Warriors

CHAPTER 1

Bill Chase picked up the phone and called 1789.

Chase had always thought a year was an odd name for a restaurant. Even for a quaint, colonial eatery in the historic heart of Georgetown. But the year, he knew, was historic: in 1789, George Washington was unanimously elected the nation’s first president. In that same year, the United States Constitution went into effect. And also that year, his alma mater, Georgetown University, had been founded.

1789 had been his go-to dining spot in town since his freshman year. The place felt like home, that was all. He loved the elegant high-ceilinged, flower-filled rooms upstairs, usually filled with an eclectic potpourri of the well-heeled and the well-oiled, frenetic lobbyists, assorted besotted lovers, gay and straight, illicit and otherwise, various self-delighted junior senators with JFK haircuts, as well as the tired, the careworn, the elderly congressmen.

He liked the restaurant for its authentic colonial vibe, the simple food and subtle service, even the quaint Limoges china. Not to mention the complete absence of pretentious waiters or wine stewards who uttered absurdities like “And what will we be enjoying this evening?”

We? Really? Are you joining us for dinner? Or this little gem he’d heard just last week at Chez Panisse: “And at what temperature would you like your steak this evening, Mr. Chase?” Temperature? Sorry, forgot my meat thermometer this evening. Honestly, who came up with this crap?

1789’s utter lack of haute-moderne pretension was precisely what had kept Chase coming back since his college days; those beery, cheery, halcyon days when he’d been a semipermanent habitué of the horseshoe bar at the Tombs downstairs.

Chase hung up the phone in his office, rose from his father’s old partner’s desk, and stood gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was late afternoon, and the cold, wintry skies over northern Virginia were laced with streaks of violet and magenta. His private office on the thirtieth floor of Lightstorm’s world headquarters had vistas overlooking the Capitol, the White House, and the Pentagon.

To his left he could see Georgetown, Washington’s oldest neighborhood, and home to the Chase family for generations. The streets of town were already lost to a grey fog bank. He watched it now, rolling up from the south and over the silvery Potomac like a misty tsunami. Traffic on the Francis Scott Key bridge had become two parallel streams of haloed red and white lights flowing slowly in opposite directions.

Bill Chase had plenty of reasons to be happy despite the dull grey weather. His marriage had never been stronger or more passionate, and his new fighter aircraft prototype, the Lightstorm, had just emerged victorious in a global battle for a huge Pentagon aeronautical contract. But the best part? His two adored kids, Milo, age four, and Sarah, age seven, were healthy, happy, and thriving at school.

Today was a red-letter day. His wife’s fortieth. The Big Four-Oh, as she’d been calling it recently. He had just booked a table for four upstairs at 1789. His family would be dining tonight at a cozy round table in the gracious Garden Room on the second floor, right next to the fireplace.

Bill Chase had come a long way.

In this decisive year of 2009, he was the fifty-year-old wunderkind behind Lightstorm Advanced Weapons Systems. LAWS was a global powerhouse whose rapid rise to the top in the ongoing battle for world dominance in the military tech industry was the stuff of legend. Bill himself had acquired a bit of legend.

Fortune magazine’s recent cover story on him had been headlined: “One Part Gates, One Part Jobs, One Part Oppenheimer!” His portrait, shot by Annie Leibovitz, showed him smiling in the open cockpit of the new Lightstorm fighter.

The Pentagon had relied heavily on LAWS for the last decade. Chase’s firm had just been awarded a massive British government contract to develop an unmanned fighter-bomber code-named Sorcerer. It was Bill’s pet project: a mammoth batwing UAV capable of being launched from Royal Navy aircraft carriers. Heavy payloads, all-weather capability, extreme performance parameters, and zero risk of pilot casualty or death.

An electric crack and a heavy rumble of thunder stirred Chase out of his reverie. He looked up and gazed out his tall windows.

Steep-piled buttresses of thunderheads had towered up darkly. Another mounting bulwark of black clouds to the west, veined with white lightning, was stacking up beyond the Potomac. Big storm coming. He stood at his office window watching the first few fat drops of rain slant across his expansive windows. A stormy night, rain mixed with fog, was on the way and it was too bad.

They had planned to walk the few blocks to the restaurant from their gracious two-hundred-year-old town house just off Reservoir Road.

He wanted the evening to be special in every way. He’d bought Kat a ridiculously expensive piece of jewelry, filled their house with flowers. All day today his wife, Kathleen, had been facing down the Big Four-Oh, and, like most women, she wasn’t happy about it.

Kat had been adamant about her big birthday. She’d insisted upon no fancy-pants black-tie party at the Chevy Chase Club, no shindig of any stripe, and, God forbid, not even the merest suggestion of a surprise party.

No. She wanted a quiet dinner out with her husband and their two children. Period.

No cake, no candles.

Bill was feeling celebratory, but he had acquiesced readily. It was, after all, her birthday, not his. Light-years ago, she’d fallen for his southern Bayou Teche drawl and charm; but she’d come to rely on his southern manners. True gents were somewhat in short supply in the nation’s capital. And Kat, at least, believed she had found one. Besides his own career, William Lincoln Chase Jr.’s wife and family meant the world to him.

And he tried hard to let them know it, every day of his life.