As the room reacted to the crisis, directing the country’s mammoth military and governmental machine as it went, Neal kept a part of his thoughts on his two friends flying silently, unseen, on the other side of the planet. America may be focused on the fires burning in southern Georgia, but any moment now Martin and Jack would be starting fires of their own. And the people they were trying to save would probably not be grateful.

Chapter 56: Thermobaric Defense

“Jack. Jack!” Martin shouted from his seat at the controls.

“Yes, Martin, I’m coming. Is everything OK?” said Jack, wiping sleep from his eyes.

The flight deck of the B-2 was split into two small sections. With the long patrol missions the B-2 was designed to fly, often taking upwards of twenty to thirty hours, the crew needed some basic amenities onboard. There wasn’t much, a small cot, a bathroom, and several small lockers packed with dried foods, an extensive medicine cabinet, and plenty of powdered Gatorade. These pleasantries were located in a small compartment aft of the cockpit, with the access hatch through which the pilots entered the plane coming up between the two.

For this particular flight, the space was made even more cramped by the addition of the two unconscious pilots on the floor of the rear section of the flight deck. The dart gun that they had used to sedate the plane’s real pilots was only designed to last ten minutes or so, so Martin had administered an intravenous sedative soon after takeoff and every five hours since then to keep them under, a timer on his wristwatch warning when the two bound pilots needed to be re-dosed.

Martin had done his best to arrange the two sedated people as comfortably as possible while Jack had taken the plane up to its cruising altitude of 40,000 feet. As the attack on the satellites raged above southern Florida, they had flown southeast over the US to the Atlantic, where the plane was supposed to fly a patrol pattern over the Mid-Atlantic and Caribbean.

The US had spent billions of dollars in order to make the B-2 Spirit Bomber virtually invisible to radar and they had been so successful that they had actually had to install a beacon that made it visible to air traffic control while it was in US airspace. Theoretically, they were supposed to use it in Allied airspace as well, but typical mission parameters required that the beacon be turned off when leaving US airspace unless otherwise directed, a policy that suited Jack and Martin’s purposes just fine.