“Dave, the idea is nutzo,” Patrick said, shaking his head. The StepVan pulled up in front of a squat concrete building. Patrick grabbed his flight gear and manuals and headed for the door. “I’m not here to replace Furness or kick her ass or teach her how to fly the Bone — I’m here to observe and report. That’s all I’m going to do, and then I want to go home to my wife and son and my work that’s piling up back at Dreamland.”
“Yes, sir,” Luger said, obviously not believing a word of it. “Have a good flight… commander.”
A security guard posted inside the front door of the squadron building called the squadron to attention as Patrick walked in. “As you were,” Patrick responded as he showed his ID armband to the guard. Even with a major exercise going on, someone still thought about calling the unit to attention when a senior officer entered the building. Just as his staff said in their preliminary exercise report — impressive.
Patrick found Lieutenant Colonel Rebecca Furness in one of the squadron mission planning rooms a few minutes later, writing a schedule on the whiteboard with felt-tip markers of various colors. “Morning, Colonel,” he said.
“General,” Furness responded. “Briefing in fifteen minutes. Coffee’s in the Casino. I’ll get one of the guys to help you find things.”
“I’ll find it,” Patrick said. He walked back to the “Casino,” the squadron’s lounge, found a guest coffee mug, and poured himself a cup. Cripes, Patrick thought, even each squadron member’s coffee cup was clean — he never remembered seeing such a spotless coffee bar back at his old B-52 base. There was beer on tap — with a pair of fuzzy dice tied around the beer tap handles, signifying that the bar was closed. There were a few slot machines, some pinball and video games — all unplugged — and a big popcorn maker, with all the fixings for jalapeño popcorn, where they mixed chopped jalapeños in with the cooking oil. There was a “crud” table, which looked like a regular billiard table except there were no pool cues around, meaning that the balls had to be propelled by hand as the players raced around the table in a sometimes physical free-for-all. Over the bar, the squadron’s “Friday” name tags were on display, with each flier’s call sign on the patch instead of his first and last names.
Like all of the TV sets Patrick saw all over the base, the lounge’s TV was on and tuned to CNN. As it had been for the past several weeks, the international news was about North Korea. One of the planet’s last Communist states had barely come through last winter intact. Hundreds of thousands of citizens had died of starvation, sickness, and exposure because of a lack of heating oil, food, and medicines. There had been yet another unsuccessful attempt on President Kim Jong-il’s life; the perpetrators had been arrested, publicly tried, and publicly executed by firing squad, all of this shown around the world on CNN. President Kim then executed several military officers on charges of conspiracy, treason, and sedition. Food riots were commonplace; all were harshly, even brutally, repressed by government forces.
But at the same time, North Korea continued a massive military buildup that surpassed all other Asian countries’. They had tested another rail-garrisoned Daepedong-1 intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile, firing it over sixty-five hundred miles across the Pacific, and were promising to make it operational within the year. An advanced longer-range version of the missile, the Daepedong-2, reportedly had a range of over nine thousand miles, making it capable of hitting targets in the continental United States. They had deployed the Nodong-1 and Nodong-2 rail-mobile nuclear ballistic missiles, capable of hitting targets all over Japan, including Okinawa. They had hundreds of short-and medium-range ballistic missiles, some carrying chemical or biological warheads; and some of their nine-thousand-plus artillery pieces and howitzers were also capable of firing nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons shells. In a country with a population of only twenty-four million, a per capita income of less than nine hundred dollars, and a negative growth rate, North Korea was spending a staggering thirty percent of their gross national product on defense.
What was equally puzzling was South Korea’s reaction to the North’s huge military buildup. Instead of calling for a larger military buildup of its own, or for increased help from the United States, the South Korean government was actually increasing aid and outreach programs to the North and simultaneously erecting roadblocks to a greater American presence on the Korean peninsula. The United States had fewer than ten thousand troops stationed in South Korea, almost all of them observers, advisers, and instructors, not combat forces. Compared to North Korea, the South’s military forces were much more modern, but a fraction of the size. Yet while the South’s defense budget barely managed to hold steady year after year, its budget for economic aid, humanitarian programs, cultural exchanges, and family reunion programs with North Korea was rapidly increasing.
Was this part of the Korean mind-set? Patrick wondered as he watched the news piece on the growing North Korean crisis. Help your enemy even though he wants nothing more than to crush you? Or was South Korea naïvely assuring its own destruction by feeding and supplying its sworn enemy? Every time another spy ring or cross-border tunnel was discovered, South Korean aid to North Korea increased. When Wonsan was nearly destroyed by a nuclear device three years earlier, reportedly by China in an attempt to divert world attention from its attempt to conquer Taiwan, it had been South Korea that sent money and equipment to rebuild the city.
He returned to the mission planning room and studied the schedule Furness had put on the whiteboard. It had been copied from a page from a three-ring binder, part of the extensive array of “plastic brains” the squadron used to do every chore, from turning on the lights to going to war. “Good idea,” Patrick remarked as he reviewed the contents of the binder. “No need to remember how to organize for a mission briefing — it’s all in here.”
“No need to reinvent the wheel on every sortie,” Furness said. “Everyone does it the same, so there’re no surprises. If something gets missed, someone will know it.”
Every step of mission planning was organized to the exact minute: show time, overview briefing, intelligence briefing, the “how d’ya do?” briefing — a short meeting to check everyone’s mission planning progress — the formation briefing, mass briefing, crew briefing, step time, life support stop, weather and NOTAMS briefing, flight plan filing, bus time, time at aircraft, check-in, copy clearance time, start engines time, taxi time, and takeoff time. Each crew member in the formation had a job to do — everything from preparing flight plans, to getting sun positions during air refuelings and bomb runs, to getting lunch orders, was assigned to someone. He or she would return to the mission planning room and drop off the paperwork for the flight leader to examine, and then check off the item.
Patrick’s task written on the whiteboard was a simple one: “Hammer on Seaver.”
At that moment, Rinc Seaver walked into the mission planning room. “Morning, General, Colonel,” he said formally. Furness did not respond.
“Good job on that EP sim ride, Major,” Patrick said. He had decided to give Seaver an emergency procedures simulator evaluation, loaded up with a fairly demanding scenario, to see how he could handle stressful situations. What Patrick had really wanted to do was duplicate the fateful Fallon mission, to see how it could have been done differently. But as he told Furness and the others, he wasn’t there to investigate the crash. “I like the way you delegate the radios and checklists. Shows good crew coordination, good situational awareness.”