Air Battle Force (31 page)

“I know you want this, Bill, but trust me, you're not ready for the political spotlight yet,” Martindale said earnestly. “You can't run the White House like a Fortune 500 company—the bureaucrats, the political hacks, and the press inside the Beltway will drive you to homicide in no time. You're helping me now more than you know. Once we make it back to Sixteen Hundred Pennsylvania Avenue, I'll bring you in on everything. But for now you're more effective behind the scenes.”

“Okay—for now, Kevin,” Hitchcock said, obviously disappointed. “But I want to assure you, I'm more than just deep pockets. Let me prove it to you. You won't be sorry.”

“Thanks, William. You're definitely on my short list. But unfortunately, no matter how much money you have, we can't do it without the party's support, and that means taking actions and formulating policies with which the party can build a strong nationwide platform—and we can't start picking staff and appointees without the party's input. Let's keep our eyes on our plan and timetable. We maintain the momentum going in foreign affairs, energy policy, and the military; we stay in the media spotlight, and the party will be kissing our boots and agreeing to anything we want before you know it. They'll be begging us to make you chief of the White House staff.”

“Sounds good to me, Kevin. Sounds good to me.”

They shook hands again. “Don't worry about Turkmenistan, Bill. It'll all be over in a couple days, and we'll come out of it smelling just fine. It's in the bag. Thorn will be sitting around cross-legged, confused, and clueless while we solve yet another brewing foreign crisis right under his nose.”

“What if he or his administration is already doing something about Turkmenistan?” Hitchcock asked. “How do you know we're in the lead on this problem?”

Martindale shrugged and replied with a smile, “I'll ask him. I'm the former president of the United States—I should be able to make some inquiries and get some briefings from his staff. Besides, Thorn believes in open government. He or his staff will tell me everything. And if that doesn't work, I'll just send my spies into the White House and find out everything my own way.”

Early that morning

“With all due respect, Rebecca, this is the most harebrained stunt I've ever heard of,” Colonel John Long, operations-group commander of the 111th Bombardment Wing, snapped. He was standing out on the underground flight line of Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base with Rebecca Furness, Patrick McLanahan, Dean Grey, and the ground team, getting ready to brief the ground crew prior to their flight mission. Long and Major Samuel “Flamer” Pogue were to fly in the second EB-1C, parked beside Rebecca's, as the alternate mission aircraft.

“You've made your opinion plain to everyone, Long Dong,” Rebecca said quietly. “Keep it to yourself.”

“It's my job to point out potential policy mistakes by our senior officers,” Long retorted, raising his voice so everyone could hear and plainly refusing to take the hint, “and this is one perfect example. Completely untested, unverified, a disaster waiting to happen.”

“We copy all, Colonel,” Patrick McLanahan interjected. He wanted to chew the guy out for voicing his opinion like that in front of the entire ground crew, but he didn't want to quash debate, no matter how unprofessionally it was initiated. Instead he only glanced at Long, nodded, and said, “John, we've discussed this decision for two days now. We've staffed it up and down as best we could.”

“General, we had no choice but to meet your arbitrary deadline,” Long insisted. “I'm concerned that
you're
more concerned with dazzling your friends in the Pentagon and meeting a deadline than with crew safety, and I'm afraid this will end in a real disaster.”

“You've made your view very clear,” Patrick said. “I'm taking full responsibility for this test. Your career won't suffer if it fails.”

“I'm concerned about this wing, not about my career.”

“Then that will be a
first,
” Patrick said acidly. “Now, I
strongly
encourage you to keep your opinions to yourself unless asked directly for them. Is that understood, Colonel?”

“Yes,
sir,
” Long shot back. “Loud and clear,
sir
.”

Rebecca and Patrick finished their Form 781 logbook review and crew briefing, then began a walk-around inspection of the aircraft. The forward bomb bay held a rotary launcher carrying four AIM-150 Anaconda long-range, radar-guided, air-to-air missiles and four AIM-120 medium-range, radar-guided missiles. The aft bomb bay held a rotary launcher with eight AGM-165 Longhorn TV- and imaging-infrared-guided attack missiles. The center bomb bay held two AGM-177 Wolverine attack missiles loaded into air-retrieval baskets. Patrick knew that the Wolverines' bomb bays each held four AGM-211 mini-Maverick guided missiles.

“I hate to say it, General, but Long is right—this is crazy,” Rebecca said to Patrick once they were out of earshot of the ground crew.

“It'll work fine,” Patrick said.

“There is an army of engineers and test pilots at Edwards whose job it is to test stuff like this, Patrick,” she said. “Why don't we let them do their damned jobs?”

“Rebecca, if you feel so strongly about this, why are you going along?”

“The same reason you're going—because it's
our
plan and
our
program, and we don't put others in harm's way unless we're willing to take the lead and do it ourselves,” Rebecca replied. “Besides, they're
my
planes, and if you crash one, it's
my
ass. We have some skilled fliers in our unit, but they're newborns compared to us. They've never been in a B-1 bomber that's trying to kill them. But there are a dozen crewdogs at Edwards or Dreamland who would give a month's pay to fly some test missions for us. Why don't we just take the bird down there and let them do it?”

“You know why—because no one at Edwards or anywhere else will waste one gallon of jet fuel or spare one man-hour to work this project without a fully authorized budget.”

“Except me. Me and my budget are the expendable ones, right?”

“I've given you lots of opportunities to back out of this project, Rebecca,” Patrick said. He stopped and looked at her seriously. “You and John Long seem to delight in busting my ass and branding me as the bad guy, the one that breaks the rules but gets away with it every time. Fair enough—I'll accept that criticism. But both of you can put the brakes on this at any time with one phone call to General Magness at Eighth Air Force or General Craig at Air Reserve Forces Command. You haven't done it. You've chewed me out in front of every officer on this base. Long steps right up to the brink of insubordination without even blinking. He's done everything but put an ad in the
Reno Gazette-Journal.

“But you never made the call, and I think I know the reason: You're hoping this works. Every new wing commander wants two things: for no one to screw up too badly, and to make a name for him- or herself in order to stand out above all the other commanders. In relative peacetime it's even more important to shine. Long wants his first star so badly it hurts, and you can trade on your reputation as the first female combat pilot only so long.”

“That's not true, General,” Rebecca said—but her voice had no force, no authority behind it. She knew he was right.

“We can debate this all day, but it won't make any difference,” Patrick went on. “We have the skill and knowledge to make this work. But you're the aircraft commander, the final authority. If you disagree, call a stop to it.” He waited, hands on hips. When she turned her flashlight up at the emergency landing gear blowdown bottle gauges, continuing the preflight, he nodded and said, “All right then, let's
do
it.”

They finished their walk-around inspection, then climbed the steep entry ladder behind the tall nose-gear strut and made their way to the cockpit. After preflighting his ejection seat and strapping himself in, Patrick quickly “built his nest,” then waited for the action to start.

Rebecca joined him a few moments later. After strapping herself in, she pulled out her checklist, strapped it onto her right leg, flipped to the before apu start page, and began—then stopped herself. She ignored the checklist and sat back, crossing her arms on her chest in exasperation—and maybe a little bit of fear.

“Pretty bizarre way to go to war,” she muttered.

“Pretty bizarre way to go to war,” Dean “Zane” Grey muttered. He was seated at a metal desk inside the VC—virtual-cockpit—trailer, staring at two blank flat-panel LCD computer monitors. It was a tight squeeze inside the trailer. In the center of the interior were two seats in front of the metal desk; flanking them were two more seats with full computer keyboards, a trackball, and large flat-panel LCD monitors. On Daren Mace's side, he had a “supercockpit” display—a twelve-by-twenty-four-inch full-color plasma screen on which he could call up thousands of pieces of data—everything from engine readouts to laser-radar images to satellite images—and display them on Windows- or Macintosh-like panes on the display. All other room inside the trailer was taken up by electronics racks, air-conditioning units, power supplies, and wiring. It was stuffy and confining, far worse than the real airplane ever was. It made Grey a little anxious—no, a
lot
anxious.

“Well, this is very cool,” Zane said, “but I'm ready to get going. So where is everything? Flight controls? Gauges?”

“Right here,” Daren Mace said. He handed Zane a thin, lightweight helmet resembling a bicyclist's safety helmet, with an integrated headset and wraparound semitransparent visor encircling the front. Daren then handed him a pair of thin gloves. They all took seats. Putting on the helmets helped to kill the noise of electronics-cooling fans and air-conditioning compressors.

“How cool is this!” Zane repeated. A few moments after turning on the system, he saw a three-dimensional electronic image of an ultramodern B-1 bomber cockpit. No conventional instruments—everything was voice-controlled and monitored via large, full-color, multifunctional electronics displays. He was able to reach out and “touch” the MFDs and move the control stick. “Man, this is unbelievable!”

“We can shift the view to anything you'd like to see—charts, satellite imagery, tech orders, sensor information—anything,” Daren said. “Calling up info and ‘talking' to the plane is easy—just preface every command with ‘Vampire.' Voice commands are easy and intuitive. We have a catalog of abbreviated commands, but for most commands just a simple order will do. Try to use the same tone of voice, with no inflections. You'll get the hang of it soon enough.”

“Very nice,” Zane exclaimed as he got settled in. “It's like a fancy video game, only a lot noisier. Almost as noisy as the plane, I think.”

“General McLanahan wants to build a nicer command-and-control facility here at Battle Mountain,” Daren said, “but we have to prove this thing can work first.” He spent several minutes explaining how to enter commands into the system—voice commands, touching floating buttons or menus, touching the screen with virtual fingers, or using eye-pointing techniques to activate virtual buttons and switches on the instrument panel.

“You almost don't need arms and legs to fly this thing,” Zane commented.

“It was designed at Dreamland by a guy who lost the use of his legs in a plane crash,” Daren responded. “Zen Stockard. He's a buddy of mine. There was a phase where everything designed there was based on virtual-reality or advanced neural-transfer technology, simply because that was the best way for paraplegics to be able to use the gear. You don't need to be an aviator to fly them either—the computers do most of the flying, even the air refueling. We use crew chiefs and techs to fly Global Hawk all the time. Let's report in and get the show on the road.”

“I'm ready, boss,” Zane said excitedly. “VAC is up,” he said on intercom, addressing himself as the “virtual aircraft commander.”

“VMC is up,” Daren reported as the “virtual mission commander.”

“The guinea pigs are in place,” Rebecca responded. “I mean, AC is up.”

“MC is up,” Patrick said. “The guinea pigs here resent that.”

“VE ready,” replied Jon Masters from the seat beside Patrick, reporting in as the “virtual engineer.” Dr. Jon Masters, a boyish-looking man in his mid-thirties who had several hundred patents to his name long before most kids his age had graduated from high school, was the chief engineer and CEO of Sky Masters Inc., a small high-tech engineering firm that developed state-of-the-art communications, weapons, and satellite technology, including the virtual cockpit. Patrick McLanahan had known Jon Masters for many years and had been a vice president of Sky Masters Inc. after he had been involuntarily separated from the Air Force.

“Okay, folks, here we go,” Daren said. “VAC, you have the aircraft.”

“Oh, shit, here we go,” Zane muttered. In a shaky but loud voice, he commanded, “Vampire, battery power on.” Instantly the lights inside the EB-1C Vampire's cockpit came on. He tuned in several radios and got permission to start the plane's APU, or auxiliary power unit; then: “Vampire, before-APU-start checklist.”

In the cockpit, Rebecca barely noticed the response. All the checklist items—eleven steps, which normally took about a minute to perform—were done with a rapid flicker of warning and caution lights. Within three seconds the computer responded,
“Vampire ready for APU start.”

“Wow” was all Rebecca could say.

“Shit-hot,” Zane exclaimed. “Vampire, get me a double cheeseburger, no pickles.”

“Would you like fries with that?”
the computer responded.