The Minotaur jg-3

by Stephen Coonts

  Rita stood in one smooth, fluid motion. “I want to make love to you.” she murmured as she peeled off the teddy, “but I don’t want to be too forward.”

  He pursed his Ups and nodded. “Uh-huh.” He reached out and she slid into his arms, her skin all silky and smooth.

  “Should we turn off the lights?” she suggested as he caressed her breasts with his lips. “‘

  “You’re pretty enough for lights,” he said, and pulled her down on the bed beside him.

  “I don’t want you to get the idea that I just want you for sex,” she said tentatively.

  His mouth was fall of breast, so the best he could manage was a reassuring noise.

  “The sex is great, of course, but I want us to have something else.” She ran her fingers through his hair, then smoothed the stray locks. “You’re a pretty terrific guy, and it’s more than sex. That’s what I was trying to get at this afternoon in the parking lot.”

  Toad reluctantly took a last lick at that swollen nipple, then shifted his body until his eyes were inches from hers. “Are you trying to tell me you’re in love with me?”

  She frowned. “I suppose. It hasn’t happened quite the way I always dreamed it would. Girls have their fantasies.” She took a tiny little nip on her lower lip. “I hope I’m saying this right. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “I’m delighted. I’m falling in love with you and I’m glad you feel the same way.”

  “I love you,” Rita Moravia said softly, savoring it, then gently pulled his mouth onto hers.

  When she was asleep. Toad eased out of bed and peered through the curtain. He was restless. Why had he said that — that falling-in- love stuff? Only a cretin tells a woman that just before he beds her. He sat in a chair and worried a fingernail. He was getting in over his head again and he had his doubts. Was he just scared? Nah, a little frightened maybe, nervous, but not scared. Why is it all women want to fall in love? He wondered what Samuel Dodgers would say on that subject

  Dreyfus laid it on Camacho’s desk and sat down to light his pipe. Camacho knew what it was: his boss had called him. It was a copy of a letter. The original was at the lab.

  He opened the folder that the lab technicians used for copies and glanced at it. There was no date. The envelope was postmarked Bakersfield, California, three days ago. The message was in florid longhand, yet quite legible.

  Dear Sir,

  I think it’s my duty to inform you that my daughter’s hus- band, Petty Officer First Class Terry Franklin USN, is a spy. He works at the Pentagon. Computers, or something like that. I don’t know how long he has been a spy, but he is. My daughter Lucy is sure he is and so am I. He got a funny phone call once that Lucy overheard and he got really really mad when he found out Lucy mentioned her suspicions to a neigh- bor. Lucy is afraid of him and so am I. He is crazy. He is a spy like that Walker fellow.

  We are good citizens and pay our taxes and know you will do what has to be done. We are sorry for him but he did this himself. Lucy had absolutely nothing to do with this spy thing, and that’s why I am writing this letter. I wanted her to write it but she said she just couldn’t, even though she knows it has to be this way. Please arrest him and keep Lucy and the kids out of it. Please don’t tell the newspapers he is married. His name is Terry Franklin and he works at the Pentagon and he is a spy. And PLEASE, whatever you do, don’t tell Terry we told on him. He is crazy.

  Sincerely, Flora May Southworth

  “Can you get a divorce in California if your spouse is a spy?”

  Dreyfus snorted. “You can get a divorce in California if your spouse farts in bed.”

  “Progressive as hell.”

  “Right out front.”

  “Better call out there and have an agent go interview them. Tell him to stay all afternoon and take lots of notes.”

  “You don’t want them going to the press?”

  “Do you know what the committee is going to want to do about this?”

  “Well, they sure are gonna have to do something. Now we got the mother-in-law writing us letters. They probably talked to their minister and a lawyer and every neighbor in a five-block radius.”

  “Not letters. A letter. One letter with no hard facts and a variety of unsubstantiated allegations. We get two dozen letters like this every month from people out to get even with someone in a sensi- tive job. I repeat, do you know what the committee—“

  “No.” He spit it out.

  “So we had better do our best to convince Mrs. Southworth we are going like gangbusters on this hot tip. Pledge confidentiality. Better send two agents. Tell them to be thorough. Then two days later go back for a follow-up interview with more questions. New questions, not repeats.”

  “A major break like this, maybe you want to send me out there to see that they do it right? I could go by bus, get there in a week or so.”

  Camacho ignored him. He picked up the letter and read it again. Then he pulled a legal pad around and began making notes. Drey- fus got the message and left in a swirl of smoke, closing the door behind him.

  Camacho threw the legal pad at the door.

  14

  With its twin engines bellowing a roar that could be heard for several miles, the Intruder departed the earth with a delicate wiggle, a perceptible rocking of the wings that Rita Moravia automatically smoothed with the faintest side pressure on the control stick. She had let the takeoff trim setting rotate the plane’s nose to eight degrees nose-up and had stopped it there with a nudge of forward stick in that delicious moment when the weight of twenty-five tons of machine and fuel was transferred from the main landing gear to the wings. This was the transition to flight, a shimmering, imprecise hesitation as the machine gathered its strength and the wings took a firm bite into the warm morning air.

  Now safely airborne, Rita slapped the gear handle up with her left hand. Her right thumb flicked at the coolie-hat button on the top of the stick, trimming the stick pressure to neutral as the twin- engined warplane accelerated.

  She checked to make sure the landing gear were up and locked. They were. Temps, RPMs, fuel flow normal. Oil and hydraulic pressure okay. Using her left hand again, she raised the flap handle as she caressed the stick with her right to hold the nose steady through the configuration change. Accelerating nicely. Flaps and slats up and in and the stabilizer shifted, she isolated the flight hydraulic system and continued to trim. At 290 knots indicated she pulled the nose higher into the sky in order to comply with Jake Grafton’s directive not to exceed 300 knots.

  Toad had activated the IFF and was talking to Departure. Now he switched to Los Angeles Center. The controller asked him to push the identification button on the IFF—“squawk ident”—and he complied. “Xray Echo 22, radar contact. Come left to a heading of 020. Passing Flight Level 180, proceed on course.”

  Rita Moravia dipped the left wing as Toad rogered.

  When she leveled the wings on course, still climbing, he was humming and singing over the ICS as he tuned the radar presenta- tion and checked that he had property entered the computer way- points. “ffi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go, with a hi-hi-hee and a fiddly-dee, hi-hi, ho-ho…”

  Rita grinned behind her oxygen mask. Flying with the Toadman was an experience. No wonder Captain Grafton’s face softened every time he saw Tarkington.

  She leveled the plane at Flight Level 310—31,000 feet — and en- gaged the autopilot. Just above them a thin, wispy layer slid across the top of the canopy, so close it seemed they could almost reach up and let the gauzy tendrils slip around their fingers. Rita looked ahead and tried to find that point where the motion of the ropy filaments seemed to originate as they came racing toward the cock- pit, accelerating as the distance closed. It was like flying just under an infinite, flat ceiling — some Steven Spielberg effect to give the audience a rush of speed and wonder as the woofers oomphed and the seats throbbed, before the credits came on the screen.

  After a moment she disengaged the autopilot and let the
nose creep up a smidgen. Almost imperceptibly the plane rose a hun- dred feet, where the cloud layer literally sliced around the cockpit. Toad picked that moment to withdraw his head from the radar scope and look slowly around. After a moment he glanced at her and caught her eye. She saw him wink, then readjust the hood and devote his attention to the computer and radar.

  A lifetime of work, all for this.

  She had been an outstanding student at an excellent suburban high school, one of those bright youngsters who applied themselves in a frenzy of self-discipline and diligence that separated her from her classmates, who were more interested in boys. music and peer acceptance than school. She had shocked everyone, including her parents, by her announcement that she wanted to attend a military academy. In due course an appointment to the Naval Academy came from a congressman who knew better than to echo her moth- er’s surprise or horror in an era when socially correct posturing was more important than his voting record.

  So she set forth bravely that summer after high school, at the age of eighteen, set off into the unknown world of plebes at the Naval Academy, this girl who had never set foot on a military installa- tion, this girl who knew only that she wanted to make her own way in life and that way would be much different from those of her mother or the friends of her youth.

  It had been worse than different. It had been horrid, humiliating nightmare beyond anything she had imagined in her worst mo- ments of trepidation. All the sly taunts of her friends, bound for sororities and, they hoped, excellent marriages, hadn’t even hinted at the emotional trauma she experienced those first weeks. During the day she braced and marched and ran and endured the hazing and shouting to the point of exhaustion, and at night she sobbed herself to sleep wondering if she had made the right choice- Finally one day she realized that she hadn’t cried in a week. Her second, more important revelation occurred one morning at breakfast when an upperclassman had demanded to know the name of the Soviets’ chief arms negotiator. She had answered the question cor- rectly, and as he turned his attention to a gawky boy from Georgia seated beside her, she realized that these people were demanding nothing from her she could not accomplish. From then on she had cheerfully endured, and finally excelled.

  She thought of those times this morning as the Intruder flew out from under the thin cloud layer into a crystal-clear desert sky and Toad Tarkington, the professional who had been there and back, caressed the system with a loving touch. She had made the right choice.

  Sixty miles out she once again disengaged the autopilot and low- ered the nose slightly, then slowly pulled the throttles aft as her speed crept up toward 300 knots indicated. She always liked the feel of the plane as it descended in these long, shallow, power-on glides, gravity helping the engines drive the plane down into the thicker, denser air near the earth- She could feel every knot of the airspeed the engines didn’t generate — free airspeed it seemed, though of course it wasn’t. Because she was the airplane and it was her, the energy was hers: the speed and the life and the power, she absorbed and possessed and became all of it.

  The Minotaur

  Wingtip speed brakes cracked, but not enough. She flicked them out some more and felt the buffeting of the disturbed air, a gentle shaking that imparted itself to her through the stick and throttles and the seat in which she sat. Satisfied, she slid the speed-brake switch forward with her left thumb. The boards closed obediently and the buffeting ceased.

  The desert below was baked brown and red and grayish black unleavened by the green of life. As she came down she could see sand and dirt in valleys and washes and rock the color of new iron in jagged cliffs and ridges.

  Toad was chatting with Jake Grafton on the radio. “Never fear, the pros are here.”

  “Amen,” Grafton replied. It’s a good thing Dodgers is back in China Lake, Rita thought

  “Okay, Misty, I have you in sight. Drop to about 8,000 on the pressure altimeter”—the land here was 4.000 feet above sea level— “and come north up the valley until you see the van. It’s red and has a yellow cross on the top.”

  “What kind of a cross,” she asked curiously.

  “Dodgers’ son painted it. Three guesses.” “I see it.” At this height it was just a speck amid the dirt and boulders.

  “0kay, circle the van at a distance of three miles or so and I’ll tell you when to turn on your gadget.”

  “Roger that,” Toad said, and Rita flew away from the van, then turned to establish herself on the circle with her left wingtip pointed at the van.

  Toad again examined the little box that had been taped to the top of the glare shield in front of him. The box wasn’t much. It had a three-position power switch which he had had in the middle, or standby, position for the last five minutes. While in standby the coolant was circulating around the Athena computer. Beside the power switch was a little green light that would come on to verify that the computer was receiving electrical power, and another light, yellow, to show when the system was detecting signals from an outside source. When that yellow light was on, the Athena system was doing its thing. There was a red light too, but that would illuminate only when the temperature of the super-cooled computer exceeded a level that endangered it. If that light came on, Toad was to turn off the system.

  Down on the ground Jake watched Harold Dodgers and Helmut Fritsche at the radar control panel. “Got em,” Fritsche said after a bit, speaking loudly over the steady snoring of the engine of the generator mounted on the trailer behind the van. The engine noise muffled the moan of the Intruder’s engines except when it had passed almost overhead. Jake looked at the green display. “Tell ‘em to turn it on.”

  Jake did so. In less than two seconds the blip faded from the scope. Magic! Involuntarily he looked toward that spot in the sky where the plane had to be. Yes, there it was, just now a flash as the sun glinted from the canopy, then fading to a dull yet visible white spot in the washed-out blue. He looked again at the scope. Noth- ing.

  “Maybe if they tightened the circle, flew closer,” Fritsche sug- gested.

  The plane was still invisible. However, at five miles from the radar the strength of the emissions from Athena was too much: it beaconed and a false blip appeared at two miles and another at five.

  “Dad’s gonna have to tweak it,” Harold Dodgers said, his voice confident and cheerful. “But by gum, it works.”

  “Sure enough does,” Jake Grafton said, and wiped the perspira- tion from his forehead. Hard to believe, but that crackpot and his genius son had invented a device that would revolutionize warfare. Just as Admiral Henry had known it would.

  After another twenty minutes, during which the Intruder flew back and forth in straight lines tangent to the five-mile circle so that Fritsche could chart the Athena’s protection envelope, Jake told Rita and Toad to go on back to China Lake, where Dr. Dodg- ers would tweak the computer. Then Rita and Toad would bring the plane back here for another session. Jake would have preferred to stage the plane from NAS Fallen, just a few miles west, but Admiral Dunedin had vetoed that on the grounds that base secu- rity there would be inadequate.

  “Helmut, you better drive over to the range office and call Dodg- ers on the scrambler and tell him how it went. Then call Admiral Dunedin in Washington.”

  “Sure-” Fritsche trotted over to the gray navy sedan parked near the van and left in a cloud of dust. Harold Dodgers killed the generator, which backfired once and fell silent. Now the Intruder’s engines were plainly audible, the moan echoing from the rocky ridges and outcrops.

  “CAG,” said a male voice on the radio. “Are we sweet or what?”

  “You’re sweet. Misty. See you this afternoon back here.”

  Jake watched the white dot shrink to nothing in the blue sky as Rita climbed away to the south. When even the engine noise was gone and all he could hear was the wind whispering across the aand, he walked over to the shade by the side of the van and sat down.

  Any way you looked at it, Athena was mind-boggling. A reli-
gious crackpot working in a shop that looks as if it should be full of broken-down cars comes up with an invention that will instantly obsolesce all conventional radar technology. But perhaps it wasn’t as wild as it appeared. After all, without the benefit of budgets, bureaucrats, and MBA supervisors worried about short-term prof- itability, Thomas Edison had single-handedly electrified the world and along the way fathered the recording and motion-picture in- dustry. With the same advantages Samuel Dodgers had made junk of all existing Quinary radar systems and the tactics and strategy built around those systems. And if you’re keeping score, he also just blew the B-2 program out of the sky. Why buy stealth bombers for $516 million each when you can make an existing plane invisi- ble with a $250,000 device and some superglue?

  A lot of people were going to be seriously unhappy when they heard. Powerful people, the kind that had both their senators’ un- listed Washington numbers on their Rolodex.

  Jake Grafton picked up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his fingers, Tyler Henry, Ludlow, Royce Caplinger — they were sitting on a bomb. No doubt they’ll let Jake Grafton go it alone for a while, stand out there by himself in front of the crowd as the duty expert. After he had run the bloomers up the flagpole and they had precisely measured the direction and velocity of the wind, then and only then would they decide what to do.

  They must have been ecstatic when they realized that Jake Graf- ton was just the man they needed: a genuine, decorated live hero whom they could stand with shoulder to shoulder or disavow as a crazed maverick, whichever way the cookie crumbled. They would throw him to die sharks without a second thought if they con- cluded that course looked best. Too bad, but he always was an Officer who couldn’t take orders, not a team player. And after that El Hakim thing, a bad concussion, psychiatrists; he was never right in the head. Too bad.

  These powerful people whose boats would start leaking when the Athena secret came out, what would they do? Fight. How? What would be their weapons?