A few women could be seen down here. Suter eyed them, looking for a hit. He had been married, now was not. In fact, it was the end of the marriage that had freed him to leave the Navy—no, actually, freed him to let loose the ambition he had been holding in check. She had never liked the ambitious Suter. She made me a different person. Limited me. With her, I was just another nice shmuck. It never occurred to him to wonder what she had thought about it, or if she had been another person in the marriage, too. He was simply terribly glad to be rid of her. Except for the sex, so he was now looking around.
“The general” was Brigadier Robert F. Touhey, USAF, a small, round man about fifteen pounds over a healthy weight, with shrewd blue eyes, a sidewall haircut, and just a touch of the Carolinas in his voice. He was wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt and a blue tie, as if it was summer; when he stood up, he was several inches shorter than Suter, but he had a handshake like a Denver boot. They made polite sounds, and Touhey let go of Suter’s hand, and Han muttered something that caused Touhey to give him the briefest of cold looks before he said, “Sure, okay, you take off, Jackie.” Then he motioned Suter to a chair.
Suter sat, opening his coat. The room was hot. Touhey plopped back into his desk chair and said, “What’d you do to old Jackie? He don’t like you.”
“No idea. What makes you think he doesn’t like me?”
“I can tell.” Suter leaned back. Touhey’s face was made for smiling, and, even in repose, it seemed to have the beginnings of a smile. Touhey seemed to be smiling at Suter now—but was he? “So,” Touhey said. “How’s my old buddy George Shreed?”
Suter nodded, smiled. “He sends his regards.”
“Regards!” Touhey laughed. “What’d George tell you about me?”
“He said you were the best empire-builder in the American military.”
Touhey guffawed. “And you better believe it! Alla this—” Touhey waved a hand that included the office, the building, the idea “—is my empire. I grabbed it; I rule it; and I’m gonna go on ruling it. Administrations come and go; Touhey endures. How’d you connect up with Shreed?”
“He got in touch with me.”
“What about?”
“Somebody who was going to serve under me.”
“Good or bad? Come on, George don’t dick around; what’d he want?”
“He wanted to warn me.” In fact, George Shreed of the CIA had wanted to tell him that Alan Craik was a thorough-going shit, and Suter should be careful. Shreed really hated Craik. “We had lunch, hit it off.”
“He recruited you?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t guess, okay? I don’t like vague shit. I’m a scientist and a politician, call me a scientific politician. Vagueness is for people got time to dick around. I don’t. George recruit you?”
“Yes.”
“Right there, one lunch? Man, you came cheap. So, what—he pulled strings, got you outa the Navy quick-time? Musta wanted you. If George Shreed wanted you, I better watch my ass.” Touhey smiled.
“He was moving up to a new responsibility. He wanted to reorganize.”
“Right. ‘No contingent trails.’ Okay. He sent over a file on you; you look okay. The impression I get is, you’re the kinda man can always go into the woods and find a honey tree—am I right about that? I think I am. Divorced. No kids. You a loner, Suter?”
“Maybe. I never thought of it that way.”
“‘He travels the fastest who travels alone.’ Kipling. Okay. Whatta you know about Peacemaker?”
Suter was sweating. Could he take off the suitcoat? He wasn’t quite sure how to handle this highly intelligent redneck. He decided to wear it and sweat. “I know it’s just coming out of the closet. That it’s a low-earth-orbit satellite system. That it’s part of an intelligence-communications effort. That it’s controversial. That it rang Colonel Han’s bells when I mentioned it before he did.”
“Go on.”
Suter shifted his weight and a rivulet of wet trickled down his right side. “Shreed told me it’s a weapon.”
“Ri-i-ight! By which you mean, it’s a weapon in this room, but you say it anyplace else and it’s deny, deny, deny. Old George is with me on this one; we see eyeball to eyeball. Common ground down someplace where his ideology and my theory about intelligence come together, although it’s like an ox and a bear hitched to the same plow. George and I want this thing for different reasons, but we don’t see any purpose in killing each other just yet, and we’re kissy-kissy around Congress and the White House so’s the project will succeed. You being George’s boy, I expect you to go along one hunnerd percent. Right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Damn right. Let me tell you about Peacemaker. No! Let me tell you about intelligence. Intelligence and the modern battle. Now, you’re an intel guy. Wha’d you do in the Navy? Carrier intel—what do you guys call it, CAG AI? Right. You got lots of intel from this source and that, you patched it together and strained it and shaped it and you looked at the target lists and the briefing books that Uncle provided, and then you made up something comprehensible for the jet jocks, and they took off and did what B.F. Skinner tried to get pigeons to do, which is use your intel to carry a weapon to target. Now, that’s asinine.
“Here’s my theory of intelligence. Intelligence and force projection in the electronic world are the same thing. To have a thought should be the same as to use that thought. Idea is action. Stay with me here: the usual model, the model you used on your aircraft carrier, is pre-electronic. It’s all about the failure of intelligence that’s built into slow communication. The great example is the Battle of New Orleans. The British come up into the swamps and Andrew Jackson and a lotta people shoot the ass off them, and the British tuck their tails and go away. Only trouble is, the war had been over six weeks before they started.
“When you got slow communications, you in effect got no intelligence worth the name—everything happens the night before the battle, the day of the battle, the moment of the battle. The intel guy is just some no-respect major who can read maps. Who matters is the guy who has the muscles to carry the weapon.
“But come up to the 1980s. Now I can take a photo and have it come up simultaneously on a missile that’s already in the air. The missile don’t need any pigeon to drive it; it’s got the electronic brains to drive itself, using satellite positioning and my photo. I drive it to the target. Me—the intel guy. But do they let me do it? No—they turn it over to the guys who used to carry the weapon and still want to get their rocks off.
“Now come to the 1990s. What’re we doing, mostly? We’re giving jet jocks briefing books and briefings and kneepad maps and photos and satellite coverage, and they fly off and make the same fucking mistakes that they and the pigeon could have made without all that help. Who’s still the least respected officer in a squadron? The intel guy. But who’s the one knows the most about the target? The intel guy.
“So, here’s my theory of intelligence: cut the crap. Cut out the middleman. Put your intel guy where all the electronic fields come together, and give him the button.
“That’s what Peacemaker is—the world’s first intel-driven killer. War with an arrow and no archer. George tell you how it works?”
Suter shook his head. He was a little dazzled.
“See, the problem that we saw was, you put stuff into a high orbit, you got a major launch involvement, and still you got a hell of a weight problem. You can put up your electronics, sure, but conventional weapons are heavy stuff. So we come up with something out of a sci-fi novel, no shit. What makes a conventional weapon heavy? Fuel and explosive. Okay, do away with both a them, you got your problem