“What? Why? I don’t need to go to Washington to feud with Huey. I’ve got Huey on the ropes right here. We’ve fingered all his cronies in the lab. I’ve got people here who are literally picketing them. Give me another week, and we’ll purge all the local cops, too. Once those clowns are out of the picture, I can get to some serious work around here.”
“Oscar, try to stick to the point. That lab is just a local side-show. We have a national-security crisis here. Huey has a radar hole.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means the North American radar coverage. The Air Force military radar. Part of the Southern U.S. radar boundary was run out of that Louisiana air base. Now that radar’s gone, and there’s a missing overlap between Texas and Georgia. The bayous have gone black. They’ve dropped right out of military surveillance.”
Oscar put his fork down. “What the hell does that have to do with anything? I can’t believe that. How is that even possible? No radar? A ten-year-old child can do radar!” He took a breath. “Look, surely they’ve still got air traffic control radar. New Orleans wouldn’t last two days without air traffic. Can’t the Air Force use the civilian radar?”
“You’d think so, but it just doesn’t work that way. They tell me it’s a programming problem. Civilian radar runs off a thousand decen-tralized cells. It’s distributed radar, on packet networks. That doesn’t work for the Air Force. The military has a hierarchical system archi-tecture. ”
Oscar thought quickly. “Why is that a political problem? That’s a technical issue. Let the Air Force handle that.”
“They can’t handle it. Because those are old federal missile-detection systems, they date back to Cold War One! They’re mil-spec hardware running antique code. That system just isn’t flexible — we’re lucky it still runs at all! But the point is, there’s no federal radar cover-age in Louisiana. And that means that enemy aircraft can invade the United States! Anywhere from Baton Rouge south!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Leon. It can’t possibly be that bad,” Oscar said. “How could the military miss a problem that size? There must be contingency plans. Who the hell was keeping track of all that?”
“No one seems to know,” Sosik said mournfully. “When the Emergency committees took over the base closures, the radar issue got lost in competing jurisdictions.”
Oscar grunted. “Typical.”
“It is typical. It’s totally typical. There’s just too much going on. There’s no clear line of authority. Huge, vital issues just fall through the cracks. We can’t get anywhere at all.”
Oscar was alarmed to hear Sosik sound so despondent. Clearly Sosik had been spending rather too much time at the Senator’s bed-side. Bambakias became ever more fluent and compelling as his grip on reality faded. “All right, Leon. I agree with that diagnosis, I con-cede your point. I am with you all the way there. But let’s face it — nobody’s going to invade the United States. Nobody invades national boundaries anymore. So what if some idiot Emergency committee misplaced some ancient radar? Let’s just ignore the problem.”
“We can’t ignore it. Huey won’t let us. He’s making real hay out of the issue. He says this proves that his Louisiana air base was vital to national security all along. The Louisiana delegation is kicking our ass in Congress. They’re demanding that we build them a whole new air base from the ground up, immediately. But that’ll cost us billions, and we just don’t have the funds. And even if we can swing the funding, we can’t possibly launch a major federal building program inside Louisiana.”
“Obviously not,” Oscar said. “Roadblocks, NIMBY suits, emi-nent-domain hassles … that’s tailor-made for Huey. Once he’s got federal contractors stuck knee-deep in the swamp, he could rip off a leg and bleed the whole budget to death.”
“Exactly. So we’re stuck. We were trashing Huey big-time on the patriotism charge, but he’s turned the tables on us. He’s wrapping himself in the very same flag that we stitched for him. We’ve played right into his hands. And we can’t ignore his radar hole, because he’s already exploiting it. Last night, French unmanned aircraft started buzzing South Louisiana. They’re flying over the swamps, playing French pop music.”
“French pop music?”
“Multichannel broadcasts off unmanned aerial drones. It’s the Cajun Francophone card.”
“Come on. Even Huey can’t seriously believe that anybody lis-tens to French pop music.”
“The French believe it. They can smell Yankee blood in the wa-ter. It’s your basic culture-war gambit. The French have always loved French-language confrontations. Now they can turn up their amps till we pull every burger joint out of Paris.”
“Leon, calm down. You’re a professional. You can’t let him get you rattled like this.”
“He does have me rattled, damn it. The son of a bitch just doesn’t play by the rules! He does two contradictory things at once, and he screws us coming and going. It’s like he’s got two brains!”
“Get a grip,” Oscar said. “It’s a minor provocation. What are we supposed to do about this so-called problem? Declare war on France?”
“Well …” Sosik said. He lowered his voice. “I know this sounds strange. But listen. A declaration of war would dissolve the Emergency committees by immediate fiat.”
“What!” Oscar shouted. “Are you crazy? We can’t invade France! France is a major industrial democracy! What are we, Nazis? That’s totally out of the question!”
Oscar looked up. He confronted a looming crowd of astonished scientists. They’d left their own discussion and had gathered on the far side of the lab bench, where they were straining to overhear him.
“Listen, Oscar,” Sosik continued tinnily, “nobody’s suggesting that we actually fight a war. But the concept is getting a pretty good float in DC. A declaration of war is a manual override of the federal system. As a domestic maneuver, a foreign war could be a real trump card. France is much too much, I agree with that — hell, the French still have nuclear power! But we could declare war on Holland. Hol-land’s a tiny, unarmed country, a bunch of radical pipsqueaks. So we throw a proper scare into the Dutch, the phony war lasts a week or so, and then the President declares victory. The Emergency is over. Then, once the dust settles, we have a fully functional Congress again.”
Oscar removed the phone from his ear, stared at it with distaste, and replaced it at his ear. “Look, I gotta get back to you later, Leon. I have some serious work to accomplish here.”
“The Senator’s very big on this idea, Oscar. He really thinks it could fly. It’s visionary.”
Oscar hung up. “They’re playing French pop music in Louisi-ana,” he told his impromptu audience.
Albert Gazzaniga scratched his head. “Big deal! So what?”
The crux of the matter was, of course, the money. It had always been the money. Money was the mother’s milk of politics. And although scientific politics were several steps removed from conventional poli-tics, money was the milk of science, too.
All strikes were, at the bottom line, struggles over economic power. All strikers made a bold declaration that they were willing to outstarve their employers, and if they backed it up with enough bad press and moral pressure, they were sometimes right.
So it was lovely to declare that Greta and her cadre were ready and eager to do science for nothing, asking for nothing, and refusing to supply anything but the results they themselves found of scientific interest. It was a holy crusade. But even a holy crusade needed a revenue stream.
So Oscar, Yosh, and the omnipresent Kevin found an empty cor-ner in the hotel kitchen to discuss finances.
“We could hit up Bambakias for a couple of million, just to tide us over,” Pelicanos said. “There’s no question he’s got the funds.”