The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

“Naw,” said Toad Tarkington, swallowing hard. “That wasn’t it. For just a few seconds there I was flying with you again, over the Med, and you were telling me to hang in there, Toad-man, hang tough. So I hung tough. I wanted to give Rita that chance. She was asking for it. So I sat there and watched the altimeter unwind and waited for her to perform her miracle, and look—I may have killed her, or crippled her for life.”

  “It’s all your fault, is that it?”

  “Aw, Christ, CAG.”

  “Well, if you’d been in the front seat and she’d been in the back, what would you have done?”

  “About what Rita did. If I were as good a pilot as Rita.”

  “I’ve been around these planes for a few years, Toad, and let me tell you, there are no right answers. Some answers are better than others, but every option has unforeseen twists. If you had jumped when the plane departed the second time, with fifteen or sixteen thousand feet of altitude, you and Rita would have spent the rest of your lives thinking you jumped too soon, that you might have saved it if you had hung in there just a little longer. My father always called that being between a rock and a hard place.”

  Toad shook his head.

  “Years ago, in Vietnam, I learned that you can’t second-guess yourself. You have to do the best you can all the time, make the best decision you can in the time you have to make it—which is always precious little—and live with the consequences regardless. That’s the way flying is. And occasionally you’re going to make a mistake, fuck it up. That’s inevitable. The trick is to not make a fatal mistake.”

  Jake Grafton’s voice hardened. “Flying isn’t chess or football or checkers! Flying isn’t some game! Flying is life distilled down to the essence—it’s the straight, two hundred-proof stuff. And Rita knows; she’s a U.S. Naval Aviator. She chose this line of work and worked like a slave to earn that ride today. She knows.”

  “Yes,” Toad admitted. “She knows.”

  At 3 A.M. Rita’s mother answered her phone in Connecticut. She had obviously just awoke. “This is Toad Tarkington, Mrs. Moravia.” You know, the guy who married your daughter? “Sorry to bother you this time of night. I tried to call earlier—”

  “We were at a party. Is everything okay?” She was wide awake now and becoming apprehensive.

  “Well, not really. That’s sorta why I’m calling. I thought you should know.”

  She went to battle stations while Toad tried to collect his thoughts.

  He interrupted her torrent of words. “What it is—Rita and I jumped out of an airplane today, Mrs. Moravia. Rita’s over in the hospital now.”

  He could hear her talking to Mr. Moravia. The pitch in her voice was rising.

  “Anyway, Rita’s banged up pretty good and I thought you should know.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “She’s in a coma, Mrs. Moravia. She hit the ground before her parachute had time to open.” Silence. Dead silence. Toad continued, “Anyway, I’m with her and she’s getting the best medical treatment there is and I’ll call and let you know when anything changes.”

  Mr. Moravia spoke now. Perhaps his wife had handed him the phone. “What’s the prognosis, son?”

  “She could die, Mr. Moravia. She’s in bad shape.”

  “Should we come out there?” He didn’t even know where Toad was calling from.

  “Not now. When she comes out of the coma, that might be a good idea. But not now. I’ll keep you advised.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine, sir. No injuries.” Nice that he should ask, Toad thought.

  “We’ll pray for her.”

  “Yes. Do that. I’m doing some of that myself.”

  Harry Franks, the program manager for TRX, stood in the middle of the hangar issuing orders. A small army of workmen were placing wreckage in piles as he directed. They had been working since dawn.

  He greeted Jake Grafton without enthusiasm. “Give me five more minutes and we’ll go upstairs,” he said, then pointed to a pile for a forklift operator with a piece of what looked like outboard wingtip.

  Jake and the commanders wandered toward the door, trying to get out of the way. The plane had exploded and burned when it hit, so the pieces that were left were blackened and charred.

  In an office on the second floor, the engineers from the company that had manufactured the fly-by-wire system, AeroTech, were completing the setup of their equipment. An AeroTech vice president sat on one of the few chairs, sipping coffee and watching the final installation of the network of wires that powered and connected the test boxes. He didn’t look very vice presidential. He and the engineers had flown in early this morning and had had only a few hours’ sleep. He stood up to shake hands with Jake.

  After the introductions, they got right to it. The only surviving processor from the crashed prototype was carefully removed from its bent, damaged box and its innards exposed. It was physically examined by the assembled experts with all the curiosity of a group of med students examining a man with a new disease.

  Jake backed off to let the experts have room. He found himself beside Harry Franks. “Tell me again how the fly-by-wire system works.”

  ‘The aircraft had negative stability,” Franks said, hooking his thumbs behind his belt and warming to the subject. “Most high-tech tactical aircraft today have negative stability.” Jake nodded.

  Franks continued. “A human cannot fly a negatively stable machine. It would be like trying to keep a barn door balanced on top of a flagpole. So computers actually do the flying. In that way we could build a highly maneuverable aircraft and optimize its low-observable—stealth—features without worrying that we were compromising or negating the ability of the pilot to control it. Now, the way it works is pretty neat.”

  Jake allowed himself a small smile. All engineers think elegant solutions to technical problems are neat.

  “There are three computers,” Harry Franks continued. “They each sample the aircraft’s attitude and all the other raw data—like air density, temperature, airspeed and so on—forty times a second. Then they see what control input the pilot has made. The pilot’s control input merely tells the three computers what the pilot wants the plane to do. The computers then figure out what control throws are necessary to comply with the pilot’s order, and they compare their answers. They take a vote. Any two computers can overrule the third. After the vote, the agreed electrical signal is sent to the hydraulic actuators, which move the controls. This little sequence takes place forty times a second. You understand?”

  “Yep. I think so. But how does the computer know how much to move the controls? That’s what the pilot does in a conventional airplane.”

  “Well, obviously, the computer has to be told. So the data that it uses is placed in a Programmable Read-Only Memory, a PROM. Since it’s electrical, we call it an E-PROM. There are other types, like UV-PROMS and—”

  Jake halted him with his hand. “So what you guys did when Rita complained of control sensitivity was to change the E-PROMs?”

  “Yeah. Exactly. They come on chips. The data is just fried into the little beggars. We called AeroTech and they cooked us some more and flew ’em down. That’s all there was to it.”

  “But the plane crashed.”

  “Yeah,” said Harry Franks defensively, “but we don’t know yet—”

  “Something went very wrong. We know that much,” Jake Grafton said. “The plane went into three inverted spins. Rita was trying to get it out and succeeded twice.”

  “Maybe she—”

  “Uh-uh. Nope. She knew exactly what she was doing. She recovered from more inverted spins at Test Pilot School than you’ve even seen.”

  The vice president of AeroTech had a cherubic, round face. The face looked like it had spent two days in the tropical sun when he faced Jake an hour later and said, “I don’t know how it happened, but the data is wrong on this chip.”

  “How’s that?”

  He gestured futilely. “I mean we’ve run the data
three times, and I don’t know how the heck it happened, but the E-PROM data on this chip is just flat wrong. Look here.” He flipped open a thick computer printout. “See this line here?” He read off the number, which was all it was, a number. “Now look here. This is the data on this chip.” His finger moved to another computer printout, one Jake had just watched running though the printer. Jake looked. It was a different number.

  “How could this happen? I thought you people checked these things.”

  “We do check the data. After the chip is cooked, we check every damn number. I don’t know what—I’m at a loss what to tell you.”

  “This is only one box,” Harry Franks said. “There were three of them. Maybe this is the only one that was defective.”

  “We’ll never know,” Jake Grafton said slowly, surveying the faces around him and trying to catalogue their reactions. “The other boxes got smashed and burned. This is the only one left in one piece.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” the AeroTech executive said.

  Jake Grafton walked out of the room, looking for a phone.

  Luis Camacho listened to Admiral Henry’s voice on the telephone and doodled on a legal pad. Today he was drawing houses, all with the proper perspective of course. He had the roofline and baseline right, he decided.

  “Okay, so AeroTech sold you a defective E-PROM chip. Or two or three of them. Sue the bastards. What do you need the FBI for?”

  “I had the aircraft’s control data base printed out from our computer. It’s wrong. Now, I don’t know if the AeroTech chip has this data on it or not, but the stuff in the Pentagon computer is wrong. So I got on the phone to that National Security Agency computer doctor who tends our stuff, Kleinberg. Fred Kleinberg. He played with his top secret programs that I’m not supposed to know jack about, and tells me the last guy who made a change on that data base was Harold Strong.”

  Camacho extended the lines of the roof, eaves, and base of the house until they met at the perspective convergence point. Of course, Albright’s house had more shrubs around it, and with the fence and all you would never see it looking just like this.

  “You still there, Luis?”

  “Yeah. I’m still here.”

  “I want you and your guys to look into it.”

  “You called NIS?” NIS was the Naval Investigative Service.

  “Nope. Since you are apparently the only guy inside the beltway who knows what the fuck is going on, I want you to investigate this.”

  “Investigate what?”

  “This computer screw-up, you spook asshole. A four-hundred-million-dollar prototype airplane that’s supposed to be black as the ace of spades just made a smoking hole in the ground and the pilot is at death’s door. The data on the computer chips that fly the plane is wrong. The last guy who messed with the data is dead, murdered. Somebody, someplace is bound to have committed a federal crime. Now get off your fat ass and figure out if the Minotaur or some other bastard is screwing with my program! Goddamn, what have I got to do? Call the Director? Go see the President? Maybe I should put an ad in the Post?”

  “I’ll be over in a little while.”

  The admiral slammed the phone in Camacho’s ear. The agent cradled his instrument and went to the door. “Dreyfus? Come in here.”

  At three o’clock Eastern Daylight Time that afternoon Lloyd Dreyfus and two other FBI agents boarded a plane at National Airport for a flight to Detroit, where a man from the local field office would meet them. They planned to drive straight to AeroTech’s headquarters in the suburbs.

  The agents were airborne somewhere over Pennsylvania when Toad Tarkington arrived at the hospital at the air force’s Tonopah facility. He stopped at the nurses’ station. “How is she?”

  The nurse on duty had been there yesterday when they brought Rita in. She was an air force captain. She looked at Toad with sympathy. “No change, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”

  “The doctor around?”

  “He’s eating a late lunch. He’ll be back in a half hour or so.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “Sure.”

  The ICU nurse nodded and Toad pulled a chair over near Rita’s bed. Her chest was still rising and falling rhythmically, the IVs were dripping, the green line on the heart monitor was spiking—she lay exactly as he had seen her yesterday and this morning when he looked in.

  The IV needles were in her left arm, so he picked up her right hand and massaged it gently. In a moment he wrapped her fingers around two of his. “Rita, this is Toad. If you can hear me, squeeze my hand a little.”

  The hand stayed limp.

  ‘Try real hard, Rita.”

  Nothing.

  “Harder.”

  He gave up finally and continued to lightly knead her fingers.

  There was a window there by her bed. When he pulled the curtains back he could see the distant blue mountains. Clouds were building over the peaks.

  Life is not fair. Good things happen to bad people and vice versa, almost as if the goodness or badness of those who bear the load was not factored into the equations for that great computer in the sky. Toad stood facing out the window and ruminated upon it. Somehow he had survived this last ejection all in one piece and Rita hadn’t. It wasn’t because he was a good person, or because of his pious rectitude or exemplary morals or conspicuous faith. He was physically okay because he had been lucky, sort of. And Rita was smashed up because her luck deserted her. Yet perhaps the ejection had cost him something more valuable than his life.

  Your luck won’t last forever, Tarkington. The day will come, Toad-man, the day will come. Regardless of how you live or the promises you keep, on that day to come your luck will desert you. You won’t recognize the morning, you won’t recognize the noon, but that will be the day. And on that day you’ll lose her forever.

  He slumped into the chair. Looking at Rita in her bandages was hard, looking at the IV racks, respirator, and heart monitor was harder. He twisted, trying to get comfortable.

  Somehow, someway, the E-PROMs in the fly-by-wire computers were screwed up. He had heard them talking this afternoon. How could it happen? How could TRX and AeroTech’s checks and double checks and Quality Assurance programs all go south at precisely the same time?

  Someday hell! She might die today, or tomorrow. Or the day after. You could lose her any day.

  He picked up her hand again and massaged it slowly and gently. Finally he placed it carefully back on the covers. He leaned over Rita and kissed the two square inches on her forehead not covered with a bandage. “Hang tough, Rita. Hang tough.”

  24

  The corporate offices and manufacturing facilities of AeroTech sat in a manicured industrial subdivision of a Detroit suburb in a low, sprawling, windowless building among a dozen similar buildings carefully arranged amid the lawns and pruned trees. A gardener was laboring in a flower bed as the FBI car swung into the parking lot.

  Agent Lloyd Dreyfus decided that the goddess of the post-industrial revolution had come, conquered, and already departed this corner of Michigan. Smokestacks now belonged only to the intercity poor and wretched Third World peasants. Not a single one of the antique structures blighted the skyline in any direction.

  After a display of credentials to the wide-eyed receptionist, the agents were ushered in to see the president of the company, who had trouble understanding just why the FBI were here at the AeroTech facilities. No, Dreyfus did not have a search warrant. He had not thought one necessary since AeroTech was a defense contractor with annual billings in the millions and the agents were here to investigate, not to search. But he could, of course, get such a warrant if the official thought it necessary. Did he? No. Company employees examined security clearance documents with care and led the government men to an empty conference room.

  The investigation took time. At 9 P.M. the FBI team had established that the data contained on the E-PROM chip from the TRX prototype that crashed in Nevada did not correspond to the data that AeroTech
had used to manufacture its chips. Yes, a call had been received last week from a TRX engineer in Tonopah, and yes, he had updated the data base via computer modem. The company had manufactured new E-PROM chips based on the revised data. The new chips had been taken to the mail room for overnight shipment. Yes, the records in the mailroom showed three chips sent by a bonded commercial overnight courier.

  So at 9 P.M. Dreyfus sat in the conference room and scratched his head. He had been making notes all evening on a yellow pad, and now he went over them again, placing a tick mark by each item after he considered it carefully. One of the agents had gone out for burgers, and now Dreyfus munched a cold cheeseburger and sipped a Coke in which all the ice had melted.

  He decided he had two problems, and he decided to tackle the one that he thought would be the simpler first. He asked to see the company president, who was shown into the conference room and motioned into a chair beside Dreyfus.

  “Sorry we’re taking so long,” Dreyfus said as he wadded up the cheeseburger wrapper and tossed it at a waste can.

  “Quite all right,” the president said cheerfully enough. His name was Homer T. Wiggins. The company prospectus, which Dreyfus had thumbed through earlier in the evening at a slow moment, said he was the largest shareholder of AeroTech and one of its four founders.

  “It appears we have a little problem that necessitates a search. Now, when we got here this afternoon I told you we were here to investigate, not search. Now we want to search. We can do so with your permission, or we can go get a warrant. It’s your choice.” Dreyfus got out his pipe and tobacco and began the charging ritual.

  “Why do you want to search?” Wiggins asked.

  Dreyfus shrugged. “I can’t tell you. I should tell you, though, that I believe I have enough information to persuade a judge to find probable cause and issue a search warrant.”

  “On what grounds? Just what is it you’re investigating?”

  Dreyfus took his time lighting his pipe. He puffed experimentally to ensure it was lit and drawing properly. Finally satisfied, he tucked his lighter into a pocket and took a deep drag on the pipe. “I can’t tell you.”