Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06 (15 page)

 
          
Samson
saluted. “Thank you, General. Please personally thank your men and women for
their outstanding service to the nation.”

 
          
At
precisely the moment that General Samson took the wing flag in his hands, a
loud rumbling was heard in the distance. The audience members looked up and saw
an incredible sight: flanked by three T-38 Talon jet trainers that looked
insectlike in comparison, a massive formation of twenty B-52 bombers passed
slowly only 5,000 feet overhead, forming a gigantic number 2 in the sky. The
sound of those huge planes passing overhead sounded as if a magnitude ten earthquake
were in progress—metal folding chairs rattled, bits of dirt on the ground
jumped like giant fleas, a thin cloud of dust began to rise over the ground
stirred up by the vibration, car alarms in the nearby parking lot went off, and
somewhere behind the audience a window shattered in the Base Operations
building.

 
          
Soldiers
yelled and screamed in delight, civilians put their hands to their ears and
made comments to people beside them that couldn’t be heard, and children
clutched their parents’ legs and cried in abject fear— and combat veteran and
(at least until October 1) Eighth Air Force commander Lieutenant General
Terrill Samson felt a lump of awe lodge in his throat, dredged up by a
wellspring of pride from his heart. The sounds of cracking glass in the Base
Ops building finally caused his emotions to bubble forth, and the big
three-star general laughed until he cried, clapping as hard as a young kid at a
circus. The audience happily joined in.

           
Even without dropping any iron,
Samson thought gleefully, the damn BUFFs—the Big Ugly Fat Fuckers—could still
do what they had done best for the past thirty-five years: they could still
break things on the ground with power and ease.

 
          
As
General Samson’s C-21A Learjet transport plane pulled up to the VIP parking
area in front of Base Ops a few hours after the stand- down ceremony ended,
General Samson shook hands with Barksdale’s senior officers and enlisted men
and women, returned their salutes, picked up his briefcase, and headed to the
jet’s airstair. Normally Samson would insist on taking the pilot’s seat, but
this time he had business to attend to, so he headed back to the cabin and
strapped in at the commander’s seat at the small desk. The copilot ensured that
the general was comfortable, gave a short safety briefing to the general and
the other three passengers already aboard, and hurried back to the cockpit. The
plane taxied back to the runway and was airborne again within minutes.

 
          
“Forgot
how emotional these damn stand-down ceremonies can be,” Samson said to his
three fellow passengers. “I’ve been presiding over too damn many of them.”

 
          
“Some
pretty cool flying, though,” said Dr. Jon Masters, as he sipped from a can of
Pepsi. Jon Masters, barely thirty years old, drank several such cans of sugar-laden
beverages every day, but somehow was still as skinny as a pole, still had all
his teeth, and still had no detectable chemical imbalances or vitamin
deficiencies. “They must’ve been practicing that formation for days.”

 
          
“Weeks,
Dr. Masters,” Samson said. “That’s all the flying they’ve been doing lately.”
He looked over at passenger number two, paused as if considering whether or not
he should do it, then stuck out a hand. “How the hell are you, Brad?”

 
          
Retired
Air Force Lieutenant General Bradley James Elliott smiled, noticing Samson’s
discomfort at his presence with undisguised amusement. “Peachy, Earthmover,
just peachy,” he replied, and took Samson’s hand in his.

 
          
There
it was again, Samson thought grimly—that irritating cocksure attitude. Samson was
not sure exactly how old Elliott was, probably in his early sixties, but he had
the demeanor and attitude of a young, spoiled brat, of a guy who just knew he
was going to get his way. Medium height, medium build, still as healthy-looking
in a business suit as ever—even with the leg. Samson’s eyes wandered down to
Elliott’s right leg, barely visible behind the desk. It looked normal under the
nicely tailored suit, but Samson knew it was not normal—it was artificial. Very
high-tech, fully articulating, it had been good enough to get Elliott
re-cleared for flying duties back when he was in the Air Force—but it was still
very artificial.

 
          
Elliott
saw Samson checking out his leg. He smiled that irritatingly smug grin and
said, “Yep, still have the appliance onboard, Earthmover.” He flexed his foot
around in a circle, an incredible feat for a prosthetic device—it truly did
look real. “It only hurts when I think about what’s happening to my Air Force.”
Samson chuckled, but the joke was DOA— no one, not even Elliott, was smiling.

 
          
Elliott
had always been this way, Samson remembered—grim, demanding, headstrong to the
point of being reactionary. A former Strategic Air Command bomb wing commander,
Pentagon staffer, and expert in strategic bombing and weapons, Brad Elliott had
been living the dream that Terrill Samson had harbored for many years—to be
universally acknowledged as the expert, the one that everyone, from the line
crewdogs to the President of the United States, called on for answers to
difficult questions and problems. Elliott was a protege of strategic nuclear
aerial warfare visionaries such as Curtis E. LeMay and Russell Dougherty, and a
contemporary of modern conventional strategic airpower leaders such as Mike Loh
and Don Aldridge, the true proponents of long-range air- power. It was Elliott
who had engineered the hasty but ultimately successful rebirth of the B-l
bomber, developed new cruise missile technology for the B-52, and kept the B-2
stealth bomber on track through its long and expensive trek through the halls
of Congress when it had been a deep “black” program that could be canceled in
the blink of an eye.

 
          
Rising
quickly through the ranks, Brad Elliott had become director of Air Force plans
and programs at the Pentagon, then deputy commander of the Strategic Air
Command. He had been well on his way to a fourth star and command of SAC, and
possibly back to the Pentagon as Air Force chief of staff, when ... he’d
suddenly dropped almost completely out of sight. He’d surfaced only once, as a
military advisor to the abortive U.S. Border Security Force, but he’d been
suddenly so far under cover, wrapped in an airtight cocoon of secrecy of which
Samson had never seen the like, then, now, or ever since.

 
          
Elliott’s
name was linked to dozens of dramatic, highly classified military operations
and programs supposedly originating from the
High
Technology
Aerospace
Weapons
Center
, or HAWC, the top-secret research and
testing facility in the deserts of south-central
Nevada
known as “Dreamland.” Many risky, bold
military operations all over the world had Brad Elliott’s signature style on
them: small, powerful, high-tech air attacks aimed directly into the heart of
the enemy, usually involving heavily modified bombers. Although he didn’t know
for certain, Samson was sure that Brad Elliott and the crewdogs at HAWC had
been behind unbelievable military successes from central America to
Lithuania
to the
Philippines
.

 
          
Well,
here he was again. Brad Elliott was now a civilian, working on classified Air
Force programs as a senior vice president of Sky Masters, Inc. Elliott had been
shit-canned, forced to retire, after a major spy scandal had shut down HAWC and
shoved military research programs back at least a decade. But, as always, Brad
Elliott had landed on his feet, cocky as ever. No one in
Washington
liked him, not even his advocates—like the
President of the
United States
, for example. But he had this mystique,
this air of complete command, of prescience. He was known as the man to turn
to, plain and simple. You didn’t have to like him, but you had better get him
working on your problem.

 
          
Samson
decided to ignore him for the moment, and he turned and shook hands warmly with
the third passenger. “Patrick, good to see you again,” he said to retired Air
Force Colonel Patrick McLanahan.

 
          
“Same
here, sir,” McLanahan said in return. Now, here was a kid he could get to like,
Samson thought. McLanahan was, pure and simple, the best pilot-trained
navigator-bombardier in the
United States
, probably the best in the world. He had
been an engineer, designer, and team chief at HAWC, working as one of Brad
Elliott’s supersecret whiz kids, designing aircraft and weapons that would
someday be used in wars. Like Elliott, McLanahan had been forced to accept an
early retirement in 1996 in the wake of the Kenneth Francis James spy scandal
and the HAWC closing. Even though McLanahan had risked his life to bring the
Soviet deep-cover agent Maraklov back from
Central America
before he had a chance to escape to
Russia
with a stolen secret Air Force experimental
aircraft, he’d been sacrificed for the good of the service. McLanahan and
Elliott had been close friends for many years.

 
          
But
unlike Brad Elliott, Patrick McLanahan got the job done without pissing the
leadership off, without copping an attitude. When the President had wanted
someone to head up a secret aerial strike unit under the Intelligence Support
Agency to counter Iranian aggression in the
Persian Gulf
, he hadn’t turned to Brad Elliott, the
acknowledged expert in long-range bomber tactics—he specifically had
not
wanted Elliott involved in the
secret project, although Elliott had planned and executed many such operations.
The President’s staff instead had turned to Elliott’s protege, McLanahan. And
the young Californian^ who looked more like a young college professor or
corporate lawyer than an aerial assassin, had come through brilliantly, taking
a modified B-2 Spirit stealth bomber halfway around the world to nearly
single-handedly shut down the newly rebuilt Iranian war machine. Now McLanahan
was getting a reputation as the “go-to” guy when the shooting started, even
over well-qualified active-duty crewdogs.

 
          
“So,
what do you have for us, Earthmover?” Brad Elliott asked, rubbing his hands in
exaggerated anticipation. “Are we going after the North Korean chemical weapons
plants? We going to polish up in
Iran
? Someone tried to whack the Iranian
military chief of staff Buzhazi and missed— let
us
take a shot at him. And that ex-Russian carrier is in the
South China Sea
, on its way to
Hong Kong
—we should sink that thing before it gets
within striking range of
Taiwan
. Rumor has it that it’s fully operational
and carrying.”

 
          
Samson
ignored Elliott for the moment—hard to do, since they were sitting right across
from each other—and turned to Jon Masters instead. “I take it that Brad here is
part of your team, Dr. Masters? I wasn’t made aware of that.”

 
          
“We’ve
got five of the eight Megafortresses flying now, General,” Masters said. “We
need experienced crews.”

 
          
“The
Air Combat Command guys you sent need at least six months of training time,”
McLanahan interjected. “They’re good sticks, and they can certainly handle the
beast, but the systems are unlike anything they’ve experienced before. And
we’re changing the systems, too, so we put them to work as engineers and test
pilots while they’re getting checked out on the plane.” He paused, searching
Terrill Samson’s face for any signs of difficulty. “Brad Elliott
is
the Megafortress. He’s the creator,
the progenitor.” Samson was silent, his mouth a hard line on his face.
“Problem, Terrill?”

 
          
“Terrill
thinks the President’s going to have a cow when he sees me,” Elliott answered
for the big three-star general. He turned to McLanahan.

           
“We’re going to meet the
President—didn’t you know that? I called the White House communications office
and confirmed the meeting. That cute V.P. Whiting, Chastain, Freeman, Hartman,
Collier from NS A I think, and George Balboa, that old Navy squid sack of—”

 
          
“Brad
...”