The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  Where was the plastique? It had to be here someplace. Using his flashlight, he descended again to the basement and examined the paint cans. He hefted them, shook them gently. They contained something, but it probably wasn’t paint. Oh well.

  He locked the kitchen door behind him and crossed through the back gate to his own yard.

  Standing in his own kitchen with a pot of coffee dripping through the filter, he thought about Albright’s treasure as he maneuvered a cup under the black coffee basket to fill it. With the Pyrex pot back in place, he sipped on the hot liquid as he dialed the phone.

  After talking to three people, he was connected with the man he wanted, an explosives expert. “Well, the material’s ability to resist the effects of heat and cold and humidity depends on just what kind of stuff it is. Semtex is a brand real popular right now, made in Czechoslovakia. Heat won’t do it any good, but if the heat is not too severe or prolonged, it shouldn’t take much of its punch away.”

  “How about storage in an uninsulated attic?”

  “Here, in this climate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not recommended. Best would be a place slightly below room temperature, a place where the temp stays pretty constant.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I keep mine in the wine cellar.”

  “Sure.”

  Camacho finished the cup of coffee, dumped the rest of the pot down the sink and turned off the coffee maker. He wiped the area with a dishrag and threw the wet grounds into the garbage. He didn’t want his wife noticing he had been there.

  It was three o’clock when he locked the front door and drove away.

  At about the same instant that Luis Camacho was starting his car to return to his office, Toad Tarkington was parking at the Reno hospital. When he arrived in the room, Rita was sitting in a chair talking with Mrs. Douglas, her roommate. After the introductions Toad pulled up the other chair, a molded plastic job made for a smaller bottom than his.

  “When are they going to let you go?” he asked as he tried to arrange himself comfortably.

  “Probably tomorrow. The doctor will be around in an hour or so.”

  “Did you get a good night’s sleep?”

  “Not really.” She smiled at Mrs. Douglas. “We had a series of little naps, didn’t we?”

  “We did.” Mrs. Douglas had a delicate voice. “I don’t sleep much anymore anyway.” She bit on her lower lip.

  “Perhaps we should go for a little walk,” Rita suggested. She rose and made sure her robe belt was firmly tied. “We’ll be back in a little bit, Mrs. Douglas.”

  “Okay, dear.”

  Out in the hall Toad said, “I see you fixed your hair.”

  “Wasn’t it a fright? A hospital volunteer helped me this morning. She said it would help how I felt, and she was right.” She walked slowly in her slippers, her hands in her pockets. “Poor Mrs. Douglas. Here I’ve been so concerned about my little half-acre and her two daughters came in this morning and told her she has to go to a nursing home. She’s very upset. Oh, Toad, it was terrible, for all of them. They’re afraid she’ll fall again with no one there, and the daughters work, with families of their own.”

  Toad made a sympathetic noise. He had never given the problems of elderly people much thought. He really didn’t want to do so now either.

  Rita paused for a drink from a water fountain, then turned back toward her room. “I just wanted you to know the situation. Now we’ll go back and cheer her up.”

  Toad put his hand on her arm. “Whoa, lady. Let’s run that one by again. Just how are we going to do that?”

  “You cheered me up last night. You make me feel good just being around you. You can do the same with her.”

  Toad looked up and down the hall for help, someone or something to rescue him. No such luck. He looked again at Rita, who was absorbing every twitch of his facial muscles. “Women my own age I don’t understand. Now it’s true I’ve picked up a smattering of experience here and there with the gentle sex, but eighty-year-old ladies with busted hips are completely out of—”

  “You can do it,” Rita said with simple, matter-of-fact faith, and grasping his hand, she led him back along the hallway.

  In the room she nudged him toward the chair near Mrs. Douglas. He started to give Rita a glare, but when he realized Mrs. Douglas was watching him, he changed it to a smile. It came out as a silly, nervous smile.

  Women! If they didn’t screw there’d be a bounty on ’em.

  “Rita says you’re facing some very significant changes in your life.”

  The elderly woman nodded. She was still chewing on her lip. At that moment Toad forgot Rita and saw before him his own mother as she would be in a few years. “Pretty damned tough,” he said, meaning it.

  “My life now is my garden, the roses and bulbs and the annuals that I plant every spring. I do my housework and spend my time watching the cycle of life in my garden. I wasn’t ready to give that up.”

  “I see.”

  “I have most of my things planted now. The bulbs have been up for a month or so. They were so pretty this spring.”

  “I don’t suppose any of us are ever ready to give up something we love.”

  “I suppose not. But I had hoped that I wouldn’t have to. My husband—he died fifteen years ago with a heart attack while he was playing golf. He so loved golf. I was hoping that someday in my garden I…” She closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again Toad asked about her garden. It was not large, he was told. Very small, in fact. But it was enough. That was one of life’s most important lessons, learning what was enough and what was too much. Understanding what was sufficient. “But,” Mrs. Douglas sighed, “what is sufficient changes as you get older. It’s one thing for a child, another for an adult, another thing still when you reach my age. I think as you age life gets simpler, more basic.”

  “I’m curious,” said Toad Tarkington, feeling more than a little embarrassed. He shot a hot glance at Rita. “Do you pray much?”

  “No. It’s too much like begging. The professional prayers always want things they will never get, things they just can’t have. Like peace on earth and conversion of the sinners and cures for all the sick. And to prove they really want all these things that can never be, they grovel and beg.”

  “At least they’re sincere,” Rita said.

  “Beggars always are,” Mrs. Douglas shot back. “That’s their one virtue.”

  Toad grinned. Mrs. Douglas appeared to be a fellow cynic, which he found quite agreeable. Perhaps the age difference doesn’t matter that much after all. A few minutes later he asked one more question. “What will heaven be like, do you think?”

  “A garden. With roses and flowers of all kinds. My heaven will be that anyway. What yours will be, I don’t know.” Mrs. Douglas waggled a finger at him without lifting her hand from the bed. “You are two very nice young people, to spend time with an old woman to cheer her up. When are you going to marry?”

  Toad laughed and stood. “You tell her, Mrs. Douglas. She absolutely refuses to become an honest woman.” He said his goodbyes and Rita followed him into the hall.

  “Thanks. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She had her arms folded across her chest.

  “Hang tough, Rita. If they let you take a hike tonight or tomorrow, give me a call at the BOQ. Captain Grafton or I will come get you and bring you some clothes.”

  She nodded. “You come if you can.”

  “Sure.” He paused. “What do you want from life, Rita? What will be sufficient?”

  She shook her head. He winked and walked away.

  16

  In an era when the average American male stood almost six feet tall, Secretary of Defense Royce Caplinger towered just five feet six inches in his custom-made shoes with two-inch heels. Perhaps understandably, his hero and role model was Douglas MacArthur, of whom he had written a biography ten years before. The critics had savaged it and the post-Vietnam public had ignored it. Caplin
ger, said one wag, would have won MacArthur sainthood had the book been even half true.

  How deeply this experience hurt Caplinger only his family might have known. The world was allowed to see only the merciless efficiency and detached intellect that had made him a millionaire by the time he was thirty and president and CEO of one of the twenty largest industrial companies in the nation when he was forty-two. Now worth in excess of a hundred million dollars, he was a man who believed in himself with a maniacal faith; in the world of titanic egos in which he moved he saw himself as a giant and, to his credit, others saw him the same way.

  Rude and abrasive, Caplinger never forgot or forgave. He had never been accused of possessing a sense of humor. He won many more battles than he lost because he was right, often terrifically right, as his many enemies freely acknowledged. He often won when he was wrong too, because he could play major-league hardball with the best of them. Years ago his subordinates had labeled him “the cannibal,” whispering that he liked the taste of raw flesh.

  Caplinger had the brain of Caesar and the soul of a lizard, all housed in the body of a chimpanzee, or so one of his more daring victims had groused to Time magazine. This quote crossed Jake Grafton’s mind just now as he watched the secretary’s gaze dart back and forth across the faces of the men at the luncheon table as they were served pear halves in china dishes bearing the seal of the Navy Department by a steward in a white jacket.

  Jake was back in Washington for a week while the China Lake crowd fixed their A-6, Rita Moravia recovered, and Samuel Dodgers tinkered with the Athena device. This was Jake’s first meal in the Secretary of the Navy’s dining/conference room, so today he was playing tourist and taking it all in.

  The room was spacious and paneled with dark wood, perhaps mahogany. Deep blue drapes dressed up the windows. A half dozen oil paintings of sailing ships and battles, with little spotlights to show them to advantage, were arranged strategically between the windows and doors. Gleaming brass bric-a-brac provided the accents. Sort of early New York Yacht Club, Jake decided, a nineteenth-century vision of a great place for railroad pirates and coal barons to socialize over whiskey with nautical small talk about spankers and jibs and their latest weekend sail to Newport. He would describe the room for Callie this evening. He sipped his sugarless iced tea and turned his attention to the conversation.

  In keeping with his temperament, Caplinger was doing the talking: “…the Congress has ceased to exist as a viable legislative body since Watergate. They can’t even manage to give senior leaders or the judiciary a pay raise without making a hash of it. Without strong, capable leaders, Congress is a collection of mediocrities drifting…”

  Jake used his knife to slice the fruit in his dish, two whole halves, to make it go further. Already he suspected this wasn’t going to be much of a meal.

  At the opposite end of the table from the Secretary of Defense sat today’s host, Secretary of the Navy George Ludlow. He was nibbling at pieces of pear he nicked off with his fork and listening to Caplinger. No doubt he was used to these monologues; he had married Caplinger’s second daughter, a modestly pretty young woman with a smile that looked vacuous in news photos. Jake Grafton had never met her and probably never would.

  “…five hundred thirty-five ants on a soapbox drifting down the Potomac, each of them thinking he’s steering.” Caplinger chuckled and everyone else smiled politely. Jake had heard that old saw before.

  Across the long table from Jake sat Tyler Henry, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Russell Queen, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Jerome Nathan Lanham.

  Lanham was a submariner, a nuke, with all the baggage that term implies: team player, risk minimizer, technocrat par excellence in the service of the nuclear genie. His patron saint was Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, whose portrait hung in Lanham’s office. Like Rickover, Jerome Nathan Lanham was reputed to have little use for nonengineers. Just now he sat regarding Jake Grafton, A.B. in history, with raised eyebrows.

  Jake nodded politely and speared another tiny hunk of pear. The dish was half full of juice. He wondered if he should go after it with a spoon and surveyed the table to see if anyone else was. Nope. Well, hell. He used the spoon anyway, trying to be discreet, as Caplinger ruminated upon the current political situation in Japan and the steward began serving a tiny garden salad. “…wanted to hang Hirohito after the war, but MacArthur said no, which was genius. The Japanese would never have forgiven us.”

  “If we conquered Iran today, what would you do with Khomeini?” Helmet Fritsche, seated to Jake’s right, asked the question of Caplinger, who grinned broadly.

  “Such a tiny hypothetical—he should have been a lawyer,” Ludlow muttered sotto voce as the others laughed.

  “Make Khomeini a martyr? No. I’d ensure he didn’t get any older, but the autopsy—and there would be one—would read ‘old age.’”

  After the salad came small bowls of navy bean soup accompanied by some tasteless crackers. Even Caplinger thought they were insipid. “George, these crackers taste worse than some of my old predictions.”

  When the soup was gone, the steward filled coffee cups and whisked away the dishes, then retired. Jake watched incredulously. Apparently they had just had the entire meal. At least Ludlow wasn’t blowing the whole navy budget this year on grub.

  “Well, Grafton,” Caplinger said, “will Athena work?”

  “Yessir. It’s the biggest technical advance in naval aviation since I’ve been in the navy.”

  “If it works”—the Secretary of Defense eyed Jake across the rim of his coffee cup—“it’ll be the biggest leap forward for the military since the invention of radar. The air force is going to want this technology yesterday. It’ll save their strategic bomber program.” Jake understood. The air force would be able to use much cheaper bombers than the B-2, which they would never get any significant number of at a half billion dollars each.

  “I want it right now,” Admiral Lanham said. “These devices will make surface ships invisible to radar satellites and cruise missiles. The entire Soviet naval air arm will be obsolete. I want a crash program that puts Athena in the fleet right now, and damn the cost.”

  Caplinger shifted his gaze to Helmut Fritsche, on Jake’s right. “Will it work? Can it be made to work?”

  “Anything’s possible given enough time and money.”

  “How much?” demanded Under SECDEF Russell Queen. In civilian life he had been president of a large accounting firm. White skin, banker’s hands, bald, Queen had long ago lost the battle of the bulge. He was a humorless man with thick glasses. Jake decided it would require prodigious faith to believe Russell Queen had once been young or ever loved a woman. “How much do you think will be enough?”

  Fritsche’s shoulders rose a quarter inch and fell. “Depends on how you go about it—how you structure the contract, how many units you buy annually, how big a risk you’re willing to take on unproven technology. We didn’t test a full-up system. All we did was prove the concept, and we have some more work to do on that next week. We’re a long way from an operational system that will protect just one tactical airplane.”

  “How long?”

  Helmut Fritsche took out a cigar and rolled it thoughtfully between his hands. He didn’t reach for a match. “Two or three years —if you can make all the paper pushers keep hands off. Four or five if it’s business as usual.” Every head at the table bobbed its owner’s concurrence.

  “Humph,” snorted Caplinger, who sucked in a bushel of air and sent it down as far as it would go, then exhaled slowly. “I can try to put—maybe slip it under the stealth stuff—but…” His enthusiasm wouldn’t fill a thimble. Even the Secretary of Defense couldn’t control the legions of bureaucrats with rice bowls to protect. They were too well armed with statutes and regulations and pet congressmen. “Russell, you’ll have to make this work, find some dollars in one of your little hidey-holes, keep it too small for anyone to get curious about. And no fu
cking memos.”

  Queen nodded slowly, his smooth round face revealing his discomfort. He looked, Jake thought, like a man staring into a dark abyss that he has been told to lower himself into.

  “I don’t think that’s the way to do it,” Ludlow said. “Admiral Lanham wants it now and the air force will too. We’re going to have to fund Athena as one of our highest-priority items. We’re going to have to throw money at it and hope the technology works.”

  “Do you agree, Admiral?”

  “Yes, sir. I’d rather have Athena than a whole lot of projects I can name, including the A-12.”

  “We need them both,” Caplinger said. “So we’ll keep Athena in with the ATA and request funding for them both.”

  “What about Congress?” Ludlow murmured. When no one replied, he expanded the question. “How will Athena be seen by the liberals dying to chop the defense budget? Will they think it gives us such a large qualitative technical advantage over the Soviets that they can chop our capital budget? Shrink the navy?” To maintain a navy, worn-out, obsolete ships must be constantly replaced with new ones. New ships are expensive and require years to construct. A decision not to build as many as necessary to maintain current force levels was a decision to shrink the navy. Insufficient ships to fulfill continuing worldwide commitments forced planners to delay ship overhauls and keep sailors at sea for grotesquely long periods, which wore out ships prematurely and devastated enlisted retention rates. It was a cruel downward spiral. This was the post-Vietnam nightmare from which the navy was just recovering.

  “No democracy will ever buy enough ships,” Jake Grafton said. “Not over the long haul.”

  “You’re saying we can’t maintain a six-hundred-ship navy,” Lanham said, frowning.

  “We don’t have six hundred ships now, sir, and we’re not likely to ever get them,” Jake shot back, suddenly sure he didn’t want Lanham to think he could be cowed.