Read Tomahawk for Free Online Page B

first.”
    â€œMunford mentioned some problems.”
    â€œThere are a few.” As Burdette leaned back, Dan saw a tiny golden fish on a necklace at the edge of his T-shirt. “Software’s one. We’re dealing with three outfits. One writes the launch control code, the other has the track control system, and the third is the system integrator.”
    â€œWhat’s the production status on the launcher?”
    â€œWe got prototypes. Convair put ‘em together by hand:”
    â€œCan they make more?”
    â€œNot in time. They built one for
Merrill,
see, and one for shore tests. Took them two years to hand-weld ‘em together Shoot, I got to go down to SPAWAR.”
    â€œYou can’t leave now. You heard the captain.”
    Burdette went to his cubicle to make a call. Dan satlooking over the timetable. No doubt about it, the delivery date was going to be tough.
    At 0830, Carol phoned and said the meeting with the admiral had been postponed for an hour. Hard on the heels of that, a Filipina in thick glasses and a pink pants suit tapped at the entrance to his cubicle. She carried a six-inch-thick block of files and memoranda.
    â€œLucy’s our secretary,” Burdette called. “Yours, mine, and the captain’s, but mainly the captain’s.”
    â€œYou boys be ready to go up to the twelfth floor around ten. I’ll give you a ring, so stick close.”
    Dan spent the rest of the morning reading through the flight-test reports. The missile had already gone through an extensive teething period. Numerous glitches had come to light. The engine flooded out during submarine launches. The wings didn’t deploy properly. They flexed and flapped when they
were
deployed. The booster-thrust vector tabs had been wired backward. Each failure had been investigated and corrected, and for about a year, as the long-range flight portion of the development program commenced, things had seemed to smooth out.
    Then, right after the Air Force had restarted work on their own cruise, success percentages had taken a nosedive. One shot had launched textbook-perfect, heading inland for the Tonopah, but started behaving erratically and crashed in Los Padres National Forest. Another just missed a group of horseback riders. Inspectors had gone through what wreckage remained, but no one really knew what had gone wrong. Finally Kristofferson had filed a Method D action against Convair, holding payments until results improved. The next step was to cancel the contract.
    Dan stared at the wall. The trouble with that was that the only other cruise missile the United States had going was the Boeing design. It was triangular in cross section, to fit in a rotary launcher on a bomber. It wouldn’t go out of a torpedo tube, or a shipboard launcher.
    A thought shuffled about in the basement of his brain. If
the problems hadn’t started till the Air Force had revived their missile, if a General Dynamics failure meant a Boeing success—could something other than technical bugs be responsible? He wanted to reject it as paranoia,but hadn’t Munford said something like that—about watching out for the Air Force?
    Finally, he got up and stretched. The time was 1050, and still no one had called about the meet with Niles. “What do we do for lunch?” he asked Vic over the partition.
    â€œCall down to Roy Rogers, usually. Or if you’re in a hurry, there’s a hot dog guy down in front of the Buchanan House. He’s got a propane-fired cart.”
    â€œA hot dog cart. You serious?”
    â€œHey, you want glamour, we’ll call the Cedar Deli for a sub. The contractors try to get us to go over to Stouffer’s, or to Restaurant Row. You can go if you want, but don’t let them buy.”
    Dan got up and prowled. He wasn’t used to working at a desk. Aboard ship, you were always running up ladders, checking with the chiefs, watching systems tests and maintenance,