“Real nice, Mugs.”
“It’s Margaret, you dillweed,” Harrison snapped with a smile. To McLanahan again: “Is it true, sir—did you really disregard orders from the president of the United States to bomb that Russian base in Iran?”
“I can’t talk about it,” Patrick said.
“But you did capture that Russian base in Siberia after the American holocaust and use it to attack those Russian missile sites, right, sir?” Reese Flippin, an impossibly thin, impossibly young-looking private contractor with a heavy southern accent and protruding teeth asked. “And the Russians shot nuke missiles at that base, and you survived it? Hot damn…!” And as the others laughed, the accent completely disappeared, even the teeth seemed to recede to normal positions, and Flippin added, “I mean, outstanding, sir, quite outstanding.” The laughter grew even louder.
Patrick noticed a young woman in a desert gray flight suit and gray flying boots gathering up her laptop computer and notes, staying separate from the others but watching with amusement. She had short dark hair, dark magnetic brown eyes, and a mischievous dimple that appeared and disappeared. She looked somewhat familiar, as many Air Force officers and aviators did to Patrick. Wilhelm hadn’t introduced her. “I’m sorry,” he said, talking around the others crowded around him but suddenly not caring. “We haven’t met. I’m—”
“Everyone knows General Patrick McLanahan,” the woman said. Patrick noticed with surprise that she was a lieutenant colonel and wore command pilot’s wings, but there were no other patches or unit designations on her flight suit, just vacant squares of Velcro. She extended a hand. “Gia Cazzotto. And actually, we have met.”
“We have?” Jerk, he admonished himself, how could you forget her? “I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
“I was with the One-Eleventh Bomb Squadron.”
“Oh,” was all Patrick could say. The One-Eleventh Bomb Squadron was the Nevada Air National Guard B-1B Lancer heavy bomber unit that Patrick had deactivated, then reconstituted as the First Air Battle Wing at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base in Nevada—and since Patrick didn’t remember her, and he had handpicked each and every member of the Air Battle Force, it was quickly obvious to him that she hadn’t made the cut. “Where did you go after…after…”
“After you closed down the guard unit? It’s okay to say it, sir,” Cazzotto said. “I actually did okay—maybe closing the unit was a blessing in disguise. I went back to school, got my master’s degree in engineering, then got a position at Plant Forty-two, flying the Vampires headed for Battle Mountain.”
“Well, thank you for that,” Patrick said. “We couldn’t have done it without you.” Air Force Plant 42 was one of several federally owned but contractor-occupied manufacturing facilities. Located in Palmdale, California, Plant 42 was famous for building aircraft such as Lockheed’s B-1 bomber, Northrop’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, Lockheed’s SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter, and the Space Shuttle.
After the manufacturing lines shut down, the plants often did modification work to existing airframes as well as research and design work on new projects. The Air Battle Force’s B-1 bomber, renamed the EB-1C “Vampire,” was one of the most complex redesign projects ever done at Plant 42, adding mission-adaptive technology, more powerful engines, laser radar, advanced computers and targeting systems, and the capability of employing a wide array of weapons, including air-launched antiballistic missile and antisatellite missiles. It eventually became a pilotless aircraft with even better performance.
“And you’re still flying B-1s, Colonel?” Patrick asked.
“Yes, sir,” Gia replied. “After the American holocaust, they brought a dozen Bones out of AMARC, and we refurbished them.” AMARC, or the Aircraft Maintenance and Regeneration Center—known to all as the “Boneyard”—was the vast complex at DavisMonthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, where thousands of aircraft were taken to be stored and cannibalized for spare parts. “They’re not quite Vampires, but they can do a lot of the stuff you guys did.”
“Are you flying out of Nahla, Colonel?” Patrick asked. “I didn’t know they had B-1s here.”
“Boxer is commander of the Seventh Air Expeditionary Squadron,” Kris Thompson explained. “They’re based in various places—Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Diego Garcia—and stand by for missions as coalition forces in theater need them. She’s here because of the Iraqi operation tonight—we’ll have her B-1s standing by just in case.”
Patrick nodded, then smiled. “‘Boxer’? Your call sign?”
“My great-grandfather came into the U.S. at Ellis Island,” Gia explained. “Cazzotto was not his real last name—it was Inturrigardia—what’s so hard about that?—but the immigration people couldn’t pronounce it. But they heard the other kids calling him cazzotto—which means ‘a hard punch’—and they gave him that name. We don’t know if he was getting beat up all the time or if he was the one doing the punching.”
“I’ve seen her on the punching bag at the gym; she deserves that call sign,” Kris said.
“I see,” Patrick said, smiling at Gia. She smiled back, their eyes locking…
…which gave the others around them an opening. “When can we see this plane of yours, sir?” Harrison asked.
“Can it really do everything you said…?”
“Are you taking over for all the military units in Iraq…?”
“All right, boys and girls, all right, we have work to do,” Kris Thompson interjected, holding up his hands to stop the fast-moving questions being fired at Patrick. “You’ll have time to pester the general later.” They all jostled to shake Patrick’s hand again, then gathered up their thumb drives and papers and exited the briefing room.
Gia was the last to depart. She shook Patrick’s hand, keeping it an extra moment in her own. “Very nice to meet you, sir,” she said.
“Same here, Colonel.”
“I prefer Gia.”
“Okay, Gia.” He was still clasping her hand when she said that, and he felt an instantaneous rush of warmth in it—or was his own hand suddenly sweating? “Not Boxer?”
“You don’t get to pick your own call signs, do you, sir?”
“Call me Patrick. And bomber guys didn’t have call signs when I was in.”
“I remember my old ops officer at the One-Eleventh had some choice names for you,” she said, and then smiled and headed off.
Kris Thompson was grinning at Patrick. “She’s cute, in a Murphy Brown kind of way, eh?”
“Yes. And wipe that grin off your face.”
“If it makes you uncomfortable, sure.” He kept on grinning. “We don’t know that much about her. We hear her on the radios once in a while, so she still flies. She comes in to run missions occasionally, like tonight, and then she’s off again to another command center. She rarely stays for longer than a day.”
Patrick felt an unexpected pang of disappointment, then quickly shook the uncomfortable feeling aside. Where did that come from…? “The B-1s are great planes,” he said. “I hope they resurrect more of them from AMARC.”
“The grunts love the Bones. They can get to the fight as fast as a fighter; loiter for long periods of time like a Predator or Global Hawk, even without air refueling; they have improved sensors and optics and can pass a lot of data to us and other planes; and they have as much precision-guided payload as a flight of F/A-18s.” Thompson noted the quiet, slightly wistful expression on Patrick’s face and decided to change the subject. “You’re a real inspiration to those kids, General,” he said. “That’s the most excited I’ve ever seen them since I’ve been here.”