“They did the usual PowerPoint dance, but that wasn’t the key to the increase,” Debenport said. “Those boys grabbed a lot of Homeland Security detail out of the gate. We can write those budget request entries in ink.”
“Because of a buzz phrase,” Hood said. “We might have been in a position to reorient ourselves if our attention hadn’t been on stopping nuclear war between India and Pakistan.”
“Yes, and frankly your success is part of the problem. You’ve shifted the majority of your operations from the United States to other countries—”
“At the president’s request,” Hood reminded him. “He asked us to augment Op-Center’s domestic agenda after we stopped a leftist military coup in Russia.”
“I know the history,” Debenport said. “I also know the future. The voters don’t much care whether Moscow turns Red again or Tokyo is nuked or Spain falls apart or France gets hijacked by radicals. Not anymore. Foreign aid resources are being downsized across the board.”
“Your constituents may not care, but we know that what happens there affects what happens here,” Hood said.
“That’s true,” Debenport said. “Which is why the mandate the president gave you is not being changed.”
“Only our funding. We’re supposed to do the same job but with eighty percent of an already stretched budget.”
“American households are having to do more than that,” Debenport said. “As a senator, I also have a responsibility to help alleviate that burden.”
“Senator, I appreciate your position, but this isn’t right,” Hood said. “I used to work on Wall Street. I run a trim operation, leaner than the agencies that are getting an increase. I intend to request, in writing, a hearing of the full CIOC as permitted under charter—”
“You can have it, of course. But you will be wasting your time and ours,” Debenport said. “This decision was unanimous.”
“I see. Let me ask you this, then. Is the CIOC fishing for my resignation?”
“Hell, no,” Debenport said. “I don’t run when I can pass. If the committee thought you had overstayed your welcome, I’d tell you.”
“I appreciate that,” Hood said. “Did you discuss any of this with the president?”
“That’s my next call. I wanted to tell you first,” Debenport said. “But whatever his feelings, he has no veto power. He doesn’t even have a political majority on the committee.”
“So that’s it.”
“I’m sorry, Paul.”
Hood was angry, though not at Debenport. He was upset with himself. He should have smelled this one in the oven. He thought the departure of Fox was a signal that things were going to get better. And maybe they had, in a way. Fox did not see why Op-Center was necessary at all. She believed that the overseas intelligence activities of the CIA and the FBI were sufficient to keep America safe. Of course, she was also one of the senators who had put the bulk of America’s spy capabilities into electronic intelligence. That was a huge miscalculation. If there were no operatives on the ground to pinpoint the mud huts, bunkers, apartments, cars, and caves for audio surveillance and spy satellites, a lot of what was called “incipient hostile intent” went unnoticed. That was when surgical covert activity became a War on Terror.
Still, Hood had hoped that Debenport would fight harder to keep Op-Center fully staffed.
The senator hung up, and Paul sat there, looking at the last E-mail he had opened. It was from the CIA Office of Personnel Security, Department of Communication, regarding updated procedures for the evacuation and decontamination of juveniles in the event of a biological attack on child care facilities serving the intelligence community. It was an important document, but it emphasized the gulf between the agencies. Op-Center did not even have a child care facility.
Hood closed the E-mail and brought up the budget file. He called Op-Center’s CFO Ed Colahan and asked him to come to his office. He had come in early. Colahan knew their current fiscal year gave them another six weeks of business as usual. He wanted to be ready for whatever the CIOC decided.
Hood knew he would not be ready for this.
The question Hood had to address was whether to cut personnel from most or all of their ten divisions or whether to eliminate one or two departments entirely. He knew the answer even without looking at the figures. He also knew which departments would get him close to twenty percent. One of them would cost him efficiency.
The other would cost him a friend.
FOUR
When Don Orr was a little boy, he used to look forward to June 22, the day Miss Clarion’s twenty-two-student school closed down for the summer. He did not dislike school. Just the opposite. He loved learning new things. But the first day of summer vacation was special. He would get up at sunrise. With an olive green baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, he filled his father’s canteen and slung it across a small shoulder. He made three or four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pushed them into a knapsack, along with a package of oatmeal cookies and a compass. Then he took a shovel from the tool shed. That was for beheading rattlesnakes if he encountered any. Holding the shovel like a prophet’s staff, he walked out from the family’s cattle ranch in Kingsville, Texas. He walked into the hot, windless plain to think about everything he had learned that year. Being alone like that for a day helped to burn the important things into his brain. He had learned in Bible class that this was what Jesus had done, and Moses before Him. The young boy felt that the walk would help to make him a stronger, better man.
He was right. Don Orr did that for ten years running, from the time he was eight. What he did not know, until years later, was that for the first two years, his father had one of the ranch hands follow him. The tradition ended in 1967, when Orr turned eighteen and joined the air force. Orr knew what it was like to walk and ride. Now he wanted to fly. But the air force had other ideas. They wanted him to work with his hands, like he did on the ranch. Just two years earlier, the air force had established RED HORSE units: Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron, Engineering. These were divided into two squadrons: the 555th Triple Nickel and the 554th Penny Short. They assigned Orr to one of these. After nine weeks of training at Cannon Air Base in New Mexico, the young man was sent with the 554th to Phan Rang Air Base in Vietnam. There, his specialty was drilling wells to obtain drinking water, a skill he had learned on the ranch.
Orr did one tour in Vietnam and a second in Thailand. He was sorry he never saw combat. Like breaking a horse, herding cattle, or hauling yourself into the baking summertime wilderness, war was the kind of intense challenge that burned things into a man’s head, muscles, and heart. That was one reason Senator Orr had always gotten along with combat veterans like Admiral Link. Risk-taking had been hardwired into the systems of those men.
It was not risk-taking but a sense of duty that had inspired Senator Orr to found the United States First Party six months before. Each of the two major parties was like a Third World country, a collection of ideological warlords with only one thing in common: an overwhelming dislike for the other party. There was no singular, driving philosophy. It was discouraging. Orr’s idea was simple. The United States needed to become what the Orr Ranch was, a powerful spread run by men of vision. The nation should not be run by parties that burned up their energies playing a tug-of-war for inches. National growth should not be determined by an international consensus or by despots who bullied us with goods, from lumber to steel to oil. The USF Party would provide that. Orr had influence, resolve, credentials, and an American bloodline unmatched by any third-party leader in the past. The effort would also be good for Don Orr. The senator had influence on the Hill, but he did not have control. He was affiliated with good men, but he was not surrounded by them.