Call to Treason - Tom Clancy [42]
"That was how my pop taught me," Royal Dorrance said one night in their small cabin with its corrugated tin roof.
"And is that how his father taught him?" April asked.
"Yes ma'am," he replied.
"Who was the first one who learned it?"
"That would be my granddad, Mr. Walter Emmanuel Dorrance," Royal told her. "He was a private with the 803 Pioneer Infantry during World War One. Big segregated unit, meaning they only allowed black soldiers. He learned all about engineering when he fought in France."
"He went to school in a war?" April asked.
"In a way, Precious," her father said. "He had to learn things to survive and to help his friends survive."
"Does that mean war is good?"
"Sometimes," he said. "We're free because of a war. And a lot of things get invented to fight wars."
April never forgot the idea that war could be a positive aspect of civilization.
When April was a little older, not quite eleven, she began coming home from school and fixing some of those appliances herself. She loved how proud her father was when he came home with a new truckload of goodies.
After his death, she continued in the family business to help support her mother and younger brother. With the help of her high school science and shop teachers, the young woman earned a scholarship to study electronics at the University of Tennessee College of Engineering in Knoxville. April excelled and graduated in 1984 from Cornell University with a Ph.D. in QuASSE quantum and solid state electronics.
She was immediately recruited by the CIA. April agreed to go to work for them because of the challenge, the job security, and the fact that it was close to her mother and brother. She went to work in a secret research laboratory located in Richmond, Virginia. The facility was actually below Alexandria, in a bunker below the University of Richmond. Only the UR president, select members of the board of trustees, and the UR chief of police knew they were there. No one knew what they did there. A large annual endowment bought their disinterest.
And April Dorrance got to learn and grow because of war.
The eleven-person staff of the School, as they called it, tested new forms of electronic jamming, surveillance, and triangulation equipment for use by mobile forces during combat. A university was the ideal place to do that, since computer and telecommunications use on campus was constant and typically cutting-edge. There were always students who brought with them the latest laptops, cell phones, and other portable electronics. The kids owned everything a modern soldier, spy, or terrorist might possess. Probably more. The School staffers liked nothing more than field-testing prototypes on unsuspecting students and teachers. It was like Candid Camera, watching them as they tried to figure out why their cell phones were suddenly talking to them in Bantu, the language of April's ancestors.
The problem with the School was the burnout factor. It was intense work done in windowless surroundings for long hours. It was impossible to have a social life. It was also difficult to leave. The CIA had control over the kinds of positions one could seek after leaving their employ. They did not want confidential information finding its way into the private sector. An electromagnetic inhibitor that could plant false readings on enemy radar could easily be built into an automobile to befuddle police radar. April did not want to work for a government contractor who would demand the same extended hours and would not have the kind of budget or resources she had at the School. That left teaching. April had bought a house in Goochland, halfway between Richmond and Charlottesville. She simply drove twenty miles in the opposite direction each morning to teach microelectronics at the University of Virginia.
But people who had worked with April over the years often called her to consult on specific projects, and she