“I worked at SECDEF’s office for over a year, sir,” Daren said with exasperation in his voice. “I saw perfectly outstanding projects killed on nothing more than a whim: The contractor was from the wrong state and wouldn’t relocate or open up an office in a certain congressional district. A three-hundred-page proposal was missing a few pages. Or some staffer didn’t get a luxury suite when he or she visited a base or plant. You can bust your butt and develop a great program, and they may still cancel it for reasons as stupid as they don’t like the color you painted it.
“Defense procurement is bullshit, sir. The best programs get killed all the time while the crummy ones get funded. Then, years later, the good program gets the green light, even though it costs twice as much as it did the first time.” Daren nodded toward McLanahan’s son sleeping on the ground just a few feet away. “If you pardon me for saying so, sir, there is no project I’ve seen in all my years in the Air Force that’s worth putting a child in a sleeping bag on the ground in the middle of winter so you can keep on working on it. Do you think anyone outside this base cares if you’re successful or not? I can tell you honestly, sir — no one does. It wouldn’t be worth a young boy getting even one sniffle.”
At that moment Daren saw something ignite in McLanahan’s eyes. Whoops, he thought, I just pissed the guy off.
Then McLanahan smiled a deadly-looking smile if Daren ever saw one. “You’re wrong, Colonel — and you’re right,” he said. “You’re wrong because I believe this project is that important. I can’t do anything about what the Pentagon thinks or if Congress will fund it or if the president will deploy it — all I can do is make it work, and that’s what I’m going to do. You’re right that this project is not worth having my son or any child get hurt by it. That’s why you’re going to make it work. Do you think we can get the system tweaked down enough to do complex maneuvers like air refueling?”
“Excuse me, sir, but we’re both navigators,” Daren pointed out. “We know damn well the Air Force can train chimpanzees to fly a B-1 bomber.”
Patrick laughed — and his laughter instantly seemed to brighten the dim, stifling, noisy interior of the little trailer. “You’ve given me a lot more to hope for in five minutes than anything I’ve heard in the past week, Colonel. Can you help me with this?”
“I’ll be glad to give it a try, sir.”
“Good.” He motioned to the fifth console, where the technician was struggling with a debugging program. “Take a look at this, Daren. We’ve been fighting with this routine all night.”
Daren took a quick look, narrowing his eyes as he scanned the readouts. “What program is this, sir? Where did you get it?”
“My guys at Dreamland wrote it several years ago.”
“With all due respect, sir, I think you’ve been hanging out at Dreamland too long,” Daren said. “That program is not only several years old — it’s a generation too old. I guess part of the problem of working at a supersecret research facility is that you never hear when a really good tool is fabricated in the field. My guys at Beale wrote a satellite datalink routine trace-and-synchronization setup program for Global Hawk that’ll knock your socks off. I’m sure we can adapt it for the FlightHawks and eventually the B-1.”
Patrick McLanahan clasped Daren Mace on the shoulder and said, “Outstanding, Daren. Get on it first thing in the morning.” He looked at his watch and added, “I mean, later on this morning. I know that John Long, the ops group commander, has a pretty tight checkout schedule drawn up for you. I’ll get you out of it as much as I can.”
“No problem, sir. There doesn’t seem to be a hell of a lot else to do around here.”
“Not even at Donatella’s?”
Daren smiled and felt himself blushing.
“We keep pretty close tabs on all our troops out here, Daren.”
“It was an interesting visit, sir, but I don’t think I’ll be back anytime soon,” Daren said. “I’ll call the Pentagon and put in official requests for the software to be transmitted to us. It’ll be refused, of course, but then I’ll make a few more phone calls to my boys and girls in the computer labs at Beale, Palmdale, and Wright-Pat, and I’ll have the latest version of the software up and running here by noon. We’ll let the software set up a conversation between your ground station and the aircraft. It’ll tell us where the glitches are and what we need to do to fix them, and soon, in a day or two, we should either be up and running or begging for more money for parts and equipment. But from what I’ve seen in here tonight, you have all the basic stuff already in place — we just need to sort out and correct the bugs. I’ll get right on it.”
“Outstanding,” Patrick said. He motioned to the door and led Daren outside. “And I,” he went on, “will take my boy home with me, and I think we’ll both have a good night’s rest for a change.”
“It’s gotta be tough,” Daren said, “being a two-star general on active duty and a single dad.”
“I’ve got plenty of support — friends, family, nanny — but I never knew it could be so tough,” Patrick said. “But it’s even tougher to hear your own sisters and your mother arguing that it would be in Bradley’s best interest to let him stay with them. It tears me apart, and I work even harder to solve a problem to free up more time to be with him — and what I end up doing is only digging a deeper hole for myself.” He looked at Daren earnestly and said, “I wish I’d brought you in on this project the moment I set foot on base, Daren. I guess I wasn’t thinking straight. I knew your background with the Global Hawks — that was the reason I asked for you in the first place — but then I let Furness and Long schedule the usual wing-orientation stuff with you. I’ve been spinning my wheels out here for weeks.”
“I’m not guaranteeing results, sir,” Daren said, “but we’ll start looking at all the conversations between your systems and your aircraft, track down the breaks, and see what happens. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“I feel lucky already,” Patrick said, and he held out his hand. Daren shook it. “Let’s meet tomorrow afternoon, and you can bring me up to speed on your progress. And if you want anything, buzz me. You’ll get whatever you need.”
“Yes, sir.” Daren watched as Patrick McLanahan went inside the tent and a few moments later emerged with his son clasped tightly to his chest, still snuggled down in his sleeping bag. The big armored android McLanahan named Wilde appeared with the big rifle — did McLanahan call it an “electromagnetic rail gun”?—slung on his shoulder and offered to carry the boy for the general, but Patrick waved him off with a smile on his face.
This damned Air Force had its really shitty moments, Daren thought as he headed back to his pickup truck, but right now he felt like the happiest man in the entire U.S. military. For the first time in many, many years, he finally felt like a part of something special.
He couldn’t wait to get started. He seriously doubted that he was going to get much sleep that night. At first he thought he was going to be dreaming about Amber and what he once had with Rebecca Furness. Now maybe it was going to be about flying robot warplanes.
Two
Well, here they were again, just like two days ago: almost out of food, water, fuel — and getting pretty desperate.
A few things had changed. Wakil Mohammad Zarazi now called himself “General,” and Jalaluddin Turabi now called himself “Colonel.” They had a much larger force traveling with them, well over a full company and a half, and perhaps close to a full battalion. The T-72 tank was still going strong, and they still had plenty of ammunition for its machine gun, although they still hadn’t procured any rounds for the main gun — not that it mattered, since no one in the company knew exactly how to aim and fire the thing anyway. But it looked like a real fighting force now.