The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  Jake eyed Fritsche, with his graying beard and bushy eyebrows. “Crackpot?”

  “Well, he’s a man of outrageous enthusiasms. Got a Ph.D. in physics from MIT in one of his prior incarnations, before he got religion or changed his name to that of his favorite baseball team. He grew up in Brooklyn, you know.”

  “No,” said Jake Grafton through clenched teeth. “I didn’t.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, he’s dabbled in computers and radar for years and patented this technology for suppressing reflected radiation. He came to me with some technical problems. I used my influence with the navy to get him a good radar to work with. Had it delivered in a moving van.” He chuckled. “I’ll tell you that story sometime.”

  “Henry says he’s a genius.”

  Fritsche nodded his agreement between drags on his cigar. Smoke filled the interior of the car. Jake cracked his window an inch to exhaust the thick fumes. “He’ll probably be in the running for a Nobel when his achievements get declassified.”

  “Somebody said he’s greedy.”

  “Samuel wants some bucks, all right. I can’t condemn him for that, not after a few years of reading about the pirates of Wall Street. Dodgers is the founder and only benefactor of his church and he wants to take it nationwide, with TV and radio and a hallelujah choir, the whole schmear. I think he realizes that since he’s so heavy into hellfire and damnation, contributions are going to be light. The feel-good, be-happy ministries are the ones rolling in the dough. Dodgers is going to have to keep his afloat out of his own pocket.”

  Jake Grafton arranged the collar of his civilian jacket around his neck and lowered the window another inch. “What did George Ludlow say when he heard about Dr. Dodgers?”

  “Amen,” Fritsche said lightly.

  “I believe it,” Jake muttered. His companion tittered good-naturedly.

  The car rolled on into the farm district south of San Jose. Eventually Fritsche turned up a dirt driveway and parked in front of a ramshackle wooden structure. A large sign amid the weeds proclaimed: “Faith Apostolic Gospel Tabernacle.”

  “I think we ought to get down on our knees inside and pray the GAO never gets wind of this,” Jake said as he surveyed the weeds and the fading whitewash on the old structure. The last coat of thin whitewash had been applied over a still legible Grange hall sign.

  “You’ll see,” Fritsche assured him.

  Samuel Dodgers was a stringy man in constant motion. He stood in the small, dusty chapel and tugged at this, gestured at that, reset the Dodgers baseball cap on his balding dome for the hundredth time, pulled at his trousers or ear or nose or lower lip, moving, always moving. “So you fellows wanta see it again, huh, and see what progress looks like in the late twentieth century? When do I get some money?”

  “You got your last check two weeks ago.”

  “I mean the next one.” He hitched up his pants and reset his cap and looked from face to face expectantly. The sunlight coming through a dirty windowpane fell on a long, lean face. His chin jutted outward from almost nonexistent lips. Above the grim mouth was a sharp nose and two restless black eyes. “The next check—when?”

  “I think it’s a couple months away,” Fritsche replied gently.

  “If I weren’t a Christian I’d cuss you government people. Your tax people squeeze the juice right out of a man—a man who’s sitting on the biggest advancement in military technology since the horseshoe—but the giving hand is so all-fired parsimonious, stingy, miserly. You people are just cheap!”

  “You’re being paid according to the contract you agreed to, Dr. Dodgers.”

  “Get a man over a barrel and squeeze him. It’s a sin to take advantage of a man trying to do the Lord’s work like I am. A sin.”

  Jake glanced at Helmut Fritsche. He appeared unperturbed.

  Dodgers led them between a dozen or so folding chairs toward the door near the altar. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” Fritsche muttered just loud enough for Jake to hear above the tramping and scraping of heavy feet on the wooden floor.

  The back half of the old Grange hall was a well-lit workshop. Several strings of naked hundred-watt bulbs were woven through the joists and cast their light on a crowded jumble of workbenches, tools and junk. The visitors picked their way through it behind Dodgers, who approached the only person in the place, a young man of about twenty with carrot-red hair and acne to match.

  “My boy Harold,” Dodgers said to Jake, who shook the offered hand and introduced himself. “Harold was at Stanford, but they weren’t teaching him anything, so he came back here to work with me. Learn more here with me than he would in that Sodom of little minds. Those fools with their calculators, always saying that something won’t work…” He continued to fulminate as he opened the large doors at the back end of the building and began stringing electrical cords. “Well, Helmut, you seen this done before. Don’t just stand there like a tourist.”

  Dodgers drew Jake aside as Fritsche and Harold hooked up electrical cords and moved a workbench outside. “Okay.” He cleared his throat. “Over there on that little bench below those trees”—he pointed at the side of a hill about a half mile away—“is the radar. Harold will run that. That’s the radar the navy loaned me. Got it up there in an old two-holer that used to be here behind the tabernacle.” He stopped and showed Harold exactly how he wanted the power cables connected.

  Jake joined him at a workbench. “Now this little radar suppressor—it picks up the incoming signal on these three antennas here and feeds it into this computer over there. Got four of the fastest chips made in this thing—Harold did most of the computer design. Computers are his bag. Little hobby of mine too. Anyway, the computer analyzes the incoming signal: strength, frequency, direction, PRF—that’s Pulse Repetition Frequency—and so forth, and generates a signal that goes out through these companion antennas to muffle out future signals. That’s why these antennas are twins. You have a receiver and a transmitter.”

  “But you can’t suppress the first signal coming in?”

  “Nope. They get one free look. The very first incoming pulse will not be muffled. Nor, in this generation of this device, will the second. See, you can’t get a pulse repetition frequency until you have received at least two pulses, which you must have to time your outgoing pulses, the muffling pulses. But with existing radars, the return from one pulse will be treated like static. The cathode-ray tubes need a lot more pulses than that.”

  “And when the guy painting you stops transmitting, you beacon one more time?”

  “That’s the problem Harold and I are working on right now. You see, after the first pulse comes in, and the second, the computer then has to figure it all out and start transmitting. Right now we’ve got the computing time down to about ten billionths of a second. That’s not enough of a clean chirp to let any existing radar get a definable return. If the next pulse doesn’t arrive right on time, we’ll stop the muffling pulses ten nanoseconds later. Just need to fix the software, the XY dipole and…” His voice fell to an incoherent mumble.

  “Why wouldn’t a second radar that is in a receive-only mode see you beaconing to the first radar?”

  “Bistatic radar? It would,” said the genius in jeans, “if all we were doing was pulsing straight back at the transmitter. But we aren’t. We’re pulsing from a series of antennas all over the plane to neutralize the reflected signal. Knowing how much to radiate, precisely enough yet not too much, that’s where the computer really makes this thing work. First you must know the exact reflective characteristics of the object you are trying to protect—that’s your airplane—and put that data into the computer’s memory. Then the computer calculates the scatter characteristics of the incoming signal and tells each of the two hundred transmitters positioned over the fuselage and wings and tail just how much to radiate. All of the transmitters have to radiate in all directions. And this whole thing has to work very, very quickly. No computer was fast enough to handle this until superconductivity came alon
g. See, to make the electrical signals move along fast enough to make this work, I’ve had to super-cool my computer in a tank of liquid hydrogen and encase the wires to each of the antennas in this special sheathing. That lowers the resistance just enough.” He gestured to a row of pressure bottles that stood in one corner of his workshop. “Still, there’s so much computing involved we had to go to a distributed system with multiple CPUs.”

  Jake felt like a schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework. “But how does the outgoing radar signal cancel the incoming one?”

  Dodgers stepped over to a blackboard standing in the corner. He looked around—“Where’s the rag?”—then used his shirt sleeve to erase a spot. “Harold, where’s that blasted chalk?”

  “Here, Dad.” The young man picked up a piece from a nearby bench.

  Dr. Dodgers drew a sine wave on the board. “Do you know anything about radiation?” he asked Jake gruffly.

  Jake nodded hesitantly as he traced a sine wave in the air with his finger. He knew from experience that claiming knowledge in the presence of a physicist was not a good idea.

  “It moves in waves,” Dodgers agreed dubiously. He drew another sine wave over the first, yet the peaks of the second were where the valleys of the first one were, and vice versa. “The first line is the reflected signal. The second line is our outgoing signal. They cancel each other.”

  Jake turned to Fritsche with raised eyebrows. Fritsche nodded affirmatively. “This principle has been known for a century. Dr. Dodgers’ real contribution—breakthrough—has been in the area of superconductivity at higher temperatures than anyone else has been able to achieve. So he asked himself what computer applications were now possible that had been impossible before.”

  “And came up with this one,” Jake muttered, for the first time seeing the intelligence and determination in that face under the bill of the cap.

  “Let’s fire it up,” Dodgers suggested. “Helmut, if you will be good enough to take Captain Grafton and Harold up to the outhouse, I’ll do the magic down here.”

  As Harold drove the rental car along a dirt track through a field, Jake asked, “How’s security out here?”

  “Security?” the young man said, his puzzlement showing. “The neighbors are all Presbyterians and Methodists and they think Dad’s a harmless loony. Their kids get curious and come around occasionally when they’re out of school or in the evenings, but we don’t tell them anything and they wander off after a while. Just got to keep them away when we’re radiating. Been having some troubles with the power company from time to time. We sure pull a lot of juice when we’re cooling down that hydrogen and they’ve dropped the load hereabouts a time or two.”

  “We had the head of the Federal Power Commission call the president of Pacific Gas and Electric,” Fritsche told Jake.

  “The district engineer still comes around occasionally, though,” Harold continued. “I think he’s harmless. Dad’s been feeding him a line about experimentation with electromagnetism, and he bought it ’cause he’s local and knows Dad’s a dingbat.” The youngster goosed the accelerator to take them through a mudhole in the road. “Nice car. I’d sure like to have a car, but Dad—with the church and all…”

  The radar was mounted in the old outhouse on the bench where the seats once were. It radiated right through the open door. Harold Dodgers removed a padlock from a flap door at the back of the structure to gain access to the control panel and scope. “This is an Owl Screech radar,” Fritsche told Jake. “We borrowed it from the EW range at Fallon.” The Electronic Warfare range at NAS Fallon, Nevada, provided realistic training for fleet aircrews.

  “Wonder where the U.S. Navy got this thing.” Owl Screech was a Soviet-made gunfire-control radar.

  “From the Israelis, I think. They had a few to spare after the 1973 war.”

  The drone of a jet somewhere overhead caused Jake to scan the blue sky. It was high, conning. An airliner or a bomber. A row of trees higher on the hill waved their leaves to the gentle breeze. So warm and pleasant here. Jake sat down in the grass while the redheaded youngster worked at the control panel and Helmut Fritsche observed.

  “We’re not getting any power,” Harold announced. “Can I borrow the car and run back to the shop?”

  “Sure. You have the keys.” Harold eased the car around and went bumping down the dirt road. Fritsche joined Jake in the grass.

  Jake tossed a pebble at the outhouse. The stone made a satisfying thunk. “What’s the plan to get this gizmo into production?”

  “Normally we would do engineering drawings and blueprints and take bids, but due to the time constraints and secrecy requirements, we’ll have to select a contractor on a cost-plus basis. The government will retain title to the technology and we’ll pay Dodgers royalties.”

  “What contractor will get it?”

  “One with the staff and manufacturing capacity to do it right and do it quickly. Probably an existing radar manufacturer.”

  “Cost-plus. Isn’t that beltway French for ‘can’t lose’? And the contractor’s engineers will see all the technology and have a leg up on bids for second- and third-generation gear.”

  “Yep.”

  “And if they can dream up ways to do it better, they can get some patents of their own.” Jake tossed another pebble at the outhouse. “Gonna be a nice little plum for somebody.”

  “Yep.”

  “Good thing all the guys in our shop are honest.”

  Fritsche sat silently, weighing that remark, Jake supposed. “I guess our people are like everyone else,” Fritsche said at last, without inflection. “People are pretty generally alike all over.”

  “Why was Strong killed?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Some. But I keep them to myself. I try not to gossip. There are laws against slander.”

  Jake Grafton stood and brushed off the seat of his trousers. “A river of money flowing along in front of a bunch of guys on middle-class salaries, a bunch of guys all humping to keep their bills paid until they get middle-class pensions and form letters of appreciation from the government. Everybody’s honest. Nobody’s tempted. Makes me want to salute the fucking flag and hum a march.” He looked down at Fritsche.

  “I have no facts, Captain,” the scientist said. “None.”

  Jake looked around, trying to think of something to say. He gave up and strolled up the hill to the trees, where he relieved himself. Somehow aboard ship things had been simpler, more clear. On his way back to the wooden building he saw the car returning with Harold at the wheel.

  The redhead had the radar fired up in less than a minute. With Fritsche and Jake looking over his shoulder, he flipped switches. “This is its target-acquisition—its search—mode. And that blip right there is the tabernacle.” He pointed. Jake stared at the return a moment, then stepped a few paces to his right and looked around the shed at the scene. The radar in the shed made a variety of mechanical noises and he could hear the antenna banging back and forth against its stops. Now he referred again to the radar scope, which was American, not Soviet. Okay, there was the tabernacle, the house beyond and to the right, the trees on the left…

  “Now,” said the young Dodgers, “step over there again and wave your arms at my dad. Then he’ll fire up the suppressor.” Jake did as requested and returned to the scope. Even as he watched, the blip that was the tabernacle faded from the screen, along with the ground return in the area beyond. Where the blip had been was merely a blank spot with no return at all.

  “Try the frequency agility,” Fritsche suggested. Harold flipped another switch and then turned a dial. The tabernacle became faintly visible as a ghost image. “As he changes frequency on the Owl Screech, the computer on the suppressor is trying to keep up,” Fritsche explained to Jake, “so he sees this ghost image, which is not enough to lock on to. And remember, this is an American scope, more sensitive than Soviet scopes.”

  “I’m impressed.”

&n
bsp; “Go to a higher PRF and try to lock on the spot where we know the tabernacle is,” Fritsche said to Harold. “Try the expanded display.”

  Nothing. The radar failed to lock. The center of the presentation was an empty black spot.

  After a long silence, Fritsche spoke softly, almost as if he were afraid of his own thoughts. “If we could implement this technique at optical wavelengths you wouldn’t even be able to see that building down there with the naked eye.”

  “You mean you could see right through it?”

  “No, it would look like a black hole. Nothing would come back from it. But no one is going to have that kind of technology until well into the next century.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” said a stunned Jake Grafton, “let’s just get the bugs worked out of this and get it to sea. That’s more than enough for you and me.”

  The phone on Luis Camacho’s desk rang at noon on Tuesday as he was eating a tuna salad sandwich. He had mayonnaise on his fingers and managed to smear it on the telephone. “Camacho.” “Luis, this is Bob Pickering. Could you take a few minutes now and come down to my office? I have some folks here I would like you to meet.”

  Camacho wrapped the half sandwich that remained and stuck it in his lower desk drawer, which he locked without thinking. Every drawer and cabinet in his office was always locked unless he was taking something out or putting something in. It was a habit.

  Camacho knew Pickering, but not well. Pickering worked the District of Columbia and routinely handled walk-ins. “Luis, this is Mrs. Matilda Jackson and Mr. Ralph Barber. Luis Camacho.” As they shook hands, Pickering added, “Mr. Barber’s an attorney with Ferguson and Waithe.” Ferguson and Waithe was one of the District’s larger firms, almost two hundred lawyers, and specialized in federal regulatory matters.

  Pickering summarized Mrs. Jackson’s adventures of the previous Friday evening while Camacho glanced at the visitors. He concluded, “Based on past experience, Mrs. Jackson felt that the District police may not be sympathetic to a complaint from her, so she went to Mr. Barber, her former boss, yesterday, and he thought she should come see us.”