The Gold Coast Read online

  “Ah, hahaha. No party tonight, boys.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  2

  The next morning Dennis McPherson, Jim’s father, takes United’s commuter flight from LAX to National Airport in Washington, D.C. He wakes as the Boeing 7X7 drops back into the atmosphere, shuffles the papers on his lap back into his briefcase. They haven’t helped him. Of course he’s napped for most of the short flight, but even if he had been reading them they wouldn’t have helped. He’s here, first, to meet with Air Force Colonel T. D. Eaton, to confer on the progress of the Ball Lightning program, one of the big contracts currently in development at McPherson’s company, Laguna Space Research. It’s not McPherson’s program, however, and he doesn’t know how to explain the delays that have plagued it. His old friend Dan Houston should be fielding this one, but Houston is down at White Sands, trying to get a successful trial out of Ball Lightning’s acquisition/pointing/tracking satellite. And McPherson has other errands to run in Washington, so he’s been stuck with this one too. Great.

  The other purpose for this visit is a conference with Major Tom Feldkirk, from the Air Force’s Electronic Systems Division. Feldkirk requested the conference without giving a reason for it, which is worrying. LSR has several contracts with the Electronic Systems Division, and the problem to be discussed could be in one of a number of areas.

  Because the truth of the matter is, LSR is struggling these days. Too many proposals have been lost, and too many of the contracts won have gone into delays and overruns. The Air Force is coming down on such problems harder than ever, and whatever Feldkirk wants to discuss, it isn’t likely to be good.

  The plane floats down the Potomac River basin and lands. Time to get to his hotel.

  He goes onto automatic pilot. So many repetitions.… He’s become chief errand boy at LSR for this kind of thing, sent to Washington about twenty times a year to put out one fire after another. (Off the plane, into the terminal. He’s refined his luggage to a single flight bag, and goes straight out to the taxi line.) From all these more-or-less diplomatic assignments you might guess he was a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, someone who could pal around with the flyboys and drink away their objections. Not so: Dennis McPherson is a reserved man, with a contained manner that can make people nervous. (Into a taxi, off to the Crystal City Hyatt Regency. Traffic bumpertobumper on George Washington Parkway lower level.) He can handle his end of dinner talk as well as the next man; he just isn’t into a bonhomie that in this context has to be transparent and false always, and therefore offputting. This is big business, after all, the biggest business: defense. Why even pretend that your favorite buddy is some Air Force jock you have to deal with?

  Into the Crystal City Hyatt Regency, a big irregular space filled with mirrors, escalators, cascading fountains of water and light, walls of glossy greenery, hanging elevators, overhanging balconies. He threads the maze without a thought and checks in, goes up to his room. Into the chrome-and-white-tile bathroom, to stare into the darkened mirror, perhaps clean up a bit before the day’s work.

  Pink freckled skin. He needs a shave. Strawberry-blond hair, as Lucy always calls it, receding from a round Irish forehead. Cold blue eyes and deep vertical creases between his eyebrows; he’s a stocky stubborn figure, one of those smoldering Irish who don’t say much, and now he looks harried, tired, annoyed. It’s going to be a tough day.

  Strange how it’s come to this. McPherson began as an engineer—damn it, he is an engineer. He has a degree in aerospace engineering from Cal Tech, and even though he’s hopelessly off the edge these days, he can still follow it when his design people describe things. And McPherson can see the larger patterns, where engineering touches both invention and administration. But management itself? … Other program managers got there on leadership, they know how to coax or bully extra results out of their teams. McPherson’s boss Stewart Lemon is a perfect example of this type, the Dynamic Leader of the business schools. McPherson leaves that kind of Napoleonic style to others, and in fact he despises it in Lemon. For his part, he just figures out what has to be done, and lays it out. Low-keyed approach. (Shower, shave.) No, it’s not leadership that got him out of engineering and into administration.

  How did it happen, then? He’s never been too sure. (Into the day’s clothes: colorless conservative dress, appropriate for Pentagon dealings.) He can explain technical matters to people who don’t know enough to fully understand them. Administrators in LSR’s parent company, Pentagon people, congressional aides … people who need to have a clear idea of technical problems before they can make their own decisions. McPherson can do that. He’s not sure why, but it happens. He tries to explain, and they usually get it. Strange. His wife Lucy would laugh, perhaps angrily; she considers him awful at “communicating.” But that’s what’s gotten him where he is, and really it’s not funny; it means that he has somehow strayed out of the line of work where he might have enjoyed himself, been comfortable.

  Half an hour to kill. He turns on the video wall’s news program. The war in Arabia is heating up; Bahrain is embroiled now, with U.S. Marines fighting the insurgents, which shows it’s serious. They’re finding the Hewlett-Packard IRHUD helmets are giving them a big advantage in night fighting, but the insurgents have some old Norwegian Kongsberg Vaapenfabrikk Penguin missiles that are wreaking havoc on the U.S. fleet offshore, all the aluminum in those old destroyers melting like plastic. And some Hughes Mavericks left over from the war in Thailand, still doing yeoman service in the desert hills … seems like most of the forty odd wars currently being fought are employing obsolete equipment, and the results, for democratic forces, are a real mess.

  McPherson wanders past the bold rainbow of the immense bedspread to the window of his room. There before him stands the Hughes Tower, a hotel/restaurant/office complex, one of Crystal City’s newest. Crystal City is getting bigger every year, the defense industry towers looking like an architectural rendering of their business, steel and glass ICBMs densepacked and pointed at the sky. All the money that leaves the Pentagon is funneled through these towers, through the crystal city of weapons procurement.

  It’s time to get over to the Pentagon. McPherson feels himself coming out of automatic pilot. Tuesday morning, Crystal City, USA: time to go offtrack, onto manual, into action.

  Short taxi ride to the Pentagon. Into the security complex, out with his lapel badge. A lieutenant picks him up and they drive down the endless giant white corridors in a cart, dodging all the motor and foot traffic. They might as well be on a street. McPherson always gets a kick out of this blatant attempt to impress people. And it works, too, sure. The Pentagon may be old, but it’s still immense. Seems to him that the latest reorganization has taken notice of current fashion; service and division markers are painted in bright spectrum-bend colors that pulsate under the xenon bulbs, against all the white walls.

  He meets Colonel Eaton at the Air Force’s SD Battle Management Division office, and Eaton takes him into one of the center courtyard commissaries. They talk over a lunch of croissants and salad. McPherson outlines some of the problems that Houston’s team is having with the boost-phase interceptor.

  Ball Lightning: the job is to detect and track as many as ten thousand Soviet ICBMs, launched simultaneously; then aim ground-based free-electron laser beams, bounce them off mirrors in space, and destroy the ICBMs while they’re still in boost phase. It’s a tough job, and McPherson is glad it isn’t exactly his. But now he has to take Colonel Eaton’s grilling about it, which is informed and relentless. The test results in your proposal, Eaton says, indicated that you could solve the problems you’re telling me about. That’s why you have the contract. Get it together, and soon. Or it’s a Big Hacksaw for you.

  McPherson cringes at the reference to the Hacksaw disaster, a gun program axed by the DOD for incompetence; it was the beginning of the end for Danforth Aerospace, which is now just a name in the corporate history books. That kind of thing could still happen; a
big program could go bad so disastrously that it got the axe and brought its whole company down.…

  So. Great lunch. McPherson tries to remember what he ate as he makes notes of the conversation, in the LSR offices on the top floor they rent in the Aerojet Tower. Apparently it didn’t agree with him. Salad? No matter. He spends the rest of the afternoon on the phone to OC, and then to White Sands, to tell Dan Houston that the heat is on. Dan knows that already, and in an anxious, almost frightened voice, he asks for help. McPherson agrees to do what he can. “But it’s not my program, Dan. Lemon may not give me the time to do anything. Besides, I’m not sure what I can do.”

  That evening Major Tom Feldkirk comes by and picks him up, and they track over the river into Georgetown.

  Feldkirk is around forty-five, ex-flyer, wears his black hair longer than they’d like it back on base, in a swoop over his forehead and well down his back. He’s dressed casually, sport shirt, slacks, loafers. McPherson has dealt with him twice before, likes him all right. They park in an underground lot, walk up onto a brick sidewalk and into the usual Georgetown crowd. They could be two lawyers, two congressmen, two of any part of Washington’s success structure. They discuss Georgetown, the fashionable bars, the crowds. McPherson is familiar with the area by this time, and can mention favorite restaurants and the like.

  “Have you been to Buddha In The Refrigerator?” Feldkirk asks.

  McPherson laughs. “No.”

  “Let’s try it, then. It’s not nearly so bad as it sounds.”

  He leads them down M Street, then up one of the little sidestreets, where it looks like it could be 1880, if you ignored the tracks out on the cobblestone street. Or thought of them as streetcar tracks. McPherson has a brief vision of monorailed antique street cars, then reins in his thoughts. This is business, here.…

  Inside, the restaurant looks Indian. Cloth prints of Buddha and various Hindu deities hang on the walls: six-armed, elephant-headed, outlandish stuff. McPherson’s a bit worried, he prefers not to eat food he doesn’t recognize, but then the menu turns out to have twenty pages, and you can order anything you can think of, but with every meal you’ll get some fine Buddhist vegetables. That’s okay. He orders salmon fillet. Feldkirk orders some kind of Asian soup. He was stationed on Guam for several years, and developed a taste for the food. They discuss the Pacific situation for a bit. “The Soviets have got the choke points,” says Feldkirk, “but now we’re stationed outside them all, so it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Leaves Japan and Korea kind of hanging.”

  “True. But with the Japanese arming themselves so well, they can take the front line of their own defense. We can cover them from behind. It’s not a bad situation.”

  “And Korea?”

  “Well!…”

  Their meals are served, and as they eat they discuss the Redskins and the Rams, then technical aspects of the war in Burma. McPherson begins to enjoy himself a bit. He likes this man, he can get along with him, he’s sort of a kindred spirit. Feldkirk talks ruefully about his two sons, both now at Annapolis. “I took them sailing a lot when we were on Guam, but I never thought it would lead to this.” McPherson laughs at his expression. Still, Annapolis is awfully hard to get into. “And your kids?” Feldkirk asks.

  “Just one. He’s still hanging out in Orange County, teaching night classes and working in a real estate office part-time.” McPherson shakes his head. “He’s a strange one. A brain without a program.” And Feldkirk laughs.

  Then the meals are done, they’re lingering over drinks and cheesecake, watching Washington’s finest chattering around them. Feldkirk leans back in his chair. “You’re probably wondering what I’ve got in mind for tonight.”

  McPherson lifts his eyebrows: here it comes. “Sure,” he says with a smile.

  “Well, we have an idea for a system that I want to discuss with you. You see, the RX-16 is almost operational now.”

  “Is it?” The RX-16 is Northrop’s RPV, a remotely piloted vehicle, which in certain quarters of the Electronic Systems Division is all the rage now: a robot jet craft with classified speeds, perhaps up to Mach 7, and capable of turns and rolls that would kill a pilot. Made of kevlar and other lightweight stealth materials, it has the radar signature of a bee. It’s one of Northrop’s most successful recent contracts, and McPherson was in fact aware it is about to go into production, but he didn’t want to say so.

  “Yeah. Great plane.” Feldkirk looks wistful. “I bet it would be a real kick to fly one. But the time for manned fighter planes has passed, it looks like. Anyway, we’ve got some ideas for the use of this RX-16 in the European theater.”

  Use against the threat of the Warsaw Pact invasion, then, the Big Contingency that has stimulated so much of the conventional weapons upgrade spiral between the superpowers. McPherson nods. “Yeah?”

  “Well, here’s what we’re thinking. The RX is ready, and for some time to come we think it’ll be a good deal faster and more maneuverable than anything that the Soviets will have. Now if the tanks ever roll, we’d like to be able to use the RXs against them, because if we can do that, it might turn into a shooting gallery situation. We have in mind flying the RXs straight down at full speed from sixty thousand feet to terrain-following level, having them make covert runs down there, finding a dozen tanks and clotheslining the Harris Stalker Nine missiles to them, then popping out and up. And turning around for other runs, until the missiles and fuel run out.”

  “Stuka pilots would recognize the flight pattern,” McPherson remarks, thinking about it. “So you need a navigation system for the terrain following.” Tree-top contouring at a mile a second or more.…

  “That’s right.”

  “And covert, you say.” Which means they don’t want the plane sending out investigating signals that can be picked up by enemy detection systems. This contradicts the desire for tight navigation and makes things tough.

  “That’s right.” The standard device for locating targets, Feldkirk goes on, a YAG laser operating at the 1.06 micron wavelength, won’t do anymore. The new window for targeting lasers is from about eight to fourteen microns, which fits between the upper and lower ends of the Soviets’ latest radar systems. “This means a CO-two laser, probably.”

  But CO2 lasers don’t penetrate cloud anywhere near as well as those using yttrium/aluminum/garnet. “You want it all-weather?” McPherson asks.

  “No, just under the weather, day and night.”

  So they weren’t concerned about fog, for instance. McPherson suddenly imagines the Soviet tanks waiting for fog to start World War Three.…

  “How much weight?”

  “We’d like it under five hundred pounds, if you’ve got it in a single pod. Maybe seven fifty if you put it in two wing pods. We can work that out later.”

  McPherson lets out a breath. That’s a constraint for you. “And how much power can the plane give the system?”

  “Maybe ten KVA. Ten point five, tops.”

  Another constraint. McPherson thinks about it, putting all the factors together in his mind. The components of such a system exist; it’s a matter of putting them together, making them work on this new robot jet.

  “Sounds interesting,” he says at last. “I think we could make a proposal, given that my boss likes the idea, of course.”

  Feldkirk is shaking his head; a small smile makes him look boyish. “We aren’t going to put out an RFP on this one.”

  “Ah!”

  The meeting suddenly makes sense.

  Legally, the Pentagon is obliged to offer all their programs for open bidding by contractors. This means publishing a Request For Proposal in Commerce Business Daily, which outlines the specifications for what they want. The problem with the system, of course, is that Soviet intelligence can buy Commerce Business Daily and get an excellent idea of the capabilities of the American military. In this case, they would know to close the window in their radar systems. “And,” Feldkirk says, “if they know they have to speed u
p their antiaircraft response, and can do it, then we’re no longer in the air. So we’ve decided to go superblack with this one, and deal with the company we judge would do the job best.”

  Illegal, of course. Technically. But the Pentagon is also charged with defending the country. Even Congress recognizes that some programs have to be kept secret. In fact, black programs are an acknowledged part of the system, and a few members of the Armed Services Committees hear about them regularly. A superblack program, however … that’s between the Pentagon and the chosen contractor only.

  So, LSR has a contract. Other defense contractors won’t complain about it even if they do hear rumors, because they’ve all got secret programs of their own.

  Feldkirk continues justifying the decision to make the program superblack. “We figure we’ve got other ways to keep the Soviets from rolling, for now. We don’t need to make this public, to scare them. So while they’re ignorant of it, we’ve got a safeguard—if the tanks do roll, they’re goners. Ducks on the pond, as obsolete as aircraft carriers. Meanwhile, the government can get serious about the negotiations to get battlefield nukes off the front line. That should help reconcile the Soviets to our space installations, and it eases the use-’em-or-lose-’em situation with the artillery nukes in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, all the rest. Nobody’s ever liked those, but we’re still living with them. This way, we might be able to end that risk—we just won’t need battlefield nukes anymore to do the job, and that’s the bottom line.”

  McPherson nods. “That would be good all right.” He doesn’t like to reflect on how fully American strategy is entangled in nuclear weapons; the situation repels him. It just isn’t smart defense. “I’ll have to consult back at the office, you know.”

  “Of course.”

  “But, truthfully, I can’t imagine we’ll turn it down.”

  “No.”

  So Feldkirk raises his glass, and they toast the deal.

  And the next day McPherson gives Stewart Lemon a call, first thing.