The Boss spoke again as Stovic made his way to his seat with his plaque. “It is my personal objective to insult everyone on the team at least once this year. I just couldn’t resist starting with you.” He stared at Stovic. “If you do that again—”
Stovic shook his head as he sat down and raised his hand in surrender.
Two waiters came in and quickly delivered the steaming hot Mexican food on plates too hot to touch. The Blues waited for the Boss to continue speaking as he appeared intent on doing. They were starved, and weren’t going to give him much time before they dug in. He saw their distress. “Eat up, please,” he said. They did.
“While you’re eating, let me tell you the real reason I wanted to get together briefly tonight. First, I think everything’s coming along fine. Everybody’s making good progress. We’re about where we should be at this point. Other than our little brush with threshold lights,” he said glancing at Stovic, “I haven’t seen anything that has given me great concern. We need to keep working, sure, and continue making progress, but I’m pleased with where we are.” The pilots nodded their agreement as they ate hungrily.
The Boss looked around the restaurant. Their table was away from the others by a good distance. It was as if they were in a private room. “So maybe this would be a good time to ask Admiral Hooker to talk to us for just a moment. Admiral . . .”
Hooker stood reluctantly and looked at each of the people seated around the table. Boy was this going to be unpleasant, he thought. “Good evening,” he said. “I’m Admiral Don Hooker, and I’m here from the Pentagon. I can’t tell you how much nicer it is to be in El Centro than in Washington. I prefer the actual desert to the moral desert that calls itself Washington.”
“I’ll drink to that!” Bean said.
Hooker smiled. “What I’ve come here to tell you I wanted to tell you to your face—to your faces. It’s not good news and is probably irrevocable. I’ll never give up, but I wanted you to know what is happening.”
The pilots looked at each other with concern.
Hooker continued. “Each year we have to justify our existence—your existence, the Blue Angels—with the Navy. The budget. There’s always a discussion, and at the end, they always approve it. Well, this year they cut you out. They don’t think they can keep the Joint Strike Fighter program going without a significant infusion of cash from the Navy budget. They’re scrounging around the whole budget looking for ways to move money, and someone took a look at your budget and decided you were expendable. So I regret to tell you—you have no idea how much I regret it—that this will be the last season for the Blue Angels.”
“What?” Oden exclaimed angrily. “How can they do that? That’s crazy.”
The Boss shook his head. He’d been blindsided. If Hooker had told him, he would have moved mountains, called every Admiral in the Navy who wears wings, called every Blue Angel from the past, and made a move to get the decision changed. Now it was a done deal, and Hooker was announcing it to the team. The Boss felt betrayed. He tried not to show it. The Boss spoke to the team. “Don’t worry, I’ll push back through whatever avenues I can identify. I’m not going to go down without a fight.”
Hooker glanced at the Boss. “Feel free. You have my blessing. I tried, but discovered pretty quickly that the JSF is more important to Washington than the Blue Angels. Sorry, but that’s what I’ve found. I’ve shown them the benefits, I’ve shown them the number of people whose lives have been touched by seeing the Blue Angels fly—not only those who become Navy pilots, but all the people across the country who have seen you fly. I’ve given them graphs showing how many millions of people have seen the Blues. They all think it is very impressive and that it will be too bad to lose that impact.”
“Why the budget crunch? What’s happened?” Hoop asked.
“When the Joint Strike Fighter was finishing its carrier suitability tests, they found some structural changes they needed to make before it gets cleared for carrier use. No money was in the budget for that. Turned out the amount they needed was about what your annual budget is.”
The pilots stared ahead, not looking at each other. Animal finally spoke. “Do we get to finish the season?”
“Yes,” Hooker replied. “This is all about next year’s budget. We’re okay for this year, but after this, . . . well . . . you’ll have to find something else. You’re going to have to get real jobs.”
Stovic sat silently. His first year on the Blues would also be his last. He couldn’t believe they were getting shut down. It was like shutting down Christmas. You just didn’t do that. The Blues were an institution.
All the Blues had stopped eating and drinking.
The Boss spoke. “I don’t like this either, but we’ve just got to do the best we can this year. I want us to go out with the reputation of being the best Blue Angel team ever to fly. I want us to be able to ride into the sunset proud of what we’ve done. I want us to leave a legacy so when people look back they’ll regret the Blue Angels aren’t around anymore. Maybe one day they’ll bring the Blues back.” The Boss sat down.
“Sorry to drop this on you,” Admiral Hooker said. He reached down, picked up his glass, and raised it. “To the Blue Angels.”
The pilots felt pride and anger coming together inside them like a chemical reaction. They stood slowly, fighting their feelings. They muttered, “To the Blues.”
* * *
“Well,” President Kendrick asked Sarah St. John as they flew back to Washington from the Armed Forces Staff College, “what did you think of my speech?”
“Perfect,” she said. “I assumed the students would all think alike. You obviously talked about what they wanted to hear. They couldn’t get enough.”
She crossed to the other side of Air Force One. She grabbed a can of soda out of the refrigerator and sat down across from the President with a small lacquered table between them.
“Had any more thoughts about the War on Terrorism? You said you were going to think about it.”
“We talk about this a lot, don’t we?”
“It’s important. Any ideas?”
“It’s not what you want to hear.”
“Try me.”
“We need to take more chances. More chances politically, economically, militarily, and with our Special Forces. Greater risk can mean greater reward.”
“Or greater failure.”
She sipped from the soda can. “That’s the risk side.”
“You have anything particular in mind?”
“I’m getting there.”
“How?”
“By opening up certain . . . communication channels. Sometimes the chain of command means keeping new ideas down. I like listening to those who will actually have to execute them instead of planning with people who only have vague recollections of actually doing things. I believe the key is listening to the operators.”
Kendrick frowned as he looked up at a young man who was delivering the iced tea he had requested. He nodded at the waiter and returned his attention to his National Security Advisor. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“Shortening the chains of command.”
“You mean going around the chains of command.”
“Maybe . . . maybe to some degree. But I want to see things get done. We have to be creative and take some risks.”
“And they’ll be my risks. Not yours.”
“I appreciate that.”
“You have something up your sleeve?”
“Not really. I’ve got a few things I’m working on, but I won’t do anything without your okay.”
“You promise?”
“Absolutely.”
Kendrick rubbed his eyes. He was beyond tired. He was starting to show how fatigued he felt. People were starting to look at him as if to say, “You okay?” “Sarah, we go way back. Don’t we?”
“Yes, sir.”
“One of the reasons I have you here, other than the fact that you’re incredibly smart—”
“
Mr. President—”
“No false humility, none of that. But one of the reasons you’re here is because I trust you.” He watched her face. “But this job isn’t mine. I work for the country. If it turns out you’re someone I can’t trust, if you let me down, or lie to me, or go behind my back, or do something without my approval that you know I would have wanted to know about, I’ll fire you so fast they won’t know where to forward your mail.”
She was taken aback. He had never spoken to her like that. “There is absolutely nothing for you to worry about, Mr. President. You have my word.”
“No agenda at work we haven’t talked about?”
St. John felt cornered. She hadn’t wanted to discuss it openly, but she would rather do that than deny it. “You may be right.”
Kendrick was surprised. “About what?”
“Maybe I do have an agenda.”
“Oh, and what might that be?”
“I think you’ve got the wrong guy as your Secretary of Defense.”
“Stuntz?”
“He’s impulsive, unthinking. He believes the best idea is the one that occurs to him first. Mr. President, his approach is dangerous. He—”
Kendrick smiled slightly. “You want his job, don’t you?”
“I think I could do a better job. It’s critically important to your administration. You don’t need a cowboy in that job.”
“I think you’re critically important to my administration as the National Security Advisor. That’s where I want you to stay.”
“That’s fine, sir. I am content. I just don’t want you to get undercut.”
Kendrick nodded and put his head back on the soft leather. He was asleep in seconds.
* * *
Rat stood next to Andrea Ash who was setting up the professional quality camera that recorded every practice maneuver on videotape. They stood at the end of a dirt road in the desert near the El Centro Naval Air Facility. Rat had ingratiated himself with the squadron. They knew he was around, that his book project had been blessed by whoever needed to bless it, and that they would see him everywhere. They didn’t mind. His status as a former SEAL was known but not discussed. His presence was simply accepted.
The diamond sat on the runway prepared to take off. The morning was cool, and the sky was turning from pink to light blue. The sun was just now over the horizon. The temperature would climb steadily to the high eighties, but the air would feel wonderful even at the hottest point in the day.
Rat examined the large containers of gear that sat on portable tables. They were bleached from their constant exposure to the sun.
“Morning,” Rat said to Andrea.
She was adjusting the radio equipment and watching a sailor prepare the video camera to start recording. It stood on a large wooden tripod with a long neck to allow it to shoot up at very high angles. The sailor was ready.
“Morning,” Andrea replied. She took a long drink from a travel mug full of coffee. She looked tanned and content. “What brings you out here?”
“I heard about this whole videotape thing. Animal was telling me about how you film every practice, then debrief.”
“We do.”
“How did you get the job of critiquing the pilots? I mean you’re the one who gives comments at the debrief, right?”
“True,” she smiled. “Kind of counterintuitive, isn’t it?”
“I just didn’t think the pilots would listen to nonpilots.”
“They wouldn’t if I said, ‘You need to ease up on the stick at the top of the loop,’ but they listen to me if I say, ‘Number four looked out of place as you started up. He seemed to start up later.’ Then it’s just an observation of asymmetry, as opposed to how to fly your airplane.”
Rat nodded.
“Want some coffee?”
“Sure,” he said gratefully. The video operator heard her offer and went to pour Rat a cup from the large thermos in a Blue Angel mug. “Thanks.”
“So you’re a flight surgeon specializing in asymmetry.”
She laughed. “That about sums me up. Asymmetry. Always on the lookout for asymmetry. You find it in the most unlikely places.”
“I’d like to take a couple of shots out here, if you don’t mind. I’d like to have a picture of you guys standing around watching practice, giving objective input to the pilots.”
She shrugged as the Blues roared to afterburner and rolled down the runway. “Samuels, you got the camera going?”
“All over it, ma’am.”
“That okay?” Rat asked.
“Sure,” Andrea said, her attention now fixed on the Blues instead of him.
The Blue Angels were beginning to fly as a team. The pilots in the diamond were closing the distance every day, flying closer and closer together. The two solos were flying passes much faster and closer than they had been. Stovic’s confidence was building, and Oden’s precision was getting more remarkable. During an air show the solos flew either at each other or with each other. On the passes—for which the solos were famous—they were to pass as closely together as possible and then flip on their sides in parallel knife-edged passes to look as if they were flying right into each other. Crowds always gasped and brought their hands to their mouths until the solos passed each other and pulled up intact.
The Boss was like a caller at a square dance but calling a ballet instead. It was smooth and lyrical, unrushed, calm, and beautiful. He would call out the next maneuver—like the diamond loop—and the other three diamond pilots would respond with their call signs in less than a second: “Loop, Link, Beaner!” They would say them so quickly that no one who wasn’t clued in would know what was happening. They would hear, “LpLnkBeaner!” Bean would always take advantage of being last by drawing out his call sign and saying it with energy, even adding another syllable, “Beaner!”
The Boss would then put the tight diamond in the perfect position to start the maneuver, taking into consideration the wind, the clouds, the crowd, and their speed, and start them in his singsong command with slightly rising pitch on each word, “Up . . . we . . . go. . . .” The pilots would start pulling back on their sticks on the g of “go.” And the boss would continue, “A . . . lit-tle . . . more . . . pull . . . ,” with a distinctive p to be heard clearly over the radio. The pilots would increase the G forces on their airplanes by pulling back harder on the stick with the first sound of that p in “pull,” the diamond pilots’ eyes riveted on the Boss’s airplane to know exactly how much to pull, or how much power to put on.
The Boss would then tell the diamond where they were—they couldn’t even grab a glance in front of them when they were in their tight formation—”Exiting area crowd right . . .” and they would slip out just slightly to ease up on the demand of the formation flying, with the wings of the other blue jets twenty or thirty inches from the other canopies during the maneuvers in front of the crowd.
And as the diamond exited, the solos would be lined up for their next pass, the next amazing feat of precision flying that would wow the crowd and make those who wanted to fly jealous that someone else could be having so much fun in an airplane, flying around just below the speed of sound fifty feet off the ground, pulling on the stick like a maniac and ripping the air as if they owned it.
Twice during the air show Stovic and Oden joined the diamond. They then formed the Blue Angel delta. Even Stovic was impressed that they could do it, forming a six-plane delta formation, nearly as close together as the four-plane diamond. They would do the maneuvers, “Up . . . we . . . go . . .” and break off with the others for the fleur de lis that took them to all points of the compass, where each Blue Angel would reverse his airplane and come racing back toward the center point at the other five jets, all trying to arrive at the same point at the same time, separated only by one hundred feet in altitude.
They were growing in confidence and it was showing. They were almost ready to let the public see their work of art.
Rat reached into his camera bag and pulle
d out a long cylindrical device. He looked through it at the Blues as they lifted off the runway.
“What’s that?” Andrea asked glancing over her shoulder.
He was surprised by her question. “Laser range finder. Helps me focus my camera on them.”
She frowned. “Laser range finders transmit. There’s no room in that thing for a battery. And your camera should be focused to infinity at this distance.” She looked into his eyes, waiting for a response.
He smiled and put the device back up to his eye. He watched the indicator in the eyepiece tell him the infrared signature of the airplane, the temperature range that was coming from the F/A-18s, the heat a missile would see if it were looking.
“You’re not going to answer me?”
“You didn’t ask me a question.”
“Okay,” she grinned. “What the hell is it that you have in your hand that you just looked through?”
“Laser range finder,” he repeated.
“Not going to tell me, huh?”
“Just did.”
“Whatever.”
He pressed the button on the top of the sight, inserted it into a base in the camera bag, and recorded the information. He took out his Nikon digital camera and took a couple of shots of the Blues as they pulled up into a loop. He then stood back and began taking pictures of the desert way station where they were standing. He took several photographs of Andrea. She tried to ignore him, then couldn’t. “What did you do in the Navy again?”
“I was a SEAL.”
“And you got out?”
“I wanted to start my own company.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. Security company.” He took a step closer and took another picture of her. “Would you like to get together sometime? Go out and do something?” He looked around at the desert terrain. “I’m not sure what there is to do around here, maybe go out in the middle of nowhere and shoot cans.” He laughed.
The Shadows of Power Page 14
