Operation Damocles Read Free Page B

factors for it to be coincidental. What would his historical legacy read if NASA had unwittingly orbited a weapon of some sort, someone else’s weapon, to be used against the United States? And how to react?
    In a normal environment, it was his duty to tell the President. The Commander in Chief should be informed of any potential threat to national security. But these days, it wasn’t a normal environment in Washington. He had seen enough heads fall in the past six months to know that if he told the White House, it would be on the evening news. Not even a ghost of a doubt. The first thing they would do is wash their hands and make him the sacrificial goat. Even if it turned out to be some sort of innocent error, he would be painted a fool, at the very least, and his career finished.
    If he was a heartless bastard, he could “uncover” the foul-up himself, and destroy the lives of a few select people in the agency to save himself. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. NASA and its people had been his life, and he loved it too much to subject it to that kind of fallout. Security would get so tight that a person wouldn’t be able to visit the bathroom alone, and the already paper-mired process would become so impossible that NASA couldn’t launch a paper clip. It would filter out into all the support contractors and research groups until nothing substantive would get done. The agency would become just another budgetary black hole, and might even end up as part of another agency consolidation as Congress put on one of its shows of austerity for the American public. They might even put it under military command. It was already regulated by the military to some degree.
    He had admonished Dykes not to let the news leak, and he thought he could rely on him. With that thought, his resolve hardened. He would keep it quiet until the issue went away, or blew up. He would be no worse off in any event. He wasn’t about to carry an ax over to the White House and bare his neck.

IV

    Harold Tanner, newly appointed Secretary of Defense, was similarly preoccupied in the headquarters building at Langley Air Force Base. He had just come out of one of the strangest and most depressing meetings of his career, and now stood at a window in the spacious, third-floor officers’ lounge.
    Against government edict, he was smoking a cigarette indoors. He stood in a habitual attitude of military parade-rest, his feet apart and firmly planted, his hands locked behind his waist, cigarette between his fingers. He surveyed the pedestrians in their glistening plastic raincoats, their umbrellas bobbing along the sidewalks, and watched the metronome beat of windshield wipers in the slowly moving traffic along the main base boulevard.
    His crew-cut hair, humorless gray eyes and weathered face, along with the posture of his spare military frame, looked out of place in the tailored gray suit. Though he did not move, there was no mistaking the anger and agitation in him. His rigid stance, the nervous flicking of the cigarette and the scowl on his countenance forewarned anyone who might have contemplated speaking to him.
    Tanner had just carried out an order to reassign two highly experienced and successful commanders from the U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command to assignments that were an insult to their skills and abilities. He hadn’t realized what was happening until he met and talked with the two officers. As a former War College professor, he couldn’t fathom the reason for such a move, and as the new kid on the block, he knew he would get the blame for it among the services.
    The Vanderbilt administration had jumped into Washington politics with both feet, and the walls inside the Beltway were still reverberating. The deal-making and back-room bargaining had gotten under way with a vengeance that shocked even the jaded insiders of Washington society. Government programs and agendas were changing in ways that seemed mysterious, unconnected and illogical.