The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  Rain was still falling when he reached the sidewalk. He paused and turned his collar up against the damp and chill, then set off for the giant condo complex four blocks away.

  Most of the people scurrying past him on the sidewalk had done this every working day for years. They were moles, he told himself glumly, blind creatures of the dark, damp places where the sun and wind never reached, unaware that the universe held anything but the dismal corridors where they lived out their pathetic lives. And now he was one of them.

  He stopped at the corner, the model in the box under his arm. People swirled around him, their heads down, their eyes on the concrete. Callie wouldn’t get home to the flat for another hour.

  He turned and walked back against the flow of the crowd toward the station exit. Right across the street from the exit was a Roy Rogers. He paid for a cup of coffee and found a seat near the atrium window where he could watch the gray people bent against the wind and the raindrops sliding down the glass.

  The euphoria he had felt when he talked to Vice Admiral Henry this morning was completely gone. Now he had a job…a paperwork job, going to endless meetings and listening to reports and writing recommendations and trying to keep from going crazy. A job in the bureaucracy. A staff job, the one he had fought against, refused to take, pulled every string to avoid, all these years. In the puzzle palace, the place where good ideas go to die.

  It could have been worse, of course. He could have been assigned to design the new officer fitness report form.

  Like many officers who spent their careers in operational billets, Jake Grafton loathed the bureaucrats, held them in a secret contempt which he tried to suppress with varying degrees of success. In the years since World War II, the bureaucracy had grown lush and verdant here in Washington. Every member of Congress had twenty aides. Every social problem had a staff of paper pushers “managing” it. The military was just as bad. Joint commands with a staff of a thousand to fifteen hundred people were common.

  Perhaps it happens because we are human. The people in the military endlessly analyze and train for the last war because no one knows what the next one will be like. New equipment and technologies deepen the gloom which always cloaks the future. Yesterday’s warriors retire and new ones inherit the stars and the offices, and so it goes through generations, until at last every office is filled with men who have never heard a shot fired in anger or known a single problem that good, sound staff work, carefully couched in bureaucratese, could not “manage” satisfactorily. Inevitably the gloom becomes stygian. Future war becomes a profound enigma that workaday admirals and generals and congressmen cannot penetrate. So the staffs proliferate as each responsible person seeks expert help with his day-to-day duties and the insoluble policy conundrums.

  Another war would be necessary to teach the new generation the ancient truths. But in the Pax Americana following World War II, Vietnam accelerated the damage rather than arrested it.

  In its aftermath Vietnam appeared to many as the first inadvertent, incautious step toward the nuclear inferno that would destroy life on this planet. Frightened by the new technologies and fearful of the incomprehensible political forces at work throughout the world, citizens and soldiers sought—demanded—quantifiable truths and controls that would prevent the war that had become unthinkable, the future war that had become, for the generations that had known only peace, the ultimate obscenity. Laws and regulations and incomprehensible organizational charts multiplied like bacteria in a petri dish. Engineers with pocket calculators became soothsayers to the terrified.

  All of this Jake Grafton knew, and knowing it, was powerless to change. And now he was one of them, one of the faceless savants charged with creating salvation on his desk and placing it in the out basket.

  Over on the beach it was probably raining like this. The wind would be moaning around the house and leaking around the windowpanes. The surf would be pounding on the sand. It would be a great evening for a walk along the beach under a gray sky, by that gray sea. Suddenly he felt an overpowering longing to feel the wind in his hair and the salt air in his nostrils.

  Oh, to be there and not here! Not here with the problems and the hassles and the responsibilities.

  His eye fell upon the bag that the clerk had placed the F-117 model in. He ripped out the staple and slid the box from the bag. The artist had painted the plane black. It had twin vertical stabilizers, slanted in at the bottom, and flat sides all over the place, all of which he suspected were devilishly expensive to manufacture. The intakes were on top of the fuselage, behind the canopy. How would the engines get air when the pilot was pulling Gs, maneuvering? He stared at the picture. No doubt this plane was fly-by-wire with a flight control computer stabilizing the machine and automatically trimming. But what would it feel like to fly it? What would be the weight and performance penalty to get this thing aboard ship? How much were they going to cost? Could these machines ever be worth the astronomical sums the manufacturers would want to charge? The politicians would decide.

  Jake drained his coffee and threw the cup in the trash can by the door. He pulled the bag up over the box and rolled the excess tightly, then pushed the door open and stepped out into the evening.

  “Hi, darling,” Callie said brightly when she came home and found Jake assembling the model on the kitchen table.

  “Hey, beautiful.” Jake looked up and grinned at her, then resumed his chore of gluing the landing gear into the wheel wells.

  “So how was the first day back at the office?”

  Jake laid the plastic model on the diagram and leaned back in his chair. He stretched. “Okay, I guess. They didn’t tie me to the wooden post where they shoot traitors, and nobody said anything about a court-martial, so I guess I’m still in the navy.” He winked at her. “It’s going to be all right. Don’t sweat it.”

  She poured a cup of coffee and blew across it gently, then took an experimental sip. She stood looking at him over the rim of the cup. “Where will you be working?”

  “It’s a little shop, some cubbyhole that belongs to NAVAIR. I’ll be working on the new Advanced Tactical Aircraft.”

  “Oh, Jake.” She took the seat beside him. “That’s terrific.” For the first time in months, her voice carried genuine enthusiasm.

  “That’s about all I can tell you. The project is classified up the wazoo. But it’s a real job and it needs doing, which is a lot more than you can say for a lot of the jobs they have over there.”

  He shouldn’t have added that last phrase. The muscles around her eyes tightened as she caught the edge in his voice. “After all you’ve done for the navy, they owed you a good job.”

  “Hey, Callie, it doesn’t work like that. You get paid twice a month and that’s all they owe you. But this is a navy job and Lord knows how it’ll all turn out.” Perhaps he could repair the damage. “I’d rather have a navy job than be president of a bank. You know me, Callie.”

  Her lips twisted into a lopsided smile. “Yes, I guess I do.” She put her cup on the coffee table and stood.

  Uh-oh! Here we go again! Jake took out his shirttail and used it to clean his glasses as she walked into the kitchen. You’d better be cool now, he decided. Help her along. He called out, “What say we go get some dinner? I’m hungry. How about you?”

  4

  The ringing of the telephone woke Jake Grafton. As he groped for the receiver on the stand by the bed he blinked mightily to make out the luminous hands of the alarm clock: 5 A.M. “Grafton.”

  “Good morning, Captain. Admiral Henry. I wanted to catch you before you got started this morning.”

  “You did, sir.”

  “How about meeting me on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial about oh-seven-hundred in civilian clothes.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Thanks.” The connection broke.

  “Who was that?” Callie asked as Jake cradled the phone and closed his eyes. The alarm wouldn’t ring for half an hour.

  “One of my many b
osses.”

  “Oh,” she muttered. In less than a minute he heard her breathing deepen with sleep. He wondered what Tyler Henry wanted to talk about that couldn’t be said at the office. After five minutes he gave up trying to sleep and got out of bed. He tiptoed for the bathroom.

  By the time the alarm went off he had showered and shaved and dressed. He had picked out dark gray slacks and a long-sleeved yellow shirt. Over this he had added a tie, an old sweater and a blue blazer.

  “Good morning,” he said as he pushed the lever in on the back of the clock to silence it.

  “Come hug me.” She smelled of warm woman and sleep. “It’s so nice having you here to give me my morning hug.” She pushed him back so she could see his face.

  “I love you, woman.” He cradled her head in his hands. “You’re going to have to quit trying to analyze it and just accept it. It’s true.”

  “Hmmm.” She flashed a smile and became all business as she moved away from him and got up. “Why the civilian clothes?”

  “I’m playing hooky with the boss.”

  “And it’s only your second day on the job. Lucky you,” she said as she headed for the bathroom. With the door closed she called, “How about turning on the coffeepot and toasting some English muffins?”

  “Yeah.” He headed toward the kitchen, snapping on the lights as he went. “You’re a real lover, ace. One look at your sincere puss and they tighten up like an IRS agent offered a ten-dollar bribe.”

  Vice Admiral Henry was sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when the taxi deposited Jake in front. He came down the steps as Jake approached and joined him on the wide sidewalk. “Morning, sir.”

  The admiral flashed a smile and strolled to the curb. As he reached it a gray Ford Fairmont sedan sporting navy numbers on the door pulled to a stop. Henry jerked open the rear door without fanfare and maneuvered his six-foot-three-inch frame in. Jake followed him. When the door closed the sailor at the wheel got the car in motion.

  “Why the cloak and dagger?”

  “I don’t know who all the players are,” the admiral said without humor.

  Jake watched the occasional pedestrians braving the blustery wind under a raw sky until he became aware that the admiral’s attention was on the vehicles on the street behind them. Jake glanced over his shoulder once or twice, then decided to leave the spy stuff to Henry. He watched the sailor handle the car. The man was good. No wasted motion. The car glided gently through the traffic, changing lanes at the last moment and gliding around corners without the application of the brake, all quite effortlessly. It was a show and Jake watched it in silence.

  “Could have picked you up at your place,” Henry muttered, “but I wanted to visit the Wall.” The Wall was the Vietnam Memorial, just across the street from the Lincoln Memorial. “It’s been too long and I never seem to have any time.”

  “I understand.”

  “Turn left here,” Henry said to the driver, who complied. The car headed east on Independence Avenue. Henry ordered another left turn on Fourteenth Street and directed the driver to go by the Jefferson Memorial. “I think we’re clean,” he muttered to Jake after yet another careful look through the rear window. At the Jefferson Memorial, Henry asked the driver to pull over. “Come back for us at nine.”

  He led Jake toward the walkway around the Tidal Basin. Across the basin the Washington Monument rose toward the low clouds. Beyond it, Jake knew, but not visible from here, was the White House.

  Jake broke the silence first. “Does Admiral Dunedin know we’re having this talk this morning, sir?”

  “Yeah. I told him. You work for him. But I wanted to brief you personally. What do you know about stealth?”

  “The usual,” Jake said, snuggling into his coat against the chill wind. “What’s in the papers. Not much.”

  “The air force contracted for two prototype stealth fighters under a blanket of absolute secrecy. Lockheed got the production contract. They call the thing the F-117A. It’s a fighter in name only; it’s really an attack plane—performance roughly equivalent to the A-7 without afterburner but carries less than half the A-7 weapons load. Primary weapons are Maverick missiles. It’s a little ridiculous to call a subsonic minibomber a fighter, but if they can keep the performance figures low-key they might get away with it.”

  “I thought that thing was supposed to be a warp-three killing machine.”

  “Yeah. I suspect the congressmen who agreed to vote for a huge multibillion-buck project with no public debate probably did too. But even supersonic ain’t possible. The thing doesn’t even have afterburners. Might go supersonic in a dive—I don’t know. Anyway, the air force got more bang for their buck with the stealth bomber, the B-2, which Northrop is building. It’s also subsonic, a flying wing, but big and capable with a good fuel load. The only problem is the B-2s cost $516 million a pop, so unless you’re sending them to Moscow to save the human race, you can’t justify risking them on anything else. A B-2 isn’t a battlefield weapon.”

  “How are these gizmos going to find their targets?” Conventional bombers used radar to navigate and locate their targets, but the transmission of a radar beam from a stealth bomber would reveal its location, thereby negating all the expensive technology used to hide it.

  Admiral Henry settled onto a park bench with his back to the Tidal Basin. His eyes roamed the sidewalks, which were deserted on this early-spring morning. “You’re not going to believe this, but the air force hasn’t solved that problem yet. They’re waiting for technology that’s under development.”

  Jake Grafton looked at Henry to see if he was serious. He appeared to be. “How about a satellite rig like the A-6G was going to have? The Navstar Global Positioning System?”

  “That’s part of the plan, but the trouble with satellites is that you can’t count on them to last longer than forty-eight hours into a major East-West confrontation. And there’s only eight satellites aloft—the system needs twenty-eight. If they ever get all the birds aloft it should tell you your position to within sixteen meters anywhere on earth, but that’s a big if what with NASA’s shuttle and budget problems. No, I think the answer is going to be a system made up of a solid-state, ring-laser gyro inertial nav system, passive infrared sensors and a stealthy radar, one that powers up only enough to see what’s necessary, has automatic frequency agility, that sort of thing. That’s basically the A-6G and B-2 system. We’ll use it on the A-12. It’s still under development.”

  Henry snorted and wiggled his buttocks to get comfortable. “Congress isn’t going to fund any significant B-2 buy. The way the whole budget process screwed up the buy, with inflation and predictable overruns and underbuys, the last plane in the program is going to cost over a billion bucks. The manned strategic bomber is going the way of the giant panda and the California condor. We want to avoid the mistakes the air force made.”

  “SAC will have more generals than airplanes.”

  “The stealth concept has been around since World War II,” Henry continued, “more as a curio than anything else. It really became a driving force in aircraft design after Vietnam when it became apparent that conventional aircraft were going to have a very rough time surviving in the dense electronic environment over a Western European battlefield. Conventional electronic warfare can only do so much. The spooks say there’ll be too many frequencies and too many sensors. That’s the conventional wisdom, so it’s probably wrong.” He shrugged. “But any way you cut it, the attrition rate over that battlefield would be high, which favors the Soviets. They have lots of planes and we can’t match them in quantity. So we would lose. Ergo, stealth.”

  “But we could match them in quantity,” Jake said. “At least the air force could build a lot of cheap airplanes optimized for one mission, like fighter or attack. No room on carriers for that kind of plane, of course.”

  “The air force doesn’t want that. Their institutional ethic is for more complex, advanced aircraft with greater and greater capability. That
’s the whole irony of the stealth fighter. They’ve billed this technology as a big advance but in reality they got a brand-new tactical bomber with 1950s performance. But. they argue, it’s survivable. Now. For the immediate future. Until and only until the Russians come up with a way to find these planes—or someone else figures out a way and the Russians steal it. Even so, the only thing that made first-generation stealth technology feasible was smart weapons, assuming the crew can find the target. These planes have little or no capability with air-to-mud dumb bombs.” Henry stared at his toes and wriggled them experimentally. “Can you imagine risking a five-hundred-million buck airplane to dump a load of thousand-pounders on a bridge?”

  “Does stealth ensure survivability?” Jake prompted, too interested to notice his continuing discomfort from the breeze off the river.

  “Well, it all boils down to whether or not you think fixed air bases are survivable in the war the air force is building their planes to fight, and that is a war in Europe against the Soviets which has escalated to a nuclear exchange. If I were a Russian I wouldn’t worry much about these airplanes—neither of which has any off-concrete capability—I’d just knock out their bases at the beginning of hostilities and forget about them.”

  “What about a conventional war with the Soviets?”

  “If anyone has figured out a way to keep it from going nuclear, I haven’t heard about it.”