the Crystal City office complex. He wandered out into the corridors and walked along slightly dazed. A real job! A big job!
Although the aide had suggested the shuttle bus, Jake decided to walk. After asking an air force officer in the parking lot which set of tall buildings was which and getting a careful sighting across a pointing finger, Jake began walking. The wind was chilly, but not intolerably so. Under 1-395, across a four-lane boulevard dodging traffic, under U.S. Route 1, the hike took about ten minutes. He accosted a pedestrian and building Jefferson Plaza 1 was pointed out. In he went, punched the elevator button and after waiting what seemed to be an inordinately long time, rode to the twelfth floor, the top one.
They did have a set of orders. It took the civilian secretary five minutes to find them, and in the interim Jake visited with three officers he knew from his shipboard days. With the orders in his hand, the secretary called a yeoman, who put the captain to work filling out forms.
Jake was eating lunch in Gus’s Place, a commercial cafeteria on the ground floor of the complex, when Toad Tarkington spotted him. Toad came over, tray in hand. “Saw you sitting over here by yourself, CAG. May I join you?”
Jake moved his tray and Toad off-loaded his food onto the table.
A group of junior officers twenty feet away began to whisper and glance in their direction.
“How has your morning gone?”
“Same old stuff,” Toad announced as he placed his large brown manila envelope full of orders and forms on his chair and carefully sat on it “Got my picture taken for my permanent building pass, which I’m supposed to pick up this afternoon. I must have signed my name fifty times this morning. Every naval activity between here and Diego Garcia will soon receive notification in triplicate that I can be found sitting on the bull’s-eye at this critical nerve center of the nation’s defenses, ready to save the free world from the forces of evil.” Toad made a gesture of modesty and slowly unfolded his napkin.
“I hear we’re going to be putting that new officer fitness report form together, though just why the heck they got the two greatest aerial warriors of the age over here at NAVAIR to do that sort of beats me- Ours not to reason why…” He glanced at Jake to get his reaction as he smoothed the napkin on his lap.
Grafton sipped his coffee, then took another bite of tuna salad. “But what the hey,” Toad continued cheerfully. “Flying, walk- ing, or sitting on my ass, they pay me just the same. Do you know there are 3.4 women in Washington for every man? This is the place. Bachelor city. Sodom on the Potomac. A studly young lad ought to be able to do pretty well with all these lonely females seeking to satisfy their social and sexual needs. Mr. Accommoda- tion, that’s me. I figure with my salary—“
“The sexual revolution is over,” Jake muttered as he forked more tuna salad. “You missed it.”
“I’m carrying on a guerrilla campaign, sir. Indomitable and un- conquerable, that’s the ol’ Horny Toad, even in the age of latex. I just dress up like the Michelin man and go for it. A fellow could always spring a leak, I guess, but the bee must go from flower to flower. That’s the natural order of things.” He chewed thought- fully. “Have you noticed how those people over there keep sneak- ing looks at you”
“Yeah,” Jake didn’t took around. Although the room was filled with civilians and uniformed men and womea eating and carrying trays and visiting over coffee, the two junior officers two tables away had been glancing over and speaking softly since Jake sat down.
“Ifs been like that all day with me,” Toad said with a hint of despair in his voice, then sent another mouthful of food down behind his belt buckle. “At first I thought I had forgotten my pants, but now I think it’s the hero bit. Asked two admirers for dates this morning and got two yeses. Not bad for a Monday.”
“It’ll pass. Next week you’ll have to spell your name twice just to get into the men’s head. How’s your leg?”
“Got a couple girders in it, sir. One of them is a metal rod about a foot long. But I passed my flight physical. Those Israeli doctors did a good job. Aches some occasionally.”
“We were damned lucky.”
“That’s an understatement,” Toad said, and proceeded to fill Jake in on how he had spent the last five months.
After lunch Jake hiked back across the streets and parking lots to the Pentagon- His temporary pass so excited the security cop that he nodded his head a quarter inch as Jake walked by.
Commander Rob Knight was several years younger than Jake and had more hair, although it was salt-and- pepper. He wore steel- rimmed glasses and beamed when Jake introduced himself.
“Heard about your little adventure in the Med last year. Cap- tain. It’s been pretty dull without El Hakim to kick around,” Knight grinned easily. He had an air of quiet confidence that Jake found reassuring. Like all career officers getting acquainted, Knight and Jake told each other in broad terms of their past tours. Knight had spent most of his operational career in A-6 outfits, and bad been ordered to this billet after a tour as commanding officer of an A-6 squadron.
“I came by to find out everything you know about the A-12,” Jake said lightly.
Knight chuckled. “A real kidder, you are. I’ve been soaking up info for a year and a half and I haven’t even scratched the surface, And you see I’m only one guy. The A-6 coordinator sits here beside me. and on the other side of the room we have the F-14 and F/A-18 guys. One for each airplane. We don’t have a secretary or a yeoman. We do our own mail. We make our own coffee. I spend about a third of my time in this office, which is where I do the unclass stuff and confidential. Another third of my time is spent upstairs in the vault working on classified stuff. I have a desk up there with another computer and safes. The rest of my time is spent over at NAVAIR, in your shop, trying to see what you guys are up to.”
“Just one guy.” Jake was disappointed, and it showed. He felt a little like the kid who met Santa for the first time and found he was old and fat and smelled of reindeer shit. “One guy! Just exactly what is your job?”
“I’m the man with the money. I get it from Rear Admiral Cos- tello. He’s the Aviation Plans and Programs honcho. He tells me what we want the plane to do. We draw up the requirements. You build the plane we say we want, you sell it to me, and I write the checks. That’s it in a nutshell.”
“Sounds simple enough.”
“Simple as brain surgery. There’s an auditor that comes around from time to time, and he’s going to cuff me and take me away one of these days. I can see it in his eyes.”
They talked for an hour, or rather Knight talked and Jake lis- tened, with his hands on his thighs. Knight had a habit of tapping aimlessly on the computer terminal on his desk, striking keys at random. When Jake wasn’t looking at Knight he was looking at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit girl over Knight’s desk (April 1988 was a very good month), or the three airplane pictures, or the Farrah Fawcett pinup over the A-6 guru’s desk. Between the two desks sat a flung cabinet with combination locks on every drawer- Similar cabinets filled the room. Twice Knight rooted through an open cabinet drawer and handed Jake classified memos to read, but not to keep. Each was replaced in its proper file as soon as Jake handed it back.
Then Knight took Jake up a floor to the vault, where he signed a special form acknowledging the security regulations associated with black programs. In this chamber, surrounded by safes and locks and steel doors. Commander Knight briefed him on the tech- nical details of the prototypes, the program schedules and so on.
At three o’clock Jake was back on the twelfth floor of the Crys- tal City complex to meet with Vice Admiral Dunedin. His office was not quite as plush as Henry’s but it was every bit as large. Out the large windows airliners were landing and taking off from Na- tional airport.
“Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?” Dunedin asked. He was soft-spoken, with short gray hair and workman’s hands, thick, strong fingers that even now showed traces of oil and grease. Jake remembered hearing that his hobby was restoring old cars.
“In a vague, hazy way.”
“Normally we assign Aeronautical Engineering Duty Officers, AEDOs, to be program managers. By definition, an AEDO’s spe- cialty is the procurement business. Harold Strong was an AEDO. But, considering the status of the A-12, we figured that we needed a war fighter with credibility on the Hill.” The Hill, Jake knew, was Capitol Hill, Congress. But who, he wondered, were the “we” of whom the admiral spoke? “You’re our warrior. There’s not enough time to send you to the five-month program manager school, so we’ve waived it. You’re going to have to hit the ground running. Your deputy is a GS-15 civilian. Dr. Helmut Pritsche. He’s only been here three years or so but he knows the ropes. And you’ve got some AEDOs on your staff. Use them, but remember, you’re in charge.”
“I won’t forget,” Jake Grafton said.
