The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [250]
"You know the Secretary?" the officer asked on the way in.
"Oh, yeah, from a short distance, anyway."
He had to wait half a minute in an anteroom, but only half a minute.
"Al, grab a seat. Coffee?"
"Yes, thank you, Dr. Bretano."
"Tony," the SecDef corrected. He wasn't a formal man most of the time, and he knew the sort of work Gregory was capable of. A Navy steward got coffee for both men, along with croissants and jam, then withdrew. "How was the flight?"
"The red-eye never changes, sir—Tony. If you get off alive, they haven't done it right."
"Yeah, well, one nice thing about this job, I have a G waiting for me all the time. I don't have to walk or drive very much, and you saw the security detail outside."
"The guys with the knuckles dragging on the floor?" Gregory asked.
"Be nice. One of them went to Princeton before he became a SEAL."
That must be the one who reads the comic books to the others, Al didn't observe out loud. "So, Tony, what did you want me here for?"
"You used to work downstairs in SDIO, as I recall."
"Seven years down there, working in the dark with the rest of the mushrooms, and it never really worked out. I was in the free-electron-laser project. It went pretty well, except the damned lasers never scaled up the way we expected, even after we stole what the Russians were doing. They had the best laser guy in the world, by the way. Poor bastard got killed in a rock-climbing accident back in 1990, or that's what we heard in SDIO. He was bashing his head against the same wall our guys were. The 'wiggle chamber,' we called it, where you lase the hot gasses to extract the energy for your beam. We could never get a stable magnetic containment. They tried everything. I helped for nineteen months. There were some really smart guys working that problem, but we all struck out. I think the guys at Princeton will solve the fusion-containment problem before this one. We looked at that, too, but the problems were too different to copy the theoretical solutions. We ended up giving them a lot of our ideas, and they've been putting it to good use. Anyway, the Army made me a lieutenant colonel, and three weeks later, they offered me an early out because they didn't have any more use for me, and so I took the job at TRW that Dr. Flynn offered, and I've been working for you ever since." And so Gregory was getting eighty percent of his twenty-year Army pension, plus half a million a year from TRW as a section leader, with stock options, and one hell of a retirement package.
"Well, Gerry Flynn sings your praises about once a week."
"He's a good man to work for," Gregory replied, with a smile and a nod.
"He says you can do software better than anyone in Sunnyvale."
"For some things. I didn't do the code for 'Doom,' unfortunately, but I'm still your man for adaptive optics."
"How about SAMs?"
Gregory nodded. "I did some of that when I was new in the Army. Then later they had me in to play with Patriot Block-4, you know, intercepting Scuds. I helped out on the warhead software." It had been three days too late to be used in the Persian Gulf War, he didn't add, but his software was now standard on all Patriot missiles in the field.
"Excellent. I want you to look over something for me. It'll be a direct contract for the Office of the Secretary of Defense—me—and Gerry Flynn won't gripe about it."
"What's that, Tony?"
"Find out if the Navy's Aegis system can intercept a ballistic inbound."
"It can. It'll stop a Scud, but that's