Battle Born

CHAPTER THREE

Impressive as hell, Muck,” said Dave Luger. “That’s it in a nutshell. Very damned impressive.”

Patrick McLanahan took a sip of coffee and raised an eyebrow in surprise as he sat in the back of a large blue StepVan, used by his evaluation team as their mobile headquarters. It was a couple of hours before dawn, right at the twelve-hour safety-of-flight crew rest time limit prescribed by regulation for all fliers. It was damned early, much too early, but Patrick was determined not to let his team leaders — who certainly had had much longer days than he — see how tired he was.

With him inside the van were Patrick’s old friend and partner Lieutenant Colonel David Luger, acting as chief of the maintenance and weapons inspection team; Lieutenant Colonel Hal Briggs, chief of the security and administrative inspection team; and Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Cheshire, chief of the command and control and services inspection team. They were parked on the Air National Guard ramp, just outside the entry control point of the long aircraft parking ramp. The line of sleek, deadly B-1B bombers, illuminated in the harsh yellow glow of overhead “ball park” lights, filled the place with excitement. Maintenance vehicles and crews moved around purposefully. To this unit, this was no exercise — it was the real thing. Aces High was going to war, and every man and woman in the small unit, from the airman basic cook in the in-flight kitchen to the commander, knew it.

“All of the planes came up with only minor squawks,” Luger went on. Dave Luger was a tall, lanky Texan, a former B-52 navigator who now worked as chief project engineer under Patrick McLanahan at the supersecret Dreamland research facility. “Seven bombers fully configured and ready to fly. The biggest hitch was getting weapons from the Navy depot at Creashawn, but once they showed up, they uploaded them without any deficiencies.”

“None?” Patrick asked incredulously.

“None,” Dave assured him. “Seven B-1s with mixed payloads — twenty-eight Mark 82 AIRs in the forward bay, a rotary launcher with eight GBU-32 JDAMs in the mid bay, and ten CBU-87s in the aft bay — all went up on time without a major glitch. I’m going to have to nitpick to find something to ding ’em on.

“The place is amazing, Muck. You know how you can tell how a unit is going to function as soon as you walk in just by looking at the floors? I knew these guys had their shit together the minute I walked in there. The floors are so clean you can eat off them. They look like they polish their weapon-jammers and tow bars, not just clean them.”

“Every unit spit shines their gear when an inspection team’s on base,” Patrick pointed out.

“But you can usually tell if the spit shine is cosmetic, done once a year, or if it’s done regularly — and around here, it’s obviously done a lot,” Dave said. “Besides, this was a no-notice inspection — there was no time to spit shine every tool, every shop, every workbench, every rack. It was already done. And remember, this unit thought they were on their way to Ellsworth or Dyess for their pre-D. Why clean every piece of equipment before dragging it all off station?

“A big help around here is the crewdogs,” Luger went on. “The flight crews are right there with the maintainers, assisting and checking. Their attention to foreign-object damage control is the best I’ve ever seen — we can take some lessons from them. They aren’t afraid to go up to an inspector and get on his case for dropping a pencil or not checking vehicle tires for FOD.”

“Good.” Patrick knew that was true. A buck sergeant had admonished him — politely but firmly — for placing a checklist clipboard down on the ramp. The nearest running engine was at the adjacent parking spot almost three hundred feet away, but the danger of having a gust of wind or a vehicle push the checklist close enough to get sucked into a seven-million-dollar jet engine was too great to take a chance. “So we’ve got seven birds uploaded and ready to fly?”

“Seven in the green, fueled, armed, and ready,” Luger replied. “These guys pull together well. They’d be hard to distinguish from an active-duty unit. I have no doubt they can surge their birds for as long as we want.”

“Overall rating?”

“Excellent,” David replied. “In critical mission-essential areas, I rate them an ‘outstanding.’”

“Very good.” Patrick turned to Hal Briggs. “What have you seen, Hal?”

“Ditto,” Briggs replied. He was a wiry black man who always seemed in perpetual motion, always animated and excited, with dark dancing eyes and a quick smile. But Patrick had also seen him kill with equal joy. Until the death of his mentor, Brad Elliott, Hal’s favorite sidearm had been a rare.45-caliber Uzi submachine gun — now it was Elliott’s ivory-handled.45-caliber Colt M1911A1 Government autopistol.

“As you know, me and a couple of my white boys and girls arrived a couple of days ago to poke around and do some security probes,” Briggs said. “We tried everything — the janitor routine, the telephone man routine, the sneak-and-peek routine, everything but a full commando assault. For a unit located on a commercial civilian airfield, their security is pretty damned good. They practice good COMSEC procedures all the time. Airport security is typical — lousy — but security tightens quickly as you get closer to the Guard ramp. Good K-9 unit, good use of manpower, good rotation procedures, good challenge and response and use of authenticators.

“I found a few unlocked doors and open gates and was able to get close enough to hand-toss some fake grenades at a plane in a fuel dock. We found one bag of shredded classified material in a Dumpster, but it was confetti-shredded and unreadable — still a violation, but not a serious one. Never got access to a plane, never got near their command post or their classified documents vault. Couldn’t hack into their classified computer server. Bought lots of drinks, but we couldn’t get one single Guard guy in a bar to talk about anything even remotely approaching classified topics — even had one guy report his contact to Furness, who filed the report with the adjutant general, state police, and Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Beale Air Force Base. Rating: ‘above average’ overall, ‘excellent’ in critical areas.”

“Good,” Patrick said. “What do you have, Nance?”

“I sound like a broken record, Patrick, but I give them an overall ‘above average’ and an ‘excellent’ in mission-essential areas,” Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Cheshire replied. Cheshire, a petite dark-haired woman in her late thirties with large doe eyes and a little button nose, was one of the Air Force’s toughest and most talented test pilots. She was the first female pilot to fly the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber, but her real accomplishments had come as Dreamland’s first and greatest female test and combat pilot, flying three secret missions in experimental B-52 bombers over the past several years. Now she was the chief test pilot of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center.

“It was a pleasure to watch these Guard guys go to work,” she continued. “The battle staff, operational support squadron, and command post performed flawlessly in all the scenarios. Good security procedures, good time control, good use of checklists and command doctrine. One overdue situation report and one brain-fart with a radio frequency that broadcast a coded message on an open frequency prevented them from getting an overall ‘outstanding.’

“I was primarily concerned about the mobility line, but that’s where this unit really earns an ‘outstanding’ score. It must be the unit’s recent history with C-130 transports, but these guys run a mobility line more efficiently than anyone I’ve ever seen. Excellent use of computers, with most programs custom-written for this unit. Almost no wasted time. But the key is the folks going through the line, and I’ve got to say that this unit has got the procedures down cold. Everyone had updated records, everyone had current vaccinations, everyone had their required gear. This unit was waiting for their transportation to arrive. It’s a small, close-knit unit, true, but these folks are revved up and ready to fight.”

“They can generate, they can pull alert, and they can mobilize,” Dave Luger summarized. “The big questions now are…”

“Can they fight, and can they deploy and then fight?” Patrick finished for him. “Maybe it’s time to load ’em up a bit and see how much mayhem they can take.”

Nancy Cheshire gave an evil grin. “You gonna make it hurt, Muck?”

“This is not a training situation here,” Patrick replied. “I want to see what they got. It might hurt a little.” He nodded to all of his staff officers around him. “Thanks for all your hard work, guys. Unclassified summary reports in my e-mail box by sixteen hundred hours today; classified summaries by tomorrow morning. I’ll see you at Tonopah.”

Suppressing yawns, they all left the StepVan except for Dave Luger. “How are preparations for Lancelot progressing back at the home drome?” Patrick asked.

“General Samson has got the Lancelot modification kits ready to go for the first two planes — we just need the planes and we’re ready to go,” Luger replied. “He received authorization for two more kits. By the time we’re ready to fly one and two, we should be starting work on three and four. Leaving one for a ground training article, that should leave us with three operational birds in two to three months.” He paused for a moment, then added, “From what I’ve seen so far, we might be looking at our best candidates right here. The birds are in excellent shape; the maintenance guys are top-notch; they have good facilities and good support. What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Dave,” Patrick replied uneasily. “I agree, the machines are in good shape — it’s the aircrews I have a problem with. These guys have a real cocky attitude. Furness delights in telling everyone to go to hell, and it’s rubbed off on her troops. They were mouthing off at the adjutant general right to my face, all of them. Rinc Seaver is the worst of the bunch — the best, but the worst.” Patrick got up, stretched, then told their driver to head over to the squadron building.

“The force is different from when we were pulling a crew, Muck,” Dave said. “Since the Strategic Air Command’s bombers were absorbed by the Tactical Air Command, all the crewdogs are like fighter jocks — they’re cocky, tougher, more aggressive, more competitive, and lots smarter. The force is smaller and leaner, which means that only the best of the best get to fly. And the Air National Guard is all that and more. They’re like a pack of wild starving wolves fighting over who’s going to kill the caribou. I don’t think we need to straighten them out — I think it’s us that needs to realize what the modern-day force is like.”

“Maybe so,” Patrick said grumpily, suddenly feeling very old. “But some of them can still use a good dose of whup-ass.”

Luger watched his longtime friend stifle a jaw-breaking yawn. “You ready to fly, partner?” he asked with a smile. “It’s been — what, five years, six? — a long time since you’ve been in a B-1.”

“I’ll be fine, Dave,” Patrick said. “I know the Bone like the back of my hand—”

“I’m talking about you, partner,” Dave interrupted. “It’s been about a year since you ejected out of the Megafortress. Are you ready to start flying again?”

“I have been flying for the past year or so, Dave…”

“I don’t mean flying prototypes, simulators, test beds with a bunch of engineers, or the BERP suit — I mean flying a real sortie with a real crew, as part of the crew,” Luger interrupted again. “You don’t have to do this, you know. Nancy can give Seaver an evaluation, and I can certainly let you know if these guys are the real deal or just hot dogs. Besides,” he added with a serious expression, “you old guys need more sleep.”

Patrick scratched his nose with an uplifted middle finger, making sure Luger got the message, then clasped him on the shoulder. “I’ll be fine, partner,” he said. “This will give me an opportunity to get back into the real world. I’m looking forward to this.”

Dave nodded. “Then go get ’em, Muck,” he said. “I’ll be on the SATCOM if you need me.” Patrick nodded, successfully stifling another yawn. They were silent for a moment. Then: “You can always take command of the squadron,” Dave said.

If Patrick had been a bit drowsy a moment ago, he now looked as if he had been blasted awake by heaven’s trumpets. He stared at his partner in utter surprise and asked, “What did you say, Dave?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of it already,” Luger said, grinning. “If Furness can’t control her troops, she deserves to get taken down a peg or two. She’s treating this squadron like her own personal plaything, true, but the operative word is ‘her.’ Take it away from her, even for a short time, and then see what kind of commander she is. If she straightens out, good. If she doesn’t, you’ve saved the state of Nevada the task of removing her, and you’ve still created a better unit. Plus, you get your first command.”

“Dave, my job is to give this evaluation and report back to Samson, not pirate an Air National Guard command,” Patrick said. “Besides, I’ve got a job. I’ve got a dozen projects that need my attention. I can’t just leave—”

“Ah, the first sign of mental illness — thinking that you’re indispensable,” Dave said. Patrick scowled at him, then shook his head, laughing it off. “Muck, I know you. You’re not a desk jockey. You’re a crewdog. You’ve always been one and you’ll always be one, no matter how many stars you wear. But you’re also a one-star general in the United States Air Force, and that means you command. This Lancelot unit is going to be your creation — why not take command of it?”

“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.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I thought you were a little too aggressive,” Furness said. At Patrick’s request, Rebecca Furness had flown in the evaluator’s seat, while two systems officers operated the SO’s side of the weapon systems trainer; terrain-following systems would only work in the sim if the SO’s cab was powered up too. He also asked Furness to administer his closed-book and emergency procedures written test. “Why ask for CITS codes and the expanded tech order text?” she went on. “It got distracting. You were juggling too many balls in the air at once.”

Rinc looked at Patrick, who nodded. “She’s right,” Patrick said to Seaver. “You obviously know your stuff, but you did get a couple steps ahead of the crew as they ran through the troubleshooting matrix, and it was distracting. You had a handful of broken jet to fly.” He turned to Furness. “Good call, Colonel. Anything for me?”

“You’re rusty, you don’t know local procedures that well, and you don’t verbalize enough,” she replied. “But you got the job done and brought your crippled jet back home. I’d fly with you. You’d fly anyway, I suppose, even if you were picking your nose the whole time, right?”

“Right. But thanks. I’ll give my official critique to General Bretoff, but I rated Seaver’s performance an ‘excellent.’ Good job, all of you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Seaver said. Furness offered no congratulations. Seaver copied some notes from the whiteboard, then departed.

“I gotta tell you, Colonel,” Patrick said as he watched Furness work, “I’m very impressed with the squadron. Everyone’s doing an exceptional job.”

“You say that like you expected us to be a bunch of drunken slobs,” Furness retorted.

“No. But it’s certainly getting tough to explain how you lost a jet and a crew.”

“I don’t suppose you believe in plain old bad luck, do you?”

“Sure I do,” Patrick replied. “You think it was bad luck?”

“Yep. Shit happens. You fly jets long enough, something bad happens. It’s a dangerous business.”

“True,” Patrick admitted. “But I’ve noticed in the sim and looking over the accident records…”

“I thought you weren’t here investigating the crash, sir.”

“I’m not, but I’d be an idiot if I didn’t get some background on the accident, wouldn’t I, Colonel?” Patrick retorted. “Most of your bomb runs are level radar bombing, right?”

“All of our bomb runs are level radar,” Rebecca replied. “The Joint Direct Attack Munition will give us a little more flexibility, but without precision-guided bombs or imaging sensors like LANTIRN or Pave Tack, we pretty much do it the same way strategic bombers have been doing it since the beginning.”

“But your squadron flies very aggressively,” Patrick pointed out. “Maybe too aggressively. Some might say recklessly. If all your bomb runs are the same, why all the gyrations?”

“My opinion, sir, is that we’re asked to do more with less,” Furness replied. “We have fewer bombers, smaller budgets, and more taskings over more dangerous battlefields. We don’t set up the threats. We do whatever it takes to destroy the target against whatever threat we encounter.”

Furness regarded Patrick for a moment before continuing: “You’re a bomber guy, sir.” Patrick had no response. “I remember hearing a little about you, back when I flew tankers and later when I got into the RF-111s. You know how bombers used to fly — low, fast, and alone, mostly with gravity nukes or SRAMs. Well, it’s not done that way anymore. We fly as packages. We go in high, or low, or slow, or fast, depending on the threat and the weapon we employ.

“But we don’t train that way. We still train like you and I did years ago — alone against the threats, the area defenses, and the target. Instead of having a cruise missile or stealth bomber take out the threats from standoff range followed by Bones with fighter cover, we drive a couple of Bones through a gauntlet of fighters and SAMs. It’s unrealistic. We’d never do that in the real world. But that’s the way we train because it’s cheap and it’s easy.

“Our job is to destroy the target, no matter what the threat,” Furness went on. “That means pushing ourselves and our machines to the limit. The Bone has the payload of a BUFF but the speed and agility of a Strike Eagle. We’ve got the horses, so we’re going to use them.”

“Well, what do you think about Bones going in alone?” Patrick asked. “Are they capable? Or do they need a package to do the mission?”

“Of course we’re capable,” Rebecca replied hotly. “When you flew BUFFs, you flew against every threat in the book without any support. True, in the SIOP missions, you expected to go in long after the initial ICBM laydown, so most of the threats would be taken down for you. But if that’s true, why did BUFFs and Bones and Aardvarks and even B-2 stealth bombers start going low? Why did we start training in ranges with fighters and SAMs and triple-A? Because we were expected to fly against any target, any threat, whether there was a strike package or nuclear laydown preceding us or not.

“We can do the same thing again — but we need better tools. Give us a standoff capability, like JSOW or SLAM or TSSAM, and we can take out our own threats as we encounter them, like a HARM shooter such as an EA-6 or F-16CJ. Or give us an imaging infrared or TV capability, and we can hunt down our own targets like an F-15E or F-16 Block 50. The Bone can do all that. We can carry four or five different weapons at the same time. I guess it’s politically better to build fighters and deploy carriers. But we’re still training like we did in the seventies and eighties. We should train like we’re going to fight.”

Patrick nodded, pleased with the way this woman was thinking. He knew he was on the right track — he knew his plan would be accepted by the crews. Now he just had to make it work and then sell it to the brass.

“What’s everyone got against Rinc Seaver?” Patrick asked. “He’s a good stick, a good systems operator, a good crewdog. Is he a good team player or more of a loner?”

“No one has anything against the guy,” Furness said. “You ever lose a crew and a plane in your unit before, sir?” Again, Patrick had no answer, so Rebecca assumed the answer was no. “It tears the unit apart like nothing you’d ever believe. But we’re still technicians, pilots, systems officers. We need to find a reason for the accident…”

“You mean someone to blame?”

“We’re human too,” Rebecca said. “Maybe part of the healing process is assigning guilt, blame, responsibility. Rinc is it. He had the controls, he was the commander, he pulled the handles, and he survived, and all that makes him culpable. It’s shitty, but it’s the way it is.”

“How do you feel about Rinc Seaver, Colonel?” Patrick asked.

“I told you. He’s a good crew member, a good OSO. But he had the bad luck to survive this unit’s only training mission crash. It’ll take some time for him to work his way back into the unit.” Patrick hesitated, looking carefully into her eyes, expecting her to add something a little more. “If you have something to say, sir, please say it.”

“No,” Patrick said finally. “Forget it. Completely unrelated.” He spotted Rinc Seaver and a few other crew members drifting back and forth in front of the open door, wondering if it was safe to enter, so Patrick decided to back off. They had a mission to prepare for, and everyone’s attention had to be focused on the task ahead. The room filled up quickly with crew members and technicians ready to start the briefing.

Furness began precisely on time; she dinged one crewdog two dollars for showing up just as she was starting to close the door and gave him a warning glare, then began:

“This is the initial flight briefing for Aces Two-Zero flight of two.” She put the first of a small stack of overhead slides on the projector. “Everyone is present. I am the flight lead, and Rodeo is second-in-command in Aces Two-One. We are the first strike package for our unit pre-D. Intelligence briefing.”

A technical sergeant stood up and put his first briefing slide on the projector. It was marked “Confidential (Scenario Unclassified).” “Good morning, ladies and gents,” he said. “The following is classified ‘confidential,’ with a fictional exercise scenario; the real-world briefing is available in the intel shop if you’re interested.

“Two days ago the godless Communist dictatorship of North Kimchee moved eleven armor and infantry brigades to the border of the God-fearing democratic pro-American nation of South Kimchee, and stepped up fighter and antiship patrols over the ocean around its borders.” Patrick always found himself struggling not to smile when the intelligence techs recited the fictional exercise scenarios; they were prepared with a vivid imagination and a good sense of humor. “The National Command Authority responded by ordering the full mobilization of all long-range bomber units, in case the North Kimchee Army decides to invade, and warned North Kimchee that we were guaranteeing the peace and sovereignty of South Kimchee and would use force to back our promise up. The warning order directed us to prepare to execute an attack-then-deploy bombing mission against North Kimchee ground units along the border. One Navy carrier battle group was already in the area when the warning order was issued, and another is en route.”

As the briefing continued, Patrick was amazed at the level of detail. When he kicked off the exercise, he had given the squadron a simple notification order, a short message explaining the exercise scenario. The intelligence and operations support divisions had gleaned a massive amount of follow-up information from his exercise referees, then devised an entire realistic play-byplay mission profile based on the exercise scenario. He had no doubt that this was exactly what the real briefing would look like if this were an actual combat situation — with real-world country names, of course.

“In response to our mobilization,” the intelligence technician continued, “North Kimchee moved a large number of antiaircraft weapon systems into the area. We have received fairly good data about the types and numbers of systems, but since they’re mobile systems, it’s been difficult to pinpoint them. Then, early this morning, North Kimchee declared our actions tantamount to war, formally declared war against the United States and South Kimchee, and crossed the border with eight divisions, leaving three in reserve. We received the execution order this morning, and we expect the launch order in about six hours.

“Our primary job is to blunt the invasion by destroying as many enemy vehicles as possible,” the briefer went on. “Our prestrike satellite reconnaissance can tell us fairly accurately where the troop and vehicle concentrations are, so we’ll plan saturation bombing and minelaying operations against them. The problem is, we don’t have a very accurate picture of what the antiair defenses are, and we can’t risk any manned aircraft to find out.

“So the plan is to have a large salvo of Navy Tomahawk surface-and sub-launched land-attack cruise missiles lead the mission. The cruise missiles will be going against fixed targets farther north, not against the divisions that are going across the DMZ. But the cruise missiles will certainly draw a lot of fire. The Air Force will send electronic reconnaissance aircraft to try to pinpoint the locations and types of enemy antiaircraft that will try to shoot down the cruise missiles. We’re hoping that the recon planes will detect and pinpoint most of the surface-to-air missile sites during North Kimchee’s response to the first salvo of cruise missiles, and pass the position info back to us. We hope they’ll do a good job, because we’ll be coming in right behind them, before North Kimchee gets a chance to reload and regroup.

“So our secondary mission is to destroy as many targets of opportunity as possible so we can clear the way for follow-on sorties. We’ll use two-thousand-pound JDAMs for plinking targets of opportunity. We can expect to receive target coordinates in a multitude of ways, so part of our tasking on this mission is to see how carefully we can monitor all of the data sources for target info.”

The intel briefer put up a new slide with all of the various communications systems, their security authentication routines, and times of operation. “The primary source of target information will be via SATCOM hookup between us and the theater commander, which for the exercise will be simulated by the exercise referees. But we must also maintain listening watches on HAVE QUICK, VHF, UHF, and even HF for data relays by radar planes, mostly via the E-8 Joint Surveillance Targeting and Reconnaissance plane. We can get target info through a list of geographic coordinates that we can plug directly into JDAM, or receive a set of grid coordinates where we can look for targets on the attack radar. We also have to be prepared to upchannel any target coordinates we mensurate ourselves.”

Next came another slide, this one of area enemy defenses and threats. “We can expect everything in the book out there,” the briefer continued. Patrick liked the way he said “we,” as if he were going along on every sortie — which, judging by the way this unit pulled together, was figuratively true. “North Kimchee has an extensive list of Soviet and Chinese antiaircraft systems, from long-range modern stuff like the SA-10 and SA-12 to low-tech, optically guided antiaircraft artillery. They’re playing it smart, keeping their radars shut off and their units on the move, so we may not be able to detect or pinpoint these systems until close to your target times. Therefore, expect extensive last-minute inflight replanning and retargeting.

“After the attack, we will be deploying to a bare-base location in southern South Kimchee, approximately five hundred miles from the border. Weapons, fuel, equipment, and supplies have already been moved there under cover of darkness, so we feel fairly certain that we can conduct operations from there for at least two days before the bad guys realize where we are and start counteroffensive actions. We can expect to conduct three-per-day surge bombing sorties from this location. By that time, the Navy will have moved two carrier battle groups and more cruise missile shooters into the area to help out.

“Our sources tell us that, although not involved right now, the People’s Republic of Chowdown may support North Kimchee’s war effort by sending fighters and bombers to harass or even attack us during our deployment,” the intelligence briefer concluded. “Of course, if we fail to stop North Kimchee’s advance, we may come under direct attack by North Kimchee artillery. Therefore, supplies and support might dwindle. We’ll learn more later. Questions?” There were a few; after they were answered and discussed, Furness took the podium again.

Before she began, she wrote the acronym “BOTOTCHA” as item number one on the list of objectives of the mission. “Our overall objective on this mission is, as always, ‘Bombs on target, on time, come home alive,’” she said. “Our primary objective is to stop or blunt the North Kimchee invasion by destroying as many high-value strategic targets such as artillery sites, rocket sites, air defense sites, armor and vehicle concentrations, and vehicle marshaling areas as possible. Our secondary objective will be to destroy targets of opportunity transmitted to us by reconnaissance and intelligence sources. Our subobjectives, as always, are: no withholds due to crew or switch position errors; no unreacted-to threats; and clear communications and transmission of threat and intelligence information.

“Each sortie has two assigned targets, which will be attacked using Mark 82 AIRs from the forward bomb bay and CBU-89 cluster bomb dispensers from the aft bay. The Mark 82 attacks will generally be against armored-vehicle marshaling areas, vehicle and troop concentrations, and enemy weapons and supply depots inside South Kimchee. The CBU operations will generally be against air defense sites, artillery emplacements, and vehicle and troop concentrations inside North Kimchee, since we don’t want to hamper friendly vehicle movement with our mines.

“We will then withdraw to a refueling anchor area and await any follow-on targets transmitted via SATCOM. Follow-on targets will be attacked using JDAMs from mid-or high altitude. These can be any type of target, deep inside North Kimchee or over South Kimchee. You hit as many as you can, then withdraw to the forward operating location.

“The forward operating location for us will be Tonopah Air Force Base, Nevada,” Rebecca went on. “The Operational Support Squadron, Civil Engineers, and the Air Base Group have already deployed. After you arrive, you’ll reload with Mark 82s and CBU-89s, go on crew rest, and get ready to accept new strike packages.”

“What!” John Long exclaimed. A loud, surprised murmur of voices in the room echoed him. “We’re going to fly strike missions from a bare-base location?”

“Shut up, all of you,” Furness broke in hotly. “I know this isn’t standard. Our usual scenario is to turn our birds over to a forward-deployed active-duty unit that has already been set up in the forward location. Well, we’re not doing it that way. The bare-base operation at Tonopah will be ours — our gear, our spares, our planes, our staff, our plans. We can expect to do this for as long as ten days, so I hope you brought your toothbrushes and gave your honeys the full monty, because it’s going to be us in the sand with the bugs for a long time.”

Rebecca pointed to the list of tasks on the whiteboard. “Here’s your jobs, here’s the schedule. We’ll have a ‘how d’ya do?’ in thirty minutes.” She paused, then glanced at Patrick. “I suppose you all know that we’ll be having an evaluator aboard Rodeo’s flight. General McLanahan will be in the copilot’s seat, so I guess that makes him invulnerable to SAMs, right, sir?” No response from Patrick. “Remember, we follow peacetime safety-of-flight rules,” Furness concluded. “We play it by the book. Any questions?” No reply. “Rise.”

As Rinc Seaver headed for the door, he placed several piles of papers on the table in front of Furness, then began checking off items on the whiteboard. “What’s this, Rodeo?” Furness asked.

“Got all these things done already,” Seaver replied.

“What? How? I just got the info myself an hour ago.”

“I got it an hour ago too,” Rinc said, “and I finished the planning. Computer target predictions, fly-through simulation, threat assessment, sun position, terrain analysis — it’s all there. I’ll get the latest intel briefing materials and plug ’em into the flight plans.”

Furness looked very irritated. She glanced up at McLanahan, who instantly got the message and stepped out of the briefing room. When he was out of earshot, Furness said angrily, “You better not have busted crew rest, Rinc.”

“Not that you know about,” Rinc shot back. Furness looked as if she was going to explode. “Lighten up, Beck. The general was already out on the ramp. I saw Heels coming out of the in-flight kitchen when I was going to the command post, so she was obviously on base before five.” Captain Annie “Heels” Dewey, one of the 111th’s three other female Bone crew members, was Furness’s copilot for this mission. “I showed up at the command post at five after five to get a copy of the frag order. They said you already picked a copy up—twenty minutes before me. Let me know when you’re ready to bust your own ass — I’d like to see it for myself.”

Rinc stepped closer to Furness, looked her right in the eye, and said in a low voice, “This is my requal check ride, Beck, my first evaluation after losing my crew and my friends. Let me sink or swim on my own. You do your job and let me do mine, and we’ll see if I got what it takes to keep my wings. If I don’t, I’m outta here.”

“No one wants to see you flunk, Rinc.” She lowered her voice a bit, then added, “Especially me. But we’re all under the gun here. We’ve got to do it like we always do it, by the book and together.” But Furness could see that Rinc wasn’t about to believe anything she said right now. “Rodeo, get together with the other crews and see if they need some help.”

“I’ve got a better idea, Colonel,” Patrick said from just outside the door. He reached into a flight suit pocket and pulled out a small stack of envelopes. Fanning them out like a deck of cards, he held them up to Furness. “Pick a card. Any card.” Furness looked puzzled, then selected an envelope. Patrick opened it, read it quickly, then nodded. “Good one. Very good.” He left the room with a smile on his face.

“What was that about?” she wondered.

“Change in scenario,” Rinc said. “He must’ve seen us arguing and decided to shake things up a bit.”

Sure enough, a few moments later the intercom buzzed, summoning Furness to the senior controller’s desk in the ready room. The ready room was filled with crew members scurrying around, collecting information and getting ready for the mass prestrike briefing in a couple of hours. “What is it, Scarecrow?” Furness asked the senior controller, Major Sean “Scarecrow” Asterman.

“Just got a note from the exercise referee,” Asterman said. “ACC wants to send three bombers straight to the forward operating location ASAP, without doing bomb runs. Battle staff will be meeting in five minutes.”

“Shit, shit, shit!” Furness exclaimed. That meant that the four remaining bombers would have to take up the target list of the three scratched bombers. And that meant a complete replanning — new weapons loads, which would take time, all new frags, all new target times, all new intelligence briefings, all new mission tapes. And they had less than six hours in which to do an entire day’s worth of planning.

Furness’s eyes scanned the room and found Brigadier General McLanahan talking on his secure cellular phone. Patrick looked up, saw her glaring at him, then smiled and waved the envelope — the one Furness had picked! It was the change of scenario! McLanahan must’ve noticed that the mission planning was going so well that he decided to throw a major monkey wrench into the works.

“I’m on my way,” Furness told Asterman. “Notify the crews and tell them to stand by to start replanning.” When Patrick walked up to her, she said in a low voice, “This isn’t realistic, General. We’re less than six hours from launching. Air Combat Command would assign the new sortie to another unit that hadn’t finished generating its sorties. We have to replan, download weapons, deconflict all our tracks…”

“Then I suggest we get on over to the battle staff meeting and find out what we need to do,” McLanahan said. “But the change stays. Or do you want to throw in the towel now? You have that authority.”

Furness gritted her teeth and mumbled a low, growling “No way, sir,” then spun on her heel and headed for the door. Patrick had to trot to keep up with her.

The tactic was simple: Do what the North Koreans had been doing for years — only deadlier.

One hundred and sixteen feet long and displacing only 275 tons submerged, the Yugo-class midget submarine looked like a sophisticated but comical toy. Its top speed was twelve knots, but it was usually restricted to three or four knots because its temperamental diesel engines couldn’t stand the strain — some ocean currents around the Korean peninsula could easily outrun it. It was one of approximately forty-five midget submarines used by the North Korean Spetznaz special operations forces to infiltrate South Korea and land commandos and spies near its most important military bases.

But several Yugos had been captured intact over the years, and now they were the property of the Republic of Korea Marines.

Eight Yugos captured by the South Koreans had been towed by the South Korean Navy from their base at Cheju Island in the East China Sea to the naval special operations base near Inchon, refueled and rearmed, then sent on their mission. Staying at least three miles offshore, diving only when acoustic or electromagnetic threats were detected around them, they made their 150-mile trek across North Korea’s west coast in twenty hours. Before crossing into North Korean waters, two Yugos had to drop out of the formation because of massive engine or electrical malfunctions. But the men aboard the remaining subs considered the 75 percent survival rate a real bonus.

The last twenty miles to Sukchon, traveling into the mouth of the Yengyn Inlet, were made completely submerged. Using its passive sonar detection system to clear the area of nearby enemy ships first, the lead sub raised a global positioning system satellite navigation receiver on a retractable mast just two feet above the waves to get a position fix. Once the vessels reached their preprogrammed initial point, they bottomed themselves into the thick mud of the inlet about two thousand yards off the shoreline and waited.

Every spring, the Sukchon delta region falls victim to killer floods, so the area had recently been extensively rebuilt, with assistance from Chinese military troops and engineers. At least, that was the story most of the world knew. Those Chinese engineers had made other improvements as well: they had rebuilt nearby Sunan People’s Army Air Base into the new secret Military Command and Coordination Facility of the Korean People’s Army. In just two short years, Sunan had been transformed from a minor supply and transportation air base into North Korea’s main war-fighting nerve center.

The region was also the home of two full Army corps infantry commands, a mechanized corps command, nine artillery brigades, and five special forces brigades — over 100,000 troops stationed at three Army barracks in the immediate area. These served as the main reserve forces for the defense of the capital, Pyongyang, only thirty miles to the south. The air base facilities had also been beefed up: Sunan was the new home to one full air combat command, including a light bomber regiment, two ground-attack air regiments, five interceptor regiments, ten transport regiments, and three air defense regiments. Between one main and two auxiliary airfields nearby, more than three hundred aircraft were assigned to Sunan.

Sunan had other key forces as well. It was the new home of the Fourth Artillery Division, comprising eighteen medium-range and ten long-range ballistic missile batteries. The short-range FROG-5 and FROG-7 missiles had nonnuclear warheads, designed to blast any South Korean forces who dared move north of the Demilitarized Zone, just 120 miles to the south. Four medium-range mobile Scud-B missile batteries, designed to hit targets inside South Korea, carried chemical and biological munitions, mostly Vx nerve gas and anthrax agents. The other six longer-range rail-mobile Nodong-1 batteries, housed in concrete aboveground shelters covered with earth to camouflage them from spies, carried ten-to-one-hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads and had sufficient range to reach Seoul, Taegu, even Kwangju — effectively, over 90 percent of South Korea.

But the Command and Coordination Facility, or CCF, was the most important target at Sunan, and possibly the most important in all of North Korea, for reasons beyond its aircraft, infantry, armor, or even its deadly missiles.

It served as the main command and control facility for all of the military bases in North Korea, the Defense Ministry in Pyongyang, the Central Committee of the North Korean Politburo, and with Beijing. In times of conflict or heightened alert, the bases were linked together through the CCF so that the general staff could issue orders to all facilities at once, through one central coordinator. Although most of the world did not know it, Sunan was the tip of the spear, the key to the destruction of the Republic of Korea and the Communist occupation of the entire Korean peninsula.

That’s why Sunan had to be neutralized.

At the prearranged time, the minisubs lifted from the thick silt bottom and began cruising at minimum steerageway speed toward shore. At periscope depth, about six feet below the surface in the tiny vessels, a hatch popped open on each sub and eight commandos rose to the surface, gave each other an “okay” sign, then swam for their infiltration point. One sub’s hatch could not be reseated, and it had to be scuttled. Its crew had no choice but to swim for shore and either hide or try their best to make it back to friendly territory on their own. There was no emergency rescue plan for this one-way covert operation.

The leader swam slowly, using a minimum-effort stroke that placed him under the surface during all but a few seconds out of every minute. He stopped frequently to check his bearings, listen for danger, and check his troops. Every time he came up, the first thing to break the surface was the muzzle of his Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun.

It took twenty minutes for the team of forty-eight commandos to swim to shore and reach the wharf that was their landfall. They secured their swimming gear to the bottom in black nylon bags, climbed up a dockside ladder until they could get up inside the framework of the wharf, then made their way ashore. They found a dark, secluded area between two noisy ventilator units and stopped to dole out equipment and to rest. While the leader checked in via satellite to his headquarters, his men began to unpack their equipment.

Twelve commandos carried the waterproof weapons bags for all of them. Each man was armed with a submachine gun, with a shoulder harness and five-cell pouch system that strapped onto his calf, plus a 9-millimeter SIG Sauer P226 autopistol carried on the shoulder harness. The leg pouch contained three thirty-round magazines of subsonic ammunition plus the sound suppressor for the submachine gun.

Twelve other commandos, two per squad, carried the electronics, including target markers, radios, remote-control detonators, and night-vision equipment. Two commandos carried radios; two others carried medical gear. Six commandos were the “mules,” carrying the explosives — an assortment of plastic explosives, shaped cutting charges, antipersonnel mines, incendiary explosives, and Primacord, plus detonators and timers. When they were all loaded up, checked, their timing established, and their objective identified on the map and compared to their surroundings, they set off.

Sunan was actually a conglomeration of several bases, spread out over most of western Pyongan Namdo province. In peacetime, all the facilities were independent, run by several different branches of the military. Two South Korean commando squads were detached from the group and dispatched to set charges and electronic target markers on several other key targets on base, including the early-warning and fire control radars, surface-to-air missile sites, and the Scud-B and Scud-C missile sites. Another squad was dispatched to set explosives that would act as diversions and create panic and confusion in other areas of the base.

The CCF was the commandos’ main target. The remaining three squads, twenty-four highly trained commandos, moved toward this important objective.

The CCF compound was a sprawling one-hundred-acre site with a drab gray bunkerlike building in the center. Sneaking onto the compound itself was simple. The outer-perimeter security was in poor repair and had already been broken down by bands of roving citizens looking for food or trying to sell food to starving soldiers, or by soldiers on base sneaking supplies off base to sell to local black marketers. Ironically, the best place to penetrate the outer security zone was right in front. Since heavy road traffic from the main base often set off the motion and trembler alarms, they were usually deactivated during base-wide alerts when there was a lot of vehicle traffic. A few silenced gunshots took care of the lights they could not avoid. They saw signs indicating canine patrols inside the outer security ring, but they knew there were no dogs on duty — the soldiers on base had long ago sold or butchered the guard dogs for food.

The Command and Coordination Facility itself was a squat steel and concrete building, two stories above-ground but four belowground. A long concrete tunnel controlled access to the entrances, so a frontal assault was next to impossible. The guard tower on the roof and the two guard towers around the building were dark, but the commandos could not assume they were unmanned — in fact, they had to assume that a response team was already on the way, so speed was imperative. A short chain-link dog fence protected a twelve-foot-high electrified fence. There was no doubt that the fence was on — the deadly current flowing through it could be heard and felt from ten feet away, like waves of heat from a nearby furnace.

They were hamstrung — they could not go forward unless they blew the electric fence apart, nor could they retreat. The leader hunched down with his second-in-command, set to discuss their dilemma…

… when suddenly they heard a noise ahead of them. In a matter of moments, several dozen heavily armed soldiers rushed out of an access tunnel on the north side of the squat concrete structure before them, headed right for the South Korean commandos.

And the mission had barely begun…

Even in his earliest days as a B-52 navigator and bombardier, Patrick McLanahan never remembered moving this fast. Was it because these young guys just liked to hustle, or because the schedule was that compressed? It couldn’t be a function of age — or could it?

Precisely at the prebriefed time, the crews loaded up the old bumpy two-gear blue school bus (at least that hadn’t changed — it seemed like the same old noisy school bus he had ridden in on the way to the B-52 flight line almost twenty years ago) and headed off. First stop was the life support shop, where they grabbed their flight and survival gear and checked oxygen masks and night-vision goggles. Rinc Seaver helped Patrick find his stuff and showed him how to operate the NVG tester, but they couldn’t dawdle because Rebecca Furness, her copilot, Heels Dewey, and the other crew were out the door and loading up. The next stop was base operations, where the crews received a weather briefing, filed their flight plans, checked Notices to Airmen, verified the maintenance status of the planes, got their box lunches from the in-flight kitchen, and took one last nervous pee.

This was the first opportunity Patrick had to take a breather and check out the other crewdogs as they made last-minute preparations before heading out to the flight line. The differences in the modern-day military kept surprising him. They made him feel a little — check that, a lot—out of place and, well, pretty goddamn old.

Because the first thing he noticed was how young these guys were. Even though the Air National Guard usually employed veteran aviators, and this unit was definitely top-heavy with field-grade officers, these guys still looked damned young. Their slang and references — mimicking characters like Bart Simpson, Austin Powers, and Beavis and Butt-head seemed to be the big thing — made them seem younger still. They all had very short haircuts, wore perfectly clean flight suits and spit-shined boots, none of them smoked cigarettes (cigars, yes — even the women), and none of them used vulgarity routinely in conversation. They ate like ravenous wolves — all but Heels ordered two box lunches, one to eat in base ops and the other to take along on the flight — but they all seemed trim and fit, so lean, most of them, that they bordered on the anorexic.

Rinc Seaver was not typical of the new breed. While the others were chatty, chummy, and casual, Seaver was quiet, businesslike, and not very sociable. While the others had Playboy pictures downloaded off the Internet stuck under plastic page protectors in their checklists, Seaver did not.

What was it with this guy? Patrick wondered. He didn’t need to give Seaver a full-blown check ride to know he was more than competent — he was an expert in every aspect of the Bone. The other crew members in the squadron certainly didn’t resent him or resent his expertise, and it was plain that despite the crash, the feeling of detachment, of ostracism, even outright anger toward Seaver was pretty much in Seaver’s own mind. The other crewdogs didn’t resent anyone as long as he pulled his weight and supported the unit.

Furness motioned to Patrick, and they walked out into the hallway to talk without being overheard. “With all due respect, sir — this really sucks,” Furness said. Her voice was low but angry. Well, at least the crews didn’t use vulgarity as a part of normal conversation; the commanders were different. “My guys worked damn hard to gin their birds up on time without a glitch, and then you reward them by forcing everybody to replan. It’s unfair to my troops.”

“Relax, Colonel,” Patrick said. “We take all this into account when we tally the score. But you know as well as I do that flexibility and replanning are standard operating procedure. ‘Flexibility is the key to air power.’”

Furness nodded, though her face was still rigid. “My boys will do fine, General, no matter what you toss at us.”

“That’s what I want to hear, Colonel…”

“But if I or any of my troops feel that any of this violates crew safety, I’m calling it off, and then I’ll gladly go nose-to-nose with you on who’s right,” Furness said. “Rank or no rank, no one endangers my crews.”

“My first concern is always crew safety, Colonel — but I’m also authorized to run this exercise any way I choose in order to fully evaluate your unit’s performance. That means I set the limits here, not you. I’m risking my own career by doing what I’m doing. If you squawk, you’d better be prepared to risk your career over it too. Clear?”

“No, sir, it’s not clear. Not one bit.”

“Things will become clearer to you as we go on, Colonel,” Patrick said.

Rebecca Furness squinted at the one-star general, trying to piece together what she had just heard. “General, what in hell is going on here? This isn’t about a pre-D or a check ride for Seaver, is it?”

“Don’t try to second-guess me, Colonel,” Patrick snapped. “This is my exercise. You do it my way, or you prepare to give up your command over your protest. Do you understand?” Furness had no choice but to agree. “Good. I suggest you let the game proceed, even though it might weird you out. Don’t turn your back on anything until you’re sure you have nothing to learn from it.” Furness did not argue, did not agree — she only looked more confused, although a tiny hint of intrigue and curiosity began to creep over her face. “Carry on.”

“Yes, sir,” Furness said. “We penetrate, decimate, and dominate. We never give up.”

“Ho-rah,” Patrick said, not smiling. They went back into the room, and he said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “The unit is looking real good so far, Colonel. I’m looking forward to shacking some targets today. Anything else for me?”

“No, sir,” Furness said, spitting out the “sir” from deep in her belly. Patrick noticed a lot of straight backs and serious expressions when she started the formation briefing. “Okay, hogs, listen up.” She opened up her checklist and said, “Someone get a time hack. Formation brief…”

The excitement level began to build as they headed out to the flight line several minutes later. Security was tight, but once the security guards checked line badges and inspected the crew bus with dogs and mirrors, they seemed just as keyed up about the upcoming mission and deployment as the aircrew members. Even the young airman-first-class bus driver gave them a “Go kick some ass, sir,” as they stepped off the bus at their aircraft parking spot. In the “old days,” when Patrick pulled a crew, the “sky cops,” the maintainers, the support specialties, and crewdogs all lived in separate worlds. Even though everyone respected one another’s work and knew that they all played for the same team, they knew little about what anyone else on base really did. There was always a certain degree of ambivalence and even resentment.

Not here. It felt to Patrick like a pro football team, where offense, defense, special teams, coaches, trainers, and fans all cheered equally loudly before, during, and after every play.

Furness, Dewey, and Seaver stepped off the bus and quickly carried their gear to their plane. But Patrick couldn’t help but stop and admire the plane itself. He had a couple of hundred hours’ flying time in the Bone, including second-in-command time, plus another few hundred hours in various simulators and procedures trainers, but he looked at this one as if it were the first time he’d ever seen a B-1B Lancer.

The best phrase to describe it was “deadly-looking.” He had always used that term to describe his EB-52 Megafortress bomber, the experimental high-tech B-52 Stratofortress bomber that he had worked on and flown into combat for many years. With the Bone, however, that phrase really stuck. The EB-52 was a souped-up B-52 with a pointed nose and other aerodynamic enhancements, but it still had the bulk, the huge thick wings, and the presence of a big, lumbering bomber — the various enhancements worked very well, but they definitely looked “tacked on,” retrofitted.

The B-1 looked sleek and deadly because it had been designed that way from the beginning. Unlike the B-52s, nothing was hanging off the wings or the fuselage. All weapons were carried internally, and the wings were thin, supercritical airfoils that swept back for high-speed flight. From its long, pointed nose to its gracefully swept “lifting body” fuselage, to its thin wings, to its swept and pointed tail, it looked fast even sitting on the ground. But it was every bit as large as the EB-52, and it could do far more things.

The rising sun spilled over the Sierra Nevada and began to shine on the flight line, surrounding Patrick’s Bone with golden light. It was then that he knew his future was going to be with this war machine. He had worked on many different high-tech planes and weapons at Dreamland, but none of them had the potential that the B-1 had right now. He realized that he was looking at the new Megafortress.

Brad Elliott had created the EB-52 Megafortress. That was his legacy. This plane was going to be Patrick McLanahan’s legacy.

He quickly rejoined his crew at the base of the one-story-tall nose landing gear, and Rinc Seaver began reviewing and briefing the Form 781 aircraft logbooks, going over any recent problems and making sure all the required sign-offs were there. Patrick met the crew chief and two assistant crew chiefs, remarking again to himself how young they were as well. The crew chief, Master Sergeant Chris Bowler, was a fifteen-year veteran, but his assistants, one buck sergeant and one staff sergeant, looked fresh out of tech school. In reality, they had twenty-five years of B-1B experience between them.

The first order of business after reviewing the 781 and briefing the crew chiefs was a “FOD walk,” where the flight and ground crews walked out from the wheels along the Bone’s taxi path to check for anything on the ground that might get sucked up into the engines when they taxied. Every bit of the aircraft parking ramp was meticulously swept and checked for FOD twenty-four hours a day, and the chance that the flight crew, who were busy mentally preparing for their upcoming mission, would actually find anything on the concrete was fairly remote.

But this was a “crew” thing, something the crews did together for their bird. The aircraft “belonged” to the crew chiefs until the aircraft commander signed the 781, at which point the aircraft “belonged” to the flight crew until the crew chief signed the 781 after the maintenance debrief and took control of it again. The FOD walk was a kind of symbolic act, something they did together for the mutual benefit of “their” war machine. For a brief period of time, they were not officers or enlisted personnel, not fliers or ground-pounders — they were Aces High.

Once they parted after the FOD walk, shaking hands, giving high fives, flashing their squadron “gang sign” at each other — three fingers jammed downward in a dunking motion, signifying the 111th — and shouting their squadron motto, “Aces High: Penetrate, Decimate, and Dominate,” they became “flight” crew members and “ground” crew members again. But the bond between them would never be broken.

Patrick followed the crew offensive systems officer, or “O,” John Long, as he did a preflight of the Bone’s three weapon bays. As briefed, the bomber was fully loaded. It was as exciting for Patrick to be out here now, preflighting a bomb bay filled with live weapons, as it was years ago when he was the bombardier in charge of all the explosive power in the B-52 Stratofortress and later in the EB-52 Megafortress.

Long counted the bombs in the forward bomb bay. “Twenty-eight Mark 82 AIRs, ready to go,” he said. The bottom of the bomb bay was ten feet overhead, so there was nothing for him to do but count the weapons and check for any obvious malfunctions or damage.

The five-hundred-pound Mk82 was the second smallest high-explosive bomb carried by the Air Force and the smallest weapon carried by the B-1. Its basic design hadn’t changed since the 1950s; in fact, many of the more than one million Mk80-class weapons still in the inventory were leftovers from the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. The Bone’s Mk82 AIRs (air-inflatable retarded) were modified for low-altitude delivery with the BSU-49/B Ballute tail unit, which was an air-inflatable mushroom-looking canvas parachute that would slow the bomb down enough to allow the bomber to escape the detonation and blast effects without damaging itself.

The weapons were loaded onto slanting racks in a confused-looking array, with bombs tightly stacked atop one another. It seemed impossible that those racks could fold and flip out of the way before the bombs above them released, Patrick thought. Twenty-eight five-hundred-pound bombs safely leaving the bomb bay, separated by only one-fifth of a second. Amazing. He knew precisely how they worked, of course — but studying the engineering on paper was much different from actually seeing the bomb bay jammed with more than five tons of explosive power.

“These are my babies here,” John Long said proudly as they reached the center, or intermediate, bomb bay. This bay held a rotary launcher loaded with eight inert two-thousand-pound GBU-32 JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) guided gravity bombs, the deadliest nonnuclear weapon in the Bone’s arsenal.

Although radar level bombing from the B-1 had always been very accurate, JDAM gave the Block D Bone its only near-precision bombing capability. Target coordinates were fed to a global positioning satellite/inertial navigation system computer strapped onto each bomb, either by manually entering the geographical coordinates by computer keyboard or by feeding the coordinates from the Bone’s bombing computers and attack radar. When the bomb was released, it would steer itself to the target coordinates, using movable control surfaces on its tail. The Bone’s rotary launcher could spit out eight JDAMs in a little over sixty seconds.

Using only its strap-down inertial navigation system, JDAM was normally accurate to within two hundred feet, even if released from an altitude of thirty thousand feet. But if the bomb could lock onto at least three GPS navigation satellites as it fell, its accuracy increased to sixty feet. If it locked onto eight satellites for at least seven seconds, which it could do if released from high altitude, the bomb’s accuracy increased to less than twenty feet — and with a two-thousand-pound bomb, that was guaranteed to wipe out any target smaller than a three-story house.

What’s more, the bomb could glide as far as fifteen miles if released from high altitude, so it was not necessary to release it at a specific point in space. That meant that the B-1 could fly anywhere within a fifteen-mile diameter “basket,” from any direction and at any speed, and start pumping out JDAMs as fast as the rotary launcher could go — and each bomb would automatically find its own target, even if the target was behind it. On a large target complex such as an airfield, military base, city, or weapons storage area, eight different targets could be attacked on the same bomb run by one bomber within sixty seconds, with accuracy second only to laser-or TV-guided bombs or missiles, day or night, in any weather or battlefield conditions.

“You like JDAM, do you, Colonel?” Patrick asked.

“If it wasn’t for JDAM, I think we’d be out of business,” Long replied. “Every other attack plane in the inventory except the Bone and the B-2 stealth bomber has a precision-guided bombing capability — even the lousy little F-16 can launch Maverick missiles. Even with all its payload, range, and speed advantages, what good would a Bone be if it took three bombs to destroy a target that one bomb from an F-15E or F-117 stealth fighter could destroy? With JDAM, we come close to pinpoint bombing accuracy without having to use a datalink, forward-looking infrared, or laser.”

Patrick nodded, appearing to agree — though it was all he could do to keep quiet. The Joint Direct Attack Munition was indeed a good weapon. It was cheap, it worked well, and it modernized the huge supply of one-and two-thousand-pound bombs still in the inventory. But there were a dozen next-generation weapons available for the B-1B bomber, and at least another dozen weapons Patrick and his teams at Dreamland were working on, third-and fourth-and fifth-generation stuff, that made JDAM seem as effective as cavemen throwing rocks. Patrick only wished he could tell this young bombardier about the innovations they were about to unleash.

They moved to the aft bomb bay, which was loaded with ten CBU-87/B CEM (Combined Effects Munition) dispensers. This was the primary wide-area antiarmor and antipersonnel bomblet used by the Bone. Each dispenser carried over two hundred two-pound bomblets. When released, the dispenser would spin rapidly, scattering BLU-97 bomblets over a wide oval-shaped area. The bomblets would float down on a tiny inflatable parachute, then detonate at a preselected altitude above ground.

The kill-and-hurt pattern of this tiny two-pound bomblet was enormous. A shaped charge warhead, capable of penetrating four inches of steel, would shoot straight down, designed to cut through the light armor atop a tank or armored vehicle. At the same instant, a hundred tiny steel fragments would shoot outward, capable of shredding light vehicles within fifty yards and injuring soldiers over a hundred yards away. Finally, a ring of sponge zirconium would ignite, scattering burning pieces of white-hot metal over two hundred yards away and igniting brush, fuel, buildings — or humans — with ease. One CBU-87 could cut a swath of death and destruction the size of eight football fields.

After Long completed his inspection, they climbed up the steep ladder behind the tall nose landing gear into the crew compartment. Patrick followed right behind. He had to keep from grinning like a kid stepping onto a roller coaster. He couldn’t believe how excited he felt. After all the bomber missions he’d flown—why?

Go with it, he told himself, and he broke out into a big shit-eating grin. It was exciting because it is exciting. It felt fun because it is fun! Yes, it was dangerous. Yes, this crew had a mission to accomplish, and Patrick was their judge, their jury — and, in a very real sense, their executioner. But they were also going to fly one of the deadliest planes in the world and drop enough real live no-shit high-explosive material to wipe out an entire brigade of enemy armor. It was the ultimate job, the ultimate game, the ultimate kick in the pants.

Savor it, Patrick told himself. For once, forget about the responsibility and the mission and savor the excitement you are about to experience.

Despite the fact that the B-1B was over 140 feet long and its max gross weight exceeded 230 tons, there was just enough room inside for four crew members in ejection seats plus a little storage space. Rinc stowed his jacket in a cubbyhole above the entry tunnel and his gear in a little step built behind the center console, pre-flighted his ejection seat to make sure it was safetied, then sat down and began running his power-off and before-APU-start checklists.

Patrick stuffed his jacket in the “bunk” behind the copilot’s seat, his helmet bag of extra booklets and “plastic brains” in the space beside his seat, then pre-flighted his seat. He checked that the four seat safety pins were in place, the ejection handle lock was down, and the ejection mode switch was in MANUAL, meaning that if either pilot’s seat malfunctioned or was inadvertently activated, it wouldn’t automatically eject anyone else’s seat. Then he climbed in and started strapping in.

The last bomber he had any time in at all was the EB-52 Megafortress — and that was cavernous compared to the B-1 cockpit. Patrick was unaccustomed to wearing a big, bulky survival vest, and threading all the seat straps around it and finding the right clips and fasteners was harder than he expected. You didn’t just sit in a B-1 bomber — you wore it. He had to leave the shoulder straps as loose as he could and push his arm with his opposite hand to reach switches. Even adjusting the seat took a few moments to relearn.

“How’re you doing over there, sir?” Rinc asked, a trace of amusement on his lips. “Finding everything okay?”

Patrick felt a bit self-conscious as he finally got straightened around and settled in. He wrapped the Velcro strap of his checklist around his left thigh, a small metal kneeboard around his right thigh, and opened the checklist to the “Before APU Start” checklist page. He capped it off by slipping on a new pair of Nomex flight gloves, working the fingers down tight, then punching a fist into his palm excitedly, just as he used to do before starting engines years ago as a young crewpuppy. “I’m doing fine, Major,” Patrick replied. “Don’t be afraid to kick my butt if I’m not keeping up with you.”

“You’re doing fine so far,” Rinc said. “It took me three tries to find all my harness straps without help.”

The first order of business was starting the APU, or auxiliary power unit. The APU was a fifth small self-contained jet engine, mounted in the B-1’s tail, which provided electrical, hydraulic, and pneumatic power to the aircraft without starting one of the big turbofans or relying on external power carts. With the APU, the Bone was completely self-sufficient — it did not need ground power equipment for any flight-line operations. Once the B-1’s APU was started and supplying electrical power, the crew started to turn on their equipment and run power-on and before-engine-start checklists. At precisely the briefed time, the crew began the engine-start and after-engine-start checklists. It took only a few moments to get all four engines running.

Things happened quickly after that. The pilots ran a series of checklists, testing every system, backup system, and function aboard their plane. The TACAN radio receiver was not passing its self-test, but the avionics maintenance “Red Ball” team had a spare part out to the aircraft and installed in record time. They certainly could’ve launched without a TACAN receiver — with all the sophisticated inertial and satellite navigation gear on board, the old TACAN was seldom used except on precision instrument approaches — but it was a required piece of equipment. Furness’s flight checked in precisely at the prebriefed time. Patrick copied the mission clearance and command post clearance, then began to taxi out.

Except for a sudden brief loss of the nosewheel steering system in Rinc’s plane, which was corrected immediately by recycling the system, the flight taxied out without incident. A large crowd of onlookers was up on the roof of both commercial airline terminal buildings at Reno-Tahoe International, watching the two-ship of B-1B bombers taxiing out for takeoff. All the commercial flights had been cleared onto the parallel runway to make way for the military flights, but several stopped to watch the Bones parade by. Almost everyone based at Reno International knew that the 111th Bomb Squadron was getting some sort of evaluation, and a few knew that these planes carried live weapons, so they recognized that this was something special.

They received a “last chance” inspection at the end of the runway by the supervisor of flying behind the steel revetments in the runway hammerhead. “Looks like you got a nick in the left nosewheel tire, Rodeo,” the SOF radioed via the maintenance officer’s intercom cord. “Must’ve happened when your nosewheel steering cut out.”

“Any cords showing?” Rinc asked.

“I see two cord belts.”

“Shit,” Rinc muttered. That meant an abort to change the tire. A Bone near max gross weight with a bald spot on a nose gear tire was not a good place to be. “Screw it. We’ll take it.”

“You sure about that?” Patrick asked.

“The book says we can take up to three cords—”

“But at gross weight?”

“It doesn’t give a gross weight restriction, sir,” Seaver pressed. “Besides, we’re forty thousand under gross right now. Three cords peacetime, five cords wartime. We can probably get a waiver for five. We should—”

“We’re going off station to a forward-deployment base that probably won’t have the gear we need to change tires,” Patrick said. “Better to get it changed now rather than take a broken bird to a forward bare-base.”

“This is our pre-D launch, General — we’re talking about Probability to Launch and Survive points,” Rinc emphasized. “PLS isn’t a factor once we get to our deployment base. But if we lose PLS points due to a late launch, we get hammered. We’ll be okay with two cords missing. You should know that the tires have twelve cord belts, and even with five gone we’ve got a wide safety margin. We’re still legal. Let’s get the hell outta here and go drop some iron.” Patrick hesitated. Seaver added irritably, “Unless you’re going to order me to get it changed.”

“You’re the boss,” Patrick said.

“SOF, I’m taking the plane,” Rinc said, nodding to his guest copilot. “Finish up and clear the runway for launch.”

“Roger dodger, Rodeo,” the SOF said. He finished his drive-arounds and found nothing else wrong with any of the planes. “Aces Two-Zero flight, pins and streamers pulled, doors closed, and you appear to be in takeoff configuration. Penetrate, decimate, and dominate. SOF is clear. Break. Reno tower, Aces SOF, clear me on three-four left for a last-chance runway inspection.”

“Aces SOF, Reno tower, clear on three-four left, report when off.” The SOF sped down the runway, making a last inspection for anything that might cause damage to the Bones during takeoff. Once the SOF cleared off the runway, it was time for departure.

Patrick had forgotten what a takeoff in the B-1B was like. He had flown lots of different aircraft, including supersonic bombers, but there was something different about the raw power meshed with the physical size of the Bone that made takeoffs even more spectacular in this plane than in any other.

As soon as Rebecca Furness in Aces Two-Zero started rolling, Rinc Seaver lined up on centerline, locked the brakes using his toes on top of the rudder pedals, then started to feed in power. The sound was muted, silky smooth, with no trace of rattle or “burping” as in the G-model B-52s Patrick used to fly. Rinc moved the throttles up to military power, paused to let all four engines stabilize, then cracked the throttles into afterburner range. He watched as the eight afterburner initiator lights illuminated, then released brakes and pushed the throttles to max AB.

Acceleration was rapid but not very dramatic in military power — but when those four huge afterburners lit and power was moved to max AB, the thrust and acceleration snapped Patrick’s eyes open. The ejection seat felt as though it came up and smacked him in the back of the head. He had felt afterburner kicks plenty of times, but usually it was just that — a kick and nothing more. In the Bone, a constant, steady pressure that forced him deep into his seat followed that nice hard kick. It was like flying in a rocket ship headed for earth orbit. Patrick hadn’t felt G-forces like that in a long time. The pressure and acceleration made his head spin — it seemed as if the deck was inclined at least forty-five degrees.

Seaver’s little “departure show” routine didn’t help Patrick’s stomach. Rinc lifted only about one hundred feet off the runway, pushed the nose over to hold that altitude, then raised the gear and flaps and swept the wings back to twenty-four degrees. He accelerated to well over four hundred knots — at max afterburner, it only took a few seconds — then, as he blasted between the twin towers of the Nugget Casino and the Hilton Hotel Casino, he wagged the wings twice before lifting the Bone on its fiery tail. Their 400,000-pound bird suddenly did become a rocket ship, headed skyward at almost ten thousand feet per minute. Rinc didn’t revert to a more conventional climb-out until passing twelve thousand feet, when he pulled back to military power at 350 knots. They leveled off at twenty-one thousand feet in no time.

John Long reported “tied on radar” and fed continuous position information on the flight leader, and the formation quickly joined up. After closing to tight wingtip formation to check one another out, Rinc extended to loose route formation so he could perform their checklists without having to concentrate too much on formation flying.

“How you doing over there, General?” Rinc asked.

“Fine,” Patrick replied.

“Heard some heavy breathing on interphone. Thought you might lose some of your box lunch.”

“Not a chance,” Patrick responded. “I’ll be with you on the TERFLW checklist in a minute. Crew, I’ll be on secure SATCOM. I’d appreciate it if no one monitors that channel until I let you know. Copy?”

“Sure,” Rinc replied. “Monitor GUARD and interphone, report back up. I’m starting the TERFLW checklist.”

“O.”

“D.”

“Thanks,” Patrick said. “Copilot is clearing off to SECURE.”

Patrick set the referee’s SATCOM channel into the satellite communications thumbwheels, clicked his communications wafer switch to SECURE, then keyed the mike button: “Firebird, Firebird, Aces Two-One.”

“Two-One, this is Firebird.” Patrick instantly recognized Luger’s voice on the scrambled satellite communications channel. “Authenticate Foxtrot-Uniform.”

There was a moment’s pause while Patrick looked up the response in his AKAC-1553 code book for the familiar “F-U” challenge: “Two-One has ‘Tango.’ Is this Amarillo?”

“Sure is.” Dave Luger was from Amarillo, Texas, and Patrick, from California, usually never let him live it down. Only months of concentrated Russian brainwashing and years of working as a Soviet bomber design engineer in Lithuania, where he was known to the Central Intelligence Agency as an American defector code-named “Redtail Hawk,” had made Luger lose his thick Texas drawl.

“Then authenticate Alpha-Hotel, amigo,” Patrick said. The “A-H” was another endearing authentication used by parties known to each other.

“Firebird authenticates ‘India.’”

“Loud and clear,” Patrick said. Both parties were required to double-check authentication, even though they were on a discrete, secure satellite channel available only to them. “How’s it going, partner?”

“All bombers are away, the last of the squadron will be loaded up in a few hours, and we’ll be right behind them,” Dave said. “Be advised, bud: I was with the SOF during the launch, and I got a good look at your nosewheel. I think you got more than two cords cut — looked to me more like five or six. If you land with weapons onboard, be careful. I understand these guys wanted to max out PLS points, which they did, but they might have violated peacetime safety-of-flight rules by taking a broke bird into the air. I think they should have at least gotten a maintenance supervisor out there to look. Just so you know.”

“Copy that, Amarillo.” Patrick shook his head, hoping Seaver was eavesdropping.

“How did your takeoff feel, sir? Didn’t fill up a helmet bag, did you?”

“Felt just great,” Patrick said. “I forgot what a zoomer this baby is. I think I left part of my gut back on the runway. If I lose it, it’ll probably be low-level.”

“You mess up, you clean up, sir,” Luger reminded him. “That was quite the show your AC put on. I’ll bet the folks in those casinos got a great shot. You could see the windows rattling from the ground. Hey, listen, Muck. I got a call from the home drome.” The home drome in his case was Dreamland. “We’re getting ready to monitor the Chinese and North Koreans during the first day of Team Spirit bombing exercises in South Korea.”

“Everything okay so far?”

“Normal activity from the DPRK and China — not so normal for the ROK,” Dave said.

“How so?”

“I dunno. Just — busy. Everyone is supercharged. It sounds like it’s the big finale day of the exercise rather than the first supercautious ramp-up-slowly day.”

“Lots of high-powered visibility in this one,” Patrick pointed out. “Lots of VIPs, including Japan. Our cutie Vice Prez is out there too.” He hesitated for a moment, thinking hard. Something inside his head was saying the news from Luger had to be investigated. He didn’t know why, but it had to be checked out. No matter what other disasters were happening, he never went wrong when he listened to that tiny, almost drowned-out little voice in his head. Patrick keyed the mike: “What do we got overhead?”

“I’ll have to double-check,” Luger said. “Overhead” meant satellites. Through their contractors, Patrick had access to several kinds of sophisticated photo, communications, radar, and electromagnetic reconnaissance satellites, all of which could be steered over the Korean peninsula in a matter of hours if needed. Since Dreamland was not an active combat base — at least, not one that most of the rest of the government knew — Patrick and his staff did not get normal access to CIA and Defense Department satellite imagery, so they relied on their own. “You want to take an unofficial peek, Muck?”

“Let’s get a Carter and a Ford over the peninsula and start matching up origins and destinations of all that comm traffic,” Patrick said. The reconnaissance satellites designed, built, and launched by Sky Masters Inc., one of the Air Force’s smallest but more important contractors, were all named for American Presidents. The Carter series were communications eavesdropping satellites capable of detecting, tracing, and analyzing radio, TV, cellular, microwave, Internet, and satellite communications. The Ford series of satellites were millimeter-wave radar reconnaissance satellites, capable of detecting, pinpointing, and identifying objects as small as a car almost anywhere on earth — even underground, hidden in buildings, or under camouflage or underwater. All were inserted into low earth orbit so they needed very little power to send their signals back to earth. Launched by boosters carried on commercial airliners, a constellation of these small satellites, called NIRTSats (“Need it right this second” satellites) could be set up in a matter of hours.

“You got it, Muck,” Luger said. “I think we have a few assets in place right now we can tap into.”

“Good. I’ve got checklists to run, Amarillo. Talk at you soon.”

“Go kick some butt, D,” Luger said. “I’ll meet you at Tonopah. Firebird clear.”

Patrick flipped back to interphone. “Crew, D’s back up interphone. Clear to switch SATCOM to primary monitor channels.”

“We need to get going on these checklists, sir,” Seaver said. “We’re waiting on you.”

Yep, he was behind already. Things happened fast in the B-1B. “Sorry about that, gang. Got busy on SATCOM. I’m ready.”

“Let’s not be late, co,” Rinc said, taking a swig of orange juice and giving his guest copilot a mock disapproving scowl, then a friendly, easy smile. He was taking great delight in needling the one-star general sitting in his cockpit. “Let’s not be late.”

You are late.

The South Korean commandos relaxed and lowered the muzzles of their MP5Ks. The two groups approached each other. The South Korean team leader saluted the ranking officer. “Lieutenant An Sun-hun, team leader.”

The North Korean returned the salute. “Major Hong Song-ku, chief of security. Welcome to the People’s Army command center. Follow me.” Lieutenant An dispatched one squad to set explosives at several other key sites on base. What he didn’t tell his North Korean contact was that the commandos would also place electronic target markers on the CCF itself. In case their plan did not work, the CCF was going to be demolished with concentrated aerial and rocket bombardment until it was nothing more than a hole in the earth.

The upper two levels of the Command and Coordination Facility, which were mostly administrative offices, were virtually deserted. The ground-floor security desk was manned, with the five-ton vaultlike upper-access door secure, but the guards on duty did not register the least bit of surprise when the twelve South Korean commandos were escorted through.

The commandos quickly descended the staircase to the first subfloor level. This level housed the facility’s security forces — two full infantry companies, over two hundred specially trained and heavily armed soldiers. A security station at the bottom of the stairs was deserted too. On the other side of the security officer’s desk was another vault door, which led to the command center. On either side, angled away so there would be no cross fire from security troops, were the two access hallways leading to the barracks of the two infantry companies. The North Korean security commander led the South Koreans to his office along one of the corridors.

“We were afraid you would not come,” Major Hong said. “You were not spotted by any of our patrols until you entered the outer perimeter.” He smiled wryly. “I suppose that does not look very good for our security here — we knew you were coming, and still we could not detect your presence. My congratulations.”

Lieutenant An bowed in thanks. “We must contact our headquarters as soon as we have secured this facility, or else it will be attacked.”

“What must I do?” Hong asked.

“We must take the command center itself immediately,” An replied. “What is the situation, sir?”

“Full staffing in the command center, communications, and intelligence cells,” Hong replied. “Thirty-seven officers and fifty-three noncommissioned officers, all loyalists.” Lieutenant An’s face fell — that was a very large complement of Communists, and even if they weren’t all battle-hardened soldiers, it was going to be tough to take them all. “The vice-marshal in charge of the Artillery Command and the commander of the Air Forces are here as well, along with their personal security teams. They are here to monitor your Team Spirit bombing exercises.”

Hong added, “They ordered both security companies activated to double the guards, so I have my full force of two hundred and eleven men on duty. We have fifty men in the command center, ten in the communications and intelligence centers, and the rest spread out inside and around the building. They are more than enough to subdue all the loyalists. All are under my sole command.”

Hong noticed An’s second-in-command shift his feet uneasily. “Do not worry, Sergeant,” Hong said with a reassuring smile. “Not all of my men are conscripts, but most are, and the rest are not full party members — only officers and senior noncommissioned officers are accorded full party status.”

“Are you a party member, sir?” An asked.

“My parents were both party members, and so I was enrolled in the Young Patriots Corps and then awarded a commission,” Hong replied. “But my mother was killed trying to cross the frontier. She was accused of illegal travel and treason. She committed suicide in prison. My father and I were stripped of our party affiliations, and I was reduced in rank and given a noncom-bat post. I have been an outcast ever since. My father died of pneumonia eight months ago because he was not given any medical treatment. He had not had one regular meal or any heat for his apartment in over a year.

“Not one of us nonparty members, myself included, have been paid in more than six months, nor do we expect to be paid until perhaps next spring, if ever. Our families are starving. Our children have no clothes, no education, nothing. Only full party members are allowed to buy food at the base commissary — the rest must beg, steal, scavenge, or starve. Yet our government spends billions of won on weapons to destroy the very people whose unity we hope will bring us salvation.”

He looked at the South Korean commandos and added somberly, “The time for mistrust is over. We are on our knees. We must stop the Communist war machine from destroying us. We will start now. Every true Korean patriot is behind us.” He pointed to a stack of boxes in a corner of his office. “There are ponchos you can wear to cover your uniforms.”

“Not necessary, sir,” Lieutenant An said. With that, his commandos withdrew their own ponchos — which looked identical to North Korean-issued ones.

“Very well,” Hong said, smiling approvingly as he donned his own poncho. “Let us then march into history — or oblivion — together. I have everything ready. Follow my lead.”

“Tell me what your plan is,” An said.

“It would be better if I did not,” Hong said. “Your surprise will help the ruse. Trust me. Do you have ear and eye protection?” An nodded, then looped his flash-bang goggles around the back of his neck and hid them under his poncho. Hong did the same to his pair. “Good. Follow me.” With that, he shouted an order to his men in the hallway, issued an order on a handheld radio, then marched purposefully out into the corridor. Although An still felt that old chill of mistrust and fear, he could do nothing else but follow along. He and his men, and the nation behind them, were already too far down the path to look backward.

Hong stepped in front of the large steel door leading to the command center and pushed a CALL button. “Identify yourself” came the reply on the speaker.

“Major Hong.”

There was a confused moment’s silence. The person at the other end was the assistant to the senior controller, in charge of access to the command center. “State your business please, comrade Major.”

“Status inspection. Several security systems are not in order. I want to inspect them myself and then report to the senior controller personally. I am also bringing down six cases of food, electronic parts, water, and publications. You should have received the invoices for them already. Lieutenant Wu is with me.”

“Stand by, please.” A moment later, after receiving permission from the senior controller, the heavy steel door motored open. By design, the elevator was big enough for only three or four persons, and only two persons after they loaded the six crates of supplies onboard. Lieutenant An hid his MP5K and backpack under his poncho and squeezed inside the tiny elevator with Major Hong. The elevator moved at only two meters per minute on its way down the ten meters to the command center. It had been designed that way to prevent a massive, rapid enemy assault.

Five minutes later the elevator doors slid open, and Lieutenant An found himself staring at a room he never truly believed he would ever be allowed to see — the Korean People’s Army Military Command and Coordination Facility. The entire North Korean military machine was directed from this very chamber. It was exciting to be here — and also a bit of a letdown. It was much darker, gloomier, and smellier than Major Hong’s intelligence reports had said.

“Lieutenant,” Major Hong said in a sharp, officious voice just as the doors slid fully open, “take the top two boxes to the galley immediately.”

“Yes, sir,” An replied. He hoped this was some sort of ploy or diversion, because he had no idea where the galley was. An picked up the top two boxes…

… and, just as he took a step forward, he felt a tear at the bottom of the second box, and the bottom popped open, spilling bags of rice, cans of cooking oil, dried meat, tea, and other foods onto the floor of the elevator. The two-gallon cans of oil and the bags of rice split open, scattering rice everywhere, and the floor was slippery from the oil oozing from the cans.

“Lieutenant, what in blazes are you doing?” Hong shouted. The North Korean major whirled around and struck An sharply across the face with his open hand. “You idiot! Can you not follow one simple order without creating a disaster?”

“What is going on over there, Major?” a voice from the gloom asked.

Hong turned and bowed into the darkness. “My apologies, comrade Vice-Marshal Kim,” he replied. “My clumsy assistant has spilled some supplies in the elevator. It will take only a moment to clean it up.”

“If any of those electronic components are damaged, Major,” another voice said, “I will hold you personally responsible.”

“They do not appear to be damaged, comrade General Cho,” Hong replied.

“Relax, General,” Kim said. “We are all under enormous stress. Get it cleaned up immediately, Major. We cannot afford to have our only service access elevator down too long. And it is not the sign of a good commander to physically strike a subordinate in public, no matter how much stress one is under. Remember that next time.”

“Yes, sir, comrade Vice-Marshal,” Hong said. “Lieutenant, get out of the way.”

Lieutenant An swallowed hard as he maneuvered clear of the elevator, ready to help Hong in any way he might indicate. He realized Hong had been talking to Vice-Marshal Kim Ung-tae, the commander of the Artillery Command, himself. Vice-Marshal Kim was in charge of all of North Korea’s rockets, ballistic missiles, air defense missiles and artillery, and coastal defense missiles and artillery. He was also responsible for all of North Korea’s nuclear, chemical, and biological warheads that could be delivered by rockets or artillery. He was the third most powerful man in the North Korean armed forces and reported directly to Marshal Chang Song-u, the commander in chief of the Korean People’s Army, and to Supreme Commander and Beloved Leader President Kim Jong-il.

The other man was probably Lieutenant General Cho Myong-nok, the chief of staff of the Korean People’s Army’s Air Forces. General Cho was responsible for approximately one-fifth of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction — the warheads carried on his bombers and strike fighters. Together, these men commanded four-fifths of North Korea’s deadliest weapons. They held one of the two keys necessary to unleash those forces; the Beloved Leader, Kim Jong-il, held the other key.

It was generally believed, however, that Vice-Marshal Kim and General Cho had full authority and standing orders to launch an attack, especially if South Korea struck first — President Kim would immediately authorize a counterstrike with special weapons without any hesitation or question. That meant that Kim and Cho had extraordinary powers that few men on earth commanded.

Lieutenant An quickly realized the purpose of the spilled supplies in the elevator. Because there was only one elevator to the command center, because it moved so slowly, and because it could only hold three or four persons at a time, it was constantly in use. No one could leave or enter now.

As An’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could make out more details of the command center. It resembled a theater, with a wooden stage, an “orchestra” section at which computer and communications technicians worked, and behind them seats for the defense ministers, senior commanders, and their aides in a semicircle. There were several conference rooms and cubicles behind the commanders’ stations, a circular access aisle, and then more support staff areas. Up onstage, old-fashioned greaseboards and mark-and-erase maps and flow charts, updated by communications technicians with tissue paper and grease pens, dwarfed a few electronic computer screens. It was all much smaller and much less sophisticated than An had anticipated. But security guards were everywhere. Vice-Marshal Kim and General Cho each appeared to have one armed aide with them at all times, and another armed bodyguard was roaming the aisle off to the side so he could observe the entire room.

“Take that box up to the plotter’s station, Lieutenant,” Major Hong said in a loud voice, “and if you make another clumsy mistake, I will do much more than embarrass you before your fellow officers. Now move.” Lieutenant An bowed and picked up the box Hong indicated. He didn’t know where he was supposed to go, and Hong didn’t give him the slightest indication. The only thing that looked like a plotter was up on the stage, in front of all those high-ranking commanders. Swallowing hard, he turned and started down the access aisle to the front of the command center. When he reached the floor, he simply went up the nearest set of steps. Then, once he reached the stage, still without any guidance, he started across to the center of the stage.

Just as he reached the center, he heard Major Hong shout, “Lieutenant, what in the name of the gods in heaven are you doing?”

An stopped and turned to face Hong, somewhere in the back of the command center. Every face on the command center floor, from Vice-Marshal Kim to the lowliest clerk, was looking at him. “Major, I…”

Just then the world exploded in a blinding flash of white light and an ear-splitting ka-bang. Anyone whose eyes were open and without vision protection, including An, was instantly blinded and paralyzed from the two-kilo flash-bang grenade in the box that Major Hong had set off by remote control.

Lieutenant An awoke a long time later, sprawled in a chair on the stage. His poncho was still on, which he removed, and he still wore his MP5K on its shoulder harness sling. When he looked behind him, he noticed several officers and enlisted men, bound wrist and ankle with nylon handcuffs, their mouths wrapped in nylon too. A few were shouting muffled curses, but most were still. Major Hong handed An a canteen of water, which he poured over his face. The cool water felt wonderful — his face felt as if it had been badly sunburned.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Lieutenant,” Hong said with a reassuring smile. “Are you all right?”

“I still can’t see very well,” An replied, “but I think I am unhurt.”

“I do believe you are the first one ever to have a two-kilo flash-bang charge detonate in his hands,” Hong said. His voice was louder than normal because he knew An’s ears would still be ringing from the blast. “Good to see it is not fatal — at least not when it’s pointed away from you.” He paused, then said, “Time had run out, young sir. Several status checks had been missed; reports were being radioed directly down to the command center instead of through my office. I had to act immediately — there was no time to tell you to don your protective gear.”

“I understand, sir,” An responded. He looked around him through blurry eyes. “Are the officers secure?”

“Secure or dead — it was their choice,” Hong said matter-of-factly. “I have taken twenty officers and forty-one enlisted men captive. Ten officers and ten enlisted men pledged their support to a united Republic of Korea. They sealed their promise by desecrating their flag before the vice-marshal and General Cho. They offered to man the consoles and communications systems and try as long as possible to maintain a normal communications pattern. I do not think it can be done for very long, but we will try.”

“Can you trust the men who pledged loyalty to your revolt?” An asked. “If they are on the communications panel, they can radio for help.”

“Lieutenant, all I have to rely on is trust and my own intuition,” Major Hong said. “I trust your government to support me and my men, before and after the revolt. Besides, there is very little anyone can do even if the whole world knows of what we have done. This facility is not impregnable, but it is self-sufficient and it can withstand a very large assault. And if they do destroy it, they destroy their own national military command center, which will paralyze their command, control, and communications systems.” He smiled a faint smile. “But if our brothers in the South fulfill their part of the bargain, it will not matter. The revolution we are praying for will still take place.”

Lieutenant An nodded. “I have been praying for unification all my life, sir,” he said. “I am proud to be standing with you here this day. What shall we do now?”

“We continue operations as long as we can and make it seem as normal as possible,” Hong replied. “When the fun starts, we shall do everything we can to delay, confuse, and disrupt the Communists’ response, and then we shall pray that our brothers to the south are successful. In less than six hours, we shall see what kind of world we have created together here today.”

What in blazes is going on!” thundered Colonel of Artillery Forces Cho Mun-san, commander of the Fourth Artillery Division at Sunan People’s Army Base. “You had better start talking now, Captain!”

“Sir!” The duty officer, Captain of Artillery Kong Hwan-li, a former missile battery commander, stood at ramrod attention as the division commander entered the ready room. Kong was a young, dedicated Korean People’s Army officer, groomed to be a military officer since the age of twelve. He had been promoted to serve in headquarters after only six years in the field, first as a missile launch officer and then as assistant company commander. Now he was the night division headquarters senior duty officer, in charge of the entire artillery division at Sunan — three brigades of short-, medium-, and long-range surface-to-surface missile units, aimed at South Korea and the region just north of the Demilitarized Zone. It was a high honor for a young captain.

To Kong Hwan-li, this assignment and his previous assignment as a missile launch officer were the most important ones he could ever hope to have. With his skills and knowledge, he would be the first to strike against the capitalists to the south. It was a sacred honor and a sacred duty. The state was in a constant condition of alert and readiness, and the sooner war came, the better.

This situation was a perfect example. Either this was a joke, a no-notice exercise, or the beginning of the long-awaited war with the capitalists. To Kong, it didn’t matter — his duty was clear no matter what was going on. It was he who had had to make the decision to wake up the division commander, and now he had to have all the answers. “Sir, I must report a serious error in our routine communications checks with headquarters,” Kong said.

“Spit it out, Captain.”

He produced the duty officer’s logbook, which contained a page detailing the communications procedures that must be performed every hour. “I sent a routine hourly continuity check message to the Command and Coordination Facility. My last message was properly acknowledged by the computer, except that the authentication was made using last hour’s code. I know the assistant controller at the CCF, so I… “He swallowed nervously, then went on: “Sir, I took it upon myself to phone him to reprimand him for using the old code.”

“That is what you got me out of bed for, Captain?”

“No, sir,” Kong hurried on. “I was unable to reach the CCF by phone. I sent a communications check message, and it acknowledged properly, but again with last hour’s date-time group and authentication code. I then sent an operational security warning message to the—”

“A what?” Colonel Cho shouted. “You sent a what?” Captain Kong handed the colonel a sheet of paper, which Cho snatched out of his hand in total disbelief. “You idiot!“Cho shouted. “An operational security warning message is only sent by the division commander to notify the CCF that his designated missile batteries cannot respond to attack orders!”

“I am aware of that, sir,” Kong explained. “I thought such a serious violation of secure communications procedures warranted such a message. But when I received the reply… well, sir, this is what I received.”

Colonel Cho looked at the acknowledgment message in disbelief. The Command and Coordination Facility acknowledged Kong’s message and ordered him to keep all of his missile forces at the ready but take no further action. The CCF did not countermand or ask for clarification of the warning message, did not call Kong or Cho directly, did not send a security team out to the corps headquarters to ask what was happening or to arrest Cho and Kong for scaring the living hell out of the commanders in the CCF. Instead, they ordered him to stand by!

“What in blazes is this?” Cho muttered. He picked up the hot line telephone that rang directly to the CCF senior controller. No answer. “You have had no other contact with the CCF, Captain?”

“None, sir,” Kong replied. “Only the invalid computer-generated acknowledgment messages.”

Cho was confused. The only operational contact he was permitted was through the Control and Coordination Facility. He spoke quite often with Korean People’s Army headquarters in Pyongyang, but only for administrative and doctrinal purposes. Well, this was an emergency. It was better to wake up a few general officers than sit on his hands and look like an idiot for doing nothing.

“All I ever wanted,” Cho muttered angrily to no one, and especially not to Kong, “is to preserve my family’s name and accept an honorable retirement and pension. Is that too much to ask for a loyal servant of the fatherland? I realize I might not get much of a pension, the state’s economy being what it is, but I expect and deserve an honorable retirement. Yet it seems everyone is conspiring against me and my simple wishes.” He glared at Kong and added, “Especially the snot-nosed young captains, the ones who think they will conquer the world.”

Muttering a curse, he picked up the telephone and dialed. “Captain, this is Colonel Cho, Fourth Artillery Division commander. I want to speak with General Li.” Captain Kong swallowed hard. General Li was the commander of First Corps, the People’s Army’s largest and most powerful military headquarters, and Colonel Cho’s superior officer. Colonel Cho looked at the phone in exasperation, then said, “Well, then I will speak to his deputy, Colonel Ban… I know all calls outside normal duty hours are to be routed through the CCF at Sunan, Captain, but I have lost normal voice communication with the CCF. Perhaps you should try to contact the CCF yourself… I don’t mean a routine ops-normal connectivity check, but a simple phone call…”

The colonel went back and forth with the headquarters duty officer for a few more minutes, then was placed on hold. Captain Kong dared not ask the colonel if he wanted tea, if he wanted him to hold the line, anything — he just waited, realizing that headquarters seemed equally as confused as he did. Finally, after nearly fifteen minutes on hold, Colonel Cho shouted, “At last! What is the meaning of keeping me on hold so long, Captain?… What? My apologies, General… Yes, sir… Yes, sir… Right away, sir.” Colonel Cho lowered the phone back on its cradle, a shocked expression on his face.

“Was that General Li, sir?” Kong asked timidly. Cho did not answer, only stared blankly across the room. It was then that Kong realized something was very wrong, something strange was happening. “Sir, what are your orders from headquarters?”

“My orders were… my orders were to stand by,” Colonel Cho said woodenly. He frowned, deep in thought and confused. “General Li apparently was unable to reach the CCF either.”

“What does this mean, sir?” Kong asked. “Is it not dangerous to lose direct contact with the CCF for so long? We have no way of receiving instructions. Our forces are vulnerable to—”

“I am well aware of the impact on our forces, Captain,” Cho snapped. “My orders are to stand by. Stand by…” He thought for a moment longer; then: “We have no choice but to do as ordered.”

“Sir, the last valid communications check with the CCF was ninety-eight minutes ago,” Kong emphasized. “Two other computerized messages received from the CCF since then, but neither valid. Three voice checks, two over direct secure lines — none received.” Kong noticed his commander’s hesitation. “Sir, this is very serious,” he protested. “We must assume that all our communications to the CCF are compromised. I say we must also assume that the CCF itself may be destroyed or overtaken by enemy forces.”

“What?” Cho asked incredulously. “How can you make such an assumption? Are you mad?”

“That is the only safe assumption you can make,” Kong said. “Either that, or this is an exercise, a test. Either way, sir, you must respond as if we are under attack. You must order the division to disperse and prepare to attack immediately.”

“You are insane, Kong!” Cho shouted. “I am going to do no such thing!”

“Then we will fail this test — and fail our fatherland,” Kong said. “Sir, you must—”

“Be silent, Captain,” Cho scolded his duty officer. But the thought that this could be a secret no-notice test of his readiness — and possibly his loyalty — resonated. That could be the only reasonable explanation. And if it was, his most proactive response would be an alert dispersal. He had the authority to move his forces, and he had the authority to launch all but a nuclear attack if he felt his forces were threatened. He had the authority. If ever he should decide to use it, it would be now.

“All I really want is my retirement and for my good name to last at least one generation,” the colonel muttered again, shaking his head. But there was no choice. “Very well, Captain. Implement a division-wide alert. Brigade commanders and battle staff members will report to the battle staff command center in fifteen minutes. All regiments are to deploy to L-1 positions and await further instructions. On my authority.”

“Yes, sir!” Kong replied enthusiastically. “Sergeant!” he yelled to his communications chief. The noncommissioned officer ran in from the comm center, startled by the tone of the captain’s voice. “Issue a division-wide alert immediately, recall the battle staff and brigade commanders, and order all regiments to deploy immediately to… to L-1 positions.” The sergeant blanched, then nodded and turned back to the comm center. It was the order he always knew he would relay one day — and the order he had always dreaded.

An L-1 deployment was an attack-in-place directive. All of the division’s 240 FROG, Scud, and Nodong missiles were mobile to some extent. The FROG series and Scud missiles were road-mobile rockets, mounted on either wheeled or tracked vehicles; the Nodong-1 was a rail-mobile missile, resembling a standard railroad boxcar when in the road-march configuration. The missiles were designed to be deployed with Army units and dispersed throughout the countryside. Normally, they would be transferred from Fourth Division to whatever Army unit needed them, and that commander would deploy them and give the order to launch. In fact, one-third of Fourth Division’s weapons were already tasked to other infantry or mechanized brigades, mostly arrayed within fifty miles of the Demilitarized Zone, ready to move south and attack.

But in case of a sneak attack, Colonel Cho had plans in place for the missiles still at Sunan to quickly move to presurveyed launch points throughout the countryside, where in effect he became a field commander in charge of a massive array of firepower. The L-1 directive ordered all missile batteries to quickly march to preselected launch pads, anywhere from two to fifty miles away, set up, and prepare to launch. The wheeled FROG-7 rockets and Scud-B missiles could travel at highway speeds over most terrain, so they were dispersed farther away. The older FROG-5s on their tracks took much longer, so they were dispersed just a few miles, mostly inside the base. The nuclear Nodong ballistic missiles could take several hours to prepare to move, but they could be dispersed anywhere in the country. Mixing in with the regular commercial rail traffic would create a type of “shell game” to confuse the enemy and decrease the chance they could be destroyed by a sneak attack. The L-1 directive was a last-ditch effort that gave Cho’s valuable forces a chance to survive and perhaps even strike back at the enemy.

Captain Kong took his seat at the duty officer’s desk and retrieved the checklist book for the L-1 directive and for a division-level battle staff meeting. He worked swiftly and efficiently, a product of years of training and countless exercises, but his heart was jackhammering in his chest. He knew this was no exercise. Something or someone had cut off communications with the outside world, and his commander had just ordered his forces to get ready to attack.

It was what he was trained for. It was inevitable: the clash between good and evil where the world was destroyed but eventually made way for a new, peaceful world. The capitalist society to the south was corrupt, an American puppet. The Americans fostered the North-South split, fearing that a reunited Korea would not want anything to do with them. Peaceful reunification was theoretically possible, but the Americans wanted to use their weapons and military might because that’s what their corrupt government, propped up by money-hungry military industrialists, wanted. So as long as Americans were on Korean soil, war was inevitable. It was essential to force all foreigners off the sacred peninsula so reunification under communism could take place.

The winner, then, would be the first to strike. Now Fourth Artillery Division took one more step toward making that glorious honor theirs.

Kong opened the checklist book and began making the phone calls, activating the division recall roster and setting everything in motion. A few more calls, and it would roll forward on its own momentum, like a runaway locomotive. Finally, the war would be under way — and the North would strike first and win.