Stephen Coonts - Combat

Thanks to Don Aldridge, Lt. General, USAF (ret.), former vice commander of the Strategic Air Command, for his help and insights on the inner workings of an Air Force promotion board, and to author and former B-52 radar nav Jim Clonts for his help on living and working on Diego Garcia.

Special thanks to my friends Larry and Maryanne Ingemanson for their generosity.

The alarm goes off at 6 A.M., the clock radio set to a soothing easy-listening music station. Air Force Colonel Norman Weir dresses in a new Nike warm-up suit and runs a couple of miles through the base, returns to his room, then listens to the news on the radio while he shaves, showers, and dresses in a fresh uniform. He walks to the Officers’ Club four blocks away and has breakfast — eggs, sausage, wheat toast, orange juice, and coffee — while he reads the morning paper. Ever since his divorce three years earlier, Norman starts every workday exactly the same way.

Air Force Major Patrick S. McLanahan’s wake-up call was the clatter of the SATCOM satellite communications transceiver’s printer chugging to life as it spit out a long stream of messages onto a strip of thermal printer paper, like a grocery-store checkout receipt gone haywire. He was sitting at the navigator-bombardier’s station with his head down on the console, taking a catnap. After ten years flying long-range bombers, Patrick had developed the ability to ignore the demands of his body for the sake of the mission: to stay awake for very long periods of time; sit for long hours without relief; and fall asleep quickly and deeply enough to feel rested, even if the nap only lasted a few minutes. It was part of the survival techniques most combat aircrew members developed in the face of operational necessity.

As the printer spewed instructions, Patrick had his breakfast — a cup of protein milk shake from a stainless-steel Thermos bottle and a couple pieces of leathery beef jerky. All his meals on this long overwater flight were high-protein and low residue — no sandwiches, no veggies, and no fruit. The reason was simple: no matter how high-tech his bomber was, the toilet was still the toilet. Using it meant unfastening all his survival gear, dropping his flight suit, and sitting downstairs nearly naked in a dark, cold, noisy, smelly, drafty compartment. He would rather eat bland food and risk constipation than suffer through the indignity. He felt thankful that he served in a weapon system that allowed its crew members to use a toilet — all of his fighter brethren had to use “piddle packs,” wear adult diapers — or just hold it. That was the ultimate indignity.

When the printer finally stopped, he tore off the message strip and read it over. It was a status report request — the second one in the last hour. Patrick composed, encoded, and transmitted a new reply message, then decided he’d better talk to the aircraft commander about all these requests. He safetied his ejection seat, unstrapped, and got to his feet for the first time in what felt like days.

His partner, defensive systems officer Wendy Tork, Ph.D. was sound asleep in the right seat. She had her arms tucked inside her shoulder straps so she wouldn’t accidentally trigger her ejection handles — there had been many cases of sleeping crew members dreaming about a crash and punching themselves out of a perfectly good aircraft — her flying gloves on, her dark helmet visor down, and her oxygen mask on in case they had an emergency and she had to eject with short notice. She had her summerweight flight jacket on over her flight suit, with the flotation-device harness on over that, the bulges of the inflatable pouches under her armpits making her arms rise and fall with each deep sleepy breath.

Patrick scanned Wendy’s defensive-systems console before moving forward — but he had to force himself to admit that he paused there to look at Wendy, not the instruments. There was something about her that intrigued him — and then he stopped himself again. Face it, Muck, Patrick told himself: You’re not intrigued — you’re hot for her. Underneath that baggy flight suit and survival gear is a nice, tight, luscious body, and it feels weird, naughty, almost wrong to be thinking about stuff like this while slicing along forty-one thousand feet across the Gulf of Oman in a high-tech warbird. Weird, but exciting.

At that moment, Wendy raised the helmet’s dark visor, dropped her oxygen mask, and smiled at him. Damn, Patrick thought as he quickly turned his attention to the defensive-systems console, those eyes could melt titanium.

“Hi,” she said. Even though she had to raise her voice to talk cross-cockpit, it was still a friendly, pleasant, disarming sound. Wendy Tork, Ph.D., was one of the world’s most renowned experts in electromagnetic engineering and systems development, a pioneer in the use of computers to analyze energy waves and execute a particular response. They had been working together for nearly two years at their home base, the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center (HAWC) at Groom Lake Air Station, Nevada, known as Dreamland.

“Hi,” he said back. “I was just … checking your systems. We’re going over the Bandar Abbass horizon in a few minutes, and I wanted to see if you were picking up anything.”

“The system would’ve alerted me if it detected any signals within fifteen percent of detection threshold,” Wendy pointed out. She spoke in her usual hypertechnical voice, female but not feminine, the way she usually did. It allowed Patrick to relax and stop thinking thoughts that were so out of place to be thinking in a warplane. Then, she leaned forward in her seat, closer to him, and asked, “You were looking at me, weren’t you?”

The sudden change in her voice made his heart skip a beat and his mouth grow dry as arctic air. “You’re nutty,” he heard himself blurt out. Boy, did that sound nutty!

“I saw you though the visor, Major Hot Shot,” she said. “I could see you looking at me.” She sat back, still looking at him. “Why were you looking at me?”

“Wendy, I wasn’t …”

“Are you sure you weren’t?”

“I … I wasn’t …” What is going on? Patrick thought. Why am I so damned tongue-tied? I feel like a school kid who just got caught drawing pictures of the girl he had a crush on in his notebook.

Well, he did have a crush on her. They’d first met about three years ago when they were both recruited for the team that was developing the Megafortress flying battleship. They had a brief, intense sexual encounter, but events, circumstances, duties, and responsibilities always prevented anything more from happening. This was the last place and time he would’ve guessed their relationship might take a new, exciting step forward.

“It’s all right, Major,” Wendy said. She wouldn’t take her eyes off him, and he felt as if he wanted to duck back behind the weapons bay bulkhead and stay there until they landed. “You’re allowed.”

Patrick found himself able to breathe again. He relaxed, trying to look cool and casual even though he could feel sweat oozing from every pore. He held up the SATCOM printer tape. “I’ve got … we’ve got a message … orders … instructions,” he stammered, and she smiled both to chide him and to enjoy him at the same time. “From Eighth Air Force. I was going to talk to the general, then everybody else. On interphone. Before we go over the horizon. The Iranian horizon.”

“You do that, Major,” Wendy said, a laugh in her eyes. Patrick nodded, glad that was over with, and started to head for the cockpit. She stopped him with, “Oh, Major?”