Battle Born (18 page)

The cardplayer decided to drop a bit of his nice-guy routine. “I’m the colonel’s operations officer and second-in-command, and I don’t know anything about a meeting this afternoon. Are you sure the meeting with Colonel Furness was for today?”

“Yes, Colonel Long.”

John Long blanched. Shit, he thought, he knows who I am. “The colonel is probably back at the squadron
right now, sir,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better head on over there.” He motioned to one of the guys at the card table. “Bonzo, take this gentleman to headquarters. I’ll page the colonel.”

“I don’t have an appointment with you or anyone else today, sir,” came a woman’s stern voice, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d be a little more candid with my men. The colonel asked your name. You can tell us, or you can get out.”

Patrick turned and found Lieutenant Colonel Rebecca Furness standing right behind him. She was every bit as attractive as her official photos, but that took away none of the iron in her voice. Back when she was flying the RF-111G Vampire reconnaissance/attack planes as a flight leader and the Air Force’s first female combat pilot, Furness had earned the appellation “the Iron Maiden.” Patrick could see right away that it was deserved.

“We need to talk, Colonel,” Patrick said, allowing his eyes to survey her body.

Furness didn’t react—but John Long did. “Hey, asshole,” Long said angrily, “the lady said scram. You better leave or we’ll
help
you out.” A few of the squadron members started to move closer to the stranger.

“Colonel Long, sit down and relax,” Patrick suggested, continuing to stare at Furness. “We’re going to be working together for a long time—if you’re lucky.” He turned, went over to one of the slot machines, put in a quarter, and pulled the handle. A ten-dollar winner dropped a satisfying tinkle of coins into the tray. “Looks like I’m pretty lucky. You guys aren’t. Or maybe that’s
all
you guys are—just dumb lucky.” He left the money in the tray.

“Who the hell are you?” Furness demanded.

“My name is McLanahan, Colonel. Brigadier General Patrick McLanahan. From Air Force headquarters.
General Hayes’s staff.” There was a startled silence in the room at the news that a one-star general had walked into the middle of their “unit training session.”

“I see,” Furness said. “Do you have ID, General? Orders?”

“Yes,” McLanahan replied. He withdrew a set of orders and his green Air Force ID card.

Furness checked the card and scanned the orders, her eyes narrowing in confusion. They were the shortest set of TDY orders she’d ever seen. She handed them to John Long. “These orders don’t say shit,” Long said. “It’s just a bunch of account codes.”

“I’d like something that tells me what you want with my squadron on my base, sir,” Rebecca said.

“Okay.” Patrick reached into his pocket, pulled out a tiny cellular telephone, and tossed it to Furness. She caught it in surprise. “Speed-dial one for General Bretoff in Carson City.” Adam Bretoff was the adjutant general of the state of Nevada, the commander of all Army and Air National Guard forces in the state. “Speed-dial two for General Hayes at the Pentagon. Speed-dial three for the secretary of the Air Force. Speed-dial four for the secretary of defense.”

Furness looked at the phone, then opened it and looked at the keypad. “Who’s speed-dial five?” she asked flippantly.

“Try it and find out, Colonel. But be
very
polite.”

Furness glanced at McLanahan. “I’ll call your bluff, General,” she said, then hit some buttons. She was surprised to hear the beeps of a digital scrambler. A moment later she heard “Bretoff here and secure. Go ahead.”

Furness swallowed in disbelief, unable to control her surprise. She recognized the adjutant general’s voice immediately—the call went right to the secure phone on his desk, not to the comm center, his aide, or a clerk.
This guy was carrying a
secure
cell phone—she didn’t even know they existed! “Colonel Furness here, sir.”

“Problem, Rebecca?”

No pleasantries, no chitchat. She decided that the other speed-dial buttons on the phone were too hot to even
think
about right now. “Just verifying the identity of the gentleman who was sent over here this afternoon.”

“Are you secure?”

Furness stepped as far as she could away from the noisy video poker machines. “Yes, sir,” she replied.

“McLanahan, Patrick S., brigadier general, Air Force,” Bretoff said. “Came from the chief of staff’s office. Identity verified. Is he there already?”

“Standing right in front of me now, sir. I’m using his cell phone.”

“You’ll get a classified memo first thing in the morning informing you about his arrival,” Bretoff said. “Frankly, I’m not sure what he wants, but whatever it is, give it to him.”

“His written orders don’t say anything about what he’s doing here.”

“He doesn’t need any other written orders. He’ll brief you on what you need to do. Give it to him. Anything.”

“Say again, sir?”

“I said, give the general anything he wants,” Bretoff repeated. “Treat him like the inspector general.”

“What’s his clearance?”

“Colonel Furness,” the adjutant general said with exasperation in his voice, “am I not making myself clear? Whatever the man wants, he gets. Full access. Full authority. Whatever he says, goes. He’s got a clearance you or I have never heard of. Two hours ago I had the governor in my office and the secretary of the Air
Force on a conference call.
They
don’t even have this guy’s security clearance.”

“Sir, I understand what you’re saying,” Furness said, “but it’s damned irregular. I’d like written confirmation of my orders.”

“Written orders have been red-jacketed and placed in your personnel file, Colonel—and in mine,” Bretoff went on. “If you want, you can come down here to the vault and look at them. In the meantime, do whatever the man says. Understand?”

“Loud and clear, sir.”

“Good. And, Colonel?”

“Sir?”

“Don’t let anyone in the squadron go anywhere near the back room of that bar, the Quarry or whatever it’s called, the one you guys hang out at near the airport, until this guy departs,” Bretoff said. “The last goddamn thing we need is for a high-powered scalp hunter like McLanahan to see how depraved you characters are. In fact, I don’t want any of you near that entire establishment until he leaves. Try showing your faces in the SANGA club for a change. We don’t have all-night poker or play dollar-a-ball eight ball, but you might actually enjoy yourselves there anyway. Got it?”

Furness grimaced, and McLanahan smiled, as if he could hear everything. “Yes, sir.” The line went dead after another chatter of digital descrambling beeps. Furness carefully closed up the phone and handed it back to McLanahan.

“You don’t want to try any of the other numbers?” McLanahan asked. “It’s not too late to call Washington.”

“Boss? What’s the story?” Long asked, dumbfounded by the expression on Furness’s face.

“This is Brigadier General McLanahan, boys,” Furness said. She made introductions to all of the squadron
officers in the room. “He’s going to be with us for a while. You are to extend him every courtesy and comply with each and every request as if it was an order from the adjutant general himself.”

“We should show him a
little
more courtesy than that,” someone said
sotto voce.

“Knock that shit off, gentlemen,” Furness said, her amused eyes studying McLanahan. “Please excuse that remark, sir. Some of my crew have been on edge. We’ve had a lot of investigators and other unwanted attention lately . . .”

“Yes indeed—a dead crew and a smoking hole in the desert,” Patrick said. The smiles and whispered comments vanished, replaced by angry glares. He looked around and added, “Good to see you’re taking the accident and the corrective action seriously.”

“Of course we are. But you can’t just order men to forget about the deaths of their friends and fellow crew members, General,” Rebecca answered. “It takes time. Please understand—this unit has been through a lot lately. We all deal with grief differently.”

“I see. Well, I can help you through some of your turmoil a little, Colonel. I came here to administer a requalification check.”

Furness frowned in confusion. “Yes, sir,” she said formally, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “We can set up an orientation flight for you. Major Seaver isn’t currently qualified to fly the B-1, but . . .”

“I know that. I will administer his requalification checkout. Emergency procedures check in the sim tomorrow, then a flight ASAP.”

“I see,” Furness said, again noncommittally. “I would prefer that his requal ride be done by someone in the Nevada Guard. I would also like to know your qualifications, sir. Are you qualified to fly the Bone?”

“Doesn’t matter now, does it, Colonel?” Patrick replied.

Furness looked furious but held her anger in check. “Very good, sir. Well, this ought to be fun.” She slapped her hands together in mock excitement. “Well then, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Why don’t we get you set up in a hotel, schedule a meeting to review Seaver’s paperwork and fitness reports, and—”

“You don’t seem to understand, Colonel,” Patrick interjected. “I’m not here just to give Seaver his flight check, and I think we’ll all be too busy to worry about hotel rooms.”

“Then what the hell
are
you . . . pardon me, sir, but what are you here for, then?”

Patrick reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew an envelope. Furness saw the code “A-72” on it. Her eyes bugged out and her breath caught in her throat. He handed her the envelope. “You’ve just been notified, Colonel, that your squadron has seventy-two hours to put bombs on target and then deploy to a remote operations base to begin simulated long-range bombardment operations. Your unit’s predeployment evaluation has just begun. The clock is ticking, and as of right now,
I
am keeping score.”

“What?”
Furness exploded. She grabbed the envelope and tore it open. Sure enough, it was a standard Air Force warning-order message, stamped “Confidential,” directing an air strike against simulated targets in the Nellis bombing ranges in southern Nevada. The strike would be followed by a deployment of not more than two weeks to an undisclosed location to conduct night and day bombing operations from a bare-base location. “This has got to be a joke!” the squadron commander shouted. “I don’t know you! I can’t generate seven Bones on your say-so only!”

At that moment, John Long’s cell phone beeped. He
answered it immediately, listened, then closed it up. “Boss, the airfield operations manager just got a fax from Bretoff’s office, notifying them that intensive Air Guard operations will commence this afternoon.”

“That message was supposed to be secret,” McLanahan said. He shrugged. “You’ve got a good intelligence operation here, Colonel, I’ll give you that.” It was common courtesy for evaluators to give a “heads-up” to certain folks, such as local air traffic control facilities, before an exercise kicked off. It was also common for air traffic control facility managers to slip a heads-up call to the military guys when an exercise was about to commence, even though the information was supposed to be kept under wraps to enhance the shock and surprise element of the exercise.

“Also, Reno Approach Control reports a KC-135 twenty miles out, call sign ‘Blitz Nine-Nine,’” Long went on. The “99” suffix was a common one used by evaluation teams. “RAPCON says he’s parking at Mercury Air for two weeks and is requesting COMSEC procedures in effect for the Air Guard.” That, too, was typical of the kickoff of an exercise. From now on, under COMSEC, or communications security procedures, all movements of Air National Guard aircraft except for safety-of-flight concerns were not to be reported on open radio or phone lines.

Furness looked at McLanahan with a combination of irritation and surprise, then eased up. The predeployment exercise was usually conducted at another B-1B bomber base, usually with the unit flying out and beginning there—but nothing in the regs said it couldn’t start right at home base with a no-notice deployment generation exercise and Furness, like most good fliers, hated surprises.

But she also loved challenges, loved excitement, loved action. Exercises involving recalls, generations, en
route bombing, and deployments were right there beside actual combat on the list of things that made Rebecca Furness’s blood race. McLanahan saw the fire ignite in her eyes. He was pleased.

“Long Dong, initiate a squadron recall,” Furness ordered. “Get Dutch and Clock’s sorties back on the ground on the double. The battle staff meets in fifteen minutes with their checklists open and ready to go, and I will personally kick the ass of the man or woman who is not in their seat ready to go by the time I get there. Notify Creashawn on the secure line, have them start a recall, and get ready to move live weapons for the entire fleet on my orders.” Creashawn Arsenal was the large weapons storage facility near Naval Air Station Fallon where live weapons for the B-1s were stored. “Then call Bretoff secure and inform him I’m generating my fleet for combat operations. Reference General McLanahan’s written orders and his own verbal orders.”

As Long got on his cell phone to initiate the recall, Furness turned to McLanahan, a mischievous smile on her lips and a malevolent glow in her eyes. She looked him up and down, then said, “McLanahan. I once heard of a McLanahan from a friend of mine, the chief of staff of the Lithuanian Army. He told some pretty extraordinary stories about him. Any relation, sir?”

“Maybe.”

“Interesting.” Furness grinned. “This McLanahan was in charge of some pretty cosmic stuff, real Buck Rogers high-tech gear, made for bombers.” There was no response. She nodded, then asked, “You ready for this, General McLanahan? We move pretty fast around here.”

“I’ll be with you the entire way,” Patrick said. “When the sorties launch, I want to be manifested with Seaver as copilot. He’ll be number two in your flight.”

Furness glared at McLanahan in surprise. “I can’t do
that, sir,” she said. “I’m not going to put an unqualified person in the right seat during a live weapons mission. It’s unsafe.” She looked at him warily. “Or are you going to pull rank on this too?”