by Dale Brown
This could have been war-torn Iraq or Afghanistan, or some remote Chinese village . . . instead, it was a relatively new subdivision in the community of Battle Mountain, in north-central Nevada.
Battle Mountain began life as a small railroad depot and mining camp in post–Civil War north-central Nevada, nothing more than a small collection of warehouses, shops, saloons, and brothels. Although it became the seat of Lander County, the community never got around to becoming an incorporated town, city, or even a village. Even when the interstate highway was built nearby and the U.S. Army set up a B-17 bomber crew training base outside of town, the community never really grew far from its mining-camp, bump-in-the-road past.
And that’s pretty much what Bradley James McLanahan thought of Battle Mountain: yet another bump in his road.
Just one month away from his eighteenth birthday, tallish like his deceased mother but husky and blue-eyed like his father, Brad—no one used his full first name except his dad unless they were looking for trouble—had had his share of moves and terrible postings, like all Air Force brats. Although he didn’t think so, he actually had it pretty good compared to the kids of some other officers, because he had moved just a few times in the eighteen years his father, retired Air Force Lieutenant-General Patrick McLanahan, had been in the service. But to his thinking, Battle Mountain was his penalty for having fewer moves and bad postings.
Brad had been cooped up most of the morning playing computer games and waiting for the hellish thunderstorms to blow through, and now that the rains had stopped and the sun was coming out, he wanted to get the heck out. He found his dad in his tiny bedroom/office. “Dad, can I borrow the car?” he asked from the doorway.
“Depends,” his father replied without turning. Patrick was seemingly staring out the window of his bedroom, one hand hovering in midair, his fingers moving as if he were typing on a keyboard. Brad knew—but wasn’t allowed to tell anyone—that his father didn’t need a screen because computer images were broadcast to tiny monitors built into special lenses of his eyes so the computer images appeared as big as if on a twenty-seven-inch high-def screen; he typed on a “virtual” keyboard that he could call up as well. His dad had been the guinea pig for many such high-tech gadgets in his years in the Air Force. “Kitchen?”
“Clean, dishwasher unloaded.”
“Bathroom?”
“Sunday is my usual day to do the bathroom. Okay if I do it tomorrow?”
“Okay. Bedroom?”
“Picked up, bed made.”
“Living room?”
“Presentable.”
His father looked at him, trying to discern exactly what that meant. “Maybe we should check.”
“Okay.” He watched his dad’s blue eyes dart back and forth as he made mouse-pointer movements by simply looking at log-off commands on his virtual screen. He followed his dad down the narrow hallway. Patrick peeked into Brad’s bedroom across the hall, checked, nodded approval, then proceeded past the hall closet with the stacked washer and dryer, the kitchen/dining area, and finally into the living room. The McLanahans lived in a double-wide trailer, about half the size of their last residence in Henderson, Nevada, near Las Vegas, but large and almost ostentatious compared to many of their neighbors’.
Patrick scowled at a stack of magazines and junk mail in a pile on the coffee table. “That stuff needs to be sorted, recycled, or put away,” he said.
“It’s Gia’s stuff, Dad,” Brad said. His dad nodded solemnly. Gia Cazzotto was his dad’s girlfriend—or former girlfriend, or wacko, or alkie, he didn’t know which. She had been medically retired from the Air Force after ejecting from an EB-1C Vampire bomber that had been attacked by Russian fighters over the Arabian Sea last year.
After recovering from her injuries, Gia was sent to Washington to face charges for her actions just prior to the shoot-down. She was charged with causing injuries and damage to a peaceful vessel and its crew in international waters, inciting an international incident, disobeying orders, and dereliction of duty. Patrick went with her to lend support and to testify on her behalf, but was barred from doing so because he faced his own charges. She was found guilty in a court-martial and sentenced to three years in prison, reduction in rank to second lieutenant—she had been a full colonel, in command of a high-tech bomber unit in Southern California—and a less-than-honorable discharge. Her sentence was commuted by President Kenneth Phoenix hours after he assumed office, but the less-than-honorable discharge remained.
Gia was never the same person after that, Brad remembered. She was angry, quick-tempered, restless, and quiet. The charges against his father were dismissed by the president, which only seemed to make her angrier. The president could have completely pardoned her, but he didn’t, saying that in good conscience he couldn’t overturn a jury verdict, even if he believed what she did was in the best interests of the United States of America. That made her even angrier.
When his father accepted this job in Battle Mountain, she accompanied them for a while, helping to set up the trailer and watch over Brad while his father worked, but she was definitely no fun to be around like she was in Henderson. She started drinking: good stuff at first, top-quality Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons—Brad always got a little taste—then when the money ran low and she lost her job, it was whatever was cheapest. Soon after, she started disappearing, first for a couple days, then a couple weeks at a time. Who knew if she’d ever be back?
“Sorry. Don’t worry about it,” Patrick said, straightening his shoulders. He nodded toward the desk with the drawer with all the keys in it. “If it needs gas, you know what to do. Watch the speed limits. And no driving on the interstate. Got some cash?”
“Yes.”
Patrick nodded. Damn, he thought, his son was grown up, almost his own guy. What in hell would living in this trailer feel like without him? “Call if anything happens.”
“I know, I know, I will,” Brad said. “Thanks.” Like all of his friends, Brad got his learner’s permit at exactly age fifteen and a half on the dot because a car meant real freedom in an isolated place like Battle Mountain—the nearest town of any size was Elko, more than seventy miles away and accessible only by the interstate, unless you really liked serious off-roading. The cops knew that, and they liked to ticket kids who drove at night or used the interstate highway, which was not allowed for drivers with only learner’s permits.
The phone was ringing as Brad dashed out the door—no one he wanted to talk to right now used the home phone, so the quicker he could get away, the better. He had made it to the car and was just opening the driver’s door when he heard the front door to the trailer open and his dad shouted, “Brad!”
“Gotta go, Dad,” he shouted, not stopping. Sheesh, he thought, who calls the home number for him on a Saturday afternoon? All his friends used his cell number. “I’m meeting Ron and he needs—”
“Squadron recall,” Patrick said. “Actual. Everyone. Seventy-two hours.”
They did. All thoughts of freedom disappeared as he dashed back into the house. Hanging out with his friends, driving, playing computer games . . . all good, but they were all pretty lame compared to this.
Patrick and Brad raced back into the trailer, and within moments reemerged from their bedrooms dressed in completely different clothes. Patrick wore a sage-green flight suit and black leather flying boots. The black leather nameplate above his left pocket had a set of Civil Air Patrol wings, his name, the letters CAP in one lower corner and his Civil Air Patrol rank, COL, on the other (even though Patrick retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant-general, the highest rank he could attain in Civil Air Patrol without earning advancement points was colonel), along with Civil Air Patrol and Nevada Wing patches. Brad wore a camouflaged battle-dress uniform with blue-and-white cloth name tapes with MCLANAHAN on one side and CIVIL AIR PATROL on the other, along with a green camouflage cap, an orange safety vest, and black leather combat boots. Both carried backpacks with extra gear; Brad carried a s
maller pack on his web belt. “Ready to go, big guy?” Patrick asked.
“Ready.” Like the costumed heroes Batman and Robin heading to the Batmobile, the two raced to Patrick’s four-door Jeep Wrangler and drove off.
The roads in the trailer subdivision were muddy from the recent thunderstorms, but the Wrangler handled them with ease. The subdivision was a temporary trailer housing settlement built during the expansion of the air base located nearby—at least it was meant to be temporary, until the sudden and dramatic downturn in the economy and the new president’s response to the crisis made the trailers permanent. The roads were still unpaved, and now half of the trailers were empty.
It took about five minutes to get back on paved surfaces, and then another ten minutes before reaching the outer perimeter of the airfield. The perimeter was a simple sign and chain-link fence, designed more to keep tumbleweeds and coyotes out, and an unmanned guard gate. But Patrick and Brad both knew that their identities were already being remotely determined and recorded, and their movements carefully tracked by the air base’s high-tech security sensors. Joint Air Base Battle Mountain didn’t look much different from the surrounding high desert, but at this place, looks were deceiving.
What was now Joint Air Base Battle Mountain had a colorful past, most of which the public was unaware of, or at best indifferent to. It started life as Tuscarora Army Air Corps Field in 1942 to train bomber and pursuit crews for service in World War II. After the war, the airfield was turned over to Lander County, and some of the government land south of the field sold to mining companies. A few businesses and an air museum tried to make a go of it at the isolated airfield, but there simply wasn’t that much business in remote north-central Nevada, and the airfield seemed to languish.
But the underground elevators, buildings, rail lines, power distributors, and ventilation systems that popped up around the airfield were never meant for miners: the U.S. government secretly constructed a vast underground cave network beneath Tuscarora Army Air Corps Base. The facility was designed to be a government reconstitution command center, a base far from population centers to which the heads of the U.S. government and military would escape and ride out a Soviet or Chinese nuclear-missile attack. After the attack was over, the officials at Battle Mountain would broadcast instructions to the survivors and begin rescue and regeneration efforts for the people of the western United States.
The facility was the ultimate in 1950s technology: it made its own power, air, and water; it was built to withstand anything but a direct hit with a one-megaton nuclear warhead; it even boasted an underground hangar with elevators that would take aircraft as large as a B-52 bomber belowground to safety. The base was so isolated that most miners and ranchers never realized the facility existed.
But when the Cold War ended, Battle Mountain was shuttered . . . until it was reactivated in the early twenty-first century by General Patrick McLanahan as the headquarters for a new high-tech aerial attack unit called the Air Battle Force. The Air Battle Force contained some of the most secret and amazing air-combat machines ever built: two-hundred-ton bombers with the radar cross section of a flea; bombers fitted with lasers that could shoot down ballistic missiles and satellites in low Earth orbit; even multiple flights of unmanned bombers that could fly supersonic combat missions halfway around the world. Still, the little community and its mysterious underground base went almost completely unnoticed by the rest of the world . . .
. . . until the American Holocaust, when the United States was attacked by waves of Russian bombers launching hypersonic nuclear-tipped missiles. Almost the entire fleet of American long-range bombers and more than half of America’s intercontinental-ballistic-missile arsenal was wiped out in a matter of hours. But Battle Mountain’s little fleet of high-tech bombers, led by Patrick McLanahan, survived and formed the spearhead of the American counterattack that destroyed most of Russia’s ground-launched intercontinental nuclear missiles and restored a tenuous sort of parity in nuclear forces between the two nations.
Battle Mountain emerged from the horrific tragedy of the American Holocaust to become the center of American air-breathing strategic combat operations. All of America’s surviving heavy bombers, intelligence-gathering planes, and airborne command posts were relocated to Battle Mountain, and a fleet of long-range unmanned combat aircraft began to grow there. The base even became a staging area for America’s fleet of manned and unmanned spaceplanes—aircraft that could take off and land like conventional aircraft but boost themselves into low Earth orbit.
Even during the deep global economic recession that began in 2008, Battle Mountain grew, although the community around it barely noticed. Because of its isolation and dirt-low cost of living, many bases around the world were closed and relocated to Battle Mountain. Soon Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base became JAB (Joint Air Base) Battle Mountain, hosting air units from all the military services, the Air Reserve Forces, the Central Intelligence Agency, and even the Space Defense Force.
But then the economic crash of December 2012 happened, and everything changed.
Newly elected president Kenneth Phoenix, politically exhausted from a bruising and divisive election that saw yet another president being chosen in effect by the U.S. Supreme Court, ordered a series of massive tax cuts as well as cuts in all government services. Such government cuts had not been seen since the Thomas Thorn administration: entire cabinet-level departments, such as education, commerce, transportation, energy, and veterans affairs, were consolidated with other departments or closed outright; all entitlement-program outlays were cut in half or defunded completely; American military units and even entire bases around the world disappeared virtually overnight. Despite howls of protest from both the political left and right, Congress had no choice but to agree to the severe austerity measures.
Joint Air Base Battle Mountain was not spared. Every aircraft at the once-bustling base was in “hangar queen” status—available only for spare parts—reassigned to other bases, or mothballed. Most planes placed in “flyable storage” were not even properly mothballed, but just hoisted up on jacks and shrink-wrapped in place to protect them against sun and sandstorms. Construction at the base was halted, seemingly with nails half pounded, concrete footers half poured, and streets abruptly turning into dirt roads or littered with construction equipment that appeared to be just dropped or turned off and abandoned. There seemed to be no one on the base at all except for security patrols, and most of the visible ones were unmanned robotic vehicles responding to security breaches discovered by remote electronic sensors.
Patrick and Brad drove past the partially completed headquarters building of the Space Defense Force. They had passed just a handful of persons and vehicles since entering the base. “Man, this place looks . . . freakin’ lonely, Dad,” Brad said. “Aren’t they ever going to finish those buildings?”
“There’s no money in the budget right now,” Patrick said. He nodded toward several trailers set up nearby. “Those will do for now.” If the Space Defense Force survived the economic downturn, he silently added. President Phoenix was a big supporter, but like every other government program, it had been cut by at least 50 percent.
“Battle Mountain’s town flower: the trailer,” Brad said, reciting the oft-repeated joke.
The flight line was built up much more than the rest of the base because of all the flying activity before the 2012 crash, but now it appeared just as vacant as the rest of the base. Each large hangar had just one or two planes parked there—the rest were either in the hangars being cannibalized or on the south parking ramp encased in shrink-wrap. The most active flying units on the base were the RQ-4 Global Hawk reconnaissance planes, which had transferred here from Beale Air Force Base in Marysville, California; and the three surviving Air Force E-4B National Airborne Operations Center airborne command post planes, which along with the Navy’s Mercury sea-launched ballistic-missile airborne command posts resumed around-the-clock operations after the American Holocaust.
Patrick drove to the older western side of the flight line, parked in front of a large cube-shaped hangar, and he and Brad retrieved their gear and headed inside. The hangar was shared with several nonmilitary organizations, everyone from the Lander County Sheriff’s Department to the Nevada Department of Wildlife, so there was an assortment of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft parked inside. They found two men at a large table inside the hangar, looking over topographic charts. One was wearing an Air Force–style green Nomex flight suit, similar to Patrick’s; the other was wearing a camouflaged battle-dress utility uniform with an orange vest over the jacket. They looked up when Patrick and Brad came over to them.
“The McLanahans: first to arrive, as usual,” the man in the flight suit, Civil Air Patrol Lieutenant Colonel Rob Spara, said. Spara was a retired Army Kiowa Scout helicopter pilot and commanded an Army helicopter training squadron before retiring; he held a variety of helicopter-related jobs now, doing everything from flying skiers to fresh powder on mountaintops, to air ambulance, to maintenance and repair. He shook hands with Patrick, then handed him a clipboard with a sign-in roster. “You’re the first pilot to arrive, sir.” Even though rank in the squadron was rarely observed, everyone called Patrick “General” or “sir.” “Feel like flying the 182 today?”
“Absolutely,” Patrick said immediately. He completed the sign-in, then had Brad sign in.
“Good,” the other man, CAP Captain David Bellville, said. Bellville was the vice commander of the squadron and the commander of cadets, a ten-year veteran of the Civil Air Patrol, a twenty-two-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, and a physician’s assistant. “I’ll be your flight release officer. I’ll enter you into the ICU and give your crew a face-to-face when you’re done preflighting.” The ICU, or incident commander utility, was the computerized data-input system for the Civil Air Patrol, which did away with a lot of the paperwork required by the Air Force.
