Tomahawk (5 page)

But did he want another balls-to-the-wall assignment? He'd looked forward to shore duty to make some kind of
rational decision about his career. So far, only the shortage of midgrade officers staying in after Vietnam had kept him promotable. But that wouldn't be true forever. He was coming up on his executive officer boards. The cut was rough, almost half—

“Is this seat taken?”

He glanced up. “No.”

“I'm Zhou Xumei. They call me Mei.”

He told her his name. She nodded soberly, laying her books out across her desktop.

At twenty to eight, a darkly handsome ponytailed man in a long black leather coat swung through the door and threw his briefcase onto the desk. The blonde immediately got up and began showing him some sort of thesis or report. Dan watched her lean toward the professor, watched him examining her instead of the pages.

The stripped-off coat revealed a tweed jacket and knit tie. A quick roll call, and Dr. Edward Szerenci took command of the classroom. His voice was clipped, the accent faintly Eastern European.

“This is a course on methodology. Methodology is how we analyze a problem. Graduates from this course have a habit of ending up in one of three places: the Pentagon, the Beltway, or the Hill. Like Miss Cottrell.” Szerenci nodded toward the blonde. “We don't push any policy line here. What you have to do is think systematically, master the details, and work hard.”

Szerenci told them he'd been born in Hungary and had come to the United States when he was twelve. He worked for “a department of the government,” and did “consulting and policy.” He told them how to get an appointment with him if they wanted to discuss their work.

Dan glanced around. The others were hanging on Szerenci's words, faces lifted like sunflowers at noon. The professor reviewed the reading list, fielded a question about the schedule, then began his lecture. He paced as he talked, seizing chalk to sketch in a diagram. From time to time, he swept back a dark forelock.

“Analysis is more than operations research, although that is where many of our techniques originate. Military operations, weapons systems, economics, statistics, operations
research—in approximately that order—impact our approach to a problem.”

Dan recollected himself and scribbled rapidly: “Problem — model —> analytical techniques — elucidation —> presentation.”

After the introduction, Szerenci plunged into the current defense budget and what capabilities it bought. The chalk darted and scraped. Dan didn't have time to think. Concepts, insights, illuminating asides tumbled out faster than he could get them down. He sweated, abbreviating his words till they degenerated into scrawls.

Szerenci talked about choices in force structure. He sneered at the idea the United States should match its enemies man for man, tank for tank, plane for plane. He sneered, too, at the idea some mystical quality of generalship could upset quantitative and logistical factors. “If it's not quantifiable, it doesn't exist,” he said. “Reality is all there is. Zero out your preconceptions. Let the numbers speak. That's the only way to the truth. Or what passes for it inside the Beltway.”

At five to nine, Szerenci's watch beeped. He rounded off his sentence, underlined the last word on the board, and slammed his lesson plan closed.' “Till Monday,” he said. Dan sighed, fingering his hand as if it were made of blown glass.

As he went past her toward the door, the blonde, Sandy Cottrell, said, “You there. Want to grab a beer? Our after-class bunch gets together at Mr. Henry's. Sometimes
he
comes, too.”

“Sure,” he said. “Mr. Henry's is—”

“Right around the corner. Mei, you coming tonight?”

Mei came, along with a silent black girl, the carrottop, and a Korean. The trio of guys were marine buddies who had decided to go to school,together. They shoved tables together in the smoky old-fashioned bar and ordered beer and white wine.

Cottrell hand-rolled a cigarette from rough-cut Douwe Egberts and leaned back, rouged cheeks hollowing as she sucked in smoke. “He's totally brilliant,” she explained to the black woman. “He's always at the White House, or at
JCS. He advised the Undersecretary of State in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. This is the second time I've taken this class.”

“Are you still dating him?” the redhead asked her.

“On and off. Are you still out at PRC?”

“SAIC Breen's out there, too.”

“I thought he was at DARPA.”

“Did Dr. Szerenci say you worked at the Capitol?” Dan asked her. The cloud of smoke around her put him off, as did the indecipherable acronyms, but she was obviously the axis around which the group revolved.

“That's right. Legislative correspondent for Representative Zoelcke.”

“Oh yeah? That's great.”

“Actually, it's not. Just junior staff for a junior member. Eddie's going to find me a better slot, on the executive side.”

“Eddie?”

“Dr. Szerenci…. There he is. Over here!”

Szerenci threw his coat over a chair. The barman brought two double schnappses in tiny stemmed glasses. The professor tossed them both down. He sighed, slapped the table, and held out his hand to Dan. “We don't get much Navy presence. Where are you working?”

Dan told him about the project office. Szerenci nodded, then turned to the black girl. “Frances, did you call Schroeder out at GRC? Did he have the position?”

Cottrell leaned toward him to explain, sotto voce. “Eddie considers it his personal mission to place his students. He's got to have two, three hundred people around the Hill and inside the Beltway that he's gotten jobs for.”

“That's great,” said Dan. He caught the Chinese woman's eye across the table. She dropped her gaze instantly. “Mei, what do you do during the day?”

“Oh, just a translating position. I am hoping to do something more interesting when I go home.”

As they talked, he half-listened to Cottrell and Szerenci joking about somebody who worked at Brookings. Everyone sounded brilliant and happy and successful. He didn't feel exactly out of it, but a shadow hovered. He had two
martinis, then cut himself off and got up. The ex-marines were still hammering down beers.

Outside the bar, he stopped, congratulating himself on holding down his alcohol consumption. Then suddenly, he lifted his head, checking the shadows around him.

The bar had been lively, noisy, but Pennsylvania Avenue's shabby storefronts were dark. The sidewalks were empty, and traffic had ebbed to an occasional lone taxi. He walked west, remembering a Metro stop in that direction. He was turning down Twenty-third when a siren began to wail. Strobes licked the faces of the buildings. He glanced across the street, where he saw the entrance to George Washington University Hospital.

As the ambulance turned in, someone emerged from the shadows not far behind him. If he hadn't been looking back, he wouldn't have seen him at all. For a moment, he thought it was someone from the bar, one of the other students. Then he realized it wasn't.

The heavyset man had on a stocking cap, some sort of fatigue jacket. But his matted beard indicated he hadn't seen an inspection, or a razor, for a long time.

“Hey, mister. Got a match?”

“Sorry. Don't smoke.”

“Spare a buck?”

The night was late, the street still deserted save for the two of them. The man stood so close, Dan could smell him. He kept one hand inside the tattered jacket. Dan hesitated. Finally, he held out the change from his drinks.

“That all you got?”

“All you're getting.” He kept staring him in the eye, and at last the other looked down. As soon as the coins met his hand, he turned and limped away.

Dan breathed out and went on. Once more on the way back to the subway, he thought he heard footsteps behind him. He looked back, heart accelerating again, but saw no one. He felt relieved when the lit M sign came into view ahead, and then the hole in the earth, leading downward and back to Arlington, and eventually to bed.

4

 

 

 

He went in to work Saturday and part of Sunday, getting read in to the directives and going over minutes and technical pubs. Monday, he was at NC-1 at 0600. Niles was due in and he wanted to be ready.

When he unlocked the eleventh-floor door the boxes and trash were gone. The carpet had been shampooed and a scent of lemons hung in the air. It made him nervous, and after a moment he realized why. It was the same scent he'd inhaled for hours in the holding room outside the court of inquiry.

Shaking it off, he strolled around the cubicles, checking out the art. A series of color photos showed a tubular blur approaching, then disappearing.into a concrete wall. In the last frame, an orange opium blossom of fire bloomed on the far side. A Naval Institute poster silhouetted the U.S. fleet. Another, in red, illustrated the Soviet navy. The centerfolds and crotch shots that would have decorated a shipboard office were restrained here to a cheesecake of Morgan Fairchild in clingy red lingerie.

Next to Morgan was a sectional diagram of the missile. He leaned in. It
did
look like a torpedo. Straight-sided as a frozen foot-long frankfurter, with stubby, thin wings poking out. The tail was composed of four stiff little airfoils. A garbage can-shaped booster hung off the rear.

Pursuing his circle back to Munford's desk—no,
his
desk now—he stopped again in front of a diagram of the prototype launcher.

“Hey, Dan.” He turned, to see Vic Burdette hanging
up his hat. The black officer's smoothly shaven skull gleamed in the light. “New oh-seven's due in today. D'l hear something about you knowing him?”

Dan said he didn't exactly know Barry Niles but that he'd met him a couple of times.

“He was what, your commodore down in Charleston?”

“Right. He's a surface nuke. Had
Barney
and
California
before he went to DesRon Six.”

Burdette moved in, checking out Dan's ribbons. “Where'd you pick up the Silver Star?”

“In the Caribbean. Look, I need to pump your brains about what you and Munford were doing. Can we get together this morning?”

From the doorway, Captain Westerhouse said, “Dan, Vic. We're going in to see the new director at eight.”

“Yes, sir. We'll stand by.”

Westerhouse disappeared. Burdette took off his glasses and polished them with a tissue. “How about now?”

“Sure.”

Burdette briefed him for an hour, starting with the ABL. Each armored box launcher stored four Tomahawks. For launch, it clamshelled open, pointing the tubes up at about a thirty-degree angle. “We got turned on originally to put it on three classes of surface ship:
Spru-boats,
DLGs and CGNs. Then we got the surprise tasker to put them on the battleships first.”

“Munford mentioned some problems.”

“There are a few.” As Burdette leaned back, Dan saw a tiny golden fish on a necklace at the edge of his T-shirt. “Software's one. We're dealing with three outfits. One writes the launch control code, the other has the track control system, and the third is the system integrator.”

“What's the production status on the launcher?”

“We got prototypes. Convair put ‘em together by hand:”

“Can they make more?”

“Not in time. They built one for
Merrill,
see, and one for shore tests. Took them two years to hand-weld ‘em together Shoot, I got to go down to SPAWAR.”

“You can't leave now. You heard the captain.”

Burdette went to his cubicle to make a call. Dan sat
looking over the timetable. No doubt about it, the delivery date was going to be tough.

At 0830, Carol phoned and said the meeting with the admiral had been postponed for an hour. Hard on the heels of that, a Filipina in thick glasses and a pink pants suit tapped at the entrance to his cubicle. She carried a six-inch-thick block of files and memoranda.

“Lucy's our secretary,” Burdette called. “Yours, mine, and the captain's, but mainly the captain's.”

“You boys be ready to go up to the twelfth floor around ten. I'll give you a ring, so stick close.”

Dan spent the rest of the morning reading through the flight-test reports. The missile had already gone through an extensive teething period. Numerous glitches had come to light. The engine flooded out during submarine launches. The wings didn't deploy properly. They flexed and flapped when they
were
deployed. The booster-thrust vector tabs had been wired backward. Each failure had been investigated and corrected, and for about a year, as the long-range flight portion of the development program commenced, things had seemed to smooth out.

Then, right after the Air Force had restarted work on their own cruise, success percentages had taken a nosedive. One shot had launched textbook-perfect, heading inland for the Tonopah, but started behaving erratically and crashed in Los Padres National Forest. Another just missed a group of horseback riders. Inspectors had gone through what wreckage remained, but no one really knew what had gone wrong. Finally Kristofferson had filed a Method D action against Convair, holding payments until results improved. The next step was to cancel the contract.