Just smoking more fucking jungle, he thought, egressing to the west and dropping back to the treetops to avoid getting picked up by a—
A trail of light rushed up from the jungle a couple of miles south of his target, coming straight for his cockpit at his eleven o’clock.
So that’s where you bastards were hiding , he thought as the missile warning light blinked on the control panel and an alarm whined inside his cockpit.
Macklin frowned. The brand-new SA-3s, a vast improvement in speed, range, and accuracy over the SA-2s, demonstrated how the North Vietnamese advantage in radar and missile technology had grown since the beginning of the war.
But not our countermeasures, he thought, cutting right to place the incoming SA-3 at ninety degrees from his Thud while dispensing chaff.
C’mon baby, TURN! he thought, gripping the stick and enduring another punishing maneuver as his body weight multiplied almost seven times.
The SAM went for the chaff, but the SA-3 was just too damn fast, preventing Macklin from achieving the required separation from—
The blast, blinding and deafening, shredded the empennage of the jet as the control column trembled in his hands and alarms blared in his cockpit. Reaching for the ejection handle, the young pilot pulled it harder than anything in his life.
An instant before the fire engulfed him—
President Cord Macklin sat up in bed, his hands balled into fists that had been gripping the ejection handle, the orange glow of his burning jet fading away, replaced by the peaceful semidarkness of his bedroom, where Maria slept next to him.
Macklin inhaled deeply, trying to catch his breath, his heart hammering in his chest.
It didn’t matter how much time had passed since his being shot down; the memory remained burned in his mind. And while the president sometimes couldn’t remember what he had had for lunch the day before, he could recall every last damn second of those three days after splashing down in a rice paddy next to a small village.
He grinned, remembering the reason for the nickname given to the F-105, as his jet had made a loud thud sound when stabbing the same rice paddy a half mile from his position. The smile faded as he recalled the harrowing hours and days that followed, rushing through the jungle with the enemy relentlessly hunting him like a dog, until a hotshot Jolly Green helicopter pilot pulled him out of the bush, sparing him from an extended stay at the legendary Hanoi Hilton, the prison for—
“Can’t sleep?”
Macklin turned to see Maria on her side staring up at him.
Half-asleep, the first lady looked simply lovely in the half-light of the room, and Cord Macklin felt damn glad — and damn lucky — to be married to her.
Sitting up, she started rubbing his shoulders. “Same dream, honey?”
“Yeah,” he said, relaxing under her soothing hands. “You’d think by now my brain would have come up with something more recent. Sometimes I feel like it’s just stuck on the Vietnam War channel.”
She smiled. “It’s one of the ways you process stress,” she said.
He nodded. “At this moment, hundreds of pilots are risking their lives fighting a war we can’t seem to win… just like back in Nam.”
Macklin closed his eyes, remembering his conversation with Prost by the trout stream. “Hell,” he finally said, “maybe Hart is onto something with that secret team of his.”
She stopped and sat sideways to him, hands on her lap. “What was that all about?”
He stared at her. Even with her messy hair and no makeup, Maria’s beauty stunned him.
Taking her hands in his and kissing them, he asked, “You sure you want to know?”
“I’m a big girl, Mr. President. By now you should know I can handle anything you throw my way.”
Macklin knew that to be the truth. He had marveled at the way she had taken to the role of first lady, leading an initiative to help end childhood hunger, working the phones to ensure funding for her signature program.
“All right,” he said before sighing and adding, “short version is we’re tired of fighting Hydra.”
“‘Hydra’? Like in Captain America?”
Now it was Macklin’s turn to laugh. “Might as well be, but, no, we’re not on the trail of Red Skull.” He spent the next few minutes telling her about Prost’s task to pull together a fast-action team from the best assets in intelligence and operations — military and civilian — and reporting directly to him, who in turn answered only to Macklin.
“This time we’re going to make sure no more heads grow. Bastards don’t play by the rules, and neither should we.”
Her catlike eyes widened in obvious realization that such a directive bypassed the established cabinet protocols.
“Damn,” she said. “You sure about this? It could be considered illegal, even unconstitutional.”
“Sweetheart,” he replied, cupping her face before running his thumb over her lips, which she had twisted into a frown. “I’ve only been sure about four things in my life. Joining the Air Force. Running for office. Marrying you. And now this. That’s how sure I am.”
She blinked. “That’s… quite the statement, Mr. President. Nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Enough to get me a midnight round with the hottest first lady ever?” he asked.
Maria smiled and rolled on top of him.
Located two miles south of the quaint community of Knob Noster, Whiteman Air Force Base was home to the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit radar-evading Stealth Bomber.
The strategic multi-role aircraft was designed for medium-to-high-altitude target penetration at subsonic speed to avoid detection from the supersonic “boom” footprint, while relying on its stealth design to escape detection from enemy air-defense systems.
The B-2’s slate-gray flying wing resembled a gigantic boomerang with a sawtooth blade attached to the sleek trailing edge and a “beaver tail” mounted at its center. Officially called the “GLAS,” for gust load alleviation surface, the peculiar tail was used by an onboard computer to balance the aircraft when sensors detected vertical gusts.
The odd-looking radar-invisible bomber was capable of delivering conventional or nuclear munitions without refueling from a range of six thousand nautical miles. Staging from Whiteman, Diego Garcia, or Guam, it could cover the entire world with only one aerial refueling. Its four General Electric turbofans, buried deep in the flying wing, prevented radar waves from bouncing off the spinning turbine blades and propelled the bomber to a maximum speed of 550 knots and a service ceiling of fifty thousand feet.
A member of the 393d Bomb Squadron, 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman AFB, Lieutenant Colonel Wendy Langston glared at the rain lashing the windshield as she settled into the left seat of the Spirit of Indiana. As aircraft commander, Wendy brought a lot of experience flying a variety of Air Force bombers. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma, her nickname had been inevitable: Boomer Sooner.
Major Dave Jacoby, a former football star at the Air Force Academy, made himself comfortable in the right seat.
“Hate this damn weather,” Wendy said, frowning.
“Copy that,” Jacoby replied.
On paper, the B-2 was an all-weather bomber, but Wendy remembered what had taken place in Guam in February 2008 when as a young captain, she had witnessed the Spirit of Kansas crash and burn on takeoff. The investigation stated that heavy rain had caused moisture to enter the skin-flush air data sensors used to calculate airspeed and altitude, prompting the flight-control computer to inject a sudden thirty-degree pitch-up maneuver while lifting the heavy bomber off the ground twelve knots slower than prescribed in the manual. The crew never had a chance to recover, as the ensuing stall that close to the ground caused the bomber’s left wingtip to stab the grass alongside the runway. Fortunately, they managed to eject just before the Spirit of Kansas tumbled and exploded when its fuel ignited, resulting in the total loss of a $1.4 billion asset.