“Wonderful,” Barbeau muttered. Her jaw tightened. “How long will the Fort Worth plant be out of commission?”
“At least four months.” Rauch sighed. “But that’s the contractor’s optimistic assessment. My personal bet is that it’ll require a lot more time to get that fighter assembly line up and running again. And ramping back up to full production will take even longer — at least another twelve to eighteen months.”
Barbeau frowned. “Why so long? If it’s a question of money to buy and build more machinery and tools, we should be able to slide an emergency appropriation through Congress toot-sweet.”
“It’s not just a question of replacing damaged or destroyed equipment,” Admiral Firestone explained. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs looked haggard. Like Rauch, he’d been up all night trying to piece together more details about the attack. “In some ways, the horrible losses we took among the plant’s workforce are our biggest problem. The F-35 is an incredibly complex aircraft. Key components are manufactured by contractors in nine separate countries. Assembling each of these fifth-generation warplanes requires tens of thousands of hours of work by highly trained and skilled technicians.”
Rauch nodded, grateful for the other man’s intercession. The president had an unfortunate habit of focusing her anger narrowly, trying to fix the blame for everything that went wrong on a single person or cause. Anything that spread her irritation more widely was welcome. “From the numbers I’ve seen, well over a thousand people inside that plant were killed or very badly wounded. That represents close to half of those who were on shift. Training that many replacement workers is going to require a tremendous investment of money and time.” He shrugged his shoulders. “And that’s not counting the skilled people we’re likely to lose going forward.”
“Lose how?” Barbeau demanded.
“We can expect a pretty big fraction of the workforce to walk away,” Rauch pointed out delicately. “Yes, these are good-paying jobs and the people there are deeply patriotic, but all the money and patriotism in the world aren’t enough to compensate for the risk of being killed or maimed in another attack by these terrorists and their war robots and missiles.”
“Then we guarantee their damn safety!” Barbeau snapped. “Tell the commander down at Fort Hood that I want heavy armor from the First Cavalry Division deployed north. And have him rustle up some of the air defense units he’s got in the garrison there, too.”
With obvious reluctance, Admiral Firestone shook his head. “Ringing what’s left of that aircraft plant with troops and tanks might reassure the surviving workers, Madam President. But it won’t solve our bigger problem. We can’t possibly station Army units around every defense industry facility and military base that might be a target for these terrorists.” He spread his hands apologetically. “We just don’t have enough troops or equipment. We’d have to reintroduce the draft and radically increase the size of the armed forces even to come close.”
“I am getting awfully tired of you people telling me what cannot be done,” Barbeau said. There was a dangerous edge to her voice. “I think it’s high time I started hearing some solutions to this mess… instead of more pathetic hand-wringing.”
Rauch winced. There was no doubt about it: she was sharpening up her ax. Hastily, he said, “There are two other F-35 assembly plants. One in Italy, at Cameri, northeast of Turin. The Italians are turning out F-35As and the short-takeoff/vertical-landing F-35B version for themselves and for the Dutch. And the Japanese have a plant at Nagoya to assemble their own fighters. As a stopgap measure, we could ask for the delivery of some of the production from those two factories to our own Air Force squadrons.”
“No,” Barbeau said flatly. She scowled. “It’s bad enough that so many of my shortsighted predecessors farmed out so much of the production work for F-35 components to foreign companies. But I’ll be damned if I let the American people see me going begging, hat in hand, to the Europeans or the Japanese for a few spare fighters… fighters that we designed in the first place!”
For “people” read “voters,” Rauch thought wearily. Somehow, the realization that the president would prefer to see the Air Force go without its own chosen top-of-the-line multirole fighter longer than necessary rather than risk her standing in the polls didn’t come as much of a shock as it should have.
“What I want from you gentlemen is a plan to track down and destroy these terrorists before they hit us again,” Barbeau said acidly. “So far, everything I’ve heard here today is the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the goddamn Titanic.”
In for a penny, in for a date with the headsman, Rauch decided. A few months ago he would have seen the prospect of being fired — especially for telling the truth — as the worst thing that could happen to him. Now that possibility was beginning to look considerably more appealing. “Unfortunately, we’re no closer to being able to formulate a plan to do so than we were yesterday, Madam President,” he said, not bothering to sugarcoat his assessment. “None of the police roadblocks thrown up around the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex have stopped any plausible suspects so far. Nor were any unidentified aircraft picked up on radar either before or after the attack. Without a better idea of just who we’re fighting and how they’re evading our efforts to find them, we are inherently limited to purely reactive and defensive measures.”
To his surprise, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs nodded in agreement. “Dr. Rauch is quite correct. While these enemy war machines, the CIDs, are obviously dangerous opponents, I’m confident that our conventional forces — our armor, artillery, and airpower — could whip them in a stand-up fight. But to do that, we have to pin this enemy force down in a fixed location… or at least intercept them on the way to or from a target.”
“The very fact that these damned machines keep appearing and disappearing so quickly and easily is a key piece of the evidence pointing straight at that bastard Martindale… or at least his Scion mercenaries,” Barbeau said through clenched teeth. “Thanks to those money-grubbing cretins at Sky Masters, they’re the ones with advanced stealth aircraft, remember?”
Rauch saw no point in replying to that. Even if the president’s fixation on Scion was justified — and it was, at least as long as you only focused on known technological capabilities without considering rational motives — it didn’t get them any closer to figuring out a way to find their elusive enemies.
Luke Cohen couldn’t stay quiet any longer. In a cracked and urgent voice, the White House chief of staff broke into the discussion. “For God’s sake, this is all just spinning our wheels here. We have to do something. And fast. Or we’re screwed.”
Barbeau whipped around on him. “Oh, by all means, do feel free to give us the benefit of your wisdom, Luke,” she said with venom dripping from every word. “I’m sure Dr. Rauch, the admiral, and I have all missed some perfectly obvious course of action.”
Helplessly, the lanky New Yorker shrugged. “I’m not saying that, Madam President. But we both know you pay me mostly to keep tabs on politics, right?”
“Go on,” Barbeau said coldly. Her mantra had always been: Policy followed politics. If you were operating from a position of political strength, you could eventually shove through any piece of policy, whether good or bad. But if you were seen as politically damaged, you were finished… because Washington was a town that revered popularity and despised weakness.