Dale Brown - Shadows of steel

“Obviously it worked—the Chinese navy backed off in a matter of days,” Samson said proudly. “It was a great victory for strategic air power.”

“Well, HAWC can’t seem to get out of its own way lately, from what I hear,” Jamieson said with a sneer. “I heard rumors of a plane crash, another stolen plane, right?”

“I’m not going to go into details about what happened at HAWC, Colonel,” McLanahan said, trying not to show the flush of anger and frustration—and the flood of awful memories—that rose up within him. “But HAWC was closed down, right?” Jamieson asked.

“Tiger, drop it,” Samson warned.

“That’s all right, General,” McLanahan interjected. “Yes, Colonel, HAWC was disbanded. Weapon-test operations went to Eglin Air Force Base; flight-test ops went to Edwards. Most of our more exotic airframes and weapons were either destroyed or placed in secure storage. Some were dispersed to active-duty units after cleaning out the classified stuff. In fact, the 509th was slated to get one of our experimental airframes, Air Vehicle 0 1 1. The test crews and technicians were reassigned; the senior staff members were given early retirements, including me.”

“You don’t look too retired to me,” Jamieson said. There was a knock on the door at that moment, and two more Air Force officers were shown inside by uniformed and plain-clothes security officers.

“Colonel Jamieson, I didn’t come here to be evaluated by you: I came here to evaluate you,” McLanahan said. He motioned to the newcomers and said, “Colonel Jamieson, this is Major General Brien Griffith, commander of Air Force Air Intelligence Agency; Colonel George Dominguez, the chief B-2A maintenance officer assigned to this task force; and Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Marcia Preston, my deputy and liaison officer with the office of the White House National Security Advisor. Colonel Dominguez, Colonel Preston, and I are the chief officers of a task force of the Air Intelligence Agency, code-named Future Flight. We’re going to take charge of Air Vehicle 011.” Jamieson’s jaw dropped open in surprise as McLanahan continued, “We are going to use the B-2A to fly covert reconnaissance and defense-suppression missions in support of National Security Agency operations.

“You’re CIA?” Jamieson retorted. “You’re a goddamned CIA agent?”

“I’m a crewdog, not a CIA agent,” McLanahan said.

“You’re a contractor, a former crewdog working for the CIA,” Jamieson corrected him. “You got canned because of some fiasco at HAWC, so now you sell your services to the guys with more money than brains-“

“You don’t know shit about me or my mission, Colonel!”

“I don’t fucking care to know!”

“All right, both of you, shut up,” General Samson interjected.

“Colonel, you listen to what this man has to say. I’ll give you an opportunity to talk. Now you listen.”

“Yes, sir,” Jamieson relented. “Sorry, but I’m a little confused and a little angry that I’m being ‘volunteered’ for some illegal ops. So what does this Future Flight want with me?”

“General Griffith is taking command of Air Vehicle 01 I and assigning it to Future Hight,” McLanahan explained. “My job is to assist Colonel Dominguez in equipping it, then to recruit, train, and fly reconnaissance and defense-suppression missions in the Middle East. I’ve chosen you to be my aircraft commander.”

“What?”

“I’ve been tasked with forming a group that can support secret high-risk deep-strike and reconnaissance operations worldwide.

The B-2A stealth bomber is the best strike platform out there; the President and the National Security Council agree. I’ve been tasked to recruit B-2A flight and support crews from the active-duty ranks, among others, to support group operations.”

“You mean, you’re forming a secret squadron to fly B-2A bombing missions?” Jamieson asked incredulously.

“That’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard. Pardon me, General, but I don’t believe what I’m hearing here’ “You go ahead, Tiger,” Samson said, fixing McLanahan with a satisfied smile.

“You got something to say, say it.”

“So what about it, McLanahan?” Jamieson asked, arms crossed on his chest.

McLanahan didn’t need to be an expert on body language to know that Jamieson wasn’t going to buy any explanations—those crossed arms were like a wall erected against any suggestions. “I don’t have to explain anything to you, Colonel. My instructions were to recruit you to fly missions for me and my team and see to the refit of my plane.”

“Your plane?”

“Air Vehicle 01 I,” McLanahan said. “Colonel Dominguez’s techs are modifying it as we speak.”

“Modifying it? Are you crazy? That’s our best plane!” Jamieson cried. “That bird is tweaked tighter than any other bird Northrop’s ever cranked out! It’s got the lowest radar cross-section, the best engines, the best hydraulics, the best..

“It should have the best of everything—I spent two years on that bird back in Dreamland, redesigning and improving almost every aspect of that plane’s performance,” McLanahan said. “Air Vehicle 01 I used to be Test Vehicle 002 …”

“The one that was supposedly tested to destruction?”

“Yes, sir,” McLanahan said. “HAWC rescued it, rebuilt it—we probably spent a quarter of a billion dollars on making it airworthy and upgrading it. I spent plenty of long nights with the engineers to squeeze every knot of performance out of that plane, before the Philippines conflict. That’s the plane I flew into combat—twice. It’s the only bird in the fleet already modified to carry reconnaissance pods, anti-radar missiles, cruise missiles …”

“it can’t be the same one,” Jamieson pointed out. “AV-011 doesn’t have a MILSTREAM data bus yet for the release systems—it’s only hard-wired for dumb bombs. It can’t carry any ‘smart’ weapons without a-“

“We didn’t use MILSTD buses on test articles at HAWC,” McLanahan said. MILSTD, or Military Standard, was the generic term for the standard electrical and electronic circuits and systems developed by the U.S. military for civilian contractors—every weapons design used MILSTD, SO the plane could “talk” with the weapons or other systems. “They were too slow, too old, and too easy to jam or disrupt. We borrowed a few commercial-grade data buses from a company in Arkansas—sixty-four-bit logic, clock speed well into triple digits, fiber optics ready, secure and hardened. It’s all plumbed for our own data bus—the Sky Masters people I brought with me are going to reinstall the system in about three hours.

Ever have any problems with the radar?”

“No,” Jamieson replied, “but we haven’t had much trouble with any of our radars.”

“If your troops opened up the SAR on AV-011, you wouldn’t have known what to do with it,” McLanahan said proudly. “We modified some of its subsystems for reconnaissance as well as for targeting and terrain avoidance, far beyond Block 30 standards. Range is doubled, resolution tripled, and it has air, sea, and electromagnetic spectrum search as well as ground mapping, terrain following, and targeting—the radar can act as a signal processor for programming antiradar missiles and for jamming. We were doing terrain-following years before Block 30 was announced.”

Now Jamieson was intrigued. He’d always suspected that organizations like HAWC did cool stuff like this, and he had always wanted to be a part of it—but was this the way to do the job? “I still don’t buy it, McLanahan,” Jamieson said. “You’ll be conducting military missions in support of … who? The National Security Council? The CIA? The Boy Scouts of America?”