Rogue Forces

heard the other kids calling him cazzotto—which means ‘a hard punch’—and they gave him that name. We don’t know if he was getting beat up all the time or if he was the one doing the punching.”

“I’ve seen her on the punching bag at the gym; she deserves that call sign,” Kris said.

“I see,” Patrick said, smiling at Gia. She smiled back, their eyes locking…

…which gave the others around them an opening. “When can we see this plane of yours, sir?” Harrison asked.

“Can it really do everything you said…?”

“Are you taking over for all the military units in Iraq…?”

“All right, boys and girls, all right, we have work to do,” Kris Thompson interjected, holding up his hands to stop the fast-moving questions being fired at Patrick. “You’ll have time to pester the general later.” They all jostled to shake Patrick’s hand again, then gathered up their thumb drives and papers and exited the briefing room.

Gia was the last to depart. She shook Patrick’s hand, keeping it an extra moment in her own. “Very nice to meet you, sir,” she said.

“Same here, Colonel.”

“I prefer Gia.”

“Okay, Gia.” He was still clasping her hand when she said that, and he felt an instantaneous rush of warmth in it—or was his own hand suddenly sweating? “Not Boxer?”

“You don’t get to pick your own call signs, do you, sir?”

“Call me Patrick. And bomber guys didn’t have call signs when I was in.”

“I remember my old ops officer at the One-Eleventh had some choice names for you,” she said, and then smiled and headed off.

Kris Thompson was grinning at Patrick. “She’s cute, in a Murphy Brown kind of way, eh?”

“Yes. And wipe that grin off your face.”

“If it makes you uncomfortable, sure.” He kept on grinning. “We don’t know that much about her. We hear her on the radios once in a while, so she still flies. She comes in to run missions occasionally, like tonight, and then she’s off again to another command center. She rarely stays for longer than a day.”

Patrick felt an unexpected pang of disappointment, then quickly shook the uncomfortable feeling aside. Where did that come from…? “The B-1s are great planes,” he said. “I hope they resurrect more of them from AMARC.”

“The grunts love the Bones. They can get to the fight as fast as a fighter; loiter for long periods of time like a Predator or Global Hawk, even without air refueling; they have improved sensors and optics and can pass a lot of data to us and other planes; and they have as much precision-guided payload as a flight of F/A-18s.” Thompson noted the quiet, slightly wistful expression on Patrick’s face and decided to change the subject. “You’re a real inspiration to those kids, General,” he said. “That’s the most excited I’ve ever seen them since I’ve been here.”

“Thanks. It’s infectious—I feel energized, too. And call me Patrick, okay?”

“Can’t guarantee I will all the time, Patrick, but I’ll try. And I’m Kris. Let’s get you settled.”

“Can’t. Jon and I have a lot of work to do before tomorrow afternoon’s test flight. The staff will set up quarters for us, but I’ll probably take naps in the plane.”

“Same here,” Jon added. “Certainly wouldn’t be the first time.”

“We’ll have support services bring meals out to the plane, then.”

“Good. Kris, I’d like clearance to be in the Tank when the operation at Zahuk begins.”

“The colonel doesn’t usually allow off-duty personnel to be in the Tank during an operation, especially one this big,” Kris said, “but I’m sure he’ll let you listen in from up here.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“I’m not sure if I want to get any closer than that to Wilhelm anyway,” Jon said. “I thought for sure he was going to punch your lights out, Muck…twice.”

“But he didn’t, which means he does have some common sense,” Patrick said. “Maybe I can work with him. We’ll see.”

CHAPTER THREE

In the one hand he is carrying a stone, while he shows the bread in the other.

—TITUS MACCIUS PLAUTUS, 254–184 B.C.

ALLIED AIR BASE NAHLA, IRAQ

Thompson took Patrick and Jon back out to the hangar, where the crew chiefs and support crew were unloading bags and servicing the Loser. This gave Thompson a chance to look the plane over carefully. “This thing is beautiful,” he remarked. “Looks like a stealth bomber. I thought you were just going to do reconnaissance.”

“That’s what we were hired to do,” Patrick said.

“But this is a bomber?”

“Was a bomber.”

Thompson noticed technicians working under the aircraft’s belly and saw a large opening. “Is that a bomb bay? This thing still has a bomb bay?”

“That’s a module access hatch,” Jon Masters said. “We don’t drop anything from it—we load and unload modules through them.”

“The Loser had two bomb bays, similar to the B-2 stealth bomber except much bigger,” Patrick explained. “We combined the two bays into one big bay but retained both lower doors. We then split the bay into two decks. We’re able to move mission modules around and between decks and maneuver each module either up or down through the module hatches, all by remote control.”

“A flying-wing reconnaissance plane?”

“The flying-wing design works well as a long-range multimission plane,” Jon Masters said. “Airliners in the future will be flying wings.”

“Scion’s planes are designed to be multifunction platforms; we plug in different mission modules to perform different tasks,” Patrick said. “This plane can be a tanker, cargo plane, do electronic warfare, photoreconnaissance, communications relay, command-and-control—even several of these functions at the same time.

“Right now we’re configured for ground moving-target indication, ground target identification and tracking, air surveillance, datalink, and command-and-control,” Patrick went on. “But if we brought different modules, we can load them up and perform different missions. Tomorrow we’ll have the air surveillance emitters up top.”

He then stepped underneath the plane and showed Thompson a large opening in the belly. “Through here, we’ll suspend the ground target emitter module for ground target identification and tracking. All of the modules are ‘plug-and-play’ through the ship’s digital communications suite, which uploads the data via satellite to the end users. Other modules we’ve installed are for the very-wide-area networking, threat detection and response, and self-protection.”

“‘Threat response’? You mean, attack?”

“I can’t really get into that system because it’s not part of the contract and it’s still experimental,” Patrick said, “but we’d like to do a little more to the bad guys than just decoy or jam their weapons.”

Patrick took Kris up the ladder and into the Loser. The cockpit looked roomy and comfortable. The instrument panel was composed of five wide monitors with a few normal “steam” gauges tucked away almost out of sight. “Pretty nice flight deck.”

“Aircraft commander and mission commander up front as usual,” Patrick said. He put a hand on the side- facing seat behind the copilot’s seat. “We have a flight engineer here who monitors all of the ship’s systems and the mission modules.”

Kris motioned to a counter behind the boarding ladder. “You even have a galley in here!”

“Flushing head, too; that comes in handy on these long flights,” Jon said.

They ducked through a small hatch in the rear of the cockpit, walked down a short narrow passageway, and