A Time for Patriots by Dale Brown Read Free Book Online

Patrick retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant-general, the highest rank he could attain in Civil Air Patrol without earning advancement points was colonel), along with Civil Air Patrol and Nevada Wing patches. Brad wore a camouflaged battle-dress uniform with blue-and-white cloth name tapes with MCLANAHAN on one side and CIVIL AIR PATROL on the other, along with a green camouflage cap, an orange safety vest, and black leather combat boots. Both carried backpacks with extra gear; Brad carried a smaller pack on his web belt. “Ready to go, big guy?” Patrick asked.
    â€œReady.” 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 meant to be temporary, until the sudden and dramatic downturn in the economy and the new president’s response to the crisis made the trailers permanent. The roads were still unpaved, and now half of the trailers were empty.
    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