist
clutching an olive branch and three lightning bolts. Otherwise it looked like
the setting for countless other combat-mission briefings from years past—
except these men and women, all SAC warriors, weren’t going to war ... at least
not yet.

           
It was easy to mistake General Cal
Jarrel for just another one of the four hundred or so crew dogs at the Air
Force Strategic Warfare Center, and that was just fine with him. Jarrel was an
unimposing five foot eleven, one-hundred- sixty-pound man, with boyish brown
hair and brown eyes hidden behind standard-issue aluminum-framed aviator’s
spectacles. Many of those close to the General thought that he was
uncomfortable with the trappings of a general officer, and everyone on the base
agreed that at the very least he was the most visible one-star anyone had ever
known. On the flight line or on the indoor track in the base gym, he could be
seen jogging early each morning with a crowd of several dozen staffers and
visitors, which was how he kept his slight frame lean and trim despite an
ever-increasing amount of time flying a desk instead of a B-52 Stratofortress,
B-1B Excalibur, or F-l 11G Super ’Vark bomber. He was married to an
environmental-law attorney from
Georgia
and was the harried father of two teenage
boys.

           
Like many of the men and women in
the Strategic Air Command of the mid-1990s, Jarrel appeared studious,
introspective, unobtrusive, and soft-spoken—unlike their hotshot fighter-pilot
colleagues, it was as if they understood that the awesome responsibility of
carrying two-thirds of the nation’s nuclear deterrent force was something that
was not to be advertised or bragged about.

           
Certainly, the critics thought,
SAC’s twenty thousand aircrew members had little to boast about and nothing to
look forward to for the next century—the fifty B-2s and one hundred
rail-garrisoned Peacekeeper ICBMs planned to be operational by then might very
well be the only nucleararmed weapons in SAC’s inventory. Virtually all of the
B-52s, B-1B bombers, cruise missiles, and reconnaissance aircraft were rumored
to be headed for conventionally arnrcd tactical-support roles, in the inactive
reserves—or, worse, in the boneyard.

           
It was a winding-down period for
SAC, which created questions about readiness, training, and motivation. That’s
where Jarrel’s
Strategic
Warfare
Center
School
, and the Air Battle Force, came in.

           
“Seats,” General Cal Jarrel said in
a loud voice as he made his way to the stage. The aircrew members in the room
took their seats and restlessly murmured comments among themselves as Jarrel
stepped up to the podium. He was there to give the welcoming speech to a new
crop of aircrew members that were to begin an intensive three-week course on
strategic air combat—SAC’s “graduate school” on how to fly and fight. As was
the case for the past year since becoming director of the Strategic Warfare
Center, he had to convince each and every one of these men and women of the
importance of what they were about to learn—and, in a very real sense, to
convince the rest of the country and perhaps himself as well.

           
Lieutenant Colonel McLanahan
listened to General Jar- rel’s comments, sitting on the edge of his auditorium
seat. All around him were stealth bomber crews, who, like him, were there to
attend the
Strategic
Warfare
Center
school.

           
When General Jarrel acknowledged the
B-2 crews in his opening remarks, a ripple of applause—and a few
Bronx
cheers—passed over the crowd for the B-2
crews.

           
This is where I belong, McLanahan
thought: in a flight suit, getting briefed with these other crew dogs. He had,
he realized, been isolated at Dreamland far too long. Sure, he was one of the
most dedicated and successful aircrew members and weapon-systems project
managers in the entire military. But where had that gotten him? Flying a
battle- scarred B-52 fully renovated with modem hardware deep into Soviet
airspace to knock out
Russia
’s state-of-the-art armaments? It should
have been the most rewarding mission in his career. Instead it had landed him
at HAWC, where he’d been ever since. But flying was in his blood. McLanahan
knew the score—because of the highly classified nature of his work he’d
probably never get beyond 0-6 (Colonel), or if he was lucky, 0-7
(Brigadier-General). But at least they were letting him fly a dream plane. The
only problem was he couldn’t tell anyone about it. His cover story was that h^
was “observing” the school for the Pentagon. Still ... he was here. And the
real excitement was coming. . . .

           
General Jarrel was well into his
talk.

           
“SAC is being tasked with much more
than delivering nuclear weapons—we are being tasked with providing many
different elements of support for a wide variety of conflict scenarios,” Jarrel
went on, speaking without a script and from his heart as well as from the
numerous times he’d given this speech.

           
“The way we do it is through the Air
Battle Force,” Jarrel continued. “From this moment on, you are not members of
any bomb squadron, or fighter squadron, or airlift group— you are members of
the First Air Battle Wing. You will learn to fly and fight as a team. Each of
you will have knowledge of not only his or her own capabilities, but those of
your colleagues. The Air Battle Force marks the beginning of the first truly
integrated strike force—several different weapon systems, several different
tactical missions, training, deploying, and fighting together as one.

           
“Because the Air Battle Force
concept is new and not yet fully operational, we have to disband each task
force class and return you to your home units. When you leave this Center, you
will still belong to the Air Battle Force, and you are expected to continue
your studies and perfect your combat skills from within your own units. If a
crisis should develop, you can be brought back here to be placed back within
the Air Battle Force system, ready to form the Second or Third Air Battle
Wings. Eventually, Air Battle Wings will be formed on a full-time basis for
extended tours.”

           
Jarrel talked for several more
minutes, giving the history of the Strategic Warfare Center’s mission, which
since 1989 had conducted strategic combat training exercises through sorties
that were spread over three thousand miles of low- and high-altitude military
training routes over nine Midwestern states.

           
When he had finished, he said, “All
right, ladies and gentlemen, get out there and show us how a strategic battle
can be fought by
America
’s best and brightest!”

           
The auditorium erupted in cheers,
and somewhere in the middle of the crowd, Patrick McLanahan was cheering the
loudest.

           
Late one night a couple of days
after General Jarrel’s Strategic Warfare Training Program was under way,
Brigadier General John Ormack, who had come with Cobb, McLanahan, the EB-52 and
B-2 bombers, and the rest of the support crew from HAWC, found Patrick
McLanahan sitting in the cockpit of his Black Knight. External power and air
had been hooked up, and McLanahan was reclining in the mission commander’s seat
with a computer-generated chart of the Strategic Training Range Complex on the
three- by-two-foot Super Multi Function Display before him. Patrick had a
headset on and was issuing commands to the B-2’s sophisticated
voice-recognition computer; he was so engrossed in his work—or so deep in
daydream, Ormack couldn’t quite tell which—that the HAWC vice commander was
able to spend a few moments watching his junior chief officer from just behind
the pilot’s seat.

           
The guy had always been like this,
Ormack remembered—a little spacy, quiet, introverted, always preferring to work
alone even though it was a genuine pleasure being around him and he seemed to
enjoy working with others. He had the ability to tune out all sound and
activity around him and to focus all his attention and brainpower on the matter
at hand, whether that was a mission-planning chart, a bomb run at Mach one and
a hundred feet off the ground, or a Voltron cartoon on television. But ever
since arriving here at Ellsworth, McLanahan had become even more hardworking,
even more focused, even more tuned out—to everything else but the task at hand,
which was completing the curriculum at the
Strategic
Warfare
Center
and the Air Battle Force with the highest
possible grade. Even though McLanahan himself was not being “graded” because
the HAWC crews were not official participants, he was slamming away at the
session as if he were a young captain getting ready to meet a promotion board.
It was hard to tell if Patrick was working this hard because he enjoyed it or
because he was trying to prove to himself and others that he could still do the
job. . . .