The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  “Okay,” he told her. “This run, no inertial and no radar. Computer dead reckoning and the IR—that’s all we’ll use. We’ll even leave the laser off. Go in at a hundred feet and let’s see if we can hit anything.” Below two hundred feet system deliveries in the A-6 were degraded, probably, Toad suspected, due to the trigonometry of low grazing angles.

  She lowered the left wing and let the nose sag down into the turn. When she leveled the wings they were on the run-in line at a hundred feet, throttles against the stops, bouncing moderately in the turbulence as the engines moaned through their helmets.

  He got the reticle, or cross hair, on the IR display onto the tower. The cross hairs started drifting. The wind he typed into the computer was wrong. He pushed the velocity correct switch, then held the cross hairs on the tower bull’s-eye.

  “Master Arm on, in attack, and in range.”

  “I’m committed,” she said. This meant she had squeezed the commit trigger on the stick, authorizing the computer to release the weapon.

  Toad glanced out his side window. The desert was right there, close enough to touch, racing by beneath them. He came back to the IR scope. All okay. If Moravia got distracted and let the nose fall just a smidgen, they would be a fireball rolling across the desert so quickly they would never even know what happened. “Release coining,” he advised. The cursors started to drift in close and he held them on the base of the tower.

  When the release came she eased back on the stick and Toad felt the G press him down even as he watched the tower on the IR scope—now going inverted—for the hit. Pop. There it was! Almost dead-on.

  That was the last bomb. He glanced at the panel in front of her. They were climbing and heading north for Yakima. He flipped the radar to transmit and began to adjust the picture.

  “Your hit forty feet at seven-thirty.”

  “Boardman, thanks a lot. We’re switching to Center.”

  “Have a safe flight.”

  “Yo.” Toad dialed in the Seattle Center frequency.

  “Pretty good bombing for a fighter puke,” Moravia said.

  “Yep. It was that,” he agreed smugly, relishing the role and willing today to play it to the hilt. Moravia had had her fun last night. His head was still thumping like a toothache. “Ain’t anybody better than the ol’ Horny Toad.”

  “Or anyone more humble.”

  “Humble is for folks that can’t,” he shot back. “I can.”

  Rita called Center and asked for a clearance to the military operating area over Okanogan. She leveled the plane at Flight Level 220. Toad played with the scope.

  Entering the area, Rita disengaged the autopilot and looked about expectantly. She and her pilot instructor of the previous week, Lieutenant Clyde “Duke” Degan, had agreed to and briefed an ACM engagement. She was right on time. Now if she could just find him first. She dialed in the squadron tactical frequency and gave him a call.

  “I’m here,” Degan replied.

  Toad caught the first glimpse of the other A-6. It was high, near the sun. Ol’ Duke didn’t intend to give Moravia any break at all. “All right,” Toad enthused. “Now, by God, we’re playing my game!” Toad pointed over her left shoulder. “Up there. Better turn under him and get the nose down for some airspeed.”

  Rita knew Toad had just recently finished a three-year tour in the backseat of F-14 Tomcats. He had ridden through literally hundreds of practice dogfights. Fighter crews lived for Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM), the orgiastic climax of their training and their existence. So she knew Toad Tarkington undoubtedly knew a thing or two about dogfighting. She took his advice. “Think he’s seen us?” The A-6’s radar had no air-to-air capability.

  Toad kept the other plane in sight. Immediately above them—maybe two miles above—it rolled inverted, preparatory to a split S. “Looks like it,” Toad murmured. “Already you’re at a serious disadvantage, assuming he’s smart enough to cash in.”

  With the throttles on the stops, she began a climbing right turn holding 340 knots indicated, the best climb speed. Toad glanced across the panel, then cranked his neck to keep the other plane in sight. “He’s coming down like a ruptured duck,” Toad advised. “If you had guns you could get a low-percentage deflection shot here. Shake him up some.”

  The other plane came rocketing down with vapor pouring off its wingtips. Now his wingtip speed brakes—boards—came open. “He’s trying to minimize his overshoot.” The other Intruder went dropping through their altitude with the boards still open, vapor swirling from his wings. “Work the angles,” Toad advised. “Turn into him and get the nose down.”

  Rita Moravia did just that in a workmanlike four-G pull. “Not too much nose-down,” Toad grunted against the G. Duke Degan would undoubtedly use his energy advantage to zoom again and try to turn in behind her, but he should not have left the boards out as long as he did. That was his second mistake. His first was the split S; he should have spiraled down to convert his energy advantage to a lethal position advantage.

  Degan zoomed. Moravia smartly lifted her nose into a climb, still closing, then eased it to hold 340 indicated. “Very nice,” Toad commented. Inexperienced pilots would just yank on the stick until they had squandered all their airspeed. Moravia had better sense. Patience, Toad decided. She was patient.

  Degan was above them now, spread-eagled against the sky, maybe a mile ahead and four thousand feet above. And he was running out of airspeed.

  “You got him now,” Toad said, excitement creeping into his voice.

  Apparently Degan thought so too. He continued over the top of his loop and let the nose fall through as he half-rolled. He was going to try to go out underneath with a speed advantage and run away from her, then turn and come back into the fray on his own terms. Moravia anticipated him; as he committed with his nose she dumped hers and slammed down the left wing and honked her plane around.

  “You get another deflection shot here,” Toad advised. “You’re kicking this guy’s ass! What a clown! He should never have come back at you out of the loop.”

  She was dead behind him now, both diving, but Degan lacked the speed advantage to pull away cleanly.

  “Fox Two,” Toad whispered over the radio. Fox Two was the call when you were putting a heat-seeking missile in the air. “You’re dead meat.”

  “Bull.” Degan’s voice did not sound happy.

  “Go ahead, try something wonderful and Rita will get a guns solution.”

  “I have enough gas for one more series of turns,” Rita told the instructor.

  A long pause. Degan wasn’t liking this a bit. Part of the pain, Toad suspected, was Rita’s well-modulated feminine voice on the radio and the ribbing Duke knew he would have to take in the ready room about getting whipped by a woman. Toad would have wagered a paycheck the guys back in the ready room at Whidbey were crowded around the duty officer’s radio this very minute. Toad whacked Rita playfully on the right arm with his fist. He was having a hell of a good time. “Okay,” Degan said at last, “break off and we’ll start again with a head-on pass at twenty-two grand. I’ll run out to the west.”

  Rita dropped her wing to turn east. Toad cackled for her benefit over the ICS. Then he keyed his radio mike switch. “Hey, Duke, this is Toad. I got ten bucks to put on ol’ Rita if you can spare it.”

  “You’re on, asshole.”

  Toad chuckled over the radio. On the ICS he said, “We got him now, Rita baby. He’s mad, the sucker.”

  “Don’t Rita-baby me, you—you—”

  “Goddamn, cool off, willya?” Toad roared. “I don’t give a damn if you’re the lesbo queen of Xanadu—but right fucking now you’re a fighter pilot. This ain’t for fun.” He paused for air, then muttered, “‘Fight to fly, fly to fight, fight to win.’ There ain’t no other way.”

  “You didn’t just make that up.”

  “That’s the Top Gun motto. Now what’re you gonna do on this high-speed pass?”

  “I thought a turn in the same direction
he turns.”

  “He’ll probably make a horizontal turn as hard as he can pull. No imagination. Wait to see which way he turns, then nose up about forty degrees and roll hard into him, the rolling scissors. If he’s not too sharp you’ll get a winning position advantage, and this guy hasn’t impressed me.”

  The two Intruders came together out of the emptiness at a combined speed of a thousand knots. At first the other plane was just a speck, but it grew larger quickly until it seemed to fill the windshield. Toad had been there before, in a head-on pass with Jake Grafton in an F-14 that resulted in a collision. Involuntarily he closed his eyes.

  His head snapped down and the floor came up at him. She had the G on. He opened his eyes and used the steel handgrip on the canopy rail to pull himself around to look behind. “Which way?”

  “Left. I got him.” She was holding herself forward in the seat with her left hand on her handgrip as she craned back over her shoulder and applied the G.

  “Get the nose up higher.” Enough advice. Either she could hack it or she couldn’t.

  The left wing sagged to the vertical and the nose fell toward the horizon. G off as she slammed the stick all the way to the right and the plane rolled two hundred degrees in the blink of an eye. Back on the stick with the nose coming down. Pull, pull, pull that nose around.

  Degan was in front of them now and below, but Rita was on the inside of his turn going down at him. Relax the stick and build up your speed, close on him; Toad silently urged her on.

  “Degan lost sight,” Toad said as he fought the vomit back in his throat. The hangover had caught up with him. He ripped off a glove and jerked the mask aside. His stomach heaved once. She was set up perfectly for a downhill Sidewinder shot.

  “Fox Two,” he called over the radio. “You owe me ten bucks, Degan.” Then he puked into the glove again.

  Rita lifted the nose and reversed her turn until she was headed west. “Fuel’s going to be a little skosh,” she murmured to Toad, then called Degan and told him she was leaving this frequency for Seattle Center.

  After the debrief the duty van dropped them at the BOQ. “Thanks,” Rita said.

  “For what?”

  “Coaching me during the ACM.”

  “No sweat. They’re attack guys. ACM ain’t their bag.”

  “Are you going to get some dinner?” she asked.

  “Naw. I’m going to bed.”

  “I hope you aren’t coming down with something,” she called after him.

  Jake Grafton sat in the attic beside the pile of boxes that contained the miscellaneous junk he had collected through the years and had never been able to throw away. Everything from high school yearbooks to souvenirs from half the world’s seaports was tucked away in some box or other. He examined the boxes and tried to remember which was which. Perhaps this one. He opened it. Shoe trees, almost empty bottles of after-shave, buttons, spools of thread and some paperback novels. Three worn-out shirts.

  It was in the fourth box. He removed the pistol from the holster and flipped the cylinder out. The chambers were empty. He held the weapon up so the light from the bare forty-watt bulb on the rafter shone full upon it. No rust. Good thing he had oiled it before he put it away. He looked into the box to see if there was any ammo. Yep, one box of .357 magnum, a couple dozen shells still in the box. He closed the cylinder, worked the action several times, then loaded the weapon.

  With his back against one of the boxes, he extended his legs, crossed his ankles and thoughtfully stared at the holstered pistol on the floor beside him. Camacho said it had probably been a professional hit. Harold Strong would be just as dead if he had had a pistol. Still, a pistol nearby would make a nervous man feel better, sort of like an aspirin. Or a beer.

  A large-frame revolver like this couldn’t be hidden under a uniform. Perhaps in an attaché case? Then he would be the slowest draw in the East. In the car it could go in the glove compartment or under the seat, but it would be too far away if someone opened fire while he was sitting at a traffic light or driving along the freeway. And he rode the Metro to and from work anyhow. Maybe he should keep the gun in the bedroom or kitchen here at the beach and in the apartment in Arlington.

  How would he explain the gun to Callie?

  The hit man nailed Strong as he was driving to his weekend cabin. Probably the same route every Friday night Predictable. Predictability was vulnerability. Okay. So what do I do routinely every day, every week? He reviewed his schedule in light of his new job. Boarding the Metro, driving to and from the beach, what else?

  Strong was divorced, lived alone. What about Callie? Would she be a target?

  Smoke Judy—had he put out the contract on Strong?

  George Ludlow…Admiral Henry…Senator Duquesne was the tip of the congressional iceberg…Seventeen billion dollars, how many jobs did that mean, how many people supporting families and raising children? Seventeen…

  “Jake.” Her voice seemed distant “Jake, are you still up here?”

  He shook himself awake. “Hmmm.”

  Her head appeared in the attic access hole. She was standing on the ladder. “What are you doing up here?”

  “Drifted off.” He stirred himself. Rain was smacking against the roof, a steady drumming sound. He glanced at his watch: 1 A.M.

  She came on up the ladder and sat down beside him. She touched the leather of the pistol holster. “Why do you have this out?”

  “Looking through the boxes.” He laid the bolstered pistol in the nearest open box.

  They sat holding hands, listening to the rain. “Jake,” she said, “I want to adopt that little girl.”

  “Won’t be easy, Callie. An eleven-year-old veteran of how many foster homes? She’s had more rocky experiences and picked up more scars in her short life than you have in yours. Won’t be easy.”

  “You’re having problems at work, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bad?”

  “I suppose.” He picked up her hand and examined it carefully, then looked her straight in the eye. “I may be in over my head.”

  “Won’t be the first time.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You’ve always managed to come out in one piece before.”

  “That’s the spirit. Good of you to point that out. I see you’ve taken our talk this morning to heart.” He tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, but some crept in anyway.

  She took her hand back. “Jake. Our lives are slipping by. I want that little girl. I want her now.”

  “Okay, Callie.”

  “You’re doing what you want to do. I want that little girl.”

  “I said okay.”

  “Thursday. Thursday morning we see her, then that afternoon we go to the Department of Social Services for an interview.”

  “Okay. I’m leaving town Monday, but I should be back Wednesday. I’ll take Thursday off. Just for the record, though, last week I asked the personnel people to fill out retirement papers for me. I’m going to tell them to forget it before I leave on Monday.”

  “Retirement? Is that what the admiral’s visit today was about.”

  “Not really. The retirement thing was the catalyst, maybe. No kidding, Callie, this may be the worst mess I’ve ever been in. Worse than Vietnam, worse than the Med last year.”

  “You haven’t done anything wrong, have you?”

  “Not that I know of. Not yet.”

  She got up and moved toward the ladder. “I’m not going to wait any longer. I want that little girl,” she said, then went down.

  Toad Tarkington was sound asleep when the phone rang. He was still groggy when he picked it up. “Yeah.”

  “Tarkington, this is Grafton.”

  The cobwebs began to clear. “Yessir.”

  “How’re you doing on the flying?”

  “Pretty good, sir.”

  “Flown any full-system hops yet?”

  “Yessir.”

  “How’s Moravia doing?”


  Toad checked his watch: 12:15 in the morning. It was 3:15 in Washington. “She’s doing great, sir. Good stick.”

  “You doing okay dropping the bombs?”

  “Yessir. It’s a little different, but—”

  “How many more hops are you going to get?”

  “Six, I think. Two each Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. We come home Wednesday.”

  “Stay Wednesday and fly two more hops. Do eight. And Toad, leave the radar off. I want you to fly all eight without the radar. Use the IR and the laser and nothing else. You understand?”

  “Yessir. Leave the radar off.”

  “See you this Friday in the office. And give me a written recommendation Friday on what we can do to the system to make it easier to use without the radar. Night.” The connection broke.

  Toad cradled the dead instrument. He was wide awake. He got out of bed and went to the window. Raindrops were smearing the glass. What was that all about? Grafton didn’t seem to be getting much sleep these days. Shore duty sure wasn’t cracking up right.

  He cranked the window open a couple inches. The wind whistled though the crack and chilled him. It would be a miserable night to try to get aboard the ship. The meatball would be dancing like a crazed dervish while the fuel gauge told its sad tale. “Thank you, Lord, that I ain’t at sea flying tonight,” he muttered, and went back to bed.

  The phone rang again. Toad picked it up. “Tarkington, sir.”

  “Grafton again, Toad. Leave the Doppler off too. It radiates.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Good night, Toad.”

  “Good night, Captain.”

  8

  The plane carrying Jake and Helmut Fritsche landed at San Francisco International Airport, where the two men rented a car and ventured forth upon the freeways. Fritsche drove since he had made this trip several dozen times.

  “I guess a fair appraisal of Samuel Dodgers would include the word ‘crackpot,’” Fritsche said as they rolled south toward San Jose. “Also ‘religious fanatic,’ ‘sports fanatic’ and a few more.”