Dunedin’s secretary, Mrs. Forsythe, gave him a list of the of- ficers who would be under his supervision. She was a warm, moth- erly lady with silver-gray hair and pictures of children on her desk. Jake asked. Her grandchildren. She offered him a brownie she had baked last night, which he accepted and munched with approving comments while she placed a call to the Personnel Support De- tachment She gave him detailed directions on how to find PSD, which was, she explained, six buildings south. When Jake arrived fifteen minutes later a secretary was busy pulling the service records for him to examine.
He found an empty desk and settled in.
The civilian files stood out from the others. Helmut Fritsche. Ph.D. in electrical engineering, formerly professor at Caltech, be- fore that on the research staff of NASA. Publications; wow! Thirty or forty scientific papers. Jake ran his eye down the list. All were about radar: wave propagation, Doppler effect, numerical determi- nation of three-dimensional electromagnetic scattering, and so on.
George Wilson was a professor of aeronautical engineering at MIT on a one-year sabbatical. He had apparently been recruited by Admiral Henry and came aboard the first of the year. He would be leaving at the end of December. Like Fritsche’s, Wilson’s list of professional publications was long and complicated. He had co- authored at least one textbook, but the title that caught Jake’s eye was an article for a scientific journal: “Aerodynamic Challenges in Low Radar Cross Section Platforms.”
Jake laid the civilians’ files aside and began to flip through the naval officers. Halfway through he found one that he slowed down to examine with care. Lieutenant Rita Moravia. Naval Academy Class of ‘82. Second in her class at the Academy, first in her class in flight school and winner of an outstanding achievement award. Went through A-7 training, then transferred to F/A-ISs, where she became an instructor pilot in the West Coast replacement squad- ron. Next came a year at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monte- rey, California, for a master’s in aeronautical engineering, and an- other year at Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, where she graduated first in her class.
There were three line commanders: an A-6 bombardier-naviga- tor, an F-14 pilot and an EA-6B Electronic Countermeasures Of- ficer — ECMO. Jake knew the A-6 BN and the Prowler ECMO. There was an aircraft maintenance specialist, whom Jake knew, and five AEDOs, all of whom wore pilot or naval flight officer wings. Except for the A-6 BN and the Prowler ECMO, the rest had fighter backgrounds, including Tarkington, who was one of only two lieutenants. The rest were commanders and lieutenant commanders.
If the navy wanted a stealth attack plane, why so many fighter types? The air force called all their tactical drivers fighter pilots, but the navy had long ago divided the tactical fraternity into attack and fighter. The missions and the aircraft were completely differ- ent, so the training and tactics were also different. And according to the amateur psychologists in uniform who thought about these things and announced their conclusions at Happy Hour, the men were different too. Either their personalities were altered by the training or the missions attracted men of certain types. According to the attack community, fighter pukes were devil-may-care, kiss- tomorrow-goodbye romantics who lived and lusted for the dubious glory of individual combat in the skies. The fighter crowd said the attack pukes were phlegmatic plodders with brass balls — and no imaginations — who dropped bombs because they didn’t know any better. Most of it was good, clean fun, but with a tinge of truth.
When Jake finished going through the records he stacked them carefully and stared thoughtfully at the pile. Dunedin and Strong had assembled a good group, he concluded, officers with excellent though varied backgrounds, from all over tactical naval aviation- The test pilot was the only real question mark. Moravia certainly had her tickets punched and was probably smarter than Einstein, but she had no actual experience in flight-testing new designs. He would ask Dunedin about her.
Tomorrow he would meet them. That was soon enough. First he had to find out what was really happening from Henry or Dunedin.
Henry spoke of minefields — a grotesque understatement. The problems inherent in overcoming the inertia of the bureaucracy to produce a new state-of-the-art weapons system were nothing short of mind-boggling. Dunedin must feel like he’s been ordered to build the Great Pyramid armed with nothing but a used condom and a flyswatter. And for God’s sake, do it quietly, top secret and all. Aye aye, sir.
In the Crystal City underground mall he found a toy store and purchased a plastic model of the air force’s new stealth fighter, the F-117. He also bought a tube of glue. Then he boarded the Metro blue train for the ride to Rosslyn.
When the subway surfaced near the Key Bridge, Jake stared gloomily at the raindrops smearing the dirt on the windows as the train rocked along under a dark gray sky, then it raced noisily back into another hole in the ground and like his fellow passengers, he refocused his eyes vacantly on nothing as he instinctively created his own little private space.
He felt relieved when the doors finally opened and he joined the other passengers surging across the platform, through the turn- stiles, then onto the world’s longest escalator. The moving stair ascended slowly up the gloomy, slanting shaft bearing its veterans of purgatory. Amid the jostling, pushing, hustling throng, he was carried along as part of the flow. This morning he had been a tourist. Now he was as much a part of this human river as any of them. Morning and evening he would be an anonymous face in the mob: hurry along, hurry, push and shove gently, persistently, insis- tently, demanding equal vigor and speed from every set of legs, equal privacy from every set of blank, unfocused eyes. Hurry, hurry along.
Rain was still falling when he reached the sidewalk. He paused and turned his collar up against the damp and chill, then set off for the giant condo complex four blocks away.
Most of the people scurrying past him on the sidewalk had done this every working day for years. They were moles, he told himself glumly, blind creatures of the dark, damp places where the sun and wind never reached, unaware that the universe held anything but the dismal corridors where they lived out their pathetic lives. And now he was one of them.
He stopped at the corner, the model in the box under his arm. People swirled around him, their heads down, their eyes on the concrete. Callie wouldn’t get home to the flat for another hour.
He turned and walked back against the flow of the crowd toward the station exit. Right across the street from the exit was a Roy Rogers. He paid for a cup of coffee and found a seat near the atrium window where he could watch the gray people bent against the wind and the raindrops sliding down the glass.
The euphoria he had felt when he talked to Vice Admiral Henry this morning was completely gone. Now he had a job … a pa- perwork job, going to endless meetings and listening to reports and writing recommendations and trying to keep from going crazy. A job in the bureaucracy. A staff job, the one he had fought against, refused to take, pulled every string to avoid, all these years. In the puzzle palace, the place where good ideas go to die.
It could have been worse, of course. He could have been as- signed to design the new officer fitness report form.
Like many officers who spent their careers in operational billets, Jake Grafton loathed the bureaucrats, held them in a secret con- tempt which he tried to suppress with varying degrees of success. In the years since World War II, the bureaucracy had grown lush and verdant here in Washington. Every member of Congress had twenty aides. Every social problem had a staff of paper pushers ”managing” it. The military was just as bad. Joint commands with a staff of a thousand to fifteen hundred people were common.
Perhaps it happens because we are human. The people in the military endlessly analyze and train for the last war because no one knows what the next one will be Uke. New equipment and technol- ogies deepen the gloom which always cloaks the future. Yesterday’s warriors retire and new ones inherit the stars and the offices, and so it goes through generations, until at last every office is filled with men who have never heard a shot fired in anger or known a single problem that good, sound staff work, carefully couched in bureaucratese, could not “manage” satisfactorily. Inevitably the gloom becomes Stygian. Future war becomes a profound enigma that workaday admirals and generals and congressmen cannot pen- etrate. So the staffs proliferate as each responsible person seeks expert help with his day-to-day duties and the insoluble policy conundrums.
Another war would be necessary to teach the new generation the ancient truths. But in the Pax Americana following World War II, Vietnam accelerated the damage rather than arrested it.
In its aftermath Vietnam appeared to many as the first inadver- tent, incautious step toward the nuclear inferno that would destroy life on this planet. Frightened by the new technologies and fearful of the incomprehensible political forces at work throughout the world, citizens and soldiers sought — demanded — quantifiable truths and controls that would prevent the war that bad become unthinkable, the future war that had become, for the generations that had known only peace, the ultimate obscenity. Laws and regu- lations and
