Chains of Command by Brown Dale

Author:Brown, Dale [Brown, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Dale Brown
Published: 2014-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

394th Air Battle Wing Headquarters, Plattsburgh AFB, NY That Same Time

“Very impressive,” General Cole said half-aloud as Colonel Lafferty, the wing vice commander, entered the office. Cole ran one hand across his black-haired flattop and handed the report he was reading over to Lafferty with the other. “It’s the preliminary Air Combat Command readiness report from Maintenance Group.”

“What? So soon?” But Lafferty’s skeptical expression turned into one of surprise, then grudging admiration as he scanned the report. Lafferty was not the easiest man in the world to impress. A Naval Academy graduate who transferred to the Air Force after Navy flight assignment drawdowns went into effect following Vietnam, Lafferty looked like a typical fighter jock, with a large expensive Rolex, rolled-up sleeves on his flight suit, visible dog tags, and non-military-issue aviator sunglasses on top of his head. He loved fighters and flyers, but wasn’t overwhelmed by either until both proved themselves to him. “Well, all right—the new guy aces out the other groups his first day on the job. Mace must’ve really lit a fire under Razzano’s behind.”

“He fired Razzano,” Cole said. “Sent him to me for reassignment. Made Lieutenant Porter his exec instead—even promoted her to captain.”

“Shaking things up in the old office? Housecleaning?” Lafferty shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, it’s his prerogative. Razzano was on autopilot anyway, waiting for a reassignment, and Mace is a crewdog—he’ll cut the ground-pounders out and put in junior officers or other crewdogs every time. But I was afraid he’d do his ex-Marine head-busting routine.” He scanned the report, then: “Boy doesn’t pull any punches, either—he’s saying we’re only slightly better than minimally mission-capable. You going to upchannel this?”

“With the boss coming, I have no choice.” Cole sighed. “If my MG says it may take over seventy-two hours to generate the force for SIOP or for a max-rate deployment, I have to go along with it. But he’s got a plan to compensate. He’s moving eight Vampires into the shelters—says he’s going to put them into preload status right away.”

“We’re going to preload eight bombers?” Lafferty asked, astonished. “Jesus, spare us from the old retread SAC guys. That means we’re going to start flying with external tanks again?”

“Afraid so. With eight planes in preload status, that means he’ll need to keep at least ten, maybe twelve planes with tanks on the line.”

“God—wintertime with external tanks.” Lafferty moaned. “Remember all the problems we had? Frozen feed lines, crew chiefs pounding on tank pylons with wheel chocks to unstick frozen valves, incompatible mountings, upload tractor breakdowns …”

“Yeah, and remember the last Bravo exercise we had, where we had to cut the deployment exercise short by two days because three of our tankers went off-station and we couldn’t get enough external tanks on our planes?” Cole asked. “We’ve been kidding ourselves, Jim—we call ourselves mission-capable a lot of times when in reality we couldn’t get half this wing overseas in the required amount of time. If Colonel Mace wants to take on the challenge of maintaining one-third to one-half of our bomber fleet in preload status, let him.

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