“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.

His appeals to his congressional colleagues elicited little sympathy and no support-the base closure list was nationwide, large, and expansive; almost two hundred bases were targeted, after all. It was every man for himself. In desperation, Earl eventually took a wild gamble; he marched over to the Pentagon and appealed directly to Secretary of Defense Daniel Bellweather.