Home Goes The Warrior (20 page)

That evening, somewhere in Philadelphia, a telephone rang. The voice that answered it was rough and demanding. “Yeah?”

The man’s voice on the other end was equally rough, with a strong South Philly accent. “Boss, I think he made me. He spotted me yesterday and then today I saw him staring at me.” “Okay, stay with him. But let Sal take the close work so he don’t see you no more. What’s he been doing?”

“He went to some accountant’s place in Media yesterday. Stayed for a couple of hours. Then he just drove around in Delaware County. Today he went back there and spent the day looking at houses that’s for sale. He’s back on the Navy base now.”

“Okay, Billy. You guys stay with him. Don’t let him out of your sight if you can help it. Oh, watch for long-range hit men with rifles. I’ve been hearing rumors.”

“Gotcha, Boss. If I see anything I’ll call.”

“Thanks, Billy. Good night now.”

“G’night, Boss.”

That same evening, another meeting was in progress in the old mansion on the Main Line. The older gentleman was again chairing the meeting. “Let us dispense with all formalities. I’ve called you together to hear what Marita has brought us from the Skimmers last meeting. Marita, you have the floor.”

She stood and began speaking, referring to a small notebook that she carried. “Okay. To make a long story short, the Skimmers feel that the new combat systems officer, a Lieutenant Raines, might be an FBI plant. They’re basing this on the special attention that the planning and supply officers are giving him. There’s some doubt, but they believe they’re right and are watching him closely. After hearing their logic, I think that they could be correct.”

The stocky man at the table sat up straight in his chair, mouthing “I’ll be damned” under his breath. Then he spoke. “I’ve met him. He certainly seems like a normal Navy guy. And he has a lot of experience with Navy missile systems. I don’t know how an FBI guy could be that sharp, and up to date, on shipboard systems. But I guess anything is possible.”

The chairman thought about this for a moment. “We don’t want to overreact. Let’s let the Skimmers do their thing, and we’ll watch them. But this worries me. Having someone that’s possibly an FBI agent sitting in the combat systems office is getting a little too close to our operation. He’s actually closer to us than he is to the Skimmers. If he’s one of them, this isn’t good news.”

The other man agreed. “Yeah. But it’s still a long shot. Raines just doesn’t seem like anything but a hard-charging Navy guy. He even bitched a bit about having to get a new security clearance. I’d say that we should just watch, listen, and let the Skimmers do their thing.”

The chairman nodded. “I agree. But let’s watch him carefully. Can you put a bug on his office phone? How about his home phone?”

The stocky man nodded. “I can do the office easy. But he’s staying at the BOQ, so I’d have a lot of trouble getting in there.”

This statement caused the chairman to look up sharply. “Why’s he at the BOQ? Isn’t he an older guy? Isn’t he married?” The questions shot out.

The other woman at the table took it on herself to reply. “No. He’s not married. I’d say that he’s in his early thirties. Not over thirty-five.”

The chairman thought about this and then replied to her, “Can you get access to the paperwork he turned in for his security clearance? I’d like to have his background checked. If you can, make a copy of it and get it to me.”

She just nodded.

The chairman continued, “All right. Please watch him and monitor his calls as best we can. Get me his clearance forms, and I’ll have a check done on his background. Marita, please call me if you hear anything further from the Skimmers. Thank you my children. Be alert, but don’t worry. We can handle this person if we have to.”

With that, the meeting adjourned.

Lee met with the realtor at 1 p.m. on Sunday. She was ready and they immediately started on a tour of homes. The first two homes were far bigger than Lee wanted, so he looked her list over and eliminated two others. The third home was so run-down, and smelled so bad, that Lee wouldn’t stay to tour it.

The fourth home intrigued Lee even before they reached it. It was very close to Strath Haven, the school he’d seen when he’d first driven out here. Driving from Media to the home, they turned just before the school into a beautiful wooded area. After a short drive, they were on a road, Sykes Lane, that seemed to wander through a huge tree-lined circle behind the school. All the homes were Cape Cod style and all were constructed of bricks of various colors. Although they were all similar in architecture, each home had its own alterations and landscaping that
gave it an individual character. The realtor pulled up in front of one of them. Lee looked at her, saying, “This is more like it!” For the first time, he brought out the camera that he’d been carrying. She smiled.

The house was exactly what Lee had been looking for. It had three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a nice living room, and a big empty room upstairs that he could use as a study or a TV room. The basement was full and dry, and the place was actually air-conditioned! It also had a big two-car garage and a screened-in rear porch. It sat on a well-groomed acre of land with several trees that he couldn’t identify. The only drawback was that the kitchen was badly deteriorated, but he knew he could replace that. He loved it. He spent an hour going over the home, taking pictures and inspecting everything.

Finally, he turned to the realtor and asked, “How soon can you get me the paperwork?”

They submitted a formal offer of $72,500 that afternoon. It was accepted immediately. Lee had just bought his first home. The deal wouldn’t close for four to six weeks, but Lee was thrilled.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - PLANNING, ESTIMATING, AND SUPPLY

aptain Ray Matyas, the shipyard’s planning officer, was hosting the meeting. Lee and the shipyard’s head planner, Bob Farmer, were the only other people present. The captain was planning to give Lee an overview of the shipyard’s planning process before turning him over to the planners to learn the intricate details of their planning and estimating work. The three had filled their coffee cups and exchanged small talk, but now the captain was ready for the business at hand.

“All right, Lee, tell me everything that you know about the business of planning a Navy ship overhaul.”

Lee drew a deep breath and thought for a moment. “Well, about a year before the overhaul starts, a group of shipyard P&E
⁸
people will come aboard ship and conduct a POT&I
⁹
that usually takes about a week. They write up the repair and overhaul work that’s going to be needed during the overhaul. They bring this write-up back to the shipyard and put their notes about the required work into job order format. Then they do their magic to estimate the cost of the individual job orders. They also
get a list of new ship alterations that are to be done to the ship during the overhaul and they estimate those and put them into job orders. Then they get approval of the individual job orders from the Navy, funding is transferred, and the overhaul starts. That’s my entire understanding of the process.”

“Okay, Lee, you’ve got the big picture, except there’s no “magic” in it. The planners also track the return costs of individual job orders and carefully accumulate records of what the exact costs were for every kind of shipboard job. The return costs are the actual costs, in both labor hours and material dollars, that the shops incurred in accomplishing the job. These return costs are averaged over time and are used by the Planners to estimate the costs of future jobs.”

The captain paused and Bob Farmer began speaking. “The other thing that the planners do is develop material lists for every job. Just like the return costs, they keep records of all of the material items, like parts and new components or equipments, that each job requires. Then they go back to these lists when they are estimating the jobs. They develop lists of required material for each job and use these lists in two ways. First, they’re used to estimate the material costs for the job order. Then the lists are sent to the supply department so that the needed material items can be ordered. Supply then finds the best source of the materials and orders them. When the items are received in the supply department, they’re warehoused until the ship’s overhaul starts. When the parts are needed on the waterfront, supply sends them on to the production shop that needs them. The shop records their use and that information comes back to the planner so he has it on record for the next similar job order. At the same time, the shop is recording the man-hours expended on the job and that information also comes back to the planner.”

At that point, Captain Matyas interrupted. “This is something that I think needs to be said, loud and clear, whenever we are talking about the overhaul planning process. Too many people think that the shipyards’ work planning is a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants thing. It’s not. It’s a closed-loop system. The planners aren’t using magic. They’re using historical records to accomplish their estimating functions. It’s a foolproof system!”

Lee nodded, thinking hard about this system and looking for possible flaws. “What happens if the shop spends more than the estimate allows?”

The captain laughed and Bob Farmer grinned. The captain replied, “I get pissed and holler and shout and it don’t make a damned bit of difference. The shop spends what it needs to spend in order to get the job done and they totally ignore me!” The captain chuckled and then went on, “I have an individual Navy officer in my planning department assigned to every ship overhaul. We call them “type desk officers”. If a shop overruns an estimate, they bring this fact to the assigned type desk officer, who’s authorized to take money from a reserve account to pay for the overrun if he agrees that it’s a valid overrun. If he doesn’t approve the charge, it’s cost has to come out of the shop’s overhead which the shipyard’s production officer and the shipyard commander monitor closely. If the overhead goes too high, heads roll in the shops.”

Lee persisted, “But are there ever any significant overruns, or deviations from the normal costs?”

Bob Farmer took that question. “Yes, occasionally. When there are, we look into them hard. Usually it’s just a routine thing, like a pump that had to be replaced instead of repairing it, for example. When those occur, we make a decision at the lead planner level to either drop it from the database as an abnormality or include it if it repeats itself.”

Lee didn’t drop the question. “But have there ever been a lot of overruns or serious problems with the estimating loop?” He didn’t know why he was asking this, but his FBI training was kicking in now, and he was looking for holes in the logic that was coming his way.

The answers to his question startled him a bit. First the captain answered with a firm and almost reflexive defense, “No. Never. It’s a good system!”

But Farmer contradicted him immediately. “Sorry Captain Ray, but it has happened once. It was way back when the DLG modernization program was just starting, before you were transferred here. The traditional estimating system was used. But we forgot that these weren’t traditional overhauls. Where usually we have ship’s crews onboard doing maintenance and part of the work, the modernizations were done on ships that were decommissioned and had no Navy people onboard. Our estimates
went to hell. The ships were sitting there cold for over a year and things deteriorated. We had to replace a shit-pot full of machinery and equipment that no one had planned to touch. Our first return costs for ships in the modernization program were almost double our early estimates. That caused budget overruns a bunch. Of course, we learned from this, and our subsequent estimates took all those extra costs into account. But that first ship was an estimating disaster.”