Firebreak

by Richard Herman

  “Really, Tom,” B.J. said, peering at him over her teacup, “I do not believe the President is honoring his commitment to me. After all, I did make substantial funds available to you during the last election.” Her anger at having to summon him a second time when he did not respond to her first call was apparent in the acid tone of her voice.

  “B.J., you knew at the time that I had to launder that money and that Pontowski didn’t know a thing about it.”

  The petite woman took a sip of the herbal tea she drank before going to bed. “You led me to believe that you would be my friend at court.”

  Fraser used the break to drain his coffee cup. The summoning phone call from Allison had wakened him out of a sound sleep at three in the morning and he was still not fully awake. You bitch! he mentally cursed. How do you expect a man to think so early in the morning. “If he ever finds out,” Fraser cautioned, “he’ll appoint a special prosecutor and launch a full-scale investigation. I’ll be the first casualty.”

  “And the scandal will rival Watergate.” Allison smiled. “It will be the end of his administration.” She had enough representatives in her pocket to guarantee that the House would at least convene a committee to consider impeachment.

  Fraser fought down the urge to argue and tell her that Pontowski was a skilled and ethical politician. “Don’t underestimate him.”

  “Come, Tom. We’ve been friends too long to fight over this.” Now she was using her soft southern accent to charm. She was offering him a reprieve—if he chose to take it. She reached out a liver-splotched hand and touched his wrist. “I only want this silly talk about an excess profits tax on oil stopped. And the very idea of national emergency controls over all the oil corporations if there is another Arab oil embargo is too painful to think about. Why, you would think we did not have the best interests of our very own country at heart.”

  Fraser knew exactly what B.J. had at heart—profits. Even he would have a hard time unraveling the creative bookkeeping her accountants indulged in, but his personal estimate was that B.J. doubled her profits any time there was a significant upward shift in world oil prices. What he didn’t realize was that she could do even better if she knew a decline in prices was in the making. B.J.'s main problem was public relations. Public scrutiny of her business methods would probably raise such an outcry that the government would be forced by an irate electorate to nationalize the oil industry.

  “I can only do so much,” Fraser said. He wanted to quiz her about her sources. Highly accurate and confidential information was being leaked to her. “My value to Pontowski is how well I run the Office of the Presidency for him. I am really an administrator, not a policymaker. He sent me a strong signal the other day.”

  “Tom!” Allison had popped to her feet. The vitality in the old woman surprised him. “You”—she stressed the word—“are not listening. I made an investment in you and that man. Now I want a return on the money I spent.”

  Fraser fought down his anger. Normally, he would have ruined anyone that spoke to him that way. But this old woman was too rich, too powerful. “Please, you must look at the problem from the President’s point of view. He sees an oil crisis if the Arab-Israeli war breaks out again.”

  “Then the answer is simple, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t see an easy solution,” Fraser replied.

  “Oh, you men can be so difficult at times. Stop the war from starting. Any woman can see that.”

  “Much easier said than done.”

  “Yes, it is easy,” Allison snapped, her voice hard and raspy. “We only have to support our Arab friends and stop letting the Israelis determine our foreign policy. After all, how much oil do the Jews control?” Now her voice became soft and wheedling again. “Please, help an old friend who needs to go to bed and rest.”

  Fraser stood, glad that she was dismissing him. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Yes, do that.” The threat was obvious.

  Melissa was sorting through a pile of documents and messages when Fraser stormed into his office. “Why the hell isn’t my desk ready?” he barked.

  “Sorry, sir,” she answered and glanced at her watch. “I didn’t know you were coming in this early.”

  “Goddamn it, it’s your job to know. Look, lady, if you can’t do this job right, I’ll get someone who can.” He ripped off his suit coat and tie and threw them on the floor. “Get me another suit and a clean shirt.” He stepped into his private bathroom. “Get the fuckin’ lead out!” he shouted.

  “My, you are being a bastard this morning,” Melissa said to herself. “Well, go right ahead and press the fire-the-secretary button. We’ll see who wins that one.” She deliberately chose the wrong color tie to go with the dark brown plaid suit she pulled from his closet. She passed them through to the bathroom and then walked down the hall to a deserted office. She found a private phone line, called the White House garage, and asked to speak to Fraser’s driver.

  “Hey,” the young engineer said, “come take a look at this. It’s the third time I’ve modeled it. The results are all the same.” The senior engineer who had been working on the F-15 crash at RAF Stonewood bent over McDonnell Aircraft Company’s most advanced design computer and studied the results of the junior man’s work.

  “Change the impact angle ten degrees and run it again,” the senior engineer said. This was the eighth F-15 crash he had investigated and he had a strong suspicion what had caused the fetal midair collision involving lieutenant Colonel Locke and Captain Pontowski.

  “The results aren’t going to change,” the junior man said. He ran the program again and the results stayed the same. “Only one way to get a shear angle like that on Pontowski’s wing—Locke’s aircraft had to strike it while in a downward rolling maneuver.”

  “Okay,” the senior engineer said, “time to get flight test involved.”

  The two engineers picked up their computer printouts and the VCR tape from Matt’s aircraft that had survived the crash and walked over to McDonnell’s flight test section. The test pilot they talked to could have been a computer programmer working for IBM. There was none of the flash, the dash, the straight teeth and crooked smile that went with the popular image of men who risked their lives advancing man’s knowledge of the flight envelope. He was a thoughtful and highly intelligent engineer who also happened to be a superb fighter pilot at one time in his career. He also had every intention of dying in bed. He listened to the engineers and watched the VCR before he said a thing. “The last transmission from Locke’s aircraft … I can hear two ‘Knock it off’ calls. We need to break them out.”

  The test pilot joined them as they drove over to another building with a sound lab. The engineer there listened to the tape and put it through his computer, splitting one voice from the other. Now they could clearly hear Locke’s voice say, “Knock it off.”

  “No stress there,” the test pilot said.

  “Listen to the other voice,” the sound engineer said. This time the rapid voice of Colonel Roger “Ramjet” Raider could be heard alone.

  “That guy panicked,” the test pilot said.

  The four men looked at each other. “I guess this means the ‘Gruesome Twosome,’ “ the senior engineer said. Now all four—the sound engineer was very interested and not about to be left out—piled into a car and drove to the flight simulator. The simulator McDonnell had built was a far cry from a normal trainer. The mock-up of the cockpit was suspended in the middle of a planetarium and a computer-generated picture was projected on the inside of the dome. The picture, not the cockpit, moved to commands from the pilot. It was unbelievably realistic.

  Inside, they found the to young computer experts McDonnell had hired to run the system plotting some new dirty trick. They could perform magic in the simulator and took a great deal of relish in defeating budding F-15 pilots who tried to fly air-to-air combat in the sim against them. Larry Stigler was the oldest at twenty-eight, and looked eighteen. Stigler seldom said a word and resembled
a stork. His junior partner, Dennis Leander, was twenty-three and looked like a very short overfed elf. But he had the personality of a gremlin. Around the company, they were known as the Gruesome Twosome.

  The six men sat around the table and reconstructed the accident, going over every detail. Stigler raised an eyebrow in the general direction of Leander. “Colonel Raider came through here about a year ago,” he said, “and spent about an hour in the sim.”

  “He crashed three times,” Leander added. “He was ten miles behind the aircraft with his head up his ass.” He let that sink in. It was a confidence he would never voice outside the company. “I think we can reconstruct the midair with no trouble.”

  The test pilot crawled into the front seat of the cockpit while the senior engineer played backseater. The junior engineer stood on the narrow platform that surrounded the cockpit. He was ten feet in the air. The three men could hear talking coming from the control console until Stigler closed the door, sealing them into the dome. The picture on the wall showed them sitting at the end of a runway, ready to take off. The pilot cranked engines and started his takeoff roll. The runway flashed past them and then they were climbing out at a steep angle. The pilot commanded a roll and the picture moved around them. They heard a loud thump as the junior engineer fell down onto the platform.

  “Damn,” he said, “I’ve got vertigo. Better get out before I toss my cookies.” Leander froze the sim, suspending them just above a cloud deck. The door at the back flew open and Stigler helped the sick engineer out.

  Then they were “free” and “flying” again. The test pilot flew two engagements, once as Locke then as Pontowski. Leander played the opposite aircraft from the control console and the image of his jet would flash past them on the walls of the dome, exactly as it really happened. “Okay, freeze the sim,” the test pilot ordered. “Can one of you two fly this puppy? I want to see it from Raider’s position.”

  The sim froze again, the door opened, and a grinning Stigler crawled into the front cockpit while the test pilot took Raider’s position in the backseat. The test pilot was amazed at how well Stigler could fly the simulator and wondered what he would do in the real thing. On the first setup, the suspicion came to him. “Stig,” he said, “we need to switch cockpits.” After they were repositioned, the pilot continued. “When you hear me say ‘Knock it off,’ I want you to vote on the stick and push it forward, hard. The idea is that you want to lower the nose to see Pontowski’s jet.”

  Again, they went through the setup and entered a scissors. Again, the angle of attack increased as their airspeed bled off. Finally, the exact position of the two jets was re-created. “Knock it off,” the pilot said. Stigler did as he had been told and pushed the stick in the rear cockpit forward with both hands, palms open. But the pilot instinctively tried to hold on to the stick. The contrary resistance sent the stick sideways out of his grasp. The simulator rolled under and downward to the left, creating the same angles that had puzzled the junior engineer. The test pilot had learned what had happened. “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough.”

  Outside, the six men gathered around the table. The test pilot looked at them, a sad expression on his face. “From the backseat it looks hairy. They were flying at a low airspeed and a high angle of attack, but still had lots of control. They were not even close to departing controlled flight. The pilots had no trouble seeing each other but Raider would have lost sight of Pontowski’s jet under the nose. For an experienced wizzo, no problem. But now listen to the VCR tape just before impact.” He played the tape. “Just when Locke radioed for them to disengage with a ‘Knock it off’ call, Raider yelled the same thing. You can hear the panic in his voice. Then he voted on the stick, momentarily overriding Locke’s control, and crashed them into Pontowski’s wing.” The test pilot paused. “The only other explanation is that Locke committed suicide.”

  “Is that a possibility?” Leander asked.

  “No way,” the test pilot said. “I flew out of Ras Assanya with him when he brought the Forty-fifth home from the Persian Gulf. I knew him.”

  The envelope was addressed to M. Courtney-Smith and waiting for her in the mailbox when she got home. Melissa checked the return address—it was the one she had been waiting for. Thanks, Joannie, she thought. An old friend, another secretary who had devoted her life to public service, had called from her office in the Pentagon and told her about the final report on Matt’s accident. Melissa had asked her to mail it to her and bypass the normal six or seven bureaucratic layers that would edit and change the report before it was judged to be sent to the White House.

  Inside her apartment, she made a cup of tea and settled down to wade through the document. Her cat, Caesar, jumped into her lap and purred. Outside of her work, Melissa was a very lonely person. She was amazed at the clear and lucid way the report was written. The conclusions were hard and unyielding. “No wonder the milicrats in the Air Force won’t let these things go public,” she told the cat. Instinctively, she knew that the report would step on too many toes and raise some hard questions about how the Inspector General system selected the officers who conducted inspections.

  Like most Air Force reports, the details and meat of the accident board’s findings were in the appendix. She flipped to the back and ferreted out details. The descriptions under the Cause of Death section brought tears to her eyes and she thought about the one man other than Zack Pontowski she had ever loved. Tom Dennison had been a Navy fighter pilot who had found a watery grave while making a night carrier landing in heavy weather. She remembered the way he had laughed when he told her, “Peacetime readiness inspections are like mess-hall cuisine—a contradiction in terms. No combat-ready unit ever passed an inspection.”

  “Well, I know two people who should see this,” she told her cat. Then she thought about Fraser. “Perhaps, I should drop in on Mrs. Pontowski.” Caesar purred his approval.

  Ambler Furry wandered through the squadron looking for Matt. He finally found his pilot alone in the Intelligence section, his head buried in a report on the combat capabilities of the new Soviet fighter, the Su-27 Flanker. “The squadron still avoiding you?” Furry asked and flopped his bulk down on the couch beside him.

  “Yeah, like the plague.” Rather than talk about that, Matt changed the subject. “You know, the Intel weinies say I’m the first one in the squadron to read this.” He waved the report at Furry.

  “It does get your attention, doesn’t it. Whatcha think?”

  “It’s getting tough out there. Better than the MiG-Twenty-nine Fulcrum. I think they’ve finally got a counter to the Eagle.”

  “Probably,” Furry allowed, “but they won’t use it right. To match us, they’ve got to train like we do and that means their pilots would have to learn to think for themselves. There’s no way the commissars will chance that. Hell, independent judgment goes against their basic doctrine and scares the hell out ‘em.”

  “They can’t be that stupid,” Matt said.

  “Well, they have been so far. Kinda encouraging, isn’t it?” Matt agreed with him. “Speaking of encouraging, I think you should read this.” Furry pulled a folded copy of the accident report out of a leg pocket on his flight suit and threw it at Matt. He sat and waited while the pilot read it. When Matt looked up, Furry was smiling.

  “Shit hot!” Matt shouted. The report completely cleared him and laid the blame squarely on pilot error when Colonel Raider took unauthorized control of Locke’s aircraft. The bitterness that had soured Matt’s existence shattered as the self-doubts that had driven him to the edge of despair evaporated. He had not been responsible for the accident and there it was for all the world to see.

  “Kinda encouraging, isn’t it?” Furry allowed. He got up to leave. “I’ll leave that copy for the squadron to read. Looks like you’re home free.”

  For a moment, Matt was at a loss for words. “I think I’ll take some leave now and go home. My grandmother’s not well …”

  “Can you hold off
on that for a few days?” Furry asked. “We need to rub a few assholes in the dirt on an exercise we got coming up.” A wicked look crossed the wizzo’s face.

  “I can do that.”

  Furry grunted and turned to leave.

  “Amb,” Matt said. “Thanks.”

  “I’m so glad you came.” Tosh Pontowski smiled from her bed. She was sitting up and feeling much better. The surge of hope Melissa felt when she saw how much the President’s wife had improved brightened her smile. “Don’t be fooled,” Tosh told her. “This damn disease comes and goes. Right now it’s in remission.” She patted the bed beside her, wanting Melissa to sit close. The last thing the President’s wife wanted was sympathy. She considered her fight against lupus, which means “wolf” in Latin, her own personal battle.

  The two women were old friends and for a few minutes talked and laughed about day-to-day life around the White House. Melissa could see Tosh grow tired as they talked and fought back her tears, thinking how unfair it was that such a vibrant woman who had given so much was being ravished by lupus. “I heard some good news about Matt,” Melissa said. She could see Tosh brighten. “The Air Force cleared him of the accident. A friend sent me a copy of the accident report. She thought we’d like to know right away. She said otherwise it would be weeks before we heard.” Both women knew that the Pentagon would “officially” release the report only after several layers of military bureaucracy had “chopped” on it. In the process of gaining each office’s approval, it would be heavily edited.

  Tears glistened in Tosh’s eyes. “That is good news. I would like to see him.”

  “I can arrange that,” Melissa offered.

  “No, please don’t. He is on his own.” Then another thought surfaced. Like her husband, Tosh Pontowski was a political animal and, even now, could not put her restless mind at ease. “Does Tom Fraser know about the report? That you’re here?” Melissa shook her head no to both questions. “Please don’t tell him. I would like to tell Zack.” She sank back into her pillows. “I know Tom is an excellent chief of staff … but for some reason … I just don’t like him. I’m being silly, I suppose.”