Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (67 page)

The Pentagon,
Washington
,
D.C.

The next morning

           
He felt stupid at first, with
everyone watching. The place was packed, and most of the people looked as if
they had nothing better to do than to watch him. Or was it just because he was
here to face the music, and he thought everyone here knew it?

 
          
The
nearly six-hundrcd-acre Pentagon Reservation was like a little city unto
itself, so it was generally easy to hide among the over twenty-six thousand
military and civilian Department of Defense employees and three thousand staff
persons there. You automatically felt anonymous when you walked into the place.
The Pentagon building itself was an impressive, imposing structure encompassing
thirty-four acres and almost four million square feet of office space, making
it one of the largest office buildings in the world. Built in just sixteen
months at the beginning of World War II over a former garbage dump and swamp,
it was said that the building was designed so efficiently that anyone could
walk from one end of it to the other in less thin ten minutes (although it
could take as long as thirty minutes just to walk in from the parking lot). If
you w ere one of the thousands of persons w alking into the North Parking
entrance, you could easily feel insignificant indeed, like a tiny ant climbing
into a huge anthill.

 
          
Even
at
six
a.m.
,
the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club at the
end of Corridor Eiight was nearly full. Patrick McLanahan would have liked to
use a treadmill or a recumbent bicycle— since there were so many of them, lined
up three deep practically the entire width of the complex, he would have felt a
lot less conspicuous. But every one of the dozens of machines was already
taken, so he had to go with his trusty weight machines. Besides, some of the
soldiers on the treadmills, even the older ones, were jogging or running on
them at a pace that made Patrick cringe. The POAC did not have the newer weight
machines, the ones that electronically set and varied the resistance, so
Patrick did it the old-fashioned way—set a weight, tried it, adjusted it, then
did three sets of ten reps with heavy weights. Once he got into the rhythm, he
forgot about being the only guy in the entire facility lifting weights.

 
          
His
body quickly shifted to automatic workout mode, freeing his mind to work on
other problems—like what was going to happen to his career and his life now.

 
          
He
was gone from the
High-Technology
Weapons
Center
, dismissed for security reasons pending
court-martial, after twelve occasionally turbulent, oftentimes dangerous, most
times thrilling off-and-on years. When he'd arrived there in 1988, HAWC—known
then simply as Groom Lake Test Range—had been little more than a collection of
old weatherbeaten Atomic Energy Commission wooden shacks and bird’s- nest-infested
hangars surrounding an old World War II runway built on, then hidden on, the
dry lake bed. with a few high-tech security updates added by Lieutenant-General
Brad Elliott, its first full-time commander, in order to attract the attention
of military scientists and Pentagon program managers. Over the years, under
Brad Elliott, Dreamland had grown, expanded, modernized, and then finally taken
the lead in futuristic weapons and aircraft research and development. Patrick
had been there to see most of it.

 
          
With
Brad gone. Patrick had hoped that he might someday take over the reins at
Dreamland and take it to the next level of innovation and leadership. A command
assignment at Dreamland was considered a sure ticket to a four-star billet.
That was almost certainly true—if you could adapt to the strict security and
compartmentalization and ignore the fact that for the entire time you were
there and for some time after you departed, you became virtually invisible,
even dead to the rest of the world.

           
You quickly had to learn to live
with the fact that being part of the future of the
U.S.
military would forever alter your life.

           
Patrick had accepted that fact, and
even learned to enjoy it. Having a wife who used to work there helped
considerably. But it took a special mind-set to work at Dreamland, just as it
surely took a special mind-set to work at the Five-Sided Potomac Puzzle Palace.
Patrick preferred the hot. dry, wide-open skies of
Groom
Lake
to the stifling, confining, prisonlike feel
of this place.

 
          
In
between sets, he w'as able to peek at the televisions throughout the POAC. They
were filled with news stories about the recently declared war between
Albania
and
Macedonia
, the unraveling of the Dayton Peace Accords
and the cease-fire in Kosovo, and the expansion of German and Russian
peacekeeping forces in the Balkans to try to maintain order, on the heels of a
rapid American withdrawal from the region. But mostly, the stories were about
the dismantling of the American military and the American loss of prestige as
the protector of world democracy.

 
          
Maybe
it was good that I’m getting out now, Patrick thought grimly, as he started
working on lat pull-downs. The
U.S.
military looked as if it was in the midst
of a complete cultural and ideological meltdown—thanks to the new hippie
president and his eighteenth-century ideas. They just had no place in the
twenty-first century. Unfortunately, the
United States
was about to find this out the hard way.

 
          
More
folks were looking at him again, and Patrick realized he was pumping away at
the weight machines like a maniac. The more he watched the rapid, shocking
dismantling and denigration of the military in which he had spent most of his
adult life, the angrier he became. The workout was supposed to relax him before
he went on to his Pentagon appointments, but they were unfortunately having the
opposite effect. It was time to go and face his future.

 
          
Screw
'em, Patrick told himself. If they want to take my stars or court-martial me,
let them try. I’ll fight them every last step of the way. The military is worth
a fight... at least, the
old
military, the one Patrick thought he knew,
was worth it.

 
          
He
showered, then dressed in his Class A uniform. For the first time in many
years, he studied himself in a full-length mirror. It wasn’t often he wore
Class A’s, and the blue cotton- polyester outfit was shiny and oddly creased
from disuse and improper storage. The single silver stars, given to him by the
former president of the United States Kevin Martindale, and the shiny command navigator
wings given to him by Brad Elliott, looked awfully good, but everything else
seemed extraordinarily plain. Only two rows of ribbons, the same as he’d had as
a junior captain—Brad Elliott didn’t believe in awards and decorations and
prohibited the release of any information whatsoever from Dreamland that might
reveal something about its activities.

 
          
A
rather plain uniform, he thought. Like his uniform, maybe his career in the Air
Force really didn’t amount to anything after all. Even though he had done a lot
of very cool, very exciting things, in the end maybe it didn't matter, any more
than he did among all the superstar military men and women in the Pentagon.

 
          
As
he put the uniform on and prepared for his meetings, Patrick realized with
surprise that it would possibly be the last time he would ever wear this
uniform—except perhaps at his court-martial,

 
          
After
dressing, Patrick went right to the H. H. “Hap” Arnold Executive Corridor and
the Secretary of the Air Force’s and Air Staff offices. Although HAWC was
“overtly” run by Headquarters Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Materiel
Command, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio (the actual chain
of command was classified, but if anyone did any checking that’s what they
would find), the work at HAWC was so classified that the Secretary of the Air
Force himself, Steven C. Bryant, oversaw most matters dealing with HAWC.

 
          
Patrick’s
appointments stemmed from his court-martial—as Terrill Samson promised, formal
charges against him and David Luger had been preferred at the close of business
the day of their meeting—so his first stop was the offices of the Air Staff. At
first the chief Area Defense Counsel from Air Force Materiel Command
headquarters, a full colonel, had been assigned to his case, and he had been
given all the preliminary briefings and paperwork. That was all window
dressing, of course, because none of this would ever go through the normal
legal channels. The matter stayed at Wright-Pat for less than twenty-four hours
before being referred directly to the two- star Air Force Judge Advocate
General (TJAG) at the Pentagon.

 
          
His
0730 appointment w ith TJAG lasted five minutes. The two-star's recommendation:
request early retirement at current rank and time in serv ice and end this
thing with an honorable discharge and an unblemished record. All the paperwork
was ready, the chief Air Force Area Defense Counsel, a one-star general,
standing by to answer any questions. The Area Defense Counsels were the Air
Force’s “defense attorneys,” answerable to no one but the chief of staff of the
Air Force, General Victor Hayes. He, too, recommended he request early
retirement: he had reviewed the memoranda from the Secretary of Defense and
found the offer of a clear record, full time in grade and service, and an
honorable discharge complete and acceptable, even generous considering the
seriousness of the charges.

 
          
Patrick's
simple answer: “No, sir.”

 
          
Patrick’s
next stop was the office of the three-star Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel.
Again behind closed doors, he was notified that his security clearance had been
taken away, he no longer had a nuclear weapons security or surety
authorization, was no longer authorized to fly as a crew member in military
aircraft, and could not handle or employ any kinds of weapons, from an airborne
laser all the way down to a handgun. Patrick was also notified that his Air
Force Specialty Code had been changed from an XO. Commander and Director, to
OX, or “Other”—“other" in this case meaning a defendant in a court-martial
case, an officer with no specialty, no responsibilities, no unit, no team. The
change in AFSC would be entered into his official personnel records for
everyone to see, virtually guaranteeing that he would never be selected for
another assignment, never selected for promotion, and never be given any awards
or decorations. That record could also be made public, so any future employers
would see it, too. guaranteeing that he would never be chosen to sit on a board
of directors or be hired for any position, either home or abroad, that required
a security clearance.

           
Each time Patrick was told of some
new surprise, he was required to sign a form notifying him that he understood
everything that had been said and all of the possible consequences of w hat was
happening. At the same time, each time he was warned of some dire consequence
or advised about some new potentially embarrassing or stressful step in the
court-martial process, he was offered another chance to voluntarily retire with
full rank, time in service, his records expunged, and a completely honorable
discharge—definitely “carrot and stick’" tactics. Each time, his answer
was the same: “No. sir,”

 
          
By
the time he’d finished, Patrick felt like a gang of thugs had beaten him. His
briefcase was stuffed with dozens of copies of all of the forms, letters,
memos, and directives outlining the beginning of the end of his seventeen-year
Air Force career.

 
          
When
Patrick emerged from the meeting with the DCS/ Personnel office, a lieutenant
colonel with gold piping on his shoulder was waiting just outside the door:
“Sir. General Hayes would like to have a word with you.” he said simply, and
led the way out. Well. Patrick thought, he couldn't get it any worse from the
Chief of Staff than from all the other Air Staff officers he had already
encountered. Might as well get it over with.

 
          
General
Victor “Jester” Hayes’s office was large, with a twelve-person triangular
videoconference table setup and a comfortable casual conversation pit in front
of his desk, but it was simply decorated, with pictures and items celebrating
the history and advancements of the U.S. Air Force rather than celebrating his
own career. Although Jester’s undergraduate degree had been in engineering from
the
Air
Force
Academy
, his first love was twentieth-century
American history, especially as it related to aviation. His office was like a
small aviation museum: a copy of the Wright brothers’ patent for the first
powered airplane: a machine gun from a Curtis-Jenny biplane flown during World
War I; a Norden bomb sight; a control stick from his belov ed F-15 Eagle: and
photographs galore of aviation pioneers, aces, and Air Force Medal of Honor
recipients.