“Warning, launch command received…”
“Patrick, this is Control, emergency! Knock it off, knock it off, knock it off!” Luger suddenly radioed with the emergency “stop attack” call. “Abort the run. Abort the run. Return to base ASAP.”
“Knock it off, knock it off, knock it off!” Rebecca called out on the exercise channel. “Stop launch!” The warning was echoed by the range controllers to the Turkish Air Force and their air combat controllers, and the computer canceled the launch command just as the forward bomb bay doors were opening. “What the hell is going on, Luger?”
“We’re going operational — right now,” David said breathlessly. “Get on the ground ASAP.”
“Seats,” Lieutenant-General Terrill Samson said in a booming voice as he trotted into the High-Technology Aerospace Weapons Center’s battle staff room, ordering everyone back into their seats from attention. McLanahan and Hal Briggs were already there, along with Colonel Furness and other members of the One-Eleventh Bomb Squadron and a few senior staff officers from HAWC. “All right, all right, someone tell me what in hell’s going on.”
“We just received a warning order ten minutes ago, sir,” Patrick responded. “There’s an incident occurring in Russia, and we’ve been asked to get ready to provide support.”
“That’s not entirely true, sir,” Rebecca interjected. “We don’t have a warning order. We haven’t been authorized to do anything yet.”
“There exists an opportunity for the One-Eleventh to provide air support,” Patrick said. “I think we should get moving on this immediately. The warning order will be coming through at any moment.”
Terrill Samson hadn’t felt this kind of excitement since accepting this position at HAWC two years earlier. Although working at HAWC was certainly challenging and exciting, it never had the immediacy and vitality of a combat unit. They tested the world’s most advanced weapon systems, true, but in the end mostly what Samson did was write a report, submit engineering data, and give the hardware back to whoever had built it.
Samson glanced at the raw eagerness on the face of Patrick McLanahan, HAWC’s deputy commander. He was a natural-born leader, certainly deserving of his own command. But he had been with HAWC too long, seen too much, and did so much weird — and probably illegal — stuff with the high-tech gadgets that filled this place that there was no place for him in the real-world Air Force. How could he be asked to command a wing of B-2A Spirit stealth bombers, the most advanced warplanes known, when he knew that there existed in Dreamland planes and weapons that were a hundred times more advanced, a thousand times deadlier?
Samson was concerned. Patrick McLanahan’s career had developed under the tutelage — most would use the term “curse”—of Lieutenant-General Brad Elliott, Samson’s predecessor and the man for whom their base had been named. To put it as politely as possible, Elliott had been a rogue officer, a completely loose cannon. He’d been killed on one of his infamous “operational test flights,” where he had flown an experimental B-52 bomber — stolen right out from under federal agents — over China during the recent China-Taiwan conflict. Although his efforts had helped avert a global thermonuclear exchange, perhaps for the sixth or seventh time in his career at HAWC, one couldn’t help but notice that most officials in the White House and the Pentagon had breathed a sigh of relief after hearing that Elliott was dead. The only thing that still kept them up at night was the fact that Elliott’s body had never been recovered, so there was still a possibility that the bastard was still alive.
Patrick McLanahan had learned from Brad Elliott that, when the shooting starts and it seems like the world is on the brink of destruction, sometimes in order to get results it was necessary to color outside the lines. Patrick was much more of a “team player” than Brad Elliott ever was — but he was no longer young, he had rank and certainly much higher status, and he was entering his second decade at the isolated supersecret desert research base. Like McLanahan, Terrill Samson was a protégé of Brad Elliott — he knew him, knew what a little power and a “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” attitude could do to a man. Samson had chosen to follow his own path, and he’d earned his stars by playing by the rules. He was certainly worried that Patrick McLanahan was following the ghost of Brad Elliott down the wrong path.
“Time out, children, time out,” Samson said pointedly. “I got a call saying that we received a warning order. Whatever we received, who’s got it?”
“Actually, sir, I do,” Lieutenant Colonel Hal Briggs said. ‘You do?” Samson knew that Hal Briggs was a highly trained and experienced commando and infantryman — serving as HAWC’s chief of security was only one of his areas of expertise. He also knew that Briggs had been an operative in some highly classified intelligence operations unit that he had not been privileged enough to have a need to know. Briggs handed him a telefax from the command post, sent from the Director of Central Intelligence, authorizing Hal Briggs as the point of contact for this operation. “Okay, I’m impressed,” Samson said truthfully. “Well, Colonel, we’re waiting. If you’re permitted to tell us, let’s hear it.”
“Yes, sir,” Briggs said. The tall, thin, black officer, who had been assigned to Dreamland longer than anyone else in the room, looked as excited as a kid who’d just been told he’d be going to Disneyland for his birthday. “Since Patrick has been involved in operations of this sort before, I briefed him on the warning order. He gave me some suggestions, and then recommended I call you and the One-Eleventh in on it. Since I’m the man in charge of the team, I authorized it.”
“Proceed, then.”
Briggs motioned to Patrick, who punched instructions into his computer terminal, and a map of western Russia appeared on the large electronic computer monitor at the foot of the conference table. “My team has been tasked to support a hostile rescue mission inside Russia. Apparently the CIA has a deep cover agent on the run outside Zhukovsky Air Base east of Moscow. The normal procedure was to activate an underground railroad-type network inside Russia to get her out, but the network was shut down.”
“Obviously, CIA neglected to tell the agent about this tiny detail,” Terrill Samson surmised.
“You got it, sir,” Briggs said.
“What team are you talking about, Colonel?” Furness asked, glancing warily at both McLanahan and Briggs. She was a full member of HAWC as well as the One-Eleventh Bomb Squadron and had complete access to the facility, but she also reminded herself that what she knew was probably only the tip of the iceberg — this place was so compartmentalized and so deep undercover that she’d probably be stupefied by everything that went on here.
“Unfortunately, I can’t go into details, ma’am,” Briggs replied. “I’ll reveal as much as I can to give as much planning data to your guys, but you’ll have to follow my lead on a lot of it. Anyway, CIA wants this agent out immediately. I fly out immediately. I’m going to pick up some gear at a friend of ours place in Arkansas, and then deploy with my team to Turkey to stage out of there.”
“Well, good luck,” Samson said. “But I’m still confused. What’s our involvement?”
“Hal was tasked to perform a hostile exfiltration deep in Russian airspace,” Patrick explained. “I recommended that we provide air cover for his team.”
“Air cover?” Samson asked. “What do you mean, ‘air cover’?”
“Here’s the target area,” Patrick replied, motioning to the computerized map. “In about forty-two hours, Hal’s team will land somewhere near Zhukovsky, here, to attempt to extract the CIA operative. Hal expects heavy resistance — apparently they’ve been looking for the agent for about twelve hours already, and the search is intensifying. I suggested stealth airborne cover for the infiltration and exfiltration.”