“The way we do it is through the Air Battle Force,” Jarrel continued. “From this moment on, you are not members of any bomb squadron, or fighter squadron, or airlift group — you are members of the First Air Battle Wing. You will learn to fly and fight as a team. Each of you will have knowledge of not only his or her own capabilities, but those of your colleagues. The Air Battle Force marks the beginning of the first truly integrated strike force — several different weapon systems, several different tactical missions, training, deploying, and fighting together as one.
“Because the Air Battle Force concept is new and not yet fully operational, we have to disband each task force class and return you to your home units. When you leave this Center, you will still belong to the Air Battle Force, and you are expected to continue your studies and perfect your combat skills from within your own units. If a crisis should develop, you can be brought back here to be placed back within the Air Battle Force system, ready to form the Second or Third Air Battle Wings. Eventually, Air Battle Wings will be formed on a full-time basis for extended tours.”
Jarrel talked for several more minutes, giving the history of the Strategic Warfare Center’s mission, which since 1989 had conducted strategic combat training exercises through sorties that were spread over three thousand miles of low- and high-altitude military training routes over nine Midwestern states.
When he had finished, he said, “All right, ladies and gentlemen, get out there and show us how a strategic battle can be fought by America’s best and brightest!”
The auditorium erupted in cheers, and somewhere in the middle of the crowd, Patrick McLanahan was cheering the loudest.
Late one night a couple of days after General Jarrel’s Strategic Warfare Training Program was under way, Brigadier General John Ormack, who had come with Cobb, McLanahan, the EB-52 and B-2 bombers, and the rest of the support crew from HAWC, found Patrick McLanahan sitting in the cockpit of his Black Knight. External power and air had been hooked up, and McLanahan was reclining in the mission commander’s seat with a computer-generated chart of the Strategic Training Range Complex on the three- by-two-foot Super Multi Function Display before him. Patrick had a headset on and was issuing commands to the B-2’s sophisticated voice-recognition computer; he was so engrossed in his work — or so deep in daydream, Ormack couldn’t quite tell which — that the HAWC vice commander was able to spend a few moments watching his junior chief officer from just behind the pilot’s seat.
The guy had always been like this, Ormack remembered — a little spacy, quiet, introverted, always preferring to work alone even though it was a genuine pleasure being around him and he seemed to enjoy working with others. He had the ability to tune out all sound and activity around him and to focus all his attention and brainpower on the matter at hand, whether that was a mission-planning chart, a bomb run at Mach one and a hundred feet off the ground, or a Voltron cartoon on television. But ever since arriving here at Ellsworth, McLanahan had become even more hardworking, even more focused, even more tuned out — to everything else but the task at hand, which was completing the curriculum at the Strategic Warfare Center and the Air Battle Force with the highest possible grade. Even though McLanahan himself was not being “graded” because the HAWC crews were not official participants, he was slamming away at the session as if he were a young captain getting ready to meet a promotion board. It was hard to tell if Patrick was working this hard because he enjoyed it or because he was trying to prove to himself and others that he could still do the job…
But that was Patrick McLanahan.
Ormack stepped over the center console and into the leftside pilot’s seat. McLanahan noticed him, straightened himself up in his seat, and slid the headsets off. “Hey, sir,” McLanahan greeted him. “What brings you here this evening?”
“Looking for you,” Ormack said. He motioned to the SMFD. “Route study?”
“A little mission planning with the PACER SKY processor,” McLanahan said. “I fed the STRC attack route through the system to see what it might come up with, and it turns out if we attack this target here from the west instead of from the northeast, the MUTES in Powder River MOA site won’t see us for an extra twenty-one seconds. We’ve got to gain sixty seconds after the Baker bomb site to get the extra time to get around to the west, so we’ll lose a few points on timing, but if this works we’ll gain even more points on bomber defense.” He shook his head as he flipped through the computer-generated graphics on the big screen. “The rest of the crews in the Air Battle Force would kill me if they knew I had something like PACER SKY doing my mission planning.”
