Excerpt from Every Man A Tiger by Tom Clancy, General Chuck Horner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

All about them, the ramp was silent. Shaw had been ready for two weeks to go to war, so local flying was at a minimum.

As soon as Horner climbed down the ladder, he told José to get the jet ready to go. He suspected he'd be on the ground only a short time. Meanwhile, Grr came running over. Horner told him to file a flight plan for MacDill; then he shrugged out of his G suit.

It's hard to look anything but rumpled when you shed a G suit, but this was not a problem for Chuck Horner. For him, rumpled was normal. He had a comfortable, but not pretty, bloodhound face, sandy, thinning hair, and a bulldog body. He looked nothing like Tom Cruise or Cary Grant, or any other Hollywood fighter-jock image. On the other hand, Horner moved with great verve and dash; he had an easy, infectious laugh and a wicked wit; and inside his bloodhound head was one of the sharpest, quickest minds inside the Air Force or out. He liked to play the Iowa farmboy, but he'd come a long way out of Iowa.

He walked over to his staff car, threw his G suit in the backseat, and drove to his office in the headquarters Ninth Air Force/CENTAF building just two blocks away.

Horner's secretary, Jean Barrineau, was waiting at the door of the outer office. A tall, slender, middle-aged woman with light brown hair who looked younger than her years, Jean was the Ninth Air Force Commander's brain. She ruled his schedule, yet she wielded her power lightly. Most of the time a visitor would find her with a twinkling face, her eyes shining with amusement, and a little-girl smile, as though she was playing some private joke on her boss - which she often did.

Today there were no tricks and no smiles. She was worried and all business. "General Schwarzkopf wants you to call him," she said, "secure."

He blew past her into the office.

The office was institutional but pleasant, with the inevitable government-issue big mahogany desk at one end and a small seating area at the other. The walls held the collection of "I love me" plaques and pictures a man accumulated in the military as he went from base to base. On one wall was a large painting of an F-15 with Horner's name painted on the canopy rail - a gift from the 2d Squadron at Tyndall AFB in Florida, where he'd served from 1983 to '85. On the coffee table in the seating area was a copy of the Holy Bible and the Holy Koran; the Bible came from the base chapel, the Koran from a friend in Saudi Arabia. Both were in English. Around the room on various end tables and bookcases were the odds and ends he had gathered while traveling around the world. A gold-colored dagger was a gift from the AWACS crews in Riyadh, a bronze block paperweight commemorated his time in TAC Headquarters as the deputy for Plans and Programs, and there were fighter squadron plaques from the Ninth Air Force units with whom Horner had flown training sorties during base visits. To the right of the back wall was a door that led to the toilet and washstand he shared with his deputy, Major General Tom Olsen. A large, computerlike telephone was located on a credenza under the office's rear window, directly behind the desk. It shared the space with a few books of the trade, including his F-16 Pilots Handbook and a copy of the United States Military Code of Justice. The phone looked like a computer, because in fact it was a computer, designed to scramble conversations, and it featured thirty or more hot-line buttons that connected with locations in the building and around the world.

Horner sat down behind his desk and punched the top right red switch hot-line button; it was marked "CINCCENT." Schwarzkopf's Master Chief answered after the first ring; she said the General would be on the line right away. A moment later, the gruff yet friendly voice of H. Norman Schwarzkopf came on the line. "Chuck, can you come down to MacDill?"

Reprinted from EVERY MAN A TIGER by Tom Clancy with General Chuck Horner (RET.) by permission of G. P. Putnam & Sons, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright May 1999 by C. P. Commanders, Inc