“I can only do so much,” Fraser said. He wanted to quiz her about her sources. Highly accurate and confidential information was being leaked to her. “My value to Pontowski is how well I run the Office of the Presidency for him. I am really an administrator, not a policymaker. He sent me a strong signal the other day.”
“Tom!” Allison had popped to her feet. The vitality in the old woman surprised him. “You”—she stressed the word—“are not listening. I made an investment in you and that man. Now I want a return on the money I spent.”
Fraser fought down his anger. Normally, he would have ruined anyone that spoke to him that way. But this old woman was too rich, too powerful. “Please, you must look at the problem from the President’s point of view. He sees an oil crisis if the Arab-Israeli war breaks out again.”
“Then the answer is simple, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see an easy solution,” Fraser replied.
“Oh, you men can be so difficult at times. Stop the war from starting. Any woman can see that.”
“Much easier said than done.”
“Yes, it is easy,” Allison snapped, her voice hard and raspy. “We only have to support our Arab friends and stop letting the Israelis determine our foreign policy. After all, how much oil do the Jews control?” Now her voice became soft and wheedling again. “Please, help an old friend who needs to go to bed and rest.”
Fraser stood, glad that she was dismissing him. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Yes, do that.” The threat was obvious.
Melissa was sorting through a pile of documents and messages when Fraser stormed into his office. “Why the hell isn’t my desk ready?” he barked.
“Sorry, sir,” she answered and glanced at her watch. “I didn’t know you were coming in this early.”
“Goddamn it, it’s your job to know. Look, lady, if you can’t do this job right, I’ll get someone who can.” He ripped off his suit coat and tie and threw them on the floor. “Get me another suit and a clean shirt.” He stepped into his private bathroom. “Get the fuckin’ lead out!” he shouted.
“My, you are being a bastard this morning,” Melissa said to herself. “Well, go right ahead and press the fire-the-secretary button. We’ll see who wins that one.” She deliberately chose the wrong color tie to go with the dark brown plaid suit she pulled from his closet. She passed them through to the bathroom and then walked down the hall to a deserted office. She found a private phone line, called the White House garage, and asked to speak to Fraser’s driver.
“Hey,” the young engineer said, “come take a look at this. It’s the third time I’ve modeled it. The results are all the same.” The senior engineer who had been working on the F-15 crash at RAF Stonewood bent over McDonnell Aircraft Company’s most advanced design computer and studied the results of the junior man’s work.
“Change the impact angle ten degrees and run it again,” the senior engineer said. This was the eighth F-15 crash he had investigated and he had a strong suspicion what had caused the fetal midair collision involving lieutenant Colonel Locke and Captain Pontowski.
“The results aren’t going to change,” the junior man said. He ran the program again and the results stayed the same. “Only one way to get a shear angle like that on Pontowski’s wing — Locke’s aircraft had to strike it while in a downward rolling maneuver.”
“Okay,” the senior engineer said, “time to get flight test involved.”
The two engineers picked up their computer printouts and the VCR tape from Matt’s aircraft that had survived the crash and walked over to McDonnell’s flight test section. The test pilot they talked to could have been a computer programmer working for IBM. There was none of the flash, the dash, the straight teeth and crooked smile that went with the popular image of men who risked their lives advancing man’s knowledge of the flight envelope. He was a thoughtful and highly intelligent engineer who also happened to be a superb fighter pilot at one time in his career. He also had every intention of dying in bed. He listened to the engineers and watched the VCR before he said a thing. “The last transmission from Locke’s aircraft … I can hear two ‘Knock it off’ calls. We need to break them out.”
The test pilot joined them as they drove over to another building with a sound lab. The engineer there listened to the tape and put it through his computer, splitting one voice from the other. Now they could clearly hear Locke’s voice say, “Knock it off.”
“No stress there,” the test pilot said.
“Listen to the other voice,” the sound engineer said. This time the rapid voice of Colonel Roger “Ramjet” Raider could be heard alone.
“That guy panicked,” the test pilot said.
The four men looked at each other. “I guess this means the ‘Gruesome Twosome,’ “ the senior engineer said. Now all four — the sound engineer was very interested and not about to be left out — piled into a car and drove to the flight simulator. The simulator McDonnell had built was a far cry from a normal trainer. The mock-up of the cockpit was suspended in the middle of a planetarium and a computer-generated picture was projected on the inside of the dome. The picture, not the cockpit, moved to commands from the pilot. It was unbelievably realistic.
Inside, they found the to young computer experts McDonnell had hired to run the system plotting some new dirty trick. They could perform magic in the simulator and took a great deal of relish in defeating budding F-15 pilots who tried to fly air-to-air combat in the sim against them. Larry Stigler was the oldest at twenty-eight, and looked eighteen. Stigler seldom said a word and resembled a stork. His junior partner, Dennis Leander, was twenty-three and looked like a very short overfed elf. But he had the personality of a gremlin. Around the company, they were known as the Gruesome Twosome.
The six men sat around the table and reconstructed the accident, going over every detail. Stigler raised an eyebrow in the general direction of Leander. “Colonel Raider came through here about a year ago,” he said, “and spent about an hour in the sim.”
“He crashed three times,” Leander added. “He was ten miles behind the aircraft with his head up his ass.” He let that sink in. It was a confidence he would never voice outside the company. “I think we can reconstruct the midair with no trouble.”
The test pilot crawled into the front seat of the cockpit while the senior engineer played backseater. The junior engineer stood on the narrow platform that surrounded the cockpit. He was ten feet in the air. The three men could hear talking coming from the control console until Stigler closed the door, sealing them into the dome. The picture on the wall showed them sitting at the end of a runway, ready to take off. The pilot cranked engines and started his takeoff roll. The runway flashed past them and then they were climbing out at a steep angle. The pilot commanded a roll and the picture moved around them. They heard a loud thump as the junior engineer fell down onto the platform.
“Damn,” he said, “I’ve got vertigo. Better get out before I toss my cookies.” Leander froze the sim, suspending them just above a cloud deck. The door at the back flew open and Stigler helped the sick engineer out.
Then they were “free” and “flying” again. The test pilot flew two engagements, once as Locke then as Pontowski. Leander played the opposite aircraft from the control console and the image of his jet would flash past them on the walls of the dome, exactly as it really happened. “Okay, freeze the sim,” the test pilot ordered. “Can one of you two fly this puppy? I want to see it from Raider’s position.”