“All right, Robbie.” The knowledge that Robbie would not laugh at him,
no matter how bad the shot, was somehow worse than the suspicion that he
might. On last reflection, he stood a little straighter before swinging. His
reward was a welcome sound:
Swat. The ball was thirty yards away before his head came up to see it,
still heading left.. . but already showing a fade back to the right.
“Jack?”
“Yeah,” Ryan answered without turning his head.
“Your three-iron,” Jackson said chuckling, his eyes computing the flight
path. “Don’t change anything. Do it just like that, every time.”
Somehow Jack managed to put his iron back in the bag without trying to
wrap the shaft around his friend’s head. He started laughing when the cart
moved again, up the right-side rough toward Robby’s ball, the single white
spot on the green, even carpet.
“Miss flying?” he asked gently.
Robby looked at him. “You play dirty, too,” he observed. But that was
just the way things went. He’d finished his last flying job, screened for flag,
then been considered for the post of commander of the Naval Aviation Test
Center at Naval Air Station, Patuxent River, Maryland, where his real title
would have been Chief Test Pilot, U.S. Navy. But instead Jackson was
working in J-3, the operations directorate for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. War
Plans, an odd slot for a warrior in a world where war was becoming a thing
of the past. It was more career-enhancing, but far less satisfying than the
flying billet he’d really wanted. Jackson tried to shrug it off. He’d done his
flying, after all. He’d started in Phantoms and graduated to Tomcats, com-
manded his squadron, and a carrier air wing, then screened early for flag
rank tin the basis of a solid and distinguished career during which he’d never
put H foot wrong. His next job, if he got it, would be as commander of a
turner battle group, something that had once seemed to him a goal beyond
the jirusp of Fortune itself. Now that he was there, he wondered where all the
Unic hud gone, and what lay ahead. “What happens when we get old?”
“Some of us take up golf, Rob.”
“Or go back to stocks and bonds,” Jackson countered. An eight-iron, he
thought, a soft one. Ryan followed him to his ball.
“Merchant banking,” Jack proffered. “It’s worked out for you, hasn’t
it?”
That made the aviator-active or not, Robby would always be a pilot to
himself and his friends-look up and grin. “Well, you turned my hundred
Ihou’ into something special, Sir John.” With that, he took his shot. It was
one way to get even. The ball landed, bounced, and finally stopped about
twenty feet from the pin.
“Enough to buy me lessons?”
“You sure as hell need ’em.” Robby paused and allowed his face to
change. “A lot of years, Jack. We changed the world.” And that was a good
thing, wasn’t it?
“After a fashion,” Jack conceded with a tight smile. Some people called
it an end to history, but Ryan’s doctorate was in that field, and he had trouble
with the thought.
“You really like it, what you’re doing now?”
“I’m home every night, usually before six. I get to see all the Little
League games in the summer, and most of the soccer games in the fall. And
when Sally’s ready for her first date, I won’t be in some goddamned VC-
20B halfway to nowhere for a meeting that doesn’t mean much of anything
anyway.” Jack smiled in a most comfortable way. ‘ ‘And I think I prefer that
even to playing good golf.”
“Well, that’s a good thing, ‘cuz I don’t even think Arnold Palmer can fix
your swing. But I’ll try,” Robby added, “just because Cathy asked me to.”
Jack’s pitch was too strong, forcing him to chip back onto the green-
badly-where three putts carded him a seven to Robby’s par four.
“A golfer who plays like you should swear more,” Jackson said on the
way to the second tee. Ryan didn’t have a chance for a rejoinder.
He had a beeper on his belt, of course. It was a satellite beeper, the kind
that could get you almost anywhere. Tunnels under mountains or bodies of
water offered some protection, but not much. Jack plucked it off his belt. It
was probably the Silicon Alchemy deal, he thought, even though he’d left
instructions. Maybe someone had run out of paper clips. He looked at the
number on the LCD display.
“I thought your home office was New York,” Robby noted. The area
code on the display was 202, not the 212 Jack had expected to see.
“ll is. I can teleconference most of my work out of Baltimore, but at least
once a week I have to catch the Metroliner up there.” Ryan frowned. 757-
5000. The White House Signals Office. He checked his watch. It was 7:55 in
the morning, and the time announced the urgency of the call more clearly
than anything else could. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, though, was it? he
asked himself. Not with what he’d been reading in the papers every day. The
only thing unexpected was the timing. He’d expected the call much sooner.
He walked to the cart and the golf bag, where he kept his cellular phone. It
was the one thing in the bag, actually, that he knew how to use.
It took only three minutes, as an amused Robby waited in the cart. Yes, he
was at The Greenbrier. Yes, he knew that there was an airport not too far
from there. Four hours? Less than an hour out and back, no more than an
hour at his destination. Back in time for dinner. He’d even have time to fin-
ish his round of golf, shower, and change before he left, Jack told himself,
folding the phone back up and dropping it in the pocket of the golf bag. That
was one advantage of the world’s best chauffeur service. The problem was
that once they had you, they never liked to let go. The convenience of it was
designed only to make it a more comfortable mode of confinement. Jack
shook his head as he stood at the tee, and his distraction had a strange effect.
The drive up the second fairway landed on the short grass, two hundred ten
yards downrange, and Ryan walked back to the cart without a single word,
wondering what he’d tell Cathy.
The facility was brand-new and spotless, but there was something obscene
about it, the engineer thought. His countrymen hated fire, but they positively
loathed the class of object that this room was designed to fabricate. He
couldn’t shake it off. It was like the buzz of an insect in the room-unlikely,
since every molecule of the air in this clean-room had gone through the best
filtration system his country could devise. His colleagues’ engineering ex-
cellence was a source of pride to this man, especially since he was among the
best of them. It would be that pride that sustained him, he knew, dismissing
the imaginary buzz as he inspected the fabrication machinery. After all, if
the Americans could do it, and the Russians, and the English, and the
French, and the Chinese, and even the Indians and Pakistanis, then why not
them? There was a symmetry to it, after all.
In another part of the building, the special material was being roughly
shaped even now. Purchasing agents had spent quite some time acquiring the
unique components. There were precious few. Most had been made else-
where, but some had been made in his country for use abroad. They had been
invented for one purpose, then adapted for others, but the possibility had
always existed-distant but real-that the original application beckoned. It
had become an institutional joke for the production people in the various
corporations, something not to take seriously.
Mill they’d take il seriously now, the engineer thought. He switched off
the lights and pulled the door shut behind him. He had a deadline to meet,
mt«l he would start today, after only a few hours of sleep.
I’lvcn us often as he’d been here, Ryan had never lost his mystical apprecia-
tion lor the place, and today’s manner of arrival hadn’t been contrived to
nittkc him look for the ordinary. A discreet call to his hotel had arranged for
the drive to the airport. The aircraft had been waiting, of course, a twin-prop
hmmcss bird sitting at the far end of the ramp, ordinary except for the US AF
murk ings and the fact that the flight crew had been dressed in olive-green
itonicx. Friendly smiles, again of course, deferential. A sergeant to make
Mire he knew how to use the seat belt, and the perfunctory discussion of
*«fety and emergency procedures. The look-back from the pilot who had a
M’hcdulc to meet, and off they went, with Ryan wondering where the brief-