Battle Born (26 page)

Patrick felt a bit self-conscious as he finally got straightened around and settled in. He wrapped the Velcro strap of his checklist around his left thigh, a small metal kneeboard around his right thigh, and opened the checklist to the “Before APU Start” checklist page. He capped it off by slipping on a new pair of Nomex flight gloves, working the fingers down tight, then punching a fist into his palm excitedly, just as he used to do before starting engines years ago as a young crewpuppy. “I’m doing fine, Major,” Patrick replied. “Don’t be afraid to kick my butt if I’m not keeping up with you.”

“You’re doing fine so far,” Rinc said. “It took me three tries to find all my harness straps without help.”

The first order of business was starting the APU, or auxiliary power unit. The APU was a fifth small self-contained jet engine, mounted in the B-1’s tail, which provided electrical, hydraulic, and pneumatic power to the aircraft without starting one of the big turbofans or relying on external power carts. With the APU, the Bone was completely self-sufficient—it did not need ground power equipment for any flight-line operations. Once the B-1’s APU was started and supplying electrical power, the crew started to turn on their equipment and run power-on and before-engine-start checklists. At precisely the briefed time, the crew began the engine-start and after-engine-start checklists. It took only a few moments to get all four engines running.

Things happened quickly after that. The pilots ran a series of checklists, testing every system, backup system, and function aboard their plane. The TACAN radio receiver was not passing its self-test, but the avionics maintenance “Red Ball” team had a spare part out to the aircraft and installed in record time. They certainly could’ve launched without a TACAN receiver—with all the sophisticated inertial and satellite navigation gear on board, the old TACAN was seldom used except on precision instrument approaches—but it was a required piece of equipment. Furness’s flight checked in precisely at the prebriefed time. Patrick copied the mission clearance and command post clearance, then began to taxi out.

Except for a sudden brief loss of the nosewheel steering system in Rinc’s plane, which was corrected immediately by recycling the system, the flight taxied out without incident. A large crowd of onlookers was up on the roof of both commercial airline terminal buildings at Reno-Tahoe International, watching the two-ship of
B-1B bombers taxiing out for takeoff. All the commercial flights had been cleared onto the parallel runway to make way for the military flights, but several stopped to watch the Bones parade by. Almost everyone based at Reno International knew that the 111th Bomb Squadron was getting some sort of evaluation, and a few knew that these planes carried live weapons, so they recognized that this was something special.

They received a “last chance” inspection at the end of the runway by the supervisor of flying behind the steel revetments in the runway hammerhead. “Looks like you got a nick in the left nosewheel tire, Rodeo,” the SOF radioed via the maintenance officer’s intercom cord. “Must’ve happened when your nosewheel steering cut out.”

“Any cords showing?” Rinc asked.

“I see two cord belts.”

“Shit,” Rinc muttered. That meant an abort to change the tire. A Bone near max gross weight with a bald spot on a nose gear tire was not a good place to be. “Screw it. We’ll take it.”

“You sure about that?” Patrick asked.

“The book says we can take up to three cords—”

“But at gross weight?”

“It doesn’t give a gross weight restriction, sir,” Seaver pressed. “Besides, we’re forty thousand
under
gross right now. Three cords peacetime, five cords wartime. We can probably get a waiver for five. We should—”

“We’re going off station to a forward-deployment base that probably won’t have the gear we need to change tires,” Patrick said. “Better to get it changed now rather than take a broken bird to a forward bare-base.”

“This is our pre-D launch, General—we’re talking about Probability to Launch and Survive points,” Rinc
emphasized. “PLS isn’t a factor once we get to our deployment base. But if we lose PLS points due to a late launch, we get hammered. We’ll be okay with two cords missing. You should know that the tires have twelve cord belts, and even with five gone we’ve got a wide safety margin. We’re still legal. Let’s get the hell outta here and go drop some iron.” Patrick hesitated. Seaver added irritably, “Unless you’re going to order me to get it changed.”

“You’re the boss,” Patrick said.

“SOF, I’m taking the plane,” Rinc said, nodding to his guest copilot. “Finish up and clear the runway for launch.”

“Roger dodger, Rodeo,” the SOF said. He finished his drive-arounds and found nothing else wrong with any of the planes. “Aces Two-Zero flight, pins and streamers pulled, doors closed, and you appear to be in takeoff configuration. Penetrate, decimate, and dominate. SOF is clear. Break. Reno tower, Aces SOF, clear me on three-four left for a last-chance runway inspection.”

“Aces SOF, Reno tower, clear on three-four left, report when off.” The SOF sped down the runway, making a last inspection for anything that might cause damage to the Bones during takeoff. Once the SOF cleared off the runway, it was time for departure.

Patrick had forgotten what a takeoff in the B-1B was like. He had flown lots of different aircraft, including supersonic bombers, but there was something different about the raw power meshed with the physical size of the Bone that made takeoffs even more spectacular in this plane than in any other.

As soon as Rebecca Furness in Aces Two-Zero started rolling, Rinc Seaver lined up on centerline, locked the brakes using his toes on top of the rudder pedals, then started to feed in power. The sound was
muted, silky smooth, with no trace of rattle or “burping” as in the G-model B-52s Patrick used to fly. Rinc moved the throttles up to military power, paused to let all four engines stabilize, then cracked the throttles into afterburner range. He watched as the eight afterburner initiator lights illuminated, then released brakes and pushed the throttles to max AB.

Acceleration was rapid but not very dramatic in military power—but when those four huge afterburners lit and power was moved to max AB, the thrust and acceleration snapped Patrick’s eyes open. The ejection seat felt as though it came up and smacked him in the back of the head. He had felt afterburner kicks plenty of times, but usually it was just that—a kick and nothing more. In the Bone, a constant, steady pressure that forced him deep into his seat followed that nice hard kick. It was like flying in a rocket ship headed for earth orbit. Patrick hadn’t felt G-forces like that in a long time. The pressure and acceleration made his head spin—it seemed as if the deck was inclined at least forty-five degrees.

Seaver’s little “departure show” routine didn’t help Patrick’s stomach. Rinc lifted only about one hundred feet off the runway, pushed the nose over to hold that altitude, then raised the gear and flaps and swept the wings back to twenty-four degrees. He accelerated to well over four hundred knots—at max afterburner, it only took a few seconds—then, as he blasted between the twin towers of the Nugget Casino and the Hilton Hotel Casino, he wagged the wings twice before lifting the Bone on its fiery tail. Their 400,000-pound bird suddenly did become a rocket ship, headed skyward at almost ten thousand feet per minute. Rinc didn’t revert to a more conventional climb-out until passing twelve thousand feet, when he pulled back to military power at
350 knots. They leveled off at twenty-one thousand feet in no time.

John Long reported “tied on radar” and fed continuous position information on the flight leader, and the formation quickly joined up. After closing to tight wingtip formation to check one another out, Rinc extended to loose route formation so he could perform their checklists without having to concentrate too much on formation flying.

“How you doing over there, General?” Rinc asked.

“Fine,” Patrick replied.

“Heard some heavy breathing on interphone. Thought you might lose some of your box lunch.”

“Not a chance,” Patrick responded. “I’ll be with you on the TERFLW checklist in a minute. Crew, I’ll be on secure SATCOM. I’d appreciate it if no one monitors that channel until I let you know. Copy?”

“Sure,” Rinc replied. “Monitor GUARD and interphone, report back up. I’m starting the TERFLW checklist.”

“O.”

“D.”

“Thanks,” Patrick said. “Copilot is clearing off to SECURE.”

Patrick set the referee’s SATCOM channel into the satellite communications thumbwheels, clicked his communications wafer switch to
SECURE
, then keyed the mike button: “Firebird, Firebird, Aces Two-One.”

“Two-One, this is Firebird.” Patrick instantly recognized Luger’s voice on the scrambled satellite communications channel. “Authenticate Foxtrot-Uniform.”

There was a moment’s pause while Patrick looked up the response in his AKAC-1553 code book for the familiar “F-U” challenge: “Two-One has ‘Tango.’ Is this Amarillo?”

“Sure is.” Dave Luger was from Amarillo, Texas,
and Patrick, from California, usually never let him live it down. Only months of concentrated Russian brainwashing and years of working as a Soviet bomber design engineer in Lithuania, where he was known to the Central Intelligence Agency as an American defector code-named “Redtail Hawk,” had made Luger lose his thick Texas drawl.

“Then authenticate Alpha-Hotel, amigo,” Patrick said. The “A-H” was another endearing authentication used by parties known to each other.

“Firebird authenticates ‘India.’”

“Loud and clear,” Patrick said. Both parties were required to double-check authentication, even though they were on a discrete, secure satellite channel available only to them. “How’s it going, partner?”

“All bombers are away, the last of the squadron will be loaded up in a few hours, and we’ll be right behind them,” Dave said. “Be advised, bud: I was with the SOF during the launch, and I got a good look at your nosewheel. I think you got more than two cords cut—looked to me more like five or six. If you land with weapons onboard, be careful. I understand these guys wanted to max out PLS points, which they did, but they might have violated peacetime safety-of-flight rules by taking a broke bird into the air. I think they should have at least gotten a maintenance supervisor out there to look. Just so you know.”

“Copy that, Amarillo.” Patrick shook his head, hoping Seaver was eavesdropping.

“How did your takeoff feel, sir? Didn’t fill up a helmet bag, did you?”

“Felt just great,” Patrick said. “I forgot what a zoomer this baby is. I think I left part of my gut back on the runway. If I lose it, it’ll probably be low-level.”

“You mess up, you clean up, sir,” Luger reminded him. “That was quite the show your AC put on. I’ll bet
the folks in those casinos got a great shot. You could see the windows rattling from the ground. Hey, listen, Muck. I got a call from the home drome.” The home drome in his case was Dreamland. “We’re getting ready to monitor the Chinese and North Koreans during the first day of Team Spirit bombing exercises in South Korea.”

“Everything okay so far?”

“Normal activity from the DPRK and China—not so normal for the ROK,” Dave said.

“How so?”

“I dunno. Just—busy. Everyone is supercharged. It sounds like it’s the big finale day of the exercise rather than the first supercautious ramp-up-slowly day.”

“Lots of high-powered visibility in this one,” Patrick pointed out. “Lots of VIPs, including Japan. Our cutie Vice Prez is out there too.” He hesitated for a moment, thinking hard. Something inside his head was saying the news from Luger had to be investigated. He didn’t know why, but it had to be checked out. No matter what other disasters were happening, he never went wrong when he listened to that tiny, almost drowned-out little voice in his head. Patrick keyed the mike: “What do we got overhead?”

“I’ll have to double-check,” Luger said. “Overhead” meant satellites. Through their contractors, Patrick had access to several kinds of sophisticated photo, communications, radar, and electromagnetic reconnaissance satellites, all of which could be steered over the Korean peninsula in a matter of hours if needed. Since Dreamland was not an active combat base—at least, not one that most of the rest of the government knew—Patrick and his staff did not get normal access to CIA and Defense Department satellite imagery, so they relied on their own. “You want to take an unofficial peek, Muck?”

“Let’s get a Carter and a Ford over the peninsula and start matching up origins and destinations of all that comm traffic,” Patrick said. The reconnaissance satellites designed, built, and launched by Sky Masters Inc., one of the Air Force’s smallest but more important contractors, were all named for American Presidents. The Carter series were communications eavesdropping satellites capable of detecting, tracing, and analyzing radio, TV, cellular, microwave, Internet, and satellite communications. The Ford series of satellites were millimeter-wave radar reconnaissance satellites, capable of detecting, pinpointing, and identifying objects as small as a car almost anywhere on earth—even underground, hidden in buildings, or under camouflage or underwater. All were inserted into low earth orbit so they needed very little power to send their signals back to earth. Launched by boosters carried on commercial airliners, a constellation of these small satellites, called NIRTSats (“Need it right this second” satellites) could be set up in a matter of hours.

“You got it, Muck,” Luger said. “I think we have a few assets in place right now we can tap into.”

“Good. I’ve got checklists to run, Amarillo. Talk at you soon.”

“Go kick some butt, D,” Luger said. “I’ll meet you at Tonopah. Firebird clear.”

Patrick flipped back to interphone. “Crew, D’s back up interphone. Clear to switch SATCOM to primary monitor channels.”

“We need to get going on these checklists, sir,” Seaver said. “We’re waiting on you.”

Yep, he was behind already. Things happened fast in the B-1B. “Sorry about that, gang. Got busy on SATCOM. I’m ready.”

“Let’s not be late, co,” Rinc said, taking a swig of orange juice and giving his guest copilot a mock disapproving
scowl, then a friendly, easy smile. He was taking great delight in needling the one-star general sitting in his cockpit. “Let’s not be late.”