Somebody explain how this airplane is going to be used.” Jake Grafton looked from face to face. He had his staff gathered around while he stood at the office blackboard with marker in hand. “Who wants the floor?”
“Captain, there’s been two or three studies on that written during the last three or four years,” said Smoke Judy.
“I know. Somebody dug them out for me and I read them. I want to hear your ideas.”
“Seems to me,” said Toad Tarkington, “that the first thing it has to do is land and take off from a carrier. Must be carrier-compatible.”
Jake wrote that down. Obvious, but often overlooked. Any navy attack plane must have a tailhook, nose tow, strong keel, routinely tolerate a six-hundred foot-per-minute sink rate collision with the deck on landing, fit into allotted deck space and accept electrical power and inertial alignment information from the ship’s systems. It had to be capable of being launched from existing catapults and arrested with existing machinery. In addition, it would have to be able to fly down a 3.5-degree glide slope carrying enough power to make a wave-off feasible, and with a low enough nose attitude so that the pilot could see the carrier’s optical landing system. Amazingly enough, in the late 1960s the navy was almost forced to buy a plane that wasn’t carrier-compatible—the TFX, which the air force called the F-111 and immediately began using as an all-weather tactical bomber with a system identical to the A-6’s.
“Corrosion-resistant,” Tarkington added as Jake made furious notes. “Has to be able to withstand long exposure to salty environment without a lot of expensive maintenance.”
“Maintenance,” muttered Les Richards. “Got to have easy maintainability designed in. Easy access to engines, black boxes and so forth, without a lot of special equipment.”
The requirements came thick and fast now, as quick as Jake could write. Range, speed, payload and a lot of other parameters. After ten minutes he had filled up most of the board and his staff paused for air.
“How’re we going to use this thing?” he asked again. “What I’m getting at is this: these stealth designs appear to be optimized for high-altitude ingress over heavily defended territory. Presumably at night. Are all our missions going to be at night?”
“We can’t afford to give away the day,” someone said.
“What’s that mean in the way of aircraft capability? Daytime means enemy fighters and optically aimed surface-to-air missiles. They’ll see our plane. Do we have to be able to engage the fighters and dodge the missiles? How much G capability do we need? Sustained turning ability? Dash speed? Climb speed? Will we go in low in the daytime? If so, how about ability to withstand bird strikes and turbulence?”
The staff spent an hour on these questions. There was no consensus, nor did Jake expect one. No plane in the world could do everything, but any design must meet most of the major requirements for its intended employment. Shortcomings due to design trade-offs would have to be overcome or endured.
“Weapons.” The ideal plane would carry and deliver every weapon in the U.S. and NATO inventory, and a lot of them. Was that a realistic goal with the stealth designs under consideration?
After four hours of brainstorming, the staff reexamined the proposed test program for the prototypes. In the five flights of each airplane that SECDEF had budgeted money and time for, they needed to acquire as much information as possible to answer real questions. Company test pilots had already flown both planes. These five flights of each plane by the navy would have to produce data that verified or refuted the manufacturers’ claims. More importantly, the flights would determine which plane was best suited to fill the navy’s mission requirements, or which could be made so by cost-effective modifications.
“We really need more than five flights per plane, Captain,” Les Richards said.
“Five flights are enough for what we want to find out, if we do it right. This little evolution is just a new car test drive with us doing the driving. Five flights are enough for what we want to find out if we do it right, which is precisely what we’re going to do. Henry and Ludlow and Caplinger want a fast recommendation and a fast decision.”
“Don’t they always? Then the paper pushers in SECDEF’s office will spend a couple years mulling it over, sending it from in basket to in basket.”
“Ours is not to reason why…”
The pace accelerated relentlessly in the office. Working days lasted twelve hours now, and Jake ran everyone out and turned off the lights himself at 7 P.M. He insisted that no one work on Saturday and Sunday, believing that the break would make people more productive during the week.
The weeks slid by, one by one.
Jake spent less than half his time in the office and the rest in an endless series of meetings with people from everywhere in government: SECNAV, SECDEF, OPNAV, NAVAIR, NAVSEA, the FAA, the EPA, the air force, the marines, and a host of others. Most of the time he attended these conferences with Admiral Dunedin or Commander Rob Knight.
The meetings went on and on, the paper piled higher and higher. The same subjects kept cropping up in different meetings, where they had to be rehashed again and again. Government by committee is government by consensus, and key players from every office high and low had to be listened to and pacified.
Jake felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice as he tried to pin people down and arrive at final resolutions of issues. Meetings bred more meetings: the final item on every agenda was to set the times and places for follow-up meetings.
He discovered to his horror that no one person had a complete grasp of the tens of thousands of regulations and directives that covered every aspect of procurement. At every meeting, it seemed, someone had another requirement that needed to be at least given lip service. He finally found where all this stuff was stored, a library that at last measurement contained over 1,152 linear feet of statutes, regulations, directives, and case law concerning defense procurement. Jake Grafton looked at this collection in awe and disgust, and never visited the place again.
The silent army of faceless gnomes who spent their working lives writing, interpreting, clarifying, and applying these millions of paragraphs of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” took on flesh and substance. They came in all sexes, shapes, and colors, each with his or her own coffee cup and a tiny circle of responsibility, which, no matter how small, of course overlapped with that of three or four others.
The key players were all known to Jake’s staff: “Watch out for the Arachnid,” someone would say before a meeting. Or “Beware of the Sewer Rat. He’ll be there this morning.” “The Gatekeeper will grill you on this.” The staff named these key players in the procurement process because of their resemblance to the characters in the game Dungeons and Dragons. When he returned from battle Jake had to contribute to the office lore by recounting the latest exploits of the evil ones.
“It’s a miracle that the navy even owns a rowboat,” Grafton remarked one day to Admiral Dunedin.
“True, but the Russians are more screwed up than we are. They manage every single sector of their economy like this, not just the military. You can’t even buy toilet paper in a store over there.”
“The bureaucrat factor is a multiplier,” Jake decided. “The more people there are to do paperwork, the more paper there is to be worked and the slower everything goes, until finally the wheels stop dead and only the paper moves.”
“The crat factor: it’s a law of physics,” Dunedin agreed.
Jake took a briefcase full of unclassified material home every night, and after Callie and Amy were in bed he stayed awake until midnight scribbling notes, answering queries, and reading replies and reports prepared by his staff.
He spent countless hours on the budget, trying to justify every dollar he needed for the next fiscal year. He had to make assumptions about where the ATA program would be then, and then he had to justify the assumptions. Athena was still buried deep, outside the normal budgetary process. Still he would need staff and travel money and all the rest of it. He involved everyone he could lay hands on and cajoled Admiral Dunedin into finding him two more officers and another yeoman. He didn’t have desks for them. They had to share.
But things were being accomplished. A Request for Proposal (RFP) on the Athena project was drafted, chopped by everyone up and down the line, committeed and lawyered and redrafted twice and finally approved. Numbered copies went by courier to a half dozen major defense contractors who were believed to have the technical facilities and staff to handle development of a small superconducting computer for aviation use. The office staff had to be informed, and this had been done by the admiral.
Inevitably the number of people who knew about Athena and what it could do was expanding exponentially. Access was still strictly need-to-know, but the system ensured that a great many people had the need, or could claim they did, citing chapter and verse of some regulation or directive no one else had ever read or even seen.
Callie was understanding about the time demands Jake faced. She had spent enough years as a navy wife to know how the service worked. Amy was less so. She and Callie were still going round and round, and she found Jake a pleasant change. He made rules and he enforced them, and he tucked her into bed every night. She wanted more of his time and he had precious little to give. The weekends became their special time together.
“Why do you spend so much time at work, Jake?”
“It’s my job. I have to.”
“I’m not going to have a job like yours. I’m going to get a job that gives me plenty of time to spend with my little girl.”
“Are you my little girl?”
“No. I’m Amy. I’m not anybody’s little girl. But I’m going to have a little girl of my own someday.”
“Do you ever think much about those somedays? What they’ll be like?”
“Sure. I’ll have lots of money and lots of time and a very nice little girl to buy stuff for and spend time with.”
“How are you going to get lots of money if you don’t spend much time earning it?”
“I’m going to inherit it. From you and Callie.”
“Guess we’d better work hard then.”
One day in early May, Special Agent Lloyd Dreyfus made an appointment to see Luis Camacho’s boss, P. R. Bigelow, without telling Camacho. He had thought about it for a week before he made the appointment with the secretary, and then he had two more days to wait. Jumping the chain of command was as grievous a sin in the FBI as it was in the military, yet he had decided to do it anyway and to hell with what Camacho or anyone else thought. As the day and hour approached, however, the enormity of his transgression increased with each passing hour. Surely Bigelow would understand. Even if he didn’t, he must realize Dreyfus had a right and duty to voice his concerns.
Dreyfus rehearsed his speech carefully. It wasn’t technically a speech: perhaps a better description would be “short, panicky monologue.” He had to justify himself as soon as he opened his mouth, get Bigelow’s sympathetic attention before he had a chance to start quoting the regulations, before he lost his cool and went ballistic. Was Bigelow a ballistic kind of guy? Dreyfus couldn’t recall Camacho ever saying.
He tried to recall everything he had ever heard about P. R. Bigelow, and that wasn’t much. Strange, when you stopped to think about it. Camacho never mentioned his superior officer, never said, “Bigelow wants this,” or “Bigelow is pleased,” or “Bigelow says blah-blah.” Come to think of it, Camacho never talked about anyone. If the Director himself told Luis Camacho to do thus and so, Camacho would just tell Dreyfus, “Do this” or “Do that.” He sometimes said what he hoped to find or achieve, but he never even hinted who had told him to cause something to happen, or why it was to happen. He never expressed a personal opinion. Curious as hell. Camacho was one weird duck, beyond a reasonable doubt.
Sitting in Bigelow’s reception area with the secretary checking him out surreptitiously as she did her nails, Dreyfus went over his list one more time. He wanted everything right on the tip of his tongue. It would be worse than disastrous to think of the clincher on the way to the surgery in the dungeon. Once again he assured himself he was doing the right thing. The right thing. Doing the right thing. He fondled his pipe in his pocket as if it were a set of worry beads.
The ten-button phone on the nail polisher’s desk buzzed to attract its owner’s attention. After listening a moment and grunting into the instrument in a pleasant, respectful way, she hung up and said to Dreyfus, “He’ll see you now.” Her painted eyebrows arched knowingly, condescendingly.
P. R. Bigelow was eating a large jelly doughnut at his desk. He mumbled his greeting with his mouth full, a glob of red goo in the corner of his mouth.
Dreyfus took a chair and launched into his prepared remarks. “I’ve asked for this time, sir, to ensure you know what is going on with the Minotaur investigation. The answer is almost nothing. For months now we’ve been spinning our wheels, begging computer time to try and crack the Minotaur’s letters to the Soviet ambassador, following a few people hither and yon all over Washington, monitoring some phone lines, wasting an army of manpower and bushels of money, and we are going essentially nowhere. I thought you should know that.”
Bigelow wiped the jam from his lips with a napkin, sipped coffee from a white mug labeled “World’s Best Dad” and took another bite of doughnut.
His attitude rattled Dreyfus, who got out his pipe and rubbed the bowl carefully. “Our best lead was a navy enlisted computer technician in the Pentagon, a guy we thought was tapping the computer for some of this stuff. Name of Terry Franklin. Yet Camacho never let us pick the guy up. So we sat and watched him do his little thing, and we were diligently following him, right on his tail, in March when his car blew up with him in it.”
Bigelow finished the doughnut and used a moist finger to capture and convey the last few crumbs to his mouth. Then he dabbed his lips a final time and used two napkins to scrub the powdered sugar and flecks of jelly from his oak desk. He put this trash in the wastebasket and, sighing contentedly, rearranged his bottom in his chair.
“And…?” said P. R. Bigelow.
“A hit man wiped a walk-in witness to a drop with Franklin. Camacho talked to her a couple times, but she got eliminated before we could get her to look at any photos. A professional hit. Two twenty-two caliber slugs in the skull. We’ve got the autopsy and lab reports and we’ve talked to neighbors up and down the street. We’ve got nothing at all. We’re absolutely dry on this one.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” said Lloyd Dreyfus with an edge in his voice. He was beginning to lose his temper and didn’t care if it showed a little. “One of the staff officers in the navy’s ATA project—a Commander Judy—is trying to peddle classified inside info to interested defense contractors. We got interested in this officer when the project manager was murdered over in West Virginia one Friday evening in early February. That murder is unsolved—no one is doing anything on it—and Camacho doesn’t appear to be doing any followup on Judy’s contacts. He hasn’t even turned the file over to the fraud investigators or NIS. We know some of the people Judy’s talked to and…” Dreyfus threw up his hands in frustration.
“Finished yet?”
“Yes, I think that about covers it.”
“So you asked for this appointment on the off chance that Camacho has been lying to me about the activities of his office, purposely bungling the search for this mole, wasting millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours on wild-goose chases.” Dreyfus opened his mouth to interrupt, but Bigelow held up a hand. “I grant that you can probably phrase it more tactfully. You notice I did not suggest that you came up here to tattle and gain some personal advantage. You are a better man than that.” He sighed heavily, almost a belch. “Of course there is another possibility. Perhaps you just wanted to see if I was so stupid as to be satisfied with the progress of the investigation to date.”
“I—” The upraised palm stopped him again.
“I am satisfied. Camacho has kept me fully informed of the activities of his subordinates, of which you are one, by the way. His lines of inquiry have been initiated with my knowledge and, where necessary, my approval. He has discussed his concerns with me and I have informed him of mine. He has followed orders to the letter. I am completely satisfied with his performance. He is one of the most talented senior officers in the bureau.”
Dreyfus just stared.
“Before you go back to work, do you wish for me to arrange a meeting for you with the Director?” Bigeiow managed to make his face look interested and mildly amused at the same time. Yes, Lloyd, you miserable, disloyal, alarmist peckerhead, you jumped from the top of the cliff, but you seem to have had the luck to strike a bush a few feet below the edge, which arrested your downward progress. Do you wish my help in completing your suicidal plunge?
Dreyfus shook his head no.
“I suggest that you not mention this little conversation to any of your colleagues.”
“Yessir.”
“I don’t want to see you in this office ever again, Dreyfus, unless you have your supervisor with you, or unless I send for you.”
“Yessir.”
“Let’s both get back to work.” P. R. Bigelow nodded toward the closed office door and Dreyfus took the hint.
By mid-May the dance of the dwarves at the Pentagon had reached a critical frenzy. A thousand details were beginning to come together for a trip into the desert with the prototypes in June. The airplanes had been moved weeks earlier to the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, the same secret field where the air force had tested its stealth prototypes. Also known as Area 58, or Groom Lake, the field lay about a hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas on a huge government reservation with excellent physical security. Here the contractors’ field teams readied the planes in separate hangars and installed telemetry devices.
Toad and Rita would leave for Nevada two weeks before Jake and the rest of the staff. They had intensive sessions planned with company test pilots and engineers to learn everything they could about the planes and how they flew. The Saturday night before they left, Jake and Callie had them to dinner at the house in Rehoboth Beach.
“How do you like being married?” Callie asked Rita in the kitchen.
“I should have had a brother,” Rita confided. “Men are such sloppy creatures. They don’t think like we do.”
On the screened-in porch, Jake and Toad sipped on bourbon and Amy slurped a Coke. “So how’s married life, Toad?”
“Oh, so-so, I guess. Isn’t exactly like I thought it would be, but nothing ever is. Ol’ Rita can think up stuff for me to do faster than I can do it, and we only live in an apartment. If we had a town house or something with a basement and a lawn, she’d have worked me to death by now.”
Amy Carol thought this remark deliriously funny and giggled hugely.
“Why don’t you go visit with Mom and Rita?”
She stood regally and tossed her hair. “I do believe I will join the ladies, but she isn’t my mom. I wish you’d stop calling her that.” She flounced off toward the kitchen.
“The day she”—Jake pointed after the departing youngster—“gets married, I am going to get down on my knees and give thanks.”
“That bad, huh?”
“She’s about driven Callie over the edge. That poor woman had no idea what she was getting into. No matter how much love she pours on Amy, the kid still does exactly as she chooses. She intentionally disobeys and cuts up just to get her goat. And Callie never gets mad, never pops off, never gives her anything but love. She’s gonna go nuts.”
“Maybe she should get angry.”
“That’s what I think. And Callie insists she doesn’t want my help or advice.”
“They’re all alike,” Toad said, now vastly experienced.
Amy was back in five minutes, hopping from foot to foot, so excited she bounced. “Can we fly the glider now, so I can show Rita? She’s a pilot.”
Toad gasped. “She is?”
“You’re teasing me,” Amy said, stamping her foot.
“The wind’s wrong,” Jake pointed out. “It isn’t coming in from the sea. This evening it’s a land breeze.”
“David said we might be able to fly the glider above the house in a land breeze. He said the wind just goes right up and over our house.”
“I never thought of that. Well, run down the street and see if he can spend a half hour consulting with us.” As Amy scampered off, Jake told Toad, “There’s an aviation expert right down the street who is kind enough to offer advice from time to time.”
The aviation expert was apparently unoccupied at the moment. He showed up wearing a monster-truck T-shirt bearing the legend “Eat Street.” His shoelaces were untied, his cowlicks fully aroused, and his grin as impish as ever. He listened carefully to Jake’s plan. “Sounds to me like it might work, Cap’n,” he said with a sidelong glance at Toad. “Might ding up your plane a little, though.”
“I’ll risk it if you’ll fix the damage.”
“Callie! Rita!” Amy called excitedly. “We’re going to fly.”
Jake readied the plane for flight in the front yard under David’s supervision. Eight rubber bands were stretched to hold the six-foot wing to the fuselage. Batteries were tested and inserted, the cover closed, switch on, controls waggled to the full extent of their travel using the radio control box: Amy checked each item after Jake performed it while David briefed Toad on proper launch procedure. In five minutes they were ready for the sky.
Toad climbed the ladder from the garage and scaled the sloping roof until he sat perched on the ridgepole with the plane in hand.
“Pretty good breeze up here,” he informed the crowd below, which now included Callie and Rita.
“Don’t you jump off there, Darius Green,” Rita called as Toad sucked on a finger and held it aloft.
“As you can plainly see, dear wife, I’m not wearing my wings tonight,” Tarkington replied lightly. He flapped his elbows experimentally. “‘I’ll astonish the nation and all creation, by flyin’ over the celebration! I’ll dance on the chimneys, I’ll stand on the steeple, I’ll flop up to winders and scare all the people,’” quoteth he, striking a precarious pose, or trying to, up there on the ridge of the roof with an airplane grasped carefully in his right hand.
“Maybe I’d better alert the emergency room at the hospital,” Callie said, laughing.
“Oh, Callie,” Amy groaned. “He’s not going to jump! Really!”
Toad finished his recitation with a flourish: “’And I’ll say to the gawpin’ fools below, What world’s this here that I’ve come near?’”
Jake Grafton handed the radio control box to David. “You’re up first. Whenever you’re ready.”
The youngster centered the control levers and shouted to Toad, “Let ’er go!”
With the gentlest of tosses, Toad laid the glider into the rising air currents. The boy immediately banked left and raised the nose until the aircraft was barely moving in relation to the ground. As it reached the end of the house, he reversed the controls and flew it back the other way. The ship soared upward on the rising current of air. It floated above Toad’s head, back and forth along the peak of the roof, banking gently to maintain position and rising and falling as the air currents dictated.
“All right!” Toad shouted and began to clap. On the ground the spectators all did likewise.
“There’s just enough wind,” Jake told David, grinning broadly. “Now, by God, that’s flying!”
“Awesome,” David agreed, his pixie grin spreading uncontrollably.
After a few minutes, David handed the control box to Jake. He overbanked and the plane lost altitude precipitously, threatening to strike Toad straddling the roof’s ridge. “Keep your nose up,” David advised hurriedly. “You can fly slower than that.” As the glider responded, he continued. “That’s it! She’s got plenty of camber in those wings and good washout. She’ll fly real, real slow, just riding those updrafts. That’s it! Let ’er fly. Just sorta urge ’er along.”
He was right. The plane soared like a living thing, banking and diving and climbing, seeking the rising air and responding willingly. The evening sun flashed on the wings and fuselage and made the little craft brightly lustrous against the darkening blue of the sky above.
“Let Rita try it,” Amy urged.
“Don’t you want to?”
“No. Let Rita.”
“Come over here, Rita Moravia.” The pilot did as she was bid. She watched the captain manipulate the controls as he explained what each was. “The thing you gotta watch is that the controls work backwards as you look at the plane head-on. Turn around and fly it by looking over your shoulder. Then left will be left and right will be right.”
Rita obediently faced away from the house and looked back over her shoulder. Toad waved. Jake handed her the radio control box. As David and Amy tried to offer simultaneous advice, Rita clumsily swung the plane back and forth and worked the nose hesitantly. She overcontrolled as David groaned, “Not too much, no no no.”
But the wind was dying. She got the nose too high trying to maintain altitude: the plane stalled and the nose fell through. The plane shot forward away from the house, toward the street. David scrambled, but Rita stalled it again and the left wing and nose dug into the sandy lawn before the running boy could reach it. The rubber bands let loose and the wing popped free of the fuselage, minimizing the damage.
“Nasty,” David declared.
“My dinner!” Callie exclaimed, and charged for the door.
“You did great for a first solo,” Amy assured Rita. The pilot pulled the girl to her and gave her a mighty hug and a kiss on the cheek. She got a big hug in return.
“She ain’t banged up too bad, Cap’n,” David called.
Up on the roof Toad was laughing. He blew Rita a kiss.
After dinner Callie shooed Jake and Toad off to the screened-in porch while she cleaned up the dishes. Rita and Amy helped.
“So what did your parents think of Toad when they met him, or have they yet?” Callie asked Rita.
“We went to visit them two weekends ago. Mother invited a few of their closest friends over to meet the newlyweds. Then she cornered Toad, and making sure I was in earshot, she asked him, ‘Now that you’re married, when is Rita going to give up flying?’” Rita laughed ruefully, remembering. “How well do you know Toad?” she asked Callie.
“Not very well. I met him for the first time last year in the Mediterranean.”
“Well, he looked at Mother with that slightly baffled, Lord of the Turnip Truck expression of his, and said, ‘Why would she do that? Flying is what she does.’ I could have kissed him right there in front of everyone.” Rita chuckled again.
“Doesn’t your mom want you to fly,” Amy piped, her chin resting on a hand, her eyes fixed on her new heroine.
“My mother is one of these new moderns who have elevated the elimination of risk to a religious status. She serves only food certified safe for laboratory rats. She writes weekly letters to congressmen urging a national fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, helmets for motorcyclists, gun control—she has never been on a motorcycle in her life and to the best of my knowledge has never even seen a real firearm. Her latest cause is a ban on mountain climbing since she read an article about how many people per year fall off cliffs or die of hypothermia. This from a woman who regards a walk across a large parking lot as a survival trek.”
“I’m not afraid of things,” Amy assured Rita.
“It’s not fear that motivates Mother. She thinks of government as Super-Mom, and who better to advise the politicians than the superest mom of them all?”
“Flying is risky, inherently dangerous. I can understand your mother’s concern,” Callie said as she rinsed a pot. “Flying is something I’ve had to live with. It’s a part of Jake and his life, a big part. But I’ve had very mixed emotions about his being grounded.” As she dried the pot she turned to Rita. “You or Toad may be killed or crippled for life in an accident. After it happens, if it happens, it won’t matter whose fault it is or how good you are in a cockpit. I know. I’ve seen it too many times.”
“Life is risky,” Rita replied. “Life isn’t some bland puree with all the caffeine and cholesterol removed. It doesn’t just go on for ever and ever without end, amen. For every living thing there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. And life is chance. Chance is the means whereby God rules the universe.”
The flier thought a moment, then continued, choosing her words carefully. “I have the courage to try to live with my fate, whatever it may be.”
“Do you have enough?” Amy asked, dead serious.
“I don’t know,” said Rita. She smiled at the youngster. “I hope so. I haven’t needed much courage so far. I’m healthy, reasonably intelligent, and I’ve been lucky. But still, I gather courage where I find it and save it for the storms to come.”