Deadly Highway: Super Highway Beta 1.0

By J. Stewart Willis

What happens when ambitious and competitive people at a major tech company are involved in preparing a proposal for a lucrative contract that will ensure the future of the company and its leaders for years to come? Deadly Highway follows the competition of these people and their wives as they prepare the proposal. The competition is cutthroat, involving adultery, blackmail, drugs, and death. Deadly Highway delivers it all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543482270

J. Stewart Willis

About the author: J. Stewart Willis served twenty-five years in the United States Army and worked for twelve years with a division of a major tech company in Northern Virginia. While working in the tech industry, he worked on three proposals including the management of one for over a hundred million dollars. DEADLY HIGHWAY is based very loosely on those experiences.

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Copyright © 2018 by J. Stewart Willis.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2018901384

ISBN:                    Hardcover                  978-1-5434-8225-6

                              Softcover                    978-1-5434-8226-3

                              eBook                          978-1-5434-8227-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/30/2018

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To Michelle and Jim for their love and uncompromising support.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Chapter Seventy-Five

PROLOGUE

Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Hendricks got out of his vehicle and walked over to the wreck of a Humvee. He looked in the driver’s compartment and saw blood puddled and drying black on the seat and the floor. In his mind, he pictured the explosion, the vehicle thrown to the side, the explosion compressing brains inside skulls, men thrown against the Humvee’s twisted frame, jagged metal penetrating human flesh, minutes of pain for those still conscious, hands grabbing them and carrying them to helicopters, the feeling of agony as they listened to the beat of the chopper blades, medics giving them shots, waking up on a medevac plane headed for Germany and the horror of convalescence.

Charlie stared. He didn’t have to be there, but he had to see. When the call had come, he’d jumped in a Humvee and joined one of his lieutenants in a convoy of a wrecker, a flatbed, a backhoe, a grader, a truckload of gravel, and an infantry squad in a personnel carrier as they proceeded out of Kabul to the east on the Nangarhar Highway. The lieutenant could have handled things by himself just fine. Just recover the wrecked vehicle and patch the road. All routine. But Charlie couldn’t stay at his desk. This was where an engineer’s action was, and he had to be there.

Charlie had one month left on his tour. Orders for his next assignment at the Pentagon were already cut. His promotion to bird colonel was coming up. He’d wait until then and retire. The writing was on the wall. His promotion would come a year after that of some of his contemporaries, the men who were still in the running to become general officers. There was no use hanging on, although Charlie knew he would miss the army.

Charlie leaned down and picked up a piece of shrapnel, twisted and sharp-edged. He shook his head. Flying through the air, burning hot, it could have taken off a man’s arm. Charlie would take it back to the office and put it on his desk with the three scraps of shrapnel that were already there. He would contemplate them at quiet times and think about what they represented.

They were ugly, ugly, ugly—visceral—and fascinating.

CHAPTER ONE

How the hell did I end up in this job? Charlie Hendricks thought to himself as he got off the Blue Line and headed for his office in Rosslyn. He crossed his building’s grand foyer and joined a packed elevator, his thoughts continuing. I did it because I was scared. Twenty-two years in the army and not a single early promotion. Two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, but nowhere. He thought of the airfields and roads he’d built and repaired, of the dredging he had managed in New York Harbor when he’d worked for the New York District. He had tons of experience, but no future in the army. He hadn’t wanted to put in thirty years, be forced to retire, and have to look for a job when he was in his fifties. He had thought that he would do better at forty-four.

He arrived at work just before eight on Monday morning. He sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. He then got back up and went to get a cup of coffee. He thanked goodness that Eddie Bixby had gotten there early and started the coffeepot. With his coffee in hand, Charlie returned to his desk and sat down. Thanks, Eddie. I really need this coffee. You’re a good man.

As Charlie started to pull up fedbizops.gov, Eddie Bixby looked up from his computer. Hey, Charlie, it’s finally here!

Charlie Hendricks got up from his desk and hurried to look over Bixby’s shoulder. It’s about time. This could make us for years. Almost as good as a new fighter or bomber.

You think we should go tell Davies now?

No. We need to know what we’re talking about. Download the solicitation, print out a couple of copies, and let’s at least scan it before we go to the big wheels.

That will take a little while. I bet there are hundreds of pages.

We still need to do it. Need to separate the meat from the boilerplate. I’ll go make sure the printer has plenty of paper.

Okay. I’ll start the download.

Charlie filled the paper trays. Okay, the printer is ready.

Charlie returned to his desk and studied the solicitation on his computer screen. Finally, he heard the printer begin to grind away. He thought to himself, Hallelujah. Maybe this is the answer to my prayers.

He and Bixby were in an office on the tenth floor of an office building in Rosslyn, Virginia. It would have been an impressive location if the office had windows. Unfortunately, it was an inside office. The big wheels had the windows with a view overlooking Theodore Roosevelt Island with the Kennedy Center and Watergate in the distance, across the Potomac River. He and Bixby were part of the Government Relations Office of the Bedford-Ewings International Corporation, a fancy name for the lobbying office. However, Hendricks and Bixby did no lobbying. Their job was to track business opportunities offered by the federal government. That meant spending time reading through government documentation on the Internet. It wasn’t the interesting job Charlie had wanted.

Despite having retired from the army at the age of forty-four, Charlie had still found that the job market was tight. He had used the military network, contacting retired officers in various companies in the Washington area. One of the people he had contacted was Brigadier General Sidney Davies, who was deputy here in government relations. Davies had warned him that the company primarily used electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, software developers, and logisticians. Davies had thought Charlie might work into general management or maybe logistics and got him an offer of a job starting in the Government Relations Office. In short time, Charlie had realized it was grunt work, nothing challenging, but he had to start somewhere, and here he was. He hated it.

The paper that was being printed was a solicitation from the Department of Transportation for the initial phase of the replacement of the Interstate Highway System. That sounded like civil engineering to Charlie, but he knew he wouldn’t be building anything. B-E International didn’t do that. The company took on the management of contracts. It was called system engineering. To bid on a contract of the size of the replacement of the Interstate Highway System, B-E would put together a team of companies with different areas of expertise and integrate their work to accomplish whatever had to be done. Although B-E wouldn’t be building anything, Charlie was sure the system engineering aspect would require civil engineering experience in dealing with whatever company did the construction. He was going to jump on the opportunity as soon as he could.

Bixby pulled the papers from the printer and handed a pile to Charlie, who divided them into sections and put clips on each. He would refine the sections later when he better understood how the solicitation had been assembled by the DOT.

He watched Bixby return to his desk and begin his own assembly process.

Charlie had little in common with Bixby. They sometimes ate lunch together, but no friendship had developed. The guy was nice enough, but he had been in this office for three years and would probably still be at the same desk when he retired. Bixby was glad to have a job that didn’t demand too much, just an overall perspective of what the company could do. He had been around long enough to have a good feel for that.

The truth about working at B-E International was that Charlie would probably never make good friends there. He’d have associates. He would even like a lot of them and enjoy lunch with them, but when the day was done, he and they would go home to widely dispersed locations in the Washington area, or he would go to the Pentagon and play handball with guys he had known in the army, where the handball players were a group who knew one another. His friends would come from the neighborhood where he lived, probably friends that his wife made.

Charlie lived in Springfield. Bixby lived in Warrenton. There was no way they could share a thing.

Charlie and his wife, Linda, had bought the house more than twelve years earlier when he was assigned to Fort Belvoir. Its cost had strained their finances. They had lived there for two years doing almost nothing outside the home. They had no money to spare. It had been a real sacrifice to buy the house, but it had worked as planned. Linda stayed there while Charlie spent tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they lived there when he returned from Afghanistan and was assigned to the Pentagon. The home had provided stability that many never found in the military. They still had friends in Springfield from ten years ago, and Charlie’s two boys had the remarkable experience of a number of years in the same school system.

Charlie studied the solicitation. It was going to be run out of the offices of the US Department of Transportation on New Jersey Avenue in Southeast Washington. That seemed a little out of place to Charlie. He wondered why the department wasn’t on Independence Avenue or some other more imposing place. He figured Metro must have some way to get there. As he read more, he found they were going to set up an annex in Savannah. Goodness, he thought to himself. That might be a nice place to live. It would get him and his family away from the hubbub of Washington, D.C. He decided that, if B-E won the contract, he’d have to look into Savannah some more.

CHAPTER TWO

Gunnar Davidson swiveled in his desk chair and stared out the window of his office in the Bedford-Ewing International Building in Fair Oaks, Virginia. He admired the view into the thick woods behind the building beyond where the grass was carefully mowed up to the edge of the trees. The underbrush had been cleared from under the trees for fifty feet or so into the woods, which gave an almost unreal sparseness to the view. He thought that it must be European in appearance, perhaps German.

Davidson’s nerves were on edge. He was excited about the solicitation from the Department of Transportation. He was going to be briefed on it at nine this morning, but he had already read it. The briefing was a formality to get things going.

Davidson had been a Virginia State senator from Southeast Virginia, a territory of naval bases and shipyards. When Frank Bladyslaw had run for the Presidency, Davidson had been a leader of his candidacy in Virginia and had received his reward for his efforts, having been nominated and approved as Under Secretary of the Navy for Research and Development. It was a plush job, but it had only lasted four years, as Bladyslaw, the nation’s first Polish President, had not been reelected. It had been long enough, however, for Davidson to get to know the Washington world and to make contacts throughout the city. That was enough to sell himself to B-E and become the vice president of its Washington-area operations.

In Washington, B-E had numerous contracts for software development and support, various logistics contracts, and others for the packaging of specialized communications systems. Their clients were in the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Department of Energy, and NASA. B-E, which had its headquarters and most of its operations in Los Angeles, owned two buildings in Fair Lakes and rented space in seven other buildings in Northern Virginia and one in Maryland. That was Davidson’s kingdom. It seemed large, but by the standards of the operations on the West Coast, it was small. The West Coast had an organization that included areas of expertise from which necessary personnel could be drawn to fill needs as required. They were called laboratories, although they did little research. The Washington operations were not big enough to do that. When Davidson’s operations won a contract, the expertise needed had to be drawn from other contract work and then the vacancies created had to be backfilled. Sometimes he had to ask the West Coast for the managers he needed. That didn’t make him happy. If a manager was willing to transfer from California to Washington, Davidson wondered what the motive might be. Maybe he or she wasn’t making it on the West Coast.

Davidson already had his mind made up as to who would manage the Interstate Replacement Program, or the Super Highway as industry had begun to call it. The manager would be James W. Wade who had been part of the Washington operations for several years. Wade was already a project manager for a program they were running for the Department of Defense. Taking him off that project would not make the DOD happy, but the problem would settle down in time. He would tell the DOD contracting officer that he was bringing in a skilled manager from the West Coast. Davidson prayed that the new manager would play the part and do well.

Looking out the window calmed Davidson’s nerves. It was peaceful. He remembered his view from the Pentagon, with roads full of cars going everywhere at an unnerving pace. He was glad to be gone from there. His current salary was three times as much as he had earned as a senior bureaucrat, and he now had a golden parachute. Further, he no longer had to waste time testifying before Congress. His office was bigger, too. And his commute was shorter. He was becoming happy with the job. But as a new manager, he needed a feather in his cap. The replacement of the Interstate Highway System was going to provide the prestige that was needed.

Davidson had been afraid that the West Coast would try to run the contract from out there. He had made a major effort to ensure it would be in his territory, traveling often to Los Angeles and working management aggressively to emphasize the need to be in the backyard of the Department of Transportation, since the project would be run from there and the initial work was going to be on the East Coast. He had won, and the work was about to begin.

There was a knock on the door of Davidson’s office. Ralph Evenson, Davidson’s deputy, stuck his head in. Are you ready? The briefing team is here from Government Relations and can begin any time.

Davidson rose and headed for the door. He carried nothing. It was all in his head He and Evenson entered the conference room, where James W. Wade, Sid Davies, a man named Danny Fortiano, and two other men were waiting. They sat down and faced a large screen that had been pulled down from the ceiling. Davies rose. Sir, as you know, we have received the much-anticipated solicitation from the Department of the Transportation for the construction of what will be the prototype of the highway that will replace the Interstate Highway System, a new system often referred to as the ‘Super Highway.’ The formal title of the solicitation is the Interstate Highway Upgrade Test Bed Design, Construction, and Implementation Project. In software parlance, it would be a beta version of both hardware and software. I would like to introduce you to a new member of my office, Charles Hendricks, who has prepared a briefing, which he will now present. Eddie Bixby, whom I believe you know, will be working the slides from a laptop.

Hendricks, with a laser pointer in his hand, stood as Davies sat back down. Bixby flashed the title slide up on the screen. Before Hendricks could say anything, Davidson spoke up. Welcome, Hendricks. Do you go by Charles or Charlie?

Charlie, sir.

Okay, Charlie. I just want you and Bixby to flip through the slides when I tell you to. I can read just fine. If I have questions, I’ll ask. Go ahead to the next slide.

Hendricks stood with his hands crossed in front of himself, feeling something of a fool, as Bixby flashed through the slides.

Davidson asked no questions.

When the slides had all been flashed on the screen, Davidson leaned back in his chair. As you all realize, this contract is big. Whatever company wins the contract has the potential to make billions over many years. This solicitation is just the first step. This is a fly-off. We’re to develop a concept for the new highway and propose it. Based on all the proposals submitted, the concepts of two companies will be selected, and the two winners will be asked to make proposals for the actual construction of a twenty-mile stretch of the new highway parallel to Interstate 95 in Georgia. Success to that point has the potential to lead to major contract work in the future. Every major company in the States will be bidding on this. We’re going to need to put together a systems engineering proposal and will need to team with a major construction company and a power company. Hopefully, any software and electronics can be developed in-house, although we may need help from the West Coast.

He turned to Wade. Jim, I want you to lead this. I hope you’re well rested from your trip to Hawaii.

Wade turned slightly red. As did all the B-E managers, he made frequent trips to the West Coast and to projects the company was overseeing. His United Airlines miles added up and enabled him to take periodic golfing trips to Hawaii. It was one of the undiscussed perks of being on a government contract.

Davidson continued. Finding a respectable construction company is going to be tough. The international ones like Bechtel are going to want this for themselves. You need to put together a team quickly. We have three months to get a proposal ready. I’d like concepts on my desk in four weeks. If you have trouble obtaining partners, let me know, and I’ll help. Any questions? He glanced quickly around the room. Thank you, gentlemen.

Davidson stood and left the room with Evenson in his wake.

Wade sat, looking a little stunned. He felt the burden of what had been assigned him. It was the problem with being successful. You got the tough ones—the ones that required success.

He looked around and sighed. He looked up. Hendricks was standing by him. Sir, there’s going to be a lot of civil engineering involved in this project. I’m a civil engineer and would appreciate the opportunity to work with you on this.

Wade looked at Davies, who was smiling. He’s a good man, Jim. He talked to me about this before we came over. I was also wondering if you needed a deputy.

Wade looked back and forth between the two. I guess you’re my team.

*     *     *

Eddie and Charlie packed up the projector and the laptop, let the screen wind back into the ceiling, and left the conference room.

As they walked through the lobby, Eddie noted, So, you’re going to leave me?

Charlie was suddenly concerned about Bixby’s feelings. Hey, it’s nothing personal. I’m a civil engineer, and this may be the only opportunity this company offers. I’d like to work in my field.

Eddie realized he had sounded like a whiny little kid. Hey, I understand. You’re not the first. I understand ambition. Just seems like I lose partners before I can break them in.

I understand, but, to me, this is exciting. Charlie wanted the subject changed.

As they settled into Bixby’s car for the drive back to Rosslyn, he asked, Tell me about this guy, Gunnar Davidson. Seems like he’s wound tight and impatient.

Eddie looked around as if someone might be listening in the car. He’s not an engineer, not even technical. He’s a politician who got an assignment as a deputy of some kind at the Pentagon when Bradyslaw was president. I think B-E hired him because of his Washington contacts. I think he roars through the slides because he doesn’t know enough to ask questions, although he wants it to look like he already understands everything. At least he’s smart enough to turn things over to his managers.

Charlie nodded. Okay, so the manager is this guy Wade?

Yeah, Jim Wade. He’s been bouncing around for twenty years or so running different projects. He’s running a classified one now. Been doing it for a couple of years. I guess he’s being pulled off that.

Charlie wondered about that. He looked a little shell-shocked.

Eddie concurred. He sure did. I think he was comfortable where he was and would have preferred to stay there. But this is big and very important to Davidson. The proposal is going to put a lot of pressure on everyone, especially Wade.

Okay, I can see that. I guess I’m jumping into it. Charlie continued to educate himself. How about this guy Fortiano?

Danny Fortiano. Yeah, he’s Wade’s man. Goes with him everywhere, as if he had something on Wade. Thinks he’s a real hotshot. Stevens Tech guy. Spent a few years in the army and got out. He’ll run over you if he gets a chance.

Charlie looked over at Eddie. I appreciate the info and warning.

Hey, you didn’t hear any of it from me.

CHAPTER THREE

Linda Hendricks had waited for this for twenty years. She was settled in Springfield in a