The Capitol Game (22 page)

Bellweather emerged first, followed by Alan Haggar, and Jack brought up the rear. The escorts rushed them through security, then up two flights of stairs to the office of Douglas Robinson, the current secretary of defense.

It was the Dan and Alan hour from the opening minute. Bellweather, after a brief moment surveying the office, declared, “Doug, who’s your interior decorator? What an improvement over my time.”

“My wife.”

“Listen, be sure to give her my compliments.”

“I hate it.”

Bellweather laughed and squeezed his arm. “So do I. It’s godawful.”

A crew of waiters bustled in and began setting plates, glasses, and silverware on the large conference table off to the left. The secretary was busy, very busy; not a minute was to be wasted. To underscore that point, a uniformed aide popped his head in and loudly announced they had only fifteen minutes, not a minute more; the secretary apparently was due at a White House briefing
of epic importance. Jack was pretty sure this was fabricated—the bureaucrat’s rendition of the bum’s rush. Another man, older, a scholar-looking gent of perhaps sixty, wandered in next and was introduced as Thomas Windal, the undersecretary of defense for procurement.

Jack first shook Windal’s hand, then the secretary’s. Windal’s shake was halfhearted but firm, while Robinson’s grip was limp bordering on flaccid. In truth, the secretary appeared exhausted, almost depleted: Jack thought he had aged considerably from the TV images of only a year before. He had large rings under his eyes, a dark suit that looked loose and baggy as though he had experienced a sudden weight loss, and a pale, resigned smile that suggested this meet-and-eat was at the bottom of his wish list. He’d far rather be taking a nap.

Robinson turned to Haggar, who, for a very brief period, had been his number two. “How you doing, Alan? Getting rich?”

“Working on it. That’s what we’re here to talk about,” Alan said with a wicked smile, making no effort to disguise their purpose. They began shuffling and ambling to the table.

“So what are you guys pitching today?” Robinson asked wearily, as if they were annoying insurance salesmen.

“Would you care to guess?”

“That polymer your blowhard Walters was bragging all over TV about a while ago? Am I right?”

“Yes, and we’ll get to it in a moment,” Bellweather said, falling into the seat directly to the right of Robinson. “So how’s the war going?” he asked, casually flapping open his napkin.

“Which one?” Robinson asked, a little sadly.

“We get a choice?”

“You do, but I don’t. Iraq? Afghanistan? The war on terror?”

“Why don’t we start with Iraq?”

“Just horrible. My in-box is crammed every morning with letters awaiting my signature. Condolence notes to parents about their kids that were killed. I can barely sleep. Do you know what that’s like, Dan?”

Bellweather quietly nodded. He thought it best, though, not
to remind Robinson that he’d gotten 160 soldiers killed on that senseless lark to Albania. Truthfully, he couldn’t even remember what that was about. Albania? He must’ve been high or tanked when he ordered that operation.

Then again, he hadn’t sent any letters or even brief notes to the families. Why should he? Death was one of the things their kids were paid for. “Thank God I was spared that fate,” he replied, scrunching his face solemnly, munching on his salad. “How about Afghanistan?”

“More of the same.” A brief pained pause. “Just not as bad, thankfully, at least not yet. But there’s always the future not to look forward to.”

With only twelve minutes left, they weren’t going to waste more time or words commiserating with Robinson. Haggar, always the numbers man, worked up a concerned expression and launched in. “Do you know how many of those soldiers were killed by explosive devices?”

“Somebody, a month or two ago, showed me a chart. I don’t recall the numbers exactly. I know it’s a lot.”

“Well, you’ve had 3,560 killed as of this morning,” Haggar said casually, as if they were discussing ERA stats in baseball. “Twenty percent due to accidents, disease, friendly fire, the usual cost of business.” A brief pause. “Sixty-eight percent of the total were a direct result of explosives.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, well over half. Amazing when you think about it, and ninety percent of those were roadside IEDs. Another ten percent were killed by rockets or roadside ambushes.”

“Higher than I thought.”

Bellweather reached across the table for the ketchup. “That’s why we’re here, Doug,” he explained. “We want to help.”

Laughable as that claim was, nobody so much as smiled.

“And you think this polymer will make a difference?” the secretary asked.

Bellweather was smacking the bottom of the bottle hard, slath
ering his hamburger and French fries in ketchup. “Jack, tell him about it,” he ordered without looking up.

Jack quickly raced through a description of the polymer, briefly encapsulating the physics behind it, the years spent in research, the difficulty of getting it just right. He was careful to come across as factual rather than boastful. A light dissertation more than a sales pitch.

“You might want to look at this,” suggested Haggar as he handed the secretary a copy of the pictorial results from the live testing done in Iraq. Robinson was barely eating, Jack noted, pushing a fork aimlessly around on his plate. He slid on a pair of reading glasses, opened the book, and began quietly flipping pages while Haggar began to prattle about the miraculous results.

After a quick pictorial tour, he removed his glasses and handed the book to Windal, his undersecretary. “Take a look at these,” he said, obviously impressed. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked, ignoring Haggar and now looking at Bellweather.

“Jesus, Doug,” Bellweather said, as if the question were facetious. “This screams for a fast-track, no-bid approach.”

“That’s a big request, Dan.”

“Is it? Haggar’s statistics show we’re losing eight soldiers a week to bombs. It’s become the insurgents’ weapon of choice. Our kids are sitting ducks. That’s nearly forty soldiers a month, blown apart and butchered while we look for a way to protect them. Now we have it.”

Robinson turned to Windal, whose nose was still buried in the photographs. “What do you think, Tom?”

Windal shoved the book aside, shook his head, and scowled. “Damn it, I know how important this is. The generals have been screaming at me for over a year. We’ve thrown billions into this and it’s about to pay off. There’s a lot of promising programs out there right now. Uparmoring, three or four new bomb-resistant vehicles, even the use of robotics to locate the bombs and disarm them. The best minds have worked this problem and the results are coming in. It’s very competitive.”

“Yeah, and all of those ideas are crap. They take way too much time to make it into the field,” Haggar argued, quickly and vigorously.

“Time is a consideration, but—”

“New vehicles have to be tested, refined, built, then fielded,” Haggar continued, waving his arms for emphasis. “That takes years. And those programs are habitually plagued by big setbacks, maintenance glitches, and unexpected delays. The schedules aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Uparmoring kits aren’t much better. And when you add the weight of heavy armor on vehicles not designed for it, you pay the price in busted transmissions, collapsing frames, and faulty brake systems. You know that.”

Bellweather, chewing a big bite of his hamburger, said, “He’s right,” as if there was any chance of disagreement.

“Everything takes time,” Windal answered, almost apologetically.

“Not our polymer. Mix it, then paint it on. We could have it in mass production inside a month. Thirty days. How do those other programs stack up against that?”

“A no-bid, single-source contract is out of the question. I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“You know why, Alan. The competitors would raise hell. They have billions invested in their alternatives. A lot of their ideas are absolutely ingenious. They won’t let you end-run them this way.”

“Screw ’em. Lives are at stake and that’s all we care about,” Bellweather insisted, failing miserably to make it sound sincere.

“It’s not that simple. If this polymer’s as good as you say, you should be more than willing to expose it to testing and fierce competition.”

“Forty lives a month, Tom. Waste another year, that’s four hundred lives, minimum. Think of all those letters cluttering Doug’s in-box.”

“Look, I’d get raped if I caved in to your request. Your competitors are just as powerful, just as well connected as you fellas.
They’ve got deep pockets and plenty of influential friends on the Hill.”

“So that’s it?”

“Yes, I’m afraid that’s it.”

Not looking the least frustrated or even disappointed—Jack thought, in fact, that he looked almost giddy—Bellweather pushed away from the table and got to his feet. Haggar also worked his way out of his chair. Jack had barely taken two bites of his hamburger, but taking the cue, so did he.

“Hey, I appreciate your time,” Bellweather said, sounding quite gracious and sincere.

“I can’t thank you enough for stopping by,” the secretary of defense replied, matching his tone.

A few peremptory handshakes later, they were being hustled back down the hallway and downstairs to their limousine.

Haggar was bent over, mixing a drink from the minibar as they raced over the Memorial Bridge into D.C. proper. He handed Jack a scotch. “What did you think?”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Anything you like. The truth.”

“All right, I’m badly disappointed. Crushed. The meeting was a disaster.”

“You think so?” Bellweather asked, eagerly grabbing a bourbon on the rocks from Haggar. He took a long cool sip and relaxed back into the plush seat.

“They were totally unreceptive, Dan. You pitched a great case. Both of you did, all the reasons for jumping right into this thing. It’s a no-brainer. They didn’t care.”

Bellweather and Haggar both enjoyed a good laugh, at Jack’s expense. Could he really be that naïve? After a moment Haggar said, “They were giving us the green light.”

“How do you get that?”

“We knew, and they knew, they couldn’t just give us everything we asked for.”

“And how is that favorable?”

“Well, Jack,” Bellweather said in a condescending tone, “they just described the roadblocks. They were begging us, virtually screaming for help.”

“Really?”

“Learn to listen better.”

“I’m all ears now.”

“A noncompetitive, no-bid deal is a certain invitation to scandal. We knew that going in. It draws reporters and muckrakers like flies. Drives them berserk.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Robinson and Windal were giving us a road map to make this happen. Clear a few hurdles in Congress. Muzzle our competitors, make sure they don’t have a chance to raise a big squawk.”

“And how do you do that?”

“That’s why we make the big money, Jack.”

Jack stared out the window. They were passing by monuments to Washington’s greats, Lincoln to their left, and off in the distance, Jefferson. Eventually he asked, “Where are we going?”

“To pay a visit on an old friend,” Bellweather answered, sipping from his bourbon and staring off into the distance.

Representative Earl Belzer, the Georgia Swamp Fox to his colleagues, had spent twenty-five long years on the Hill. For the past decade he had served as the feisty, rather autocratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, a roost from which he ruled the Defense Department.

He had avoided military service himself, for reasons that shifted uncomfortably over the years. During the wild and woolly seventies, it was ascribed to an admirable act of youthful conscience against the perfidious Vietnam War; in the more conservative eighties it morphed to a disabling heart murmur before a competitor discovered his childhood medical records. And there was his most recent excuse—screw off, none of your business.

He was now beyond needing an excuse.

He represented a backwater district in Georgia that hosted two large military bases. Twelve years before—a few brief years
before he rose to the omnipotent job of committee chairman—the Defense Department had tried to shutter both of them. They were extraneous, ill-located, contributed nothing to national defense, two sagging leftovers from the First World War that had long since become senseless money sumps. The Army was begging to have them closed. They were hot and muggy, and the training areas were brackish swamps. Aside from a few ubiquitous fast-food joints and one overworked whorehouse, there was nothing for the soldiers to do. Virtually no soldier reenlisted after a tour at either base.

But they also employed twenty percent of Earl’s constituents. The federal money that funneled through the bases supported another thirty percent.

If the bases went away, his district and his political career would both become pathetic wastelands. Before he was elected, Earl had been a struggling small-time lawyer, filing deeds and scrawling wills, banging around hospitals and morgues, advertising himself on park benches and in the Yellow Pages, scraping by on $30K a year. And that was a good year. In truth, he admitted to himself, he really didn’t have much talent for the law. It was a miracle he’d done that well. If he had to return home in disgrace he couldn’t pay clients to give him their cases.