“Ever since then James has always done just that little bit better in terms of promotion. But recently Stanwyck got assigned to the Pentagon. And since then he’s been a big force in the development of remotely piloted vehicles for combat missions. As you probably know, most of the Air Force brass has a strong bias against unpiloted vehicles, no matter how much sense they make in terms of current weapons technology.”
“Sure. If all combat planes become remotely piloted, it’ll be cheaper and fewer people will be killed, but where’s the glory?”
“Exactly. If it happens, the whole Air Force becomes nothing but air traffic controllers, and they can’t stand it. No more flying aces, no more right stuff, the whole tradition down the tubes. So it’s obvious why they’re so opposed to it. James among them, since he was a big flyer, one of the so-called flying colonels when they were choosing the design for the second generation ATF. But Stanwyck, now, he’s been on the ground for a long time. And he’d like nothing more than to ground the flyboys too, and have James know it was all his doing. Thus all James’s fault.
“Not only that, but Stanwyck is part of the Pentagon group that is trying to centralize all the armed forces, which would weaken the autonomy of the Air Force, and indirectly strip Air Force Systems Command, out at Andrews, of any real independent power at all.”
McPherson shakes his head. “So we were pawns in a battle between two parts of the Air Force? It wasn’t even interservice?”
Goldman pauses to consider it. “Basically true. But it was the program that was the pawn, though. And from what we now know, I suspect it was a pawn that Stanwyck intended to sacrifice all along. Because”—he stops to sip at his drink—“it was Stanwyck himself who told James of the existence of the Stormbee program. This was after you had been working on your superblack proposal for some time, see, after Stanwyck had made sure, by the use of in-house spies, or inquiries from Feldkirk or whatever, that you had a good, workable system. Only at that point, when the superblack mechanism was already rolling to award LSR the contract, did Stanwyck tell James about it, supposedly in the course of answering a request for information. But I think it was planned. I think that that was the shoving of the pawn out into an exposed position, to set up the sacrifice.”
“You mean Stanwyck wanted the program taken away and turned white?”
“Well, think about what had to happen as a result. James gets mad as hell, and because he’s a four-star general he has the authority to make it a white program, and take over the administration of the bidding process. At that point, you people at LSR are doomed, because no matter what the various other bids look like, James is bound and determined that LSR is not going to win this contract, because you are the company that Stanwyck chose. At the same time, as Stanwyck well knows, LSR has a damn good system worked up. So … do you see?”
“He set James up to initiate cheating in the evaluation process,” McPherson says. He feels a certain theoretical pleasure in understanding at the same time that disgust is twisting his stomach again. “If it happened, and we protested successfully, then James loses power.”
“He might even lose his job! They might force him to retire, no doubt about it. At this point James has his back to the wall, and that’s a fact.”
“So Stanwyck’s gambit worked. The pawn was taken, but the king is in trouble.”
“Yes.” Goldman nods precisely. “And as you might guess, it’s people in Stanwyck’s command at the Pentagon who have leaked a fair amount of the material used by us and the GAO. Now, Judge Tobiason is either on James’s side, or he isn’t aware of the conflict and is only protecting the Air Force. Or else he disapproves of the fight and only wants to stop it. Impossible to tell. We don’t really know. It doesn’t really matter, now that that stage of the battle is over.”
“And where did you get this information about Stanwyck and James?”
“From James’s subordinates. He isn’t much liked, and the story is widespread at Andrews. And from Stanwyck’s people, who want it known.”
“Hmph.”
They order another round, then talk about tactics in the campaign to get Congress to act. Goldman is enthusiastic about this in a way McPherson hasn’t seen before; apparently Goldman wrote off their chances in court ever since Tobiason was appointed judge in the case, so that this is the point where he can really work with some hope of success.
But McPherson finds himself very tired of the matter. The truth is, the day has seen the end of one of their last chances. Once a pawn has been sacrificed successfully and taken off the board, what real chance is there for it to petition its way back on, to protest the way it was used, to redress its grievances?
Well, Goldman thinks their chances are pretty good. It isn’t exactly chess, after all. Much more ambiguous and uncertain. But McPherson goes back to the Crystal City Hyatt Regency feeling depressed, and more than a little drunk.
Out one of the great mirror-windowed walls of the Hyatt stands the Pentagon Annex, a massive concrete bunker defended against all the world. Impenetrable. Who could really believe it could be defeated?
He gets lost on the way to his room, has to consult three bad maps and walk half a mile of halls to find it. When he does there’s nothing there but the bed, the video, a window facing the inky Potomac. Can he stand to turn the video on?
No. He sits on the bed. Tomorrow he can fly home. Be back with Lucy. Only fourteen hours to get through till then.
Some two hours later, just as he is falling asleep watching the dead video screen, the phone rings. He leaps up as if shot. Answers it.
“Dennis? Tom Feldkirk here. I—I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about what’s happened in this case. I didn’t have any part in it and didn’t have any way to change things. And I want you to know I don’t like what’s happened one bit.” The man’s voice is strained to the point of shaking. “I’m damned sorry, Dennis. It isn’t how I meant it to happen.”
McPherson sits dully with phone to ear. He thinks of the stories Goldman told him that evening. It’s possible, even likely, that Feldkirk wasn’t aware of how the superblack program would be used by Stanwyck. He probably found out after it was too late to do anything about it. Another pawn in the game. Otherwise why even call?
“Dennis?”
“That’s all right, Tom. It wasn’t your fault. Maybe next time it’ll go better.”
“I hope so. I hope so.”
Awkward good-bye. McPherson hangs up, looks at his watch.
Only twelve hours to go.
57
In 1940 the population was 130,000. By 1980 it was 2,000,000.
At that point the northwestern half of the county was saturated. La Habra, Brea, Yorba Linda, Placentia, Fullerton, Buena Park, La Mirada, Cerritos, La Palma, Cypress, Stanton, Anaheim, Orange, Villa Park, El Modena, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Westminster, Fountain Valley, Los Alamitos, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Corona del Mar, Irvine, Tustin: all of these cities had grown, merged, melted together, until the idea that twenty-seven cities existed on the land was just a fiction of administration, a collection of unnoticed street signs, announcing borders that only the maps knew. It was one city.
This new megacity, “Orange County North,” had as its transport system the freeways. The private car was the only way; the little train system of the early days had been pulled out, like the more extensive electric rail network in Los Angeles, to make more room for cars. In the end there were no trains, no buses, no trams, no subways. People had to drive cars to work, to get food, to do all the chores, to play—to do anything.
So after the completion of the Santa Ana Freeway in the late 1950s, the others quickly followed. The Newport and Riverside freeways bisected the county into its northwest and southeast halves; the San Diego Freeway followed the coast, extended the Santa Ana Freeway south to San Diego; the Garden Grove, Orange, and San Gabriel freeways added ribbing to the system, so that one could get to within a few miles of anywhere in Oran
ge County North that one wanted to go, all on the freeways.
Soon the northwestern half was saturated, every acre of land bought, covered with concrete, built on, filled up. Nothing left but the dry bed of the Santa Ana River, and even that was banked and paved.
Then the Irvine Ranch was bought by a development company. For years the county government had taxed the ranch as hard as it could, trying to force it out of agriculture, into more tract housing. Now they got their wish. The new owners made a general plan that was (at first) unusually slow and thoughtful by Orange County standards; the University of California was given ten thousand acres, a town was built around it, a development schedule was worked up for the rest of the land. But the wedge was knocked into the southeast half of the county, and the pressure for growth drove it ever harder.
Meanwhile, in the northwest half the congestion grew with an intensity that the spread to the southeast couldn’t help; in fact, given the thousands of new users that the southward expansion gave to the freeway system, it only made things worse. The old Santa Ana Freeway, three lanes in each direction, was clogged every day; the same was true of the Newport Freeway, and to a lesser extent of all the freeways. And yet there was no room left to widen them. What to do?
In the 1980s a plan was put forth to build an elevated second story for the Santa Ana Freeway, between Buena Park and Tustin; and in the 1990s, with the prospect of the county’s population doubling again in ten years, the Board of Supervisors acted on it. Eight new lanes were put up on an elevated viaduct, set on massive pylons thirty-seven feet above the old freeway; they were opened to southbound traffic in 1998. Three years later the same was done for the Newport and Garden Grove freeways, and in the triangle of the elevated freeways, three miles on each side, the elevated lanes were joined by elevated gas stations and convenience stops and restaurants and movie theaters and all the rest. It was the beginning of the “second story” of the city.
The next generation of freeways were the Foothill, Eastern, and San Joaquin, all designed to ease the access to the southern half of the county. When those were in it made sense to connect the ends of the Garden Grove and Foothill freeways, which were only a few miles from each other; and so they were spliced by a great viaduct above Cowan and Lemon Heights, leaving the homes below devalued but intact. Then the new Santiago and Cleveland freeways were built in the same way, flying through the sky on great pylons, above the new condos springing up everywhere in the back hills, in what used to be Irvine Ranch, Mission Viejo Ranch, O’Neill Ranch—now the new towns of Santiago, Silverado, Trabuco, Seaview Terrace, San Juan Springs, Los Pinos, O’Neill, Ortega, Saddleback, Alicia, and so on and so on. And as the land was subdivided, platted, developed, covered with concrete, built up, the freeway system grew with it. When the national push for the electromagnetic road track system began, the freeways of Orange County were in place and ready for it; it only took five years to make the change, and work created by this transformation helped head off the recession of the Boring Twenties before it plunged into outright worldwide depression. A new transport system, a new boom; always the case in Orange County, as in all the American West.
So the southeast half of Orange County, when the flood burst over the Irvine Ranch and the development began, grew even faster than the northwest half had, fifty years before. In thirty quick years it became indistinguishable from the rest of the megacity. The only land left was the Cleveland National Forest. The real estate companies hungrily eyed this empty, dry, hilly land; what condos could be put up there, what luxury homes, on the high slopes of old Saddleback Mountain! And it only took a sympathetic administration in Washington to begin the dismemberment of this insignificant little national forest. Not even any forest there! Why worry about it! The county was crowded, they needed that 66,000 acres for more homes, more jobs, more profits, more cars, more money, more weapons, more drugs, more real estate, more freeways! And so that land was sold too.
And none of that ever went away.
58
Abe and Xavier have been sitting around headquarters for a good half of their shift, a rare event indeed. They’ve been playing video football, pumping weights, napping, and playing more football. Xavier is killer at the game, he plays for money at the Boathouse, and he hits the keys of his control board like a typist going at two hundred words a minute, so that all eleven of his men play like inspired all-stars. On offense Abe is constantly being tackled for a loss, sacked, intercepted, or having his punts blocked, and once on defense he gets steamrolled every way possible. In the latest game the stat board shows him with minus 389 yards rushing, in a game he is losing 98–7. And he got the seven by screaming, “Look out!” just after beginning a play, actually fooling Xavier into glancing around while he tossed a successful bomb.
So Abe quits.
“No, Abe, no! I’ll play with my eyes shut, I swear!”
“No way.”
And Abe is napping again when the alarm goes, a high, not-so-loud ringing that squeezes every adrenal gland in his body. He’s up and out and fastening his seat belt before he’s even awake, and only as they zip out onto Edinger and into traffic does his heart rate sink back to a halfway reasonable patter. Another year off his life, no doubt; firemen and paramedics have a really high heart attack rate, as a result of the damage caused by these sudden leaps of adrenal acceleration. “Where’m I going?”
“Proceed northward on the Newport until encountering the Garbage Grove Freeway, west to the Orange Freeway, north to Nutwood and over to State. We have been called to render assistance at a car crash.”
“You’re kidding.”
Abe notices that Xavier’s hand is clamped on the radio microphone so tight that the yellowy palm is almost completely white. And the joky rapid-fire patter has an edge in it, it always did of course, but now it burrs X’s voice to the point where the dispatcher asks him to repeat things sometimes. Xavier needs a long vacation, no doubt about it. Or a change of work. He’s burning out, Abe can see it happening shift by shift. But with his own family, and the dependency of what sounds like a good chunk of Santa Ana’s populace, he can’t afford to quit or to take a long break. Pretty obviously he won’t stop until it’s him that breaks.
Abe concentrates on driving. Traffic is bad where the Garden Grove Freeway bleeds into the Orange and Santa Ana, in the giant multilevel concrete ramp pretzel, every ramp stopped up entirely, it’s offtrack time again, the song of the sirens howling up and down, power sensation as the truck leaps under his foot, the tracked cars on his right flying by in a blur of color, one long rainbow bar of neon metal flowing by, whoops there’s a car offtrack right in their path blocking it entirely, heavy brakes. “Shit! What’s that doing there!”
“Get back ontrack.”
“I’m trying, man, can’t just drive over these civilians you know.” Abe puts on flasher, blinkers, the truck is strobing light at a score of frequencies, should hypnotize the car drivers if nothing else. No break in the traffic appears.
“They think we a Christmas tree,” X says angrily, and leans far out of his window to wave futilely at the passing stream. “Just edge over into them, man.”
Abe takes a deep breath, eases in the clutch, steers right. Xavier shouts abuse at the cars in the fast lane, and finally says to Abe, “Go for it,” and blindly Abe floors it and steers over into the lane, expecting a crunch from the side any second. As soon as he gets past the stalled car on the shoulder he veers back onto the concrete shoulder and guns it, fishtailing almost into the rail. Xavier is waving thanks to the driver who gave them the gap. They’re up to speed again. “We got a dangerous job,” Xavier says heavily as he settles back into his seat. “Opportunities for impaction while attempting to reach our designated destination are numerous indeed.”
Abe sings the last line of their “Ode to Fred Spaulding”:
And he never, exceeded, the speed, limit—againnnn!
Xavier joins in and they cackle wildly as they trundle at eighty miles an hour up the
freeway shoulder. Abe’s hands clamp the steering wheel, Xavier’s palm is white-person white on the mike.
X says, “Have you heard the latest Fred Spaulding joke? Fred sees the overpass pylon coming at them, he shouts back into the ambulance compartment, ‘Tell the victim we’ll have him there in a second!’”
Abe laughs. “That’s like the one where he asks the victim what’s the definition of bad luck.”
“Ha! Yeah. Or where he asks him to explain double-indemnity insurance.”
“Ha! ha! Or the one where he says, ‘Have you got insurance?’ and the victim says, ‘No!’ and Fred says, ‘Don’t worry about it!’”
Xavier is helpless at this, he puts his forehead on the dash and giggles away. When he’s done he says, “Wish I didn’t believe in insurance. You wouldn’t believe how much I pay every month.”
“It’s a good bet, remember that.”
“That’s right. You die young, the insurance company says, ‘You win!’” He laughs again, and Abe is cheered to see it. Abe adds:
“And if you lose the bet, you’re still alive.”
“Exactly.”
They reach Nutwood, turn off the freeway and head west to College Avenue, shooting through the shops and restaurants and laundromats and bookstores that serve Cal State Fullerton. Crowds watch them pass, cars skitter over to the slow track or slide into empty parking slots, giving Abe little scares each time they hesitate and almost scatter into his path. Familiar surge of power as they part traffic likes Moses at the Red Sea. Up ahead traffic is dense, stopped, the brake lights go off in his brain, Chippie car lights rolling red and blue in the intersection. “We need the cutters,” Xavier reports from the radio. “Code six.”
Abe sucks down air, he’s breathing rapidly. He drives onto a sidewalk to make half a block, thumps back over the curb and crawls by cars to the sota.
They’re there. Three-car job. Sits, something in the silicon. Or maybe this was a combination of silicon breakdown and human error. College had a green light, cars were pouring through, apparently; a truck fired through its red light on Nutwood and broadsided a left-lane car that was caught against the car in the right lane, the three of them skidding over into a traffic light and a power pole, knocking the poles flat over. Both the cars are crunched, especially the middle one, which is a pancake. And the truck driver isn’t too well off either, no seat belt natch.
The Gold Coast: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Page 33
