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  “Let’s get out of here, Brad,” Patrick chimed in. “No sense in risking a dogfight up here.”

  “We’re in international airspace,” Elliott retorted indignantly. “We have as much right to be up here as this turkey.”

  “Sir, this is a combat area,” Patrick emphasized. “Crew, let’s get ready to get the hell out of here.”

  With one touch, Wendy ordered the Megafortress’s powerful jammers to shut down the Iranian fighter’s search radar. “Trackbreakers active,” Wendy announced. “Give me ninety left.” Brad Elliott put the Megafortress in a tight right turn and rolled out perpendicular to the fighter’s flight path. The plane’s pulse-Doppler radar might not detect a target with a zero relative closure rate. “Bandit at three o‘clock, thirty-five miles and steady, high. Moving to four o’clock. I think he lost us.”

  “Not so fast,” the crew mission commander and copilot, Colonel John Ormack, interjected. Ormack was HAWC’s deputy commander and chief engineering wizard, a commander pilot with several thousand hours in various tactical aircraft. But his first love was computers, avionics, and gadgets. Brad Elliott had the ideas, but he relied on Ormack to turn those ideas into reality. If they gave badges or wings for technogeeks, John Ormack would wear them proudly. “He might be going passive. We’ve got to put some distance between us and him. He might not need a radar to intercept us.”

  “I copy that,” Wendy said. “But I think his IRSTS is out of range. He …”

  At that moment, they all heard a loud, faster-paced “DEEDLE DEEDLE DEEDLE!” warning on the intercom. “Airborne interceptor locked on, range thirty miles and closing fast! His radar is huge—he’s burning right through my jammers. Solid radar lock, closure rate … closure rate moving to six hundred knots!”

  “Well,” John Ormack said, “at least that water down there is warm even this time of year.”

  Making jokes was the only thing any of them could think about right then—because being highlighted by a supersonic interceptor alone over the Gulf of Oman was just about the most fatal thing a bomber crew could ever face.

  This morning was a little different for Norman Weir. Today and for the next two weeks Weir and several dozen of his fellow Air Force full colonels were at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, for a lieutenant colonel’s promotion board. Their task: pick the best, the brightest, and the most highly qualified from a field of about three thousand Air Force majors to be promoted to lieutenant colonel.

  Colonel Norman Weir knew a lot about making choices using complex objective criteria—a promotion board was right up his alley. Norman was commander of the Air Force Budget Analysis Agency at the Pentagon. His job was to do exactly what he was now being asked to do: sift through mountains of information on weapon and information systems and decide the future life-cycle costs and benefits of each. In effect, he and his staff of sixty-five military and civilian analysts, accountants, and technical experts decided the future of the United States Air Force every day. Every aircraft, missile, satellite, computer, “black box,” and bomb, along with every man and woman in the Air Force, came under his scrutiny. Every item on every unit’s budget had to pass his team’s rigorous examination. If it didn’t, by the end of the fiscal year it would cease to exist with a single memo to someone in the Secretary of the Air Force’s office. He had power and responsibility over billions of dollars every week, and he wielded that power with skill and enthusiasm.

  Thanks to his father, Norman decided on a military career in high school. Norman’s father was drafted in the mid-sixties but thought it might be safer serving offshore in the Navy, so he enlisted and served as a jet power-plant technician on board various aircraft carriers. He returned from long Pacific and Indian Ocean cruises with incredible stories of aviation heroism and triumph, and Norman was hooked. Norman’s father also came home minus half his left arm, the result of a deck munition explosion on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, and a Purple Heart. That became Norman’s ticket to an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.

  But Academy life was hard. To say Norman was merely introverted was putting it mildly. Norman lived inside his own head, existing in a sterile, protected world of knowledge and reflection. Solving problems was an academic exercise, not a physical or even a leadership one. The more they made him run and do push-ups and march and drill, the more he hated it. He failed a physical-conditioning test, was dismissed with prejudice, and returned to Iowa.

  His father’s almost constant niggling about wasting his appointment and dropping out of the Naval Academy—as if his father had chosen to sacrifice his arm so his son could go to Annapolis—weighed heavily on his mind. His father practically disowned his son, announcing there was no money for college and urging his son to get out and find a job. Desperate to make his father happy, Norman applied and was accepted to Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, receiving a degree in finance and an Air Force commission, becoming an accounting and finance specialist and earning his CPA certification a few months later.

  Norman loved the Air Force. It was the best of all worlds: He got respect from the folks who respected and admired accountants, and he could demand respect from most of the others because he outranked and outsmarted them. He pinned on a major’s gold oak leaves right on time, and took command of his own base accounting service center shortly thereafter.

  Even his wife seemed to enjoy the life, after her initial uncertainty. Most women adopted their husband’s rank, and Norman’s wife spitshined and paraded that invisible but tangible rank every chance she got. She was “volunteered” by the higher-ranking officers’ wives for committeeships, which at first she resented. But she soon learned that she had the power to “volunteer” lower-ranking officers’ wives to serve on her committee, so only the wives of lower-ranking officers and noncommissioned officers had to do the heavy work. It was a very neat and uncomplicated system.

  For Norman, the work was rewarding but not challenging. Except for manning a few mobility lines during unit deployments and a few late nights preparing for no-notice and annual base inspections, he had a forty-hour workweek and very little stress. He accepted a few unusual assignments: conducting an audit at a radar outpost on Greenland; serving on advisory staffs for some congressional staffers doing research for a bill. High-visibility, low-risk, busywork assignments. Norman loved them.

  But that’s when the conflicts began closer to home. Both he and his wife were born and raised in Iowa, but Iowa had no Air Force bases, so it was guaranteed they weren’t going home except to visit. Norman’s one unaccompanied overseas PCS assignment to Korea gave her time to go home, but that was small comfort without her husband. The frequent uprooting hurt the couple unequally. Norman promised his wife they’d start a family when the cycle of assignment changes slowed down, but after fifteen years it was apparent that Norman had no real intention of starting a family.

  The last straw was Norman’s latest assignment to the Pentagon to become the first director of a brand new Air Force budget oversight agency. They said it was a guaranteed four-year assignment—no more moving around. He could even retire from that assignment if he chose. His wife’s biological clock, which had been ringing loudly for the past five years, was deafening by then. But Norman said wait. It was a new shop. Lots of late nights, lots of weekends. What kind of life would that be for a family? Besides, he hinted one morning after yet another discussion about kids, wasn’t she getting a little old to be trying to raise a newborn?

  She was gone by the time he returned home the next evening. That was over three years ago, and Norman hadn’t seen or spoken to her since. Her signature on the divorce papers was the last thing he ever saw that belonged to her.

  Well, he told himself often, he was better off without her. He could accept better, more exotic assignments; travel the world without having to worry about always going either to Iowa in the summer or to Florida in the winter, where the in-laws stayed; and he didn’t have to listen to his ex-
wife harping about how two intelligent persons should be having a better, more fulfilling—meaning “civilian”—life. Besides, as the old saying went: “If the Air Force wanted you to have a wife, they’d have issued you one.” Norman began to believe that was true.

  The first day at the promotion board at the Selection Board Secretariat at the Air Force Military Personnel Center at Randolph was filled with organizational minutiae and several briefings on how the board worked, the criteria to use during the selection process, how to use the checklists and grading sheets, and an overview of the standard candidate’s personnel file. The briefings were given by Colonel Ted Fellows, chief of the Air Force Selection Board Secretariat. Fellows gave a briefing on the profile of the candidates—average length of service, geographical distribution, specialty distribution, and other tidbits of information designed to explain how these candidates were selected.

  Then, the promotion board president, Major General Larry Dean Ingemanson, the commander of Tenth Air Division, stepped up before the board members and distributed the panel assignments for each board member, along with the Secretary of the Air Force’s Memorandum of Instruction, or MOI. The MOI was the set of orders handed down by the Secretary of the Air Force to the board members, informing them of who was going to receive promotions and the quotas for each, along with general guidelines on how to choose the candidates eligible for promotion.

  There were three general categories of officers eligible for promotion: in-, above-, and below-the-primary zone candidates. Within each category were the specialties being considered: line officers, including flying, or rated, officers, nonrated operations officers such as security police and maintenance officers, and mission-support officers such as finance, administration, and base services; along with critical mission-support subspecialties such as Chaplain Corps, Medical Service Corps, Nurse Corps, Biomedical Sciences Corps, Dental Corps, and Judge Advocate General Corps. General Ingemanson also announced that panels could be convened for any other personnel matters that might be required by the Secretary of the Air Force.

  The board members were randomly divided up into eight panels of seven members each, adjusted by the president so each panel was not overly weighted by one specialty or command. Every Air Force major command, direct reporting unit, field operating agency, and specialty seemed to be represented here: logistics, maintenance, personnel, finance, information technology, chaplains, security police, and dozens of others, including the flying specialties. Norman noticed right away that the flying or “rated” specialties were especially well represented here. At least half of all the board members were rated officers, mostly unit commanders or staff officers assigned to high-level posts at the Pentagon or major command headquarters.

  That was the biggest problem Norman saw in the Air Force, the one factor that dominated the service to the exclusion of all else, the one specialty that screwed it up for everyone else—the flyers.

  Sure, this was the U.S. Air Force, not the U.S. Accountant Force—the service existed to conduct battles in the national defense by taking control of the sky and near space, and flyers were obviously going to play a big part. But they had the biggest egos and the biggest mouths too. The service bent over backward for their aviators, far more than they supported any other specialty no matter how vital. Flyers got all the breaks. They were treated like firstborns by unit commanders—in fact, most unit commanders were flyers, even if the unit had no direct flying commitment.

  Norman didn’t entirely know where his dislike for those who wore wings came from. Most likely, it was from his father. Naval aircraft mechanics were treated like indentured servants by flyers, even if the mechanic was a seasoned veteran while the flyer was a know-nothing newbie on his first cruise. Norman’s dad complained loud and long about officers in general and aviators in particular. He always wanted his son to be an officer, but he was determined to teach him how to be an officer that enlisted and noncommissioned officers would admire and respect—and that meant putting flyers in their place at every opportunity.

  Of course, it was an officer, a flyer, who ignored safety precautions and his plane captain’s suggestions and fired a Zuni rocket into a line of jets waited to be fueled and created one of the biggest noncombat disasters at sea the Navy had ever experienced, which resulted in over two hundred deaths and several hundred injuries, including Norman’s father. A cocky, arrogant, know-it-all flyer had disregarded the rules. That officer was quickly, quietly dismissed from service. Norman’s unit commanders had several times thrown the book at nonrated officers and enlisted personnel for the tiniest infractions, but flyers were usually given two, three, or even four chances before finally being offered the opportunity to resign rather than face a court-martial. They always got all the breaks.

  Well, this was going to be different. If I get a flyer’s promotion jacket, Norman thought, he’s going to have to prove to me that he’s worthy of promotion. And he vowed that wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Let’s hit the deck,” Patrick said.

  “Damn fine idea,” Brad said. He yanked the Megafortress’s throttles to idle, rolled the plane up onto its left wing, and nosed the big bomber over into a relatively gentle six-thousand-footper-minute dive. “Wendy, jam the piss out of them. Full spectrum. No radio transmissions. We don’t want the whole Iranian air force after us.”

  “Copy,” Wendy said weakly. She scrambled to catch flying pencils and checklists as the negative Gs sent anything unsecure floating around the cabin. Switching her oxygen regulator to “100%” helped when her stomach and most of its contents threatened to start floating around the cabin too. “I’m jamming. He’s …” Suddenly, they all heard a fastpitched “DEEDLEDEEDLEDEEDLE!” warning, and red alert lights flashed in every compartment. “Radar missile launch, seven o’clock, twenty-five miles!” Wendy shouted. “Break right!”

  Elliott slammed the Megafortress bomber into a hard right turn and pulled the throttles to idle, keeping the nose down to complicate the missile’s intercept and to screen the bomber’s engine exhaust from the attacker as much as possible. As the bomber slowed it turned faster. Patrick felt as if he were upside down and backwards—the sudden deceleration, steep dive, and steep turn only served to tumble his and everyone’s senses.

  “Chaff! Chaff!” Wendy shouted as she ejected chaff from the left ejectors. The chaff, packets of tinsel-like strips of metal, formed large blobs of radar-reflective clouds that made inviting spoof targets for enemy missiles.

  “Missiles still inbound!” Wendy shouted. “Arming Stingers!” As the enemy missiles closed in, Wendy fired small radar-and heat-seeking rockets out of a steerable cannon on the Megafortress’s tail. The Stinger airmine rockets flew head to head with the incoming missiles, then exploded several dozen feet in the missile’s path, shredding its fuselage and guidance system. It worked. The last enemy missile exploded less than five thousand feet away.

  It took them only four minutes to get down to just two hundred feet above the Gulf of Oman, guided by the navigation computer’s terrain database, by the satellite navigation system, and by a pencil-thin beam of energy that measured the distance between the bomber’s belly and the water. They headed southwest at full military power, as far away from the Iranian coastline as possible. Brad Elliott knew what fighter pilots feared-low-altitude flight, darkness, and heading out over water away from friendly shores. Every engine cough was amplified, every dip of the fuel gauge needles seemed critical—even the slightest crackle in the headset or a shudder in the flight controls seemed to signal disaster. Having a potential enemy out there, one that was jamming radar and radio transmissions, made the tension even worse. Few fighter pilots had the stomach for night overwater chases.

  But as Wendy studied her threat displays, it soon became obvious that the MiG or whatever it was out there wasn’t going to go away so easily. “No luck, guys—we didn’t lose him. He’s closed inside twenty miles and he’s right on our tail, staying high but still got a pretty good radar l
ock on us.”

  “Relaying messages to headquarters too, I’ll bet,” Elliott said.

  “Six o’clock, high, fifteen miles. Coming within heater range.” With the enemy attacker’s radar jammed, he couldn’t use a radar-guided missile—but with IRSTS, he could easily close in and make a heat-seeking missile shot.

  “Wendy, get ready to launch Scorpions,” Brad said.

  “Roger.” Wendy already had her fingers on the keyboard, and she typed in instructions to warm up the Megafortress’s surprise weapon—the AIM-120 Scorpion AMRAAM, or Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile. The EB-52 carried six Scorpion missiles on each wing pylon. The Scorpions were radar-guided missiles that were command-guided by the Megafortress’s attack radar or by an onboard radar in the missile’s nose—the missiles could even attack targets in the bomber’s rear quadrant by guidance from a tail-mounted radar, allowing for an “over-the-shoulder” launch on a pursuing enemy. Only a few aircraft in the entire world carried AMRAAMs—but the EB-52 Megafortress had been carrying one for three years, including one combat mission. The enemy aircraft was well within the Scorpion’s maximum twenty-mile range.

  “Twelve miles.”

  “When he breaks eight miles, lock him up and hit ’em,” Brad said.

  “We gotta be the one who shoots first.”

  “Brad, we need to knock this off,” Patrick said urgently.

  Wendy looked at him in complete surprise, but it was Brad Elliott who exclaimed, “What was that, Patrick?”

  “I said, we should stop this,” Patrick repeated. “Listen, we’re in international airspace. We just dropped down to low altitude, we’re jamming his radar. He knows we’re a bad guy. Forcing a fight won’t solve anything.”

  “He jumped us first, Patrick.”

  “Listen, we’re acting like hostiles, and he’s doing his job—kicking us out of his zone and away from his airspace,” Patrick argued. “We tried to sneak in, and we got caught. No one wants a fight here.”