Battle Born by Dale Brown

you’ve seen them play, sir,” Terrill Samson responded, his deep, booming voice amplified over the intercom system. The two men were sitting side by side in the cockpit of an F-111 fighter-bomber, used by the Air Force asa photo “chase plane” on flight tests. They were flying a few hundred yards off the right wing of a black B-1B Lancer bomber, at an altitude of only two thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean off the southern California coast. Victor Hayes found it hard to believe Samson had managed to squeeze himself inside the F-111’s rather small cockpit, but now that they were both strapped in, he was clearly right at home there.
    “I usually don’t go on a flight test without knowing more about what I’m getting into,” Hayes said. In truth, he was enjoying the hell out of this flight—he got to fly so seldom these days. “You mind filling me in?”
    “I was just going to get to that, sir,” Samson said. His formation flying skills were excellent, Hayes had noted—he had chosen to hand-fly the big supersonic bomber the entire flight so far, and they might as well have been welded to the B-1’s right wingtip. Very impressive—even with over ten thousand hours of flying time in over a dozen different military warplanes, Hayes doubted that he could fly as well, especially given all the years since he’d been operational in any tactical unit. “We’ve got about five minutes to go.
    “As you know, sir,” Samson went on, “my group at Dreamland helped test the Army’s THAAD system. In fact, we launched some targets from that same B-1 . . .”
    “I know,” Hayes said. “Looks like THAAD is turning into a money pit. You find a way to fix it?”
    “Not exactly,” Samson said. “THAAD’s supposed to be an improved Patriot system—to destroy ballistic missiles in the upper atmosphere, or in near-space, at least twice as high as Patriot. It’s supposed to keep the warhead and critical pieces of the missile away from defended territory while staying as far away from the forward edge of the battle area as possible. But as you know from the Senate hearing, the technology to placea small antimissile missile close enough to a high-altitude, fast-moving target still isn’t fully matured—it’s literally a ‘bullet hitting a bullet’ from hundreds of miles apart. The problem is hitting a target in the midcourse or reentry phase of flight. THAAD can’t do it except with the plasma-yield warhead, which increases the cost of the system tremendously. Well, I had my guys start trying some things . . .”
    Beneath his oxygen mask and sun visor, Hayes winced. HAWC’s first commander, Lieutenant General Bradley James Elliott, was famous throughout the Pentagon for “trying some things,” mostly with exotic aircraft and weapons being secretly developed at Dreamland. Elliott had this knack for taking a weapons development program and turning it into a military marvel—or monstrosity. The truth was, his inventions were often successfully—and secretly—used in real emergencies all around the world to try to avert conflicts before they escalated into major shooting wars.
    The problem was, Elliott sometimes sent his monstrosities off to war without letting certain key folks know about it—like anyone in the Pentagon, Congress, or even the White House. A conflict would be brewing somewhere in the world—China, Ukraine, Russia, the Baltics, the Philippines—and almost before anyone could react, Elliott’s “creations” were on their way. He had been slapped down many times, even forced into retirement, yet he kept on coming back. As Hayes saw it, the curse of Brad Elliott now seemed to have fallen on Terrill Samson, former commander of Eighth Air Force, the command in charge of the Air Force’s dwindling fleet of heavy bombers. There was no doubt that Samson was a protégé of Brad Elliott, especially in the development and deployment of the heavy bomber—and it certainly looked as though he was