Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (15 page)

 
          
“Agreed,”
Freeman said.

 
          
“As
for your other recommendation . .. you have something specific in mind,” the
President surmised. “Spill it.”

 
          
“It
has to do with certain operations in your old administration, sir,” Freeman
said warily. The President shifted uncomfortably but nodded, allowing Freeman
to go on. “Time after time—over
Russia
, in the
Philippines
and the
South China Sea
, over
Belarus
and
Lithuania
,
Central America
, even over the
United States
—something
happened. An invasion force
was neutralized, a heavily protected base or enemy stronghold was mysteriously
smashed. I know our regular military guys didn’t do it; our allies say they
didn’t do it. I have an idea who did, but I tried to talk to some of the key
players several weeks ago, and they weren’t talking. You have some very loyal
friends out there, sir.”

 
          
“I
heard you had been asking questions,” Martindale said. He turned away, then
stood up and began to pace the Oval Office. He stopped and stared at one of the
rounded walls, his hands behind his back. “Bill Stuart... Danahall... O’Day ...
Wilbur Curtis ... oh, God, Marshall Brent, my old teacher ...” He fell silent,
then turned toward his advisers. “Hell, I feel guilty because I haven’t thought
about them more, haven’t had time to pick their brains and have them give me
their wisdom and imagination....”

 
          
“Mr.
President, you used these people because they were the best, because they knew
how much your administration wanted peace but wanted to stop aggression. You
wanted to control the escalation of the conflict, because any other response
could have led to World War Three.”

 
          
“World
War Three ... shit, Brad Elliott.. . HAWC ... Old Dog ...” The President
turned, a wry smile creeping across his face. He rubbed the back of his neck,
then appeared embarrassed to be doing so. “Just thinking about that old
warhorse and what he might be up to makes the hairs on the back of my neck
stand up. You have any idea how much sleep that bastard cost me, worrying about
what might happen if one of his cockamamie ideas blew up in our faces? Christ,
I’m sure he took ten years off my backside. You thought of this several weeks
ago, before the crisis?”

 
          
“A
fight with
Iran
has been looming for many years, since Desert Storm and
Iran
’s military buildup after the war, sir,”
Freeman said. He saw the President nod in silent agreement. “We had to be ready
if
Iran
, or
North Korea
, or
China
struck.”

 
          
“You
two have lost me,” Ellen Christine Whiting interjected. “I know General Curtis,
and General Elliott when he was with Border Security, and I’m familiar with
most everyone you’ve mentioned in the old administration, and Marshall Brent,
of course—he was the greatest, the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln himself—but
I’ve never heard of HAWC or this Old Dog. And what’s all this got to do with
Iran
?”

 
          
“Ellen,
back in the midst of the Cold War and the turmoil in the
Soviet Union
and
China
, we didn’t want to do anything to upset the
superpowers, our allies, or the American people,” the President explained. “We
had a military research unit called HAWC—hell, I don’t even remember what it
stood for, probably some string of military-sounding words just so the acronym
came out cool and tough—commanded by Brad Elliott, way before his stint with
the Border Security Force. He had a small to medium budget, buried so deeply in
the Air Force budget that I think everyone mistook it for a warehouse or a
military band or something. It was always getting slashed, and that bastard
would march up to the Pentagon and scream and holler and jump on desks until we
gave him a few bucks more just to shut him up.

 
          
“Anyway,
Elliott and his staff could take a piece-of-shit plane like a B
-52
bomber and make it
dance,
” the President went on, so
excited with his reminiscing that he found himself talking with his hands,
something he rarely did. “Elliott was building stealth bombers years before the
B-2A; he was playing with TV-guided bombs and small satellites and brilliant
search-and-destroy cruise missiles years before Desert Storm, even before most
experts in the Pentagon ever
heard
of
them. He was so good .. . the stuff he turned out was so reliable, so
effective, that we .. . used them a few times.” “You
what?”
the Vice President asked incredulously. “Used them ... as
in, sent them off to
war?”

 
          
“Sent
them off
before
the war,” the
President said, still smiling. “Remember that Soviet laser site in
Siberia
, the one that was shooting down satellites
and even taking shots at our intelligence aircraft? Remember how it just up and
blew itself apart one night?”

 
          
“We
all assumed it was the Navy SEALs or Delta Force.”

 
          
“Delta
Force didn’t even exist back then,” Freeman corrected her. “The defenses were
so thick around that site, we couldn’t get a plane or a sub in close enough to
infiltrate a SEAL or Green Beret team. We thought we’d need an ICBM to take it
out.” He turned to the President. “That was Elliott? Flying one of his
experimental planes?”

 
          
“A
fucking B-52 bomber, a job older than most of the crew members who flew it.
They called it the
Old Dog.
Called
Brad Elliott that, too,” the President said proudly. “Elliott called it a
‘flying battleship,’ had it loaded up with smart bombs, decoy drones, even air-
to-air missiles, if you can believe it.”

 
          
“I
can’t believe this,” Whiting exclaimed. “Congress knew absolutely nothing about
it?”

 
          
“No
one knew, except for the White House inner circle,” the President said. “Heck,
even
I
got briefed
after
the fact! But Elliott did it,
Ellen. He was so successful, we used him again and again. A Chinese radar site
and a big battleship needed taking out in the
Philippines
? Nobody else around within a thousand
miles, no carriers, no subs—but Elliott’s toys would take them out. Elliott’s
toys destroyed an entire Belarussian armored battalion, a hundred tanks and
armored vehicles, in one night—hell,
in
one pass
—without anyone in
Europe
knowing about it.”

 
          
The
Vice President was still shaking her head. “What happened to him?”

 
          
“He
was fired, forced to retire,” Martindale replied. “He started to make mistakes,
got a little overconfident. He was a throwback, too. He’d go out looking for
fights—he’d want to fly his hybrid spaceships in each and every little conflict
that cropped up in the whole friggin’ world. Fortunately for us, he would never
quit—
un-
fortunately for him, he
never learned
when
to quit.”

 
          
“Sounds
like my kind of guy,” Freeman said with a smile.

 
          
“No,
Phil, not anymore. If you’re thinking about using him in some way for this
Iran
thing, forget it. He was a loose cannon. We
stayed awake nights thinking of how we were going to explain things to
Congress, to the American people, to our allies, if Elliott screwed the pooch.”

 
          
“I
wasn’t thinking about Elliott,” Freeman said. “I was thinking about McLanahan.”

 
          
“Who?”
asked Whiting.

 
          
“Patrick
McLanahan,” said Martindale. “One of Elliott’s deputies. Damned talented youngster.
But I thought he was gone, too.”

           
“I found him,” Freeman said with a
mischievous smile. “I found most of the surviving members of Elliott’s gang. .
. and I prescreened most of them under NSA Article Three.”

           
“Article what?” Ellen Whiting asked.
She hurriedly read through a draft Executive Order that Freeman handed to her.
“And you’re proposing that we create a military force that acts under sole
authority of the White House? The Pentagon will never support it. The Cabinet
will never buy it. Congress will never fund it. The American people will scream
bloody murder.”

           
“We’ve already got the force in
place, Ellen,” Freeman said. “It’s called the Air Force Intelligence Agency,
based out of San Antonio, Texas. They’ve been in business for four years now,
assisting the Air Force and other agencies in combat, scientific, and human
intelligence operations. The agency is a combination of assets from other
forces, including Air Combat Command. These were the guys that helped pick out
targets in
Baghdad
for the stealth fighters; they operated in
Iraq
and even in
Haiti
, picking targets for the Air Force. They’re
experienced with working with the National Security Agency, CIA, and foreign
intelligence services. So what we do is team them up with the Intelligence
Support Agency to find
Iran
’s mobile missiles and mess up their
command-and-control system. If we destroy their communications and
command-control network, maybe we can head off a war
before
it starts.”

 
          
The
Vice President remained openly skeptical; the exasperated shake of her head
told her opinion of the legal authority to conduct military operations without
notifying Congress, not to mention the commonsense logic of doing such
operations without getting the entire Cabinet on board. “Ma’am, I’m not
suggesting we start a war— I’m suggesting that we get some high-tech eyes out
there to keep an eye on the region and get some precision, survivable firepower
in the area in case something does happen,” Freeman went on. “We all know that
Iran
would very well start a war if we do a
Desert Shield-type escalation or overtly threaten them with any show of
force—that’s why I’m suggesting we do this operation as quietly and as
stealthily as possible.”

 
          
“But
we have political and diplomatic realities to face, General.” The President
held up a hand to the Vice President. “Hold on, Ellen. Let’s let the general
dig himself out of this. What are you proposing, Philip?” the President asked.

           
“I’m proposing an escalation of
technologies, if you will, all employed by the Air Force Intelligence Agency,
and all centered around keeping an eye on Iran as it conducts this
saber-rattling routine,”

 
          
Freeman
said. “I want the same B-2A HAWC flew over the
Philippines
in the
China
conflict, the one that carried the exotic weapons
that no one ever heard of. We’ll need specialized crews for this plane. They
happen to be civilians, but I think they’ll come back and fly for us.”

 
          
“Why
that particular plane, Phil?” the Vice President asked. “Why a civilian to fly
it?”

 
          
“The
Air Force doesn’t have the new weapons yet—no one has them, except the crews
that used to work at HAWC in
Nevada
,” Freeman replied. “Even the B-2As still
use dumb bombs. Only a handful of fliers know how to use the real
twenty-first-century Buck Rogers hardware—and I found them.”

 
          
“So
you’re proposing sending this B-2A loaded up with smart bombs and flown by CIA
spies over
Iran
to blow up a command center—without declaring war or notifying
Congress?” Whiting asked incredulously. Both Freeman and Whiting noticed that
the President was perfectly content to let her play “devil’s advocate” and come
up with as many negatives as possible, so she charged ahead: “I can’t think of
a faster, easier way to start a world war, bring down international
condemnation on this office, and be branded as lunatic terrorists ourselves!”