“Hi ya, Charlie!” Rear Admiral Joshua Painter emerged from the next room, drying his hands with a towel. “How was it coming in?” “Little rocky,” Davenport allowed, shaking hands. “This is Jack Ryan.” Ryan had never met Painter but knew him by reputation. A Phantom pilot during the Vietnam War, he had written a book, Paddystrikes, on the conduct of the air campaigns. It had been a truthful book, not the sort of thing that wins friends. He was a small, feisty man who could not have weighed more than a hundred thirty pounds. He was also a gifted tactician and a man of puritanical integrity. “One
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