After a 4:00 A.M. touchdown at Andrews, they were driven across town to Wainwright Hall, the Distinguished Visitors Quarters at Fort Meyer on the Virginia side of the Potomac, and a five-minute drive from the Pentagon. At Wainwright, Horner grabbed a twenty-minute nap and a shower, which took away some of the cobwebs and grunge of the previous day and night.

Despite the antipathy of the ejection-seat technicians in the Life Support shop to storing clothes where they didn’t belong, Horner habitually kept a shaving kit and blue, short-sleeve uniform tucked up in the canopy of his F-16. Pilots normally used an underwing baggage pod for carrying personal baggage, but the pod limited maneuvering to only three Gs; and since he’d set out Friday morning to fight F-15s, there was no way he was going to stand for that.

He took advantage of the kit and the uniform now and, looking as put together as circumstances allowed, everyone regrouped and got in the cars that were to take them to the helicopter pad on the south end of the Pentagon.

By the time they reached the pad, it was about 6:00 A.M. Shortly afterward, they were joined by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and Horner’s old National War College classmate), General Colin Powell, who radiated the warmth and humor that make everyone acquainted with him think of him as a best friend. After the greetings, Powell drew General Schwarzkopf aside for some last-minute coaching, to head off the chance that Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney or President Bush might reach conclusions at the briefing that he didn’t approve.

In Chuck Horner’s view, Colin Powell was a decent, honorable, intelligent, and genuinely likable man with unquestionable integrity who was also a brilliant schemer, manipulator, and political operator . . . and he had one serious flaw: he was Army through and through. He had never been able to admit the ascendancy of airpower. In Powell’s mind, it all came down to a zero-sum game, expressed in a simple syllogism: if airpower was growing in importance, then land power must be decreasing. That was bad for the nation, however; consequently, he had to make sure that brakes were applied to the growth of airpower.

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, wearing cowboy boots, walked up to the pad a couple of minutes after General Powell, and immediately introduced himself to Horner with a warm handshake and a smile. The Secretary of Defense was of medium height and build, balding, neat, friendly, and, Horner quickly learned, a good listener. Until this morning, the two had never met.

As for Cheney, this was just another general, not even a slim or handsome one, whose shy Iowa mumblings were not likely to inspire a powerful first impression. “What do you call the Secretary of Defense?” Horner kept asking himself. “Mister Secretary? Boss? Dick? Your Honor?” Yet, for his part, Horner liked what he saw: this man was smart, selfless, and straightforward.