The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  Barber was in his fifties, still wearing his topcoat and white silk scarf. Apparently he hoped this interview would be brief. Mrs. Jackson still had her coat around her too, but its faded cloth contrasted sharply with the blue mohair that kept the spring winds from the lawyer’s plump frame.

  “The neighborhood used to be someplace a person could be proud of,” Mrs. Jackson said slowly. “But those crack houses and dealers on the corners…The police have got to do something!”

  “We felt that the information and evidence Mrs. Jackson has would probably receive a more dispassionate look from the FBI.” The counselor gestured toward the edge of Pickering’s desk, upon which lay a roll of film and a clear plastic Baggie containing a crumpled cigarette pack.

  “I thought you might want to send these to the lab,” Pickering told Luis. “I’ll do the report and send you a copy. We’ll get back to you in a few days, Mrs. Jackson. One of us will. Right now we need to get a set of your fingerprints to compare with whatever is on that cigarette pack. Just in case, you understand.”

  Camacho jotted the report number on a piece of paper from Pickering’s desk, then excused himself. Curious about the two items he carried, he walked them straight to the lab and logged them in. Tomorrow afternoon, he was told. After three.

  The Consolidated Technologies prototype had a hangar all to itself in Palmdale. As Jake stood and looked about the cavernous interior, he was surrounded by engineers and vice presidents, at least twenty people all told. The vice presidents all wore business suits, but the engineers seemed fond of short-sleeved white shirts with dark ties. If that garb didn’t announce their profession, they all sported nerd buckets—plastic shirt-pocket protectors full of pens and pencils, from which dangled their building passes. Solar-powered calculators rested in belt holsters on engineers and vice presidents alike.

  The black airplane had a conventional dual nose wheel with the nose tow bar that enabled it to be launched by catapult, but that was about the only feature Jake found familiar. The rounded wings were situated well back on the fuselage and a canard protruded under each side of the canopy. Two vertical stabilizers canted inboard rose from the rear of the fuselage. The engine air intakes were on top of the plane, behind the cockpit, which seated two crewmen in tandem.

  The senior vice president, a tall woman in her late forties whom Wilson had said rose from the accounting department to her present position on sheer raw talent, led the group toward the machine and explained major features to Jake. “The aircraft’s shape is optimized to reduce the aircraft’s Radar Cross Section. We’ve used radar-absorbent materials in all the leading and trailing edges—laminated layers of glass fiber and plastic with carbon coating…”

  “Uh-huh,” said Jake Grafton.

  “For low frequencies that put the plane into the Rayleigh region, we’ve tried to lower the overall electromagnetic susceptibility…carbon-epoxy laminate for wing skin, coatings of multilayer absorbers—mainly Schiff base salts and honeycomb composites. The goal was to reduce resonant microwave frequency scattering, magnetic waves and even surface waves before they escape from the edges.”

  “I see,” he lied. The canopy was open and the boarding ladder down, so Jake climbed up and peered into the forward cockpit. The control stick was a small vertical handle on the right side of the cockpit. Two power levers were installed on the left console. The forward panel contained two Multifunction Displays, MFDs, arranged on either side of the control panel for a Heads-Up Display, a HUD, which sat on top of the forward panel so as he flew the pilot could look straight ahead through the tilted glass. Under the HUD control panel was another screen, similar to the MFDs, but without the frame of buttons that circled the upper two. All of the screens looked like eleven-inch color television screens with the power off: they were larger than the five-inch displays to which Jake was accustomed. But the weirdest thing—there were no engine instruments. Oh, the panel had a conventional gear lever, a standby gyro and even a G meter, but of engine instruments there were none.

  “Go ahead. Climb in and sit down,” the woman urged. Jake glanced again at her name tag. Adele DeCrescentis.

  “Okay.” As he arranged himself in the pilot’s seat, Ms. DeCrescentis mounted the ladder. “Where’s the ashtray?” he asked.

  “Captain, I don’t think—”

  “Sorry. Just kidding.” The look on her face implied that levity was inappropriate. Here in the high-tech cathedral, Jake thought. Or the new-car showroom.

  Down below, the entourage was making small talk among themselves and casting many glances at the cockpit and vice president DeCrescentis, who probably didn’t look very vice presidential perched on the boarding ladder. “What’s going to happen to engine airflow in high-angle-of-attack maneuvers?”

  “That was one of the trade-offs,” said DeCrescentis, shifting her weight gingerly. Even the medium heels she was wearing must be mighty uncomfortable on the rungs of that ladder. “Each intake has a flap that is raised hydraulically to funnel more air into the intake when the FCC—Flight Control Computer—senses an increase in G or angle of attack which correlates with a decrease in compressor inlet pressure, but those flaps can only do so much. The concept is angle-of-attack-limited, so it made sense to design to a five-G limit. That enabled us to lighten the airframe and increase the use of honeycomb composites, which made it even more stealthy. And we achieved better fuel economy.”

  “I bet spins will be exciting.”

  “The engines will compressor-stall in an upright spin and have to be shut down, but they can be restarted once a normal angle of attack is achieved. Inverted spins shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Hmmm.” Jake moved the control handle experimentally. It looked like the joystick for a computer game. “Fly by wire?”

  “Of course.”

  “Ms. DeCrescentis, I appreciate all you folks taking the time this morning to show me this plane, but what say I sort of look it over with my staff? They’ve been involved in this project for quite a while and no doubt can answer any questions I know enough to ask.”

  “I suppose,” she said reluctantly, glancing again at the crowd below. She maneuvered her way down the ladder and two men below reached up to help her to the floor.

  Fritsche scrambled up and seated himself on the cockpit coaming. Commander Rob Knight, the project coordinator, came up behind him and stood on the ladder. “What d’ya think?” Dr. Fritsche asked.

  “Pretty stealthy, I guess.”

  “About the same RCS as a bird.”

  “How big a bird?”

  “You aren’t impressed, are you?”

  Jake Grafton took his time answering. He examined the panels on each side of the seat, then fingered the switches experimentally. “You guys tell me if I’m wrong: what we have here is one of the air force stealth-fighter prototypes, a version the blue-sky boys decided not to buy. It’s subsonic, shoots only smart weapons, has limited maneuverability and carries a nonstealthy belly tank for training purposes that can’t be carried in combat. Combat radius un-refueled is about six hundred nautical miles. Now, that is. To make this plane carrier-suitable it needs a beefed-up structure, tail-hook and folding wings, all of which will add at least a thousand pounds of weight—probably fifteen hundred pounds—and cost us speed and range. This killing machine will lighten Uncle Sugar’s wallet to the tune of about sixty-two million bucks a pop. If, and only if, it can be acquired on the most economic—the optimum—production schedule. Is that right?”

  “Well, the cost factors are a lot more complicated than you’ve indicated, but your summary is fair.”

  “Due to the likelihood that the five-G limit will be routinely exceeded by fleet aircrews in training situations, the design needs further modification to prevent compressor stalls. That involves more structural strengthening, computer-operated secondary intakes, loss of some stealthiness. That will cost an additional…?”

  “Five million a plane, assuming an optimum production schedule. Ten million more
per plane if we buy new engines.”

  “Five million a plane,” Jake continued. “And if we don’t buy that mod, we’ll have the compressor-stall problem that plagued the F-14 the first ten years of its life, which will mean a higher attrition rate than we would experience otherwise.” Attrition meant crashes, planes lost in training accidents. “Yet to go the new-engine route will take ten years because the engines don’t even exist; all we have is an engineers’ proposal saying they could build them sooner or later for about so many dollars apiece, subject to all the usual caveats about buy rates, research, inflation, etc.”

  “Hiram Duquesne likes this plane.”

  “Ah yes, Senator Duquesne. Another great American.”

  “We didn’t get the senior vice president this morning because she likes your nose,” Knight shot back. “Consolidated has about two hundred million dollars of their own funds tied up in this prototype. They employ twenty thousand people. Consolidated is big business. They’ve bet their company on getting a stealth contract.”

  “Yeah. Stock options and bonuses and company cars for the executives, jobs for the little people, and votes for the big people in Washington. I got the picture.”

  “Don’t be so damned cynical,” Rob Knight said. “Listen, Jake, it may well come down to buying this plane to replace the A-6 or doing without. Ludlow and Royce Caplinger have to be goddamn sure they have the votes in Congress before they go up to Capitol Hill with their hats in their hands.”

  “That’s their problem, not mine. I’m just a worn-out, washed-up attack pilot. I didn’t understand two words that DeCrescentis woman said.” He twiddled some knobs. “I didn’t ask for this job,” he roared. “I’m not going to be responsible for whether twenty thousand people keep their jobs! Don’t lay that crap on me!”

  Knight retreated down the ladder. Fritsche followed, his face averted. Jake sat alone in the cockpit. He tried to imagine how this plane would feel to fly. With his right arm in the rest and his hand on the stick and his left curved over the throttles, he thought about how it would feel to look through the HUD at a Soviet ship. This plane had to be able to take on Soviet ships in the Med and the Indian Ocean and the Arctic in winter. But it also had to be able to fight in brushfire wars in places like Lebanon and North Africa, Afghanistan, Iran, Korea, Vietnam. Maybe China. Could it? With million-dollar missiles and a five-G restriction?

  When he had recovered his temper, he motioned to Knight and Fritsche, who ascended the ladder again. “What would Sam Dodgers’ gizmo do for this plane?”

  “Lower the RCS from a bird to a June bug.” Fritsche frowned. “It’s so stealthy now that making it more so wouldn’t be cost-effective, at least not in the lifetime of this machine. That’s just my opinion, of course.”

  “On the other hand,” Knight said, “this plane wouldn’t be junk if Dodgers’ suppressor can’t be made to work in a real airplane. Dodgers knows the reflective characteristics of that tabernacle wall precisely when viewed from the old outhouse by one radar. Protecting a shape as complex as an aircraft from numerous transmitters and God knows how many receivers situated in all three dimensions—that’s another thing altogether.”

  “Tell me what all this stuff is,” Jake said. “This doesn’t look like any cockpit I ever saw.”

  “Both prototypes have exactly the same layout. This is all the stuff that was going into the A-6G. What these television-screen things are are Multifunction Displays. This lower middle one is a map that moves as the plane moves. The plane always stays in the center. This should do away with the necessity for the crew to always carry awkward charts in the cockpit.

  “Now these upper two MFDs present literally all the information the pilot might wish to know, or the info can be presented on the HUD. A touch of the button calls up engine information, another button calls up the radar presentation from the rear cockpit, still another the presentation from either one of the two IR sensors, and so on. Then there’s a variety of tactical displays…” He droned on.

  Jake was astounded. This was several generations beyond the A-6 cockpit. It was technically as far beyond an A-6 as an A-6 was from a World War II B-17. “I had no idea,” he muttered, awed.

  Knight showed him the rear cockpit. It was equally futuristic. Instead of the HUD control panel, it possessed a third MFD, so three of them were arranged in a row right across the panel. Under the center one was the map display. “This moving map—didn’t James Bond have one like this in one of the movies?”

  “Yep. But this is better.”

  “Mamma Mia!”

  The BN in an A-6 had one cursor control stick. The BN in this plane had two, one on each side panel, and instead of just a couple of buttons sticking out, each stick was festooned with buttons, like warts. “The idea is that the BN won’t have to reach for controls. Everything he needs is on those control sticks.”

  After Jake spent another half hour walking around the airplane and looking at every inch, he asked each of the commanders what they thought. One complained about range and payload, another about the intake problems, a third about the difficulty of maintenance. All were aghast at the cost. “But five years from now we’ll all probably think sixty-two million dollars for a plane was a hell of a buy,” Smoke Judy commented.

  “You know,” Jake said later as he stood in the doorway with Helmut Fritsche and looked back at the all-black airplane, “I had an uncle who went to the car dealer one morning to buy a station wagon for the family, and that evening he went home with a little red convertible coupe.”

  “High tech is sexy.”

  Jake thought about it. “It’s so damn neat that you try to convince yourself that you need it. All the bells and whistles and doohickeys and thingamajigs. And the day you have to bet your ass on these gadgets, they don’t work.”

  “Shapes and absorbers work.”

  “I suppose. But how is Sam Dodgers’ superconductive computer with multiple CPUs going to work after five hundred catapult shots and five hundred arrested landings when some kid racks the plane through a six-G pull to evade an optically aimed missile? How are all these MFDs and IR sensors and ring-laser gyros going to hold up? Is this techno-junk gonna work then?”

  9

  Terry Franklin stood with his back against a pillar and tried to keep his face pointed at Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The pillar was the second one on the right after you came through the main entrance. The man on the phone had been very precise about that. Second pillar on the right, on the side toward the Inaugural Address.

  His eyes kept moving. He was nervous, so nervous. He had vomited up his breakfast an hour ago…Not that person, a teenage girl. Not that old fat woman with the cane and the two kids. Maybe that man in the suit over there…he could be FBI. Was he looking this way? Why was he turning? That long-haired guy in jeans…

  He had been here ten minutes and had already spotted five men who could be FBI. Maybe they all were. What if they had him staked out, like a goat? Maybe he should just leave, walk away and forget all of this. He had plenty of money. Enough. He had enough. If they weren’t on to him he could live carefully and comfortably for years with no one the wiser. But what if they knew?

  “It’s one of the world’s great speeches, isn’t it?”

  He turned and stared. A man, in his fifties with a tan face, stocky, wearing a short jacket, looking at the speech carved in the marble. On his head a brimmed hat. What’s the response? Holy…think! “Yeah…uh, but I think the Gettysburg Address is better.”

  “Stay twenty feet or so behind me.” The man turned and walked for the entrance, not fast, not slow, just walking. After he had gone three paces Terry Franklin could wait no longer and followed.

  The man was only ten feet ahead going down the wide, broad steps in front of the Memorial. Franklin forced himself to slow down and lag behind. The distance had increased to fifteen feet by the time they reached the sidewalk, but it narrowed again as Franklin strode along. He stood right behind the man as he waite
d for a tour bus to roll by.

  On the other side of the street the man said, “Walk beside me.” He led Terry along the north side of the Reflecting Pool until he found an empty bench. “Here,” he said.

  “Can’t we go somewhere private?” Franklin asked, still on his feet and looking around in all directions.

  “This is private. Sit!” The petty officer obeyed. “Look at me. Stop looking around. You’re as nervous as a schoolboy smoking his first cigarette.”

  “Something went wrong. Really wrong. Why in hell did you people have a drop in a black ghetto? Some nigger doper could have torn my head off over there.”

  “The drops were selected in Moscow, from a list. That drop was originally chosen for another agent.” The man shrugged, resigned. “Bureaucrats. These things happen.”

  “So who got the message? Answer me that! Who saw me there? The cops? The FBI? NIS?” The pitch of his voice started rising. “What am I supposed to do now? Wait until—”

  “No one saw you. Some child or derelict probably removed the cigarette pack, or it was blown out of the hole by the wind. If you had been observed they would be tailing you now.”

  Franklin couldn’t help himself. He turned his head quickly, scanning.

  “Sit still! You only call attention to yourself by doing that, and believe me, there is nothing to see. You are clean. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”

  Franklin stared at his feet. He was so miserable. “I called in sick today.”

  “And you rode the subways just as we instructed, and we checked you all the way. No one followed. No one pulled up to Metro stations to see if you got off. No one made phone calls or ran for a car after you passed by. You are clean. You are not being watched.”

  “So who are you?”

  “You don’t need—” He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “My name is Yuri.” The man extracted a pack of cigarettes from an inside jacket pocket and lit one. Marlboro Gold 100s, Franklin noticed. The fingers that held the cigarette were thick, the nails short. No rings.