Suddenly there’s a creak, and a forty-foot yacht has hove to alongside them. Three men jump down onto the deck of the cat, frightening Sandy. The thumps and the sudden tilt of the deck wake Tash, and he appears out of his cabin to stand beside Sandy. Sandy still feels like he’s in a dream, he’s too groggy to move. The three strangers form a chain and small metal drums are hefted over the water onto the cat’s middeck, behind the mast.
While they’re at it, right in the middle of their operation, there’s a deep crump from the island, followed by a huge sonic boom. BOOOOMM!!!! Whoah!
That’ll wake you up. Tash stares out to sea. “Look there, quick,” he says urgently, and points. Sandy looks. A black dot, just over the water out on the horizon, skimming in over the mist … it’s moving fast and jinking from side to side as it approaches, zoom past the two boats faster than Sandy can turn his head, and crump into the island. BOOOM! a racking sonic boom, like the fabric of the world has been ripped. And another dot has appeared out there.…
Bizarrely, the strangers from the yacht have continued to sling the drums over onto their deck, not missing a stroke, completely ignoring the missiles screaming overhead. When there’s twelve drums on board they stop. One man comes back to them. “Here.” A card is put in his hand, the man hops up to the deck of the yacht. It pulls away, all its sails angel-wing white over the mist. Around the southern tip of the island, and gone.
Sandy and Tash are still staring at each other, wordless and bleary-eyed. Here comes another skittering black dot, another crump, another shattering roar. “What are they?” Sandy cries.
“Cruise missiles. Look how fast and low they fly! Here comes another one—”
Skimming black dot. One every couple minutes. Each sonic boom smacks their nerves, makes them jump. Finally Tash stops waiting for them to cease. He checks the drums on the middeck, returns. “I guess we’re the proud owners of twelve drums of aphrodisiac,” he says. BOOM! The mast is quivering in the blasts of air. “Let us get the fuck out of here.”
40
Late that afternoon they are approaching Dana Point harbor, under the fine rugged bluff of Dana Point. This is where Bob Tompkins asked them to bring the boat. But then Tash spots two Coast Guard cutters, lying off the jetty. They appear, through binoculars, to be stopping boats and boarding them. “Sandy, I don’t think we should try to go in past those two, not with this cargo.”
“I agree. Let’s change course now before it gets too obvious we’re avoiding them.”
They tack and begin a long northwesterly reach to Newport, using the auxiliary engines to gain speed. Sandy will just have to call Tompkins and tell him the goods are elsewhere. Tompkins won’t be overjoyed, but that’s life. No way they can risk a search by the Coast Guard, and it looks like that’s what they’re doing. Could they be searching for Sandy and Tash’s cargo? Sandy doesn’t like to think such obviously paranoid thoughts, but it’s hard to avoid them with what they’ve got aboard.
An hour later Tashi climbs the minimal mast halyards, with some difficulty, for a look north using the binoculars. “Shit,” he says. “Look here, Sandy, let’s cut back toward Reef Point.”
“Why?”
“There’s Coast Guard off Newport too! And they’re stopping boats.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wouldn’t kid you about something like that. There’s a lot of them, in fact, and I think—I think—yeah, a couple of them are coming this way. Making a sweep of the coast, maybe.”
“So, you’re thinking of dropping the stuff off?”
“Right. And we’d better be quick about it—it looks to me like they’re only stopping cats of about our size.”
“Damn! I wonder if they’ve been tipped off?”
“Maybe so. Let’s get the drums back on deck.”
Tashi descends and they quickly lift the metal drums out of the cabins. The cat is slower in the water with the drums aboard, but the effect is least when they’re clumped right behind the mast, so that’s where they put them.
Tashi takes the tiller and brings them in past the reefs of Reef Point, a beachless point on the continuous fifty-foot bluff that makes up the old “Irvine coast,” from Corona del Mar to Laguna. The top of the bluff in this area is occupied by a big industrial complex; just to its right are the condos of Muddy Canyon.
Tash motors them further in, out of view of the buildings on the bluff above them. “That’s where Jim’s dad works,” Tashi says as he luffs to a stop in waist-deep water, just outside the shorebreak. Happily it’s a day without surf. “That’s Laguna Space Research, right above us.” He tosses the boat’s little anchor over the side. “Hurry up, Sandy, those cutters were coming south pretty fast.”
He jumps overboard and Sandy picks up the drums and hands them down to him. Both of them handle the drums as if they were empty; adrenaline is about to replace their blood entirely. Tash takes the drums onto one shoulder and runs them up the mussel-and-seaweed-crusted boulders at the base of the sandstone bluff. He puts them into gaps between boulders, roots around like a mad dog to find small loose boulders to place over them. Sandy jumps in and rushes from boat to shore with the drums, huffing and puffing, splashing in the small shorebreak, skidding around on the slick rock bottom in search for better footing. They both are panting in great gasps as the sprint exertions catch up with them.
Then all the drums are hidden and they’re back on the boat and motoring offshore. No sight of other boats. Ten minutes, perhaps, for the whole operation, although it felt like an hour. Whew.
They motor west until they can circle around and approach Newport again, from out to sea. Sure enough, off Newport harbor they’re stopped by a Coast Guard cutter, and searched very closely indeed. It’s a first for both of them, although it resembles police searches of their cars on land. Sandy has thrown all the eyedroppers overboard, and he is polite and cooperative with the Guardsmen. Tash is grumpy and rude; they’re doing good detainee/bad detainee, just out of habit.
Search done, the Guardsmen let them go impassively. They motor on into the harbor, subdued until they get into the slip and are off the boat, onto the strangely steady, solid decking. Back to the parking lot and Sandy’s car, away from the scene of the crime, so to speak. Now, no matter what happens to the Rhinoceros, they are safe.
“Pretty nerve-racking,” Tash says mildly.
“Yeah.” Despite his relief, Sandy is still worried. “I don’t know what Bob is going to say about this.” Actually, he does know; Bob will be furious. For a while, anyway.
“Well hey, it looks to me like they had a pretty bad information leak.”
“Maybe. Still, to put the stuff right under LSR. They’re sure to have security of some kind. I suspect I am going to be status but not gratis with the San Diego boys.”
“To hell with them.”
“Easy for you to say.”
And there won’t be any payment without the goods delivered. Sigh. “Well. We’d better go get stoned and think it over.”
“No lie.”
41
Sandy decides that the best thing to do is return immediately to Reef Point and recover the drums, and he calls Bob Tompkins to explain about the delay, also to complain about the apparent information leak. But Tompkins is in Washington to do some lobbying, and that same afternoon Sandy is visited by a worried-looking Tashi. “Did you see the news?” Tashi asks.
“No, what’s up? San Clemente Island blown to smithereens?”
Jim looks up from Sandy’s computer. “Where’d that word come from?”
“Ignore him,” says Sandy. “He’s testing my new drug, Verbality.”
“Verbosity, more like. Here, check out the news.” Tash clicks on the main wall screen and taps in the command for the Los Angeles Times. When it appears he runs through it until he reaches the first page of the Orange County section. The screen fills with a picture of what appears to be a twentieth-century newspaper page, a formatting gimmick that has gotten the Times a lot of s
ubscriptions down at Seizure World. “Top right.”
Sandy reads aloud. “LSR Announces Increased Security For Laguna Hills Plant, oh man, because of recent spate of sabotage attacks, defense contractors in OC, perimeter now patrolled, blah blah blah so what,” so Tashi cuts in and reads a sentence near the bottom of the article: “The new measures will include cliff patrols and boat patrols in the ocean directly off LSR’s seacliff location. ‘Any sea craft coming within a mile of us is going to be under intense surveillance,’ says LSR’s new security director Armando Perez.”
“They must be joking,” Sandy says weakly.
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s illegal!” Panic seeping in everywhere.…
“I doubt it.”
Jim looks up. “What could be the difficulty that is encumbering and freighting your voices with the sounds of sturm und drang, my brethren?”
“Scrap that new drug,” Tashi suggests.
“I will. The difficulty,” Sandy explains to Jim, “is that we have stashed twelve big drums of an illegal new aphrodisiac at the bottom of a bluff now under the intense scrutiny of a trigger-happy private security army!”
“Zounds! Jeepers!”
“Shut up.” Sandy rereads the article, turns it off. The initial shock over, he is again thinking furiously. “I’ve got an idea.”
“What’s that?”
“Let’s go to Europe.”
“Taking the constructive approach, I see.”
“No, let’s go!” Jim says. “Semester break frees me after Wednesday’s class! On the other hand”—crestfallen—“I am a trifle short of funds.”
“I’ll loan it to you,” Sandy says darkly. “High interest.” Actually, he’s short of funds himself. But there’s always Angela’s emergency account. And this is an emergency; he needs to be out of town when Bob gets this news, to give him time to adjust to it. Bob’s like that; he has two- or three-day fits of anger, then collects himself and returns to cool rationality. The important thing is to be out of reach during those first two or three days, so that nothing irrevocable can happen. “Bob’s in Washington for a couple days, so I’ll leave a message on his answering machine outlining the situation. By the time we get back, he’ll have had time to cool down.”
“And you’ll have time to think of something,” Tash says.
“Right. You coming, Tash?”
“Don’t know.”
The news spreads quickly: they’re going to Europe. Jim asks Humphrey for time off work, and Humphrey agrees to it, as long as he can come along. Angela agrees to the use of her emergency account, takes her vacation time, and is coming too. Abe can’t get the time off. Tashi is thinking of splurging for it, but Erica’s angry about it—“I’ve got to work, of course”—and he decides against going.
Humphrey takes over arrangements for the trip and finds them a low-budget red-eye no-frills popper that will put them in Stockholm two hours after departure. After they arrive they’ll decide where to go; this is Sandy’s decree.
Following his last class on Wednesday, Jim tells Hana that he’s off to Europe with friends. “Sounds like fun,” she remarks, and wishes him bon voyage. They make arrangements to meet again when the next semester begins, and happily Jim goes back home to pack.
“Off to the Old World!” he says to his ap. “I’ll be walking waist deep in history wherever we go!” And as he packs he sings along with Radio Caracas, playing the latest by the Pentagon Mothers:
We only want to take you to the thick of the fray!
World War Three? It isn’t just on its way!
You’re in it, you’re a part of it, you win every day!
So come on everybody, let’s all stand up and say:
Mutual Assured Stupiditee-uh-eeeeeeeee!
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.”
The Gold Coast: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Page 24