Tomahawk (30 page)

“Sandy, are you sure you're okay? Maybe you need to get some kind of help.”

“Yeah, I need help all right…. I'll see what I can find out. Give me your number again.” He gave her his JCM extension.

Time to see the admiral. He took a moment before he went up to transfer a couple of sheets of paper from his briefcase to a blue correspondence folder.

When he stepped off the elevator, he touched his ribbons, ran a hand down his buttons, checked his shoes. He felt detached, unable to believe the moment had arrived. He thought, Every habit I've got is Navy Practically every thought I have is Navy. Can I really go through with this?

It seemed like a long walk across the carpet, skirting the low coffee table with its pristine new issues
of Armed Forces Journal, Military Technology,
and
International Defense Review.
Past the leather couch. Carol pointed him on into the inner office. He took a last deep breath, then went in.

The admiral was sitting at his desk in his shirtsleeves, reading a report. His blouse hung from an oak stand. Past and below him spread the fields and railroad yards that were slowly sprouting more office complexes. One wall was covered with photographs of ships and unit plaques. Dan centered himself before the desk and came to attention. “Lieutenant Commander Lenson, sir,”

Niles's eyes came up slowly. “Carry on, Lenson. Fireball?”

“No thank you, sir.”

“Sit down.” Niles reached out to the intercom. “Carol,
give us twenty minutes.” The secretary said, “Yes, sir,” and Dan heard the door close.

Niles looked back at whatever he'd been reading. Dan let himself down into the chair, realizing this was the first time he'd ever been alone with the man. He remembered when he'd first met Niles, a captain then, in a concrete-block admin building at Charleston Naval Base. He'd faced him again after the incident off Cuba, in
Barrett's
wardroom. Niles had chaired the investigation. He suddenly realized it must have been Niles who'd put him in for the Silver Star.

Now the report was laid aside with a grunt. Once more the little eyes with the sleepy, freckled lids perused him; again the mustache turned down above grim lips. It was as if Niles, too, was remembering.

The admiral rumbled, “You've been doing a lot of work for the deputy.”

“For Colonel Evans? Yes, sir.”

“What you get assigned seems to get done. Those were good briefing papers for the hearing, too.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But now Dale tells me you've been criticizing the program. I'm getting that from other sources, too. What the hell's going on?”

“I said something. Yes, sir.”

“In front of congressional people, staffers.”

Now Dan saw the problem. He remembered the civilians sitting with them, in the Rayburn Building's basement. Finally, he said, “Sir, that was poor judgment and I apologize for that. For giving a personal opinion when I was in uniform. But the fact is, there have been some changes going on in my life. I don't know how to describe it.”

“You don't like what's going on at the hearings?”

‘That's not the biggest issue, but no, sir, that's not exactly inspiring, either.”

Niles selected a red sphere from the container and unwrapped it. He held it close to his eye as if examining it for imperfections. Then popped it into his mouth and said around it, “I don't like it myself. In fact, when I left yesterday,
I had to take down my pants and kiss my ass just to get my self-respect back.

“You know, they say every weapons program has two phases: too early to tell and too late to stop. Every program takes hits from Congress. But we've got our mafia out there, too. This missile's going to fly. I promised that when I took over “

“Well, sir—”

“I know it's not that inspiring looking at American government in action. But ask yourself: How sharp a lens do you want them to be supervising us through?”

Dan thought that through. “I'm having trouble getting my arms around that statement, sir. Are you saying it's better for us if Congress doesn't know what they're doing?”

“Well, not exactly. But those are the people we work for, and if we had it any other way I know of, we wouldn't like it any better, and probably a lot less. Hear what I'm saying?”

“Well, sir, I wasn't actually talking about the hearings.”

Niles's forehead turned slightly darker. “So what exactly is the problem?”

“Sir, I'm just… undergoing a change in attitude on participating in the development of weapons.”

“You didn't seem to have any problem handling weapons when you took out those gunboats and aircraft on
Barrett.
And faced down that son of a bitch Harper with a forty-five.”

“He had the forty-five, sir, I had the riot gun. But I guess my thinking has evolved since then.”

Niles grunted. “Go on.”

“Well… we're so focused on violence. Every ethical system says it's wrong to kill, and here we are prepping for it night and day and on weekends.” He felt silly even as he said it. What else was the military for? Words that had felt simple and right in the bare dining room at the Dorothy Day House sounded naïve here. Niles blinked in sleepy incredulity, but Dan kept on. “We're the best-armed country in the world. Most of our R and D money goes to weapons development. And we wonder why the
Japanese and the Europeans are ripping us up on imports. The cities are going to hell; we're running this tremendous deficit—when do we say enough?”

Niles sat back, sucking the candy. After a pause, he said, “We're facing a country that spends fifty billion dollars more a year on weapons than we do. They just invaded Afghanistan. They outnumber us, they outspend us, and they hate our guts. How do they fit into your picture?”

“I'm not sure. But we've got to look like just as big a threat. We've got armies in Europe, carriers off their coasts; we've got more warheads pointed at them than they have pointed at us. I've been on one of their ships. They're not supermen. The damn bulkheads were made out of wood. They're probably as scared of us as we are of them.”

“They're the ones with massive armored forces threatening Europe. They're the ones pointing SS-twenties down our throat. If working on offensive weapons is what's bothering you, Tomahawk should go down smooth. It's obviously not first-strike.”

“Tomahawk's deep-strike, power-projection. If there is such a thing as a purely defensive system, that missile's not it.”

When Niles locked his hands behind his head, his chest looked even more massive. “Whether or not that's true— and I don't think it is—you're not talking to our mission here. Let's let State psychoanalyze the Russians. We're the ones the country trusts to develop the weapons to keep them off our backs. One, for deterrence, so we don't have to fight that war. Two, so that if we have to, we'll win.”

“Can anyone win a nuclear war, sir?”

“I don't know, but I want to be damn sure the other side figures they're going to lose at least as much as we will. And they're not the only bad guys, in case you haven't been reading the papers. It's a dangerous world and we're a fat, tempting target.”

Dan sat forward. He'd been trying to put what he felt into some logically consistent statement. Now Niles was leading him to what he'd been groping for. “Yes, sir, but—that's what bothers me. There's all kinds of arguments you can make to justify building whatever you
want. But if we've got them, the way I read history, sooner or later they'll be used.”

Niles started to answer, but Dan saw with lightning suddenness how it all fit together. “Just a minute, sir. What I'm saying is, we can't build our arguments on threat, or economics, or even politics. Because those are all
feedback
systems. We build; they build. They strike; we strike back. The institutions can't change. If we had real peace, they'd evaporate, and no institution ever liquidated itself. If we didn't have the Communists anymore, we'd go find somebody else to hate and fear.

“The only way we can escape is individually. If I choose not to resist evil with violence”—Niles's eyelids elevated a millimeter—”that breaks the loop. We are all, each,
individually,
responsible for the way things are. Only if we opt out
individually
will it ever stop.”

He stopped, feeling dizzy. Then he leaned back and waited for the shock front to hit.

Instead, Niles just nodded. Then said, “A lot of people tried turning the other cheek with the Nazis. It wasn't a successful strategy. But I hear what you're saying. It's about as good a way as I've ever heard of dicking yourself, careerwise. Short of sending a Polaroid of you and your dog to the selection board.”

“Sir, they told us both at the Academy that sometimes doing the right thing means you accept adverse outcomes. I'm thinking more and more that the right thing for me is to get out of weapons development.”

“And use?”

“Yes, sir, that's the logical next question, isn't it? If I'm going back to being an operator, how is that different from developing the hardware?”

“No, it's horseshit,” Niles rumbled. “I think you're getting confused by C rays.”

“Sir?”

“I think you're under the influence of this girlfriend Bucky Evans tells me you're seeing. This peace protester, or whatever she is.”

“You can leave her out of it, sir. These are my own thoughts.”

“All right, you lifted your safeties. Now you got a decision
to make. Because all I have to say is the same thing Dale tells me he told you. If those are the lines you're thinking along, you don't belong in the military. You figuring on the church? A preacher, a rabbi, a priest?”

“I don't think I've got a religious calling, sir.”

“Well, then, you already know you can either change your attitude, and we'll close-hold this conversation between us, or you can put in your letter.” The eyelids drooped; the fingertips met. “Have you got any leave on the books?”

“I'm due back in Cold Lake for the second half of the tests, sir.”

“Somebody else can cover that.”

“Sir, I don't think the shop's got anybody else with the background. I signed up for it and I'll finish the job.” Dan took a deep breath. It was here, the moment he'd thought would never come.

Getting up, he laid the folder he'd brought in with him precisely on the centerline of Niles's desk. “Captain Westerhouse presented me with that choice yesterday, and I thought it over last night. And I typed this up.”

Niles looked at the folder. “This what I think it is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is stupid. I need you here. You love the Navy. Don't you?”

That was true, so he said simply, “Yes, sir, I do.”

“If I open this, I have to forward it. You know what I think? I think your head's so full of pussy, you can't think straight.”

Dan said tightly, “Sir, I don't think that's an appropriate thing for you to say. I believe you owe me an apology for that.”

Niles thought about it. Finally, he grunted. “Sorry. Your life's your own. I just hate to see a good officer put himself in the compactor.” He waited a second more, but when Dan said nothing, he reached for the folder. He lifted it, his eyes still holding Dan's.

Dan had a moment of uncertainty, of something not far from terror. Was Niles right? He was tossing away everything he'd sacrificed for, suffered for. Maybe he
should reconsider…. Shit, his emotions were all over the screen.

Niles held it suspended for a moment more. Then, when Dan still said nothing, he opened the folder. He glanced at the letter, then tossed it onto the desk. It slid along the slick surface, almost to the edge, and teetered there. For a moment, Dan thought it would slip off to the floor, but then it decided to stay.

“You know these aren't granted automatically. Especially now, when we're short of trained ship drivers. It could hang fire for a while.”

“Yes, sir, I know that. ‘At the pleasure of the President.' “

“So you could hold on to it, make sure you don't have any second thoughts.”

“I'm not pulling it, sir. I want out.”

Niles swiveled his chair away from him. He picked up the report again, the one he'd been reading when Dan came in. Lenson stood there uncertainly. Finally, he said, “Am I dismissed, Admiral?”

“Get the fuck out of here,” Niles said.

He worked for a couple of hours with steadily decreasing enthusiasm before Sakai came over to show him a drawing. He gazed at it. “What the hell's that?”

“Part of the booster subassembly. The part that catapults it free after the pyrotechnic cord cutter shears the bolts that hold it on. See these little detents here?” He pointed to six little ears that ringed the portion of the booster that fit around the stern of the missile airframe.

Dan said he saw them. Sakai said, “These here could be the source of our hang-up problem. Under certain circumstances, what if they jammed? Like a screw top on a pickle jar when you get it cross-threaded.”

“You think that might be it?”

“I don't know. Trouble is, both times it did that, the missile took a header into the water. The divers found the missile once, but not the booster. The other time, they found it, but it was so banged up, you couldn't tell what happened.”

“You want to request another redesign?”

“Can't. I don't know the failure mode, whether it jams forward, aft, from torque, or what. Just thought I'd show it to you.”

Sakai went back to his desk. Dan sat with his head in his hands, pretending to read, but actually worrying.

If he really resigned … Shit, he
had.
What was this
if
business? But what if it came back approved next month? Where would he go? The merchant marine idea was stupid. The other possibility was to use his engineering experience. The natural place to go would be the defense industry. Convair or FMC or IBM Government Systems Division. But what sense did it make resigning from weapons development to take up weapons development?