The Gold Coast

42

On the next trip to Washington Dennis McPherson is taken by Louis Goldman to a restaurant in the “old” section of Alexandria, Virginia. Here prerevolutionary brick is shored up by hidden steel, and the old dock warehouses are filled with boutiques, ice-cream shops, souvenir stands, and restaurants. Business is great. The seafood in the restaurant Goldman has chosen is superb, and they eat scallops and lobster and enjoy a couple bottles of gewürztraminer before getting down to it.

Plates cleared, glasses refilled, Goldman sits back in his chair and closes his eyes for a moment. McPherson, getting to know his man, takes a deep breath and readies himself.

“We’ve found out some things about the decision-making process in your case,” Goldman says slowly. “It’s a typical Pentagon procurement story, in that it has all the trappings of an objective rational process, but is at the same time fairly easy to manipulate to whatever ends are desired. In your case, it turns out that the Source Selection Evaluation Board made its usual detailed report on all the bids, and that report was characterized as thorough and accurate by our information source. And it favored LSR.”

“It favored us?”

“That’s what our source told us. It favored LSR, and this report was sent up to the Source Selection Authority without any tampering. So far so good. But the SSA takes the report and summarizes it to use when he justifies his decision to the people above him. And here’s where it got interesting. The SSA was a four-star general, General Jack James, from Air Force Systems Command at Andrews. Know him?”

“No. I mean I’ve met him, but I don’t know him.”

“Well, he’s your man. When he summarized the SSEB’s report, he skewed the results so sharply that they came out favoring Parnell where they had originally favored you. He’s the one that introduced the concern for blind let-down that’s not in the RFP, and he’s the one who oversaw the most probable cost evaluations, to the extent of fixing some numbers himself. And then he made the decision, too.”

Remarkable how this Goldman can spoil a good dinner. “Can we prove this?” McPherson asks.

“Oh no. All this was given to us by an insider who would never admit to talking with us. We’re just seeking to understand what happened, to find an entry point, you know. And some of this information, conveyed privately to the investigators at the GAO, might help them aim their inquiries. So we’ve told them what we know. That’s how these legal battles with the Pentagon go. A lot of it consists of subterranean skirmishes that are never revealed or acknowledged to be happening. You can bet the Air Force lawyers are doing the same kind of work.”

This news sends a little chill through McPherson. “So,” he says, “we’ve got a General James who didn’t want us to get the contract. Why?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me. We’re still trying to find out, but I doubt we will any time soon. Certainly not before the GAO releases their report. It’s due out soon, and from what we hear it’s going to be very favorable to us.”

“Is that right?” After all he has heard so far, McPherson is surprised by this. But Goldman nods.

All of a sudden the possibility of getting these men—James, Feldkirk, the whole Air Force—Parnell—the possibility of taking their corrupt, fraudulent, cheating decision and stuffing it back down their throats and choking them on it—the possibility of forcing them to acknowledge that they have some accountability to the rules—oh it rises in McPherson like a great draft of clean fresh air; he almost laughs aloud. “And if it is favorable to us?”

“Well, if their report is stated in strong enough terms, Judge Tobiason won’t be able to ignore it, no matter what his personal biases are. He’ll be forced to declare the contract improperly awarded, and to call for a new process under the Defense Procurement statutes of 2019. They’d have to repeat the bidding process, this time adhering very closely to the RFP, because the courts would be overseeing it.”

“Wow.” McPherson sips his drink. “That might really happen?”

Goldman grins at his skepticism. “That’s right.” He raises his glass, and they toast the idea.

So McPherson returns to California feeling as optimistic about the whole matter as he has since the proposal went from superblack to white.

Back at the office, however, he has to turn immediately to the problem of Ball Lightning. Things are as bad as ever on that front. McPherson’s role has been deliberately left vague by Lemon, as part of the punishment; he is to “assist” Dan Houston, whatever that means, Dan Houston who has had less time with the company and is clearly not competent to do the job. Galling. Exactly what Lemon had in mind.

But worse than that are the problems with the program itself. The Soviets’ new countermeasure for their slow-burning boosters, introducing modest fluctuations in their propulsion—called “jinking”—has made LSR’s trajectory analysis software obsolete, and so their easiest targets have become difficult. Really, offensive countermeasures to the boost-phase defenses are so easy and cheap that McPherson is close to convinced that their free-electron laser system is more or less useless. They’d have better luck throwing stones. (In fact there’s a good rival program at TRW pursuing a form of this very idea.) But the Air Force is unlikely to be happy to discover this, some thirty billion dollars into the project, with test results in their files that show the thing is feasible. Strapped chicken results.

Dan Houston, bowed down by all these hard facts, has already given up. He still comes into the office, but he’s not really thinking anymore. He’s useless. One day McPherson can barely keep from shouting at the man.

That afternoon, after Dan has gone home early, his assistant Art Wong talks to McPherson about him. “You know,” Art says, hesitant under McPherson’s sharp gaze, “Dan’s having quite a bit of trouble at home.”

“What’s this?”

“Well, he made some bad investments in real estate, and he’s pretty far in debt. I guess he might lose the condo. And—well—his ally has left. She took the kids and moved up to L.A. I guess she said he was drinking too much. Which is probably true. And spending too much time at work—you know he never came home in the evenings when he first started on this program. He really put in the long hours trying to get it to work, after we won the bid.”

“I’ll bet.” Considering the tests that won it. Ah, Dan…

“So… well, it’s been pretty hard on him. I don’t think…” Art Wong doesn’t know what else to say.

“All right, Art,” McPherson says wearily. “Thanks for telling me.”

Poor Dan.

That night at the dinner table Dennis watches Lucy bustle around the kitchen telling him about the day’s events at the church, which as usual he is tuning out entirely; and he thinks about Dan. McPherson has spent much of his life—too much of it—at work. On the weekends, in the evenings… But he can see, just by looking at her, that it has never even occurred to Lucy to leave him because of that, no matter how sick of it she may have gotten. It just isn’t something she would do. He can rely on that, whether he deserves it or not. As she passes his chair he reaches out impulsively and gives her a rough hug. Surprised, she laughs. Who knows what this Dennis McPherson will do next, eh? No one. Not even him. He gives her a wry grin, shakes his head at her inquiries, eats his dinner.

And at work he tries to treat Dan with a little more sympathy, tries to lay the eye on him a little less often. Still, one day he can hardly contain himself. Dan is moaning again about the impossibility of their task, and says in a low voice, as if he has a good but slightly dangerous idea, “You know, Dennis, the system makes a perfectly fine weapon for fixed ground targets like missile silos. We’ve worked up its power so much for the rapidly moving targets that stationary ones wouldn’t stand a chance. Missile silos hit before they launch, you know.”

“Not our job, Dan.” Strategy.…

“Or even cities. You know, just the threat of a firestorm retaliation for any attack—who could ignore that?”

“That’s just MAD all over again, Dan,” McPherson snaps. He tries to control himself. “It wasn’t what they bought this system for, so really, it’s irrelevant. We just have to try to track and hold the boosters long enough to cook them, that’s all there is to it. We’ve done everything possible to the power plant—let’s work on tracking and on phased-array to increase the brightness of the beam, and just admit to the Air Force that the kill process will take longer than expected. Call it a boost phase/post–boost phase defense.”

Dan shrugs. “Okay. But the truth is that every defense system we’ve got works even better at suppressing defenses. Or at offense.”

“Just don’t think about that,” McPherson says. “Strategy isn’t our area.”

And they get back to it. Software design, a swamp with no bottom or border. With the deadline closing in on them.

Dennis is in Laguna when he gets the next call from Louis Goldman. “The GAO report is out.”

“And?” Heartbeat accelerating at an accelerating rate, not good for him.…

“Well, it concludes that there were irregularities, and recommends the contract be bid on again.”

“Great!”

“Well, true. But it’s not really as gung-ho as I expected, frankly. The word is that the Air Force really put the arm on the GAO in the last couple of weeks, and they managed to flatten the tone of the report considerably.”

“Now how the hell can they do that?” McPherson demands. “I mean, what sort of power could the Air Force have over the GAO? Isn’t GAO part of Congress? They can’t possibly threaten them, can they?”

“Well, it’s not a matter of threatening physical violence, of course. But you know, these people have got to work with each other in case after case. So if the Air Force cares enough, they can say, Listen, you lay off us on this or we’ll never cooperate with you again—we’ll make sure any dealings you have with us are pure torture for you, and you won’t be able to fully function in this realm anymore. So, the folks at GAO have to look beyond this particular case, and they’re realists, they say, this one is top priority for them, but not for us. And so the report gets laundered a little. No lies, just deemphasizing.”

McPherson doesn’t know what to say to this. Disgust makes him too bitter to think.

“But listen,” Goldman goes on, “it isn’t as bad as I’m making it sound. In the main the GAO stuck to their guns, and after all they did recommend a new bidding process. Now we’ll just have to wait and see what Judge Tobiason decides in the case.”

“When will that take place?”

“Looks like about three weeks, judging by his published schedule.”

“I’ll come out for it.”

“Good, I’ll see you then.”

Thus McPherson is in a foul mood, apprehensive and angry and hopeful all at once, when Dan Houston comes by at the end of the day and asks him to come along to El Torito for some drinks.

“Not tonight, Dan.”

But Dan is insistent. “I’ve really got to talk to you, Mac.”

Sigh. The man’s hurting, that’s clear. “All right. Just one pitcher, though.”

They track over and take their usual table, order the usual pitcher of margaritas, start drinking. Dan downs his first in two swallows, starts on a second. “This whole BM defense,” he complains. “We can barely make these systems work, and when we do they work just as well against defensive systems, so in essence they’re another offense. And meanwhile we aren’t even paying attention to cruise missiles or sub attack, so as for a real umbrella, well that isn’t even what we’re trying for!”

McPherson nods, depressed. He’s felt that way about strategic defense for years. In fact that was his big mistake, accidentally letting Lemon know how he felt. And his dislike for the concept springs from exactly the reasons Dan is speaking of; every aspect of it has spiraled off into absurdity. “You’d think the original system architects would have thought of these kinds of things,” he says.

Dan nods vehemently and puts down his margarita to point, spilling some ice over the salt on the rim. “That’s right! Those bastards…” He shakes his head, is already drunk enough to keep going: “They just saw their chance and took it. During their careers they could make it big designing these programs and selling them to the Air Force, making it all look easy! Because for them it meant bucks! It meant they had it made. And it’s only after it was put in space and began to come on line that the next generation of engineers had to make the system work. And that’s us! We’re the ones paying for their fat careers.”

“Well, whatever,” McPherson says, uncomfortable with Dan’s raw bitterness. There is a sort of team code in the defense industry, and really, you don’t say things like this. “We’re stuck with it, anyway, so we might as well make the best of it.”

Here he is, sounding like Lucy. And Dan, drunk and miserable, far past the code, will have none of it: “Make the best of it! How can we make the best of it? Even if we could get it to work, all the Soviets have to do is put a bucket of nails in orbit and wham, ten of our mirrors are gone. Talk about cost-effective at the margin! A ten-penny nail will take out a billion-dollar mirror! Ha! ha! So we defend those mirrors by claiming that we will start a nuclear war with anyone who attacks them, so it comes right back to MAD to defend the very system that was supposed to get us away from all that.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know.” McPherson can feel the margaritas fuzzing his brain, and Dan has had about twice as many as he has. Dan’s getting sloppy drunk here, McPherson can see it. So he tries to prevent Dan from ordering another pitcher, but Dan shoves his hand away angrily and orders another anyway. Nothing McPherson can do about it. He feels depression growing in him, settling into a knot around the tequila in his stomach. This is a waste of his time. And Dan, well, Dan…

Dan mutters on while waiting for the next drink to arrive. “Soviets get their own BMD and we don’t like it, no no no, even though the whole strategy demands parity. All sorts of regional wars start so our hard guys can express their displeasure without setting off the big one. Boom, bam, hook to the jaw, jab in the eye, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists sets the war clock at one second to midnight—one second to midnight, man, set there for twenty years! And, and the Soviets’ beam systems could be trained on American cities, burn us to toast in five minutes, and we could do the same to them like I was saying today but we all ignore that, that’s not real no no no, we pretend they’re defensive systems only and we work on knocking each other’s stuff down before the other side does, so we can MIRV each other right into the ground—”

“All right, all right,” McPherson says irritably. “It’s complicated, sure. No one ever said it wasn’t complicated.”

A tortilla chip snaps in Dan’s fingers. “I’m not saying it’s just complicated, Mac! I’m saying it’s crazy! And the people who designed this architecture, they knew it was crazy and they went ahead and did it anyway. They went along with it because it was good for them. The whole industry loved it because it was new business just when the nukes were topping out. And the physicists went along with it because it made them important again, like during the Manhattan Project. And the Air Force went along with it because it made them more important than ever. And the government went along with it because the economy was looking bad at the end of the century. Need a boost—military spending—it’s been the method of choice ever since World War Two got them out of the Great Depression. Hard times? Start a war! Or pump money into weapons whether there’s a war or not. It’s like we use weapons as a drug, snort some up and stimulate the old economy. Best upper known to man.”

“Okay, Dan, okay. But calm down, will you? Calm down, calm down. There’s nothing we can do about that now.”

Dan stares out the window. The next pitcher arrives and he fills his new glass, spilling over the edge so all the big grains of salt run in yellow-white streams down onto the paper tablecloth. He drinks, elbows on the table, leaning forward. He stares down into the empty glass. “It’s a hell of a business.”

McPherson sighs heavily; he hates a maudlin drunk, and he’s about to physically stop Dan from refilling his glass yet again when Dan looks up at him; and those red-rimmed eyes, so full of pain, pierce McPherson and hold him in place.

“A hell of a business,” Dan repeats soddenly. “You spend your whole life working on proposals. Bids, for Christ’s sake. It isn’t even work that is ever going to see the light. The Pentagon just sets companies at each other’s throats. Group bids, one-on-one competitions, leader-follower bids. Kind of like cockfighting. I wonder if they bet on us.”

“Stimulates fast development,” McPherson says shortly. There’s no sense talking about this kind of thing.…

“Yeah, sure, but the waste! The waste, man, the waste. For each project five or six companies work up separate proposals. That’s six times as much work as they would need to do if they were all working together in coordination, like parts of a team. And it’s hard work, too! It eats people’s lives.”

Now Dan gets an expression on his face that McPherson can’t bear to watch; he’s thinking of his ally Dawn now, sure. McPherson looks around for the waitress, signals for their check.

“All their lives used up in meeting deadlines for these proposals. And for five out of every six of them it’s work wasted. Nothing gained out of that work, nothing made from it. Nothing made from it, Mac. Whole careers. Whole lives.”

“That’s the way it is,” McPherson says, signing the check.

Dan stares at him dully. “It’s the American way, eh Mac?”

“That’s right. The American way. Come on, Dan, let’s get you home.”

And then Dan slips in the attempt to stand, and knocks the pitcher off the table. McPherson has to hold him up by the arm, guide him between tables as he staggers. My God, a sloppy drunk; McPherson, red-faced with embarrassment, avoids the eyes of the other customers as they watch him help Dan out.

He gets Dan into his car, fastens his seat belt around him, reaches across his slumped body to punch the car’s program for home. “There you are, Dan,” he says, irritation and pity mixing about equally in him. “Get yourself home.”

“What home.”