The woman standing beside Freeman hurried over to the fallen Secret Service agent. As she did, she passed close by Patrick and, to his amazement, whipped off her blond wig and handed it to him. “Hello, Colonel. Last time I saw you, you were blasting that rat bastard Maraklov out of the sky in Cheetah. Never thought I’d ever see you asking me if I wanted a hot appetizer. I couldn’t help laughing. Sorry.”
Patrick blinked in total surprise: “Preston? Major Marcia Preston …?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Preston, Patrick,” she said as she gave him a friendly hug. Preston had been former National Security Advisor Deborah O’Day’s personal aide and bodyguard, a U.S. Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet fighter pilot, and one of the first female combat pilots in the American military. “It’s nice to see you, but let’s get General Freeman’s man up off the floor, shall we?” Patrick’s head was swimming in confusion as they helped Zanatti to an armchair and revived him. After he was up and around, Preston stood and walked over to Wendy and extended a hand. “You must be Dr. Wendy Tork … er, Dr. Wendy McLanahan. Marcia Preston.”
They shook hands. “I’ve only flown once with your husband, but it was a ride I’ll never forget.”
“This is Wendy Tork?” Freeman asked in surprise. He too walked over and extended a hand in greeting. “It somehow didn’t show up in any files that you two were married. Congratulations. I assume it was just before your … accident.”
“That’s right, General.”
“It was an unfortunate, tragic incident, a huge and incredible loss,” Freeman said, “but out of the ashes will come a newer, even stronger force.”
He turned to Patrick and said, “I must ask a favor, Patrick. I need to speak to you right away, and since I see you’re one of the only ones on duty, it might be better if you closed up early. We have a lot to discuss. The White House will see to it that you’re compensated for your lost time.”
The dark, cold expression came over Patrick’s face. “Somehow, I doubt that,” he said, “but since you’ve probably scared all the other customers out already …”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Freeman acknowledged with a wry smile.
“I guess we don’t have much choice … as usual,” Patrick said, and he went to close and lock the doors.
Freeman’s men swept Wendy and Patrick’s apartment for listening devices in just a few minutes—thankfully, there were none—and they sat down to talk over coffee and fresh fruit. Freeman winced as he put a slice of fresh kiwi up to his nose, wishing he had a nice thick, gooey doughnut instead, but he seemed to enjoy the kiwi and helped himself to a slice of mango next. “We’re nicknaming it Future Flight,” the President’s National Security Advisor began. “I’m bringing back your team, Patrick, at least as many as we can. Being the senior member, I want you to command the team. I borrowed Colonel Preston here from the Marine Corps again, and she’ll be your deputy.”
“What exactly are we going to do, General?” Patrick asked.
“Anything and everything,” Freeman replied. “The purpose of Future Flight is to support specialized intelligence operations with long-range, stealthy aerial assets—in particular, a certain B-2A Spirit stealth bomber, which you knew as Test Article Number Two, assigned to the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, and which you tested and flew for two years, loaded with various payloads, including reconnaissance, communications, intelligence, and combat strike.
“Sounds pretty … open-ended,” McLanahan observed warily. “A license to kill, so to speak.”
“You’ll be attached to the Air Force Air Intelligence Agency—you’ll report to Major General Brien Griffith. He’ll report to me …”
“And you report to the President,” Patrick interjected. Freeman nodded. “Sounds awfully dangerous to me— lots of chances for abuse.”
“You did it all the time when you were a member of HAWC”
“And look what happened to us,” Patrick snapped. “HAWC is closed down, General Elliott was demoted and forced to retire, and everyone else was scattered to the four winds or kicked out. Lots of careers and reputations were ruined, General. If we wanted to appeal those verdicts, we’d have been thrown in prison for life for violating national security-“
“You retired with an honorable discharge and a pension after only sixteen years of active-duty service, Colonel,” Freeman pointed out. “You made out pretty well, I’d say.”
“Only because Brad Elliott used the last of his political markers to get us some leniency,” Patrick said. “Only because I agreed not to talk, not to go to the press, not to sue. I’m not proud of the way I exited, sir. One reason I’m not in the service and doing what I was trained to do is because Brad did everything the White House and the Pentagon wanted of him, and he was branded a loose cannon and taken down. My only other options were a less- than-honorable discharge or a demotion and reassignment to a remote non-flying specialty.
“My point is, sir, what we learned after ten years was a simple lesson: If the government wants a strike or recon mission done, call on the armed services to do it,” Patrick said. “If they don’t have the equipment or the training, either get them what they need, or don’t do the mission.”
“Neither are options, Patrick,” Freeman said. “We don’t have the funds to equip an active-duty unit with the equipment you developed at HAWC, and we don’t have the time to train an active-duty flier on how to use the equipment you designed, tested, and flew in combat. Our only other option is to withdraw all the ISA technical groups from their deployed positions, which would hurt our intelligence-gathering capabilities—to the contrary, we want to assist these cells and allow them the chance to do even more.”
“ISA can take care of themselves, sir,” Patrick said. “If they can’t, if the situation is too hot for them, yank them out. If the situation’s too hot for ISA, it’s probably at the wartime stage anyway.”
“That’s the whole point, Patrick. Future Flight’s mission is to prevent any situation from escalating into the wartime stage by the careful, controlled application of strike assets,” Freeman said, “and I’m talking about ISA, and I’m talking about the B-2A stealth bomber. Iran has done exactly the same thing: they’ve drawn a line at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, daring anyone to cross it. The rest of the world is completely paralyzed with fear; Iran knows this, and they’re going to take advantage of it.”
“So your solution is to play high-tech terrorist, too, right?”
“in a manner of speaking, yes!” Freeman replied resolutely, slapping a hand on his knee. “Who the hell says the United States has only two choices—war or peace?—pardon my language, Dr. McLanahan.”
“Wendy,” she said. “And your language doesn’t offend me, sir—but frankly, your ideas do.”
“Then I’ll try to explain them,” Freeman said. “Listen, Patrick, Wendy: my job is to coordinate the United States’ national security affairs before they get to the guns and bombs phase. In peacetime, that usually means intelligence operations—trying to find out what the bad guys are doing before they do it, so we can pursue diplomatic and legal solutions and avert war. Sometimes NSA uses field operatives, and in very rare instances we’ll use military forces to help out in security or direct-engagement situations. But we’re expanding that role now to include military and paramilitary options. Our means are less ‘hide-and-seek,’ more offensive than pure intelligence operations, but the goal is the same: find out what the bad guys are doing before they do something so we can pursue diplomatic solutions and avert a war.”
“You can sugarcoat it all you want, General,” Wendy said, “but the bottom line is the same—it’s terrorism. If Iranians were doing the same to us, we’d call it terrorism, and we’d be correct.”
“And what about that Gulf Cooperation Council attack on Abu Musa Island?” McLanahan said. “Iran says the attack was conducted by an American stealth bomber and Israeli F-15E attack planes, which I believe is bullshit, but they got one observation right: the attack had to have been made by precision-guided weapons.”
“So what if that’s true …?”
“So the British Aerospace Hawks flown by Oman and the United Arab Emirates don’t normally drop precision-guided munitions,” McLanahan said, “and the Super Puma and Gazelle attack helicopters normally fire only AS-12 missiles, which are short-range optically-guided missiles, not very useful on high-speed night attacks—they need spotters to find targets for them. And those Peninsula Shield crews weren’t trained in using Maverick missiles, especially the imaging infrared version. That tells me that the missiles were laser guided, probably Hellfires or French AS-30L missiles. And since none of the aircraft involved in the attack carries laser designators, the designators had to be on the ground, which meant you had commando teams lasing targets for the Peninsula Shield pilots. Who were they, General Freeman?
Marines? SAS? Green Berets? The CIA?”
“What in hell difference does it make, McLanahan?” Freeman retorted, silently very impressed with this civilian’s accurate analysis. “The GCC attacked hostile offensive weapon systems-“
