by Dale Brown
He also never asked for anything. Consequently, he never got anything. What would he be like, she wondered, if he started demanding respect instead of earning it — like Rinc Seaver?
Rinc was her ill-advised romantic relationship that had filled the void left in her life when she was promoted up and away beyond Daren Mace. Both men were strong, handsome, and intelligent. Unfortunately, Rinc Seaver knew it, and he never let anyone forget it. He had a chip on his shoulder the size of the Golden Gate Bridge, and it would take a nuclear bomb to knock it off.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what did him in.
“Daren, it’s good to have you here,” Rebecca said seriously. “And it’s good to see you again. But I don’t have the time to worry about your feelings toward the Air Force or me. I’m here to stand up a flying wing, and I picked you to help me. I recommended you because I know you can do the job. You were the de facto wing commander at Plattsburgh when no one else on the entire base knew a thing about generating combat aircraft for nuclear war. You pulled us through that. You did some amazing things at Beale with the Global Hawk wing. Now I need you to pull the Fifty-first through this ramp-up and initial cadre-training phase. I’m counting on you.”
“Rebecca, you know I’ll do it,” Daren said. Again, that was a weird comment. What’s so hard about ramping up a KC-135 unit? The Stratotanker had been around for almost forty years, and it would probably be around another ten or twenty at least. What’s going on here? he wondered. What he said was “Seeing you… well, it just reopened a few old wounds, that’s all. I’m over it.” He nodded, smiled, and added, “The kiss didn’t help — but it didn’t hurt either.”
“Glad to hear both of those things.” She headed for the door. “I’ll show you around. You’re not going to believe this place.”
“The objective of this place,” Rebecca said, after Daren had met up with her in the TV lounge, “was to build the most modern military facility in the world: highly secure, as secret as you can make an airfield, and efficient in any kind of weather and tactical situation. Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base is the first military base with a flying mission to be built from the ground up in over fifty years.”
“From what I’ve seen so far, it’s pretty high-tech,” Daren commented. Why in hell was Rebecca blathering on about this place? There were no more than a dozen buildings on the whole base, and, except for the sensors and information datalinks they obviously had set up here, there was no security that he could see. Most of the base looked like open rangeland. The aircraft hangars didn’t even have doors — and Daren knew how cold and snowy it got here in the winter.
Rebecca slid Daren a sly glance, which he noticed. Why was she giving him a look like the joke was on him? “We are still technically a Nevada Air National Guard base,” she went on, “so we don’t have much in the way of facilities like base housing or recreation — we have to rely on the local economy for that. But we do get a lot of assistance from the active-duty force, so we expect to build more and more facilities as time goes by.” She looked at her watch. “We’ve got a launch in a few minutes, and since we’re the only ones around, we get to do the last-chance inspection. Let’s go.”
“Okay,” he said. A last-chance inspection on a KC-135 tanker? Last-chance inspections were usually reserved for aircraft that might have things falling or shooting off them, like bombs or missiles. But it was something to do. They climbed into a Suburban that was laden with radios and had a runway braking-action accelerometer unit installed, and headed off down the taxiway. They reached the departure end of the runway and stopped at the hold line, their flashing lights on.
“When do you expect them to finish your control tower?” Daren asked.
“We don’t get a control tower,” Rebecca replied. “We control the airfield by using sensors in the ground and cameras and radar for the surface and sky.”
“Aren’t you worried that you’re depending an awful lot on all these sensors and datalinks?” Daren asked. “Wouldn’t you feel more secure if you had more sets of eyes out here?”
“I’ll show you the security and monitoring section next — you won’t believe what we can see,” Rebecca said. She received a green light at the hold line, looked up and down the runway for incoming traffic, then pulled out onto the runway and headed back toward the other end. “But we still use humans for a lot of chores, such as runway inspections. We have sensors that can detect a piece of metal on the runway as small as a pea, but we still do visual inspections. Some habits die hard, I guess.”
“Tell me, Rebecca, where’s General McLanahan’s office?” Daren asked.
“You’ve met the general?”
“Last night, working in a virtual-cockpit trailer out on the other side of the runway.”
“Hmm. He doesn’t really have offices here. He travels a lot, usually to TTR or Dreamland.” TTR, or Tonopah Test Range, was the classified flight and weapon test facility administered by the ninety-ninth wing at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas. High-value weapon systems underwent detailed secret test and evaluation programs at TTR before being deployed.
“Is he current and qualified in the planes assigned here?”
“He’s fully qualified to fly all the planes here. In fact, he’s one of the few who are qualified here, including me,” Rebecca replied. “You know, Daren, I don’t really know what the general’s mission here is. I know he’s trying to start up some sort of a high-tech joint-forces command center based here at Battle Mountain—”
“Based here? Where? You don’t even have room for the tanker squadron, let alone a joint-forces command. And what ‘joint forces’ are you talking about? All I see are some tankers. Or is this something we’re going to be standing up in the next few years?”
“You’ll see.”
A few minutes later one of the KC-135R Stratotankers taxied over to the end of the runway but stopped well short of the hammerhead inspection area. “C’mon, boys, taxi up here, we won’t bite,” Mace murmured. He noticed Rebecca stifling another smile. “Why doesn’t he taxi up to the hammerhead?”
“He’s okay for now,” Rebecca said. Into her commlink, she spoke, “Bobcat Four-one, Alpha, clear me in for last chance.”
“Roger, Alpha, radars down, brakes set, cleared in.”
“Alpha’s coming in.” They started their slow drive around the Stratotanker, looking for open access panel, preflight streamers pulled, landing-gear downlock keys removed, serviceable tires, and to be sure the flaps were down, takeoff trim set, the refueling boom stowed, and the tail-support bar removed. The KC-135R was the reengined version of the venerable KC-135, a Boeing 707 airliner fitted with a boom operator’s pod, rear observation window, director lights, and a refueling probe and pumps; it also did double duty as a medium-capacity, medium-range freight hauler. These KC-135s, Daren noticed, also had wingtip-mounted hose-and-drogue refueling pods, so they could refuel U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, NATO, and other nations’ aircraft that used the same system. The fin flash letters were “BA,” for Battle Mountain.
“Everything looks good to me,” Daren said.
“Me, too,” Rebecca acknowledged. On her commlink she said, “Bobcat Four-one, this is Alpha, safety check complete, you appear to be in takeoff configuration. Have a good one.” To Daren she added, “ ‘Bobcat’ is our unit call sign; the tankers start with ‘four.’ “
“Four-one copies, thanks,” the pilot replied.
“You always use the commlink, even talking to aircraft?” Daren asked.
“The commlink is not just a cell phone — it can tie in to many different radio frequencies, satellite communications, computer networks, about a dozen different systems,” Rebecca said. “It’s secure and pretty good quality, so we use it all the time. They’re working on an even smaller version.”
Rebecca started to drive around the KC-135, turning to the left side so they’d be in full view of the pilot. “So do the tankers here get the usual taskings from all the services,” Daren asked,
“or do we just get taskings from—?” He stopped short, his mouth gaping open in utter surprise.
Because directly in front of the KC-135R, in the hammerhead aircraft-inspection ramp, were two B-1B Lancer supersonic bombers. They had appeared completely out of nowhere! “What… in… hell…?”
“What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’? Where did those bombers come from?”
“You mean to tell me you didn’t notice them when we drove up here?” Rebecca asked, totally serious.
“Don’t bullshit me, Rebecca!”
“All right, all right,” Rebecca relented. “Let’s do this last-chance, and then I’ll explain everything.”
Daren was absolutely speechless — but his astonishment was nowhere near complete. The first thing he noticed was that the swing-wings of the B-1s were not fully extended. “They don’t look like they’re in takeoff configuration,” he said.
“With these planes they are,” Rebecca said. “Our bombers usually keep the wings back for all phases of flight.”
“But how can they do that?”
“Mission-adaptive technology,” she replied. “The whole fuselage is a lift-producing surface and flight control. C’mon, let’s finish this, and I’ll fill you in.” They did a last-chance inspection of both bombers. As soon as they were done, the bombers were airborne, followed by the tanker. In less than five minutes, the airfield was completely quiet again. Rebecca drove around to the hammerhead parking area. “Let’s step outside.”
“Rebecca, how did those bombers get there?” Daren asked excitedly as he followed her out of the Suburban. “And how… when… shit, Rebecca, what’s going on here?”
“You’re about to find out.” At that moment Daren felt a slight rumble under his feet.
And the entire section of aircraft-parking ramp under their feet started to descend!
“You actually built an underground air base?” Mace asked incredulously. Two huge sections of the hammerhead parking area were actually aircraft elevators, like the ones on an aircraft carrier but a few times larger. He stared wide-eyed as several feet of concrete, rock, armor, dirt, and steel passed overhead, followed by banks of overhead lights. Six stories below they could see men and equipment scurrying around. “This is amazing!”
“It’s an amazing engineering project,” Rebecca said. “There are eight of these elevators — two on each end of the runway and four in the mass parking area. We have a solar-charged backup system that can operate the elevators and air-circulation system in case the commercial power goes out. We can seal the interior against chemical or biological attack, and it can withstand anything but a direct hit with a nuclear weapon. We have accommodations for over a thousand men and women down here, plus twenty aircraft. We have twelve assigned here now.”
Once the large elevator — which Daren thought looked like a moving city block — reached the bottom, they drove off into a parking area and stepped out so he could see the complex on foot. It was truly impressive. Except for the echo, it looked and felt like any military flight line at night, illuminated only by artificial light. The complex was enormous, stretching out seemingly to infinity. “I… I can’t believe this,” Daren gasped. “It doesn’t feel like we’re underground at all, but when I remind myself that we are, it doesn’t seem real. How in the world can the air stay fresh enough to breathe?”
“It’s a completely passive air-circulation system,” Rebecca said. “Air from the surface vents up from the surrounding mountains through natural crevices and tunnels in the rock. We didn’t have to drill one hole to get the ventilation system running. The hot air from here is cooled and dispersed enough through the mountains that the exhaust can’t be detected from a satellite, so the bad guys can’t guess how many planes we’re launching. The complex is naturally conditioned to a temperature of fifty-five degrees and fifty percent humidity, which is almost ideal for living and working and uses about as much power as a standard four-story office building.”
“Nice — if you enjoy living like a mole,” Daren said dryly.
“Get used to it. Your squadron is based down here,” Rebecca said.
“Down here? I’m confused. You keep more tankers down here?”
“Yes, we can if we need to.” They had stopped at one of the B-1 bombers, which looked as if it had just returned from a mission. “But you don’t belong to the tanker squadron. You’re the new squadron commander of the One-eleventh Attack Wing.”
Daren Mace broke into a wide grin. “A B-1 squadron!” he exclaimed. “Very cool.”
“Not just a B-1 wing,” Rebecca said. They piled into an electric golf cart and drove down the aircraft taxiway. Even though brilliantly lit from above, the planes emerged from the vastness of the underground chamber like beasts appearing through a thick fog.
“This is incredible, simply incredible,” Daren said, still shaking his head in amazement. “You know, you’ve just made me an extremely happy man, Rebecca.”
“You weren’t happy being a tanker commander?”
“No offense to the tanker toads, but I’ve always been a fast-mover, and I’m happy to be one now,” Daren admitted. “I’ve always loved the Bones.”
“Then you’ll be really happy with the Vampires,” Rebecca said.
“Vampires? You named these ‘Vampire,’ too, like the RF-111Gs?”
“These are what the RF-111s aspired to be,” Rebecca said. “You won’t believe what they can do.”
“Then let’s go have a look. I assume I’ll be cleared to go in the plane?”
“You’re checked in, and your security clearance has been entered. If there’s a problem, the sky cops will stop you,” Rebecca said.
Mace was like a kid in a toy store as he stepped toward the sleek aircraft. The Security Forces officer asked to see Daren’s line badge, and Daren took a few moments to talk with the young airman.
Rebecca nodded to Daren as they reached the plane. “The security units are also part of your squadron,” she pointed out. “I’m happy you stopped to talk to the young troops. Crew dogs are usually too busy to talk with the junior enlisted guys.”
“I have to admit, I’m guilty of that, too,” Daren said. “But I’m just sightseeing here — he’s the one on duty.” Daren looked over the bomber. “I see a few changes right away: a much smaller vertical stabilizer, no horizontal stabilizer, and no gust-load alleviator vanes.”
“Very good, Colonel,” Rebecca said. “The EB-1C uses adaptive skin technology—‘smart skin’—on the forward and aft sections of the fuselage and on the wings. The composite structure is reshaped by computer-controlled microhydraulic actuators that can create lift or drag as needed without the use of rigid control surfaces. Same on the wings: These planes don’t use spoilers for roll control or flaps for angle-of-attack control. We pretty much use full seventy-two-degree wing sweep for all phases of flight, because the smart skin is more effective in controlling angle of attack than anything else. If the adaptive-wing-technology computers fail, we need to go back to using wing sweep and the lift-and-drag devices, but the system is pretty reliable.”
As soon as Daren stepped up inside the plane, he noticed the difference. The two systems officers’ positions in the crew compartment behind the cockpit were gone, replaced by racks of solid-state black boxes. “My God, this is incredible!” he said for what seemed like the twentieth time. “It seems spacious in here now compared to before!”
“Hell, we had to put three thousand pounds of fuel tanks up here to compensate for all the crew stuff we took out,” Rebecca said. “The mission-adaptive technology takes care of the rest. We’ve increased range and performance another twenty-five percent by taking out all the human stuff back here.”
They crawled through the tunnel connecting the systems operators’ compartment to the cockpit. Rebecca saw that Daren was speechless with surprise as he looked at the completely empty space on the instrument panels. Almost all of the tape instruments, gauges, knobs, and switches had been re
placed by multifunction displays — only a few backup gauges remained, relegated to lower corners of the instrument panel.
“Welcome to the electronic bomber, Daren. The B-1 was always a highly automated, systems-driven aircraft, but now the humans have been taken completely out of the equation. You don’t fly this thing anymore — you manage it.” Still looking at Daren, Rebecca spoke, “Bobcat Two-zero-three, battery on, interior lights on.” Immediately the lights in the cockpit snapped on.
“Don’t tell me you talk to the planes, like you talk to the duty officer?”
“That’s exactly what you do,” Rebecca said. “In fact, with most missions, you don’t even have to talk — the aircraft does its preflight according to the mission timetable.” She shrugged and added, “The computers are smarter, faster, and more reliable than human crews. Why not let them do the fighting and dying? The plane doesn’t care. In fact, it probably enjoys not having to lug around human beings with their need for warmth and their heavy life-support systems. We’re a slow, inefficient, wasteful redundant subsystem, totally unnecessary to the completion of the mission.”
“Jesus, Rebecca, you sound like some kind of Isaac Asimov robot character.”
“No, I’m doing an imitation of General McLanahan, General Luger, Colonel Cheshire, Colonel Law, and most of the brain trust here at Battle Mountain,” she responded. “Daren, just between you, me, and the fence post, the guys who run this place are the biggest technonerds you’ve ever met. They’ve all come from Dreamland, designing and building these things for the past fifteen-odd years, and their minds are in the friggin’ ozone. Everything is high-tech and computerized, from the phone system to the latrines. You’d think the whole bunch of them just beamed down to earth from the Starship Enterprise.”
