Tomahawk (10 page)

And another, possibly even more dangerous opponent was stirring.

As he cut back toward the river, running along darkening paths past Roosevelt Island, he remembered the background—far back, to the early days of World War II.

When the battle line had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor, the Navy's few aircraft carriers were left to hold the line in the Pacific. They had, and as the war progressed, a growing armada built around them struck and moved and struck again till the Japanese fleet was erased and the Imperial Army lay stranded and stunned on its islands. And the future belonged to planes and those who flew them.

Ever since, these mobile concentrations of self-contained force had been the spear point of American might. Destroyers, cruisers, and frigates were their shield. The sword was the aircraft on the flattop's decks, able to strike hundreds of nautical miles, not only at enemy ships and aircraft but at land installations, airfields, communications. Wherever unrest or aggression threatened, the gray ramparts rose from the sea. And the aviators' lives were tied to them, first as fliers, then as carrier skippers, then as commanders of the great battle groups.

Those men led the Navy now, and they were waking to a threat. You saw it not in public, but in a professional note in the Naval Institute
Proceedings,
a skeptical letter to the
Naval War College Review.
Dan had trouble at first believing he had to worry about the naval aviation lobby. Then he remembered what Munford had told him: how they'd helped kill the other cruise programs.

He pondered as he ran, till the towers of Rosslyn rose twinkling and he began the climb toward his apartment, still a couple of miles distant, but uphill all the way.

As he neared the Key Memorial Bridge, he slowed.
Red lights flashed. Police cars were blocking the bridge. Instead of traffic, the entrance ramps were thronged with people.

He slowed to a jog, to a walk, and finally to a bemused halt.

Below a waning moon, a man with the head of a crow lifted a bottle to his beak. Leaves crunched beneath Godzilla's claws. A Red Death staggered. Beyond them hundreds more drifted downhill through oak leaves and wind. The murmur of a great throng surged from the far side of the river. He caught conversation as one knot drifted past. The voices were young, excited.

“Spooky.”

“Dark as the inside of my asshole.”

“Keep it tight,” a masked headsman advised. “We close on the hour when things hidden ooze into the light. When dooms long in fruition wake to life. When spirits come.”

“Do spirits come?” A penguin belched and rifled his can into the underbrush.

Three weird sisters loomed from the night: witch, baseball player, infant. A vampire grinned his way alongside. “Hey, baby, need that diaper changed?”

“Piss off.”

“Halloween is the time of change, the time of revelation.”

She screamed as the rear of her diaper ripped free. Suddenly, they were running, the vampire's cape flapping, the headsman's heels unsteady castanets, a giggle from beneath the penguin's mask.

Dan glanced uphill, toward the promise of a shower and a drink. Then he looked toward the bridge. Over there, darkness, the bobbing glimmer of flashlights, and— were those torches?

He joined the snaking line that moved out over the black water.

The last hill dropped away from his feet. Beyond the Potomac, Georgetown was chandeliered red light. The windows of the Watergate trembled like a thousand jack-o'-lanterns. He whiffed marijuana and perfume, rum and the dank miasma of river. The penguin grabbed at the
count's cloak, rolling in a drunken shamble. Showgirls, Zorros, pickles, magicians' assistants pushed along in jerky peristalsis. Toward the city glitter, they pilgrimed together above chthonian chaos. A proffered fifth of Seagram's; he hesitated, then shook his head. A barge burned red and green below. Bottles snapped out from the crowd, bubbles of glass spinning down into darkness, each querying the night,
Who
—
who
—
who,
till they burst on sudden steel.

On M Street, smoking fusees smeared scarlet light over the face of a bleeding Jesus who walked with the back of his hand on his hip. Dan pushed past Santa Claus, androids, whores, zombies, generals with three-foot penises. At the corner of Bank Alley, a party of impassive Chinese in blue Mao suits stood watching giant rats, clams, androgynes dance and gyrate past.

At Thirty-third, the crowd jelled solid into six lanes of partying flesh. Beneath the clock on the Riggs Bank, a woman's immense rubber breasts proclaimed her a Mutant for Nuclear Power. Undertakers, punkers, Arabs in Saran Wrap rocked and tottered under sodium fluorescence. A black woman in jodhpurs led a blond savage on a chain. Three Girl Scouts with Reagan masks staring from crotchless panty hose offered him a liter of Popov's. Hands and paws clawed at it, but he lifted it from their reach. Abandoning at last all thought of going home, he sucked clear fire till his lungs ached for air.

The night was advanced when he found a clear space again. He was leaning against a tree, watching a train of elephants sway past by firelight. The stars swayed crazily above drunken pullulation. Women swayed by, stripped to the waists. The freezing air packed his nose with burning garbage, beer, grass, and greasepaint, the commingled smells of a balls-to-the-wall riot of four thousand in one square mile, commingled din of forty rock bands in a street ten blocks long.

“You dropped your hat.”

She was nearly as tall as he was, and her voice was cool as autumn through the mask. “Thanks,” he said, taking the watch cap. “Uh, nice costume. A witch?”

“Close enough. What are you—a thug?”

“No. Actually, it's not a costume. I was just out running and saw everything going on.”

“Sometimes you need to become somebody else.”

“True. True.” He was musing on her black domino when a crash came from the next street, the shatter of glass and hammer of metal. He remembered an unwisely parked Jag. “It's getting rough.”

“Last year, they burned two squad cars. The cops pulled out at eleven.” She laughed, half-innocent, half-cynical. “This your first Halloween in Georgetown?”

“That's right. Where are you from?”

“Northeast. Out by Catholic U.”

“You go there? Catholic U?”

She shook her head no. The black mask gleamed under the streetlight. He sensed the warmth of her body through a foot of cold air.

“Go for a walk?”

“Maybe.”

They crossed a footbridge over the abandoned canal. Yelling and screaming fell away behind them. The moon glimmered dim on waterlogged leaves, quivered on stagnant water. They stepped over drunken men, asleep on cobblestones in October. The light waned as the moon slipped on a mask of cloud. “Where are you going?” she murmured.

“Nowhere.”

“It's too dark here. I'm going back.”

He stopped. The corner of an old building cut off the sky. She hesitated, then leaned against the rough stone wall.

“So, what's your name?”

“Do we need names?”

He reached out to hold her. Her hair was a black wave against stone, her perfume a black flower against the smell of piss in corners.

“You feel so good,” he whispered.

“Are you drunk?”

“Yeah.” He x-rayed her mask. “Why don't you take that off?”

She was shuddering in the cold. Sirens ripped by on
the parkway. The stars shivered. He muttered again, “Let me see you.”

As she lifted her hands to the mask, the moon came out from its shadow. Her lips appeared first, full, glistening. Then the lunar light silhouetted an almost-masculine chin, high cheekbones, a heavy dark curve of eyebrow. Her eyes waited, wide and dark as silent water.

“What's your name?”

“Why?”

“I want to see you again.”

“Are you serious? What's yours?”

“Dan. Dan Lenson. I live in Arlington. I'm divorced, in the Navy, one child—”

“My, you
are
serious. Well, I'm Kerry Donavan. Kerry, with a K.”

“Hi, Kerry. Funny way to meet, huh? Tell me about yourself.”

“You might not like what you hear.” Her mouth was too wide and her chin too broad for her face to be beautiful. But it was striking, a face that would make men look at her and then, most of them, look away. Her body was strong, too, under the cloak, solidity and purpose in her shoulders and arms. “Anyway, I have to go home.”

“What, now? Can't we go someplace?”

“Not tonight.”

“Well, look, can I get your number? Can I call you?”

She gave him a string of digits. He didn't have a pen, so he tried to memorize them. “I've got to go,” she said again. “Walk me back to the light.”

“How are you getting home?”

“Just get me back to M, all right?”

She turned to look back, heading away up Wisconsin, and he waved. Then she was gone. He rubbed his face, suddenly depressed, less at her departure than at his own solitude and desperation. Grasping at anyone who might fill that emptiness … He should be home, getting some sleep, not drinking so much…. He spat angrily, then stumbled into an uncertain run.

7

 

 

 

The word telegraphed through the building. Niles was going after the Air Force. Two light colonels and a female master sergeant were cleaning out their desks. Dan didn't understand what the director was doing, but he had to admire his tactics. He'd slashed and burned through his own service first, then gone after the contractors. Now it was the turn of the boys in sky blue, they couldn't say they were being discriminated against.

“Okay, you're on-line,” Sakai said, sliding back from the new personal computer on Dan's desktop. There were rumors of new carpeting, too.

He worked till 9:00 A.M., broke for a meeting on sup-portability, then talked on the phone with a systems analyst from Johns Hopkins about the weapons control system software.

He looked at his “things to do” list and remembered he hadn't called the woman he'd met in Georgetown. Kerry. If that was really her name. He took the elevator down to use the pay phone in the lobby. It rang and rang. He was about to hang up when a man's voice said, “Day House, hello?”

“Sorry, wrong number.”

“Colonel Evans wants to see you,” Burdette said when he got back to the office.

He wondered what the deputy director wanted. He checked his ribbons and tie, made sure he had his wheel-book and a pen, and headed down the hall.

The deputy's office looked the same as it had the day
he reported in: the pipe haze in the air, the aircraft photos on the walls. He knew more about the trim, fair-haired colonel now. Knew, for example, that Scott Evans had shot down three MiGs in Vietnam; had been an aide to the Secretary of the Air Force; had had highly successful command tours at the squadron and wing levels; and had just been selected for promotion to general, though he wouldn't actually pin his stars on till next year. The Air Force ran things casually compared with the Navy, so instead of sounding off, he just said, “You wanted to see me, sir?”

Evans turned from the window. “Dan. How are you doing with us? Getting along okay with Dale and Vic?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That's great.” Evans eased down behind his desk and leaned back, hands behind his head. He didn't look as if he was worried about getting fired, and for a moment Dan wondered why; everybody else was running scared. “Have a seat, okay? Look, I wanted to talk to you about doing something for Test and Evaluation. I'd go through your boss, but he's been out of pocket for a few days.”

“Yessir, haven't seen him all week.”

“Well, this is a G/R issue anyway.”

“G/R” meant common both to the Navy missile and the GLCM, the Air Force-owned nuclear Tomahawk slated for deployment to Europe.

Evans started with a recap. Most of the developmental glitches had been worked through, but there was still an occasional failure to transition from launch to flight—the same problem the sea-based Tomahawks were experiencing.

“How close are they to a final design, sir?”

“I'm crossing my fingers this is it, the bird we're gonna fly next month. The Brits are set for a deployment at Greenham Common next December.”

“What do you need me to do, sir?”

“The admiral wants somebody from this office to observe the tests at Cold Lake. Can you help us out? The T and E side will take care of your travel arrangements.”

“Well, I guess so, sir. If Admiral Niles wants me to. Any specific direction, other than observe?”

“The prime contractor's actually going to run the launch, under direction of the operational test and evaluation community. We just want to keep the system honest, make sure that if there's some little problem, the OSD guys don't give them an
F
when they actually ought to be getting a
B.
Like what just happened to that Army air defense gun, and they canceled the whole project.”