The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  Forget the money. What are the important things to discuss during this session? She was trying to arrange her thoughts when the door opened and Dr. Arnold beckoned. He was of medium height, in his late thirties, and wore a neat brown beard. “He looks like Sigmund Freud before he got old and twisted,” Jake had grumped once. Above the beard this morning was a small, thoughtful smile.

  “Good morning, Callie.” He held the door open for her.

  “Hello.” She sank into the stuffed armchair across from him, the middle of the three “guest” chairs. When he used to come Jake always sat on her left, near the window, while she always used this chair. For a brief moment she wondered what Arnold made of her continued use of this chair although Jake wasn’t here.

  After a few preliminary comments, she stated, “Jake went back to work this Monday,” and paused, waiting for his reaction.

  Arnold prompted, “How has that gone this week?”

  “He seems enthusiastic, and somewhat relieved. They have him working on a new airplane project and he hasn’t said much about it. If that’s what he’s working on. I think he’s disappointed, but it doesn’t show. He’s hiding it well.” She thought about it. “That’s unusual. He’s always been stoic at work—his colleagues have told me that he usually shows little emotion at the office—but he’s never been like that at home. I can read him very well.”

  Dr. Arnold, Benny to all his patients, looked up from his notes. “Last weekend, did you threaten him?”

  Callie’s head bobbed. “I suppose.” She swallowed hard and felt her eyes tearing up. She bit her lower lip. “I never did that before. Never again!” She moved to the chair near the window, Jake’s chair, and looked out. Trees just budding stood expectantly in the pale spring sun. Jake had sat here all winter and looked at the black, bare, upthrusted limbs. And now spring was finally here.

  She should never have said those things, about leaving him. She could never do it. She loved him too much to even consider it. But it was so hard last fall, after she thought him dead and her life in ashes. When she heard he was still alive the euphoria swept her to heights she didn’t believe possible. The subsequent descent from rapture to reality had been torturous.

  An officer from the CNO’s office had escorted her to Bethesda Naval Hospital the morning after Jake was flown back from Greece. She had expected—thinking about it now, she didn’t know just what she expected. But her hopes were so high and the officer who drove her tried gently to prepare her.

  His face was still swollen and mottled, his eyes mere slits, his tongue raw from where he had chewed on it. His eyes—those piercing gray eyes that had melted her a thousand times—they lay unfocused in the shapeless mass of flesh that was his face as IVs dripped their solution into his arms. A severe concussion, the doctor said gently. Jake had taken a lot of Gs, more Gs than any man could be expected to survive. Capillaries had burst under the tremendous strain. And he was grossly dehydrated, unable to take water. Slowly Callie began to understand. Brain damage. Bleeding in the frontal lobe, where memory and personality resided. Oh, she assured herself a hundred times that he would be the same—that life would never play them a dirty, filthy trick like that, that God was in his heaven, that the man who loved her and she loved with all her soul would get well and…He had gotten well. Almost—

  He’s quieter, more subdued, as if he’s someplace else…or thinking of something he can’t share.

  “Do you think he has forgotten?”

  The words startled her. She had been musing aloud.

  “I don’t know. He says he can’t remember much about it, and that’s probably true. But he stops there and doesn’t say what he does remember.”

  Arnold nodded. For three months in this office Jake had said nothing of the flight that led to his injury. “What of his decision to die?”

  Callie stared at the psychologist. “You think he made that decision?”

  “You know he did.” Arnold’s eyes held her. “He decided to ram the transport. The odds of surviving such a collision were very small. Jake knew that. He’s a professional military aviator; he had to know the probably outcome of a ramming.” The doctor’s shoulders moved ever so slightly. “He was willing to die to kill his enemies.”

  After a moment Callie nodded.

  “You must come to grips with that. It was a profound moment in his life, one he apparently doesn’t wish to dwell on or try to remember. The complex human being that he is, that’s how he chooses to live with it. Now you must come to grips with his decision and you must learn to live with it.”

  “Don’t many men in combat come to that moment?”

  “I think not.” Benny tugged at his beard. “The literature—it’s hard to say. Most men—I suspect—most men facing a situation that may cause their death who do go forward probably do so without thought. The situation draws them onward, the situation and their training and their own private concept of manhood. But in that cockpit—Jake evaluated the danger and saw no other alternative and decided to go forward. Willingly. To accept the inevitable consequences, one of which would be his death.” He continued to worry the strands of hair on his chin.

  “There’s a verse in the Bible,” Callie said, her chin quivering. “‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”

  “Aha! If only you believed that!”

  “I do,” she said, trying to convince herself, and turned back to the window. Other husbands went off to work every morning, they had regular jobs, they came home nights and weekends and life was safe and sane. Of course, people die in car wrecks and you read about airliner crashes. But those things don’t happen to people like me!

  Why couldn’t Jake have found a safe, sane, regular job, with an office and a company car and a nice, predictable future? Damn him, she had waited all these years for the sword to drop. Those memorial services whenever someone was killed—she always went with Jake to those. The widow, the kids, the condolences, the organ music. But it wouldn’t happen to Jake—oh no! He’s a good pilot, real good, the other men say, too good to ever smear himself all over some farmer’s potato field, too good to ever leave her sitting alone in the chapel with the organ wheezing and some fat preacher spouting platitudes and everyone filing past and muttering well-meaning nonsense. Damn you, Jake. Damn you!

  Arnold passed her a Kleenex and she used it on her eyes. He held out the box and she took several and blew her nose.

  “Next week, perhaps we can talk about that little girl you want to adopt?”

  Callie nodded and tried to arrange her face.

  “Thank you for coming today.” He smiled gravely. She rose and he held the door for her, then eased it shut as she paused at the receptionist’s desk to write a check.

  He opened her file and made some notes. After a glance at his watch, he picked up his phone and dialed. On the third ring a man answered. One word: “Yes.”

  “She was here today,” Arnold said without preliminaries. “He’s going to be working on a new airplane project, she says.” He continued, reading from his notes.

  It wasn’t until the A-6 was taxiing toward the duty runway for takeoff that the incongruity of the whole situation struck Toad Tarkington. The plane thumped and wheezed and swayed like a drunken dowager as it rolled over the expansion joints in the concrete. He had been so busy with the computer and Inertial Navigation System while they sat in the chocks that he had had no time to look around and become accustomed to this new cockpit. Now as he took it all in a wry grin twisted his lips under his oxygen mask. Rita Moravia sat in the pilot’s seat on his left in the side-by-side cockpit. Her seat was slightly higher than his and several inches further forward, but due to her size her head was on the same level as his. Not an inch of her skin was exposed. Her helmet, green visor and oxygen mask encased her head, and her body and arms were sheathed in a green flight suit, gloves, steel-toed black boots. Over all this she wore a G suit, torso harness and survival vest, to which was attachéed an
inflatable life vest. Toad wore exactly the same outfit, but the thought that the beautiful Rita Moravia was hidden somewhere under the flight gear in the pilot’s seat struck him as amusing. One would never even know she was a woman except for the sound of her voice on the intercom system, the ICS. “Takeoff checklist,” she said crisply, her voice all business.

  Toad read the items one by one and she gave the response to each after checking the appropriate switch or lever or gauge as the plane rolled along. The taxiway seemed like a little highway going nowhere in particular; the concrete runways on the right were hidden by the grassy swell of a low hill. To the left was a gravel road, and paralleling that the beach, where the Puget Sound waves lapped at the land. The water in the sound appeared glassy today. Above them was blue sky, a pleasant change from the clouds that had moved restlessly from west to east since Toad and Rita arrived on the island. Even Mother Nature was cooperating. The background noise of the two idling engines, a not unpleasant drone, murmured of latent power. They promised flight. Toad breathed deeply and exhaled slowly. He had been on the ground too long.

  Clearance copied and read back, Toad asked the tower for clearance to take off. It was readily granted. The traffic pattern was momentarily empty. Rita Moravia rolled the A-6 onto the runway and braked to a stop. With her left hand she advanced the throttles to the stops as Toad flipped the IFF to transmit. The IFF encoded the plane’s radar blip on all air control radars.

  The engines wound up slowly at first, then quickened to a full-throated roar that was loud even in the cockpit. The nose of the machine dipped as the thrust compressed the nose-gear oleo, almost as if the plane were crouching, gathering strength for its leap into the sky. Moravia waggled the stick gently, testing the controls one more time, while she waited for the engine temperatures to peak. Outside the plane, Toad knew, the roar of the two engines could be heard for several miles. No doubt the flight crewmen on the ramps near the hangars were pausing, listening as the roar reached them, their attention momentarily captured by the bird announcing its readiness for flight. Finally satisfied, Rita Moravia released the brakes.

  The nose oleo rebounded and the A-6 began to roll, gathering speed, faster and faster and faster. The needle on the airspeed indicator came off the peg…80…100…faster and faster as the wheels thumped and the machine swayed gently over the uneven concrete…130…140…the nose came off the ground and Moravia stopped the stick’s rearward movement with a gentle nudge.

  As the broad, swept wings bit into the air the main wheels left the ground and the thumps and bumps ceased.

  Moravia slapped the gear handle up and, passing 170 knots, raised the flaps and slats. Climbing and accelerating, the Intruder shot over the little town of Oak Harbor bellowing its song. Upward they flew, upward, into the smooth gentle sky.

  He was flying again. It seemed—somehow it was strange and bittersweet all at once. He hadn’t thought about his last flight in months, but now as the engines moaned and the plane swam through the air, memories of his last flight with Jake Grafton in an F-14 over the Med flooded over Toad Tarkington. There was fear in those memories. He fought to push them out of his mind as he twiddled the knobs to optimize the radar presentation and checked the computer readouts. He glanced outside. The peaks of the Cascade Mountains were sliding by beneath the plane. The steep crags were gray in those places where the clouds and snow didn’t hide their naked slopes.

  Rita Moravia had the Intruder level at Flight Level 230—23,000 feet. Toad concentrated on the equipment on the panel in front of him. As he tried desperately to remember all that his instructor had told him, he sneaked a glance at Moravia. She sat in her seat calmly scanning the sky and the instrument panel. She had engaged the autopilot and was watching it fly the plane. Now she adjusted the bug on the HSI, the rotating compass ring. She had the Yakima TACAN dialed in. Now she toggled the switch that moved her seat up a millimeter and stretched lazily. “Nice plane, huh?” she said when her left hand once more came to rest on the throttles, where her ICS button was.

  Toad fumbled with his ICS button, which he keyed with his left foot. “Yeah. Fucking super.”

  “How’s the system?”

  “Looks okay to me, as if I knew.”

  “Found Yakima yet?”

  He ignored the question as he studied the radar. The city was still seventy miles away according to the TACAN. There it was on the radar, right under the cursor cross hairs, just a blob of solid return amid a whole scopeful of return from hills and ridges and houses and barns.

  Yeah, Toad, you better figure out how to find a city in all this mess or this little flight is gonna be a disaster. The whole essence of the bombardier’s art was interpreting this jumble of return on the radar scope. And Jake Grafton and those other A-6 perverts demanded he pick it up in just a week! Well, he’d show them! If those attack weenies can figure out this shit in eight months, a week will be about right for the old Horny Toad. After all, this worn-out flying dump truck—

  Moravia was asking Seattle Center if they could proceed direct to the start of the low-level route. Toad cycled the steering to that point and examined the radar carefully. Thank God the guys at VA-128 had picked a town on the Columbia River to start the route. Even a blind fighter RIO—Radar Intercept Officer—could find that. Or should be able to find it with the aid of the radarscope photographs that were included in the navigation package for this route. He arranged the stack of photographs on his kneeboard and compared the first one to the live presentation on the radar scope. Yep!

  They had passed the third checkpoint on the navigation route and were somewhere in central Oregon flying at 360 knots true, 335 indicated, 500 feet above the ground, when Toad’s savage mood began to improve. He was identifying the checkpoints without difficulty, no doubt because they were ridiculously prominent features in the landscape ahead, but he was finding them. The system seemed to be working as advertised and the INS was tight, tight as a virgin’s…

  For the first time he became aware of Moravia’s smooth, confident touch on the controls. She flew the plane with a skill that belied her inexperience. Toad watched her handle the plane. The stick barely moved as the plane rose and fell to follow the ground contour and her thumb flicked the trim button automatically. She was good. The airspeed needle seemed glued to the 335-knot tic on the dial. “You’re a pretty good pilot,” he said on the ICS.

  “Just navigate,” she replied, not even glancing at him.

  Another casual slap in the chops. Goddamn women! He placed his face against the black hood that shielded the radar scope and studiously ignored her.

  The plane approached the Columbia River again from the south down a long, jagged canyon that ran almost straight north out of central Oregon. Stealing glances from the radar, out the right side of the airplane Toad saw a harsh, arid landscape of cliffs and stone pillars, spectacular monuments to the power of wind and water and the vastness of time. The almost vertical rock surfaces produced crisp, sharp images on the radar screen. He examined the infrared display. The infrared images were from a sensor mounted on a turret on the bottom of the aircraft’s nose, immediately in front of the nose-gear door. The sides of the rock toward the sun looked almost white on the IR scope, which was mounted above the radar scope and was also shielded from extraneous light by the black flexible hood projecting from the instrument panel.

  The navigation checkpoint to enter the navy’s target range at Boardman, Oregon, was a grain silo and barn on top of a cliff near the lower reaches of this canyon. The cursors—cross hairs positioned by the computer on the radar screen—rested near a prominent blip. Toad turned up the magnification on the infrared as he moved the cursors to the blip. Yep. That was the barn all right.

  Over the barn he cycled the steering to the initial point for the run-in to the target and called the range on radio.

  “November Julie 832, you’re cleared in.”

  Rita let the plane drift up to 1,500 feet above the ground. They had left the cliffs a
nd canyons behind them and flew now over almost flat, gently rolling terrain that was used for dry-land farming. Following a printed checklist on his kneeboard, Toad set the switches in the cockpit for bombing. Six blue twenty-five-pound Mark 76 practice bombs hung on a rack under the right wing, Station Four. Each of these little bombs contained a smoke charge that would mark the spot of impact. The A-6 crossed the initial point, the IP, and Rita swung it toward the target ten miles east.

  The target lay on the south side of the Columbia River in flat, dry, treeless country. The run-in line was marked by a dirt road on the ground, but neither Toad nor Rita paid any attention. During the minute and forty seconds it took the Intruder to traverse the ten miles from the IP to the target, Toad was absorbed in getting the cursors precisely on the radar reflector that marked the target bull’s-eye, checking the computer and inertial readouts, using the infrared for visual ID, locking up the target with the laser ranger-designator, then checking the information the computer received to make sure it was valid. Finally he put the system into attack.

  Even though the practice bombs lacked laser seekers, the laser in the nose turret would give the computer more precise range and angular information than the radar could. Rita was equally busy flying the plane and centering the steering commands on the Analog Display Indicator, the ADI, immediately in front of her.

  The infrared and laser stayed locked to the radar reflector on the little tower that constituted the target bull’s-eye even after bomb release as the nose turret rotated. In the cockpit Toad watched the picture on the infrared display change as the plane passed over the target. He was looking at an inverted picture of the tower when he saw the puff of smoke near the base sent up by the practice bomb. An excellent hit.

  On the downwind leg Toad raised his helmet visor and swabbed his face with his gloved hands. This was work. The plane was headed west parallel to the Columbia River. Rita scanned the sky for light aircraft.

  “832, your hit twenty-five feet at six o’clock.”