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.