“Then lead the way,” Perry said.
They hurried off down the street.
EIGHT
It seemed to Gordian that Dan Parker had been watching his back for as long as they’d known each other… which was now something like thirty-five years. In Nam, when both served with the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, he had been wingman to Gordian’s lead in the countless bombing runs they had made over enemy territory. Going low against VC strongpoints in their F-4 Phantoms, they had learned the difficulty of hitting camouflaged, dug-in targets with their payloads at speeds approaching Mach 2—and come to understand the importance of developing guided weapons systems that would allow pilots to drop their ordnance in tight spots without having to fly multiple passes over their objectives, while practically holding their fingers up into the wind to decide which way it was blowing.
Gordian’s final day in a warplane — and in the war, for that matter — had been January 20, 1968, when he was downed during a close-support mission about four miles east of Khe Sanh. Ditching out of his fiery cockpit over an enemy-held ridge, he had scarcely shucked his parachute before he found himself surrounded by a bristling ring of North Vietnamese machine guns. As a pilot, he had been a prized catch, able to provide information about Air Force tactics and technology… and valuable enough for his captors to put him in a specimen cage rather than mount his head on a trophy wall. But throughout his five-year imprisonment in the Hanoi Hilton he had kept what he knew to himself, resisting carrot-and-stick coercions that had ranged from promises of early release to solitary confinement and torture.
Meanwhile, Dan had completed his second tour of duty in ’70 and returned to the States with a chest full of military decorations. The son of a prominent California congressman, he’d successfully pressured his social and political contacts to get a Red Cross pipeline through to Gordian. The humanitarian teams had provided basic medical treatment, delivered letters and care packages, and reported back to Gordian’s family about his condition, all despite an uncooperative North Vietnamese government that had done little more than pay lip service to the Geneva Convention.
Dan’s efforts on his friend’s behalf hardly stopped there. As the Paris peace talks staggered toward a cease- fire agreement, he had twisted arms to ensure that Gordian was among the first prisoners of war to be released. And although Gordian emerged from captivity weakened and underweight, he was in vastly better shape than he would have been without Dan’s unfailing support.
In the following decades, that support would reach across to the professional arena even as their friendship and mutual respect took on increasingly greater dimension. Their experiences in Vietnam had left both men convinced of the need for technology that would combine advanced navigation and reconnaissance capabilities with a precision missile delivery system. Together they had been forced to rely on guesswork time and again when making their strikes, placing their lives in jeopardy and causing unnecessary collateral damage to civilian locations. And Gordian had never forgotten that he owed his incarceration in a POW camp to a Russian surface-to-air missile that he hadn’t seen coming. While things had changed dramatically since the advent of smart weapons, there was still a lack of integration — a gap, so to speak — between infrared-targeting and radar surveillance systems.
By the late eighties, Gordian had begun to see how it was at least theoretically possible to fill that gap using modern satellite communications… and Dan was in a position to help him obtain the funding he needed to make those ideas a reality. Having followed in his father’s footsteps, he had pursued a career in politics, and in his third term as a congressman from California occupied seats on several House allocations committees. His confidence in Gordian had been instrumental in shaking loose underwriting grants which, added to Gordian’s own huge investment of corporate profits into R&D, opened the way for the development of GAPSFREE, the most impressive jewel in UpLink’s wire-and-silicon crown.
In terms of its adaptability to existing avionics and communications hardware, GAPSFREE was almost too good a package to be believed. Interfacing with orbital Global Positioning System satellites, it allowed the pilot or weapons officer of a fighter plane to know exactly where he was in relation to his target, or what was targeting him, providing real-time data relayed directly from the satellites to onboard navigational computers, and using synthetic-aperture radar to peer through fog and battle smoke. The system was also light and compact enough to be enclosed in a weapons pod that could be affixed to hardpoints on even low-tech aircraft like the A-10, transforming them — in combination with some cockpit modifications — into lethal fighter-bombers able to launch the smartest of smart weapons. This versatility made GAPSFREE the cheapest and most effective guidance system for missiles and precision guided munitions ever designed.
Not surprisingly, it also made Gordian’s firm the worldwide leader in recon tech.
And made Gordian a very, very rich man.
Having reached this sort of professional milestone, many entrepreneurs would have retired, or at least rested on their laurels. But Gordian had already begun pushing his ideas toward their next logical phase. Parlaying his tremendous success, he expanded his corporation in numerous ways, moving into dozens of countries, opening up new markets, and absorbing local chemical, communications, telephone, and industrial holdings on all four continents. His ultimate goal was to create a single, world spanning, satellite-based communications network that would allow phone transmissions to be made inexpensively from a mobile phone — or fax, or modem — to a destination anywhere on the globe.
What drove him was neither ego nor a desire for greater wealth, but a belief that this system could truly make a difference in the lives of millions, perhaps billions of people, bringing communications services and technology to every spot on earth. In his eyes, rapid access to information was a weapon. He had returned from Vietnam with a firm commitment to do what he could to stand up to totalitarian governments and oppressive regimes. And he had seen firsthand how no such government could stand in the face of freedom of communication.
To achieve his goal, however, he needed the support of the governments of a dozen or more key countries. He needed them to assign radio frequencies to his company; he needed them to give him access to their space programs to provide for the scores of low-earth-orbit satellite launches that NASA simply couldn’t handle; and he needed them to allow him to build ground stations in countries scattered all across the planet, to link into his satellite network and feed signals into existing land lines.
He also needed Dan Parker. Again. Of course. Since 1997, Dan had been guiding him through the regulatory tangle that had accompanied the evolution of handheld satellite communications. More recently, he’d been keeping tabs on events in Congress that could affect Gordian’s plans to have his Russian ground station operational by the end of the year.
Now, sitting across from Dan at the Washington Palm on Nineteenth Street, Gordian took a drink of his beer and glanced up at the sports and political cartoons covering the walls. Stirring his martini to melt the ice cubes, Dan looked impatient for their food to arrive. Gordian couldn’t remember him ever
They were at their regular corner table beneath an affectionate caricature of Tiger Woods. A decade ago, when they’d started having their monthly lunches here, the drawing in that spot had been of O.J. Simpson. Then that had come down and one of Marv Albert had taken its place. Then Albert was removed and Woods had gone up.
“Tiger,” Gordian mused aloud. “An all-American legend.”
“Let’s keep our fingers crossed he stays up there,” Parker said.
“He goes, who’ll be left?”
Dan shook his head. “Secretariat, maybe.”
“Maybe,” Gordian said.
They waited some more. The people around them were mostly political staffers, reporters, and lobbyists, with a sprinkling of tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of someone important. So far Gordian hadn’t noticed any stargazers looking in his direction. He wondered idly if he was having a bad hair day.
“So,” he said, “how about you tell me about Delacroix’s latest isolationist rants.”
