Air Battle Force (21 page)

“Thank you.”

“Stopped hanging out in biker bars, I assume?”

“I ride into one every now and then,” Daren said. “You know, midlife crisis—a guy's gotta have a Harley. But I cut out the beer and the pizzas. My cholesterol count and blood pressure were racing each other to see which could kill me first.” She smiled and nodded. “You look terrific, as always. I like the short hair, too.” There was the second of what it seemed would be many awkward silences. “Congratulations on getting your star,” he added quickly. “You deserve it. You always did.”

“Thank you.”

Awkward silence number three. Thank God, he thought, for the water bottles. “And now you're the wing commander here. Congratulations again.” He looked at her seriously. “I must have you to thank for getting me this assignment.”

“Your record spoke for itself.”

“My record is crap and we both know it, Rebecca,” Mace interjected. “My last assignment as a brand-new full bird colonel was running an office that prepared audiovisual presentations at the Pentagon. I had more responsibility when I was a swing-shift manager at McDonald's in high school.”

“We all have to pull our share of desk jobs.”

“Which one was yours—the bomb squadron in Reno or senior combat air-strike adviser to CINCPAC?”

“What is this—bitterness? Toward the Air Force? You're not the type.”

“At least you still thought of your friends on your way up the ladder—nine years later.”

“Now we're sinking into sarcasm and resentment against
me,
is that it? I advise you to drop that attitude right now, Colonel.” Daren fell silent and briefly lowered his eyes, his only concession to her rank and authority. “If you need a shrink to help you examine these feelings of resentment and rejection, Daren, we'll find you one. But we've got a wing to run. Do you want some time to contemplate your navel and examine your feelings about your father, or do you want to come look around?”

He stood but did not move toward the door. She stood and watched him for a few moments. “Rebecca, you know that I'm grateful for whatever you did. . . .”

“All I did was give them a name—the Air Force and General McLanahan did the rest,” Rebecca said. “You may have been stuck in some less-than-thrilling jobs, but you must've done something right, because you were picked to come here anyway. General McLanahan handpicks everyone who sets foot on this base. And all I know about you is what you say and what you do, Daren. Sometimes I wonder if I ever knew you at all.”

“I guess you're right,” Mace said. He gave her a sly grin. “But as I remember it, neither one of us was intent on exploring the other's feelings. I think we both had only one thing on our minds then.”

Rebecca smiled, despite all her efforts not to let him take her back to that point in time. She never liked to think that she
needed
a man—men were responsible for so many of the headaches, heartaches, roadblocks, and defeats in her career. But back when her career, her sense of self-worth, and the world seemed to be flying apart all at once, she needed a man to want her without demanding anything of her. Daren was there for her, and, as he demonstrated through most of the things he did, he didn't disappoint. He was caring without being clingy and needy, strong without being macho, and sensitive without being stifling.

He also never asked for anything. Consequently, he never got anything. What would he be like, she wondered, if he started demanding respect instead of earning it—like Rinc Seaver?

Rinc was her ill-advised romantic relationship that had filled the void left in her life when she was promoted up and away beyond Daren Mace. Both men were strong, handsome, and intelligent. Unfortunately, Rinc Seaver knew it, and he never let anyone forget it. He had a chip on his shoulder the size of the Golden Gate Bridge, and it would take a nuclear bomb to knock it off.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what did him in.

“Daren, it's good to have you here,” Rebecca said seriously. “And it's good to see you again. But I don't have the time to worry about your feelings toward the Air Force or me. I'm here to stand up a flying wing, and I picked you to help me. I recommended you because I know you can do the job. You were the de facto wing commander at Plattsburgh when no one else on the entire base knew a thing about generating combat aircraft for nuclear war. You pulled us through that. You did some amazing things at Beale with the Global Hawk wing. Now I need you to pull the Fifty-first through this ramp-up and initial cadre-training phase. I'm counting on you.”

“Rebecca, you know I'll do it,” Daren said. Again, that was a weird comment. What's so hard about ramping up a KC-135 unit? The Stratotanker had been around for almost forty years, and it would probably be around another ten or twenty at least. What's going on here? he wondered. What he said was “Seeing you . . . well, it just reopened a few old wounds, that's all. I'm over it.” He nodded, smiled, and added, “The kiss didn't help—but it didn't hurt either.”

“Glad to hear both of those things.” She headed for the door. “I'll show you around. You're not going to believe this place.”

“The objective of this place,” Rebecca said, after Daren had met up with her in the TV lounge, “was to build the most modern military facility in the world: highly secure, as secret as you can make an airfield, and efficient in any kind of weather and tactical situation. Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base is the first military base with a flying mission to be built from the ground up in over fifty years.”

“From what I've seen so far, it's pretty high-tech,” Daren commented. Why in hell was Rebecca blathering on about this place? There were no more than a dozen buildings on the whole base, and, except for the sensors and information datalinks they obviously had set up here, there was no security that he could see. Most of the base looked like open rangeland. The aircraft hangars didn't even have doors—and Daren knew how cold and snowy it got here in the winter.

Rebecca slid Daren a sly glance, which he noticed. Why was she giving him a look like the joke was on him? “We are still technically a Nevada Air National Guard base,” she went on, “so we don't have much in the way of facilities like base housing or recreation—we have to rely on the local economy for that. But we do get a lot of assistance from the active-duty force, so we expect to build more and more facilities as time goes by.” She looked at her watch. “We've got a launch in a few minutes, and since we're the only ones around, we get to do the last-chance inspection. Let's go.”

“Okay,” he said. A last-chance inspection on a KC-135 tanker? Last-chance inspections were usually reserved for aircraft that might have things falling or shooting off them, like bombs or missiles. But it was something to do. They climbed into a Suburban that was laden with radios and had a runway braking-action accelerometer unit installed, and headed off down the taxiway. They reached the departure end of the runway and stopped at the hold line, their flashing lights on.

“When do you expect them to finish your control tower?” Daren asked.

“We don't get a control tower,” Rebecca replied. “We control the airfield by using sensors in the ground and cameras and radar for the surface and sky.”

“Aren't you worried that you're depending an awful lot on all these sensors and datalinks?” Daren asked. “Wouldn't you feel more secure if you had more sets of eyes out here?”

“I'll show you the security and monitoring section next—you won't believe what we can see,” Rebecca said. She received a green light at the hold line, looked up and down the runway for incoming traffic, then pulled out onto the runway and headed back toward the other end. “But we still use humans for a lot of chores, such as runway inspections. We have sensors that can detect a piece of metal on the runway as small as a pea, but we still do visual inspections. Some habits die hard, I guess.”

“Tell me, Rebecca, where's General McLanahan's office?” Daren asked.

“You've met the general?”

“Last night, working in a virtual-cockpit trailer out on the other side of the runway.”

“Hmm. He doesn't really have offices here. He travels a lot, usually to TTR or Dreamland.” TTR, or Tonopah Test Range, was the classified flight and weapon test facility administered by the ninety-ninth wing at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas. High-value weapon systems underwent detailed secret test and evaluation programs at TTR before being deployed.

“Is he current and qualified in the planes assigned here?”

“He's fully qualified to fly all the planes here. In fact, he's one of the
few
who are qualified here, including me,” Rebecca replied. “You know, Daren, I don't really know what the general's mission here is. I know he's trying to start up some sort of a high-tech joint-forces command center based here at Battle Mountain—”

“Based
here?
Where? You don't even have room for the tanker squadron, let alone a joint-forces command. And what ‘joint forces' are you talking about? All I see are some tankers. Or is this something we're going to be standing up in the next few years?”

“You'll see.”

A few minutes later one of the KC-135R Stratotankers taxied over to the end of the runway but stopped well short of the hammerhead inspection area. “C'mon, boys, taxi up here, we won't bite,” Mace murmured. He noticed Rebecca stifling another smile. “Why doesn't he taxi up to the hammerhead?”

“He's okay for now,” Rebecca said. Into her commlink, she spoke, “Bobcat Four-one, Alpha, clear me in for last chance.”

“Roger, Alpha, radars down, brakes set, cleared in.”

“Alpha's coming in.” They started their slow drive around the Stratotanker, looking for open access panel, preflight streamers pulled, landing-gear downlock keys removed, serviceable tires, and to be sure the flaps were down, takeoff trim set, the refueling boom stowed, and the tail-support bar removed. The KC-135R was the reengined version of the venerable KC-135, a Boeing 707 airliner fitted with a boom operator's pod, rear observation window, director lights, and a refueling probe and pumps; it also did double duty as a medium-capacity, medium-range freight hauler. These KC-135s, Daren noticed, also had wingtip-mounted hose-and-drogue refueling pods, so they could refuel U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, NATO, and other nations' aircraft that used the same system. The fin flash letters were “BA,” for Battle Mountain.

“Everything looks good to me,” Daren said.

“Me, too,” Rebecca acknowledged. On her commlink she said, “Bobcat Four-one, this is Alpha, safety check complete, you appear to be in takeoff configuration. Have a good one.” To Daren she added, “ ‘Bobcat' is our unit call sign; the tankers start with ‘four.' “

“Four-one copies, thanks,” the pilot replied.

“You always use the commlink, even talking to aircraft?” Daren asked.

“The commlink is not just a cell phone—it can tie in to many different radio frequencies, satellite communications, computer networks, about a dozen different systems,” Rebecca said. “It's secure and pretty good quality, so we use it all the time. They're working on an even smaller version.”

Rebecca started to drive around the KC-135, turning to the left side so they'd be in full view of the pilot. “So do the tankers here get the usual taskings from all the services,” Daren asked, “or do we just get taskings from—?” He stopped short, his mouth gaping open in utter surprise.

Because directly in front of the KC-135R, in the hammerhead aircraft-inspection ramp, were two B-1B Lancer supersonic bombers. They had appeared completely out of nowhere! “What . . . in . . .
hell . . . ?
”

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what'?
Where did those bombers come from?
”

“You mean to tell me you didn't notice them when we drove up here?” Rebecca asked, totally serious.

“Don't bullshit me, Rebecca!”

“All right, all right,” Rebecca relented. “Let's do this last-chance, and then I'll explain everything.”

Daren was absolutely speechless—but his astonishment was nowhere near complete. The first thing he noticed was that the swing-wings of the B-1s were not fully extended. “They don't look like they're in takeoff configuration,” he said.

“With these planes they are,” Rebecca said. “Our bombers usually keep the wings back for all phases of flight.”

“But how can they do that?”

“Mission-adaptive technology,” she replied. “The whole fuselage is a lift-producing surface and flight control. C'mon, let's finish this, and I'll fill you in.” They did a last-chance inspection of both bombers. As soon as they were done, the bombers were airborne, followed by the tanker. In less than five minutes, the airfield was completely quiet again. Rebecca drove around to the hammerhead parking area. “Let's step outside.”

“Rebecca, how did those bombers get there?” Daren asked excitedly as he followed her out of the Suburban. “And how . . . when . . . shit, Rebecca, what's going on here?”

“You're about to find out.” At that moment Daren felt a slight rumble under his feet.

And the entire section of aircraft-parking ramp under their feet started to descend!

“You actually
built an underground air base?
” Mace asked incredulously. Two huge sections of the hammerhead parking area were actually aircraft elevators, like the ones on an aircraft carrier but a few times larger. He stared wide-eyed as several feet of concrete, rock, armor, dirt, and steel passed overhead, followed by banks of overhead lights. Six stories below they could see men and equipment scurrying around. “This is amazing!”

“It's an amazing engineering project,” Rebecca said. “There are eight of these elevators—two on each end of the runway and four in the mass parking area. We have a solar-charged backup system that can operate the elevators and air-circulation system in case the commercial power goes out. We can seal the interior against chemical or biological attack, and it can withstand anything but a direct hit with a nuclear weapon. We have accommodations for over a thousand men and women down here, plus twenty aircraft. We have twelve assigned here now.”