Patrick McLanahan Collection #1

by Dale Brown

  “The border crossing and highway into Mary is sealed up tight now, and the Russians have a pretty solid air-defense setup out there now—too hot even for normal Air Force special-ops planes or helos, let alone the normal modes of transportation the Nine-sixty-sixth uses. What might the Air Battle Force have that we could use?”

  “Dave Luger can insert a Battle Force team in about thirty-six hours and get one, maybe two of your guys out,” Patrick said.

  “Thirty-six-hours? That’s impossible.”

  “But neither the Pentagon nor Central Intelligence would ever approve it. It would have to be someone pretty damned important.”

  “Ever heard of General Jalaluddin Turabi?”

  “Turabi?” Patrick exclaimed. “Chief of the Turkmen army? He’s your contact?”

  “You tangled with him?”

  “He saved our team in the first battle against the Russians in Turkmenistan. He’s a hero.”

  “He’s a better spy and guerrilla than he ever was a general,” Griffin said. “He’s been out collecting information and harassing the Russians, and at the same time recruiting soldiers for his army, using Air Intelligence Agency dollars. But when you hit the Russian SA-12 site, he scattered. We gave him up for dead. He resurfaced recently, one or two steps ahead of the Russians. We’d sure love to yank him out.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  “It won’t do us any good to go into Bukhara, Patrick. We still need to go another two hundred and fifty miles to—”

  “I’m not talking about Bukhara, Tagger—I’m talking about Mary.”

  “Mary?” Griffin exclaimed. “How can you do that? We can’t overfly Turkmenistan….”

  “We’re prohibited from overflying Turkmenistan with combat aircraft,” Patrick corrected him. “Transport aircraft are still allowed by peacekeeping and observer forces.”

  “The Russians will spot a transport plane anywhere within two hundred miles of Mary.”

  “Not our transport plane, they won’t.”

  Griffin opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, then stopped and smiled. “Okay, Patrick. What is it? What do you guys have that I don’t know about?”

  “A little toy we’ve been working on for a few years—an old idea we’ve just modernized. We—” Patrick stopped himself. He still couldn’t stop thinking about the Air Battle Force as “his.” “I mean, the Air Battle Force can get you in anywhere you want to go.”

  “I’ll start working on getting authorizations right away.”

  “Dave Luger at Battle Mountain is in charge of surveillance and observer air operations over Turkmenistan—he’ll give you permission,” Patrick said.

  “I’d have to join the team, of course,” Griffin added with a sly smile.

  Patrick smiled and nodded. Yep, he thought, he definitely liked this guy. “That you’ll have to take up with General Houser,” Patrick said. “But I’m sure Dave Luger can put in a by-name request for you to be part of the team. You’ll have to undergo a few days of training with the Air Battle Force ground-operations team and their equipment. But I don’t think you’ll have any problem keeping up with the team—in fact, you might be teaching them a thing or two. And you’ll be working with Hal Briggs again.”

  “Outstanding. I like going to school, especially for new stuff.” Griffin was so excited that he was literally stepping from foot to foot—the man could hardly wait to get started.

  “Anyway, let me continue with my orientation before the boss shows up,” Griffin went on. “Our work product is called the Strike Assessment Catalog, or what we call ‘The List.’ ” Griffin went to his desk, punched in a few commands on a computer keyboard, and a blank line on a large plasma wall display appeared. “The List used to be just that—a list, a paper catalog—but of course we’ve computerized it. Pick a target. Any target.”

  Patrick thought for a moment. “Pro Player Stadium—I hate the Miami Dolphins.”

  Griffin shook his head and smiled. “Good thing you didn’t say the Dallas Cowboys or Houston Texans, or you’d have a fight on your hands. Unfortunately, we haven’t done any U.S. targets—and you’re the first guy to ever ask to see the lineup for a U.S. target. How about we take a look at the latest on what the Russians are doing in Turkmenistan?”

  Griffin punched instructions into the computer, and soon some satellite photos appeared.

  “The western outskirts of the city of Mary,” Patrick said. “I recognize that area well.”

  “We have pretty decent coverage of this area right now, maybe one photo every couple hours, so we have a good database going,” Griffin said. He entered more instructions into the computer, and several blinking yellow circles appeared. “We can overlay synthetic-aperture radar images in with the visuals, and we see several newcomers to the area. We can digitally enhance and enlarge the picture”—the photo distorted for a moment, then sharpened to show an individual vehicle—“and here we have what looks like a Russian BTR scout vehicle, with a couple dismounts standing nearby. The other targets we identified are also scouts.”

  “Driving right to the outskirts of Mary,” Patrick remarked. “They’re not even bothering to hide anymore.”

  “We can have the computer select the best weapon to take them out, or we can select the weapon system and the computer will recommend the best plan of attack,” Griffin went on. “But the real value in our system is not picking targets but in identifying and risk-assessing the threats. Here, I’ll ask to overlay the most recent threat depictions for the area.” A few moments later, several large red circles appeared, along with lists of weapons on the side of the image. “The number-one threat in this particular area is from mobile antiaircraft systems—in this case it’s from known twenty-three-millimeter optronically guided weapons on the scouts themselves. But this outer dashed circle represents the threat from SA-14 man-portable antiaircraft missiles that are known to be carried aboard Russian scout platoons.”

  “So a planner or even a politician can ask for information on a particular target,” Patrick said. “You start feeding all this information to the brass, and they decide if the cost, risk, and complexity are worth the desired result.”

  “Exactly,” Griffin said. It was unusual, Griffin thought, to hear an Air Force general thinking of political realities when planning strike missions. This could be why, he thought, the guy was still being considered to be President Thorn’s first national security adviser. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we don’t even get past the threat analysis—some assistant deputy secretary of one of the services wants to know how we can blow up a breeder reactor in China, and we just pull up the threat analysis. He’s all hot to trot when it comes to contemplating an attack, but they go away very quickly when they learn how many assets it takes to do it. Diplomatic initiatives start to look a whole lot more appealing.”

  “Tell me more about the Air Intelligence Agency and Gary Houser,” Patrick said.

  “Getting right down to the meat of the matter, eh?” Griffin asked, his ever-present smile and twinkling blue eyes reappearing. “Okay, here goes:

  “Quite simply, the Air Intelligence Agency is one of the most far-reaching and, in my opinion, powerful commands in the entire American military. General Houser has his fingertips on every piece of intelligence data generated in the free world. He personally directs the activities of a score of satellites, dozens of aircraft, and thousands of analysts and operatives around the world. He is also the American military’s one and only ‘quintuple hat,’ at least as a deputy: As commander of AIA, he’s also a deputy commander of intelligence for Air Combat Command, Eighth Air Force, and U.S. Strategic Command, as well as a deputy director of the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency. He is definitely Mr. Intel in the Pentagon.

  “Over the years various intelligence and electronic-warfare units were shut down or consolidated, mostly because of budget cuts but also to minimize redundancy and enhance security, and Air Intelligence Agency—when it was kn
own as the Air Force Electronic Security Agency—gained most of them. AIA controls almost all of the Air Force’s intelligence-gathering operations, but it also controls areas such as MIJL—meaconing, interception, jamming, and intrusion of enemy electronic signals—electronic counterintelligence, decoy deployment, and spycraft. Now, instead of just intercepting enemy transmissions, AIA has the capability to manipulate transmissions—change them, scramble them, or move them, in order to confuse the enemy. When computers came to the forefront, AIA began doing to computer data what we did with the electromagnetic spectrum—intercept and analyze, then manipulate and distort, while protecting and securing our own data. Other units and services started doing the same thing, but AIA had been doing it for a decade before anyone else.

  “At first AIA’s work product was so timely and valuable that it began serving customers in other numbered air forces, not just the Mighty Eighth. Then it eventually replaced Air Combat Command’s intelligence stuff, and finally its information was being shared with planners in other commands. AIA has become so powerful and far-reaching that its mission has even supplanted Eighth Air Force’s mission, and it gets a lot of funding that normally goes to many other branches, command, and agencies.

  “My predictions are that General Houser will easily win his third star, become commander of Eighth Air Force, and begin the transformation to an intelligence-gathering combat command. General Houser insists that Eighth Air Force will eventually become the information-warfare command and that bombers will be all but obsolete.”

  “Not in my lifetime, I hope,” Patrick said.

  “It’s already happening, Patrick,” Griffin said. “It won’t be long before the number of LDHDs—low-density, high-demand aircraft like spy planes, radar planes, jammers, dedicated anti-air-defense attack weapons, and data-manipulation platforms—will exceed the number of strike aircraft in the inventory.

  “But I think General Houser is shooting higher: If General Samson gets selected as the Air Force chief of staff, he’ll see to it that Gary Houser gets his fourth star and becomes the first commander of the new U.S. Information Warfare Command, a major unified command on a par or maybe even surpassing the theater commands in importance, tasking, and funding. It will probably combine all the intelligence-gathering assets of Strategic Command, the Air Force, the Navy, and perhaps even the National Security Agency and Strategic Reconnaissance Office into one supercommand.

  “That could change the entire face of warfare as we know it. General Houser says that it takes the Air Force twenty-four hours to blow up an intercontinental-ballistic-missile launch site or a bomber base in Russia—but soon his information warriors can put that same site out of commission in twenty-four minutes by jamming, spoofing, interfering, reprogramming it, giving it a computer virus, or shutting down its power by computer command.”

  “I don’t know how it’s done,” Patrick said, “but if you guys have progressed to the point where you can hack into a computer that controls a power grid or networks air-defense sites together and shuts them down with the push of a button, it would be an incredibly powerful weapon. Maybe it will replace bombers someday—but I wouldn’t recommend replacing the bomber fleet with computers or aircrews with hackers.”

  “This is the new Eighth Air Force, Patrick,” Griffin said. “The bombers in Eighth Air Force are still dedicated to the nuclear mission, but I think they’ll soon shift to Twelfth Air Force along with all the other nonnuclear attack units.

  “Even Strategic Command is supporting planning and targeting for nonnuclear conflicts, using all their staff and computers that were originally dedicated to planning World War III against Russia and China to plan missions in every area in the world where any level of conflict could break out. Nuclear warfighting is all but dead. You have to speak in terms of ‘network-centric warfare’ and ‘low-density conflict.’ Your Air Battle Force sounds like the kind of thing Houser wants to transform Eighth Air Force into, but he wants the shooters to support intel, not the other way around.”

  “Then I’d better get up to speed as soon as possible,” Patrick said.

  “That sounds pretty positive to me, General,” Griffin said. “I take it you’ll stay on with us for a while?”

  “Tagger, to be honest, there wasn’t really that much chance I’d just get up and leave,” Patrick admitted. “I’m not the kind of guy who gets out because I don’t like the working conditions. I’m an Air Force officer, and I go where I’m assigned. If they asked me to get out, I’d be out of here—but they didn’t. Now they have to contend with me.”

  “Contend with us,” Trevor Griffin said. He extended his hand, and Patrick shook it enthusiastically. “Welcome to the Nine-sixty-sixth, sir. I think we’ll set this command on its ear—and have some fun doing it.” Patrick was about to say something, but Griffin interrupted him with an upraised hand. “And I truly believe they’ll eventually give you your stars back.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” they heard a voice behind them say.

  They turned and found two men standing in the doorway—the command’s chief master sergeant, Harold Bayless, and the commander of the Air Intelligence Agency, Major General Gary Houser. Griffin glanced accusingly at Bayless, and the chief returned his look with a smug smile—they both knew that Griffin had asked the chief to notify him when the commander arrived in the headquarters, but instead Bayless had facilitated this little surprise arrival and eavesdropping opportunity.

  “Room, ten-hut,” Patrick said, and both he and Griffin stood quickly and snapped to attention.

  Gary Houser stepped over to Trevor and Patrick, keeping his head up to emphasize his height advantage over the two. Gary Houser was at least seven inches taller than Patrick, with a beefy frame, big hands, a square face, dark eyes, and closely cut hair to deemphasize his baldness. After he moved close to both officers in the room, he tried to look into their eyes to read their expressions, but of course he towered over both of them, especially Griffin. Both Griffin and McLanahan stayed at attention, eyes caged.

  “So,” Houser asked in a low voice, “which one of you clowns do I have to contend with?” Neither one replied. Houser gave Griffin a warning glare, put his hands behind his back, and went closer to Patrick. “Patrick McLanahan. Long time no see. My long-lost crew navigator who supposedly goes TDY to Fairchild but who mysteriously disappears off the face of the earth and ends up getting involved with cockamamie ideas such as the Border Security Force and…what was that other group? The Night Riders? Night Invaders?”

  “Night Stalkers, sir,” Patrick replied.

  “Right…the Night Stalkers. Big, bad, vigilante assassination squad. Are you a big, bad assassin now, Patrick?”

  “No, sir,” Patrick replied, still standing at attention.

  “You a close and personal friend of that big shot Kevin Martindale?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you going to be national security adviser, secretary of defense, or maybe even the fucking president now?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So you just screwed the pooch too many times at this new super-duper bomber attack base up in Nevada, and you got your ass kicked all the way down to me by SECDEF, is that it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then why are you here, Patrick McLanahan?”

  “Reporting as ordered, sir.”

  “Why did you lose a star, ex–Major General Patrick McLanahan? Why am I getting a disgraced and demoted general officer who has no intelligence experience, no prospects for promotion, and no future in the United States Air Force?”

  Looking straight ahead, standing stiffly at attention, Patrick replied, “Because you’re one lucky son of a bitch, sir.”

  Houser’s faced puffed, his eyes bugged out, and for a moment it appeared as if he’d explode with rage. Then he laughed out loud, guffawing directly—and purposely—into Patrick’s face. “Good one, nav!” he barked. “Sounds like you finally got yourself a sense of humor. About fucking time.” He glanced
at Griffin and shook his head. “Look at you two, standing at attention like academy plebes! Stand at ease, stand at ease. I don’t want you jokers to pass out on me from the strain.” Griffin relaxed enough to go to parade rest.

  Houser stuck out his hand, and Patrick shook it. “How the hell are you, Patrick? Good to see you.” To Griffin he said, “This guy was on my BUFF crew for three damned years. He went from a know-nothing, pud-pounding kid to the best bombardier in SAC, and that’s no shit. We won the Fairchild and LeMay trophies two years in a row and won a shitload of other awards, too. During a competition run, he dropped a shack bomb with a completely failed bomb-nav system and helped the crew shoot down an F-15 fighter. No lie.” He slapped Patrick on the shoulder and added, “All under my outstanding leadership and tutelage, of course.” Both Griffin and McLanahan were careful not to forget to smile and nod in agreement. “You done with him, Tagger?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Follow me, Patrick.” Griffin called the room to attention as Houser strode out.

  Patrick turned and extended his hand. “Good to meet you, Tagger. We’ll talk after I meet my troops.”

  “Good to meet you, too, Patrick,” Griffin replied as he shook McLanahan’s hand. He gave Patrick a warning glance, and Patrick nodded that he received it.

  Patrick had to take giant steps to keep up with the Air Intelligence Agency commander as he made his way downstairs to his office on the first floor. Houser neither acknowledged nor greeted anyone, and most everyone they passed in the corridors, Patrick noticed, chose not to make eye contact with the general. They reached a set of oak double doors flanked by an Air Intelligence Agency flag and a two-star general’s flag, guarded by a lone Security Force armed guard in blue Class A’s with white web belt, pistol holster, shoulder braids, ascot, and spats. The guard snapped to attention and pressed a button to unlock the door.