Combat Read online

I took off my helmet, listened for airplane noise … nothing.

  Just a distant jet, maybe an airliner leaving the commercial airport.

  I buried the chute and helmet and coveralls in a hole I dug with a folding shovel. I tossed the shovel into the hole and filled it with my hands, tromped it down with my new civilian shoes, then set off downhill with a flashlight. Didn’t see a soul.

  The next morning I walked into town and got a room at a decent hotel. I had a hot bath and went to bed and slept the clock around, almost twenty-four hours. When I awoke I went to the airport and caught a flight to Capetown.

  Capetown is a pretty city in a spectacular setting, on the ocean with Table Mountain behind it. I had plenty of cash and I established an account with a local bank, then had money wired in from Switzerland. There was three million in the Swiss account before my first transfer, so Julie Giraud made good on her promise. As I instinctively knew she would.

  I lived in a hotel the first week, then found a little place that a widow rented to me.

  I watched the paper pretty close, expecting to see a story about the massacre in the Libyan desert. The Libyans were bound to find the wreckage of those jets sooner or later, and the bodies, and the news would leak out.

  But it didn’t.

  The newspapers never mentioned it.

  Finally I got to walking down to the city library and reading the papers from Europe and the United States.

  Nothing. Nada.

  Like it never happened.

  A month went by, a peaceful, quiet month. No one paid any attention to me, I had a mountain of money in the local bank and in Switzerland, and neither radio, television, nor newspapers ever mentioned all those dead people in the desert.

  Finally I called my retired Marine pal Bill Wiley in Van Nuys, the police dispatcher. “Hey, Bill, this is Charlie Dean.”

  “Hey Charlie. When you coming home, guy?”

  “I don’t know. How’s Candy doing with the stations?”

  “They’re making more money than they ever did with you running them. He’s got rid of the facial iron and works twelve hours a day.”

  “No shit!”

  “So where are you?”

  “Let’s skip that for a bit. I want you to do me a favor. Tomorrow at work how about running me on the crime computer, see if I’m wanted for anything.”

  He whistled. “What the hell you been up to, Charlie?”

  “Will you do that? I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

  “Give me your birth date and social security number.”

  I gave it to him, then said good-bye.

  I was on pins and needles for the next twenty-four hours. When I called again, Bill said, “You ain’t in the big computer, Charlie. What the hell you been up to?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it sometime.”

  “So when you coming home?”

  “One of these days. I’m still vacationing as hard as I can.”

  “Kiss her once for me,” Bill Wiley said.

  At the Capetown library I got into old copies of the International Herald Tribune, published in Paris. I finally found what I was looking for on microfiche: a complete list of the passengers who died twelve years ago on the Air France flight that blew up over Niger. Colonel Giraud and his wife were not on the list.

  Well, the light finally began to dawn.

  I got one of the librarians to help me get on the Internet. What I was interested in were lists of U.S. Air Force Academy graduates, say from five to ten years ago.

  I read the names until I thought my eyeballs were going to fall out. No Julie Giraud.

  I’d been had. Julie was either a CIA or French agent. French, I suspected, and the Americans agreed to let her steal a plane.

  As I sat and thought about it, I realized that I didn’t ever meet old Colonel Giraud’s kids. Not to the best of my recollection. Maybe he had a couple of daughters, maybe he didn’t, but damned if I could remember.

  What had she said? That the colonel said I was the best Marine in the corps?

  Stupid ol’ Charlie Dean. I ate that shit with a spoon. The best Marine in the corps! So I helped her “steal” a plane and kill a bunch of convicted terrorists that Libya would never extradite.

  If we were caught I would have sworn under torture, until my very last breath, that no government was involved, that the people planning this escapade were a U.S. Air Force deserter and an ex-Marine she hired.

  I loafed around Capetown for a few more days, paid my bills, thanked the widow lady, gave her a cock-and-bull story about my sick kids in America, and took a plane to New York. At JFK I got on another plane to Los Angeles.

  When the taxi dropped me at my apartment, I stopped by the super’s office and paid the rent. The battery in my car had enough juice to start the motor on the very first crank.

  I almost didn’t recognize Candy. He had even gotten a haircut and wore clean jeans. “Hey, Mr. Dean,” Candy said after we had been chatting a while. “Thanks for giving me another chance. You’ve taught me a lot.”

  “We all make mistakes,” I told him. If only he knew how true that was.

  STEPHEN COONTS is the author of eight New York Times best-selling novels, the first of which was the classic flying tale Flight of the Intruder, which spent over six months on the New York Times best-seller list. He graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in political science, and immediately was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy, where he began flight training in Pensacola, Florida, training on the A-6 Intruder aircraft. After two combat cruises in Vietnam aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and one tour as assistant catapult and arresting gear officer aboard USS Nimitz, he left active duty in 1977 to pursue a law degree, which he received from the University of Colorado. His novels have been published around the world and have been translated into more than a dozen different languages. He was honored by the U.S. Navy Institute with its Author of the Year award in 1986. His latest novel is Hong Kong. He and his wife, Deborah, reside in Clarksville, Maryland.

  LEADERSHIP MATERIAL

  BY DALE BROWN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  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.

  March 1991

  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 wer
e 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?”

  Patrick turned back to her. “Yes, Doctor?”

  “You never told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “Do all my systems look OK to you?”

  Thank God she smiled after that, Patrick thought—maybe she doesn’t think I’m some sort of pervert. Regaining a bit of his lost composure, but still afraid to let his eyes roam over her “systems,” he replied, “They look great to me, Doc.”

  “Good,” she said. “Thank you.” She smiled a bit more warmly, let her eyes look him up and down, and added, “I’ll be sure to keep an eye on your systems too.”

  Patrick never felt more relieved, and yet more naked, as he bent to crawl through that connecting tunnel and make his way to the cockpit. But just before he announced he was moving forward and unplugged his intercom cord, he heard the slow-paced electronic “DEEDLE … DEEDLE … DEEDLE …” warning tone of the ship’s threat-detection system. They had just been highlighted by enemy radar.

  Patrick virtually flew back into his ejection seat, strapped in, and unsafed his ejection seat. He was in the aft crew compartment of an EB-52C Megafortress bomber, the next generation of “flying battleships” Patrick’s classified research unit was hoping to produce for the Air Force. It was once a “stock” B-52H Stratofortress bomber, the workhorse of America’s long-range heavy-bombardment fleet, built for long range and heavy nuclear and nonnuclear payloads. The original B-52 was designed in the 1950s; the last rolled off the assembly line twenty years ago. But this plane was different. The original airframe had been rebuilt from the ground up with state-of-the-art technology not just to modernize it, but to make it the most advanced warplane … that no one had ever heard of.

  “Wendy?” he radioed on interphone. “What do we got?”

  “This is weird,” Wendy responded. “I’ve got a variable PRF X-band target out there. Switching between antiship and antiaircraft search profiles. Estimated range … damn, range thirty-five miles, twelve o’clock. He’s right on top of us. Well within radar-guided missile range.”

  “Any idea what it is?”

  “Could be an AWACS plane,” Wendy replied. “He looks like he’s scanning both surface and air targets. No fast PRFs—just scanning. Faster than an APY scan, like on an E-2 Hawkeye or E-3 Sentry, but same profile.”

  “An Iranian AWACS?” Patrick asked. The EB-52 Megafortress was flying in international airspace over the Gulf of Oman, just west of the Iranian coastline and just south of the Strait of Hormuz, outside the Persian Gulf. The director of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, Lieutenant General Brad Elliott, had ordered three of his experimental Megafortress bombers to start patrolling the skies near
the Persian Gulf to provide a secret, stealthy punch in case one of the supposedly neutral countries in the region decided to jump into the conflict raging between the Coalition forces and the Republic of Iraq.

  “Could be a ‘Mainstay’ or ‘Candid,’” Patrick offered. “One of the aircraft Iraq supposedly surrendered to Iran was an Ilyushin-76MD airborne early-warning aircraft. Maybe the Iranians are trying out their new toy. Can he see us?”

  “I think he can,” Wendy said. “He’s not locking on to us, just scanning around—but he’s close, and we’re approaching detection threshold.” The B-52 Stratofortress was not designed or ever considered a “stealth” aircraft, but the EB-52 Megafortress was much different. It retained most of the new antiradar technology it had been fitted with as an experimental test-bed aircraft—nonmetallic “fibersteel” skin, stronger and lighter than steel but nonradar-reflective; swept-back control surfaces instead of straight edges; no external antennas; radar-absorbent material used in the engine inlets and windows; and a unique radar-absorbing energy system that retransmitted radar energy along the airframe and discharged it back along the wing trailing edges, reducing the amount of radar energy reflected back to the enemy. It also carried a wide variety of weapons and could provide as much firepower as a flight of Air Force or Navy tactical fighters.

  “Looks like he’s ‘guarding’ the Strait of Hormuz, looking for inbound aircraft,” Patrick offered. “Heading two-three-zero to go around him. If he spots us, it might get the Iranians excited.”

  But he had spoken too late: “He can see us,” Wendy cut in. “He’s at thirty-five miles, one o’clock, high, making a beeline for us. Speed increasing to five hundred knots.”

  “That’s not an AWACS plane,” Patrick said. “Looks like we picked up some kind of fast-moving patrol plane.”

  “Crap,” the aircraft commander, Lieutenant General Brad Elliott, swore on intercom. Elliott was the commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, also known as Dreamland, and the developer of the EB-52 Megafortress flying battleship. “Shut his radar down, Wendy, and let’s hope he thinks he has a bent radar and decides to call it a night.”