“It’s the way things need to be from now on, my friend,” Patrick responded. “I’ll have the complete package plan out to you within the hour, and the air tasking order for movement of spacecraft will be out to you sooner. Thanks, Harold. Odin out.”
Patrick’s next videoconference call was to his battle management area at Elliott Air Force Base: “Macomber notified us that you had given him a ground op in Iran and that he was in a time crunch to do some planning, so we’ve already jumped in,” his deputy commander, Brigadier General David Luger, said. The two navigators had been together for over two decades, first as fellow B-52G Stratofortress crewmembers and then assigned to the High- Technology Aerospace Weapons Center as aircraft and weapon flight test engineers. Tall, lean, quiet, and deliberate in personality as well as appearance, Luger’s best attribute was acting as Patrick McLanahan’s conscience whenever his irascible, determined, single-minded side threatened to obliterate all common sense. “We should have something for you in no time. The guy’s fast and pretty well organized.”
“I knew you’d be on it, buddy,” Patrick said. “Surprised to hear from Whack?”
“Surprised? How about thunderstruck?” Luger deadpanned. “Everyone in the Air Battle Force goes out of their way to avoid the guy. But when he gets down to business, he does okay.”
“Any thoughts on Soltanabad?”
“Yeah — I think we should skip the prelims and just put a couple spreads of SkySTREAKs or Meteors with high explosives down there, instead of wasting time inserting a Battle Force team,” Luger replied. “If the Iranians are hiding something there, our guys will be landing right on top of them.”
“As much as I like blowing things up, Texas,” Patrick responded, “I think we should get a look first. If those craters are really decoys, they’re the best I’ve ever seen, which means—”
“They’re probably not Iranian,” Luger said. “You thinking maybe the Russians?”
“I think Moscow would like nothing better than to help Mohtaz destroy Buzhazi’s army and station a few brigades there as his reward,” Patrick said.
“You think that’s what Zevitin wants to do?”
“An American-friendly state in Iran would be completely unacceptable,” Patrick said. “Mohtaz is a nutcase, but if Zevitin can convince him to allow Russian troops into Iran to help defeat Buzhazi’s army — or for any other reason such as defending against American aggression — Zevitin will be able to send in troops to counterbalance American domination in the region. At the very least, he can put pressure on President Gardner to back away from supporting former Soviet bloc countries that are drifting into the American sphere of influence.”
“All that geopolitical stuff makes my head hurt, Muck,” Dave said with mock weariness. Patrick could see Dave’s attention diverted away from the videoconference camera. “I have the first draft of the plan ready — I’ll upload it to you,” he said, entering instructions into his computer.
“Okay, Muck, here’s the preliminary status reports,” Luger went on moments later. “We have two Black Stallion spaceplanes available within four hours along with their dedicated tankers and enough fuel and supplies for orbital missions, and three available in seven hours if we cancel some training sorties. Macomber says he can get loaded up in time to launch. How do you want to build the air tasking order?”
Patrick made fast mental calculations, working the timing backward from when he wanted the Black Stallion off the ground and out of Persian airspace. “I’d sure like to have decoys, backups, more intel, and more rehearsals for Whack and the ground forces, but my primary concern is getting a good look at that base soon without the Revolutionary Guards being alerted,” he said. “I’ll see if I can get approval for two Studs to go in right away. If we launch in four hours, we’ll be over the objective by midnight to one A.M. local time — let’s call it two A.M. to be safe. We recon for one hour max, blast off before civil sunrise, refuel somewhere over western Afghanistan, and head home.”
“The ‘Duty Officer’ is spitting out the preliminary guesstimate for the air tasking order,” Luger said. The “Duty Officer” was the central computer system based at the High-Technology Aerospace Weapons Center that tied in all of the various departments and laboratories around the world and could be securely accessed by any member of HAWC anywhere in the world — or, in the case of Armstrong Space Station,
“And when was the last time we ever had a mission go completely flawless?”
“I don’t recall that
“Let’s push ahead with this plan,” Patrick said. “We’ll present it as is and bring in as many contingency assets as we can — hopefully we won’t need any of them.”
“You got it, Muck,” Dave said. “I need to…stand by, Patrick…I have a call from your flight surgeon at Walter Reed. He wants to talk with you.”
“Plug me in, and stay on the line.”
“Roger that. Stand by…” A moment later the video image split in two, with Dave on the left side and the image of a rather young-looking man in Navy Work Uniform camouflage blue digital fatigues, typical of all military personnel in the United States since the American Holocaust. “Go ahead, Captain, the general is on the line, secure.”
“General McLanahan?”
“How are you, Captain Summers?” Patrick asked. U.S. Navy Captain Alfred Summers was the chief of cardiovascular surgery at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the man in charge of Patrick’s case.
“I saw your interview this morning,” the surgeon said testily, “and with all due respect, General, I was wondering where you got your medical degree from?”
“You have some problems with what I told the interviewer, I take it?”
“You made it sound like long-QT syndrome can be cured by taking a couple aspirin, sir,” Summers complained. “It’s not as easy as that, and I don’t want my staff blamed in case your request to remain on flight status is denied.”
“Blamed by whom, Captain?”
“Frankly, sir, by the great majority of Americans who think you are a national treasure that should not be sidelined for any reason whatsoever,” the physician responded. “I’m sure you know what I mean. In short, sir, long-QT syndrome is an automatic denial of flight privileges — there’s no appeal process.”
“My staff has been researching the condition, Captain, as well as the medical histories of several astronauts who have been disqualified from space duties but still retained flight status, and they tell me that the condition is not life-threatening and might not be serious enough to warrant a denial of—”
“As your doctor and the leading expert on this condition in the United States, General, let me set it straight for you if I may,” Summers interjected. “The syndrome was most likely caused by what we call myocardial stretch, where severe G-forces deform the heart muscles and nerves and create electrical abnormalities. The syndrome has obviously lain dormant for your entire life until you flew into space, and then it hit full force. It’s interesting to me that you obviously experienced some symptoms during some or perhaps all of your space flights, but then it lay dormant again until you had a mere videoconference confrontation — I’d guess it was equally as stressing as flying in space, or maybe just stressful enough to provide the trigger for another full-blown episode.”
“The White House and Pentagon can do that, Doctor,” Patrick said.
“No doubt, sir,” Summers agreed. “But do you not see the danger in this condition, General? The stress of that simple videoconference episode, combined with your repeated trips into orbit, sparked electrical interruptions that eventually created an arrhythmia. It was so severe that it created cardiac fibrillation, or irregular heartbeat, a true heat ‘flutter,’ which like a cavitating pump means that not enough blood gets circulated to the brain even though the heart hasn’t stopped. It goes without saying, sir, that any stressor now can bring on another episode, and without constant monitoring we have absolutely no way of knowing when or how severe it would be. Allowing you to stay on flight status would jeopardize every mission and every piece of hardware under your control.”
“I assume you were going to add, ‘not to mention your
