“Sort of. The New People’s Army and the Chinese lost a big battle for the city of Cotabato, here on Moro Gulf. We think the Chinese wanted to use the airport there to stage fighters to support their upcoming assault on Davao. Samar’s guerrillas held out — for a while. But it was long enough, because they demolished the airfield before they were driven out by Chinese air raids. Pretty clever how they did it, too — instead of just cratering the runway, which would have made it easy for Chinese engineers to repair, they stripped out sections of runway, buried stolen bombs in it, then cemented trucks over the bombs. It’s going to take the Chinese two or three days to repair the runway and another few days to make it a usable staging base.”
“So what do we do, then?” McLanahan asked. “This is what might be called a target-rich environment. What’s first?”
“General Stone and the Joint Task Force still haven’t decided,” Elliott replied. “They have a general outline to work with, but they’ll wait for the latest satellite data from Washington before going ahead with a frag order. If Jon Masters’ setup was working, we’d be done by now — it only takes a few minutes to build a frag order from PACER SKY data. We get flight plans, data cartridges, computer tapes, charts, briefing boards, even slides from his system here. Now we have to program all this stuff by hand.” McLanahan saw Masters on the master console. “Masters, how are you doing?”
“Cool, Mac, my man, real cool,” Masters said. Masters was dressed in white shorts, a flowered Hawaiian shirt, and sneakers with no socks — it looked as if he had just returned from Tarague Beach, Andersen Air Force Base’s recreation area. “Brad, we got ten more minutes until the data comes in…”
“Is it back on-line, Doctor Masters?”
“Not quite,” Masters admitted. “But, hey, you gotta think positive. Everything looks good so far. Say, Mac, you ready to kick some Chinese butt out there tonight?” Patrick stared, not believing what he had just heard.
“Excuse me, Doctor?”
“Yeah, man, you’re gonna clean up,” Masters enthused. “We got spectacular photos and data, and we’ve got ingress and egress routes scoped out so well that the Chinks won’t even know you’ve just kicked their sloped asses…”
“I don’t think we better—”
“Hey, loosen up,” Masters said, taking a big swallow from his ever-present squeeze bottle of Pepsi. “Just sit back in that big B-2 cockpit of yours, put on some tunes, turn on the BNS, and send Uncle Cheung’s squids to the bottom of the Celebes Sea. You can come back and we’ll check out the Japanese babes out on Turnon Beach…”
Patrick noticed General Elliott take a step toward Masters, but Patrick was already moving by then. Without another word, Patrick had taken Masters’ skinny left arm in his big left hand and had pulled the young scientist up out of his chair and out of the battle staff area.
“Hey, Mac, I can’t leave the board quite yet…”
The adjacent office near the Command Post was unoccupied and unlocked, so McLanahan took Masters right inside, closed the door behind him, and deposited him unceremoniously onto the worn Naugahyde sofa. “Let’s get something straight, Doctor. First, the name is Lieutenant Colonel Patrick McLanahan. Second, you’ve got a big mouth.”
Masters stared at the looming, six-foot blond pilot. He looked a lot bigger standing over him than he had a moment ago. “Look, Colonel, I know you’re a little nervous about—”
“You don’t know jack-shit, including when to keep your mouth shut about classified material and when to conduct yourself in an appropriate manner—”
Masters smiled weakly. “Hey, who are you, Dirty Harry?” He tried to rise, but McLanahan pushed him back down.
“Get this straight, Doctor. While you’re in this command post, you’ll not wear shorts or sneakers, you’ll address the senior officer in the room as ‘sir’ or by their rank, not their first name, and you’ll keep your bigoted comments to yourself. You’re supposed to be a professional, so start acting like one.” McLanahan looked at his watch. “You’ve got about ten minutes before your satellite data comes in — that’s plenty of time for you to go back to your barracks and change.”
“Hey, man, you’re not my father,” Masters complained. “Get off your Clint Eastwood act and off my case…”
McLanahan leaned over the couch, putting his face within an inch of Masters’ own. They were but eight years apart in age, but worlds apart in experience. McLanahan looked directly into Masters’ eyes. “I shouldn’t have to be on your case, Doctor. But if you’d open your eyes, you might learn a thing or two about what’s going on here.”
Masters cleared his throat and tried to look away from McLanahan, but couldn’t. “Hey,” he said calmly, “I know what’s going on. I know the weapons you’re going to use, the routes you’ll fly. I wrote the friggin’ scenarios, for Gods-sake.”
“You may have,” McLanahan said, moving back a bit from Masters, “but you don’t know anything about combat. About what it’s like to be in a war machine facing your own mortality. Have General Elliott or Ormack or Cobb tell you sometime about combat, about life in the cockpit…”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before — your secret society, your brotherhood of aviators. Brad — General Elliott — and his B-52s during Vietnam, out at that Arc Light Memorial, he tried to get into it, but he couldn’t explain it. He says, ‘You gotta be there.’ Stone, Jarrel, and all the others, even you — you’ve all been in combat before. But you treat it like a game, so why shouldn’t I?”
McLanahan bristled. He pulled out his dog tags from under his flight suit. “A game? What are these, Doctor? Tell me.”
Masters rolled his eyes. This was boring. “Dog tags. Next.”
“You’re partially right. Out here, Doctor, we have them for more than ornaments on a key ring. See how one is on the neck chain and one’s a small chain all by itself? There’s a reason for that. One they bring back to headquarters to prove you were killed in action — if they find your body, that is. The other they keep on the body, usually clamped shut in your mouth.”
He pulled out his water bottle from his left leg pocket. “You see this? Emergency water supply in case I lose my survival kit after ejection — this could be the only fresh water for a thousand miles if I have to punch out over the Philippine Sea.” He ripped off his unit patches and name tag from their Velcro strips on his flight suit. “Patches Velcroed on and removed before we take off in case we get shot down and captured — so the enemy won’t know what unit we’re from. Some chaplain will come around and collect them before we go out to our planes. They’ll check if we made out a will, check to see if they know who our next of kin are.
“Take a look at that data you’re generating sometime, Masters. Those ships your satellites are locating represent hundreds of sailors whose job it is to find and destroy me. There are thousands of sailors out there waiting for us—”
“But we know where they are… we know who they are…”
“We know where they are because men risked their lives to get that data,” McLanahan said. “A man died getting us those pictures…”
“Well, once the NIRTSat comes back on-line, that won’t happen again…”
“It doesn’t matter, my friend. Combat isn’t a series of pre-programmed parameters on a computer monitor — it’s men and women who are scared, and brave, and angry, and who feel hopeless. It’s not a clear-cut engagement. Anything can happen. You gotta realize that the people around you don’t think in absolutes, because they know that anything can happen…”