taped music was played over the PA system, Mikaso, Stone, and, reluctantly, Teguina, positioned themselves in front of a special set of three flagpoles behind the reviewing stands. An honor guard stepped onto the stand and positioned themselves around the flagpoles. As Mikaso placed a hand over his heart in tribute, the Philippine flag was lowered a few feet in respect. Then, as “Retreat” was played, the American flag was raised to the top of the staff, then slowly lowered. “Why is our flag lowered?” Teguina whispered, as if to himself. When no one paid him any attention, he raised his voice: “I ask, why is the Philippine flag lowered first? I do not understand “Silence, Mr. Teguina, ” Mikaso whispered. “Raise the Philippine flag back to the top of the staff, , ” he said, his voice now carrying clearly over the music. “It is disrespectful for any national flag to be lowered in such a way. “We are paying honor to the Americans-“
“Bah!” Teguina spat. “They are foreigners returning home, nothing more.” But he fell silent as the American flag was lowered and the honor guard began folding it into the distinctive triangle. When the flag was folded, the honor guard passed it to General Stone, who stepped to Arturo Mikaso, saluted, and presented it to him. “With thanks from a grateful nation, Mr. President, ” Stone said. Mikaso smiled. “It will be kept in a place of honor in the capital, General Stone, as a symbol of our friendship and fidelity.”
“Thank you, sir.” At that, the two men looked skyward as a gentle roar of jet engines began to be heard. Flying over the base and directly down the mall over the reviewing stand were four flights of four F-4 Phantom fighters, followed by a flight of three B-52 bombers, all no more than two thousand feet above ground-and everyone could clearly see the twelve Harpoon antiship missiles hanging off the wings of each B-52. The audience in the bleachers applauded and cheered; the crowd outside the gate was restlessly cheering and shouting at the impressive display. But Daniel Teguina decided he had had enough. This… this American love feast was too much for a native Filipino. He pushed past Stone and Mikaso and quickly low ered the Philippine flag from its pole, unclipped it, and reattached it to the empty center pole where the American flag had just been removed. “What in God’s name are you doing, Teguina?” Mikaso shouted over the roar of the planes. Teguina ordered one of his bodyguards to raise the Philippine flag. He turned, glaring at Stone, and said, “We are not going to defer to Americans any longer. This is our land, our skies, our countryand our flag!” As the flag traveled up the pole, Stone heard one of the most chilling sounds he’d ever experienced-the screams of fury, anger and, ultimately, jubilation coming from the thousands outside the gates. As the Philippine flag reached the top of the pole, the screams reached a deafening, roaring crescendo. Teguina and Stone stared long and hard at each other, while President Mikaso began babbling apologies for his First Vice President’s behavior. Thus ended the American presence in the Philippines. After the ceremonies quickly ended, Rat Stone made his way to the air terminal to supervise the final departure-he still preferred not to call it an evacuation-of American military personnel from Clark Air Base. He couldn’t shake the feeling deep in his gut that this cessation of mutual defense arrangements had happened too quickly, too abruptly. The skirmish just last week in the Spratly Islands was still fresh in his mind. And so was the look in Daniel Teguina’s eyes… it chilled him to the bone. No, Rat Stone decided, this would not be the last time he would see the Philippines. … The question was when. HIGH TECHNOLOGY AEROSPACE WEAPONS CENTER (HAWC), NEVADA MONDAY, 13 JUNE 1994, 0715 HOURS LOCAL “Tell me this is a joke, sir, ” Lieutenant Colonel Patrick McLanahan said to Brigadier General John Ormack, “andwith all due respect, of course-I’ll beat your face in.” John Ormack, the deputy commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center-nicknamed HAWC, the Air Force’s secret flight-test research center that was a part of the Dreamland complex-didn’t have to look at the wide grin on McLanahan’s face to know that he wasn’t seriously threatening bodily harm to anyone. He could tell by McLanahan’s voice, wavering with pure excitement, that the thirty-nine-year-old radar navigator and flight-test project officer was genuinely thrilled. They were standing in front of the newest, most high-tech aircraft in the world, the B-2 stealth bomber. And best of all, for the next several months, this B-2-nicknamed the “Black Knight”belonged to him. “No joke, Patrick, ” Ormack said, putting an arm around McLanahan’s broad shoulders. “Don’t ask me how he did it, but General Elliott got one of the first B-2A test articles assigned to Dreamland. That’s one nice thing about being director of HAWC-Elliott gets to pull strings. This one has been stripped down quite a bit, but it’s a fully operational modelthis was the bomber that launched the first SRAM-II attack missile a few months back.”
“But they just made the B-2 operational, ” McLanahan pointed out. “They don’t have that many B-2s out there-just one squadron, the 393rd, right?” Ormack nodded. “What are we doing with one?” McLanahan asked. “Knowing Elliott, he put the squeeze on Systems Command to begin more advanced weapons tests on the B-2, in case they begin full-scale deployment. Air Force stopped deployment, as you know, because of budget cutbacks- but, as we both know, General Elliott’s projects aren’t under public scrutiny.” Ormack went on. “He was pushing the shift from nuclear to conventional warfighting strategy to Congress, just as Air Force did. It was hard for the Air Force to sell the B-2 as a conventional weapons platform-that is, until Elliott spoke up. He wants to turn this B-2 into another Megafortress-a flying battleship. The man managed to convince the powers-that-be to let him use one for advanced testing. “Of course we need a senior project officer with bomber experience, experience on EB-series strategic-escort concepts, and someone with a warped imagination and a real bulldogtype attitude. Naturally, we thought of you.” McLanahan was speechless, which made Ormack smile even more. Ormack was an Air Force Academy graduate, medium height, rapidly graying brown hair, lean and wiry, and although he was a command pilot with several thousand hours’ flying time in dozens of different aircraft, he was more at home in a laboratory, flight simulator, or in front of a computer console. All of the young men he worked with were either quiet, studious engineers-everyone called them “geeks” or “computer weenies”-or they were flashy, cocky, swaggering test pilots full of attitude because they had been chosen above 99.99 percent of the rest of the free world’s aviators to work at HAWC. McLanahan was neither. He wasn’t an Academy grad, not an engineer, not a test pilot. What McLanahan was was a six-foot blond with an air of understated strength and power; a hardworking, intelligent, well-organized, efficient aviator. The eldest son of Irish immigrants, McLanahan had been born in New York but raised in Sacramento where he attended Air Force ROTC at Cal State and received his commission in 1973. After navigator training at Mather AFB in Sacramento he was assigned to the B-52s of the 320th Bomb Wing there. After uprating to radar navigator, he was again assigned to Mather Air Force Base. Along the way, McLanahan became the best radar bombardier in the United States, a fact demonstrated by long lines of trophies he’d received in annual navigation and bombing exercises in his six years as a B-52 crew member. His prowess with the forty-year-old bomber, lovingly nicknamed the BUFF (for Big Ugly Fat Fucker) or StratoPig, had attracted the attention of HAWC’s commanding officer, Air Force Lieutenant General Brad Elliott, who had brought him to the desert test ranges of Nevada to develop a “Megafortress, ” a highly modified B-52 used to flight-test high-tech weapons and stealth hardware. Through an unlikely but terrifying chain of events, McLanahan had taken the Megafortress, idiomatically nicknamed the Old Dog, and its ragtag engineer crew into the Soviet Union to destroy a renegade ground-based antisatellite laser site. Rather than risk discovery of the highly classified and politically explosive mission, McLanahan had been strongly encouraged to remain at HAWC and, in effect, accept an American high-tech version of the Gulag Archipelago. The upside was that it was a chance to work with the newest aircraft and weapons in the world. McLanahan had happily accepted the position even though it was obvious to all that he had little choice. The Old Dog mission, one of the more deadly events that ultimately drove the Soviet Union to glasnost, had to be buried forever-one way or another. Many successful, career-minded men might have resented the isolation, lack of recognition, and de facto imprisonment. Not Patrick McLanahan. Because he was not an engineer and had very little technical training, his job description for his first years at HAWC consisted mainly of answering phones, acting as aide and secretary for General Elliott and General Ormack, and rewriting tech orders and checklists. But he educated himself in the hard sciences, visited the labs and test centers to talk with engineers, begged and pleaded for every minute of flying time he could, and, more important, performed each given assignment as if it were the free world’s most vital research project. Whether it was programming checklists into a cockpit computer terminal or managing the unit’s coffee fund and snack bar, Patrick McLanahan did his work efficiently and professionally. Things began to change very quickly. The Air Force promoted him to Major two years below the zone. He was given an executive officer, then a clerk, than an assistant, a staff, and finally his own office complex, complete with flight- test crews and dedicated maintenance shops. The projects began to change. Instead of being in charge of documentation and records, he was heading more concept teams, then more contractor-MAJCOM liaison jobs, then more subsystem projects, and finally full-weapon systems. Before the ink was dry on his promotion papers to Major, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. His “exile” was occasionally broken, and the young “fastburner” was frequently “loaned” with assignments with other research, development, and government agencies, including Border Security Force, Special Operations, and the Aerospace Defense Command. Very soon, McLanahan had become a fixture in any new project dealing with aviation or aerospace. He was now one of the most highly respected
