The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  By mid-May the dance of the dwarves at the Pentagon had reached a critical frenzy. A thousand details were beginning to come together for a trip into the desert with the prototypes in June. The airplanes had been moved weeks earlier to the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, the same secret field where the air force had tested its stealth prototypes. Also known as Area 58, or Groom Lake, the field lay about a hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas on a huge government reservation with excellent physical security. Here the contractors’ field teams readied the planes in separate hangars and installed telemetry devices.

  Toad and Rita would leave for Nevada two weeks before Jake and the rest of the staff. They had intensive sessions planned with company test pilots and engineers to learn everything they could about the planes and how they flew. The Saturday night before they left, Jake and Callie had them to dinner at the house in Rehoboth Beach.

  “How do you like being married?” Callie asked Rita in the kitchen.

  “I should have had a brother,” Rita confided. “Men are such sloppy creatures. They don’t think like we do.”

  On the screened-in porch, Jake and Toad sipped on bourbon and Amy slurped a Coke. “So how’s married life, Toad?”

  “Oh, so-so, I guess. Isn’t exactly like I thought it would be, but nothing ever is. Ol’ Rita can think up stuff for me to do faster than I can do it, and we only live in an apartment. If we had a town house or something with a basement and a lawn, she’d have worked me to death by now.”

  Amy Carol thought this remark deliriously funny and giggled hugely.

  “Why don’t you go visit with Mom and Rita?”

  She stood regally and tossed her hair. “I do believe I will join the ladies, but she isn’t my mom. I wish you’d stop calling her that.” She flounced off toward the kitchen.

  “The day she”—Jake pointed after the departing youngster—“gets married, I am going to get down on my knees and give thanks.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “She’s about driven Callie over the edge. That poor woman had no idea what she was getting into. No matter how much love she pours on Amy, the kid still does exactly as she chooses. She intentionally disobeys and cuts up just to get her goat. And Callie never gets mad, never pops off, never gives her anything but love. She’s gonna go nuts.”

  “Maybe she should get angry.”

  “That’s what I think. And Callie insists she doesn’t want my help or advice.”

  “They’re all alike,” Toad said, now vastly experienced.

  Amy was back in five minutes, hopping from foot to foot, so excited she bounced. “Can we fly the glider now, so I can show Rita? She’s a pilot.”

  Toad gasped. “She is?”

  “You’re teasing me,” Amy said, stamping her foot.

  “The wind’s wrong,” Jake pointed out. “It isn’t coming in from the sea. This evening it’s a land breeze.”

  “David said we might be able to fly the glider above the house in a land breeze. He said the wind just goes right up and over our house.”

  “I never thought of that. Well, run down the street and see if he can spend a half hour consulting with us.” As Amy scampered off, Jake told Toad, “There’s an aviation expert right down the street who is kind enough to offer advice from time to time.”

  The aviation expert was apparently unoccupied at the moment. He showed up wearing a monster-truck T-shirt bearing the legend “Eat Street.” His shoelaces were untied, his cowlicks fully aroused, and his grin as impish as ever. He listened carefully to Jake’s plan. “Sounds to me like it might work, Cap’n,” he said with a sidelong glance at Toad. “Might ding up your plane a little, though.”

  “I’ll risk it if you’ll fix the damage.”

  “Callie! Rita!” Amy called excitedly. “We’re going to fly.”

  Jake readied the plane for flight in the front yard under David’s supervision. Eight rubber bands were stretched to hold the six-foot wing to the fuselage. Batteries were tested and inserted, the cover closed, switch on, controls waggled to the full extent of their travel using the radio control box: Amy checked each item after Jake performed it while David briefed Toad on proper launch procedure. In five minutes they were ready for the sky.

  Toad climbed the ladder from the garage and scaled the sloping roof until he sat perched on the ridgepole with the plane in hand.

  “Pretty good breeze up here,” he informed the crowd below, which now included Callie and Rita.

  “Don’t you jump off there, Darius Green,” Rita called as Toad sucked on a finger and held it aloft.

  “As you can plainly see, dear wife, I’m not wearing my wings tonight,” Tarkington replied lightly. He flapped his elbows experimentally. “‘I’ll astonish the nation and all creation, by flyin’ over the celebration! I’ll dance on the chimneys, I’ll stand on the steeple, I’ll flop up to winders and scare all the people,’” quoteth he, striking a precarious pose, or trying to, up there on the ridge of the roof with an airplane grasped carefully in his right hand.

  “Maybe I’d better alert the emergency room at the hospital,” Callie said, laughing.

  “Oh, Callie,” Amy groaned. “He’s not going to jump! Really!”

  Toad finished his recitation with a flourish: “’And I’ll say to the gawpin’ fools below, What world’s this here that I’ve come near?’”

  Jake Grafton handed the radio control box to David. “You’re up first. Whenever you’re ready.”

  The youngster centered the control levers and shouted to Toad, “Let ’er go!”

  With the gentlest of tosses, Toad laid the glider into the rising air currents. The boy immediately banked left and raised the nose until the aircraft was barely moving in relation to the ground. As it reached the end of the house, he reversed the controls and flew it back the other way. The ship soared upward on the rising current of air. It floated above Toad’s head, back and forth along the peak of the roof, banking gently to maintain position and rising and falling as the air currents dictated.

  “All right!” Toad shouted and began to clap. On the ground the spectators all did likewise.

  “There’s just enough wind,” Jake told David, grinning broadly. “Now, by God, that’s flying!”

  “Awesome,” David agreed, his pixie grin spreading uncontrollably.

  After a few minutes, David handed the control box to Jake. He overbanked and the plane lost altitude precipitously, threatening to strike Toad straddling the roof’s ridge. “Keep your nose up,” David advised hurriedly. “You can fly slower than that.” As the glider responded, he continued. “That’s it! She’s got plenty of camber in those wings and good washout. She’ll fly real, real slow, just riding those updrafts. That’s it! Let ’er fly. Just sorta urge ’er along.”

  He was right. The plane soared like a living thing, banking and diving and climbing, seeking the rising air and responding willingly. The evening sun flashed on the wings and fuselage and made the little craft brightly lustrous against the darkening blue of the sky above.

  “Let Rita try it,” Amy urged.

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “No. Let Rita.”

  “Come over here, Rita Moravia.” The pilot did as she was bid. She watched the captain manipulate the controls as he explained what each was. “The thing you gotta watch is that the controls work backwards as you look at the plane head-on. Turn around and fly it by looking over your shoulder. Then left will be left and right will be right.”

  Rita obediently faced away from the house and looked back over her shoulder. Toad waved. Jake handed her the radio control box. As David and Amy tried to offer simultaneous advice, Rita clumsily swung the plane back and forth and worked the nose hesitantly. She overcontrolled as David groaned, “Not too much, no no no.”

  But the wind was dying. She got the nose too high trying to maintain altitude: the plane stalled and the nose fell through. The plane shot forward away from the house, toward the street. David scrambled, but Rita stalled it agai
n and the left wing and nose dug into the sandy lawn before the running boy could reach it. The rubber bands let loose and the wing popped free of the fuselage, minimizing the damage.

  “Nasty,” David declared.

  “My dinner!” Callie exclaimed, and charged for the door.

  “You did great for a first solo,” Amy assured Rita. The pilot pulled the girl to her and gave her a mighty hug and a kiss on the cheek. She got a big hug in return.

  “She ain’t banged up too bad, Cap’n,” David called.

  Up on the roof Toad was laughing. He blew Rita a kiss.

  After dinner Callie shooed Jake and Toad off to the screened-in porch while she cleaned up the dishes. Rita and Amy helped.

  “So what did your parents think of Toad when they met him, or have they yet?” Callie asked Rita.

  “We went to visit them two weekends ago. Mother invited a few of their closest friends over to meet the newlyweds. Then she cornered Toad, and making sure I was in earshot, she asked him, ‘Now that you’re married, when is Rita going to give up flying?’” Rita laughed ruefully, remembering. “How well do you know Toad?” she asked Callie.

  “Not very well. I met him for the first time last year in the Mediterranean.”

  “Well, he looked at Mother with that slightly baffled, Lord of the Turnip Truck expression of his, and said, ‘Why would she do that? Flying is what she does.’ I could have kissed him right there in front of everyone.” Rita chuckled again.

  “Doesn’t your mom want you to fly,” Amy piped, her chin resting on a hand, her eyes fixed on her new heroine.

  “My mother is one of these new moderns who have elevated the elimination of risk to a religious status. She serves only food certified safe for laboratory rats. She writes weekly letters to congressmen urging a national fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, helmets for motorcyclists, gun control—she has never been on a motorcycle in her life and to the best of my knowledge has never even seen a real firearm. Her latest cause is a ban on mountain climbing since she read an article about how many people per year fall off cliffs or die of hypothermia. This from a woman who regards a walk across a large parking lot as a survival trek.”

  “I’m not afraid of things,” Amy assured Rita.

  “It’s not fear that motivates Mother. She thinks of government as Super-Mom, and who better to advise the politicians than the superest mom of them all?”

  “Flying is risky, inherently dangerous. I can understand your mother’s concern,” Callie said as she rinsed a pot. “Flying is something I’ve had to live with. It’s a part of Jake and his life, a big part. But I’ve had very mixed emotions about his being grounded.” As she dried the pot she turned to Rita. “You or Toad may be killed or crippled for life in an accident. After it happens, if it happens, it won’t matter whose fault it is or how good you are in a cockpit. I know. I’ve seen it too many times.”

  “Life is risky,” Rita replied. “Life isn’t some bland puree with all the caffeine and cholesterol removed. It doesn’t just go on for ever and ever without end, amen. For every living thing there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. And life is chance. Chance is the means whereby God rules the universe.”

  The flier thought a moment, then continued, choosing her words carefully. “I have the courage to try to live with my fate, whatever it may be.”

  “Do you have enough?” Amy asked, dead serious.

  “I don’t know,” said Rita. She smiled at the youngster. “I hope so. I haven’t needed much courage so far. I’m healthy, reasonably intelligent, and I’ve been lucky. But still, I gather courage where I find it and save it for the storms to come.”

  20

  Through the years Jake Grafton had become a connoisseur of air force bases. Visiting one was like driving through Newport or Beverly Hills. With manicured lawns, trimmed trees, well-kept substantial buildings and nifty painted signs, air force bases made him feel like a poor farm boy visiting the estate of a rich uncle. In contrast, the money the admirals wheedled from a parsimonious Congress went into ships and airplanes. The dedication of a new cinder-block enlisted quarters at some cramped navy base in the industrial district of a major port city was such a rare event that it would draw a half dozen admirals and maybe the CNO.

  The Tonopah facility, however, didn’t look like any air force base Jake had ever seen. It looked like some shacky, jerry-built temporary facility the navy had stuck out in the middle of nowhere during World War II and had only now decided to improve. Perhaps this base was just too new. Bulldozers and earthmovers sat scattered around on large, open wounds of raw earth. No trees or grass yet, though two trenchers appeared to be excavating for a sprinkler system. When the wind blew, great clouds of dust embedded with tumbleweeds swept across the flat, featureless desert and through the stark frames of buildings under construction, and the wind blew most of the time.

  Security was as tight as Jake had ever seen it in the military. Air policemen in natty uniforms with white dickeys at their throats manned the gates and patrolled chain link fences topped with barbed wire while they fought to keep their spiffy blue berets in place against the wind. The fences were woven with metal strips to form opaque barriers. Signs every few yards forbade stopping or photography. You needed a pass to enter any area, and prominent signs vibrating in the wind advised you of that fact.

  The place reeked with that peculiar aroma of government intrigue: Important, stupendous things are happening here. You don’t want to know! We who do also know that you couldn’t handle it. Trust us. In other words, the overall effect was precisely the same gray ambience of don’t-bother-us superiority that oozes from large post offices and the mausoleums that house the departments of motor vehicles, social services, and similar enterprises throughout the land.

  Even the sergeant at the desk of the Visiting Officers’ Quarters wanted to see Jake Grafton’s security documents. He made cryptic notations in a battered green logbook and passed them back without comment as he frowned at Helmut Fritsche’s facial hair. After all, didn’t Lenin wear a beard?

  As he escorted Jake and Fritsche down the hall toward their rooms, Toad Tarkington said, “This place is really dead, Captain. The nearest whorehouse is fifty miles away.”

  Fritsche groaned.

  “Tonopah makes China Lake look like Paris after dark,” Tarkington told the physicist with relish. “This is as far as you can get away from civilization without starting out the other side.” He lowered his voice. “There’s spies everywhere. The place is crawling with ’em. Watch your mouth. Remember, loose lips sink—”

  “Loose lips sink lieutenants,” Jake Grafton rumbled.

  “Yessir, them too,” Toad chirped.

  That evening Jake inspected the Consolidated Technologies airplane. Under the bright lights of the cavernous hangar, it was being tended by a small army of engineers and technicians who were busy checking every system, every wire, every screw and bolt and rivet. Adele DeCrescentis watched a man fill in a checklist. Each item was carefully marked when completed. Rita Moravia walked back and forth around the aircraft, looking, probing, asking more questions of the company test pilot who stood beside her. Toad Tarkington was in the aft cockpit, going over the radar and computer one more time as a nearby yellow cart supplied electrical power and cooling air.

  At 9 P.M. they gathered in a large ready room on the second deck of the hangar’s office pod. The room was devoid of furnishings except for one portable blackboard and thirty or so folding chairs.

  The meeting lasted until midnight. Every aspect of tomorrow’s flight was gone over in detail. Consolidated’s people approved the test profile and agreed on the performance envelope Rita would have to stay within on the first flight. The route of the flight was laid out on a large map which was posted on one wall and briefed by Commander Les Richards. He pointed out the places where ground cameras would be posted. Real-time telemetry from the airplane would be supervised by Commander Dalton Harris. Smoke Judy would fly the chase plane, an F-1
4 borrowed from NAS Miramar, and a carefully briefed RIO would film the Consolidated prototype in flight from the F-14’s backseat.

  After the meeting broke up, Jake Grafton spent another thirty minutes with his staff, then went down to the hangar deck. Only a dozen or so technicians were still on the job.

  The overhead floods made little gleaming pinpoints where they reflected on the black surface of the Consolidated stealth plane. As he walked, the tiny pinpoints moved along the complex curved surfaces in an unpredictable way. With his face only a foot or so from the skin of the plane, he studied it. The dark material seemed to have an infinite depth, or perhaps it was only his imagination.

  The outer skin, he knew, was made of a composite that was virtually transparent to radar waves. Underneath, carrying the stresses, was a honeycomb radar-absorbent structure made of synthetic material formed into small hexagonal chambers. The honeycomb was bonded to inner skins of graphite and other strong composites. He touched the airplane’s skin. Smooth and cool.

  From this angle the curves and smooth junctions of the skin became art. No wonder the Consolidated people were so proud of their creation.

  But how would it hold up aboard a ship? Could it stand the rough handling and salt air and the poundings of cat shots and traps? Thousands of them? Would it be easy to fly, within the capabilities of the average pilot—not just a superbly trained, gifted professional like Rita Moravia, but the average bright lad from Moline or Miami with only three hundred hours of flight time who would have to learn to use this Art Deco sculpture as a weapon?

  Five flights. He needed a lot of answers in just a short time. Rita and Toad would have to get them.

  He walked away musing about Rita’s lack of test experience and wondering if he had made a mistake giving her this ride.

  Tomorrow. He would know then.

  But the following day problems with the telemetry equipment kept the prototype firmly on the ground. The engineers were still laboring in the sun on a concrete mat where the temperature exceeded a hundred and ten when Jake glanced at his watch and ordered the plane cowed back into the hangar. The Soviet satellite would soon be overhead. The hangar’s interior was shady and cool. And since the air force owned it, it was air-conditioned.