Over a Saturday night pitcher of martinis at Gomez’s home, Waters confessed that Sara and Don had put together a much better briefing than anything he could have created. “Why can’t one of them brief the Old Man and get the credit for what they’ve done?”
“Sundown prefers colonels. He likes to eat them for breakfast.”
They spent the rest of the evening swapping tall stories about war and peace and destroying martinis.
The next morning Gomez led Waters through the labyrinth of corridors to a small briefing room next to Cunningham’s office, where Blevins was waiting. A few minutes later, two generals joined them. Waters walked to the podium at the front of the small room and nodded at the projectionist’s booth to start the thirty-five-millimeter slides.
“Hit the advance button on the right side,” the sergeant running the slide projector called, figuring the tall colonel was off to a very bad start if he didn’t know that.
Waters found the button and noticed an engraved plaque on the podium that cautioned: “Never miss a golden opportunity to keep your mouth shut.” Good advice, he thought, but a little too late for me.
Blevins sat quietly at the rear, content to see another officer being readied for the slaughter. But much faster than Gomez or Blevins expected, the generals accepted what they saw, only directing that one slide be changed to correct a misspelled word. The projectionist bolted from the booth before the generals could change their mind, amazed that only one slide had to be changed. Normally half the briefing slides were scrapped or modified.
Gomez admired Waters’ cool but decided to give him some advice. “Don’t let him rattle you. Don’t start the briefing until he tells you. He likes to stare at briefers to intimidate them. God knows what else he’ll pull. Sundown has a bag of tricks. Whenever we think we’ve seen them all, he comes up with a new one. But he won’t use them on junior officers; he’s partial to colonels. I’ve been in briefings where I have actually felt sorry for some bastard I can’t stand. They tell a story here about the Russian pilot that defected with the Backfire bomber. He was the only man ever to stare the Big C down.”
“Thanks, Tom. I’ve briefed him before,” Waters said. “He was a colonel then and his wing was at Red Flag. I had run them through one hell of an exercise, the most demanding I could think of. His crews did okay, but you would have thought they had personally lost World War Three. This guy only settles for total victory. The out-brief was a major conflict in itself.” After a pause he asked, “What does the bastard accomplish by it? Does he think fear is the spur? Well, hell, I guess this is part of what we get paid for.”
A young colonel, Cunningham’s aide, entered the room. “Gentlemen, the commander,” and the room sprang to attention.
Cunningham walked quickly in, carrying a thin report. His eyes swept the room, pausing on Waters. He sat down in the center chair and started to read the report, ignoring the five waiting men. Waters returned to the podium and waited. Although he had met Cunningham before, he had forgotten how short the man was, a fact accentuated by the large overstuffed chair he sat in. His hair was almost totally white, with a few dark strands. The color of his hair blended with his pale complexion. The man is sick or needs some exercise and sun, Waters decided.
The general raised his eyes from the report and appraised Waters, who returned the general’s stare, wondering how long this would go on and what purpose it served. All the stories he had heard about Sundown’s habits replayed through his mind and he caught himself half-smiling at his own predicament.
“What’s so funny, Colonel?”
“An irrelevant thought, sir.”
“If you’re going to give a briefing I suggest you be very relevant,” Cunningham said, breaking eye contact and looking around the room.
Gomez gave Waters a look of congratulations at the results of round one.
Waters keyed the forward button as the lights dimmed. “Stifle it, Waters,” the general snapped. “I’ll run the slides.” He hit a button on the arm of his chair.
Cunningham scanned one slide after another in silence. Waters had heard the general could read at a high rate of speed, but he wondered how much the man could understand at the rate he was running through the slides. Abruptly the screen was blank, a condition reflected in Gomez’s face. Every man in the room knew that the briefing was far from over. The traditional words of British sea captains on Men-of-War about to receive a broadside flitted unbidden to Waters and another smile started to form.
Again Cunningham caught it. “Another irrelevant thought, Colonel?”
Waters caught himself, decided to play it straight. “I was thinking of an old prayer, General. ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’”
For a moment the general said nothing. Then: “Colonel, you probably managed to compromise the monitoring capabilities of my most sophisticated reconnaissance platform by downlinking. And now you make jokes. You’ve got thirty seconds to justify that compromise.”
Waters leaned over the podium, knuckles turning white as he clenched the edges. His voice, however, was calm and his face did not betray the emotion he felt. “Sir, the decision was right because of the results. Five crewmen and one C-130 recovered, one Flogger splashed, and it was the first time an Air Force pilot has made a kill since Vietnam.”
Cunningham liked the way the colonel thought. “And is that important, Waters?” He deliberately filled his voice with danger, testing, and also liking the way the colonel was standing up to him.
“Yes, sir. Very important. At least you know your Air Force can still fight.”
“I thought our job was to fly and fight.”
“There were many people who never fly that were part of that engagement,” Waters replied.
“Such as?”
“The crew chiefs, the launch controller, the GCI controller—”
“You say it was important even if the Egyptians are protesting to Allah, the State Department and God knows who else, not to mention thinking about boating us out of Egypt. Do you also presume to play at geopolitics? You, a colonel? Northern Africa was stabilizing for the first time in years. Egypt and Libya were showing signs of getting along, which is a good thing considering they’re neighbors. The U.S. needs a broader sphere of stability in the eastern Med and this incident has set that development back.” Cunningham paused, waiting to hear the colonel’s response.
“General, if the situation was developing along those lines, why were those MiGs up there in the first place?”
“To embarrass the U.S.’s presence in Egypt, Colonel, nothing more, nothing less. Besides, I could have taken the loss of a C-130 easier than the compromise of what your RC-135 can do.”
Push a little harder, Waters thought, but not to the point of insubordination. “We watch Soviet activity very closely to see if they’ve got a clue about what we can do. So far, we’ve no indication that any compromise has taken place. Also, sir, an Apple Wave is a focused transmission wave, much like a laser. When I downlinked, we bashed the message the long way around, away from Soviet monitoring activity.” Waters kept his gaze on the general, still wanting to appear respectful and not betray what he felt.
The general rolled an unlit cigar in his mouth. “You bashed the message the ‘long way ‘round’? Right over the entire Middle East and China. And you don’t think a compromise took place?”
“General, I focused the transmission over the South Pole, downlinking through Hawaii, not east or west.”
Cunningham almost smiled. So, you like to win, he thought, and don’t mind setting me up to make your point about no compromise taking place. Well done, Waters. And where the hell have you been hiding? I need people like you.