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came fully equipped: car phone, TV, stereo, CD, air-conditioning, an Army staff sergeant as chauffeur, and an anonymous-looking man in a conservative dark suit and sunglasses riding shotgun in the front seat. Magruder got into the back with Haworth. The driver guided the vehicle out into blazing sunshine, then neatly threaded the cloverleafs that led to the Shirley Memorial Parkway, heading toward the 14th Street Bridge.
“How do you like your new assignment, Admiral?” Haworth asked as they accelerated smoothly into the traffic flow. Perhaps he was simply trying to make conversation, but the question galled Magruder. “It sucks, Colonel. It goddamn sucks. I’d rather be conning a carrier than a desk any day.”
That effectively ended the conversation. Magruder gazed out the window at the ultra-modem glass towers of Pentagon City flashing by to the right. It was late enough in the morning that traffic was mercifully light. In moments, the Potomac River opened beneath them as they sped across the Rochambeau Bridge. The dome of the Jefferson Memorial rose above trees to the left that were not yet showing any green.
His new assignment was a particular and special purgatory for the fifty-seven-year-old admiral. Assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, he’d quickly found himself caught between the lines of the war currently raging in Washington over cuts in the U.S. military. Within the walls of the Pentagon, die OSD was considered to be the enemy by the Joint Staff and other departments that were primarily military in orientation and personnel; the majority of managers and directors within the OSD were political appointees, civilian bureaucrats who tended to look down on, ignore, or simply mistrust the military members of the department.
To make matters worse, Magruder had come to Fort Fumble straight from the command of a carrier battle group. Before that, he’d been captain of a supercanier. Battle groups and supercarriers together were coming under especially heavy fire as Congress and budget-management people at the White House looked for big and expensive military programs to cut. With the Soviets no longer an immediate menace, procurement programs were being slashed right and left, bases were being closed everywhere, and men were actually being paid bonuses to leave the service early. The B-2 Stealth Bomber, Star Wars,
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new supercarriers already under construction, the Sea Wolf attack sub program, all had come under savage attack during the past five years.
What made the whole situation seem like an exercise in complete futility was the fact that every program or base or weapon system also had its defenders. There were congressmen determined to kill the V-22 Osprey, which was already in production after millions had been spent on its development … yet who were fighting tooth and nail to keep an Army post open that served no tactical or strategic point whatsoever, simply because that post was in their district.
It was frustrating, and frightening. No one in the entire city seemed to understand that political realities could change overnight, while weapons programs took years to implement. A coup in Moscow, and America could be back in a shoving match with the Russians who were still gun-for-gun, tank-for-tank, and plane-for-plane the most powerful military force in the world.
A nuclear carrier could not be turned on or off so quickly. The budget for the U.S.S. Nimitz, for instance, had been approved in fiscal year ’67. Construction had begun in June of ’68, she was launched in May of ’72, and she was commissioned on 3 May, 1975. Eight years from start to finish. And there were loud cries in Congress now to retire Nimitz and the other Mmi/z-class carriers, Jefferson among them, because they were big, expensive to operate, and no longer had a part to play in the world political arena.
Magruder snorted at the thought, as the limousine exited the freeway and headed north on 14th Street. The green openness of the Mall caught him, as always, by surprise. To his left, the white concrete spike of the Washington Monument stabbed into the blue March sky. One mile away to his right, the Capitol Building rose in white magnificence beyond the Mall and the museums lining it.