Freeman knew he should be furious, but somehow he couldn’t fault McLanahan, not after all the man had seen and been through. He let the anger drain away with the pain in his right hand, then nodded. “I’ll keep my part of the bargain,” Freeman said, I not because of your little macho stunt, but because I goddamn do care about the men and women under my command. I don’t play games, Colonel McLanahan.”
McLanahan snatched up the wig and shook it in front of Freeman angrily. “We all play games—but not with the lives of fellow crewdogs. I learned a lot from Brad Elliott in almost ten years, sir, and I’ve got lots of ideas of my own. You play straight with me, and we’ll kick some ass and come home alive. If you don’t, I’ll make you wish you hired Brad Elliott and had never even heard of me.”
Freeman did not like being spoken to in this way, but he knew McLanahan was a truly dedicated man. Everything he had heard and read about this guy was true. “If you’re finished breaking my fingers and my ass, you’re on the government clock now, McLanahan.
Your plane leaves Travis Air Force Base in seven hours. Good luck.” By impulse, he held out a hand to him, then quickly retracted it. He smiled, nodded, and said, “Kiss your lovely wife good-bye, McLanahan. You’re in the ISA now.”
WHITEMAN AFB, MISSOURI 17 APRIL 1997, 0649 CT
“Who the hell is it, Tom?” Colonel Anthony Jamieson irritably asked the one-star general standing beside him. The two officers were standing in the cool, damp morning air outside the base operations building at Whiteman Air Force Base, Knob Noster, Missouri, waiting as ordered for the jet carrying the VIPs to arrive. “A Congressman? A Senator’s aide?”
“The boss says you don’t need to know the answer to that, Tony—yet.” Brigadier General Thomas Wright, the commander of the 509th Bomb Wing, Whiteman Air Force Base, and Jamieson’s boss, obviously disliked giving that kind of response to a senior officer, fellow pilot, and friend—but it was the only one allowable.
Jamieson could see his boss’s indecision and decided to keep on pressing: “Do you know who he is?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” Wright admitted, “and apparently I don’t need to know, either. Listen, Tiger, stop asking all these damned questions. You just have to fly him in the simulator. This is just one of Samson’s gee-whiz dog-and-pony-show tours. Have fun, water his eyes—you know the drill. I’ll wax your ass in golf afterward.”
Jamieson muttered a curse under his breath and fell silent, seething underneath. Tony “Tiger” Jamieson, a twenty-five-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force with over four thousand hours’ flying time and experience in several major conflicts from Vietnam to Libya to the Persian Gulf, had been tasked to give a “dog-and-pony-show” ride for a visiting VIP. The former fighter-bomber ace, now the operations group commander of the 509th Bomb Wing, the home of the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber, was not accustomed to being ordered to do these “public affairs things,” as he liked to call them, and he would have preferred to turn the whole thing over to the bomb squadron commander or one of his senior instructor pilots, the tall, studly-looking Steve Canyon types with the square jaws and blue eyes that look so good on TV and in the newspapers. But the brass—namely, the wing commander and his boss, the commander of all Air Force bomber forces—wanted Jamieson, so his job was to salute smartly. say “Yes, sir,” and perform as expected.
The C-20H military special air mission jet landed precisely at its scheduled time, and taxied quickly to the base operations building; even before the engines had spooled down on the military version of the Gulfstream IV, a door popped open and soldiers and technicians in fatigues hurried out. The VIPs, led by a three-star general accompanied by a two-star general, a colonel, and two civilians, were quickly whisked right from the plane to the waiting cars without stopping for any pleasantries, as if the early-morning sunlight would shrivel them up like vampires if they stayed in the open too long. Two Humvee security vehicles filled with uniformed and plain-clothes security officers flanked the staff cars; Jamieson was displaced to a second staff car because a plain-clothes security officer, armed with a submachine gun partially hidden under his safari-style jacket, took the front seat. He also noted many other persons in utility uniforms disembarking from the C-20 Gulfstream jet, all heading for the maintenance group hangar complex in a real hurry, some carrying catalog cases full of tech orders, some carrying toolboxes and test-gear equipment—and some, judging by the length of their hair and the width of their midsections’ obviously not military. They all looked as if they were already late for a big meeting.
Security police units closed all the intersections as the little motorcade made its way to the B-2A Weapon Systems Trainer building. All this excitement only served to make Jamieson even grumpier. Doing these “dog-and-pony shows” was bad enough, but a motorcade and extra security for a lousy civilian? A lot of it had to be for show, Jamieson decided. The visitor was probably some congressional budget weenie investigating security procedures for the B-2A stealth bomber fleet, and the brass had beefed up security to make it look good. Their security was already very tight here at Whiteman, but a good show of force never hurt.
After they were seated in a briefing room in the simulator building, with the doors closed and locked and guards stationed inside and out, Jamieson got his first opportunity to check out the VIP. Too bad it was a guy—the female congressional staffers that frequently visited Whiteman were all knockouts, and Jamieson, now single after two divorces (“if the Air Force wanted you to have a wife, they’d have issued you one”), had gotten to know many of them. The guy was about ten years younger, four inches shorter, and forty pounds heavier than Jamieson, with broad, knobby shoulders, thick arms, and weight lifter-like thighs and calves—a former college power lifter turned desk jockey who liked to hang out at the weight machines on occasion, Jamieson decided—with thin blond hair and a fairly new mustache, both a bit longer than the regs allowed and definitely a lot longer than the current crew-cut style common in the late-nineties military. His handshake was firm, his eyes were blue and sparkling with energy, and he looked as if he might have wanted to smile when the introductions were made, but something dark and painful inside him vetoed the idea of showing any emotion at all, let alone a happy one. Bags under his eyes and lines in his face showed signs of tension, of aging beyond his years.
Jamieson was also reintroduced to another VIP who was going to monitor the simulator ride: the commander of Eighth Air Force himself, Lieutenant General Terrill “Earthmover” Samson, the man responsible for manning, training, equipping, and deploying all U.S. Air Force heavy bomber units. Samson was America’s “bomber guru,” the man who was single-handedly responsible for the continued presence of the B-2A stealth bomber and the other heavy bombers still in the Air Force inventory. When everyone else had been telling Congress to get rid of the “heavies,” Samson had been trying to convince Congress that America still needed the speed, flexibility, and sheer power of the intercontinental-range combat aircraft. Jamieson had met him once, a few years earlier, when Jamieson had been installed as Operations Group commander of the 509th.
Samson often brought influential congressmen and Defense Department bureaucrats in to see the B-2A stealth bomber in order to drive his arguments home. Because civilians were not permitted to fly in the plane (the third seat in a B-2A, located at the flight engineer’s station behind the right seat, was no longer fitted with an ejection seat), a few special VIPs sat in on B-2A simulator sessions flown by other crew members. Jamieson assumed that this guy was going to get a real special treat and sit in the right seat while he flew the simulator. No problem: Jamieson could fly the beast without help just fine, from the left seat.