Read Online Air Battle Force by Dale Brown - Free Book Online Page B

from the secretary of defense himself—permission to land at Diego Garcia denied. It was too risky closing down that important Indian Ocean runway.
    â€œWhat do we do now, General?” Rebecca said, remarkably calm for an aircraft commander who was going to lose her plane in just a few minutes. “We brief these contingencies for days before these missions. I can’t believe we actually have to do it.”
    A pair of U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bombers rendezvoused with the Vampire bomber to look it over and take pictures. Patrick thought the fighter pilots would try to crowd the bomber off its final approach path—they were tucked in tight, but they weren’t going to try to bully the bigger jet away. “Puppeteer, don’t do it,” one of the Navy pilots radioed. “If you shut down that runway, I might have to punch out. I won’t take kindly to that—neither will my wife and kids.” Patrick did not reply.
    â€œGeneral, think of your family,” someone else said. “Don’t risk your life with this. It’s just a machine. It’s not worth it.”
    Patrick still did not reply. In fact, for most of the five-hour-plus flight out of Central Asia, that’s all Patrick had thought about—his son, Bradley, waiting for him back in Nevada. Bradley’s mother, Wendy, had been brutally murdered during a mission in Libya, along with Patrick’s younger brother, Paul. Patrick came home to see his son and bury his brother and then left again to try to rescue his wife when the exiled Libyan king located her in a Libyan prison.
    The rescue mission was a failure: Wendy was killed, and Patrick barely made it out alive. He was finally able to bring her body home after the Libyan king set up a new constitutional government in Libya, and they cremated her remains and scattered her ashes in the Pacific Ocean. After that, Patrick vowed he would never leave Bradley’s side. . . .
    But he broke that promise shortly afterward, when President Thomas Thorn gave him Air Force major general’s stars and command of the Air Battle Force wing at Battle Mountain. At first it was short trips away from home only, to the Tonopah Test Range or Dreamland, maybe to Washington. Bradley was being watched by Patrick’s sisters either at his home in Battle Mountain or at their home in Sacramento; many times Patrick took his son with him. Bradley was making friends, playing T-ball, and he seemed happy to see his father when he finally came home, not traumatized or clingy. Bradley was a tough kid, Patrick thought. He had gone through a lot during his short life.
    But now Patrick was on a weeklong mission, flying out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. He rationalized it by saying it was only a UCAV control-and-monitor mission—there were no plans whatsoever to fly over hostile territory, so he would be as safe as he could be in a 470,000-pound combat aircraft. Now even that flimsy rationalization was exploded. At the very worst there was an extremely good chance that he would leave his son an orphan—at best he was probably going to lose his commission. Again.
    Finally the Hornets went away, glad to be out of midair-collision range with the bomber, and the Vampire was all by itself.
    The bomber was several miles north of the island of Diego Garcia when the first engine flamed out from fuel starvation. “Shut down the opposite engine before you get two flaming out on the same side,” Rebecca told him, but Patrick was already ensuring that the computers were doing just that. Rebecca stared hard out her windscreen, but all she could see were blurs. “How are we doing?” No reply. “Patrick? You okay?”
    â€œI . . . I was thinking about my son,” Patrick said. “I barely made it home after the Libyan ordeal and his mother’s death, and now I might just orphan him with this stunt.”
    â€œIt’s not too late to