Battle Born pm-8

by Dale Brown

  Dave nodded. “Then go get ’em, Muck,” he said. “I’ll be on the SATCOM if you need me.” Patrick nodded, successfully stifling another yawn. They were silent for a moment. Then: “You can always take command of the squadron,” Dave said.

  If Patrick had been a bit drowsy a moment ago, he now looked as if he had been blasted awake by heaven’s trumpets. He stared at his partner in utter surprise and asked, “What did you say, Dave?”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of it already,” Luger said, grinning. “If Furness can’t control her troops, she deserves to get taken down a peg or two. She’s treating this squadron like her own personal plaything, true, but the operative word is ‘her.’ Take it away from her, even for a short time, and then see what kind of commander she is. If she straightens out, good. If she doesn’t, you’ve saved the state of Nevada the task of removing her, and you’ve still created a better unit. Plus, you get your first command.”

  “Dave, my job is to give this evaluation and report back to Samson, not pirate an Air National Guard command,” Patrick said. “Besides, I’ve got a job. I’ve got a dozen projects that need my attention. I can’t just leave—”

  “Ah, the first sign of mental illness — thinking that you’re indispensable,” Dave said. Patrick scowled at him, then shook his head, laughing it off. “Muck, I know you. You’re not a desk jockey. You’re a crewdog. You’ve always been one and you’ll always be one, no matter how many stars you wear. But you’re also a one-star general in the United States Air Force, and that means you command. This Lancelot unit is going to be your creation — why not take command of it?”

  “Dave, the idea is nutzo,” Patrick said, shaking his head. The StepVan pulled up in front of a squat concrete building. Patrick grabbed his flight gear and manuals and headed for the door. “I’m not here to replace Furness or kick her ass or teach her how to fly the Bone — I’m here to observe and report. That’s all I’m going to do, and then I want to go home to my wife and son and my work that’s piling up back at Dreamland.”

  “Yes, sir,” Luger said, obviously not believing a word of it. “Have a good flight… commander.”

  * * *

  A security guard posted inside the front door of the squadron building called the squadron to attention as Patrick walked in. “As you were,” Patrick responded as he showed his ID armband to the guard. Even with a major exercise going on, someone still thought about calling the unit to attention when a senior officer entered the building. Just as his staff said in their preliminary exercise report — impressive.

  Patrick found Lieutenant Colonel Rebecca Furness in one of the squadron mission planning rooms a few minutes later, writing a schedule on the whiteboard with felt-tip markers of various colors. “Morning, Colonel,” he said.

  “General,” Furness responded. “Briefing in fifteen minutes. Coffee’s in the Casino. I’ll get one of the guys to help you find things.”

  “I’ll find it,” Patrick said. He walked back to the “Casino,” the squadron’s lounge, found a guest coffee mug, and poured himself a cup. Cripes, Patrick thought, even each squadron member’s coffee cup was clean — he never remembered seeing such a spotless coffee bar back at his old B-52 base. There was beer on tap — with a pair of fuzzy dice tied around the beer tap handles, signifying that the bar was closed. There were a few slot machines, some pinball and video games — all unplugged — and a big popcorn maker, with all the fixings for jalapeño popcorn, where they mixed chopped jalapeños in with the cooking oil. There was a “crud” table, which looked like a regular billiard table except there were no pool cues around, meaning that the balls had to be propelled by hand as the players raced around the table in a sometimes physical free-for-all. Over the bar, the squadron’s “Friday” name tags were on display, with each flier’s call sign on the patch instead of his first and last names.

  Like all of the TV sets Patrick saw all over the base, the lounge’s TV was on and tuned to CNN. As it had been for the past several weeks, the international news was about North Korea. One of the planet’s last Communist states had barely come through last winter intact. Hundreds of thousands of citizens had died of starvation, sickness, and exposure because of a lack of heating oil, food, and medicines. There had been yet another unsuccessful attempt on President Kim Jong-il’s life; the perpetrators had been arrested, publicly tried, and publicly executed by firing squad, all of this shown around the world on CNN. President Kim then executed several military officers on charges of conspiracy, treason, and sedition. Food riots were commonplace; all were harshly, even brutally, repressed by government forces.

  But at the same time, North Korea continued a massive military buildup that surpassed all other Asian countries’. They had tested another rail-garrisoned Daepedong-1 intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile, firing it over sixty-five hundred miles across the Pacific, and were promising to make it operational within the year. An advanced longer-range version of the missile, the Daepedong-2, reportedly had a range of over nine thousand miles, making it capable of hitting targets in the continental United States. They had deployed the Nodong-1 and Nodong-2 rail-mobile nuclear ballistic missiles, capable of hitting targets all over Japan, including Okinawa. They had hundreds of short-and medium-range ballistic missiles, some carrying chemical or biological warheads; and some of their nine-thousand-plus artillery pieces and howitzers were also capable of firing nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons shells. In a country with a population of only twenty-four million, a per capita income of less than nine hundred dollars, and a negative growth rate, North Korea was spending a staggering thirty percent of their gross national product on defense.

  What was equally puzzling was South Korea’s reaction to the North’s huge military buildup. Instead of calling for a larger military buildup of its own, or for increased help from the United States, the South Korean government was actually increasing aid and outreach programs to the North and simultaneously erecting roadblocks to a greater American presence on the Korean peninsula. The United States had fewer than ten thousand troops stationed in South Korea, almost all of them observers, advisers, and instructors, not combat forces. Compared to North Korea, the South’s military forces were much more modern, but a fraction of the size. Yet while the South’s defense budget barely managed to hold steady year after year, its budget for economic aid, humanitarian programs, cultural exchanges, and family reunion programs with North Korea was rapidly increasing.

  Was this part of the Korean mind-set? Patrick wondered as he watched the news piece on the growing North Korean crisis. Help your enemy even though he wants nothing more than to crush you? Or was South Korea naïvely assuring its own destruction by feeding and supplying its sworn enemy? Every time another spy ring or cross-border tunnel was discovered, South Korean aid to North Korea increased. When Wonsan was nearly destroyed by a nuclear device three years earlier, reportedly by China in an attempt to divert world attention from its attempt to conquer Taiwan, it had been South Korea that sent money and equipment to rebuild the city.

  He returned to the mission planning room and studied the schedule Furness had put on the whiteboard. It had been copied from a page from a three-ring binder, part of the extensive array of “plastic brains” the squadron used to do every chore, from turning on the lights to going to war. “Good idea,” Patrick remarked as he reviewed the contents of the binder. “No need to remember how to organize for a mission briefing — it’s all in here.”

  “No need to reinvent the wheel on every sortie,” Furness said. “Everyone does it the same, so there’re no surprises. If something gets missed, someone will know it.”

  Every step of mission planning was organized to the exact minute: show time, overview briefing, intelligence briefing, the “how d’ya do?” briefing — a short meeting to check everyone’s mission planning progress — the formation briefing, mass briefing, crew briefing, step time, life support stop, weather and NOTAMS briefing, flight plan filing, bus time, time a
t aircraft, check-in, copy clearance time, start engines time, taxi time, and takeoff time. Each crew member in the formation had a job to do — everything from preparing flight plans, to getting sun positions during air refuelings and bomb runs, to getting lunch orders, was assigned to someone. He or she would return to the mission planning room and drop off the paperwork for the flight leader to examine, and then check off the item.

  Patrick’s task written on the whiteboard was a simple one: “Hammer on Seaver.”

  At that moment, Rinc Seaver walked into the mission planning room. “Morning, General, Colonel,” he said formally. Furness did not respond.

  “Good job on that EP sim ride, Major,” Patrick said. He had decided to give Seaver an emergency procedures simulator evaluation, loaded up with a fairly demanding scenario, to see how he could handle stressful situations. What Patrick had really wanted to do was duplicate the fateful Fallon mission, to see how it could have been done differently. But as he told Furness and the others, he wasn’t there to investigate the crash. “I like the way you delegate the radios and checklists. Shows good crew coordination, good situational awareness.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I thought you were a little too aggressive,” Furness said. At Patrick’s request, Rebecca Furness had flown in the evaluator’s seat, while two systems officers operated the SO’s side of the weapon systems trainer; terrain-following systems would only work in the sim if the SO’s cab was powered up too. He also asked Furness to administer his closed-book and emergency procedures written test. “Why ask for CITS codes and the expanded tech order text?” she went on. “It got distracting. You were juggling too many balls in the air at once.”

  Rinc looked at Patrick, who nodded. “She’s right,” Patrick said to Seaver. “You obviously know your stuff, but you did get a couple steps ahead of the crew as they ran through the troubleshooting matrix, and it was distracting. You had a handful of broken jet to fly.” He turned to Furness. “Good call, Colonel. Anything for me?”

  “You’re rusty, you don’t know local procedures that well, and you don’t verbalize enough,” she replied. “But you got the job done and brought your crippled jet back home. I’d fly with you. You’d fly anyway, I suppose, even if you were picking your nose the whole time, right?”

  “Right. But thanks. I’ll give my official critique to General Bretoff, but I rated Seaver’s performance an ‘excellent.’ Good job, all of you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Seaver said. Furness offered no congratulations. Seaver copied some notes from the whiteboard, then departed.

  “I gotta tell you, Colonel,” Patrick said as he watched Furness work, “I’m very impressed with the squadron. Everyone’s doing an exceptional job.”

  “You say that like you expected us to be a bunch of drunken slobs,” Furness retorted.

  “No. But it’s certainly getting tough to explain how you lost a jet and a crew.”

  “I don’t suppose you believe in plain old bad luck, do you?”

  “Sure I do,” Patrick replied. “You think it was bad luck?”

  “Yep. Shit happens. You fly jets long enough, something bad happens. It’s a dangerous business.”

  “True,” Patrick admitted. “But I’ve noticed in the sim and looking over the accident records…”

  “I thought you weren’t here investigating the crash, sir.”

  “I’m not, but I’d be an idiot if I didn’t get some background on the accident, wouldn’t I, Colonel?” Patrick retorted. “Most of your bomb runs are level radar bombing, right?”

  “All of our bomb runs are level radar,” Rebecca replied. “The Joint Direct Attack Munition will give us a little more flexibility, but without precision-guided bombs or imaging sensors like LANTIRN or Pave Tack, we pretty much do it the same way strategic bombers have been doing it since the beginning.”

  “But your squadron flies very aggressively,” Patrick pointed out. “Maybe too aggressively. Some might say recklessly. If all your bomb runs are the same, why all the gyrations?”

  “My opinion, sir, is that we’re asked to do more with less,” Furness replied. “We have fewer bombers, smaller budgets, and more taskings over more dangerous battlefields. We don’t set up the threats. We do whatever it takes to destroy the target against whatever threat we encounter.”

  Furness regarded Patrick for a moment before continuing: “You’re a bomber guy, sir.” Patrick had no response. “I remember hearing a little about you, back when I flew tankers and later when I got into the RF-111s. You know how bombers used to fly — low, fast, and alone, mostly with gravity nukes or SRAMs. Well, it’s not done that way anymore. We fly as packages. We go in high, or low, or slow, or fast, depending on the threat and the weapon we employ.

  “But we don’t train that way. We still train like you and I did years ago — alone against the threats, the area defenses, and the target. Instead of having a cruise missile or stealth bomber take out the threats from standoff range followed by Bones with fighter cover, we drive a couple of Bones through a gauntlet of fighters and SAMs. It’s unrealistic. We’d never do that in the real world. But that’s the way we train because it’s cheap and it’s easy.

  “Our job is to destroy the target, no matter what the threat,” Furness went on. “That means pushing ourselves and our machines to the limit. The Bone has the payload of a BUFF but the speed and agility of a Strike Eagle. We’ve got the horses, so we’re going to use them.”

  “Well, what do you think about Bones going in alone?” Patrick asked. “Are they capable? Or do they need a package to do the mission?”

  “Of course we’re capable,” Rebecca replied hotly. “When you flew BUFFs, you flew against every threat in the book without any support. True, in the SIOP missions, you expected to go in long after the initial ICBM laydown, so most of the threats would be taken down for you. But if that’s true, why did BUFFs and Bones and Aardvarks and even B-2 stealth bombers start going low? Why did we start training in ranges with fighters and SAMs and triple-A? Because we were expected to fly against any target, any threat, whether there was a strike package or nuclear laydown preceding us or not.

  “We can do the same thing again — but we need better tools. Give us a standoff capability, like JSOW or SLAM or TSSAM, and we can take out our own threats as we encounter them, like a HARM shooter such as an EA-6 or F-16CJ. Or give us an imaging infrared or TV capability, and we can hunt down our own targets like an F-15E or F-16 Block 50. The Bone can do all that. We can carry four or five different weapons at the same time. I guess it’s politically better to build fighters and deploy carriers. But we’re still training like we did in the seventies and eighties. We should train like we’re going to fight.”

  Patrick nodded, pleased with the way this woman was thinking. He knew he was on the right track — he knew his plan would be accepted by the crews. Now he just had to make it work and then sell it to the brass.

  “What’s everyone got against Rinc Seaver?” Patrick asked. “He’s a good stick, a good systems operator, a good crewdog. Is he a good team player or more of a loner?”

  “No one has anything against the guy,” Furness said. “You ever lose a crew and a plane in your unit before, sir?” Again, Patrick had no answer, so Rebecca assumed the answer was no. “It tears the unit apart like nothing you’d ever believe. But we’re still technicians, pilots, systems officers. We need to find a reason for the accident…”

  “You mean someone to blame?”

  “We’re human too,” Rebecca said. “Maybe part of the healing process is assigning guilt, blame, responsibility. Rinc is it. He had the controls, he was the commander, he pulled the handles, and he survived, and all that makes him culpable. It’s shitty, but it’s the way it is.”

  “How do you feel about Rinc Seaver, Colonel?” Patrick asked.

  “I told you. He’s a good crew member, a good OSO. But he had the bad luck to survive this unit’s only training mission crash. It’ll take some time for him
to work his way back into the unit.” Patrick hesitated, looking carefully into her eyes, expecting her to add something a little more. “If you have something to say, sir, please say it.”

  “No,” Patrick said finally. “Forget it. Completely unrelated.” He spotted Rinc Seaver and a few other crew members drifting back and forth in front of the open door, wondering if it was safe to enter, so Patrick decided to back off. They had a mission to prepare for, and everyone’s attention had to be focused on the task ahead. The room filled up quickly with crew members and technicians ready to start the briefing.

  Furness began precisely on time; she dinged one crewdog two dollars for showing up just as she was starting to close the door and gave him a warning glare, then began:

  “This is the initial flight briefing for Aces Two-Zero flight of two.” She put the first of a small stack of overhead slides on the projector. “Everyone is present. I am the flight lead, and Rodeo is second-in-command in Aces Two-One. We are the first strike package for our unit pre-D. Intelligence briefing.”

  A technical sergeant stood up and put his first briefing slide on the projector. It was marked “Confidential (Scenario Unclassified).” “Good morning, ladies and gents,” he said. “The following is classified ‘confidential,’ with a fictional exercise scenario; the real-world briefing is available in the intel shop if you’re interested.

  “Two days ago the godless Communist dictatorship of North Kimchee moved eleven armor and infantry brigades to the border of the God-fearing democratic pro-American nation of South Kimchee, and stepped up fighter and antiship patrols over the ocean around its borders.” Patrick always found himself struggling not to smile when the intelligence techs recited the fictional exercise scenarios; they were prepared with a vivid imagination and a good sense of humor. “The National Command Authority responded by ordering the full mobilization of all long-range bomber units, in case the North Kimchee Army decides to invade, and warned North Kimchee that we were guaranteeing the peace and sovereignty of South Kimchee and would use force to back our promise up. The warning order directed us to prepare to execute an attack-then-deploy bombing mission against North Kimchee ground units along the border. One Navy carrier battle group was already in the area when the warning order was issued, and another is en route.”