He didn't bother with a police escort. His people loved him. He was sure of that, too, and besides it was late. But there was a police car, he saw, at an intersection, its light turning and flashing, blocking the way, just beyond the cross street. A dismounted policeman raised his hand while talking into his radio, hardly even looking at them. The Premier wondered what the problem was. His driver/ bodyguard slowed the Mercedes with an annoyed snort, stopping it right in the intersection and making sure his pistol was readily accessible. Barely had the official car stopped when both of them heard a noise to their right. The Premier turned that way, and scarcely had time for his eyes to go wide before the Zil-157 truck hit him at forty kilometers per hour. The high military-style bumper hit just at the bottom of the door glass, and the official car was thrown ten meters to the left, stopping when it hit the stone walls of an office building. Then it was time for the policeman to walk over, assisted by two others who had appeared from the shadows. The driver was dead from a broken neck. The policemen could see that from the angle of his head, and one of them reached through the shattered windshield to shake it around, just to make sure. But the Premier, to everyone's astonishment, was still moaning, despite his injuries. Due to all the drink, they thought, his body limp and limber. Well, that was easily fixed. The senior cop walked to the truck, flipped open the tool box, took a tire iron, returned, and smashed it against the side of his Premier's head just forward of the ear. That task completed, he tossed the tool back to the truck driver, and the premier of Turkmenistan was dead as the result of an auto accident. Well, then, their country would have to have elections, wouldn't it? That would be something of a first, and it would call for a leader whom the people knew and respected.
"SENATOR, IT'S BEEN a long day," Tony Bretano agreed. "And it's been rather a long couple of weeks for me, learning the ropes and meeting the people, but, you know, management is management, and the Department of Defense has been without it for quite some time. I am especially concerned with the procurement system. It takes too long and costs too much. The problem isn't so much corruption as an attempt to impose a standard of fairness so exacting that—well, as a pedestrian example, if you bought food the way DOD is forced to buy weapons, you'd starve to death in the supermarket while trying to decide between Libby and DelMonte pears. TRW is an engineering company, and to my way of thinking, a very good one. There's no way I could run my company like this. My stockholders would lynch me. We can do better, and I intend to see that we do."
"Mr. Secretary-designate," the senator asked, "how much longer does this have to go on? We just won a war and—"
"Senator, America has the best medical care in the world, but people still die from cancer and heart disease. The best isn't always good enough, is it? But more than that, and more to the point, we can do better for less money. I am not going to come to you with a request for increased overall funding. Acquisition funding will have to be higher, yes. Training and readiness will be higher also. But the real money in defense goes out in personnel costs, and that is where we can make a difference. The whole department is overmanned in the wrong places. That wastes the taxpayers' money. I know. I pay a lot of taxes. We do not utilize our people effectively, and nothing, Senator, is more wasteful than that. I think I can promise you a net reduction of two or three percent. Maybe more if I can get a handle on the acquisition system. For the latter, I need statutory assistance. There's no reason why we have to wait eight to twelve years to field a new airplane. We study things to death. That was once meant to save money, and maybe once it was a good idea, but now we spend more money on studies than we do on real R and D. It's time to stop inventing the wheel every two years. Our citizens work for the money we spend, and we owe it to them to spend it intelligently.
"Most important of all, when America sends her sons and daughters into harm's way, they must be the best-trained, best-supported, best-equipped forces we can put into the field. The fact of the matter is that we can do that and save money also, by making the system work more efficiently." The nice thing about this new crop of senators, Bretano reflected, was they didn't know what was impossible. He would never have gotten away with what he'd just said as recently as a year earlier. Efficiency was a concept foreign to most government agencies, not because there was anything wrong with the people, but because nobody had ever told them to do better. There was much to be said for working at the place that printed the money, but there was much to be said for eating eclairs, too, until your arteries clogged up. If the heart of America were its government, the nation would long since have fallen over dead. Fortunately, his country's heart was elsewhere, and surviving on healthier food.
"But why do we need so much defense in an age when—"
Bretano cut him off again. It was a habit he'd have to break, which he knew even as he did it—but this was too much. "Senator, have you checked the building across the street lately?"
It was amusing to see the way the man's head jerked back, even though the aide to Bretano's left flinched almost as badly. That senator had a vote, both on the committee and on the floor of the Senate chamber, which was still open for business now that they'd gotten the smoke out of the building. But the point got across to most of the others, and the SecDef was willing to settle for that. In due course, the chairman gaveled the session to a close, and scheduled a vote for the following morning. The senators had already made their votes clear with their praise for Bretano's forthright and positive statement, pledging their desire to work with him in words almost as naive as his own, and with that another day ended on one place, with a new one soon to begin in another.
NO SOONER HAD the UN resolution passed, than the first ship had sailed for the brief steam to the Iraqi port of Bushire, there to be unloaded by the huge vacuum cleaner-like structures, and from that point on, things had gone quickly. For the first morning in many years, there would be bread enough on the breakfast tables of Iraq for everyone. Morning television proclaimed the fact for all—with the predictable live shots of neighborhood bakeries selling off their wares to happy, smiling crowds—and then concluding with word that the new revolutionary government was meeting today to discuss other matters of national importance. These signals were duly copied down at PALM BOWL and STORM TRACK and passed along, but the real news that day came from another source.