The Shadow Cabinet (52 page)

“You mean Bernie can break the law and you can't.”

“That's well put too,” he acknowledged. “Cynicism is the cross we all bear these days.”

“Has Bernie ever taken a dive?”

Merkle looked sharply at Wilson. “Bernie? Oh, Lord, no. Never.”

“You're sure?”

“Absolutely. He's one of the few people I trust without reservation. That's not to say he doesn't always look or act above suspicion, but that's been his advantage. The wrong kind do trust him—always. Why do you ask?”

“Morris disappears with all this money in his briefcase. Klempner has him staked out from next door and doesn't know a thing. That's a little odd, isn't it?”

“Not odd at all. That can be explained.”

“So how useful was he on this Caltronics case?”

“Nothing has quite worked out on this Caltronics case,” Merkle said, rising restlessly. “But Bernie's no more to blame than anyone else.” He moved again to the window.

“So Klempner does have a hunting license.”

“Does that look like snow? I haven't put on my snow tires yet. I think it does look like snow. Awfully early, isn't it?” He turned back to his desk, still standing as he sorted through the memos on his blotter. “Caltronics just dried up, Haven. It happens all the time. Investigations go nowhere and you move on to more important things. We could never get the Nixon administration to move on organized crime, remember? Every administration brings in its own priorities. These days it's drugs and they're borrowing from our budget to get it moving. That's something people don't think about. The budget problem.”

Wilson stood up. “I understand.”

“When you've got a budget crisis, you put your assets to work where you can get the best results—cost efficiency, you see.” He lifted a memo from his desk and pondered it with mock seriousness. “The fact is we've got too small a staff and too many investigations, too big a backlog. Supply-side investigations, you might say. The cost-efficient wash.”

“You mean you had a little political heat from upstairs,” Wilson said. “Do me a favor, Fred.”

“I'll do what I can, but don't misunderstand, Haven. We didn't make that Caltronics case. Nothing we could take to a grand jury.”

“Do me a favor anyway. Call Klempner and tell him about our talk today. Everything. Even my suspicions about his taking a dive. Tell him that worried you a little—”

“Are you serious?”

“I'm serious. Just do it and then maybe we can roll this thing up the right way. That's what you want, isn't it?”

Chuck Larabee's office was on the third floor of an old building on K Street. The three small rooms behind the pebbled-glass door were dim with the imperfect light leaking in through unwashed windows overlooking the building's center well. The smell of boiled coffee from a morning percolator still stained the air.

Larabee was out and his elderly secretary thought it doubtful that he would return—it was then after five. But Wilson was curious about his office and accepted her invitation to wait in a leather chair just inside Larabee's office door. She was nearly seventy. Her hair was as thin and dry as milkweed, tinted a curious color that might have been a powder-puff peach or tangerine; her face was soft and downy, and she wore nursing home shoes. She had that air of sweet fatuity and senile incompetence that he associated with long-retired government secretaries of a long-vanished era, brought out of a tiny apartment at the far edge of Connecticut Avenue for some small salary to complement a smaller pension.

She had been busy as he arrived, standing at the side of her desk as she painstakingly copied names from an aerospace industry catalogue onto three-by-five cards. She had no idea what purpose it served, except that Mr. Larabee wanted it done, and her uncertainty only increased her ineptitude. She gossiped through the door as she worked, something no efficient secretary could have managed, and she managed very poorly. During the fifteen minutes he was there she managed to complete only three cards. She lost her place in the catalogue, forgot the page number, misplaced her glasses, which she removed every time she pursued a new train of thought, couldn't locate the cards she'd already filled out, and dropped her pen on the floor. When Wilson retrieved it from under the desk, she told him his shoes needed resoling.

She talked to him of the old Agriculture Department, romaine lettuce at the supermarket, pets in apartments, and dark muggers in darker hallways. As he listened, he left the chair to study the plaques, citations, and framed pictures that decorated the walls of Larabee's small office. Painted plaster of paris or wooden ship medallions hung there, the kind passed out by U.S. naval vessels in foreign ports. There were framed CINCPAC citations, letters of appreciation from South Korean officials, a testimonial from a Thai general, warm messages from congressmen and senators he'd escorted through the souvenir shops of Seoul or Hong Kong, a certificate of attendance at a Vandenberg AFB missile launch, and a diploma from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

Larabee's deserted desk was stacked high with
Congressional Records
and old
Early Birds
, the Pentagon morning news sheet. Behind the desk was a typing table, and behind that, a small telex.

The other wall was covered with photographs, most of them group photographs, taken at a number of installations abroad or aboard U.S. vessels in foreign waters. Some were signed, many weren't; the majority had been taken by U.S. Navy or government photographers. There was Larabee with various congressmen on the flight decks of U.S. aircraft carriers, with touring senators, on the steps of American embassies, Larabee on the tarmac of foreign airfields in front of Air Force 707s ferrying junketing groups from the Armed Services or Foreign Relations Committee.

“I just don't know if he's coming back or not, Mr. Wilson,” the secretary informed him from the door as she pinned on her hat. “He's probably gone to the health club across the street, the way he does.” She gave him the name.

“Do you happen to know his telex number?” he asked as he opened the office door.

She didn't know. He seldom used it and kept the key locked up.

But it was the memory of those photographs that Wilson carried with him as he stood outside, looking for a cab. He'd never understood it, even recognized it, until that afternoon as he stood in Chuck Larabee's office. Perhaps this was because he'd been so much a part of it himself. It was all there, a chronicle of these past three decades—of this city that sent its emissaries out year after year, session after session, sent out its mercantilists of arms, aid, goodwill, and evangelism, all fanning out across the globe like circuit riders or drummers, these self-proclaimed experts who were once small-town pharmacists, lawyers, oilmen, staff aides, or astronauts, their briefing books filled with facts, their heads swollen with sanctimonious self-importance, small-town virtue, and courthouse democracy, Chautauqua-circuit busybodies and pettifogs carrying their instruction to Malaysians, Arabs, Turks, Chinese, Koreans, Afghans, blacks, and Indians, and on behalf of whom? For an American people whose deepest instincts were not for politics but the escape from politics.

5.

The headline of the Top Secret DIA daily intelligence summary appearing that morning stunned its readership and shocked the higher echelons of the Pentagon, who thought the innermost mysteries of their sanctum sanctorum secure from the laity. Staff aides and secretaries scurried for cover. The switchboards in the executive offices in the A ring lit up as subordinates called in, seeking guidance. Phones jangled through B, C, and D rings as the news spread. Cries of recrimination vibrated through the closed doors of the highest offices, and for a few hours that morning the building oscillated like some sedate old Italian opera house rung by a cacophonous twelve-tone premiere.

“Well, just how in the goddamned hell did he get there?” cried a deputy secretary to his senior aide after one such meeting. “Whoever's responsible, get him up here!”

“Do you realize what was on the President's desk this morning?” a livid White House counselor asked a senior Defense official at nine-twelve. “Do you have any idea what was waiting on his desk? Now that he's got it in his mind, how do you expect us to get it out? He's got a press conference tomorrow!”

The White House had received twenty copies; so had the National Security Council, State, CIA, a handful of House and Senate committees, OMB, and Treasury.

“Damage control, that's the main thing,” counseled a nervous Pentagon press spokesman, perplexed by the tumult about him, but his bafflement was characteristic. He had a smooth voice and a pleasant delivery, but he knew little about arms control issues. Before his appointment he'd been a publicist for a Houston mobile home manufacturer.

On the floor below, Leyton Fischer had taken his copy of the DIA daily intelligence summary from his in box, preparing to cast it aside immediately, as he usually did, when a lurid banner headline,
New York Post
style, caught his eye. He blinked, paused for a minute, moved his eyes to the window, blinked again, and let his eyes creep back to the bold red type. No, it was still there. The headline read:

32,159TH NUCLEAR WARHEAD OPTION TARGETED
!

PENTAGON POINTILLISTS PAINT OUT PEVEK
!

HERRING CANNERY IS 32,159TH
!

The text of the story identified the Soviet target just assigned the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal by the Strategic Target Planning Staff. Pevek was an isolated Russian community on the Kamchatka peninsula in the Bering Sea. The small herring plant on the Shelekhov Gulf employed thirty-five workers, but because some of the tinned product was supplied to the Soviet Navy, the Strategic Target Planning Staff had assigned the 32,159th nuclear target option to the antiquated Pevek herring works and the nearby Pevek boat repair shed, which employed twelve workers.

The story in the DIA summary lifted the secrecy from a subject only a very few were privy to. The shortage of legitimate military and industrial targets in the Soviet Union when compared with the size of the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal had long been an embarrassment to those few officials who were aware of the Pentagon's bookkeeping problem. There were simply too few legitimate targets for an arsenal that was multiplying like kudzu grass.

The dilemma had been best expressed a few months earlier by an Air Force general, a member of the Strategic Target Planning Staff whose responsibility was to identify military and industrial targets in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe for U.S. strategic nuclear warheads. His remarks, to Leyton Fischer's astonishment, were inserted at the bottom of the second paragraph.

“Goddammit,” he'd told a recently assigned STPS staff member who'd expressed amazement at the imbalance of targets and nuclear warheads. “Do you think any U.S. postmaster in his right mind would open up five hundred more post offices in Arkansas tomorrow just because Congress gave him this big new budget to spend and it was the congressman from Arkansas that did it? Hell, no; he'd turn back the money. But you put a little political heat on him, like the kind of heat we've got, and by God he'd find them right quick—put a post office right up beside every gas pump, cow pasture, and bass pond in Arkansas if he had to. That's all we're doing, in a manner of speaking, with those warheads—just delivering the U.S. mail.”

If only a few senior officials were aware of the problem, even fewer were sensitive to it. Like every other national security issue of existential importance—whether the Soviet Union had in fact achieved strategic parity, whether the Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 ICBMs were as accurate as those handful who understood their own logarithmic proof claimed, whether the Soviet civil defense effort was a primitive Muscovy reflex or a sinister Politburo calculation, whether the MX missile was a counterforce weapon or a first-strike killer—the dilemma was hidden behind a veil of secrecy so impenetrable that only a few were aware of it. In addition, the U.S. SIOP, or nuclear targeting plan, was couched in technical jargon so opaque that the physical nature of a given Soviet or East European target was further concealed from recognition. Like obscurantist high priests or existential theologians, the technicians seemed intent upon bamboozling not only others but themselves.

The DIA daily intelligence summary had lifted the cloak of concealment from the sixteen most recently selected targets. The Pevek “Soviet Naval Stores Resupply Facility—SN-16” was in fact the antiquated Pevek herring works, a ramshackle wooden structure with a tin roof, employing thirty-five civilian workers. The other targets recently added to the U.S. SIOP included a milk factory in Uzbekistan, an NCO rest and recuperation center nearby, and two truck deicing sheds in the Siberian Arctic—all of them now fresh new dots on that canvas of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe reaching from the NATO frontier to the Bering Sea, dotted in with hues of varying megatonnage, like a pointillist's finished painting, and which, one day touched with fire, would strip-mine the Soviet Union from Minsk to Sakhalin.

But that wasn't all Leyton Fischer found. Even more alarming was an article on the second page, announcing the triumph of the new U.S. strategic doctrine implicit in a November National Security Decision Directive signed just recently at the White House. Was the latter aware of its import? The anonymous author seemed to be.
DETERRENCE OFFICIALLY BURIED!
the banner announced. The article that followed explained the new strategy, based not upon the intellectually bankrupt deterrence deadlock, whose sophistries had long since been exhausted, but on unequivocal U.S. superiority. Once the U.S. nuclear edge was reclaimed, the strategic arsenals that had formerly been the inert guardians of national survival would be converted into instruments of political power—“leverage,” in the White House lexicon. The passive U.S. Minuteman missiles—“fixed like some clumsy woolly mammoth in the heroic but futile reactive mode of a bygone ice age”—would be replaced by the MX missile, the centerpiece of the new strategy, a foraging first-strike killer. Soviet adventurism would be a lonely swimmer in the uncertain seas inhabited by this cruising great white shark—predatory, unpredictable, and ruthlessly malevolent, like the D-5 submarine-launched missile soon to follow.