The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  “Roger.” Toad made a note on his kneeboard. “On the next run,” he said to Rita, “let’s do 500 knots.”

  “Okay.”

  At the increased speed Toad had only about sixty-five seconds from the IP to bomb release, so he had to work faster. The plane bounced in the warm afternoon thermals. In wartime the plane would race in toward its target at full throttle. The air could be full of flak and enemy radar signals probing the darkness to lock them up for a missile shot. Today over this Oregon prairie under a brilliant sun, Toad could visualize how it would be. Sweat trickled down his forehead and into his eyes as he manipulated the switches and knobs of the equipment. He got the bomb off but he was struggling. He would need a lot of practice to gain real proficiency, and today the equipment was working perfectly, no one was shooting.

  “A thousand feet this time, as fast as she’ll go.”

  “Roger,” Rita said.

  As fast as she’ll go turned out to be 512 knots indicated. On the next run they came in at five hundred feet, then four hundred, then three.

  On the downwind leg before their last run, Toad flipped the radar switch from transmit to standby. The picture disappeared from the scope. A stealth bomber that beaconed its position with radar emissions would have a short life and fiery end. The infrared was passive, emitting nothing.

  As they crossed the IP inbound, Toad found the infrared was still on the bull’s-eye tower. With the help of the inertial, the computer had kept the cursors there and the infrared was slaved to the cursors. He turned the laser on early and stepped the computer into attack.

  Yes, it could be done, and with practice, done well. Moisture in the air would degrade the IR, of course, but you couldn’t have everything.

  As they crossed the Columbia climbing northwest, the spotting tower gave them a call. “We didn’t spot your last hit. Maybe the smoke charge didn’t go off.”

  Toad checked the computer readouts. Rita had been eleven mils off on steering at the moment of weapon release. Toad couldn’t resist. He informed her of that fact. She said nothing. “Still,” Toad added magnanimously, “an okay job.” He was feeling rather pleased with himself.

  “For a woman.”

  “I didn’t say that, Miss Thin Skin. I said an okay job.”

  “Look at the ordnance panel, ace.” Toad did so. He had inadvertently selected Station Three instead of Station Four for the last bomb run. The practice bombs were on Station Four, and the last bomb was undoubtedly still there. Station Three—the belly station —had been empty, thank God! Oh damn. And good ol’ Rita had sat there and watched him do it and hadn’t squeaked a word! “Call Center and get our clearance back to Whidbey,” she said now, her voice deadpan.

  Toad reached for the radio panel.

  Terry Franklin was watching television when he heard the telephone ring. He listened for the second ring, but it didn’t come. He sat staring at the TV screen, no longer hearing the words or seeing the picture.

  His wife had taken the kids to the mall. She had left only a half hour ago. How long would she be?

  He was trying to decide just how much time he had when the phone rang again. He felt his muscles tense. Only one ring.

  He turned off the TV and got his coat from the closet. He felt in his pocket for the keys to the old Datsun. They were there. He snapped off the living-room lights and peered between the curtains at the street. No one out there.

  Ring, pause, ring, pause, ring…

  Three rings. The drop on G Street. He would have to hurry to beat Lucy and the kids home. He remembered to lock the door behind him.

  Matilda Jackson was sixty-seven years old and she was fed up. Five years ago she retired from the law firm where she had worked as a clerk-typist for twenty-six years. Seventeen months ago she had made the last payment on her mortgage. The house wasn’t much— a run-down row house in a run-down neighborhood—but by God it was hers. And it was all she could afford on her social security income and the $93.57 she got every month from the law firm’s pension plan.

  The house had been something when she and Charlie bought it in 1958, and Charlie had been a good worker inside and outside, keeping everything painted and nice and the sidewalk swept. But he had died of diabetes—had it really been sixteen years ago?— after they amputated his feet and his liver got bad.

  Poor Charlie, thank God he can’t see this neighborhood now, it’d break his heart. Everything gone to rack and ruin, trash everywhere, and those kids selling dope in the house right across the street, the house where ol’ lady Melvin, the preacher’s widow, used to live. Some old man from New Orleans was in there now: she didn’t know his name.

  Mrs. Jackson heard a car stop outside and peered through the window. Four young men dressed fit to kill stood on the sidewalk looking around. Mrs. Jackson reached for her camera, an ancient Brownie, but she had loaded it with some of that new film the man at the drugstore said would take pictures without a flash. When she got the camera ready and pointed through the gap in the drapes she could see only two men. The other two must have gone inside.

  Damn those cops anyway.

  She had told those detectives that Melvin’s was a crack house and nothing had happened. They weren’t going to pay much attention to a fat old black lady, no way. She had seen that in their hard eyes as they looked up and down the street at the boarded-up windows and the trash and that worthless, shiftless Arnold Spivey sitting on Wilson’s stoop drinking from a bottle in a paper bag.

  She was going to get pictures. They would have to do something if she had pictures. And if they didn’t do anything, she would send the photos to that neighborhood watch group or maybe even the newspapers. Leaving old people to watch their neighborhood rot and the dope peddlers take over—they would have to do something about pictures.

  She snapped the camera at the two men on the sidewalk, slick loose-jointed dudes with sports coats and pimp hats with wide brims and flashy hatbands. The license plate of that big car would be in both photos.

  Here comes someone. A white man, walking bold as brass after dark in a neighborhood as black as printer’s ink, a neighborhood where the kids would rip off your arm to get your Timex watch. She squinted. Late fifties or early sixties, chunky, wearing a full-length raincoat and a little trilby hat. Oh yes, he went by earlier this evening, just walking and looking. She hadn’t paid much attention then, but here he is, back again. She pointed the camera and clicked the shutter. The two dudes on the opposite sidewalk by the big car were watching him, but he was ignoring them.

  Now what did he just do? Stuffed something in that hollow iron fence post as he walked by.

  Why did he do that? My God, the street is full of trash; why didn’t he just throw it down like everyone else does?

  The two men who had gone into the crack house came out and they and their compatriots piled in the car and left, laughing and peeling rubber. Mrs. Jackson got more photos of them, then busied herself in the kitchen making tea since the street seemed quiet now.

  She was sipping tea in the darkened living room and looking through the curtain gap when a haggard black woman in dilapidated blue jeans and a torn sweatshirt staggered around the corner and along the sidewalk to the crack house. She struggled up the steps to the stoop. The door opened before she even knocked. Mrs. Jackson didn’t bother taking her picture; she was one of the regulars, a crack addict who Mrs. Jackson suspected didn’t have long to live. Mrs. Blue next door had said her name was Mandy and she had heard she was doing tricks under the Southeast Freeway.

  Nobody gave a damn. About Mandy or Mrs. Jackson or Mrs. Blue or any of them. Just a bunch of poor niggers down in the sewer.

  Wonder what that white man stuffed in that fence post? Something to do with that crack house, no doubt. Maybe he’s a judge or police on the take. Not getting enough. Maybe it’s money, a payoff for someone.

  Well, we’ll just see. We’ve got some rights too.

  She pulled her sweater around her shoulders and got her cane. Her ar
thritis was bothering her pretty badly but there was no help for it. She unbolted the door and lowered herself down the steps. As she approached the hollow iron post two houses down she glanced around guiltily. Her frustration was fast evaporating into fear. No one looking. Quick! She reached into the post. Only a crushed cigarette pack. Disappointed, she felt around in the hollow cavity. There was nothing else. With the cigarette pack in her pocket, she slowly made her way back to her house, steeling herself to look straight ahead. Oh God, why had she done this?

  She locked and bolted her doors and sat at the kitchen table examining her find. Writing on the back, block letters. Numbers and such. Code of some sort. Payoffs, most likely. We’ll see what the police make of all this. Not that they’d ever tell an old black woman what it’s all about. No matter, if they’d just close that crack house, that’d be something.

  But should she go to the police? They’ve been told about that crack house and they’ve done nothing. What if the police have been paid off? What if they tell the dopers about her?

  Mrs. Jackson had lived too long in the ghetto not to know the dangers associated with interfering in someone else’s illegal enterprise. As she stared at the cigarette pack she realized she had crossed that invisible line between officious nuisance and enemy. And she knew exactly what happened to enemies of dope dealers. They died. Fast and bloody. Those four punks on the sidewalk in their fancy clothes would smile as they cut off her ears, nose and tongue, then her arms.

  She turned off the kitchen light and sat in the darkness, trying to think. What should she do? My God, what had she done?

  Mrs. Jackson was still sitting in the darkness of her kitchen thirty minutes later when Terry Franklin walked past the front of her house toward the hollow post. He had parked the car three blocks away. Normally he was very circumspect and drove around for at least an hour to make sure that he had lost any possible tails, but tonight he was in a hurry. He had to get home before Lucy and the kids got back from the mall. So he had driven straight from Annandale to G Street.

  The block appeared empty. No, there was someone sitting in a doorway, across the street. Some black guy with a brown bag. A wino. No sweat. What a shitty neighborhood! He had never understood why the Russians had picked a drop in a run-down black neighborhood, but since he hadn’t talked to them after he had found the described drops, he had had no opportunity to ask.

  It would be just his luck to get mugged down here some night.

  He walked at a regular pace toward the post, not too fast and not too slow. Just a man who knows where he’s going. He would just reach in while barely breaking stride, get the cigarette pack and keep on walking, right on around the block and back to his car. Piece of cake.

  He slowed his pace as he reached into the post.

  It was empty!

  Dumbfounded, he stopped and looked in. There was just enough light coming from the streetlight up on the corner and the windows of the houses to see into the hole. It was about four inches deep. Empty!

  He walked on. What had happened? This had never happened before. What in hell was going on?

  He turned and walked back to the post. He looked in again. The hole was still empty. He looked around on the sidewalk and the grass behind the fence for anything that might be an empty cigarette pack.

  Nothing!

  It must be here, somewhere, and he just wasn’t seeing it.

  He was living one of those cold-sweat gibbering nightmares where you are stuck in quicksand and going to die and the rope is forever just inches out of reach. Finally he realized the cigarette pack truly wasn’t there.

  Maybe he was being set up. Maybe the FBI was going to grab him.

  Franklin looked around wildly, trying to see who was watching. Just blank windows. The wino—still there, sucking from his bottle. He reached into the hole again, trying to understand. Someone had gotten it. God, it must be the FBI. They must be on to him. Even now, they’re watching from somewhere, ready to pounce. Prison—he would go to prison. The wino—an agent—watching and laughing and ready to arrest him.

  Terry Franklin panicked.

  He ran for the car, a staggering hell-bent gallop down the sidewalk as he tried to look in every direction for the agents closing in. To arrest him.

  He careened into a garbage can and it fell over with a loud clang and the lid flew off and garbage went everywhere. He kept running. At the intersection a car slammed on its brakes to the screeching of tires, barely missing him. He bounced off a parked car but he didn’t slow.

  He almost broke the key getting it into the door lock. The engine ground mercilessly and refused to start.

  He smacked his head against the steering wheel in rage and frustration. He tried the ignition again as he scanned the sidewalks, searching for the agents that must be coming.

  The engine caught. Franklin slammed the shift lever into drive and mashed on the accelerator.

  Bang! Into the car ahead. Holy…! Reverse. Then forward, out of the parking space.

  Cranking the wheel over at the corner, he slewed around with tires squalling and stomped on the gas.

  Toad Tarkington stared glumly at the remains of a beer in the glass in front of him. Across the table Rita Moravia was chattering away with the peckerhead attack pilot who had spent the last three days initiating her into the mysteries of the A-6. Beside Toad sat the bombardier who had been coaching him, ol’ Henry Jenks. Both these mental giants were hanging on every word from Moravia’s gorgeous lips. There she sat, smiling and joking and behaving like a real live normal woman-type female, as she never did around him, damn her! And these two attack weenies were eating it with a spoon!

  The pilot, Toad decided, had a rather high opinion of himself. He looked and acted like a lifelong miser who has just decided to spend a quarter on a piece of pussy that he knows will be worth two dollars. His smile widened every time Moravia glanced into his little pig eyes. If he wasn’t careful his face would crack.

  This BN, Jenks, wasn’t any better. He obviously hadn’t had a good piece of ass since his junior year of high school. Jenks was telling a funny to the pilot as he watched Rita’s reaction out of the corner of his eyes. “Do you know a fighter puke’s definition of foreplay?” After the obligatory negative from his listeners, Jenks continued. “Six hours of begging.” Rita joined in the ha-ha-has.

  Watching these two cheap masturbators in action was a thirsty business. The waitress caught Toad’s hi sign and came over. “Four double tequilas, neat,” Toad said, and looked around to see if there were any other orders. The attack weenies were still drooling down Moravia’s cleavage as she told an anecdote about something or other. “That’s it,” he told the waitress, who regarded him incredulously.

  “Four?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  She shrugged and turned away.

  The club was still crowded with the remnants of the Friday-night Happy Hour gang. The married guys had left some time back and a bunch of reservists were drifting in. Altogether forty or fifty people, ten or twelve of them women, three of whom were still in uniform. Canned rock music blared from loudspeakers that Toad didn’t see. Only one couple was dancing.

  When the waitress brought the drinks she sat them in the center of the table. Jenks looked at the drinks with raised eyebrows. “I’ll have another beer,” he said. “Perrier with a twist,” Moravia chirped. “Diet Coke,” intoned the lecher beside her.

  Toad drank one of the tequilas in two gulps. The liquor burned all the way down. Ah baby!

  Another song started on the loudspeakers, a fast number. Toad tossed off a second drink, then climbed up on his chair. He straightened and filled his lungs with air. “Hey, fat girl,” he roared.

  Every eye in the place turned his way. Toad picked the nearest female and leaped toward her with a shout: “Let’s dance!” Behind him his chair flew over with a crash.

  And oh, that woman could dance.

  7

  The bedroom lights were on in the second stor
y of the town house when Terry Franklin parked the car. He turned off the ignition and headlights and sat behind the wheel, trying to think.

  He had driven around for an hour and a half after his panicked departure from the drop, craning to spot the agents he felt sure were tailing him. At one point he had pulled over and looked at the damage to the front of his car. The left front headlight was smashed and the bumper bent from smacking into that car when he tried to get out of that parking space too quickly.

  A dozen times he thought he spotted a tail, but the trailing vehicle usually went its own way at the next corner or the one after. A blue Ford with Pennsylvania plates followed along for half a mile until he could stand it no longer and ran a red light. His panicky wanderings back and forth through the avenues and traffic circles of downtown Washington seemed like something from a drug-induced nightmare, a horrible descent into a paranoid hell of traffic and stoplights and police cars that refused to chase him.

  Franklin sat now behind the wheel smelling his own foul body odor. His clothes were sodden with sweat.

  Lucy and the kids were home. He tried to come up with a lie for Lucy as he scanned the street for mysterious watchers and people sitting in cars.

  How long could he live like this? Should he take the money he had and run? Where could he run with the FBI and CIA looking for him? He didn’t have enough money to evade them forever. Should he go to Russia? The very thought nauseated him. Freezing in some gray workers’ paradise for the rest of his days was about as far from the good life as a man could get this side of the grave.

  He wasn’t feeling well and went to the dispensary, that was what he would tell Lucy. God knows he must look like he was in the terminal stages of AIDS. No good. No prescription. A beer. Yeah, he went out for a beer. He got out of the car wishing he had really stopped for one. After another look at the broken headlight and grille, he plodded toward the front door.

  She came out of the kitchen when she heard the door open. “Where have you been?” She stood rigid, her face pale.