One of the three men waiting in civilian clothes atop the truck-mounted boarding steps was General Redstone. That was good because the other two had the look and the size of folks who’d be sent to take Kelly out of play.
If they’d wanted to do that, of course – especially after what had happened at the landing site near Istanbul – there were going to be more than two guys sent.
“Christ, that’s beautiful,” Kelly blurted as he stepped from the Starlifter onto the landing of the boarding stairs.
“Hang on,” directed Redstone, and the two – call them attendants – each grabbed Kelly firmly with one hand while anchoring themselves to the railing with the other. “Somebody thought this’d – ”
The truck backed away from the C-141 in an arc, then braked sharply enough that Kelly gripped one of the attendants and the closest portion of the railing himself. The big men’s touch had shocked him, but they had not tried to immobilize his hands. The truck accelerated forward, toward the open hatch of the plane that had drawn Kelly’s exclamation.
The aircraft was a Boeing 747 which had few external modifications beyond the slight excrescence on the nose for accepting a refueling drogue, and the radome which recapitulated in miniature the bulge of the flight deck on which it rested.
Kelly’s vision of the Strategic Air Command had been molded by the tired B-52D’s which had flown to Lebanon out of Akrotiri, painted in camouflage colors and carrying tens of tons of high-explosive bombs under the wings. But an Airborne Command Post was as close to being a showpiece as SAC had available; and in these days, when budget cutters reasonably suggested the nuclear strike mission be left wholly to Space Command and Fortress, the manned-bomber boys weren’t going to miss any opportunity for show.
The big aircraft was painted dazzling white, with a blue accent stripe down the line of windows from nose to tail. Above the stripe, in Times Roman letters that must have been five feet high, were the words United States of America. The forward entrance hatch was swung inward, awaiting the motorized boarding stairs.
“Geez,” Kelly muttered, “do they paint ’em like that to make ’em easier to target on?”
“Maybe somebody told ’em white’d make the damn thing more survivable in a near nuke,” responded Redstone with a grimace of his own. Red hadn’t been the smartest fellow Kelly had met in the service, but his instincts were good and he’d been willing to go to the wall for his men. How he’d made general was a wonder and a half. “Of course,” Redstone continued, “that flag on the tail’s going to burn seven red stripes right through the control surfaces.”
“Purty, though,” Kelly observed. He was squinting. Twenty miles an hour seemed plenty fast enough when you hung onto a railing fifteen feet in the air.
Grit was blowing across the field, along with fumes from the big turbofans of the aircraft they approached. The odor left no question but that the bird was burning JP-4 rather than kerosene-based JP-1. The gasoline propellant could be expected both to significantly increase speed and range, and to turn the aircraft into a huge bomb if it had to make a belly landing.
Well, Kelly’s taste had always been for performance over survivability. His plans for Fortress didn’t strike him as particularly survivable, even if everything worked up to specs.
The truck slowed. An attendant in the doorway of the 747 was talking the driver in. A flat-topped yellow fuel tanker pulled away from the other side of the aircraft which it had been topping off. Kelly wondered how long the Airborne Command Post had been idling here, ready to take off as soon as the Starlifter from Incirlik landed its cargo.
“Something you might keep in mind, Kelly,” said General Redstone as the truck began to nestle the stairs’ padded bumpers against the 747, “is that a lot of ’em don’t like you, and I don’t guess anybody believes everything you put in that cable – me included. But nobody knows what the fuck’s going on, either. If you keep your temper – that’s always been the problem, Kelly – and you keep saying what you say you know . . . then I guess you might get what you say you want.”