Patrick and Brad raced back into the trailer, and within moments reemerged from their bedrooms dressed in completely different clothes. Patrick wore a sage-green flight suit and black leather flying boots. The black leather nameplate above his left pocket had a set of Civil Air Patrol wings, his name, the letters
“Ready.” Like the costumed heroes Batman and Robin heading to the Batmobile, the two raced to Patrick’s four-door Jeep Wrangler and drove off.
The roads in the trailer subdivision were muddy from the recent thunderstorms, but the Wrangler handled them with ease. The subdivision was a temporary trailer housing settlement built during the expansion of the air base located nearby — at least it was
It took about five minutes to get back on paved surfaces, and then another ten minutes before reaching the outer perimeter of the airfield. The perimeter was a simple sign and chain-link fence, designed more to keep tumbleweeds and coyotes out, and an unmanned guard gate. But Patrick and Brad both knew that their identities were already being remotely determined and recorded, and their movements carefully tracked by the air base’s high-tech security sensors. Joint Air Base Battle Mountain didn’t look much different from the surrounding high desert, but at this place, looks were deceiving.
What was now Joint Air Base Battle Mountain had a colorful past, most of which the public was unaware of, or at best indifferent to. It started life as Tuscarora Army Air Corps Field in 1942 to train bomber and pursuit crews for service in World War II. After the war, the airfield was turned over to Lander County, and some of the government land south of the field sold to mining companies. A few businesses and an air museum tried to make a go of it at the isolated airfield, but there simply wasn’t that much business in remote north-central Nevada, and the airfield seemed to languish.
But the underground elevators, buildings, rail lines, power distributors, and ventilation systems that popped up around the airfield were never meant for miners: the U.S. government secretly constructed a vast underground cave network beneath Tuscarora Army Air Corps Base. The facility was designed to be a government reconstitution command center, a base far from population centers to which the heads of the U.S. government and military would escape and ride out a Soviet or Chinese nuclear-missile attack. After the attack was over, the officials at Battle Mountain would broadcast instructions to the survivors and begin rescue and regeneration efforts for the people of the western United States.
The facility was the ultimate in 1950s technology: it made its own power, air, and water; it was built to withstand anything but a direct hit with a one-megaton nuclear warhead; it even boasted an underground hangar with elevators that would take aircraft as large as a B-52 bomber belowground to safety. The base was so isolated that most miners and ranchers never realized the facility existed.
But when the Cold War ended, Battle Mountain was shuttered… until it was reactivated in the early twenty- first century by General Patrick McLanahan as the headquarters for a new high-tech aerial attack unit called the Air Battle Force. The Air Battle Force contained some of the most secret and amazing air-combat machines ever built: two-hundred-ton bombers with the radar cross section of a flea; bombers fitted with lasers that could shoot down ballistic missiles and satellites in low Earth orbit; even multiple flights of unmanned bombers that could fly supersonic combat missions halfway around the world. Still, the little community and its mysterious underground base went almost completely unnoticed by the rest of the world…
… until the American Holocaust, when the United States was attacked by waves of Russian bombers launching hypersonic nuclear-tipped missiles. Almost the entire fleet of American long-range bombers and more than half of America’s intercontinental-ballistic-missile arsenal was wiped out in a matter of hours. But Battle Mountain’s little fleet of high-tech bombers, led by Patrick McLanahan, survived and formed the spearhead of the American counterattack that destroyed most of Russia’s ground-launched intercontinental nuclear missiles and restored a tenuous sort of parity in nuclear forces between the two nations.
Battle Mountain emerged from the horrific tragedy of the American Holocaust to become the center of American air-breathing strategic combat operations. All of America’s surviving heavy bombers, intelligence- gathering planes, and airborne command posts were relocated to Battle Mountain, and a fleet of long-range unmanned combat aircraft began to grow there. The base even became a staging area for America’s fleet of manned and unmanned spaceplanes — aircraft that could take off and land like conventional aircraft but boost themselves into low Earth orbit.
Even during the deep global economic recession that began in 2008, Battle Mountain grew, although the community around it barely noticed. Because of its isolation and dirt-low cost of living, many bases around the world were closed and relocated to Battle Mountain. Soon Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base became JAB (Joint Air Base) Battle Mountain, hosting air units from all the military services, the Air Reserve Forces, the Central Intelligence Agency, and even the Space Defense Force.
But then the economic crash of December 2012 happened, and everything changed.
Newly elected president Kenneth Phoenix, politically exhausted from a bruising and divisive election that saw yet another president being chosen in effect by the U.S. Supreme Court, ordered a series of massive tax cuts as well as cuts in all government services. Such government cuts had not been seen since the Thomas Thorn administration: entire cabinet-level departments, such as education, commerce, transportation, energy, and veterans affairs, were consolidated with other departments or closed outright; all entitlement-program outlays were cut in half or defunded completely; American military units and even entire bases around the world disappeared virtually overnight. Despite howls of protest from both the political left and right, Congress had no choice but to agree to the severe austerity measures.
Joint Air Base Battle Mountain was not spared. Every aircraft at the once-bustling base was in “hangar queen” status — available only for spare parts — reassigned to other bases, or mothballed. Most planes placed in “flyable storage” were not even properly mothballed, but just hoisted up on jacks and shrink-wrapped in place to protect them against sun and sandstorms. Construction at the base was halted, seemingly with nails half pounded, concrete footers half poured, and streets abruptly turning into dirt roads or littered with construction equipment that appeared to be just dropped or turned off and abandoned. There seemed to be no one on the base at all except for security patrols, and most of the visible ones were unmanned robotic vehicles responding to security breaches discovered by remote electronic sensors.
Patrick and Brad drove past the partially completed headquarters building of the Space Defense Force. They had passed just a handful of persons and vehicles since entering the base. “Man, this place looks… freakin’ lonely, Dad,” Brad said. “Aren’t they ever going to finish those buildings?”
“There’s no money in the budget right now,” Patrick said. He nodded toward several trailers set up nearby. “Those will do for now.” If the Space Defense Force survived the economic downturn, he silently added. President Phoenix was a big supporter, but like every other government program, it had been cut by at least 50 percent.
“Battle Mountain’s town flower: the trailer,” Brad said, reciting the oft-repeated joke.
The flight line was built up much more than the rest of the base because of all the flying activity before the 2012 crash, but now it appeared just as vacant as the rest of the base. Each large hangar had just one or two planes parked there — the rest were either in the hangars being cannibalized or on the south parking ramp encased in shrink-wrap. The most active flying units on the base were the RQ-4 Global Hawk reconnaissance planes, which had transferred here from Beale Air Force Base in Marysville, California; and the three surviving Air Force E-4B National Airborne Operations Center airborne command post planes, which along with the Navy’s Mercury sea- launched ballistic-missile airborne command posts resumed around-the-clock operations after the American Holocaust.
Patrick drove to the older western side of the flight line, parked in front of a large cube-shaped hangar, and he and Brad retrieved their gear and headed inside. The hangar was shared with several nonmilitary organizations, everyone from the Lander County Sheriff’s Department to the Nevada Department of Wildlife, so there was an
