Tomahawk (15 page)

“Where's all this money coming from? I thought Reagan just cut taxes.”

“He did. The economy will grow, and receipts will rise, and that's how the deficit will get paid back.”

“So we're just borrowing it?”

“What do you care?” DeSilva tossed his plate onto the dais and kissed Cottrell on the cheek. “Got to get over to Energy and Commerce. Thanks, beautiful.”

“Wait a minute, Mr. DeSilva—”

Dan looked down the assistant's chubby upraised finger.

“Commander, I don't think you realize how many heavy hitters are gunning for your little buzz bomb. The whole issue of the General Dynamics-Navy relationship, the Electric Boat settlement and the Trident work, there's even F-sixteens and tanks in the pot. Are you aware that if that blows up, you're toast? I'm just trying to help. Tell your admiral that if he ever wants to go to production, he'd better do it now.” He gave Dan a possibly friendly but also possibly mocking salute and left.

Dan said angrily to Cottrell, “So this was all business?”

“It's
all
business, Dan. Don't tell me you haven't realized that yet.” She looked around, then up at the big leather chairs. “Those look comfortable. Come on.”

He eased himself down into one. The leather was soft. He looked out over the thronged floor, imagining himself as a powerful committee head. Cottrell said, “Let me tell you a little story about Roger Zoelcke.”

“The guy whose staff you're on?”

“Right, right. Well, he tried to run a clean shop when he first came in. He got put on the transportation subcommittee. Not sexy, but important stuff, roads and bridges. Then one day, Transportation comes in with this proposal. They did some experiments, and they proposed that the federal government, on the interstate highway system, require that the contractors have to add old chopped-up tires to the concrete or whatever they used for paving, as a filler.”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

“It
was
a good idea. Not only does it give you someplace to put all the fucking tires but it makes the road
more flexible or something too; it actually lasts twice as long. But the contractors had a problem with that. They don't
want
it to last twice as long. So their association had a talk with him. And good old Rog, he told them no, they'd just have to get with the program and start putting rubber in their cement.

“Instead, they raised a quarter of a million bucks and gave it to a banker in his district and he lost his seat.

“He came back two years later, but it was like he'd had a brain transplant. Now the asphalt association guys come around before every election, have their little fundraisers, five hundred a plate. And there's no rubber in the roads anymore.”

“What's the message?”

“The message is that the government doesn't buy things because anybody needs them, Dan. They get bought because the shipbuilders and the guys who build tanks have a drink together. They cut checks for Representatives X and Y. Then Y says to X, ‘You help me get these cruisers built in my state, I'll help you out with the tanks they build in yours.' Then some summer intern writes it into the budget.”

“Some of them must have the interests of the country at heart.”

“I love it. Childlike faith. Sooner or later, you learn people around here have only one goal: to stay in office. Now, you were looking for a job, weren't you? When you get out?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“Eddie found something for you.”

Dan drew a diagram on the arm of the chair with his finger. He said, “What?”

“It's called the Senior Executive Service. You rotate every five years, but you stay inside the Beltway.”

“And he and your other friends can help me get in?”

“Oh, it's mainly Eddie. He can get you in at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or Program Analysis and Evaluation. You might be better at PA and E, actually.”

“What do I have to do?”

“I told you before—he just wants to help his students.
He has a lot of respect for you. Do you want me to tell him you're considering it?”

“Let me think about it. I've still got some time before I have to make a decision.”

She leaned back in her chair. Then he felt her shoeless nyloned foot slide up his leg. “That isn't the only reason I invited you here.”

“To introduce me to Andy?”

“And to talk about our careers. No.” Her foot moved up his thigh, onto his lap. He leaned back too and wiped his hair back, glancing around. No one was looking at them. The long table shielded them both from the chest down.

“Here's a member of the standing committee,” she murmured. The colored spots flamed in her cheeks.

“I thought you were dating Eddie … Dr. Szerenci.”

“I don't need help keeping track of my relationships. Let's go up to Ron's office and do it on his desk.”

“Jesus, Sandy.”

The toes stopped. “Wait a minute. You've been coming on to me at Henry's, and that's okay, but when I come on to you, it's ‘Jesus'? Tell me you haven't been brainfucking me since the first night of class.”

“I'd better get back to work.” He pushed her foot off his crotch and got up, knocking over his ginger ale. “Shit. … Look, I'll think about the SES thing, all right?”

“Coward,” she said, but she didn't look displeased as he stumbled away, mopping at his pants with a napkin. She looked off over the hall and coughed, then leaned back and lit another cigarette.

Sitting in the Metro on the way back to Crystal City, watching the lights flash past in the subterranean darkness, he couldn't say why he'd reacted the way he had with Cottrell. She was good-looking and smart and, yeah, he
had
fantasized about her. But face-to-face with an invitation, he'd wilted, No, that wasn't exactly it. Pondering it, he realized that some wary and self-preserving instinct had warned him to steer clear of her. He smiled sardonically at his reflection in the window as around him other passengers gathered papers and briefcases, preparing to
depart. And for once, goddamn it, he'd listened! Was he getting smart at last?

The afternoon pretest meeting for Primal Thunder was at a conference room in the Crystal City Marriott. When he slid his hat into the rack, it was the only Navy cover there. A line of Air Force officers and Canadians in their dark green single-service uniforms stood in line at a folding table. Behind them, noncoms were checking IDs against a list. They found his name on it, but there didn't seem to be a briefing package for him. He protested and they found a spare. He got a seat and flipped through it— schedules, a welcome-aboard package, maps, an operation plan.

He closed it as a Canadian colonel took the podium. The colonel made a short statement in French, then switched to English, as if having made his point. “In cooperation with our NATO allies, and in pursuance of a bilateral agreement signed in Ottawa last year, my government and armed service are completing preparations for tests of the U.S. Air Force AGM-eighty-six air-launched cruise missile over the territory of Canada.

“First a brief overview of what we are calling Project Primal Thunder.

“Starting on January fifteenth, a test series of eight missiles will be launched from B-fifty-two Gs in the Beaufort Sea, fly a fifteen-hundred-mile corridor through the Northwest Territories and British Columbia, and be parachute-recovered at the Primrose Test Range, Cold Lake, Alberta. The decision to test the cruise in Canada will take them over terrain and through air masses and weather conditions similar to those a missile would encounter launching over the Barents, Kara, or Laptev seas on penetrations of northern Russia to Soviet Siberia.

“Two other programs will be carried out simultaneously with the ALCM tests. The first is to permit the Canadian armed services to evaluate the ability of the DEW line and the Pinetree line to detect launch aircraft and the missiles themselves, and the ability of the Canadian Region of NORAD to detect, track, and destroy. The second is to test the ground-launched U.S. Air Force BGM-one
oh nine G, with this missile flying along the same route but in the opposite direction: launching at Primrose, then impacting on-ice targets just north of the Yukon coast.”

He turned the meeting over to a USAF general, and Dan leaned forward, squinting as the graphic went up.

The corridor was shaped like a hockey stick, with the bottom of the L facing east. A hundred nautical miles wide, it began north of the Canadian coast, three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, in the ice-locked emptiness of the Beaufort Sea. Section A extended from the air-launch point to just within the coast. B and C curved southeast, west of Great Bear Lake. D and E turned south, section E crossing the border into British Columbia between 121 and 124 degrees west. F was a snaky bend east again, leaving the flat frozen tundra to thread the passes of the Rocky Mountains. G and H passed north of Great Slave Lake and Edmonton, centered on 56 degrees north. The end of segment H, the tip of the hockey stick, poked out into Saskatchewan north of Saskatoon. Looking at it, Dan had to admit that whichever way you flew it, it would be a good workout for a low-altitude missile.

At the very end of the brief, the general mentioned GLCMs again, very briefly. Then he turned the floor over to a youthful-looking Air Force major.

People began getting up even as he put his first slide on the screen. Dan craned past bodies to see it. The field tests would be carried out with launchers and battery personnel from Dugway Proving Ground, where earlier tests had been conducted. The transporter-erector-launchers, which were mounted on truck-towed trailers, would convoy from Dugway to Cold Lake in an epic cross-country journey that would double as a road test.

By now most of the audience had either left the room or were standing in the back, discussing the ALCM in loud voices. The major seemed to note this. He paused, looking down, then said, simply, “That concludes my brief.”

He turned the mike off and came down from the platform. Dan got up as the major passed him, and said, “Hey. Hey! I' m the Navy guy who's going along with you.”

“Oh yeah? Steve Manhurin. Major, USAF.” They
shook hands. “You coming on the cross-country thing?”

“I don't think so. I'll be flying up, meet you in Cold Lake. How do you feel about your boosters?”

“I wish I felt better,” said Manhurin. “The results we got at Dugway weren't conclusive. I'm not exactly an expert, but seems like it's worse when the missile gets cold-soaked. Maybe we can get a handle on exactly what's wrong this time.”

“Uh, do I get the feeling you're playing second fiddle to the AGM-eighty-six?”

“I get that feeling too. But I think we basically have a good missile. I'll go to Europe with it.”

Dan hung around awhile, talked to a couple of the Canadians and exchanged cards. Finally, he got his hat and headed back through the Crystal Underground, thinking about what he'd just seen.

10

 

 

 

“Finished with that, sir?”

Dan flinched back from sleep. His mouth tasted foul. He slugged down the last half an inch of warm scotch and handed the cup to the flight attendant. Beside him, Sakai made choking noises. The plastic sound channels of his headphones were twisted around his neck. Dan nudged him. “Sparky. We're on final. Wake up before you hang yourself.”

As the engineer writhed into wakefulness, Dan looked down again at his notes from the latest West Coast trip.
New Jersey
was out of dry dock and moored at Long Beach, preparing for sea trials and commissioning. Rip-out and rebuild of belowdecks spaces had been completed, and Raytheon was shipping the consoles and racks later this month.

The software, though, was now nearly a year behind schedule. The
Merrill
software build was supposed to be the basis for the battleship programming, but it wouldn't be ready for commissioning and might not be for the shakedown cruise, either. Dan was recommending that the integration contractor start a parallel software development effort.

He passed it to Sakai. “Press your eyeballs to that.”

While the engineer read, Dan went through his wheel-book, making sure he'd done as much as he could. Tomorrow was the party; he had to slip over to the Exchange and stock up. Next week he'd be leaving for Canada, with the congressional appearance after that, then Canada
again. Lots going on…. The big news this week had been Bill Perry's decision to put the Boeing ALCM into full production. Dan wondered if they'd even have a Tomahawk program left after the hearings.

“Attention, please. We are beginning our approach to Dulles Airport, Washington, D.C. Please return your seats and tray tables to their full upright position.”

He'd called Kerry from California, and waited eagerly to hear her voice. But when she came on, it had been casual enough. Just “Hi, how are you? I'm coming back Saturday. Want to get together?” They'd agreed on a run and bike ride along the C and O Canal, then dinner in Georgetown.