'I am aware of that, sir.' Once the missile batteries turned on their radars, spy planes and satellites could map their location easily, so it was important to move the missiles and radars around to make it more difficult for the enemy to find and target their radars. Fortunately, the S-300 missile system was very easy to relocate-it took less than a half hour to set up again after finding a suitable spot. The units were moved several times a week-no more than a few hundred meters, but far enough where garbage pits, latrines, and launcher anchor points had to be retlug each time out of the desert. That was usually the hardest part, and the aspect of the move that caused the most grumbling. 'Very well.' The lieutenant was one of the best battery commanders in the entire brigade. The lieutenant started out as a conscript after dropping out of high school at the age of fifteen. By the age of eighteen, he had accepted a regular enlistment, and just two years after that was made a noncommissioned officer. Being prior enlisted himself, he could handle his enlisted men, conscripts, and noncommissioned officers just fine. 'Report your threat assessment and engagement to the brigade operations officer immediately after you've called off the alert.' There were a few clacks in the net; then, on the brigade-wide channel, the lieutenant heard, 'All units, all units, Twelve has issued a general air defense warning for the brigade. Report and correlate all contacts now. This is Brigade, out.'
My God, what in hell is going on here?' Greg 'Gonzo' Wickland, the mission commander aboard the EB-52 Megafortress, exclaimed. They had just launched from Jaghbub and had no sooner turned southbound on course than the entire Libyan air defense network seemed to light up all at once. 'SA-10, SA-11, SA-5s-every theater and tactical air defense radar is on the air all of a sudden.'
'Sanusi's men didn't make it,' the aircraft commander, George 'Zero' Tanaka, surmised. 'The Libyans probably shot down the Mi-24, and that alerted the whole country.'
'What do we do?'
'We press on,' Tanaka said. 'The Hind helicopter was just a feint-we can still go in on our own,'
Wickland shook his head. 'This is crazy, Zero,' he said. 'We've got the gas to get us all the way to Iceland- why didn't he just order us to head west and link up with a tanker to send us home? We're loaded down with crappy Russian bombs and missiles that probably won't work; we're surrounded by bad guys; and this isn't even our damned fight!'
'Just button it, will you, Gonzo?'
'I'm serious here, man!' Wickland shouted. 'What are we doing here? I'm an engineer, for Chrissakes! I've never been in the military! My job is designing and testing weapons and attack systems and writing software, not dropping bombs on Libyans who want nothing more than to shoot my ass off! I want to-'
'Gonzo, I don't give a shit what you want,' Tanaka interrupted. 'Just keep the computers humming and shut your pie-hole.'
'Sure, go ahead-bitch at me. You're the ex-Air Force war hero-you get off on this shit, not me. It's McLanahan who's going to get our asses shot off! I didn't come out here to…'
'Wickland, I said, shut the fuck up,' Tanaka said. 'You knew exactly where we were going and what we were going to do, when we briefed this mission. You knew we were going to attack Libya, refuel and rearm, then attack again. You took the money, bought your Mercedes and your big house in Memphis, and got your big stock options. Now you gotta earn your money. So just fly the plane, keep those computers going and that nav system up tight, and shut up.'
Wickland seemed to shrivel up just then. He sat upright in his ejection seat, seemingly oblivious to all the new air defense warnings popping up on their threat display. Tanaka looked over at him, and after a few moments realized that the guy was just plain scared. Tanaka, a twentyone-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force and retired lieutenant colonel, with over five thousand hours in about nine different tactical fighter and bomber aircraft, instantly felt sorry for him. Combat was just another phase of flight for Tanaka. The simulators they flew back at Sky Masters Inc.'s headquarters in Blytheville were a hundred times more hectic and every bit as realistic as the real thingTanaka thought it was excellent preparation for these operational missions, so much so that he felt ultraprepared for almost every Megafortress flight. He never realized that the other, less experienced guys might not think that way. Wickland was an engineer, a designer, not atombat aircrewman.
'Listen, Gonzo,' Tanaka said, 'I'm sorry. I know you're scared….'
'I'm not scared.'
'Okay. That's fine. I just want you to do your job-'
'I'm going to do my job, George.'
'Good. I know you will. Just think of this as just another sim ride. We're wringing out a new weapon code, that's all, nothing to it.'
But as soon as Tanaka uttered those words, he knew they didn't ring true.
'I'm sorry, Greg,' Tanaka went on. 'We're not in the sim. We're not wringing out a new software program. This is the real thing. The missile that we fail to defeat or we don't see will kill us, not just crash the IPL or freeze the sim. I know you didn't sign up with the company to go to war. And I know you agreed to do this mission on the ground-but now we're in the air, and we're surrounded by about nine hostile SAM systems that will shoot us out of the sky the instant they get a lock on us, and you're having second thoughts.' He paused, looking at Wickland, who said nothing. 'Am I right?'
'Zero…'
'It's okay, Gonzo,' Tanaka said. 'We use these call signs and dress up in cool flight suits and pretend we're Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards in Top Gun, but the truth is hammering us in the head right now-that we're in deep shit, that we could die any second up here; and if we do, no one will know what the hell we're doing up here. We'll be dead, and that's all.' Wickland remained silent, but he turned to his aircraft commander, his chest inflating and deflating as if he was having trouble breathing all of a sudden.
'Gonzo, we don't have to do this if you don't want to,' Tanaka said. 'This is the general's fight, not ours. We're the crew members aboard this plane, but we're not sworn to fight and die for whoever the company is doing all this for. We signed a contract to fly planes for Sky Masters Inc., not get our asses shot at by a thousand Libyan SAMs. So if you want to break out of here, we will.'
Wickland's mouth opened in surprise. 'You will?'
'Damn straight,' Tanaka said. 'I realize we're not in this to save our country. We're doing this because we like flying planes and building cool weapon systems and watching them work. So if you say so, I'll call the general right now and tell him we're aborting the mission.'
'You will?' Wickland repeated, stunned.
'I said I would,' Tanaka said. 'We'll climb out, avoid all the SAMs and intercept radars, get out over open ocean away from all other air traffic, head toward the Scotland refueling anchor, and call for gas to take us home or land at our facility at Glasgow or Lossiemouth.'
'We'll catch hell for doing that….'
'The company can't do dick to us, Gonzo. They can't fire us, they can't dock our pay, and they can't sue us.'
'What about the guys on the ground?'
'If they're smart, they'll bug out shortly after we do,' Tanaka said. 'I'll let them know exactly what we're doing, and why.' That made Wickland swallow hard-he was scared of dying, obviously, but also scared of being thought of as a coward by his cohorts. 'Like I said, Gonzo, this is the general's fight, not ours. I'm flying this mission because I happen to believe that we're doing something good, something right-and besides, I like flying this kick- ass plane into battle, real battle. But I respect your wishes, too-we do this together. So what do you say?'
Wickland looked at his supercockpit display, automatically entering commands or adjusting settings. He turned to Tanaka, opened his mouth as if to say something, then turned back to his console.
'Gonzo? What's it going to be?'
The mission commander shrugged. He was called the 'mission commander,' but truthfully he didn't feel like a commander of anything. All he wanted to do was build and test cutting-edge neural network computer systems. He didn't want to go to war.
Still…
'Let's keep going,' he heard himself say. 'I spent four hours getting the interface to work between those hunks of junk in our bomb bay-now I want to see if they'll work.'
'Sounds like a plan to me,' Tanaka said. 'Let's plot a course around as many of these SAMs as we can, then make our way to the initial point on time.' He was pleased to see Wickland immediately start punching the
