Plan of Attack

“Good thing you did,” Griffin said. “So let me guess — your orders to Lackland were being cut the next day.”

“It didn’t take even that long,” Patrick admitted. “I was relieved of command before the last bomb fragments hit the ground.”

“All for doing what you were supposed to be doing — making sure the Russians weren’t trying to move against Turkmenistan’s new military forces before they could organize,” Griffin said disgustedly. “Now look at what’s happening out there: Russia is claiming that Turkmeni guerrillas are attacking their observer forces, and they’re flying so-called defensive-counterinsurgency missions against Turkmeni military forces. They’ve violated the United Nations cease-fire dozens of times in just the past few weeks, but no one is saying squat about it. Things are too hot for us to send recon aircraft like Rivet Joint and Joint STARS in to monitor their movements, so the Russians now have free rein.”

“I would like to keep a careful eye on the Russians and continue to report their movements to the Pentagon,” Patrick said.

“You’ve come to the right place, Patrick,” Griffin said proudly. “That’s what we do best. I believe we have the best and possibly the only remaining true brain trust in the intelligence field: Our guys stay here longer than in any other career field, and we maintain the only seriously long-term database of enemy threats in the world. Let’s talk about this unit, and maybe I’ll help talk you into staying — or it may convince you to take whatever might be waiting for you on the other side.”

“Fair enough.”

“The unit you’ll take command of, the Nine-sixty-sixth Information Warfare Wing, is one of several wings and centers managed by the commander of the Air Intelligence Agency, who as you know is Major General Gary Houser.” He noticed Patrick’s suddenly stony face. “You know him?”

“He was my first B-52G aircraft commander, almost twenty years ago.”

Griffin chuckled at that. “That’s funny. To listen to him, you’d think he was always an intel weenie — in fact, he trash-talks fliers, especially bomber guys, all the time. I knew he was a pilot, of course, but I didn’t know he flew B-52s. He sees the BUFF as another Cold War relic sucking money away from information warfare.” He looked carefully at Patrick again, then added, “So…maybe you’re here to check out General Houser and not just the Nine-sixty-sixth — decide whether you’re cut out to work for your old aircraft commander again?”

“Let’s not try to psychoanalyze this thing too much, okay, Tagger?”

“Yes, sir,” Griffin said, his eyes falling apologetically again. Patrick couldn’t help but like the colonel: he wasn’t afraid to express his feelings and thoughts, which made him a trustworthy person. Patrick felt very comfortable around him.

“Anyway, the Nine-sixty-sixth is probably the last vestige of the old Mighty Eighth — which, now that I think about it, might be another reason why you’re here: This is a good place to hide someone nowadays,” Griffin went on. “Like most of the Air Intelligence Agency, we’re a combination of many Air Force agencies. We were known as the Strike Information Center not long ago, and the Air Force Strategic Planning Agency before that, and we absorbed the Sixty-sixth Combat Support Group last year. When General Houser changed everything over to an ‘information warfare’ theme, the combined group became the Nine-sixty-sixth Information Warfare Wing. Our primary mission is to gather information vital to planning and directing strike missions by Eighth Air Force aircraft. Any country, any objective, any target, any weapon, any threat condition — the Nine-sixty-sixth’s job is to find a way to attack it.

“We can tap in to any intelligence or imagery source in the world, but primarily we use overhead imagery produced by Air Force assets, combined with domestic satellite assets and augmented by HUMINT field reports,” Griffin went on. “We still do a fair amount of covert ops ourselves, but General Houser thinks that’s unnecessarily dangerous and doesn’t yield proportionally higher-quality data.”

“What do you think about that?” Patrick asked.

“Well, as a former ground-pounder, I believe you always need boots on the ground to do the job right — but I’ll also admit that I’m pretty old-school,” Griffin replied. “Give me a few good trained operatives, a parachute, and a pair of binoculars and drop me anywhere on the planet, and I’ll bring back information that no satellite can get you — and if you need the target blown up, I can pull that off, too. Ask your typical satellite to do that.” He looked at Patrick, then smiled. “And if you give me Hal Briggs and a few of his shooters that you spoke about a minute ago, I can probably blow up a lot more — like what went down in Libya recently? Or inside Turkmenistan…?”

Griffin punched in further instructions, and the satellite imagery shifted to a more desolate landscape. “I might as well tell you now, Patrick — the Nine-sixty-sixth had an ongoing covert reconnaissance operation against the Russians in Turkmenistan. Your…incident…near Mary forced us to pull out.”

“I don’t suppose anyone will ever blame the Russian army for causing the problems over there in Turkmenistan, will they?” Patrick asked sarcastically.

“Sorry, sir, I didn’t mean it was your fault…” Griffin said. “Anyway, we were running covert ops out of a small air base in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. We made contact with some members of the Turkmen army, made some payoffs, traded weapons and ammo for information, that sort of thing. We left several of our Turkmeni contacts behind, and we’d sure like to pull them out.

“The border crossing and highway into Mary is sealed up tight now, and the Russians have a pretty solid air- defense setup out there now — too hot even for normal Air Force special-ops planes or helos, let alone the normal modes of transportation the Nine-sixty-sixth uses. What might the Air Battle Force have that we could use?”

“Dave Luger can insert a Battle Force team in about thirty-six hours and get one, maybe two of your guys out,” Patrick said.

“Thirty-six-hours? That’s impossible.”

“But neither the Pentagon nor Central Intelligence would ever approve it. It would have to be someone pretty damned important.”

“Ever heard of General Jalaluddin Turabi?”

“Turabi?” Patrick exclaimed. “Chief of the Turkmen army? He’s your contact?”

“You tangled with him?”

“He saved our team in the first battle against the Russians in Turkmenistan. He’s a hero.”

“He’s a better spy and guerrilla than he ever was a general,” Griffin said. “He’s been out collecting information and harassing the Russians, and at the same time recruiting soldiers for his army, using Air Intelligence Agency dollars. But when you hit the Russian SA-12 site, he scattered. We gave him up for dead. He resurfaced recently, one or two steps ahead of the Russians. We’d sure love to yank him out.”

“Then let’s do it.”

“It won’t do us any good to go into Bukhara, Patrick. We still need to go another two hundred and fifty miles to—”

“I’m not talking about Bukhara, Tagger — I’m talking about Mary.”

“Mary?” Griffin exclaimed. “How can you do that? We can’t overfly Turkmenistan….”

“We’re prohibited from overflying Turkmenistan with combat aircraft,” Patrick corrected him. “Transport aircraft are still allowed by peacekeeping and observer forces.”

“The Russians will spot a transport plane anywhere within two hundred miles of Mary.”

“Not our transport plane, they won’t.”

Griffin opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, then stopped and smiled. “Okay, Patrick. What is it? What do you guys have that I don’t know about?”

“A little toy we’ve been working on for a few years — an old idea we’ve just modernized. We—” Patrick stopped himself. He still couldn’t stop thinking about the Air Battle Force as “his.” “I mean, the Air Battle Force can get you in anywhere you want to go.”

“I’ll start working on getting authorizations right away.”

“Dave Luger at Battle Mountain is in charge of surveillance and observer air operations over Turkmenistan — he’ll give you permission,” Patrick said.

“I’d have to join the team, of course,” Griffin added with a sly smile.

Patrick smiled and nodded. Yep, he thought, he definitely liked this guy. “That you’ll